Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Sheene was the first rider to put his name on the back of his helmet. It was a name that was well known around the world, but especially so in Great Britain. up to Phil Read in the MCN Man of the Year awards in the year Read won the 500 crown on an MV Agu'sta. Only at Easter, in the Transatlantic Series, did Barry take a pasting. Significantly, it was from Kenny Roberts, air-cooled twin in Finland. In 1974, leading the American team and tak- the square four appeared. It had ing five out of six wins, leaving just some way to go before achieving reli- one to Sheene. ability and competitive handling, but At the start of the year, Banry had Barry took it to second in the French raced at Daytona and drawn the GP at Clermont Ferrand in its first starting number seven. He liked it. appearance. And he stuck with it, from then until the end of his career. Little did he His greatest triumphs were at home. Sheene dominated by right, know that end was to come uncom- taking the MCN Superbike and the fortably close at the same circuit, less Shellsport 500 titles, though runner- than a year later. The Lifest"yle Of ____ lk_~-=-(!JJ_=___i[QJ@u~~(QJ Sheene and Roberts: 11TIi:l@ ~®©hmCN illJJj)c9J U!h@ )YIDrFtJ1s, Every great rider deserves a worthy opponent. For Barry Sheene, that man was Kenny Roberts. Roberts was also Barry's nernesis. Before Kenny arrived, Barry had it easy. After the fierce little American tumed up on a yellow Yamaha wellring Goodyear tires. Barry never won another title. Paradoxically, tha years from 1.978 until 1982 were Barry's greatest years as a rider. Roberts raised the game, and Barry was the only rider up to it. And he ran him very close. But for the tum of various events, at least some of the results might quite easily have gone the other way. Sheene met Roberts for the first time at the TransAtlantic Series - and was somewhat surprised when the Yank could win races at tracks he'd never even seen before. At the GPs, however, Sheene was lord of all he surveyed. When news broke that Kenny . was coming over, his response was confident: "He's a talented rider," Sh~e admitted. "But with all the new tracks to learn, and adapting to GP life, he won't win the title in his first year." A quarter of a century later, the memory was still fresh for Kenny. "He shouldn't have said that," the rllcin,g legend told me. Because when Kenny started to beat him, it got Barry into all sorts of trouble. • Kenny is clear that Sheene's mistake was simply to underestimate his threat. "He'd only seen me on a TZ750," Roberts said. "He didn't realize that I'd be more aggressive on a 500. The Yamaha was coming of age as a design, whereas the Suzuki had already won two titles. The Goodyear tires worked better than he'd expected. I could Jearn new tracks real quick. And I had Ke1 Carruthers (legendary ex·Worid Champion ttUned crew chief), which was a big advantage. It was a good situation for me.' That 1978 season went to the wire. If Kenny hadn't fallen off in Sweden, he'd have tied it up earlier. If Barry hadn't bro· ken down at the next round at lmatra then he might have been champion. Barry had no problem riding at his best. But he'd promised too much at the start of the year, and when the press turned to him for explanations, he was caught on the wrong foot. Never at a loss for words, Sheene belittled this new hardtalking, hard-riding rival with a series of put-downs in print. Roberts kept on winning. Sheene's position became increasingly desperate, and losing the title tasted aU the more bitter. Roberts remains in no doubt of Barry's strength as a racer. 'He had the talent and the machine to beat me," Roberts said. "The only new thing was I would go harder at the beginning of the race than he was used to. The Goodyears came in real quick. The year before he'd been able to take his time and still win races. That wasn't going to work any more. "If it wasn't for Barry, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did. To give your best, you have to race someone with equal talent. and Barry Sheene was that guy. On track, there was nobody I trusted more," said Roberts. "If he hadn't quit Suzuki at the end of 1979, we'd have had a lot more battles. That took him right off the map." ciII u For a working-class kid who grew up in a city apartment, steeped in the nuts and bolts of motorcycle racing, Barry Sheene broke through barriers and created new horizons. He became a new type of post, '60s champion - 'a playboy, a superstar, a racy celebrity, and a household name. In the same way as he moved straight from novice racer to win· ner, the working-class school bad boy cut a swathe through the racing paddock and then stepped straight into the capital's fast set. Among many remarkable llbilities was that Barry could remain comfortable and charming at pretty much any level of society. No stranger to the sleazier aspects of social life at bike racing, Sheene was just as much at home hobnobbing with the great and the good at awards dinners or on TV chat shows - or escorting a glamorous model to a swanky fast-life London night club. Mixing with the rich and famous was easy, because by.the early to middle '70s, that's what he was, too. But the circle he preferred lived fast and partied hard. Sheenie was a popular regular at Tramp nightclub in t~e heart of London and at dozens of others still swinging in the Seventies around Chelsea and thereabouts. If motorcycle racing became fashionable in the late '70s, it was because of Barry Sheene. Sheene brought an extremely acute business sense to racing and an unprecedented awareness of the financial value of fame - advantages he pressed home with his famous advertising contracts with Brut aftershave and Texaco, among others. In '1975, his earnings topped £150,000 for the first time - the equivalent of half a million or more today, and in a league of his own in motorcycle racing. Sheene liked to show his wealth, to be the first with things. But his astuteness meant he always invested wisely and could play every deal to the hilt. Sheene bought his first Rolls Royce Silver Shadow in 1975 after the Daytona crash, "to cheer myself up." It was regularly replaced, backed up by a string of other cars lent by publicity-hungry firms. Before the end of his racing career, Barry had moved on to the top-of-the-range Mercedes Benz, with a bumper sticker reading: "Helicopter pilots get it up quicker." Because by then he was flying - he gained his helicopter license in 1981. It was a passion that would prove as absorbing as motorcycles, right up to the end of his life. In his last appearance at a GP, the Australian round, Barry arrived in style, at the controls of his own helicopter. with teen-age son Freddie by his side. Sheene had two goes at being a country squire. The first was in 1972, when he bought a near-derelict 10-room farmhouse at Walton Highway, Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire. It was here that he had a brush with the law, losing his driving license for 18 months in 1974 after a drunk-driving charge. Sheene had driven home after a minor accident, later claiming that he was worried about chips of glass in his eye. It was here also that he forged a lifelong friendship with a fellow bike racer, Steve Parrish, who lived on a farm not far away. The pair's pranks would become legendary. But the country life soon palled, and Sheene was back in London by the mid- '70s. At first he shared an apartment with Piers Weld Forrester, a high-bom bon vivant and motorcycle fan who remained a close friend and crazy companion until his death in a motorcycle racing crash at the end of 1977. Soon he bought a town house of his own in Putney, southwest London, just across the river from the fun centers of Fulham and Chelsea. "London definitely had an attraction for Barry," said Parrish earlier this year, still embarrassed now to reveal all the details of a typical night out with Barry. "His favorite haunts were Italian restaurants and then on to a club. Tramp was obviously one, but there were loads of others. Most of them have closed down now. "It was always exciting going out with Barry," Parrish continued. "Everyone knew who he was, so wherever we went, we had the key to the house. And you never knew exactly what might happen.' Sheene eventually tired of the city life, moving in 1977 from Putney to Surrey, right on the Sussex border, not far from Gatwick Airport. His latest purchase, for the then-staggering figure of £ 100,000, was The Manor House, Charlwood - a sprawling 23-room affair, with parts dating back 700 years. He sold up Wisbech and Putney to pay for renovation, including converting the outhouses into racing workshops, and an annex to a self-con- tained apartment for Frank and Iris. He and Stephanie lived there until they left Britain for Australia soon after his racing retirement at the end of 1984. cue I ... n e vv s MARCH 26, 2003 37

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