Lifetime Achievement Award: Ashraf Sheik

ALTHOUGH THE RISE IN ENTHUSIAST MOTORCYCLING is seen as a fairly recent phenomenon, the fact is Indian motorcycling attained a very high pedigree quite early on. As a tribute to the heyday of Indian motorcycling, former motorcycle racer and contributor Ashraf Sheik was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the India Bike Week 2015.

Born in March 1937, Ashraf Sheik, after having passed the SSC examination from the Billimoria High School, Panchgani, has spent his entire adult life involved with automobiles, particularly two-wheelers.

The highlight of his rather brief bike racing career in the early 1960s was at Lohegaon, near Pune, when on a virtually stock Matchless 250 he convincingly beat the much more fancied opposition comprising Hondas and NSUs.

Opting for a career in automobiles rather than pursuing academics, he served an apprenticeship in various garages, acquiring a hard-core, handson experience in working on cars and motorcycles. To expand his knowledge in auto-related areas, he worked at Buckau Wolf as a balancing machine operator and then at SKF Ball Bearing Co as a tool maker.

Besides running a performance-related workshop for cars and bikes, he was contracted to Bajaj Auto to modify in-house and race their M80 and GF 125-cc bikes. The programme resulted in innumerable victories. The contract extended to maintaining and racing the Kawasaki Moto-X racers. The prestigious Rodil Trophy 250-cc class was won for two consecutive years under his leadership.

Later he was engaged full-time as an R&D consultant with Kinetic Engineering.

The most recent and certainly the most outstanding example of his sports car chassis design and construction skills has been the building of the entire rolling chassis, suspension and braking system for the Avanti sports car for DC Design.

His deep understanding of automobile technology and practical experience with cars and bikes made him a natural choice to serve as Road Test Editor and technical consultant initially to the and magazine and subsequently to as well as He continues to write as a freelance auto journalist and to be involved as a consultant to interesting auto projects.