METAL
Looking back on my rose-tinted and (mostly) charmed life, I can now accurately pin the beginnings of this down to me buying a Yamaha TD2B from a bloke who lived at Aston Clinton called Roger Keen.
Now, anyone who has ever owned a Yamaha Race bike between 1970 and 1990 will know or have dealt with Roger Keen, as he was a crankshaft god: A brilliant engineer on pretty much any two-stroke race bike.
I met Roger at various racetracks around the UK in 1972 when I was club racing. It was my first proper year racing with a Triton which had been put together by myself and a bunch of local reprobates who used to drink at a pub near Cambridge called The Coach and Horses.
One drunken night we decided to start a race team; we were all about 17 years old, we didn’t really have a budget – to be fair we were all skint except for John Wright (Frog). Big Beadle was an engineer, Bernie Dillon was an electrician and Bernie Abbs was a paint sprayer. There was also Pat Cook who was entertainment officer and me! It was decided that I would be the rider for our team, one that rose out from the pints of IPA.
The home-built Triton leaked so much oil we thought
