‘I became the person to go to for race engines’
Stan Stephens is the man who transformed two-stroke tuning on both road and track
“When I first started as a motorbike mechanic in the 1960s it was at the real boom time of bikes, but it was everyman’s transport. For a family it was a sidecar and for a man going to work, he used his motorbike. “When I started racing for myself in about 1970 I became the person to go to for preparing the race engines. I raced for myself in all categories – solo racing, sidecar racing, drag racing, a bit of trials, but mainly I was known for road racing. “I raced all the way through the 70s and in that time production racing was starting to take off. When the LC came out I could see it was going to be the bike that everybody would have to have. I put all my business into getting those bikes ready for racing and that’s where I made my name internationally. “Towards the end of the 80s I asked the ACU if we could turn the bikes more into race bikes, without clunky foot pegs and lights. “It was good for the sport because they had proper tyres on and so on and that’s how production racing progressed. Out of that sprang the Formula 1, 2 and 3 and from that came the Supersport 400s, 600s and Superbikes. Now I’ve got a huge queue of people with classic twostroke engines that they want to have completely renovated. “I’ve now built a lovely workshop at home and I’ve continued to work on engines as a one-man band. My favourite engine to work on is the Yamaha RD500LC because they are so complicated that no-one else wants to do them!”
‘When the LC came out I could see it was the bike to have’