TAKING TO THE TRACK
I was 18 at the time and the racing bug had already bitten. So, away went an entry for the National Clubman’s Handicap race that was a curtain raiser to the big International Silverstone Saturday race in April 1960. Surprisingly my entry was accepted and so my first race was to be on the high-speed GP circuit. Not even a chicane at Woodcote in those days, just a long right-hander taken flat out and flat on the tank. The limit of my ‘race preparation’ was to take off the lights, swap clip-on bars for the standard ones and bolt on some numberplates. The speedometer had been discarded with the headlight nacelle and I couldn’t afford a rev-counter kit. Not that it mattered – my race plan was just to go as fast as I could, rev the motor to the max and see what happened. Practice day arrived – meaning, I had a chance to find out (a) how fast the Triumph was against proper racing Gold Stars and (b) whether I was as fast as I thought I was in my ‘cafe racer’ guise! That first question was rudely answered at Copse, the very first corner, which was a tighter, more rightangled right-hander in those days. When I sat up to brake, a guy on a racing 200cc Tiger Cub came storming past on the inside, still flat on the tank. Luckily, that had the necessary ‘red rag to a bull’ effect and I passed him down the next straight. It was a handicap race which saw the 250s first away, then the 350s and then us on the 500s. After the start it was all a bit of a blur. I remember passing people (presumably those on the 250s and 350s) in the early laps and then following a couple of blokes on Gold Stars that I made no impression on for the rest of the race. I don’t recall being passed by anyone but, even so, at the end of the race was truly amazed to be told that I had finished third in the 500cc class behind the two Gold Stars at an 83.60mph average and sixth on handicap. So much so, I wondered if the lap scorers had got it wrong. My next race was at Rhydymwyn in North Wales – and what a shock that was. I knew nothing about gearing bikes for different-sized tracks and turned up with the same high ‘TT gearing’ that the bike had always had…only to find that the track was 16 feet wide and just over half a mile long through an old Army coal dump. They sorted out the field for the final by a load of heat races with eight riders at a time. I never got out of first gear and still burned out the clutch. It was a rude awakening about the technicalities of going racing. Incidentally, I had a ‘celebrity pit crew’ for that race – future World Champion, Rod Gould and the future ‘voice of British racing’ Fred Clarke. I rode the bike the 120 miles to the meeting and the ‘crew transport’ was Rod’s Excelsior Talisman Twin. I can still remember following them and laughing at the sight of 6ft 4in Fred perched on the pillion, towering above 5ft 6in Rod with two ex-army knapsacks attached to pannier frames – one full of our tools and the other containing our lunch. And that was about it, apart from road riding, for the Triumph in its original Clubman’s TT form. I was aiming to get more serious about racing in later seasons (something I sadly never really did) so we took the Triumph off the road for 1961 and into the workshop behind Rod Gould’s house, where he built it into a very purposeful-looking racer. With a special pannier tank and racing seat from one of Eddie Dow’s Gold Star specials, plus new small-bore exhaust pipes and reverse cone megaphones, it was an eye-catching bike. But in the real world of racing neither it nor I were going to be near the front. I only recall racing it occasionally. The main reason for this was because I joined Motor Cycling magazine as a journalist in 1961 and was not allowed to race. That changed in 1963 when I joined Motor Cycle Mechanics as assistant editor and was allowed to race again. I teamed up with the magazine’s workshop manager, Dave Weightman, to ride a Yamahayds2 in the Thruxton 500 and we then decided to install the Triumph engine in Dave’s Norton Dominator chassis to make a tidy-looking bike for me to ride in the 1963 Manx Grand Prix. It was during that exercise that we stripped the engine down and realised just how much work had been lavished on the internals by the guys at the Triumph factory who had prepared the bike for the 1954 Clubman’s TT. All of the cam drive wheels from the crankshaft and their central idler gear had been lightened and radially drilled; the camshafts themselves had also been lightened by virtue of being put on a lathe and turned down between the lobes. All excess metal was removed from that area so that no casting marks remained and the E3134 identification number was written on with a scribing tool. The rocker arms had been ground down so that their tops were almost a knife edge. It was obvious that someone had spent a lot of time and expertise on the engine. So the T100C engine went back to the Isle of Man in 1963 mounted in the Norton Dominator road bike chassis. With that combination I lapped at 86+mph – good enough for an MGP newcomer with Triumph power in those days but a speed which only goes to underline just how good was the 84+mph pace of Tony Ovens and the Triumph on their way to that Clubman’s TT fourth place nine years earlier. Obviously Triumph had done its best to provide a Clubman’s TT winner for Tony Ovens and he had also obviously done his best to repay its efforts – fourth at 84+mph was probably the best that could be expected in that first year of Gold Star domination. Talking of Gold Stars, I was interested to note that two places behind Tony Ovens in the race standings was a certain Percy Tait – riding a Gold Star because the Clubman’s rules did not allow anyone to race a bike if they worked for the manufacturer of that particular machine. Percy, of course, was even then a tester and development rider for Triumph and his name will always be synonymous with the motorcycles from Meriden. After spotting his name in the 1954 results, I often wonder whether Percy might have been involved with the preparation and even the testing of the Ovens’ bike and the other T100C ‘works prepared’ bikes that year. So, where did my rare Triumph end up? I wish I knew. Possibly it went to Triton specialist, Dave Degens at Dresda Autos in part exchange for his Greeves Silverstone I purchased and raced in 1964. Obviously I wish I’d never sold it and it was in my garage restored to its 1954 Clubman’stt specification. But, as is often said, hindsight is a wonderful thing…