Comebacks aplenty

Here was a man who was pot-bellied, couldn’t walk properly and was very conscious he might destroy his own legend, or worse,” said Ted Macauley, Mike Hailwood’s confidant, friend and mentor.

He was speaking of Hailwood’s comeback to the Isle of Man TT in 1978 after an 11-year hiatus from motorcycle racing.

It’s not hard to understand Hailwood’s reservations – his last TT was in 1967 and the machinery in 1978 was completely different to the exotica he’d campaigned in the mid to late 1960s. What’s more, he’d sustained a serious injury during a Formula One car race at the Nürburgring, from which he was still recovering.

But boy, how Hailwood blew all doubts to oblivion when he won the 1978 Formula One race on the Sports Motorcycles Ducati. Blasting past a symphony of cheers