It had our name on it
33 years after it last appeared in Bike, this exroland Brown Honda RC30 has resurfaced and, after a refresh, it’s going back to the Bol d’or in September. Ian Martin tells the story so far…
This may get complicated, so bear with me. Team Bike is a concept that has changed shape many times over the 50 years of Bike magazine. There have been ‘Team Bike’ drag race teams, enduro efforts and in club racing, but the most famous incarnation was in the 1980s when, under the guidance of Howard Lees and with Mat Oxley (still of this parish) as one of the riders, they achieved some impressive results in Endurance Racing and turned a whole generation of Bike readers onto foreign bike travel to support the team.
That officially ended in 1988 when that team became Team MCN (or Team Chip Wrap to readers of Bike) and Team Saluki, the outfit that was organised by Bike staffer Roland Brown (see page 47), became the defacto ‘Team Bike’ that was written about and celebrated in the magazine. Are you still following?
In December ’88 the magazine ran a story from Circuit Paul Ricard about Roland’s team’s crashtastic exploits at the Bol d’or. After dropping their Rock Oil sponsored Honda RC30 numerous times, they were eventually forced to retire. A similar comedy of disasters happened at Le Mans in April ’89, and after that Roland quit racing, the team disbanded and their RC30 disappeared in the way old race bikes do. Fast forward to 2009 and the revived Team Bike started doing occasional ‘classic’ endurance events using some of the ex-howard Lees bikes. We won the Classic Bol a couple of times with ‘our’ RC30, including when the race returned to
‘She was prepared to let it go provided we promised to race it’
Circuit Paul Ricard in 2015, which plenty of Bike readers came down to watch and which was written about in the magazine. Subsequently we blew up an RC30 at Spa, but rebuilt it with an increase of capacity from 750 to 840 to stay competitive with the over-bored Kawasakis. Then the organisers changed the rules for the classic Bol, so we weren’t allowed to race the bigger engine there. Shame. Sorry, are you still with me?
We’ve had a couple of years out since racing at the Bol d’or in 2019 but were planning to run the 840 this year, so there would be no Bol d’or excursion. Then I got an email from Roland. The gist was that his old bike was available, and did I want to buy it. It’s a typical race bike story, after Roland had quit the bike ended up with Dave Goodley who raced it in 1992 at the TT and other road circuits, and then it disappeared again, before surfacing with a chap called Keiran Conlon who unfortunately passed away in 2018. RC30 values have gone mad, but this was Keiran’s widow selling it and she was prepared to let it go for sensible money, provided that we promised to race it, because that’s what he would have wanted. Madam, you have come to the right people. So now we have a bike for the Classic Bol d’or and we’re going to do Keiran proud.
When the bike arrived it looked fantastic. The bodywork was really good and it had been beautifully painted in Honda RVF colours. Unfortunately it was a mess underneath. It’d obviously been in storage for a while, the wiring was horribly bodged, there was a big oil leak, the exhaust didn’t fit, the carbs were gummed up (even though they’d apparently been professionally serviced), the back suspension unit was leaking and the forks had been weirdly modified.
We went through it front to back, fixing the oil leak, overhauling the carburettors and I had to put a whole new wiring loom on it, but apart from a service and fixing that leak we haven’t touched the engine. Now it seems to be running nicely the next thing to do is put it onto the dyno and see how fit the engine is. Assuming that’s all good we’ll run at Donington in a few weeks time and then start prepping for the Classic Bol d’or on 17-19 September (boldor. com). It’ll be a brilliant way to blow away Covid cobwebs.