Spanish stroker
Okay, readers, especially TT fans – it’s Trivial Pursuits time. Which was the first two-stroke to finish in the top two places, in any class, of an Isle of Man TT race when it was a World Championship GP? Yamaha, did I hear you say, or perhaps Suzuki – or, hang on, was it DKW?
Not bad, because the West German strokers did manage a pair of third places, most notably Cecil Sandford’s finish in the 1955 Junior TT on his 75° V-three device. But the German bikes never finished any higher than that in the IoM – so, ah, you say, how about Bultaco? Well, that’s close – but there’s still no cigar, because Bultaco didn’t yet exist in 1956 when 21-year old Marcelo Cama led a trio of 125cc Montesa two-stroke singles clad in their distinctive low-slung plastic streamlining across the finishing line of the 1956 mass-start Ultra-Lightweight TT run on the 10.92-mile Clypse Course. In doing so, he and team-mates Paco González and Enrique Sirera finished second, third and fourth behind that year’s eventual 125cc world champion, the victorious Carlo Ubbiali on his works MV Agusta.
Though there were only nine finishers out of the 22 starters, 11 of those had been MV-mounted but eight retired, and the Spanish strokers had either beaten them to the finish line or else outlasted them, in an impressive demonstration of speed and reliability in those early days of two-stroke race development.
Nowadays, when Spain is one of the pillars of the EU, and so many of us go there to seek sunshine, sand and sangria by holidaying along its various coastlines, it’s hard to conceive just how desperately poor and relatively backward the entire country outside Madrid was under the Fascist dictatorship of General Franco, until his death in 1975. That particularly applied to Catalunya, whose capital Barcelona had been the home of the anti-Franco Republican movement during the devastating Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.
Having won his crusade against Communism, as he saw it, with support from Adolf Hitler via an abundance of German planes, tanks, and arms, Franco’s revenge was total, from murdering thousands of former Republican supporters, to banning
