GRAND PRIX D’ENDURANCE 1966
After six hours and 20 minutes of contesting the lead, the Degens/butcher team on GTR 51D won the 1966 race a mere 10.4 seconds from factory tester Percy Tait and reigning 250cc world champion Phil Read.
Nearly five hours in, Read’s 60bhp works Bonneville slowed, smoke pouring from the left side. In the pit, factory staff frantically tried to stem an oil leak at the rev-counter drive from the exhaust camshaft. The Lawton bike was now leading and while Read went hard to catch up, by the time he came in for a mandatory rider change the smoke had reappeared. Tait set off on his final stint after Degens had passed the pits and was heeling into Paddock Bend.
“I saw Percy coming up behind me and cleared off,” Degens recalls. But then the Lawton bike also began to billow smoke from the left side; oil from a small hole in the primary chaincase was burning on the exhaust pipe. Degens did not slow, even extending his lead to more than 13 seconds. Although Tait went all out on the final lap, he had to settle for second at the flag.
Third place was taken by Griff Jenkins and journalist David Dixon on a Norton Atlas entered by Richard Rainbow Motorcycles. Syd Lawton was a master of endurance race preparation and the oil leak, caused by a flying stone chip, was the only problem to afflict GTR 51D. The bike’s average speed over 189 laps of the 2.65-mile Brands circuit, including rider change-overs, was 79.10mph.
Rex Butcher’s strongest memory of the day is a conversation he had with Mike Hailwood, who’d dropped the starter’s flag.
“I was in our pit repairing my boots with pieces of rubber and Evo-stik,” he recalls. “Mike came by and said ‘It’s looking good, Dave’s in the lead’. I said I reckoned we could do it and the prize money would be useful as I was getting married and needed to put a deposit on a house. He said: ‘If anything goes wrong, I’ll lend you the money.’ That was Mike, he was such a nice bloke.”