The official Mike Hailwood website

Alan Cathcart writes..... (page 2)

MIKE HAILWOOD'S TT-WINNING DUCATI... Steve Wynne Tells the Inside Story

"I've never considered myself to be superstitious, but this was one occasion that makes me wonder. Though it was a dream come true to win a TT, and especially with Mike Hailwood riding my bike, the pressure and responsibility were immense. I had many hundreds of letters before the race from Hailwood fans, many threatening to hold me personally responsible if Mike were to be killed or injured - honestly! Motor Cycle News printed a photo of the bike back to front without the bodywork on, which gave the mistaken impression the sump plug was wired up the wrong way: this caused 40 or 50 people - not just two or three! - to write or phone telling me of the apparent error. The atmosphere throughout practice was electric, because Honda were going all out to retain their title, and besides Phil Read had the likes of Tom Herron, Tony Rutter, John Williams and Helmut Dahne on their own works bikes or on dealer entries, with only our Ducatis and Chas Mortimer on a Suzuki to stop them. But there was some good natured banter between Read and Hailwood, and just before the start of the race, Phil came over to wish Mike and myself good luck, and in typical cheeky form suggested I ought to support him by wearing a Phil Read T-shirt! I did in fact take off my Sports Motorcycles/Hailwood T-shirt and spent the whole of the race in the pits apparently supporting our greatest rival, till at the end of the last lap, Mike's light came on at Signpost Corner miles in the lead, to tell us we were almost home and dry. Only then, realising I still had the Phil Read T-shirt on, did I start to take it off to don our own team colours, ready to welcome Mike as the victor. But Giuliano Pedretti, the Ducati works mechanic, stopped me as I did so: "Keep it on," he said, "or it may cause bad luck." I wonder to this day, if I'd removed the T-shirt, would the timing gear have broken at Governor's Bridge just a few hundred yards from the finish, instead of just on the line?! Am I superstitious now? Maybe just a little...."

"Having got the bikes early meant I could prepare them very carefully, reworking the heads with larger valves and changing pistons, ignition, clutch and most importantly the gear cluster, which was the real achilles heel of a racing Ducati at that time. This was achieved courtesy of a contact of Mike's from his F1 car days, Hewland Gears, who made all the gearboxes for the British F1 teams. But whereas this service would normally have commanded a five-figure fee, such was the esteem Hailwood was held in by car people as well as bikers that Mike Hewland redesigned and manufactured the new gear ratios free of charge, and the information was passed on to Ducati equally gratis, for them to incorporate much of the design into future road models."

"During pre-race testing and TT practice our Sports-tuned engine proved fast and reliable - Mike topped the TT F1 leaderboard with a new lap record at 111 mph, yet was convinced he'd only done 105 mph or so because the Ducati felt so easy and relaxing to ride. Two race engineers had turned up from the Ducati factory to observe and help out, Franco Farne and Giuliano Pedretti. Farne became concerned over the high mileage this engine had done in practice, so persuaded me to fit a new one they had brought over with them, which Mike did a solitary lap with on Friday night, the day before the race. In the event, though good enough to win the race this proved much slower than our motor, and blew up when the bottom bevel gear on the rear cylinder disintegrated just as Mike shut off to cross the finish line and win! I didn't even know this till I got the bike home, because under FIM pressure there was a strict noise control at the TT that year, and all the finishers were supposed to be tested at the end of the race. There was some doubt whether the Ducati would pass, even with the Triumph silencers we'd grafted on to the Lafranconi exhaust meggas, but the noise meter man didn't fancy being lynched for being the one to disqualify Hailwood after his famous TT comeback win, so as I pushed the bike back to the parc ferme I was greeted with the rhetorical question that "the engine won't start, will it?!" to which I was happy to agree - except that, had I but known it then, it was quite true!!"

"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."