Tune, or not to tune

Decades ago, a friend and his son bought a new 250cc Yamaha LC on which the youngster would go short circuit racing. When they arrived home, junior wheeled his new motorcycle into the workshop armed with a stack of ‘how to’ tuning guides.

Dad, with 30-plus years of motorcycle engine building under his belt, refused. “We will service, maintain and set up the bike exactly as Yamaha recommend. When you’ve learned to race it on the track to its limit, then, and only then, will we tune it.”

A second, and much better known story is also worthwhile here. Visitors to Steve Lancefield’s Forest Hill, south-east London home, where during his later years he built Norton racing single cylinder ohc engines in his front room, would get short change if they mentioned the word ‘tuning.’ Getting agitated, Lancefield would send such visitors away with a flea in their ear unless they were worth persevering with, in which case he’d firmly inform them he was a ‘racing motorcycle engineer’, not a tuner, adding ‘tuners tune pianos’.

In an interview, another renowned racing engineer and noted Norton specialist, Francis Beart, would often respond when asked how he ‘tuned’ motorcycles that he didn’t – instead, he blue-printed (so meticulously and carefully assembled) their engines.

A fourth tale is perhaps worthwhile here, too. Buy a new car or motorcycle in the years of my youth, over half a century ago, and ‘wise’ sages would utter “get a midweek ‘un”. The logic here was they were better assembled on the production line than one from Monday, when