‘If an engine seized Suzuki couldn’t fix it’
to lose weight on the frame because they worked on the principle that weight is horsepower. They were forever twiddling at it and if they could get the weight down by about one kilogram then that equates to about one horsepower. So, they built a little aluminium frame for the RT67 and if you sat on it with the engine out it would just bend. It wasn’t a full cradle – it stopped at the front engine mounts and stopped at the back engine mounts. Suzuki even tried that with their first 500 but it was lethal. They thought that would be enough but it isn’t because the engine isn’t a stressed member – it’s all bits moving around, even if you think you’ve bolted them up. Whether or not the other factories were making frames on their 125s that way, I don’t know because I never got near a Yamaha V4, but they had black frames so I think they might have been steel.” Ogborne says the RT67 presented one of the biggest problems of all the restorations. “It has a 10-speed gearbox and uncaged needle rollers throughout, so you have to put them in with tweezers and if you drop one it goes in the engine. For that reason, Suzuki couldn’t repair those engines – if one of them seized they just used another one. I realised that if we took the piston pin out the rollers from the small-end, the bearings would all drop down. So, we stuffed the hole in the crankcase full of rags, pulled the piston out and, sure enough, about four needle rollers fell down. We were then stuck for about an hour wondering how we were going to line the piston up when we put it back in without more rollers falling out. I eventually decided to make a little aluminium plug slightly smaller than the piston pin so when we pushed the pin in it pushed the plug out without taking the rollers with it. That was one of the trickiest parts of any of the restorations.” The RT67 is made even more special by the fact that Sheene raced it at the TT in 1971. At the time, the TT was still part of the Grand Prix world championship calendar and Sheene only raced there to try to score valuable points for his title campaign, knowing that Nieto wouldn’t be competing on such a dangerous course. Sheene had posted the third fastest time on the little RT67 during practice week and briefly led the race on the first lap before thick fog came down. At the start of the second lap Sheene crashed out at the slow Quarterbridge corner and would never return to the TT.
“Yes, Barry fell off this bike at the TT,” Ogborne says. “But if he hadn’t fallen off that day, he might have had a very different view of the TT. He only just lost out to Nieto in the 125cc world championship that year and that’s why he took umbrage with the TT. He said he couldn’t see where he was going because of the mist. He was running off the road up the mountain and all sorts. He literally couldn’t see and didn’t know the course well enough. He said ‘What is the point of a circuit that you can’t even bloody see?’ That’s what got to him and that’s why he never went back. People say ‘Well, how come he raced at Scarborough then?’ But he wasn’t actually racing at Scarborough – he was just performing. And he knew the circuit and could see where he was going, unlike the Isle of Man.”