There’s a funny thing with sidecar engines. Well it’s a rule really, that if an engine is any good in a solo it’ll be rubbish in a sidecar and vice versa. In the 1960s Triumph solos won everything, but they weren’t a serious proposition in a chair. You wanted a BSA. The same held true for the German machines. Who raced a BMW solo? Not even the Germans. Kim Newcombe tried a Konig solo and did quite well, but no one else got anywhere. Yet in the sidecars BMWs then Konigs were the thing to have.
As newer engines came along it was much the same. Roy Woodhouse and Dick Greasley both had Honda 750s for a while. They were quick, Dick Mann won on one at Daytona. We thought if someone ever got one to handle they’d be good, so when they came out with six-inch and seven-inch rear tyres for them we thought: “Ah, right, that’s it, game over.” But they hardly had enough power to spin those tyres around, let alone really use them. An old BSA A65 would kill a Honda. When the big Japanese two-strokes came in it was déjà vu. Mac Hobson had a TZ700 but he had an RG500 too, to do GPs. A Suzuki RG500 just like Barry Sheene’s was the thing to have as a solo, not a TZ500. But the RGs twisted cranks and obviously it was even worse in a sidecar, so you went for a Yamaha. For us it was academic though, we couldn’t have afforded either an RG500 or a TZ750. But in another Suzuki I thought we’d found the answer.
We went down to pick it up off Heron Suzuki, with proper folding bank notes in a big brown envelope. I think we paid about £1800 for it, which sounded like a lot of money for back then and it was. The thing was that TZs were about four grand at the time and this was an ex-Barry Sheene, 850cc triple, a big one, bought directly off Rex White: a proper
