In the chair – the Mick Boddice story
The finest product of one of Britain’s most established racing dynasties, Mick Boddice was rarely out of the results for over four decades of racing. Arguably he kept his best until last, as he recounted to Pete Crawford at his Kidderminster home.
Right from the start, Mick was a boy fascinated with speed and engines. The story of how that turned into a racing icon who was immortalised on a Manx coin is a fascinating one.
“Isuppose my most memorable race was the Ulster GP, where I had a wheel-to-wheel battle with Jock Taylor. He was world champion at the time and he’d lead one lap and I’d lead the next – it just went backwards aand forwards, a real good ride. Then, on the last lap, we came down to the hairpin, hhe went straight on and into the ditch and I wwon it. I had another good ride at the Ulster aactually, where I won again and beat Gote Bbrodin into second.” The Ulster seems an odd one to choose, ggiven Mick had nine TT victories among 22 rrostrum places – as well as numerous British titles. But sidecar racers are a different breed aand Mick Boddice was certainly born to it – eeven though, with a wry smile, he suggests hhe drifted into it, but early photos hint ootherwise and the date on his race licence oonly confirms it. “My birthday was in November, which aannoyed me, as I had to wait until the next sseason to start racing. Aged 16, at Brands Hhatch, it was Good Friday and I was on my old mman’s bike. It was as soon as I could race, and I won 12 quid. I thought I was a millionaire
and bought a pair of Agostini goggles with the money.” The money came from a third in the handicap race, after a 15th in the main event. The handicappers were rarely generous – the stars usually pulled through for the cash – so it indicated a deal of learning between the one race and the other. That early learning curve remained steep, culminating the following year, on Sunday, May 16, at Snetterton. With a first victory, a first MCN headline, and a first win over dad, the press article proclaimed: ‘First win for a gingerhaired 17-year-old who is going to be a great rider… the spotlight was turned on young Mick Boddice who tore away from a top line field including his father Bill, in the big sidecar event. And Mick’s passenger, 18-year-old Dave Loach, had never been in a racing sidecar before. The two teenage tearaways went into the lead on lap three.’ “My dad said he’d retire when I beat him, but he always had an excuse when I did. He was an electrician, then a car dealer selling Volvos, but through racing he knew Clive Bennett, from Ariel. And when Ariel moved into BSA Clive was in engine development,
and said to me: ‘Do an apprenticeship, then move into my department.’ I actually moved three years before I finished my apprenticeship, and from there into the Comp Shop.” As a sidecar racer in the mid-1960s, if there was one place to be in the world – outside BMW’S race department perhaps– then it was at BSA. For a company which famously didn’t go racing, you couldn’t move for racers and the ideal engine was sitting readily to hand. “When I started, dad was still on a Norton, but when I got that job he said: ‘Have a word with Brian Martin and see if you can get an engine.’ So, I got him an engine and the first thing he did was cut the bloody gearbox off, to stick a six-speed shift light behind it. And it didn’t go down very well at work I can tell you: ‘We gave him an engine and now he’s cut it up and using the wrong parts on it.’ “But the A65 was so much quicker than a Triumph and so easy to swap the top ends on – from a 500 to a 650. Snetterton used to have a 500 race first, then an unlimited afterwards, so you’d come in after the 500 race, just lift the top end off with it red hot, change the pistons and put the big top on. The crank’s weight didn’t make much difference. “They called us the Birmingham BSA riders. They said you had to work there, what with the Boddices, the Hanks and Browny (Peter Brown). Brian Martin was always helpful with bits and pieces but there were no special parts, even if he did give us time off to go racing. The first time I could do the TT I went into his office and said: ‘Can I have the last week in May and first weeks in June as my holidays?’ And he said: ‘No. But we can pay you and you can go.’ That first TT ride resulted in a DNF when a stray bolt punctured his fuel tank, but he scored regular top places around the UK the same year, while juggling commitments as mechanic to BSA solo racer Tony Smith (there wasn’t too much juggling though if there was a clash of dates). There was also mutual support as BSA’S road racing – while tacitly acknowledged – always ran woefully underresourced. “When I was with Tony, BSA would pay for the hotel and expenses, as we used to go the night before, even for club events, Snetterton and that. But if there was a clash? No chance. I wouldn’t be there. He’d have to do it all himself. But Tony did me a squish head and pistons, machined it all up, and it was better. Tony would ream those heads out, but where the springs sat, it would break through and wouldn’t be flat for the springs to sit on. So, through family connections, I’d take them to Ernie Earles, of Earles Metals, and get a tube knocked in. And those solo tanks? Ernie did those too. I don’t know how he got the job?” It’s said with a grin. As that’s how it was done, calling in favours and trial and error. It was the same with his rolling chassis too, as Mick started with a cut down Featherbed frame, like many others, before it was replaced by a Ken Sprayson special, allowing his potential to shine and win the prestigious Grovewood prize in 1967. In later years this would be awarded to the likes of Dave Croxford, Phil Haslam, Steve Parrish, Keith Huewen and Damon Hill – showing that they rarely made a mistake – but the £250 prize money didn’t last long in Boddice’s impatient hands.
“Grovewood owned Brands and they gave a rider award and a car driver award each year. Well, I planned to buy Derek Minter’s van, and he was giving the awards, so he said: ‘Sign the back of the cheque and you can hand it back to me straight after and have the van.’” The best equipment and transport to suit couldn’t guarantee outright race victories however. Mick’s rise coincided with one of the golden ages of British sidecar racing and his direct opposition had access to near identical kit to himself and some of the cream of three-wheeled motorsport just happened to also work at BSA. Peter Brown and Norman Hanks were no more than a spanner’s throw away Monday to Friday, while Chris Vincent – who’d been given carte blanche to ‘work from home’ – was also an occasional visitor. As you can imagine, bragging rights on a Monday morning were a big issue. “It was like going to a motorcycle club meet every day. I’d still be there today if they were in business. On a Monday morning you’d have lots of excuses ready if they beat you. If it was Mallory one week, it was: ‘Wait till Brands next week. I’ll get you back.’ I beat Norman Hanks one day at Castle Coombe – a fast circuit – which cost him the British championship (Vincent held on to it instead). We used to work together, and we were bought up together, but he never spoke to me for a month. We were working in the same place as motocrosser Jeff Smith though and Jeff said: ‘What’s wrong with you Norman? You race to win races, not championships. Man-up!’ “Pip Harris was actually my idol when I started. He was on a Norton then, as at the time it was a Manx or G50 Matchless – and Chris Vincent of course, he was alright. I beat him once at Snetterton. I out-braked him, it was the old Snetterton, and I out-braked him into the hairpin at the end. I nearly beat him once at Castle Coombe too – we both broke the lap record that day, at exactly the same speed. I was going to go to see him after that race but the old man said: ‘No. No you don’t. Wait for him to come and see you.’ So, he comes over and just says (he never said much): ‘Peddling hard weren’t
yo ou chap?’ I can remember the day I beat h im clearly though, cos I never beat him ag gain, he was that good. But the time I beat him was the last time he used 1 6-inch wheels. Next time he came out it was w with Mini wheels all round.” That was typical of the advancements ta aking place during the late 1960s. But B they weren’t all in chassis design. Boddice B was a factory employee and the t new parts and new engines kept coming, by both fair means and foul, even if the racers’ innovations rarely made it into production. “The gearbox would jump out o of third gear, but if you knew what w to do it was alright. What I did was weld two cam plates together t and had them ground both b sides, so it was all more rigid. r Things like that might filter back b on to the production bikes but b the biggest problem was a chap called Alister Cave. The chaps c in development would tell him h what they’d found, but he’d say: s ‘Oh no, I’m running my own li ittle development shop. I’m not in nterested.’ So, the problems were with w management, not technical. “I’m sure Norman (Hanks) has to old you that we used to go up to o the machine shop and select th he barrels with the bores square in n the middle of the casting. Les Mason M even got some special o nes cast, but the main thing was to o get hold of an A70 crank. It was a case of: ‘Oh we’ve had hundreds made. m Where have they all gone?’ I don’t know how that engine evolved but we’d all been using A10 cranks, and then these things arrived, and it was: ‘Wow!’ It was instant extra power. I started on a 654cc, then +40 oversize, about 670cc. But the best one I had was the long stroke, with a +40 barrel, because you got to rev it and it was still torquey. I didn’t bother with a really big engine, as even like that it was all torque. It was ridiculous really. It was just wup, wup, wup through all the gears. Incredible, at any revs and Brian asked me to try special bits too, like a Quaife gearbox, a five-speed, one of the first. It was safer that I rode with one, rather than a solo who’d get pitched off down the road if it locked up – which it did. Mine had obviously chipped a gear, which had gone between two more, as it locked up on me going round the Devil’s Elbow, at Mallory Park. Brian kicked them all back to Quaife after that. “It was Brian who also wanted me to get on a Triple. Well, whether it was actually Brian or it came from on high I didn’t know, but it was nothing like the twin. The first time I used mine it was at the TT and I led right up until the last lap. We’d just passed Heinz Luthringhauser – and he won the race – but there’s a little timing window in the crankcases, to get top dead centre, and there’s a little cover on that. Well it was loose, came off and sprayed oil all over the pipes. Otherwise it would have been my first TT win. Triumph had some real good cams for the Triple too, but they wouldn’t let us have them of course. No way! The old man knew Bert Hopwood real well, but we still couldn’t get these cams off them. Hopwood and Hele were anti anything unless it was Triumph. Which was a shame as somewhere, like the TT, where you could keep it going, the triple
was okay. But in reality, it was heavy, too heavy, to be good on a short circuit and at the time the A65 was brilliant anyway.” Brilliant, but instantly obsolete once BSA went belly-up, as they did in 1972. Many riders persevered with the big British twins, but Boddice was one of the original innovators and, by chance, had an interesting alternative readily to hand. “Dave Simmonds was my brother-in-law. He only rode his H1R once, at Brands, it handled so badly. So, there was this Kawasaki engine lying about, and I did reasonably on that. But it wasn’t really a good sidecar motor, though more powerful than most things. So, I went on to Konigs after that, and they were the worst thing imaginable. The castings were porous, and nothing fitted. They were sucking water in and were blowing it out, so they were fine on a boat, for which they were designed, but totally unreliable in a motorcycle. I think I got started on them through Jeff Gawley, but I finished two races that first year. Two races. One was the Stars of Darley and one was the Belgium GP, where I finished third. Everything was porous, so as soon as you stopped you had to drain it all off. But loads of people tried them, as they were so quick compared with what we’d used before. Then I was at Silverstone one day and Roy Woodhouse said: ‘Try this.’ It was a TZ and I couldn’t believe how smooth and fast it was. This was the year they reopened Donington, so I asked if I could try it there. Roy was the driver, Doug was the passenger. Doug came out with me and we lapped four seconds quicker than he had with Roy. So, when he got back Doug said to Roy: ‘If you’re going to ride that scruffy, I’m never riding with you again!’ So, he packed up. They never did race again and let me ride the bike from then on. The Woodhouses had a garage, Mots
etc, a motorcycle garage and a car workshop, not an actual dealer, but they’d import bikes from America before they’d even become available here. And that was the start of the Woodhouse Yamaha days. It was their outfit but later my engines and of course there was proper prize money back then and bonuses. If I won a national meeting I’d come back with £600 and you had a day job paying £300. So, you could spend all the money and still live! “I originally hung around with Norman Hanks, then on the GPS with Mac Hobson and Trevor Ireson and because Dave Simmonds was the super bloke that he was, we got to know all the characters through him. I remember me and Mike Hailwood moved Dan Shory’s caravan so he couldn’t find it at the Belgium GP, and when Hailwood turned up in an Iso Grifo sportscar at Spa he just chucked me the keys and said: ‘Go on. Do a lap.’ It was the same with a lot of them. Like Rudi Kurth and Dane Rowe – our bike caught c fire and burnt out at Paul Richard, so he h said: ‘Come to our place in Switzerland and a fix it.’ We were getting close and didn’t really r know where he lived, but Dane had said: s ‘You’ll know when you get there.’ So, you y know what Switzerland is like, beautiful buildings b and all that. Well, we see this thing that t looks like a witch was living in it and we said: s ‘This has got to be it!’ But he had the most m fantastic workshop. Beautiful. And that was w where we first met Rolf Biland. He was just j a boy, but Rudi said: ‘Watch out for him he’ll h be a world champion.’” It was closer to home that Boddice had the most m success however and he flirted with the t TT podium with fourth places, as early as 1969 1 (BSA) and 1973 (Kawasaki). Once the Konig K was ditched and the Yamaha sorted there were second places in 1978 and 1981, before three wins in a row from 1983 to 1985, all with Chas Birks in the chair. There was a second place in 1985 too, for good measure. That first and second place finish in 1985 was tantalisingly close to the perfect ‘double’ and following another lone win in 1987, the double victory finally came in 1988. The year he also won the ACU Star. The TT double was a feat he repeated in 1991, this time with Dave Wells in the chair, and those were interesting years all round. In between his doubles he won at 107.17mph in 1989, the last year of the big, bad, two-strokes, since in 1990 the Formula went to F2- 350 two-strokes and 600 four-strokes. Reading that all back there are a lot of statistics and a lot of rule changes, but what it meant was that Mick successfully negotiated a number of format changes and achieved a race speed in 1989 which the top sidecar runners were still struggling to match a good decade later. “I did four-strokes to two-strokes, then back again to four-strokes. I got accused of swaying the ACU, so you could have four-strokes against two-strokes, but F2 350s were obsolete by then anyway, so that wasn’t really fair. Like the first year I won the TT, when Anneka Rice was presenting the trophies. I came back and thought: ‘Great. Anneka Rice!’ But as dad had died in the May, and this was only June, they asked mum to present the award, so I missed out on that one!
Doing the maths
As part of a typical sidecar racing dynasty, the TT was always in Mick’s DNA. Realistically Grand Prix aspirations had to be kept in check anyway, through the financial realities of racing as a privateer. “When I was at BSA we never really
thought about the fact we weren’t getting official factory support. We were getting bits for free, so it didn’t really matter. But back then you couldn’t see the hill for people at Mallory and it was the same at Cadwell Park. Wherever we used to race we used to stay and eat at the circuit afterwards, as it was impossible to get out at the end. Nowadays you can walk round and sit anywhere you want. “And later you got loads of free things – leathers, helmets and such like; Bob Heath helped and Ernie Earles (Earles were panel beaters and fabricators). Do you remember the Mini Coopers, the originals? They did a lot of pressings for those and all the four branch exhaust manifolds for the Cooper S. They made prototype scooters and Les Graham’s aluminium frame and used to get royalties from BMW for every motorcycle with those leading-link forks. So he helped. But if we won any money I just ploughed it all back in. I came fourth at the TT one year. 1969 I think, and won £40 – it was more than that for the ferry. “Then for the TZ we had sponsorship from Bran Bardsley. Bran raced himself, but bought all the obsolete spares off Suzuki and dealt in those from Wales, while the Woodhouse brothers provided a chassis. But who was really sponsoring me? My wages that’s what. For a new bike you’d have to mortgage the house. That’s pretty drastic, but self-belief was the word, and of course there was proper prize money. But then it all turned to racing-cars-withthree-wheels, and I couldn’t get on with my LCR really. I decided the TT was more important than Grand Prix anyway, plus the kids were starting at school which made it all a bit awkward. But there were missed opportunities certainly, we were offered that URS that Chris Vincent had, but we didn’t
have enough, and then there was Fowlers. Dennis Trollope said: ‘If you’ll sign for Castrol I’ll back you.’ But I said no. I’d been with Shell since I started, and I felt loyalty towards them. Twelve months later, Shell pulled out and if I’d signed for Castrol there and then I could have had everything that Jock Taylor had – later when I went to Honda I had to sign for Castrol anyway!” The Honda connection was interesting and probably misunderstood. As while Mick approached Honda for support with his 600cc outfit – there was a sidecar shaped hole in Honda’s TT record – the official support wasn’t quite what was anticipated. Not in the first instance at least. The chassis went off to Derek Windle for modification but when Mick and his engine man, Keith Whiting of WR Racing Developments in nearby Kidderminster went to collect the engine off Honda, all was not quite as envisaged. “We were sent round the backstreets to a place where they kept the test fleet and there was our bike at the back. It was an ex-press test bike, 90,000 miles on the clock and thrashed by everyone who’d sat on it. They were surprised I managed to finish second on it, and I was 10 years with them after, when I’d get two engines a year. Nothing super special mind, but it helped with getting 22 times on the rostrum in total by the end. Nine wins and I could have had 10 if Dick Greasley’s clutch hadn’t gone and I picked up his broken clutch plate! But then Honda took on Molyneux and dropped me like a sack of the proverbial. I’d been on the rostrum for 10 years, then I finished fifth and thought: ‘It’s about time I packed up.’” Mick’s final TT year was a disappointing DNF in 1998, but between 1990 and 1998, there was only one year when he wasn’t on the podium – that fifth. Which was not bad for someone who had been racing without a break since 1966 and pretty much selffunded from the start. He must have been forgiving as a driver too, since he only really had four passengers throughout his entire career – Dave Loach, Clive Pollington, Charlie Birch and Dave Wells – and is keen to point out: ‘You need a good passenger.’ A successful race school followed which built on the good relationship with Honda, though Mick’s continued connection to two wheels proved less fruitful more recently, while on holiday with fellow British champion and EX-BSA employee, Norman Hanks. “We do take the mick out of Norman, on presentation. I always thought if you want someone to sponsor you, you’d want to look clean and tidy and he’d turn up with some really scrappy things – and it’s the same now with his push bikes. Unfortunately, last year when we went on holiday together, I came off my mountain bike and the damage is still rearing its ugly head. I fractured my eye socket and my skull, and it’s just taking a long time to heal up as before. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I only had five crashes racing. My first made the front page of Motorcycle News and I had a real bad one at the Dutch TT. But five in 35 years is still pretty good.“