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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.

      As things turned out, the day’s testing went so smoothly that Frank asked Barry to do some further bedding-in the following week. By that point the bikes had some miles under their belts and Barry was able to pick up the revs and push a good bit harder. He was also much more familiar with the track layout, the correct lines to take and the whole race-track environment, all of which is very alien to beginners. Being let loose on a circuit where there’s no cars, trucks or buses coming the other way, no speed limits, no mirrors on your bike and no restrictions or guides as to where you should position yourself on the road takes a bit of getting used to, even if you are Barry Sheene. But by the second weekend of testing, Barry was looking like he’d been born to it, and the fact didn’t go unnoticed. Reports from trackside marshals started to filter back to Frank that his son was looking a bit handy out there on the Bultacos; in fact, he looked faster than many racers those same marshals had seen. Maybe Barry should try his hand at racing? Frank related the news to his son, and Barry admitted to letting the praise go to his head. He readily agreed that maybe the time was right to carry on the family racing tradition and get out on the track in anger for the first time.

      It was March 1968 and Sheene was 17 years old when he lined up on the starting grid, his gangly figure dwarfing the little 125cc Bultaco,

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