1980 Red Rose
Strong minded athletes in any sport have to take a few knocks, dust themselves down and raise their game to fight their way back. That’s exactly what Nigel Birkett did at the 1980 Red Rose Trial. Yes, we are talking about the same Nigel Birkett who is the
The Montesa Cota 349 was a superb motorcycle, but not for Nigel Birkett. I understood this situation even further when I came across Nigel pushing his ‘dead’ machine out of some woods at the Inter Centre Team Trial in April 1980. He discreetly showed me the flywheel with the snapped-off crank still attached to it in his hand! In the last year of his Montesa contract sponsor Jim Sandiford understood Birkett’s predicament and suggested a move to the new Montesa Cota 200 model. Jim was always at a trials event every weekend supporting his Montesa team and suggested that Birkett’s light build could maybe suit the smaller capacity machine, his nickname of ‘Butterfly Birkett’ used in the press at the time supporting this theory.
The machine for Nigel to use would come from the European test fleet that Montesa had sent around Europe for evaluation purposes before full scale production commenced. It was a little second hand when it arrived but Sandiford put it through his workshop in the very capable hands of Bill Brandwood. Birkett then used his own knowledge to ‘tune’ the machine to his own requirements. As they say, the rest is history. In the year that Martin Lampkin gave an Italian manufacturer its first British Championship title with SWM his friend Birkett would win two championship rounds and a handful of nationals on the Montesa Cota 200.