Just how good was Steve McQueen?
The people who knew him best rate the film icon’s riding
Steve McQueen’s love of motorcycles is well known but how good was he at actually riding them? It’s one thing to own a huge collection of bikes but quite another to be able to get the best out of them. So was McQueen just a rich actor who could afford to indulge his passion for collecting motorcycles or was he the real deal?
Born in Indiana in 1930, McQueen’s love affair with bikes was a fiery one right from the start. Moving to New York to study acting in 1952, he bought his first bike, a 1946 Indian Chief complete with sidecar, and soon found he had a choice to make. “It was my first bike and I loved it but I was going with a girl who began to hate the cycle,” McQueen explained many years later. “She just hated riding in the bumpy sidecar so she told me, ‘Either the cycle goes or I go!’ Well, there was no contest. She went.”
There would be no shortage of other girls, and no shortage of other motorcycles either. During his lifetime McQueen owned over 200 bikes, many of which have come up for auction since his death in 1980 and have fetched record-breaking prices.
He may have been the biggest movie star in the world in the 1960s and early 1970s but McQueen’s passion for riding bikes was so strong that he never did quite know where his priorities lay. “I’m not sure whether I’m an actor who races, or a racer who acts,” he famously commented.
Judging what others said about his skills on a motorcycle, McQueen could certainly have cut it as a professional motorcycle racer had he chosen to. Here’s what those who rode with him, and saw him ride, had to say about the screen legend.
The Great Escape
When he was filming the 1963 classic The Great Escape McQueen had only just begun riding off-road and was nowhere near as good as he would later become. With both the producers and the film’s director, John Sturges, concerned about their star getting hurt, McQueen asked off-road legend and close friend Bud Ekins to do the famous 60ft leap over a barbed wire fence that was the highlight of the film. Speaking in 1973, McQueen said: “I always felt a little guilty about that. A lot of people thought it was me making that jump but I’ve never tried to hide the truth. I could handle the jump now, I’m sure, but back in 1962 I just didn’t quite have the savvy.”
In William Nolan’s 1972 book Steve McQueen: Star On Wheels, Ekins heaped praise on McQueen’s riding ability. “Steve did a helluva lot of that riding himself, I really didn’t do much of it. Anything where he may get hurt, that’s what I did. But all the other stuff, when you see him riding by, he did all that himself. There’s a chase sequence where the German stunt riders were after him and he was so much better at riding than they were that he just ran away from them. And you weren’t going to slow him down. So they put a German uniform on him and he chased himself!”
The International Six Days Trial
Perhaps McQueen’s greatest biking claim to fame was that he represented the USA in the 1964 International Six Days Trial (now known as the International Six Days Enduro). Thanks to the massive success of films like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, McQueen was the biggest movie star in the world by 1964. It speaks volumes about the man that he was still prepared to risk injury or humiliating defeat in an international motorcycle event in front of the world’s press. It also speaks volumes about his confidence in his own riding abilities. Riding a 650cc Triumph TR6SC, he joined team-mates Bud and Dave Ekins, Cliff Coleman, and John Steen in Erfurt, East Germany to take on the world’s best trials and enduro riders. The ISDT has always been one of the toughest and most gruelling motorcycle competitions on earth, taking in several days and hundreds of miles (day one alone of the 1964 event covered 264 miles) of against-theclock racing on every type of surface. To have your entry accepted is proof alone that you’re an accomplished, international-level rider. In fact, McQueen held a full, unrestricted FIM racing licence which indicates that international motorcycle sport’s governing body considered him a professional rider.
He was also competent enough to do all his own spannering, as stipulated by the regulations. In fact, McQueen had worked as a mechanic before becoming an actor and reputedly once worked on one of James Dean’s bikes, so he was every bit as skilled with a set of spanners as he was with a throttle. McQueen and his team were on gold medal-winning pace after the first two days and McQueen held his own against much more experienced competition. Sadly, on day three, both he and Bud Ekins suffered crashes that ended the team’s campaign (although Dave Ekins continued as an individual entrant and won a gold medal). Ekins was again full of praise for his team-mate after the event, saying: “The rest of the team felt Steve was up to the task but he put the most pressure on himself not to become the weak link, he was like that.”
On Any Sunday
McQueen loved bikes so much he even agreed to bankroll a movie about them. Directed by Bruce Brown and released in 1971, On Any Sunday covered many aspects of motorcycle sport but focused heavily on off-road riding and provided a chance for McQueen to showcase his skills on two wheels. Speaking in 2007, Brown, who died last year, recalled trying to convince his hero to fund his film. “I called Steve’s company, which was Solar Productions, and he knew who I was from the surf movies (Brown made his name with the classic 1966 surfing documentary The Endless Summer) so I told him I wanted to make a movie about motorcycle competition and he said, ‘Oh, that’s great. What do you want me to do?” I said ‘I want you to pay for it!’ He laughed and said, ‘Hey man, I don’t bankroll movies.’ So I said, ‘Well you can’t be in my movie then.’ He laughed again and said, ‘Look, I’ll call you tomorrow,’ and he did call the next day and said, OK, let’s go for it.’” Brown, like everyone else who knew and rode with McQueen, rated his skills highly. “He could get out there and mix it up with everybody. He was a good rider and super-competitive. If you ever beat him it would piss him off to the max. He lived in a pretty insulated world so riding bikes gave him a chance to get out with real people and bang elbows with them. I think that was important to him. Steve was a real good rider. I mean he was an excellent rider and race car driver. It was a no-bull deal – he was good at it.”
In a 1991 video tribute to McQueen, Brown summed up his friend’s riding abilities. “It is often overlooked how good a rider Steve was. He was a member of the International Six Days Trial team in 1964, a top-ranked amateur in the desert at one time, and a very good amateur motocrosser. He respected his fellow racers and they respected him. He liked to work on his own equipment and got his knuckles bloody, just like the rest of us.”
Harvey Mushman and the Elsinore Grand Prix
Preferring to avoid the clamouring attentions of movie fans, McQueen often used the pseudonym Harvey Mushman when entering races, though he was too recognisable for it to make any difference.
In 1970, Mushman entered the gruelling Elsinore Grand Prix and provided some fantastic footage for On Any Sunday. Another brutal course, ten-miles long, the Elsinore track encompassed both demanding off-road sections and normal streets (think the Isle of Man
TT on dirt bikes). Over 500 riders would enter and of those, about 150 took it deadly serious while others treated is as a bit of fun. McQueen’s account of the race, quoted in William Nolan’s Steve
McQueen: Star On Wheels, shows he wasn’t afraid of getting hurt on bikes either. “When you’re runnin’ with the top ten, as I was, you’re really honkin’ on pretty good and what happens is that, with so many bikes choppin’ up the dirt, the holes in the course get worse... deeper with each lap. I was comin’ out of a wash under a bridge with this road dip ahead and I just kinda took one of those big jumps where you’re sure you’re gonna make it but you don’t. My bike nosed into the dip, which was, like, deep, and I went ass-over-the-bars into the crowd. Didn’t hurt anybody but me. My left foot was busted in six places.” Undeterred, McQueen remounted and finished the 100mile race in eighth place.
The Real McQueen
It seems that, by all accounts, McQueen was the real McCoy when it came to bikes and could easily have cut it as a pro racer. Sadly, Steve McQueen died from lung cancer on November 7, 1980. He was 50 years old. The final word goes to the man himself. It comes from the trailer for On Any Sunday and perfectly sums up McQueen’s love of motorcycles and their ability to spread happiness and joy, even when everything else seems to be going wrong. They’re the words of a man who truly understands the very essence of motorcycling: “Every time I start thinking the world is all bad, then I start seeing people out there having a good time on motorcycles and it makes me take another look.”
‘I’m not sure whether I’m an actor who races, or a racer who acts’