Bartol’s 250 racer

BARTOL’S 1983 250

Harald Bartol was an engineer who worked with the biggest names of the sport and then went on to take projects to their maximum potential. His own 250 was very interesting indeed, not least for the way it turned some ways of populist convention on its collective head.

A chassis that didn't work. Big money lost in development. His own ideas about the engine. It took a while, but when it came good... oh boy, did it come good. Quarter-litre art.

Jocular and modest, but also focused and determined, Austrian Harald Bartol was one of the top two-stroke tuners in the GP paddock up until the demise of the 125GP class in 2011. But he was also one of the rare breed of rider engineers, equally skilled in carving lines and winning races on a bike, as in developing its engine. And that extended to building his own bike, the short-lived Bartol rotary-valve twin.

After retiring from racing in 1980 and sinking all of his savings accrued during a 15-year riding career into the construction of the 250cc Bartol parallel-twin Grand Prix racers, the first such bike appeared late in 1981. “The original idea was to build something for me to race myself in the 250GP class,” recalls Harald, 72, today. “The 125 riders were getting smaller and lighter, and I was just too big physically to be competitive like I used to be. I started out with a TZ Yamaha, but in 1979, I got a good sponsorship contract with an Italian company called Amaretto di Saronno, so I thought - okay, now I can build my own engine. But I started this project without having received any money from this company, and in the end it never came – so that was the reason that I had to stop racing. I’d already spent more than DM100,000 on this project (€250,000 today), which was all the money I had. So there was no more to continue riding, even in 125s.”

To try to recoup at least some of his R&D costs, Harald decided to develop a small series of complete rotary-valve parallel-twin 250GP Bartol racers for sale to customers. “So we made seven complete bikes altogether,” he says, “as well as a few spare engines, including a stroked 350 for Patrick Fernandez to use in the final season of the 350cc World championship in 1982, and a 375cc version he could ride in the 500cc class, too.” Initially, the Bartol GP racers were intended to provide a more potent privateer alternative to the Yamaha TZ250 engine Harald was already familiar with, with identical engine pickups permitting a straight transplant. One early customer to choose this route was the Pernod-sponsored Frenchman Fernandez, who replaced the TZ Yamaha engines in his Massimotamburini designed Bimota YB3 frames – the same chassis on which Jon Ekerold had become the 1980 350cc world champion – with rotary-valve Bartol motors. In only his second race on such a bike, Fernandez finished third in the 350cc Austrian GP at the Salzburgring on Harald’s home ground, followed by fourth in Assen and then eighth in Imatra to finish ninth in the 1982 350cc points standings.

The 250 was a flier, too, albeit fragile as well as fast – Fernandez twice put a Bartol-engined Bimota 250 on pole position for a GP, with a highest finish of second place in the 1983 German GP at Hockenheim which, added to fourth and sixth in the first two rounds at Kyalami and Paul Ricard, put him 11th in the championship at the season’s end – tying on points with his Pernod sponsor’s own 250GP bike ridden by Jacques Bolle!

But too few customers opted to take advantage of the extra performance offered by the Austrian motors, perhaps thanks to early mechanical problems. “Like with any new thing, we had some initial problems with the engine, but finally it came very good,” says Harald.

“But the biggest problem came in 1983 when Jeffrey Sayle rode the complete Bartol 250 motorcycle, and never qualified, not even

once, for a GP race on the thing. No wonder Kenny Roberts named it “the fastest camel in the world”, because it didn’t handle very well – it simply would not steer.”

Bartol had decided he needed to build a complete bike because of the compromise Fernandez was experiencing with tyres on the 1980-spec Bimota. “We have big problems with the frame, because it was designed by Tamburini for the crossply tyre technology of 1979, and the new radial Dunlops are too wide to use in it,” Patrick told me at Assen midway through the season. “We’re using their 16in front tyre which partially helps matters, but we really need a new chassis. The first thing was to concentrate on getting the engine right, which we’ve now done, while learning to live with the poor handling. For next season [1983] we’ll have a purpose-built Bartol chassis, which will surely resolve these problems.”

Except it didn’t. The seven complete bikes Bartol built went to Fernandez, Aussie Jeff Sayle, Austrians Siggi Minich, Sepp Hutter, Gustl Auinger and

Bertl Neumayr, and British

sponsor George Beale for another Aussie, Graeme Mcgregor to ride. All these customers universally gave the flawed handling a thumbs down, either with 16 or 18in front tyres fitted. After 37 years, Harald reveals why this came about. “My main target in racing was always the engine side,” he says. “I was not good on the chassis side, so I thought, what can I do? I went to (five-time world champion) Toni Mang and asked him: ‘Can you lend me one of your Kawasakis, only the chassis, to measure dimensions and stuff?’ and he said yes.

“I arranged to take the bike to the guys near me who built KTM motocross frames, and I told them: ‘I want the same angles and

everything, exactly the same as the Kawasaki, also the suspension, but with my engine.’ The weight balance was good as it was a paralleltwin and not a tandem-twin like the Kawasaki, so they said: ‘Okay, we can do this.’

“But finally, when I saw the chassis, the link on the top operating the rear shock was completely different, and had been moved forward. I said to the guys: ‘That looks a bit strange to me,’ but they told me, ‘No, no, we’ve made the calculations, this is much better.’

“I’d rather not say their names, because they tried to help me, but they failed completely – the bike was really unrideable.

“I remember at Silverstone a long-haired Australian guy came into the pit – he looked like a college student with overalls on. And he looked at the bike, and he said, pointing to the suspension, ‘This won’t work – it’ll do this and this and this – he described exactly the problems we’d been having. ‘You can cut all this crap out,’ he said, pointing to the link: ‘You’re better off making it just direct operation without a link.’

Jeffrey (Sayle) had already gone back to Australia, but the next race was a European Championship round in Brno, where Gustl Auinger rode the bike after we cut all this out, and he won the race and set a new lap record!

But it was all too late – and I never did get the Aussie guy’s name to thank him!”

The Yorkshireman

However, Harald’s main helper in creating the flawed Bartol 250GP bikes was English, not Austrian – or Australian! Yorkshireman Alistair Taylor, now 69, is a 20-year veteran of the Grand Prix paddock, who during his time as variously a race mechanic, team coordinator, motorhome driver and paddock parts supplier, worked with a host of riders ranging from Mick Grant, Richard Schlachter, Cliff Carr and Graeme Mcgregor, to Eddie Lawson, Gustl Auinger, Carlos Lavado and Martin Wimmer.

Fluent in German, Alistair had found himself out of work in the 1976 Finnish GP paddock at Imatra after a bust-up with Alex

George, who he’d been working with for all of six weeks! It was a watershed moment in his wrench-wielding career.

“I’d known Harald Bartol for two years, and he was such a nice guy,” recalls Alistair. “He had this super-fast 125 Morbidelli he’d tuned himself – it was engine number 1005, so only the fifth one made. My mate Derek Booth, an ex-sidecar passenger from Doncaster, who had worked for Jack Findlay until Sweden, had also jumped ship from Jack and started working for Harald and Karl Auer, another Austrian guy who raced 500 and 350. They were in Finland with four bikes and two riders, and they’d not been able to find anybody in Austria to come all the way up to Finland to help them. Derek knew I’d left Alex and was doing nothing, so he said: ‘Can

you come and give me a hand here, because I’ve got four bikes, and I need help!’ So we did the meeting and Harald was okay with what I’d been doing, so he suggested I came to Austria to work for him. That lasted for six years – I used to come home to Britain in the winter and work for Terry Windle building sidecar chassis, and then go back to Austria in February, do a bit of skiing, and get the bikes ready for Harald, and then after he retired, for Gustl Auinger, who I mechanicked for during the GP season.

“But then in the winter of 1982/83, Harald decided in his infinite wisdom that he was going to build several complete race bikes with his own engine, so I fetched some Reynolds 531 tube back from England, and at the end of November we set about building seven complete frames.

“By March we had them all built – but unfortunately they didn’t work! The rear suspension design was a progressive-rate link system, and the ratio was all wrong. It would load up, and understeer everywhere – it just wouldn’t turn, plus there’d be massive rear end chatter.

“The problem was that the guy who designed it built successful Motocross frames for KTM, but had no experience of road racing.”

Change that chassis

The solution was obvious – use the fact that the Bartol motor was interchangeable with a TZ Yamaha to install it in an aftermarket TZ250 frame. For 1984 Auinger chose the best one then available which Alistair Taylor helped him build up, a Nico Bakker chassis made from aluminium tubing, with a proven rear suspension system using a White Power shock, whose durable but lightweight construction brought the half-dry weight down close to the 250GP class’s then 100kg minimum weight limit.

But after half a season of struggling unsuccessfully to get Graeme Mcgregor’s original Bartol 250, owned by George Beale, to handle, Alistair began running a paddock spares service for German Martin Ziegler, going on to work for Erv Kanemoto, Kenny Roberts and the Gilera 250GP factory team in various capacities, before returning to Yorkshire in 1994 for life after racing doing specialist engineering.

In 2002 he founded Alta Engineering in his home town of Barnsley, a plant maintenance

firm that’s subsequently flourished, giving him the time and money to go back to the future by taking up Classic racing with – what else – a 250 Bartol.

“I knew the Bartol engine had heaps of potential that was never realised, because the bad-handling chassis diverted attention from the real advances Harald had made with the motor,” says Alistair. “So I started looking out for a bike with such an engine – and in 2012 I found one on Facebook, owned by a lad in Vienna named Christopher Eder, who’d been racing it for two or three years in Classic events. He’d bought it from Norbert Moser, who was a friend of Auinger’s, and he’d bought the bike off him – so this was Gustl’s old bike from 1984 with the Bakker frame. I telephoned him straight away and said: “Do not sell that bike to anybody else until we’ve talked terms.” And he’s like, “Well, who are you?” I said: “I used to be a mechanic for

Auinger, and I’ve worked for Bartol for six years, I’ve got my own engineering company in England, I built that bike, so it’s just a bit special!” So we did the deal over the phone, and I went down and picked it up. Unfortunately, by then it had suffered, what Germans call a kapital motorschaden – he’d blown it up big-time at his last race meeting at Frohburg. It had seized, and the piston was in two parts and the gudgeon pin had machined the cylinder square. It was a running bike when I bought it, but when I got there it was destroyed! Okay, that’s racing, there’s your money, I’ll take this pile of scrap.”

On his way back to Yorkshire from

Vienna, Taylor

called in at Bartol HQ in Strasswalchen, and enlisted its creator’s help in making the motor live again. Once sceptical, Harald became an enthusiastic contributor to the Alta Engineering race effort, though it took long hours and lots of Austrian ingenuity to make the engine a runner again. But on his annual skiing trip to Austria in February 2018, Taylor helped Harald complete the build, by which time he had the Bakker chassis ready to accept it, and a rider to race it. Privateer Leif Nielsen was Denmark’s only GP racer in the 1970-80s, and since 2010 he had already been racing his TZ350 Yamaha in European historic events when Alistair contacted him to see if he’d like to ride the Bartol. “I’d been in touch with Alistair ever since the 1970s, and we’ve been at parties together at Derek’s place, and we always stayed connected,” says Leif. “It was great to finally team up together to ride the Bartol.”