Riding with DJ

Being confined to a wheelchair was never going to stoptony Jefferies riding with his son, so when the chance to do a parade lap in the Darley Moor Past Masters Cavalcade came along in 1994, Tony didn’t hesitate.

“We thought we’d better have a practice, so we jumped on the bike and rode out of the paddock at Darley Moor out onto the main road,”tony explained. “I was on the front of the bike – it was a Triumph 1200 Daytona – and Dave was on the back, shifting gears. We had the rear footrests modified so that David could change gears from the pillion seat via a linkage.

“My own feet were tied onto the front footrests. As we were leaving the circuit, an official tried to stop us to let another car out, but I couldn’t put my feet down, so I just swerved round the car – and a caravan – on the wrong side of the road and up over the grass, all over the place, with the marshal shouting after us! Anyway, we went out onto the road and DJ just started booting up through the gears and timed it perfectly.you wouldn’t have known it was two riders at the controls. We were giggling under our helmets, but how David anticipated every gear change so perfectly was impressive.

“On the way back, I decided to give it some, so we were doing about 120mph. This was in 1994, but I had my old racing helmet on, and all the lining and shit was falling out and the visor was loose, so it was rattling like crazy, but we had a great laugh. Back at the circuit, it was only meant to be parade laps that we were doing, but once a racer, always a racer, and everyone took off from the line like they meant it. I was the same, and we started passing all sorts of people. I remember passing John Cooper and Dave grabbing hold of his elbow going down the main straight.

“Changing direction was difficult for me because I have no movement from the chest down so, when we approached the chicane a bit too fast, I just rode straight over the kerbs.then the bloody Heath Robinson gear linkage that we’d made broke, so we just left the bike in third gear and carried on!

“We didn’t get passed by very many people and at the end the tyres were absolutely shagged.

“There used to be a woman we called the Sweetie Lady who went to all the races in the 1970s, handing out energy sweets to the riders. When we got back to the pit, she was standing there with tears streaming down her face. When I asked her why, she just said she was so overjoyed to see me back on a bike again and enjoying myself after all those years. It was the first time I’d ridden a bike on a racetrack since I’d been paralysed in 1973.”