An hour…
B ack in the late Sixties Swed i sh Husqvarna pilot Olle wa s one t he best 250 ri der s ar ou nd . At the p eak of his car eer he bec ame , as t he first Eu r op ean ever, involved in R&D work for Suzuki. Thanks to Olle’s work the factory took their firs
…with Olle Petterssen. To be at your height in racing and the factory say ‘you know what? Don’t need you’ could be a downer, but not for Swedish legend Olle Petterssen.
Olle, born 1937, has lived all his life in Strängnäs. The town is, by Swedish standards, medium-sized and of modest importance. During Olle’s time as a youngster in the Fifties, Sweden boomed economically. Wealth, although minuscule by today’s measurement, was reflected in a growing motorbike scene and a bigger variety of Hollywood films at the local cinema. All this made a huge impact on Olle, who soon bought his first motorbike, an NV with a 128cc engine. In those days motocross was a big thing in Sweden. Stars were celebrated as national heroes but as the decade went along further economic growth slowly started to undermine the motorbike scene. People could suddenly afford small cars and less sponsor money went into motorcycle racing.
Olle started racing back in 1954 but he soon found out that even successful riders had a hard time making ends meet. At first he didn’t have a car, so Olle either took his bike to local events or hitchhiked with some lorry driver that didn’t mind him bringing a motorcycle along. He got to know Torsten Hallman, later to become a four-time 250 champ, and together they split the costs of transport. Olle’s first racing experience outside Sweden was the Dutch Markelo in 1959. He soon earned a reputation as a good rider. He did some outings in the 500-class, mostly on a BSA. In 1961 he, as one of a few selected riders, was invited to purchase a specially-built Husqvarna 250 directly from the factory. The same year he was runner-up in the national championship, beaten only by Torsten Hallman. So it went on, Olle was successful but always behind Torsten who, it is fair to add, had more support from Husqvarna than Olle. In 1965 he tried Bultaco but soon went back to Husqvarna. 1966 and 1967 saw Olle as national 250 champ. He also took, in 1967, a bronze medal in the world championship.
Career swing
In late 1967 Husqvarna made it clear to Olle that they could offer him a free bike and some additional support if he wanted to continue riding their bikes. Olle thought the fierce rivalry between Torsten Hallman and Joel Robert could open doors for him. A gold medal was surely, at least in Olle’s own eyes, within reach. But fate intervened. He got an offer from Suzuki.
At the time Suzuki didn’t have a competitive bike, so the offer was to be considered as an offer to become riding R&D employee. No one Olle knew had ever worked with motocross for a Japanese factory. That the Japanese picked Olle had a lot to do with his impeccable record of finishing races. He was a stable rider.
Language posed a bit of a problem. Naturally, Olle didn’t speak much Japanese but unfortunately he didn’t speak much English either. A friend from home, a sales manager from a local tooling factory, joined Olle – in early 1968 – on his first trip to Japan. The negotiations went well, but in retrospect Olle regrets not having asked for more money, but at the time he was happy. With all the paperwork done, he was immediately hurried away to Suzuki’s test track. His first mission was to try out the factory’s new 250cc. Olle wasn’t particularly impressed. In front of a huge crowd of Japanese engineers he stated that apart from the gearbox and the clutch, everything else was rather crappy and had to be redesigned.
The Japanese did their homework and some months afterwards they sent staff and a new 250 bike to Olle in Strängnäs. The Japanese always came in pairs – one engineer and one mechanic. At the beginning the progress was modest. Neither the Japanese nor Olle excelled in English – to put it mildly. Olle remembers a particular problem when talking to his foreign co-workers. They always acknowledged a question by answering “Yes” and then made a pause to formulate an answer. This could produce comical, as well as dangerous, situations. Once, Olle – who couldn’t properly see parts of the road behind a bush – asked if he should proceed. His Japanese friend, who presumably had a better view of the road than him, calmly said: ”Yes… No, big lorry”. Olle, who at the time was well aware of the
Japanese way of answering, just smiled and waited for the lorry to pass.
Suzuki clinches 250 title
All the work that was put into Suzuki’s 250 machine soon began to pay off. The bike became more and more competitive. Then, bad luck struck the team. Olle had a bone-breaking crash in Sweden and had to sit out the rest of 1968. But the Japanese where nonetheless satisfied and, based on his reports, they constructed a new bike. That bike took Olle to yet another 250 World Championship bronze medal in 1969. Suzuki realised they had a winner and contracted two more riders for the coming 1970 World Championship season. That year proved to be a great success for Suzuki. Joel Robert took the gold and Sylvain Geboers the silver. Olle finished in fifth spot but his work was done. He stayed with Suzuki as R&D rider but he had less and less to contribute, as knowledge about motocross – thanks to him – was much more widespread at the factory than before.
In 1972 Kawasaki showed interest in Olle’s services and Suzuki didn’t really mind him leaving. His mission at Kawasaki was the same as in the beginning with Suzuki. Kawasaki wanted him to help them build a competitive motocross bike. At first Kawasaki had huge plans for motocross but somehow most resources where diverted to road racing. Consequently, progress was slow. As before, the R&D work was done in Strängnäs with staff from Japan. At first Kawasaki presented Olle with a bike that he felt was about as good for motocross as any average family car was likely to be for rallying. But, as he was still a good rider, he managed to finish in sixth spot at a GP race in Holland. The bosses at Kawasaki, who must have thought rather less of Olle’s skills as a rider, took the result as an indication that their bike was much better than Olle had stated. For a while no major redesign was contemplated but eventually his co-workers from Kawasaki began to realise he had a point. The machine needed a total overhaul, as well as a new engine.
Olle can still remember a lively telephone exchange between ‘his’ Japanese engineer in Sweden and the chief engineer at the factory in Japan. At last it looked like Olle’s
view would prevail. A totally new bike was promised but what later came from Japan wasn’t as good as was initially promised. But it still was a huge step forward and by 1974 Olle had talented Swede Torleif Hansen signing up for Kawasaki.
All was set for 1975 to become a good season but once more the bike delivered by Kawasaki wasn’t fully competitive. Finally, in the beginning of 1976, Torleif was invited down to Japan to test Kawasaki’s latest 250cc bike. This time the machine worked great and, consequently, Olle’s work was completed. Torleif stayed with Kawasaki and took a World Championship 250 silver medal in 1978.
At the time Olle was Swedish national motocross team coach but most of his time was spent coaching his own son Dick, who eventually took two motocross National Championship titles in the 125 class.
Today it is more than 40 years since Olle worked with Suzuki and Kawasaki, but he still thinks of it as a great time. And he has absolutely no regrets about his decision not to stay with Husqvarna in 1968. He might have thrown away an excellent opportunity of becoming World Champion but if he had chosen otherwise there might have been no odyssey into the enchanting world of R&D work for the Japanese. )
In my previous column I recounted my first visit to a scramble back in the mid-sixties. Scroll forward a couple of years and following a move up the country to East Anglia, I would regularly be watching the likes of Dave Bickers, John Banks, Jim Aim, Dave Nicoll and Freddie Mayes perform. At such events my father would patiently explain the differences between two-stroke and four-stroke machines, how a Triumph twin sounded and performed differently to four-stroke singles and that the lovely little red bike that Dave Bickers raced was not a twin, even though it clearly sported two distinct exhaust pipes!
We also got to see our fair share of national and international meetings, usually at Wakes Colne, just six miles away from our home on the Essex-suffolk border. At such events, the riders list was augmented by such luminaries as Jeff Smith, Alan Clough and Bryan Goss and visiting overseas stars like Olle Pettersson, Sylvain Geboers and Adolf Weil. At these meetings, dad would instruct me to keep an eye on ‘Smithy’, who would, he informed me, patiently sit behind the leader until he could slip past in the closing laps and go on to win. Apparently, he was ‘pacing’ himself.
But my motorcycling sport education did not end there. The dawning of a new decade saw me introduced to the bewildering sport of trials riding when I was a spectator at the first ‘East Anglian’ National promoted by the Sudbury Club. I remember whistling down country lanes at breakneck speed in dad’s Triumph 2000, in an effort to beat the riders to the next group of ‘sections’, whatever they might be. My initial impression was that trials were very complicated compared with scrambles, but dad, who had been a good Expert in his day, came through explaining first and foremost that a trial was not a race – today’s followers of the sport take note! He added that riders passed through a number of ‘sections’, overseen by ‘observers’ who registered their loss of marks. The marking scheme itself was rather baffling; I got the idea of a ‘five’, but how could anyone refer to an unpenalised ride through a section as a ‘clean’ when rider and machine had to traverse such muddy terrain?
I rapidly discovered that one advantage of spectating at a trial was that you could get up really close, not just to the action, but also to the bikes as riders abandoned them to ‘examine’ the sections. Dad pointed out the more liberally studded Dunlop ‘Trials Universal’ tyres, higher ground clearance, shorter wheelbase and steeper head angle of a trials machine and explained the need for lower gear ratios. As one rider returned to his machine dad drew my attention to a Union Jack cloth badge on his Barbour jacket; the rider was John Pease, the machine a Greeves Scottish and the badge, of course, indicated he was an ISDT man.
Following a winter of spectating at centre trials, dad purchased a one-year-old Montesa in 1971 and wherever he travelled to trials there I’d be, mainly spectating, but occasionally cajoled into doing a spot of observing. We would also venture out every other week to the ‘club night’. This would invariably include a quiz on motorcycle sport, in which, as an avid reader of the motorcycle rags of the day, I was an instant hit, establishing myself as somewhat of an authority – on contemporary questions at least!
It was around this time that almost imperceptibly I went from being the pupil to becoming the teacher. I suppose most, if not all, parents must experience this gradual shift in balance, as I have with my children.
By the mid-seventies when dad and I attended both trials and scrambles and I began competing in trials, I was suddenly the one spotting up and coming riders, new machines and innovations, though my technical knowledge of how a ‘cantilever’ suspension or ‘reed valve’ worked still left a lot to be desired.
In 1976, I found myself competing in the Dulais Valley Trial in South Wales. Some 25 years earlier my father had also been riding in the same area in the Cambrian Trial and he remembered a fearsome climb that he’d had to undertake on his Norton 500T. The hill, used in the prewar and immediately postwar ISDTS, was ‘Dinas Rock’. When I received the route card I think dad was a little alarmed to see that I would have to ride the same section. However, with the passing of time and the evolution of the trials motorcycle, the hill offered little challenge, even to a novice on a 250 Bultaco and it wasn’t even observed. How times change.
Time passes but through it all neither my father nor I have lost our desire to learn about motorcycling and to impart the knowledge gained. In a recent telephone conversation dad was super enthusiastic over a new book he had bought, written by the one-time editor of the Motor Cycle, Arthur Bourne, under his pen-name ‘Torrens’, which he is keen to show me next time I am home. They say ‘once a motorcyclist, always a motorcyclist’, but it would appear the same is also true of teachers.
Time passes but through it all neither my father nor I have lost our desire to learn about motorcycling and to impart the knowledge gained
Ian Berry