Terry Beckett
Sadly Terry Beckett has passed away aged 87. Terry was a pioneer in tuning two-strokes, mainly for production racing. I was still racing sidecars in the mid-1970s. Looking around the race paddocks all the proddy bikes had ‘Tuned by Terry Beckett’ stickers on them (stickers that are still selling on ebay for that authentic period look). The major proddy race national championship then was The Avon Race Series and Terry’s tuned machines won all the two-stroke classes each season. Back then, I had a motorcycle business and was also tuning engines for local riders but Terry was tuning them nationally and was the established expert, to me he was the person I looked up to. Terry was based in the north and I was in the south and it was many years before we met. It was in the early 1980s and the LCS were winning everything, by that time I was up there on a par with Terry and the ACU asked us both to attend a meeting of the rules committee to thrash out new rules for the Production racing. I had never spoken to Terry but we both arrived with the same ideas of the direction that production racing should take. Our rules were taken on by the ACU and in later years were tweaked to become Formula 1, 2 and 3 and then later tweaked again to be Supersport 400 and Supersport 600. Terry and I got on really well and we agreed to keep in touch at race meetings. The fantastic Marlboro Race series was in full swing by this time and almost all the 250 and 350 proddy races were won by either Terry Beckett tuned bikes or Stan Stephens tuned bikes. There was great rivalry between us and between our riders but what our fiercely loyal riders didn’t know was that Terry and I watched the races together and when the race meetings were down south Terry used to come and stay with us! We both carried out a lot of development with reed-valves and came up with the same results. We decided to have reeds made by Harpowa to our own spec, his and mine were identical but we had his coloured blue and mine red. There was a lot of debate in the paddock on which ones were the best; only Terry and I knew they were the same! Years later I had a call from Terry saying that he wanted to retire and would I go up to his workshop in Nottingham with my van and to take a trailer. Terry insisted on loading every last piece of equipment and tools into my van and trailer. He then said: “I can now retire and if anyone wants any tuning done I can say I can’t, I haven’t got any equipment to do it, ring Stan Stephens!” Terry was a very meticulous man and he had organised his own funeral and the service. He had even left a list of people that he wanted to attend his funeral. I was very proud to be on that list and I went to the service along with many others who were proud to have known him.