Brilliant on-bike colour footage of Bob McIntyre riding a Norton Manx at Oulton Park in the very late Fifties, maybe 1960-'61 (the Cheshire track where he'd sustain fatal injuries in 1962). You can only imagine the size of the camera bolted to the bike. I've had this for 15 years or more on VHS but went looking for it on DVD. I'm glad to say you can get it from Duke, and it's well worth it, there's more of this lap, plus you get a full lap behind the flyscreen, and there's loads more stuff about all types of bikesport. I think it was one of those films made to show before the main feature in cinemas to stop the nation's youth from slipping into a dirty rocker lifestyle.
It's an apt time to mention that McIntyre was the first rider to put in a 100+mph lap of the TT, in the 1957 Senior on a four-cylinder Gilera 500. To mark the TT's golden jubilee, that year's Senior was run over eight laps (instead of six). That's over 300 miles and more than three hours' racing. On the Mountain Course. On a 170mph bike with drum brakes. Bloody hell. MP
PS: Don't know where the video went earlier. It's here now and the rest of the post should now make sense.
Brilliant, Bob MacIntyre has always been a hero of mine since I joined his club the Glasgow Mercury MCC as a young snot. We all wore the same patch that Mac had on his pudding basin lid.
ReplyDeleteClub nights involved an unofficial race across the city from the clubhouse to the Stirling Castle pub - one guy had an outfit and used to hang his sidecar 6 feet in the air on the last corner, another time an older mate overtook me on the high street just as a car pulled out in front, he slid down the road in a shower of sparks , sending a spare pair of boots and a tool roll flying up the road, a poor old dear thought his legs had been severed. One second later he jumped up to round up some witnesses and brief them it was all the cars fault . . . he was a veteran of many crashes, none of them his fault.