Classic Racer

As a rider, the diminutive Fausto Gresini was well-suited to the smaller classes and he would win two 125cc championships during the 1980s. The Italian from Imola began his race career in 1978 in the 50cc class aboard a Minarelli, but soon made it to

ChrisVincent not only won an Isle of ManTT sidecar race, and British championships on two and three wheels, but he was also a former factory bike tester, innovative sidecar designer, as well as father to two talented racing sons. Hailing from Birming

It’s a pity in a way that Massimo Laverda and Soichiro Honda never met each other before they both sadly passed away, because even through interpreters they’d have discovered a common passion for high-quality four-stroke engineering, and for going ra

Future 500GP World Champion Marco Lucchinelli began racing internationally for the Laverda team at just 20 years of age in 1975 – an arrangement that happened almost by accident, as Piero Laverda explains: “In preparation for the 1975 season we went

We think it would be unfair to come up with the age-old statement ‘the best rider never to have won a World Superbike title’, for Aaron Slight – it’s the sort of thing that gets trotted out for Randy Mamola when it comes to 500cc GP racing. There was

My dad David had a self-sufficiency thing going on for a while and boy was he was tight! We had a boiler for heating but logs were too expensive for him, so he did some deals. We had an MoT station for a while and some other guy had a place getting c

“There was a poster on the wall in the smoko (lunch) room at the bike shop I worked at during my apprenticeship,” says Kevin Magee. “It was a picture of Kenny Roberts on the black and yellowYamaha. I don’t reckon I ever walked past that poster withou

It was a nail-biting finish to a year that had turned into a two-man battle. It was Dutchman Dave Strijbos against Frenchman Jean-Michel Bayle in the 1988 125 motocross World Championship – and the younger gun won, becoming Honda’s first 125 world ch

Carlo Pernat was a first believer in Jean-Michel Bayle’s qualities. His phone call to the Frenchman after his road racing debut at the French Grand Prix in 1992 was not the first time the two spoke. “I knew Jean-Michel from when he was a motocross ri

With Irish Classic racing still reeling from the loss of almost all of 2020’s fixtures, it came as yet another body blow when it was announced that all southern Irish road racing has been cancelled for 2021. This decision comes on top of the cancella

The Isle of Man TT course has seen it all: from the very first running, back in 1907, it has crowned heroes and has mourned plenty of them too. It took a breath during wartime, again for foot and mouth in 2001 and with the 2020 and 2021 TT races canc

After the defection of Ernst Degner, with all the secrets of MZ’s two-stroke development, to Suzuki in 1961, it did not take long for the Japanese bikes to turn from also-rans to world champions. Walter Kaaden, the head of the MZ Race Department in Z