THE NORTON CONQUEST
“I remember at Andover one time, we were out celebrating with Frank Perris. Later, I must have wedged my clenched fist inside my other arm, then slept on it in the car – killing a nerve!” – Dave Croxford recalls surely the most bizarre injury in the history of motorcycle racing, with his better half Pauline.
“Let me see, we were in the Aston, weren’t we Pauline? I had to lift my arm up to put it on to the steering wheel and the next day we had to drive to Clermont-Ferrand, in France, to go racing.
“So we got there, I put my hand on the handlebar for the race and… it promptly fell off. I said to the team: ‘Well it’s a bit awkward with one arm!’
“So, I was going past the start-finish line swinging it, trying to get it back up on the ’bar and everyone’s going ‘He’s waving, the flash git!’ I raced like that for a month. The arm took six months to recover properly and what was bloody annoying was that when we’d woken up in the morning we looked out of the car in which we’d slept and thought: ‘Bloody hell, there’s a hotel just over there!’
“And today, going through the pictures, you can see I went through Aston Martins. Look – a DB5 in British Racing Green and we’ve got the seats out of it, sitting on the beach at the Barcelona 24hr race. There’s half a million pounds’ worth there and look what we were doing with it! I could cry my eyes out!”
He could, but he’s not. He’s laughing, as he would have been back in the 1970s. Croxford might have been a multiple British Champion, Master of Mallory, King of Brands and all the rest, but the crucial thing was that Dave was on a works deal when works deals no
