Barry Sheene 1950–2003: The Biography

But Sheene was always quick to spot an opportunity and was extremely adept at turning ill fortune to his advantage. Rather than seeing his asthma as a disability, he found ways to make it work for him. For starters, it was a good excuse for getting out of school sports, of which he was never fond; it was an even better excuse for playing truant, and he regularly told teachers he had asthma clinics to attend. To be fair, sometimes he did have legitimate appointments, but there were many more occasions when he didn’t. His truancy habit was made considerably easier to sustain when Sheene found a pile of pre-stamped appointment cards on one particular visit to a clinic. Spotting a golden opportunity, he promptly pocketed the lot, got a friend to sign them, and from then on enjoyed what amounted to a healthy supply of get-out-of-school-free cards. They were not wasted.

Sheene’s hatred of school has been well documented. It’s not that he didn’t have an aptitude for learning – as he would later prove by teaching himself five languages and learning to pilot a helicopter – it was just that he didn’t like it. And when Barry Sheene didn’t like doing something, he didn’t do it. He didn’t like the work, he didn’t like the discipline, and most of all he didn’t like the teachers. ‘For me, school was like a bad dream,’ he said. ‘Every minute of every day was murder. I hated being told what to do and when to do it by a bunch of teachers who always wanted to try to insult me or belittle me.’ Sheene didn’t respond well to being told what to do. If he was given a free rein, as he was in Frank’s workshop, he displayed a fantastic ability to learn, but he resented the apparently pointless rigidity of the school environment. That stubborn streak would remain with him throughout his life, and it helped him amass a fortune as a property developer in Australia when he stopped racing motorcycles. Barry’s headmaster at St Martin’s in the Fields once told Iris that her son could have been top boy if he had only put his mind to it, but Barry simply wasn’t interested. He had decided at a very early age that he would do things his own way or not at all. That same headmaster sent his former pupil a letter of congratulations when he won the 500cc World Championship in 1976, a fact of which Barry was understandably proud. It was, after all, a written acknowledgement of achievements attained without the aid of formal education.

Sheene brought up the subject of his schooldays again in 1978 when he appeared on the Parkinson show. Speaking of one teacher whom he had particularly disliked (he diplomatically stopped short of naming him) he said, ‘I was caught for This Is Your Life the other night. I thought, I hope they don’t bring that teacher on because it would be the first punch-in. I feel bitter about it. I think it is one of the things that’s driven me on, because in the back of my mind there’s always this guy saying you will never make anything of your life.’

At one point, it looked more likely that Barry Sheene would become famous as a musical star rather than as a bike racer as he landed a job as an extra in the musical Tosca in Covent Garden, not far from his house. Sheene had been spotted fighting by a teacher who was looking for extras and she’d asked him if he could sing as well as fight. He replied that he could ‘at a push’, auditioned for the part of a scrapping, singing youth, and ended up sharing the stage with world-renowned opera singer Maria Callas. Sheene explained, ‘She [the teacher] was recruiting lads as extras … and another young boy and I were auditioned and given small parts in the first act to scrap in a churchyard scene. Being cast as a singing, fighting hooligan wasn’t altogether at odds with the way I behaved in real life! Sharing the stage with Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas at such a famous place became one of my most vivid childhood memories. I even had to sing. Best part of it was it meant getting off school.’

To escape the misery of school when he wasn’t treading the boards, Barry would often sneak off behind the bike sheds to chain-smoke cigarettes. It seems incredible that someone with chronic asthma would want to smoke, but Barry had taken up the habit when he was just nine years old. Most parents would have been horrified to catch their child smoking, although to be fair on Mr and Mrs Sheene attitudes towards smoking have changed markedly since the fifties and sixties; when Frank caught Barry at it when he was 11, he simply handed him two Woodbines (extremely strong, non-filter cigarettes) and said that if Barry could finish them off he was free to smoke. Fifteen minutes later, Barry was free to smoke. He was soon openly sharing his cigarettes with his family. Years later, his greatest joy having returned to the paddock was his first post-race cigarette. ‘For no other reason than for the sheer pleasure it brings, my first priority upon dumping the bike in the pits is to have a cigarette,’ he said. ‘I might have had my last drag on the start line [through the hole drilled in his helmet’s chin bar] but I crave one immediately I’ve finished the race, not as a means of calming the nerves but simply because it has been over an hour since my last one. For a heavy smoker like myself, that’s a long time!’

Drinking, however, was never one of his vices, although he was as prone to getting carried away on nights out as the next man, and he did once take sadistic pleasure in getting a schoolfriend drunk during a lunch break in what has become one of the most often-repeated stories from Sheene’s childhood. Barry plied his hapless chum with a concoction of spirits from his father’s drinks cabinet before dragging him back to the classroom to observe the effects. His friend was so intoxicated that he needed to be rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Sheene, not surprisingly, thought he was in for big trouble when his parents were called in to school to see the headmaster, but Frank was his usual laid-back self, dropping cigarette ash all over the headmaster’s pristine carpet as he explained his son’s actions by resignedly announcing that ‘Boys will be boys.’

Barry first got drunk at the Isle of Man TT in 1960 when he was only 10 years old after guzzling two glasses of champagne given to him by Gary Hocking, who had just finished second in the Junior TT. The experience was enough to put him off touching another drop of alcohol until he was 16. Even after that he claimed he never became a heavy drinker, although he did later develop a passion for fine wines and took great pride in his well-stocked cellar.

Girls were another matter altogether. Perhaps because he’d come so close to losing his manhood as a child, Barry seemed determined to put it to good use as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It finally did over a snooker table in the crypt of a local church when Barry was 14, with a girl whose name he could never remember. From that point on he never looked back. He’d eventually become so famous for his womanizing that he would make front-page news after being photographed leaving a nightclub with a new date, and he would also be selected as a judge for the Miss World contest.

But whatever mischief Barry got up to in his youth, he never rebelled against his parents. The Sheene family was a very tight-knit unit and it stayed that way throughout Barry’s racing career, with Frank helping on the bikes and Iris keeping hot food and drinks flowing for the family and their guests. Barry never treated his parents with anything other than full respect, though he often fought with his elder sister Maggie. ‘Team Sheene’ would become legendary round the paddocks of the world, Frank and Iris providing all the back-up their boy needed when he was racing bikes. The trio were practically inseparable.

Unlike some parents who attempt to live out their own unfulfilled dreams through their children, Frank never pushed Barry into riding motorcycles, but then he didn’t have to. When he offered the five-year-old Barry a motorcycle, the youngster jumped at the chance, like most boys would. The bike was a damaged 50cc Ducati that Frank had rebuilt, and Barry spent hours riding around the spacious back yard of the Royal College of Surgeons on the little four-stroke single, driving the neighbours to distraction. The machine actually had two gears, but Barry, not knowing how to change gears, only ever used one. It was still good enough to reach speeds of around 50mph.

Ironically, it wasn’t hurtling around on a motorcycle which caused Barry’s first serious injury; it was a pushbike accident at the age of eight which resulted in a broken arm. After the arm was plastered, Sheene told his mother that he’d always wanted to break his arm (again, like most schoolboys) and was well chuffed with his plaster trophy.

The little Ducati was eventually replaced by a 100cc Triumph Tiger Cub which Barry took to race meetings so he could potter around in the nearby fields, of which there wasn’t an abundance in central London. He had tried riding the Tiger round the roads near his home but a couple of run-ins with the law had put an end to that, even though the coppers had taken it easy on Barry as they regularly utilized Frank’s services for repair work. When he wasn’t riding his own bike, Barry would take his dad’s race bikes out for short test runs at disused airfields or racing paddocks, all the time developing his skill for analysing how the bikes were running. Sheene’s developmental and analytical skills became finely honed during these years, and they played a big part in his success. But that was no real surprise when one considers that he could strip and rebuild an engine by the age of 12 and was riding real racing motorcycles when his class-mates were still mastering the art of pedalling. Barry recalled getting plenty of snotty looks as a kid when he suggested to puzzled and frustrated riders in the paddock what might be wrong with their bikes just by listening to them being revved. But those who were modest enough to take his advice usually found (probably to their amazement) that the advice was good. Indeed, Sheene became quite the little paddock consultant for any rider whose ego was willing to accommodate the fact that a child knew more about engine mechanics than he did.

Frank Sheene’s bikes were among the best in the country in the sixties and were in demand by many of the top racers of that era, and Barry was fast catching his father up on technical know-how. So much so that by the time he was 14 he was a good enough mechanic to be offered a job looking after race bikes, even though it didn’t pay. But for someone who hated school as much as Barry did the opportunity must have felt like a dream come true: he was asked if he would like to spend a month working as a mechanic in Europe for American Grand Prix racer Tony Woodman. Needless to say, he didn’t have to be asked twice. Frank, fully approving of what he saw as a unique chance for his son to see something of the world and to gain work experience while other kids were stuck in school only reading about foreign lands, gave his son £15 for the month to cover all expenses from food, drink and cigarettes to ferry fares. It was a very modest sum, even in 1964, but Barry, showing a thriftiness that would later become a hallmark, managed to return from the trip with change in his pocket. His parents signed him off school for a month, blaming another bout of illness.

There were few luxuries available and food was scarce, but it was an incredible experience for a boy of 14 and an invaluable insight into the Grand Prix world he would soon come to dominate. And the fact that Woodman was not there just to make up the GP numbers but was a genuine contender made Sheene’s position even more remarkable, a real testament to the skills he had acquired. The trip, which embraced visits to the Salzburgring and the Nurburgring for the Austrian and German GPs, went well. Barry could not have had much interest in returning to school after such an eye-opener, but he still had one year to complete before being officially allowed to leave so he got on with it as best he could. Woodman, incidentally, was later paralysed after breaking his back in the North West 200 road races in Northern Ireland. It was a harsh reminder, if Sheene needed one, that racing motorcycles is a risky business, but at that point Barry showed no signs of wanting to race anyway. Like his father, he was more than happy working on bikes instead of riding them.

His final year at school completed, Sheene was at last free to try his luck in the world at large. He left formal education without a single qualification to his name and in the knowledge that the only thing he’d topped at school was the absenteeism list. But one good thing, aside from Barry’s utter relief, came from leaving school: his asthma attacks all but disappeared. They had always been made considerably worse when Barry was stressed or emotionally upset, and he felt there was no mystery attached to their clearing up almost as soon as he left school: it was a sure measure of how much he had dreaded that establishment. He couldn’t have been happier when it was time to turn his back on it for good.

It seemed obvious from his early-learned hatred of authority that Barry wasn’t going to settle comfortably into just any old job under any old boss. As he said, ‘I had never experienced working for someone other than Frank and I wasn’t quite sure how I would take to someone giving me orders.’ But with no formal qualifications, he wasn’t going to be offered many decent jobs either. Deep down, however, both Sheene and his parents knew that his profound mechanical knowledge would somehow see him through. Frank had taught him all he needed to know about stripping and rebuilding engines, about how to squeeze every last ounce of power out of a motorcycle. Surely that knowledge alone would stand him in good stead?

But being a mechanic didn’t seem to be top of Barry’s job-hunting list. In fact, initially he didn’t have a clue what he wanted to do, and he soon found himself drifting in and out of jobs like most young people trying to find their feet in the world. Eventually he landed a job in a car spares warehouse unloading parts into different bins. The work was neither glamorous nor stimulating, and it paid a measly £5 a week, of which Barry pocketed just 75 shillings after paying tax and national insurance. Needless to say, he didn’t stick at the job for long. Within a few months he had moved on to a new position which was infinitely more exciting and one small step closer to his destiny: he became a motorcycle despatch rider.

Having failed his bike test first time round because the number plate fell off his machine (in his 1976 book The Story So Far, Sheene wrote that he took his test on a 75cc Derbi, but in 2001 he claimed it was on a BSA Bantam), Barry passed at his second attempt, although he told Bike magazine years later that ‘In no way did it [the bike test] prepare me for the road. Absolutely not. In the same way that shagging your girlfriend in a Transit van does nothing to prepare you for married life.’ Having passed, Sheene was handed a BSA Bantam (which perhaps explains his confusion over which bike he had passed his test on) with which to deliver proofs and copy around London for an advertising agency. His wages jumped up to a healthier £12 a week, and more importantly for the girl-mad young Sheene, he got to meet lots of glamour models.

Needless to say, no motorcycle could be taken back to the Sheene household without Frank giving it the once-over, and the British-built Bantam was no exception. Frank soon had it tweaked and tuned to reach a top speed of 80mph, which, through London traffic at any rate, was about as fast as even Barry Sheene dared to go.

Barry enjoyed his stint as a courier, and no doubt it helped to hone his riding skills since travelling through heavy London traffic at speed is no easy task. But at the time money was more important than job satisfaction, and when a friend offered him more cash for sprucing up second-hand cars for his showroom, Barry gladly accepted.

After eighteen months of valeting cars it was time for another change, and Sheene took to driving a truck around London delivering antique furniture, quite often to television stage-sets. He had to lie about his age to get the job and had to show his prospective employers his dad’s driving licence which included the all-important HGV stamp, but somehow it worked and Barry found himself employed as a truck driver. The only problem was, he couldn’t drive a truck. This shortcoming was compounded when his new boss asked him for a lift in the truck straight after the interview. Sheene thought fast and insisted he had to have some time to check the truck over in the yard before he drove it, him being so safety conscious and all. His boss seemed suitably impressed and sought alternative transport, leaving his relieved new employee to drive round and round a nearby car park, familiarizing himself with the skills required to drive a heavy goods vehicle. Sheene took to the task easily, passed his month’s probation without any problems, and was once more to be seen despatching goods around London, albeit at a much more sedate pace.

Barry had been a competent driver, of cars if not HGVs, long before he passed his driving test first time round at the age of 17 in his father’s Rover 105. At just eight years of age he was driving an Austin Ten round the back yard at the Royal College of Surgeons. He was so small that Frank had had to fix lumps of wood onto the foot pedals. But cars never held a great appeal for Barry. To his mind, they were simply more useful for pulling women than anything else, so the style of his four-wheeled transport was more important than its performance. Most 17-year-old boys would have been delighted to be given a Thames van by their fathers, as Barry was, but he bemoaned the fact that it ‘wasn’t too flash for pussy-pulling’.

Although the young Sheene had his uses for cars, it was bikes that he was instinctively drawn to. After all, he’d been surrounded by them and their racers since birth, and even though in the early part of his youth he harboured no ambitions of being a racer, it seemed almost inevitable that he would at least try his hand at it eventually, if only out of curiosity.

The seeds of Barry’s racing career were sown, albeit indirectly, during a trip to Spain when he was eight years old. In 1958 Frank took his son to see the then-famous Barcelona 24-Hour race at Montjuich Park, and during the trip Frank introduced himself to Francesco Bulto, the head of Spanish bike manufacturer Bultaco. The two soon became friends, and it was this friendship that eventually led to Barry’s racing debut. Through Señor Bulto, Frank managed to secure a place on the first racing Bultaco to come into Britain, and he actually won a race on it first time out at the now defunct Crystal Palace circuit. Frank was suitably impressed with the capabilities of the machinery, and from that point onwards he received two new factory models at the beginning of each year to set up for other riders to race. During that 1958 trip, Bulto had allowed Barry to sit on one of his bikes and showed him how to change gears for the first time. He also reportedly told Barry that one day he would ride a factory Bultaco for him. Although he was no doubt simply humouring the child, his prediction came true fewer than ten years later when Barry made his racing debut at Brands Hatch on one of Bulto’s factory machines.

Throughout his childhood and youth, Barry had accompanied his dad to race meetings almost every weekend during the summer; if Frank wasn’t going to be attending a race or a practice day for whatever reason, young Barry would scrounge a lift from one of the many racers he had got to know in the paddock. Before he ever turned a wheel in anger, Barry Sheene was a paddock institution who could be seen either offering technical advice to riders or just generally mucking in by carrying tyres, working stopwatches or cleaning bikes. He was, quite literally, born to the paddock.

He had, for example, worked on Chas Mortimer’s bikes when Mortimer was racing them for Frank. Chas went on to win eight Isle of Man TTs and had a successful career in GPs and in British championships, as well as being Sheene’s team-mate at Yamaha in Grands Prix in 1972. ‘Barry worked for me as my mechanic when I rode for his father Frank in, I think, 1967,’ Mortimer recalled. ‘I did a few meetings in the UK on his 125 and 250cc Bultacos. Barry was quite good with the spanners even then, he always has been. I remember he used to run my bikes in for me when he was a young, long-haired youth living in Holborn. Franco and Barry used to work on the bikes in the workshop there; well, Barry would work on the bikes and Franco would be doing the talking, the team manager bit.’ Mortimer thought that the fundamentals of the characteristics which later made Sheene famous were already in place in the late sixties. ‘Barry was always quite outspoken, he was quite a precocious boy. He got his reputation with the women from right early on, and I remember when he was 14 he was smoking 30 fags a day – breaking the filters off the ends, of course.’

Multiple British champion John ‘Moon Eyes’ Cooper – so called because of the trademark eyes painted on his helmet – also remembered Sheene around the racing scene as a youngster. ‘I’ve known Franco for about 50 years,’ he said. ‘I never rode his bikes but he was always about the paddocks, riding at first then tuning bikes for other riders. Barry was always around too. When he was about 15 he used to come and stay at my house with a racer called Dave Croxford because he was helping Dave a bit at the races.’ Croxford was just one of a long list of riders who raced Frank Sheene’s bikes, and the young Barry would not only help him with the spanners, he would also be constantly absorbing valuable information from everything he saw and heard around him. ‘I’d watch the blokes on dad’s bikes [and] note how they would handle them,’ he explained, ‘listen for anything that sounded off-song. I certainly knew how an engine worked even then. While other lads would know who played outside-left for Arsenal, I could explain the principles of a two-stroke motor.’

In early 1968, Sheene experienced an even more direct involvement with racing, this time on the other side of the armco. Frank had just received his usual allotment of Bultacos – a 125cc machine and a 250cc bike – for the coming season. After stripping and rebuilding them to his own particular specifications, as every bike tuner does, he asked Barry to run them in for him at Brands Hatch. He knew his son would be mechanically sympathetic during the running-in process and he also knew that as Barry wouldn’t be out to prove anything on the track there was little chance of him crashing the precious bikes before they were even raced. Besides, there was no one else available at the time. Little could the pair have known that that inauspicious track debut would lead to one of the most glittering careers in motorcycling history.

Although Barry insisted that his dad never forced him into his track debut, it’s tempting to think he must have been at least a little curious to see how his boy would go round a circuit even if Barry didn’t seem too desperate to find out for himself. He hadn’t shown much competitive spirit at school or in his early jobs, so why should things be any different now?

Barry’s competitive career had actually started in trials riding some years before. Trials is a sport where riders negotiate near-impossible obstacles such as logs, barrels and rock faces at very low, often dead-stop speeds. The emphasis is on precise throttle control and balance, and as such it’s a good way for riders to hone their skills. The only problem was that it didn’t involve speed, and Sheene liked his speed. Despite this, Barry had shown promise in the early stages of most of the events he entered, but he struggled to maintain enough interest and concentration in the sport to make further progress. He was more engaged by the ground between the marked-out sections on the course where he could indulge in sudden bursts of speed and practise the wheelies he’d later become renowned for. In the end, it just wasn’t the sport for him. Road racing, however, was to prove a different matter entirely; it was to be the sport for which Barry had an innate aptitude.

Running in a racing motorcycle, like running in anything else, is a progressive business. It’s all about getting some steady miles on the clock to ensure everything is bedded in correctly before the machine is thrashed near to death by whoever races it. Even so, there was an inherent danger in the exercise for Sheene because every one of Frank’s new Bultacos in the past had seized on their initial outings. In other words, the engines had locked solid in mid-flight, and that usually ends with the rider being thrown off the bike unless his reactions are quick enough to allow him to pull the clutch in and freewheel to a standstill. This time round, the bikes didn’t seize. Barry found he’d actually enjoyed himself riding round the same track on which he’d watched his heroes racing for so many years. Brands Hatch, situated to the south-east of London, was Sheene’s ‘home’ track. He’d been there countless times and was familiar with the famous corners like Paddock Hill Bend, Druids and Clearways.