Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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VOL. 54 ISSUE 10 MARCH 14, 2017 P39 TT victory. He'd compete in 15 IoM TT races over a seven-year period, with six victories. He duly established an unassailable lead in the 1956 500cc World Championship to win his first of seven World crowns at the age of just 22, despite suffering a season-ending broken arm in a German GP crash. In 1957 the MV Agustas were no match for the Gileras, and Surtees battled to finish third be- hind these in the 500cc cham- pionship, and fifth in the 350cc. He'd urged Count Agusta in vain to improve engine reliabil- ity and the four-cylinder bikes' handling—especially with the full 'dustbin' streamlining that was by then universal. This led John to envisage leaving MV Agusta for Moto Guzzi, to the extent of agreeing to a test ride on the firm's increasingly competi- tive 500cc V8. But just before setting a date for this, Guzzi announced it was joining Gilera and 125/250cc double World champions Mondial in withdraw- ing from racing. MV Agusta had originally agreed to join its three fellow- Italian companies in retirement, but Count Agusta thought better of it, thus opening the door to his bikes' successive GP race victories against privateer com- petition mounted on aging British singles, and a two-decade run of uninterrupted world titles for his four-cylinder "fire engines." John Surtees was the beneficiary of this, winning six world cham- pionships in 1958-'60 in both 350/500cc classes by scoring victories in 32 out of 39 races, while also becoming the first man to win the Senior TT three years in a row. He won every GP race he started in 1958 and 1959, a total of 25 victories in succession. Frustrated by Count Agusta's refusal to allow him to race other motorcycles in non- championship events, in 1960 Surtees decided to combine both bike and car racing instead, making his Formula 1 debut for the Lotus team in the Monaco GP, retiring from the race with a broken transmission. Flying from there to the Isle of Man for TT practice, Surtees led all the way on his MV Agusta to win his final Senior TT, becoming the first person to average over 100 mph in riding to victory on the TT Course, with an average race speed of 102.44 mph and a new lap record of 104.08 mph. It was an apt swansong, leading to two final world titles before turning his back on MV Agusta and motorcycle racing—but not, however, before competing in both a car and a bike race on the same day. This came on July 24 that year, when Surtees rode his MV to victory in the 500cc German GP on the Solitude circuit outside Stuttgart, before driving Rob Walker's Porsche in the Formula 2 race held later the same day, in which he spun into retirement with a dead engine four laps from the end! Surtees had made an immedi- ate impact on four wheels with Team Lotus, scoring a second- place finish in the 1960 British GP at Silverstone, in only his second-ever Formula 1 race, and taking pole position at his third, the Portuguese GP in Lisbon. But it was only after he served his F1 apprenticeship with a smaller, private team that he agreed to join Scuderia Ferrari in 1963, clinching the Formula 1 World Championship for the Italian team in 1964. This was achieved despite the copious intrigue inseparable from going racing with Ferrari—for which his five years at MV Agusta had been good preparation!—not to mention the general disorganiza- tion partly caused by perennial strikes in Italy, a lack of testing and the thin spreading of re- sources over both Formula 1 and sports car race programs. So at the British GP at Silverstone, Surtees was obliged to put his workshop skills to good use as the only team member able to wield a welding torch, fabricat- ing an auxiliary fuel tank that enabled his car to run the full race distance without stopping to refuel. After a two-year spell with Honda in F1, in 1970 John founded the Surtees Racing Organization, which competed as a constructor in Formula 1, Formula 2 and Formula 5000, without ever quite winning a Formula 1 GP. But John's suc- cessor as Britain's—and MV