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Wynne Talk |
Steve Wynne Tells the Inside Story (page 5) "The following weekend we went from the world's longest race circuit to one of the shortest, Mallory Park, and refitted the original Sports engine that Mike had practised with in the Island for him to ride the bike in the Post-TT meeting's TT Formula 1 British title round, in which he beat future British champion John Cowie on the P&M Kawasaki, as well as Read and all his TT rivals once again. In some ways I regard this as an even greater feat than the TT victory, because the Japanese bikes were nimbler and had better accleration than the lusty, long-wheelbase Ducati, which made them better suited to such a short, frantic circuit - but Mike's brilliance made the difference. We did two more British TT F1 races together that year, at Donington where he crashed in the lead and wrote off the fairing - the crowd reacted like locusts, swarming all over the machine to pick up pieces of the broken bodywork to keep as souvenirs! - and the other at Silverstone in the British GP support race, where Cowie got his revenge and Mike finished an outpowered third on such an outright speed circuit."
"At the end of 1978 the Hailwood Ducati was sold unrestored and as used - complete with Donington crash scrapes - to a Japanese collector. This was the same engine and chassis - both bearing nos. 088238 - that Mike had used at Mallory, Donington and Silverstone, and the same chassis he won the TT with, too - and in my book, it's the chassis that determines a bike's identity: Mike Hailwood sat in that seat to win the TT, and nobody else did so on a race track after that round at Silverstone, till you came to ride it here at Mallory today. The second bike that Roger Nicholls rode in the TT (he retired with, of all things, a broken oil level inspection window) was purchased from the factory by the then British Ducati importers, who then refused to sell it on to me as my original deal with Ducati had been, but instead turned it into the first 'forgery'. They later sold it to a German enthusiast together with a letter certifying it was the Hailwood bike, which it most assuredly never was - Mike never even rode a single practice lap on it, and the importers in any case had no involvement whatsoever with our race effort, so couldn't have known which bike was which."
"I still owned not only the blown-up TT-winning engine, but also the disastrous full-works 950F1 bike ridden to fifth place in the 1979 TT by Mike, which I'd been too disgusted with to dispose of - though precisely why is another, even longer story! In 1982, I decided to enter myself in the Daytona BoTT race, using the 1979 chassis which Ron Williams of Maxton had by now transformed from a camel into a thoroughbred handling-wise, in which I installed the 1978 engine that I'd heavily modified while rebuilding it, in search of more power. The blow-up had meant that timing gears, crank, big bore pistons and cylinders, valves, gearbox etc. were all replacements, which basically only meant the crankcases and head castings were original Hailwood TT items,even if modified inside. However, I'd overdone the tuning, and at Daytona the crankcases split, which being special sandcast units were irreplaceable, and unrepairable. For a second time the engine was cast under a bench!" * * * * * |
