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/506850
IN THE WIND P30 RIP GEOFF DUKE S ix-time World Champion and TT winner Geoff Duke (Order of the British Em- pire) passed away peacefully on Friday, May 1 at his home in the Isle of Man, at the age of 92. Duke was the first global superstar of Grand Prix racing. He was the first rider to win three successive World Championships (1953-55) and also the first to win two in the same year, when he won both the 350cc and 500cc world crowns in 1951 on Norton Manx singles. In the 1950s Geoff Duke became a house- hold name all over Europe and the British Commonwealth thanks to his good looks, styl- ish riding, polite man- ner, and especially his underdog success in defeating the four-cylin- der Italian multis—Gilera and MV Agusta—to win the first three of his six World titles aboard the much less powerful, but better handling Norton singles. Then, thanks partly to the resentment by Norton's directors that he would be earning more than they did if they paid him what he was worth, he transferred to the Gilera team for twice the salary, and swiftly transformed their fast but unruly fours into unbeat- able machinery that took him to three more 500cc world crowns. It might have been more, but for a combination of injury and the six-month ban imposed on him by the FIM for daring to support the hard-pressed privateers' strike for more start money at the 1955 Dutch TT at Assen. Geoff Duke was also the first rider to wear one- piece racing leathers. He won the last two of the 33 Grand Prix victories he achieved in his 10-year road-racing career at Hedemora in Sweden in 1958, winning both the 350cc and 500cc Swed- ish Grand Prix races on privateer Nortons. After winning three races in one day at the non-championship meeting in Locarno in Switzerland in 1959, Duke called it a day and retired from motorcycle racing. A brief but unsuc- cessful attempt to resurrect his car racing career (he was a factory Aston Martin driver in 1952-53) ended with a serious crash in Sweden, after which Duke became a hotelier in the Isle of Man, where he by now lived. Duke later became involved in various compa- nies based in the Isle of Man such as a scooter rental business, a car dealership and a boat company, and was later instrumental in setting up the Manxline company that introduced the first roll-on-roll-off ferry service to the Island. Later, his son Peter founded Duke Video, at one time the world's largest publisher of motorsport videos. Alan Cathcart (Above) Geoff Duke on a Gilera four leads Bill Lomas on a Moto Guzzi V8 in the 1956 German GP at Solitude. (Left) The first and last Gilera World Champions—the late Marco Simoncelli and Geoff Duke—at the Gilera 100th birthday party in 2009.