“TOUGHER THAN A BANK VAULT DOOR!”
Gary Nixon twice came back from crashes resulting in career-threatening injuries and would return to race harder than ever to enjoy national and international success.
Paul Smart was the red-haired American’s team-mate at both Kawasaki and Suzuki and his observation that Nixon was ‘tougher than a bank vault door’ stemmed from the fact that – for three years – Nixon raced with a foot-long stainless steel rod inserted in a leg shattered in one of those big crashes.
Perseverance was one of the main attributes that marked out Gary Nixon as special in the world of motorcycle racing. Another was the extraordinary talent that took him to two US National Championship wins (in 1967 and 1968) and 19 individual race victories in some 150 races on the varied dirt tracks and road races of the American Grand National Championship Series. It also saw him come within a single point of being World Formula 750 Champion in a controversial and hotly disputed 1976 season. To this day, many feel that politics and bureaucracy robbed Gary Nixon of a world title…But more of that next time.
Nixon was both a popular and respected racer at home in the USA as well as in Europe and Japan having raced for the factory teams of Triumph, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki. His popularity in Britain came in part because he was in the vanguard of the American rider invasion of the 1970s. He came over to the 1970 Race of the Year at Mallory Park as an unknown Yank to the partisan British fans and left with their respect when he finished 4th in that hardest fought of all UK short circuit races of the period.
