Sheene’s final fling
Barry Sheene’s glorious Harris framed Suzuki 500, used for his last year in Grand Prix, is back in Britain for the first time in 33 years. And you can see it…
This Harris-framed Suzuki XR45 is the bike on which Barry Sheene brought down the curtain on his GP career in 1984.
After that final season he kept the bike and took it with him when he emigrated to Australia in 1987, it hasn’t been seen in the UK since.
Until now – it will be on display at the
MCN Excel Show in February.
The 1984 season was dicult for
Barry. He returned to Suzuki in 1983 after three years on private Yamahas, but still wasn’t on a full factory bike. ‘At the end of the 1983 season, Suzuki Japan pulled out of GP racing,’ former Suzuki factory mechanic Martyn Ogborne explains. ‘Barry was riding for Suzuki
GB and we were told to give him all the ex
Randy Mamola 1983 works bikes and parts at the end of the season.
‘Barry wasn’t happy about this and commissioned a steel frame from Harris. He’d worked with Harris while running the Yamahas and knew they could give him what he wanted.’
Sheene tested Suzuki’s frame but never raced it, preferring the Harris, according to Martyn. ‘This is the bike on which he scored his final podium position in GPS – third placed at a wet Kyalami,’ he recalls. ‘The XR45 engine evolved through three stages of tune, this is the stage one version. But, carrying serious injuries and with an “old” XR45 engine, Sheene struggled to get on the pace that year and called it a day at the end of the season.’
It might have been a slightly anticlimactic end to the career of one of Britain’s most charismatic and popular riders, but the XR45 forms the bookend to those special Sheene years. Don’t miss it at Excel – along with eight other special bikes including Sheeney’s 1976 world title winning XR14.