‘Here come Mike’s bikes’
In an age when all but the factory team racers transported their bikes to meetings in small vans, on trailers and even on motorcycle sidecar outfits, Mike’s bikes arrived in a large bus-sized transporter. Emblazoned across its sides were the chequered flag emblem of his personal ‘team’ – Ecurie Sportive – and the slogan “For the Love of the Sport”. Then, as if that was not eye-catching enough, there was also a script above the windscreen telling the folks at the paddock gates: “Here Come Mike’s Bikes”!
That was because his millionaire father, Stan, immediately applied the same colourful approach to the racing career of his son as he did to the motorcycle sales businesses that had made him rich.
He followed the Ecurie Sportive transporter in his Bentley Continental with his shy teenage son hunkered down with embarrassment in the front seat, but that was the way that ‘Stan the Wallet’ (as he was soon nicknamed by the paddock wits of the time) did business. Embarrassed or not, it was up to Mike to live up to the hype.
Live up to it he did – and this, combined with his polite and diffident personality, soon won over any critics who might at first have regarded him as a spoiled little rich boy.
At Oulton Park on April 22, 1957, Mike finished a creditable 11th in his first race, riding a 125cc MV Agusta, and his first win came less than two months after his debut. On June 10 that year, he won with his MV Agusta 125 on the fast and dangerous course that used the roads of the Army camp at Blandford in Dorset.
In the 32 years that followed, Mike raced no fewer than 42 different types of motorcycle for 18 different brands and either won or at least scored ‘top three’ podium paces with most of them. Surely, a record that is unlikely ever to be equalled?
To say that Mike Hailwood burst upon the motorcycle scene in 1957 would
