The race bike accumulator
Steve Wheatman Age: 60 Job: Businessman 20 road bikes 40 2-stroke GP bikes (numerous factory bikes) 6 Classic TT XR69 replicas and SRAD 750s 35+ WSB, BSB and Supersport 600 race bikes
Ihad multiple bikes from very early on. I got a new RD250E when I was 17 and my brother had an X7 and we’d buy things that we’d fancy doing up – I remember we had an early drum brake Kawasaki 500 triple. Then I got a GS750 Suzuki, then a 350LC, then an RG500. By then I was collecting older Suzukis – GT550S, 380s – and I had a shedful of bikes. If you’ve got a collector’s mindset it’s something you do. And it’s not just bikes – I collect books, cricket bats, paintings…
My bike collecting trundled along relatively under control for years, when I had five or six road bikes in various states of repair. Then 18 years ago I formed my own company exporting mining machinery and after a few years it started to go well, so I started to buy the bikes I’d always wanted. It began with a couple of RG500 race bikes [Steve had raced in his youth], and it grew from there.
The first proper race bike I bought was an RG500 Mk1 with a Barry Sheene connection – he hadn’t ridden it, but he’d used the engine. Then I bought another one which had a Keith Huewen connection, then another one that I part-exchanged for a Joey Dunlop Honda RS250. Then I heard of some ex-gallina factory bikes – ridden by Franco Uncini and Randy Mamola. They were a lot of money, and were my first factory bikes.
That was the start of the serious stuff. At the time, my business was making good money so it made sense to turn some of it into racing motorbikes, both from an enjoyment and investment point of view. It carried on like that until I had 100 bikes, probably about eight years ago.
When I got to about 120 bikes I was running out of space and it was becoming impractical. You’re in the grip of a disease and you get to the point where you can’t use or enjoy the bikes – you can’t even keep them all going. I don’t want a museum, so I started selling, getting rid of two or three ordinary ones and replacing them with a single special one. I’m back down to around 100 now.
We also built some to use at the Classic TT, so the collection grows that way too. And we’re still building the XR69 F1 replica bikes like the one Michael Dunlop rode to Classic TT success. Also, I have an arrangement with Suzuki that at the end of every year I get one of their race bikes – a few years back I got Michael Dunlop’s Tt-winning GSX-R1000. Then there are long term projects we’re working on – this year we’ll complete another RGV500 Schwantz factory bike. We’ve been hunting crankshafts for that for the last four years. Sometimes it’s quite cathartic to sell something you really don’t want to. Afterwards, a few weeks later, you usually think, ‘I don’t really miss that’. It feels good, it proves you can do it, like giving up drinking. In the last three or four years I’ve parted with some very special bikes and felt a wrench when they went but when they’ve gone I don’t miss them. It’s a strange thing.
‘It’s cathartic to sell something you don’t want to… it proves you can do it’