John Roeder

Age is the best disguise for someone's past. It's hard to imagine the old guy sat on a park bench fearlessly fighting in a war or drunkenly brawling outside a football ground. It's difficult to picture the old lady, the one with the thinning hair and papery skin, as a 20-year-old raver looking for illicit thrills round the back of the butcher's.

Now, John Roeder isn't that old, and the two-piece leathers he turned up to a DTRA race in a few years ago did give us a clue he had some race history, but we didn't know just how much till we spent a winter's morning in his dining room going through old scrapbooks.

We have distilled ten years of John's racing and memories from competing in Florida and beyond in the 1970s into ten pages of Sideburn 16 and we're already getting great feedback on the story from subscribers. Get your issue for just £5 plus post from the Sideburn webshop. G