Pictures: JOHN SOMERVILLE COLLECTION

ON THE ROAD

FIFTY years ago many riders still travelled to meetings with just one bike mounted on a rack attached to back of their cars. There were already quite a few who travelled by van. But they tended to be second-hand vehicles. Some riders in the 50s and 60s, including Ole Olsen, had adapted old Post Office vans to transport their bikes around in.

Meanwhile, with Ivan Mauger stood at the pinnacle of the sport, his professionalism started to spread, and it became the norm to have two or even three bikes at a meeting, rather than just one.

Bike racks were replaced by trailers, estate cars – most notably the popular Citroen Safari – and transit vans.

By the end of the 80s, purpose-built motorhomes were starting to become more commonplace, especially among the elite.

Brian Leonard, a member of West Ham’s treble-winning side in 1965, later served with the world-famous Wembley Lions and whose career ended in 1978, recalls: “I bought a Jaguar at the age of 21 and used that for most of my career. I did around 450,000 miles in that car.

“For the longer journeys, I would double up with Simmo (Malcolm Simmons) or, mostly, with Sverre Harrfeldt. I used to have a shop in the main street in Newbury and they would stay overnight, and we’d set off first thing in the morning.

“I didn’t use a rack, not even when there were two of us sharing the car. I’d remove the wheels from one bike and put it in the back, and then have the other sideways, peering out of the boot.

“I liked to do the driving. In those days, there weren’t really any speed limits, so I’d travel at around 100 mph and we’d get there quite quickly! I used to do 50,000 miles a year, because I went to a lot of speedway when I wasn’t riding as well.”

For the shorter trips, he travelled with mechanic and good friend Mike Ainsworth, and Brian has plenty of tales.

“There was one occasion going to Wolverhampton when the brakes failed, and I had to get there driving on the handbrake. That also happened going to King’s Lynn.

“In those days, you didn’t have dual brakes,

• A personalised GPO-style van was good enough for Ole Olsen in the late 60s

38 speedway star November 26, 2022

While speedway bike technology has evolved through the years, the mode of road transport used by its participants has also changed. With reflections from former riders, ROB PEASLEY looks at how riders of yesteryear took to the road...

only front brakes. I took the car to Jaguar, because I thought I was going to kill myself in it, so they put competition race pads in it. I got to know them well at the factory – they later put in a racing engine for me.

“You wouldn’t do it these days, but we used to race each other on the roads and have a lot of fun. I remember one night the traffic had stopped just around the corner, I slammed on the brakes and just avoided running into the back of Norman Strachan’s car, together with the bike on the back of it. Had I hit him, I would have written off his bike.

“I lost my driving licence 13 times, mostly due to speeding.”

BRIAN Clark was a loyal one-club man at Peterborough between 1970 and 1979, and he soon decided that a van was preferable to travelling with a bike on the back of his car.

“It stopped getting the bike wet!” he explains.

“I used to double up a lot for the longer away journeys, especially with Richard Greer because he was local.

“For meetings in Scotland, four or five of us would go together. We’d just cram the bikes into the van. We only had one bike each. It meant if anything went wrong, you would just borrow a bike from someone else.

“The vans we had were very different to the ones you see now. Ours were all secondhand; everyone seems to have new ones these days. We never had anything new. It was mostly Transit vans – nothing specialised.”

Clark recalls one particularly eventful journey: “There was a chap who used to write for the local newspaper. We took him on one of the away trips, up to Workington, and everything happened, so he ended up with loads to write about.

“We got stopped by the

• Eric and Nigel Boocock make full use of their Lotus Cortina’s boot police. And at one point, the wheel came off the trailer and went down the road like Dambusters and hit a car coming the other way. We still got there, because we fitted a washer from one of the bikes to fit the wheel back onto the trailer.”

JOHN Hack spent most of his career, curtailed by serious injury, riding for Oxford. It meant a lot of miles for the likeable Mancunian.

“We did somewhere between 700 and 900 miles a week,” Hack remembers. “My dad, my brother and I used to share the driving between us – we’d just swap every couple of hours.

“We used to travel in a Ford Cortina, with a three-bike trailer on the bike. Eddie Bull, who was involved with Bruce Penhall, made the trailer for me. I never took three bikes, just the two. It served us for a number of years until I got badly hurt.”

Hack recalls a couple of long trips to Weymouth.

“We ended up going down there seven times in six weeks. I remember one time when it was called off down there. As we set off back home, my dad put the key in his overalls and closed the boot at the back of the car . . . with the overalls inside!

“We were locked out, and the car park was