SHEENE’S FAVOURITE
Restoring the bike Barry loved most
Over the next four pages you’ll see five of the most significant motorcycles from the late, great Barry Sheene’s career – and the ones he cherry-picked to take pride of place in his Australian home. They include the bike on which he made his Grand Prix debut in 1970, the bike he rode in his final season of GP racing in 1984, his two 500cc world championshipwinning bikes, plus a special big bore version of the RG500 built for the 1979 TransAtlantic Challenge. Together, their worth is around £2.5 million. The title-winning Suzuki XR14 RG500s from 1976 and 1977 were shipped to the UK from Sheene’s house in Australia and restored in 2016, while the 1979 Suzuki XR23A (a 652cc big bore RG500) and the 1984 Harris-framed Suzuki XR45A were restored ahead of the 2019 Motorcycle Live event in Birmingham then reassembled in front of showgoers, and the 125cc Suzuki RT67 that was Bazza’s favourite bike was completed and fired back into life in the spring of 2020. As far as restoration jobs go, getting your hands on some pukka Sheene machines is as good as it gets but just how easy is it to bring such pieces of racing history back to life? Martyn Ogborne, Sheene’s mechanic for seven years, and Tim Davies, who fronts Suzuki’s Vintage Parts Programme, explain the challenges they faced. “It all started in 2015 when we were talking to the Sheene family about what we could do to celebrate the 40th anniversaries of Barry’s world titles in 2016 and 2017,” Davies says. “We brought his two championshipwinning bikes over and things just gathered momentum from there. “But I also knew that Steve Wheatman of Team Classic Suzuki and Nigel Everett of Racing Restorations Limited – both of whom we work with a lot – have a lot of spares for those bikes. So, we sent the bikes to Nigel so he could strip them down and see what actually needed doing. I was thinking it would cost about £50,000 to restore those two bikes and that was way beyond our budget. The crankcases on
‘Barry’s son Freddie didn’t want the RT67 to leave the house’
the ’76 bike were in a terrible state but Nigel and Martyn knew people who could repair them and the bill was far less than I had anticipated so things started looking more promising.”
This was the first bike Sheene ever raced in Grand Prix. He finished second to Angel Nieto on it in his debut Grand Prix at Montjuic Park in 1970. Barry also finished a close second to his great friend Nieto on this bike in the 1971 125cc world championship. Sheene had bought the ex-factory RT67 in 1970 from Stuart Graham (son of the first ever 500cc world champion, Les Graham) who had finished third on it in the 1967 world championships behind Bill Ivy and Phil Read. It cost him £2000 and he worked 14 hours a day driving a lorry to pay for it but would still never have managed without a loan from his dad, Franco (he insisted he paid every penny back). The bike – which was also the one Sheene raced in his only appearance at the TT in 1971 - was restored in the spring of 2020. It was Sheene’s favourite bike and took pride of place in his house in Queensland. “Initially Barry’s son Freddie didn’t want the RT67 to leave the house as it was the family’s prized possession,” Davies explains. “But he called several months later and said we could have it, so that was the icing on the cake.” Although Ogborne had yet to work with Sheene when he was racing the RT67 in 1971, he knows the bike inside out. “The first thing we did was take the engine out and look at the chassis. The RT67 has a tube aluminium frame which was painted blue because Suzuki didn’t want anybody to know they were using aluminium tubing. It’s crap as far as stiffness goes. The bloody engine is so heavy so they had