Memories came flooding back
ZWARTKOPS: ‘DAY OF THE CHAMPION’, ALAS, WAS MISSING MIKE HAILWOOD’S ICONIC HONDA
The grey-haired brigade, however, were in their element.
The thing about being, shall we say, more mature motorcycle enthusiasts – apart from the fact we have survived – is that we have our memories and love to relive times gone by.
So it was that in January, I headed off to the annual “Day of the Champion” which was being held at Zwartkops raceway near Pretoria.
I thought it would be fun to take my old friend Peter “Batman” Taylor with me on my Honda NC700X as he had not been there for years and had been a marshal at the track. (As well as a marshal at the old Kyalami race track.) His station was under the screen at the old drive-in theatre.
We spent a pleasant day around other bikers and we sat in the bar area with our drinks reminiscing about the old days while the various classes of classic and notso-classic bikes raced past on the track nearby. I did reflect that this sort of bike meeting was attended by the grey-haired brigade – old toppies if you will!
I was hoping that one of the old race bikes in attendance on the day would be one of the Honda RC166 250cc six-cylinder race bikes that Mike Hailwood raced in the 1960s. I had heard it roar many years ago, and it was a once in a lifetime experience. (To hear it yourself, google Honda 250-6 startup on YouTube.)
Alas, it was not to be. I was told the bike is worth £1 million and too valuable to ship around the world.
That tiny jewel of a motor (imagine a six-cylinder engine, with 24 valves, with a capacity of a small glass of water!) – which won Hailwood the World 250 Championship – was later replaced by an equally successful four-cylinder, 500cc Honda race bike, dubbed the RC181.
And, we had better luck in reliving that story this time around, because a local enthusiast, Ian Groat, has built a replica using a modern water-cooled 400cc fourcylinder version that is absolutely fabulous.
This motor, even though it is water-cooled, has cooling fins on the barrel, to resemble the older air cooled bike. It is a grey import model which makes spares difficult to source due to the bike importers not supporting these bikes.
Ian is assisted by Keith Zeeman of Zeeman Motorcycles with the preparation of the bike. The race frame was fabricated by Performance Welding in Benoni.
It is a silhouette, which means it resembles the original bike. It is not finished yet as there are a few things to sort out with the carbs and trumpets (ram tubes on the rear of the carbs). But it is already looking great and the aim is to have it finished by the time of the festival at Kyalami later this year.
Ian supplied a bit of the history of the original RC181.
Mike Hailwood commissioned Reynolds Frame Makers in England to make a special motorcycle frame for his Honda RC 181 in 1968 because he felt the standard Honda racing frame was designed like a moped and felt hinged in the middle and very unsafe to race. The bike was taken to Italy to special bike-maker Guiseppe Pattoni to weld and fabricate together.
The machine won the Italian Grand Prix, but when Honda learned it was not their machine design they wrote to Hailwood and told him to never ride the machine in public again. Hailwood went back to the original frame, but failed to win the crown that year as Agostini beat him on the MV Agusta which handled in a much superior way.