Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1264829
VOLUME 57 ISSUE 26 JUNE 30, 2020 P105 the agreed bonus money! Indeed, the pursuit of the pounds due as bonuses at Britain's Brooklands banked oval is well described, with riders like Charles Mortimer, father of '70s GP racer Chaz, owning up to colluding with his fellow denizens of the Brooklands "sheds" to beat the on-track bookies they bet with. The likes of Brooklands regular "Woolly" Worters earned the then equivalent of millions of pounds today in 1929 bonuses from oil, tire, spark plug and other manufacturers, all from carefully planned record breakings. Riders were careful not to break the old record by too much, so that their friendly rivals could earn their own payday a couple of weeks later! So after recounting how mon- ied aristocrat Charles Jarrott won Britain's first race for "motor- bicycles" held in 1897 on an oval cycle track in a private park just outside London, following a six- course lunch with "copious bottles of wine," and in doing so thrilling spectators with speeds as high as 27 mph, Oxley leads us through the next four decades of an increasingly more gripping tale of the pursuit of speed, and how to achieve it. To begin with, going fast in circles on cycle tracks was all that counted, but then with the advent of the murderous city-to-city races in Europe, bikes were expected to stop as well as go, and turn right as well as left, neither of which they did very well, to start with. Even after the advent of the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, the quest for speed meant straight-line performance above all 35mm camera that was used to record Captain Scott's doomed mission to reach the South Pole in 1913. Or how King Leopold of Bel- gium's private army ensured untold personal wealth for him—and death for an estimated 10 million native Congolese—in the years leading up to 1908, by cornering the supply in Belgium's African colony of the only kind of rubber suitable for making John Boyd Dunlop's newly-devel- oped pneumatic tires. And there's more—much more. In an unusual step sure to be ap- preciated by those readers hooked on learning more about these early days of speed, Mat lists the 58 different books he derived so many of these facts from, and there's also a fine array of period photos which add immeasurably to the story. Strangely, though, Daytona Beach barely figures in the book, and Glenn H. Curtiss, who essentially invented the V–twin motorcycle before becoming an assiduous record-setter himself, rates only a short mention for his achievement in travelling at 136 mph in 1907 on his self-built V8 motorcycle. But otherwise this book sets Mat Oxley at the very top table of motorcycle historians, and the best compliment I can pay him is that I wish I could say I had written it myself. CN SPEED: The One Genuinely Modern Pleasure By Mat Oxley Price: $48 Pages: 188 Published by Mat Oxley www.matoxley.bigcartel.com else, resulting in an all-consuming hunger to break the World Land Speed record. From being primarily a British fetish tussled over by the likes of ex-WW1 fighter pilots, such as Owen Baldwin, sated with the thrill of danger who were looking for a postwar fix, or canny working- class heroes like Bert LeVack, who brewed noxious fuels good for an extra few mph aboard a record- breaker he built from someone else's cast-offs, the pursuit of speed became an issue of national pride for Germany's Nazi party. Plus, Italy's Fascists led by Mussolini, an avid motorcyclist himself. Mat Oxley tells the story of this battle for supremacy in a truly grip- ping manner. He puts you right there alongside Italy's Piero Taruffi as, in 1937, he survives graphically described tank-slappers to become the first rider to officially break the 170-mph barrier aboard the Gilera Rondine streamliner, which invent- ed the across-the-frame format for a four-cylinder motorcycle's engine. Thanks to Mat's impressive detailed research into what today is a little- known era so very different from our own, there's a huge degree of graphic detail in each one of these chapters. Like the unthinkable fact that practice for such events took place in open roads, resulting in the need to pass a donkey-towed cart on a narrow road at over 120 mph, or the revelation that John Alfred Prestwich, creator of the record-set- ting JAP engines, made his name as a manufacturer of cine cameras. It was a hand-cranked Prestwich