AT LUNCH WITH...
He’s built race bikes, motorcycle businesses, Tt-winning teams... and these days he’s building a fascinating collection of classics
Stuart Hicken, Mallory Park owner, TT rider and classic bike collector
Standing beside his 1933 Scott TT Replica, Stuart Hicken is explaining himself. The 73-year-old managing director of Mallory Park and the Hawk Racing British Superbike team has been collecting old Brit iron for decades, and each bike has been chosen for a very specific reason. With most of them it’s down to engineering – the pressed steel frame of a Coventry Eagle or the enclosed chain of a Francis-barnett – but with the Scott, it’s emotional.
“I got this because Scotts mean a lot to me,” he says. “I’m the last person to ever finish the Isle of Man on a Scott [in the 1972 Manx GP] and I got a letter from Sir Alfred Scott’s son, which said: ‘Jolly well done young fellow!’ I was very proud of that.”
We’re in Stuart’s den at Mallory Park, interrupting our socially-distant lunch to loiter around his commendably eclectic bunch of motorcycles. “When I’ve had some stupid person talking crap about the circuit, I can come in here and I’m alright in five minutes,” he says, before continuing his Scott tale: “Back then, I was working for George Silk [founder of Silk Motorcycles] and racing my G50, but I was struggling for enough money to go to the Isle of Man.
Then a bloke came in to George’s and I mentioned that I’d love to do the Manx on a Scott and he says: ‘You’ll never get one to do a lap’. I told him I would if he paid my entry fee. He handed over the money and I was off.”
“I made a huge 14-gallon tank because Scotts drink fuel, we fitted a Velocette gearbox lying on its side and had a frame by Spondon. I made a little fairing for it, because I figured that I’d need to get well tucked in [Stuart is 6ft 2in tall]. In the first early morning practice I’m flat out in top by the time I’m under the bridge [less than a quarter mile from the start]. Obviously the gearing is completely wrong, but I can’t pull in because that would be defeatist. So I keep going, with my hands vibrating off the bars and my feet vibrating off the pegs.”
‘I BET I WAS THE ONLY BLOKE PREPARED TO REPLACE A BIG-END DURING A MANX GP’
Clearly the bike needed some serious fettling before the race. After some experimentation, Stuart ended up with a 17-tooth gearbox sprocket and a tiny 17-toother at the rear, too. That got the Scott up to 110mph. Other preparations were more basic: “You wouldn’t believe what I carried in my pocket during the race. I had a ¼ Whitworth spanner which allows you to get to the big-end. They were originally on loose rollers, but George had made a cage – and I had two on me. I’ll bet I was the only bloke prepared to replace a big-end during a Manx GP. John Mcguinness doesn’t do that. If we had a race to replace a big-end I could definitely beat him at that.”
The first lap went smoothly, but trouble struck on the second. “Because the gearbox was on its side, it upset the oil paths and she’d eat the second and third selector. It did one in practice, so we put a brand new gearbox in for the race. Second lap and it goes again, so I’ve got no second or third.” This would be a signal for most riders that it was time to pull in and head for the bar. But this is not the Hicken way. “I am a very determined character, so I revved its nuts off in first, then went to fourth. I did most of the course in fourth, but I had to do the climb up the Mountain in first and there were people flying past.”
The race didn’t exactly end in glory, either. “Because I was revving its clackers off, it ran out of petrol, so I had to push it from The Nook. Still, I managed to finish.”
Though Stuart loved his racing and competed for years at national level on his G50, he’s the first to admit that he was no Mike Hailwood. “I think I’ve always enjoyed building the bikes more than racing them. I was never very good at racing, but I was good at putting bikes together. My problem was that I never had any money – I was only earning 17/6 as an apprentice [plumber and fitter] so I look back now and wonder how I went racing at all. Mind you, I was doing a lot of other jobs too, so I suppose that’s how I managed it.” One of those jobs was for Bernard Fowler, who had a workshop in Coalville, just down the road from where Stuart was brought up. “Bernard had worked at the BSA factory as a Gold Star mechanic. Whenever they’d go to the Manx or TT, they’d have 100 engines all prepared for the people who were riding Goldies to buy them. And when they came back, nobody bothered where the engines went, so consequently Bernard had got Gold Star engines stacked up at home. “Bernard was so clever. When I was 16, he was the one who got me into engineering and doing things the correct way. But I never had the patience he had. He would build an engine and have little oil tanks rigged up and he’d spin it over and then strip it to see if he could see anything that was touching that shouldn’t be. I could never do that – he’d already gone through it with a fine tooth comb.”
How Stuart got into bikes in the first place is all a bit of a mystery – neither of his parents liked bikes, and they actively discouraged him from riding. Not that this seemed
to hinder the young Hicken. “I think I was just fascinated by being self-propelled. My mum and dad didn’t want me riding on the road, but I got my licence anyway and got a big paper round to save enough money for an Ambassador 225. I intend to buy one again when I see the right one.
“Before that I had a Franny-barnetts. I fitted the engines in go-karts and all sorts – I was always tinkering with engines as a kid. At one point I rode a Norman Nippy, and I can remember thinking: ‘Bloody hell this is fast’. Everything you jump on feels like a rocketship when you climb a step up the ladder.”
After finishing his apprenticeship, Stuart displayed the financial acumen, guts and sheer bloody-mindedness that would become a trademark of his business career. Instead of going into plumbing, he decided to set up a bike shop in Coalville, aged 21. “I went to the bank and said I wanted to borrow £1000 and they said: ‘No chance’. I do jump into things – I just give it a go. So I started the shop anyway, put my race bikes in the window so there was something to look at and did jobs on bikes, buying stock whenever I could. In the end I did it without the bank loan, it just took a bit longer.”
It’s not hard to imagine the young Hicken sticking a metaphorical two fingers up at the bank manager and getting on with his plan anyway – even at 73, he has that calm, steely energy that’s so common among successful race team bosses. He’s friendly, entertaining and great company, but you sense an unyielding streak of determination beneath.
He certainly needed that during his numerous bike trips in the 1960s. “I’ve had some good journeys,” he says, grinning. “Me and a mate went to watch the Dutch TT in 1962 or ’63. When you were a village lad like me, that was like going to the end of the world, and on the way back my 500 Triumph seized. The advantage of British bikes was a few box spanners and you were away, so I took the head off, lifted the barrel up and found one of the pistons was seized in the bore. I borrowed a hacksaw blade from someone, put my handkerchief in the bottom and sawed through the conrod. Then I turned the engine over and took that bit of conrod off [the main bearing] and rode back on one cylinder. I went on a 500 Triumph, came back on a 250. All good fun.” Stuart ran the shop for 10 years and, by using that combination of financial acumen and guts, ended up becoming the biggest Bultaco dealer in the world. “I sold Bultacos and KTMS and got to know Señor Bultó, so when the factory went bankrupt I was able to buy 500 motocrossers off them. I thought it was for stupid money – but when I went to the bank manager to borrow £16,000, I suddenly thought: ‘Stuart what are you doing?’. A house back then would cost you £2000, so it was a lot of money. But all the bikes went, so it worked out OK.”
The Coalville shop was humming along nicely when, in 1984, disaster struck. Arsonists burnt down the town railway station, a school and Stuart’s shop. Worse was to come – he had been poorly advised by his insurance broker and received just £19,000 of a claim for £190,000. “I sued the broker, but that flattened me. After week of feeling like I should just give up, I thought I’m not cut out to be a drop-out, so went off and set up the WP [White Power suspension] business.”
Stuart had got to know the WP people because the suspension was fitted as standard to the KTMS he had sold in the shop. Also, he was riding motocross in the winter to keep him fit for his road racing. The opportunity to take over the WP importership came up, and he took it, driving a 7.5-ton suspension servicing truck to motocross GPS across Europe. “I was working with the two Dutchmen who owned WP, and business was good – we turned over a lot of money. The year before they sold up to KTM, the 500GP was at Hawkstone and they rang up and said they couldn’t make it, so I had to do it on my own. I serviced 46 rear shocks and 32 sets of forks – I didn’t go to sleep on Saturday night. I was absolutely wiped out.
“Then I got in with KTM, and the two Russian riders
‘BEING SELF-PROPELLED FASCINATED ME. I WAS ALWAYS TINKERING WITH ENGINES’
Kavinov [second in the 250cc world championship in 1977] and Moisseev [three-time 250cc world champion] who were great characters. They were some people. I remember we were at the Spanish GP, and Kavinov and Moisseev always had blokes in suits with them who were minders so they didn’t run away. You’d hear stories that they had guns, although I thought that was bollocks. But a little kid scrambled under the tent wall to get an autograph and before you knew it the minders were all pointing guns at his head. I was shouting: ‘Nooo, it’s just a kid!’.
“And when the GP was in the middle of nowhere in Scotland in 1978 [at Kilmartin], they hired a house at the top of a mountain and took everything out – all the furniture, rugs, the lot. It was so they couldn’t be bugged. They slept on the floor.”
Besides giving Stuart first-hand experience of Communism’s foreign policy, he also learned a few things about riding from the two Russians. “I was asking them who tuned the engines, because I thought I could do something for them, but Kavinov told me: ‘Motocross is all corners – you don’t need power to go round a corner’. They were running a standard engine – the chassis and brakes were the important things. It always stuck with me. If you’ve got a bike that handles, you can beat anyone. It still applies today with British Superbikes.”
Stuart was also selling WP to road racers who had come to the same conclusion as Kavinov – but in the era of wildly fast two-strokes were faced with even worse handling problems. “The suspension then was basic, to say the least. I always remember putting the very first pair of upside-down road racing forks on the Suzuki that Paul ‘Loopy’ Lewis rode. I was talking to Niall Mackenzie years later and he said that three meetings after Lewis packed in, he had Loopy’s bike and finished third on it in a GP – he said it had changed his career.”
There was also success at the TT, when Stuart worked with Trevor Nation and his RG500 in the mid-1980s. “He was having trouble with the handling, so we put in some WP for the race and he came back afterwards swearing, saying it was rubbish. I said: ‘Funny that, Trev, because you’ve just done a 124mph lap and you’ve come third’. He couldn’t believe it. He said: ‘Oh well, it weren’t so bad then’.” Though Stuart raced in eight Manx GP and loved every one, he never did the TT. “Those lads were too fast for me. I have won a TT, but with someone else on my bike, which is the safer way of doing it. But I was a lot more nervous. You start doing stupid, superstitious things. The first one we won with Michael [Dunlop, on a BMW S1000RR in 2014]. I wanted to get away from everyone on the pitwall, so I ran into the truck and lay on my bunk bed with the headphones on [listening to the commentary]. Then, when I heard him go through the Creg for the final time, I ran out and watched him win. So now I have to do it every time, because if I do something different it’s going to be bad luck. It’s stupid, I know, but I can’t help it.”
It didn’t work so well the following year, though: “When Michael broke his contract with Yamaha [in 2015, after not getting on with the new R1] he rang up Steve [Stuart’s son, who now runs Hawk Racing day-to-day] to ask if he had a bike. Steve and I had a chat and worked out we could do it and we were on our way. We got to the docks and the ferry hadn’t been sorted as arranged, so Steve had to take everything out and build the bike on the docks. We got on the boat the next morning and Michael went out as soon as we arrived. No practice – we guessed the settings from the year before. Michael was up to third on the first lap and it looked like he was going to nick second, when a bloke knocked him off at the Nook. We couldn’t believe it.”
Lunch over and now brandishing cups of tea, we’re sitting in the middle of Stuart’s collection, chatting about the machines around us. He’s in his element, pointing out engineering curiosities – his favourite word is ‘fascinating’ – and talking about the Yamsel he’s just bought. Given his love of old bikes, I wonder if he’s thought about stopping work to concentrate on his collection.
“Yes, a lot of people have said it’s about time I retired, but I tell them I can’t do that because I’ve looked at my jobs to do list and that takes me through to 120. And when I do eventually go, I’ve told Steve I want it to be when I’m 100, I’m in the Isle of Man, my bike comes over the line in first place, I jump up in the air and die. That’d be perfect. And when I’m cremated I want the dust to be used like cement dust on an oil spill, so I’m doing something useful.”
‘IF YOU’VE GOT A BIKE THAT HANDLES, YOU CAN BEAT ANYONE. IT STILL APPLIES TODAY WITH BRITISH SUPERBIKES’