THE START OF IT ALL

Not only was Mike Hailwood one of the most successful riders in road racing history, he was also one of the most versatile. For Mike not only raced a huge variety of machines throughout his 23-year career, but he often competed on three or four different makes, capacities and/or types in a single day — from a 125cc 2-stroke single to a 500cc 4-stroke inline four. And in true Hailwood style, he won races on most of them.

Yet at the outset of his career, it seemed that Mike would forever be dogged by the undeniable advantage of being a rich man’s son. Time after time, after he’d proved his riding superiority by winning up to four races in an afternoon in the late 1950s, the critics would scoff that “he’s only winning because his dad can afford to buy him the best bikes.’’ True, insofar as dad Stan — or SW, as everybody called him, as in Stanley William — was an ultra-successful businessman who ran Kings Motors Group, Britain’s largest chain of 50-odd bike dealerships, and thus had access to the best possible machinery in the formative years of Mike’s career. True, too, in that in Bill Lacey, a former Norton works rider in the prewar era at Brooklands, the Hailwoods’ Ecurie Sportive team employed one of the most meticulous and astute tuners in the business. But it still took a man with supreme riding skills to clock up the success that Mike the Bike achieved during his long and illustrious career, and on such a varied selection of capacities and makes, British, Japanese and Italian alike. But it was on a German production racer that Mike first made his mark on the global stage.

Big plans

Stan Hailwood had a well-mapped plan for his son’s racing career, which involved his learning the ropes first on smaller bikes whose hairline handling and relative lack of power decreed careful, precise riding, and a high degree of concentration. Accordingly, Mike Hailwood’s racing debut came at Oulton Park on