MICK GRANT
The straight-talking Yorkshireman has won GPS and TTS, but there’s one title he missed and it still rankles...
Many great racers have a pivotal point in their career when everything changes, a moment when they instinctively know they’re going places. Mick Grant is no different, but his occurred earlier than most – at art college in the early 1960s. “I was only there because my parents wanted me to go, and it was the loneliest place in the world. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Then I did a couple of hillclimbs on my old Velocette 500 that I used to commute on, and suddenly I had a direction. I didn’t think I could win races, but I knew I wanted to do more. From that point, my life changed completely.”
With a clear target, Mick radically altered his life to achieve it. “I needed money to race, so I dropped out of college and took some labouring jobs,” he says as we wait for our lunch at a pub down the road from his home in Lincolnshire. “I spent two years at Woodhead-munroe making springs – 12 hours a day next to a furnace with a white-hot bar coming at me. One week was days, the next was nights. It was tough, but the money let me do what I wanted to do. On Friday nights I’d go to work, finish at six in the morning and trailer the bike to Cadwell to do a club meeting.”
He rented a little house as a workshop and applied the same single-minded drive. “The first thing I did was remove the staircase. The neighbours weren’t best pleased about the noise, but I needed the wood to build the workshop. Also, the house was very small and the stairs just got in the way.” He used a pulley system to get to the first floor.
With the tiresome stairs gone, Mick set about furnishing
his race HQ with tools. The trouble was, he didn’t have much cash. “I was spending all my money on entry fees so I had to make my own lathe from a washing machine motor and bits of an old woodworking lathe. I was making contact breakers and even disc brakes – I had no idea what I was doing, but I desperately wanted to go quicker. On reflection, it was mad.”
Well, it was only mad because Mick was nowhere near as good at spannering as he was at riding. Despite fitting an oversized high-compression piston, Hillman Imp brake parts, plus his home-made contact breakers and disc, the Velocette was still a slug. “Eventually I decided to take all the bits off and went to a race at Croft. People were asking me what I’d done to the Velo, because it was so fast. They wouldn’t believe I’d put it back to standard. I’d spent two years detuning it. If any Classic Bike readers want some help making their bike go slower, just give me a call.”
With the millstone of DIY work removed, Mick’s potential became clearer. Jim Lee, founder of Jim Lee Racing Components, approached him with an offer. “He asked me to work for him and said he’d build me some bikes to ride.” It was the break Mick needed, and he wore the letters ‘JL’ on his lid for the whole of his career in recognition of Jim’s faith. “The first bike we made was in 1971, around a Gold Star engine that Jim had in his workshop. The first time out at a National; I finished fourth against some proper racers – Peter Williams, for one. The bike was gorgeous to ride. Then we made a 350 Yamaha and had a lot of success.”
Despite the increasing number of race wins, Mick didn’t actually believe he was very good, exhibiting a down-toearth modesty that was later to be thrown into stark contrast by the overt confidence of Barry Sheene. “At that stage I just thought I was being very lucky,” says Mick. But what about when he won the next time? “I thought I got lucky again.”
Though later Mick was forced to accept that, as a GP winner, he had riding talent, his genuine modesty never left him. It’s a trait that makes him great company, because he comes across as an affable motorcycle enthusiast rather than racing royalty. And even now, he’s happy to accept that several riders were better than him – not a common trait among factory stars of any era.
“I’ve never been a natural rider,” he says, between mouthfuls of fish finger sandwich. “I’ve got a theory that if you’ve got 100% natural ability and 100% want, you could be a multiple world champion. I had 100% want and 85% ability. So what I achieved was about par for the course. Champions like Rossi, Agostini, Roberts, Read... they had 100% of each.”
‘I SPENT ALL MY MONEY ON
ENTRY FEES, SO I HAD TO MAKE MY OWN LATHE USING A WASHING MACHINE MOTOR’
It’s hard to comprehend that someone like Mick only had 85% ability. He has, after all, won three GPS, seven TTS and multiple British Championships. But he’s adamant. “When I went to a new circuit, I’d go a few days early and do my homework learning the track. People like Greg Hansford (10-time GP winner and Mick’s factory Kawasaki team-mate) would get out of the caravan on Thursday morning and say: ‘Mick, which way does it go?’, and within three laps he’d be on the lap record. It’s so annoying. But I had desire. If you’d said to me: ‘If you cut your granny’s throat you’ll win’, she’d have been dead.”
True to form, Mick is somewhat underselling his skills here. In his first GP – at Hockenheim in 1972 – he finished 10th, a deeply impressive result for a rookie. But not for Mick. “I was so embarrassed that I didn’t pick up my winnings,” he says. “When the guys I was racing against had come to Mallory Park, I rode rings round them and I’d gone to Hockenheim expecting to do the same.
“What I hadn’t taken into consideration was that GP tracks then were so different to English ones. Ours were stop/start, GPS were fast and flowing. The only one like that we had was Silverstone. And the bikes were different. I could run a standard Yamaha at Mallory Park and beat Walter Villa and John Dodds because power didn’t matter – you were only doing 120mph down the straights. At Hockenheim you were doing 160mph. It was a shock.”
By 1974 the manufacturers could see Mick’s potential and in 1975 he signed a four-year deal with Kawasaki. “That was a good time – the money was good. There was a time in ’77 and ’78 when I could have bought a nice house every three meetings. But money’s not everything. You’ve signed a contract and lost your freedom.
“I actually enjoyed my racing more when I was riding my own private Yamahas in ’73 and ’74. There was no bullshit or politics. If you wanted to go and race at the GP at Assen, you just went and did it. And at that time the fastest 40 were on the grid – if you won that, you were the fastest man in the world. That meant a lot.” Mick’s relationship with Kawasaki had numerous highpoints (we’ll get to the TT in a bit), but his best years in Grand Prix are tinged with regret. Though he did well, he believes he could have done better. “I first rode the 250 Kawasaki at the end of the season in 1975 and finished third behind Duhamel and Kenny Roberts. I said to the Japanese: ‘We can win a world championship with this’, but they were busy with lots of other things. “That bike didn’t get revised until 1977 and by then I’d done a lot of GPS. The team manager Stan Shenton said my team-mate Barry Ditchburn could do the first half of the season and I could do the second. I thought that was crackers, because if the bike was good enough we could win a world championship.
“I never had a problem with Barry, we got on fine. But in his half of the season he got two third-place finishes, while I won at Assen and Sweden, finished second in Finland to Walter Villa who was definitely on a 350, my brakes failed at Czecho and I fell off at Silverstone. That year I could have won the championship – it felt easy winning races. But I wasn’t allowed to.”
Mick’s 74 now; 1977 is almost half a century ago, but talking about missing that world championship makes him wince like someone’s standing on his toe – the wry smile that accompanies most of his tales vanishes and his whole body tenses. “I still feel bitter about that situation and never got to the bottom of why Stan had it in for me. I wasn’t always good enough to be a world champion, but in 1977 I definitely was. I was 32, at the top of my form, and it was a good bike. On reflection, when he said I could only do half the season, I should have made more of a scene about it. But we all make mistakes...”
Although Mick’s career is inextricably linked to the TT, we’ve nearly finished our main course and the subject
still hasn’t come up. He first competed at the TT in 1970, failing to finish in the Senior on his Velocette, but coming 18th on a Jim Lee Yamaha in the Junior. So was he instantly smitten with the place? “No. The TT was exciting and frightening, and that makes you want more of it and some people do love it. I remember Ago passing me in a practice session going up Creg Willey’s Hill and he was on the back wheel all the way. There was a guy enjoying himself.” Possibly Mick’s most famous year on the roads was 1975, when he won a double at the North West, then beat the TT lap record that Mike Hailwood had held for eight years and won the Senior – his first GP win.
“Yes, I enjoyed the Kawasakis in 1975,” he says, recalling the wild KR two-stroke triples. “I remember in 1975 at the TT Steve Parrish asked me what the line was down the Sulby Straight – I said down the middle, because that’s the furthest from the edges. If you could get the bike to go down Sulby without having to back off, the handling was good enough – you’d just make do round the rest of it.”
Mick also has mixed feelings about the other bike he’s famous for winning a TT on – Slippery Sam. “At the time it was the biggest cheat bike I’d ever ridden, but they all were then – none of the production bikes were legal. It had a Formula 750 engine in it and every practice it broke down. But come the race, it ran perfectly and it was lovely – the best you could get back then. It was a mass start and my competition was Peter Williams on the Norton. I knew if I could get to Ramsey before him, the Triumph’s extra power would let me pull away up the hill and that’s what happened.”
By 1978, Mick’s relationship with Kawasaki was on the rocks due to more disagreements with team manager Stan Shenton, so when Honda came knocking he didn’t have to think too long. “Gerald Davison [Honda UK boss] came to me at Brands Hatch after I’d won four races and said: ‘We’re developing a new four-stroke GP 500, how are you fixed?’. I thought that being Honda, it would be amazing. I thought I could still become a world champion. Ha!”
So when did Mick realise that the oval-pistoned NR500 was going to be mission impossible? “The first time I rode it! It just wasn’t fast enough. The way the Japanese factories work is that if you’re a good engineer, you go up the pecking order – and the guys at the top at Honda back then were the guys who’d built Hailwood’s six, and they really didn’t know what was happening with the two-stroke world. They didn’t know how good two-strokes were.
“They told the poor guys on the shop floor: ‘You’ve got three years to build a four-stroke world championship winner’, and instead of the shop floor guys saying: ‘Don’t be an idiot, that’s impossible’, they had a go at it. But it was never going to happen. Never.”
The reasons for Honda’s ignominious failure were only too clear to Mick at the time, but the project’s momentum couldn’t be stopped by one of its riders asking difficult questions. “It was almost as if they were conducting an experiment to see what happens when you send a group of young, inexperienced engineers racing. I remember going into the R&D workshop in Tokyo one day and there’s a new guy looking after Katayama’s bike; I asked what his previous job was and he said he’d spent the last two years working on the Honda Accord front bumper. And he was now in charge of the Nissin brakes!” These later failed.
“They had some unbelievable ideas that were never going to work – the monocoque chassis, for example... and in the initial stages it wasn’t going to be water-cooled, they were going to use liquid nitrogen gas.”
Riding the NR was, as the lowly results suggested, difficult. “It was horrible. Because there was no flywheel, when you shut the throttle the rear wheel was chattering all over the place – even in fifth gear. In the first year, the tickover was 7000rpm.” And it was slow. “At Silverstone in 1979, in an open practice, I was behind Charlie Williams on a 250 Yamaha – he was pulling away from me in a straight line and in the corners. I hadn’t a cat in hell’s chance. The most my NR ever made was 104bhp.”
At the end of 1980 he got another call from Honda boss Gerald Davison. “He said: ‘I’m organising your retirement party’. I didn’t get what he meant – but it was his way of telling me he was ending my contract. That inspired me for the next five years – my motivation was to beat Hondas.”
Which he did. Starting as a Suzuki privateer in 1981, he won the Senior TT. Then, after becoming a Suzuki factory rider, he took the MCN Superstock championship and 1985 Production TT. But by then he’d had enough. “I was lying third in the Senior and went arse over tit at Black Dub – there was some mechanical issue – and I was sitting at the side of the road with a broken thumb. It was a fifth-gear crash, so I was lucky, and I thought: ‘Maybe someone’s trying to tell me something here’. And that was the beginning of the end.” After racing at Macau, he retired.
We’ve finished our coffees and, as we get up to leave, Mick is ruminating about his career. “At the end of the day, I thought I had more in me than came out. I was making a good living doing British Superbikes and occasional GPS, and maybe I should have been a bit more adventurous. I’ve always been brought up with the motto ‘if you can’t afford it, don’t do it’ and I couldn’t afford to do a full season of GPS. The ones I did in Sweden, Finland and Germany, I loved, and I could afford to do them because my British racing was paying for it. I just thought I was incredibly lucky to race motorbikes and get paid to do it…”
‘I MADE A GOOD LIVING DOING BRITISH SUPERBIKES AND OCCASIONAL GPS’