“I HIT THIS LAKE OF WATER FLAT ON THE TANK, AROUND 240KM/H”
On 17 September 1961, Mike Hailwood and his four-cylinder RC162 won the 250cc Swedish grand prix at Kristianstad, securing Honda’s first world championship as he crossed the line.
Jim Redman finished the race in fourth, completing a clean sweep of the top four places for Honda, watched by company founder Soichiro Honda, who had made a rare trip to Europe – from Tokyo to Stockholm via Hong Kong, Mumbai, Karachi, Cairo and Rome – to see his dream come true.
“There is no need to be a winner in Japan – first, I want to be the world winner,” Honda-san had said seven years earlier.
Redman was Honda’s most successful rider of the so-called Golden Age, winning six world championships between 1962 and 1965. Six decades later no other Honda rider has bettered that total and the 89-year-old is Honda’s only world champion from that era still with us.
Redman was one of the hardest riders of that generation, somewhat like Phil Read, his arch-rival at Yamaha. Both were ruthless operators, so unlike the boyish, fun-loving Hailwood.
Redman certainly had good reason to be hard-hearted. Born in North London in 1931 he lost both his parents soon after the war.
