MIKE HAILWOOD'S MACHINES
IT’S SATURDAY, June 3, 1978 and a young man is dispatched to buy a tennis ball and a sponge. It’s an unusual shopping list for a mechanic clad in racing team gear but, nonetheless, he runs to Douglas high street on the Isle of Man as if his life depended on it. And that’s because it did, or at least, someone’s life depended on it…
The sponge and the tennis ball were for the world’s greatest motorcycle racer, Mike Hailwood who, after an 11-year hiatus from TT racing, returned to the island and raced in what is now considered to be one of the greatest sporting ‘comebacks’ of all time.
In fact so momentous was Hailwood’s return to the Isle of Man, that it is not merely known as a comeback it is the Comeback.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before we get to the tennis ball, the sponge and the greatest sporting comeback ever, let’s rewind a few months and see how it all started.
It all began with a phone call in late August 1977.
Patrick Slinn, the then technical manager of the UK’s Ducati and Moto Guzzi importer, Coburn and Hughes, remembers it well: “I had a confidential call from Sports Motorcycles director Steve Wynn. Wynn explained that he’d been contacted by the Daily Mirror’s sports editor Ted Macauley – who was also acting as Mike Hailwood’s
