135.067mph: the fastest GP of all time

Sheene scored his first GP win in the 125 class at Spa in 1971 and he would’ve won the 1976 Belgian GP on his way to his first world title if his RG hadn’t gone sick. When he returned in July 1977 he was once again leading the world championship, fending off Steve Baker’s factory Yamaha. Victory at Spa would very nearly put the title out of Baker’s reach.

One of Sheene’s two new team-mates in 1977 was best mate Steve Parrish, who had never raced on a street circuit. Sheene showed the youngster what he was in for by taking him for a few high-speed reconnaissance laps in his Rolls-Royce, but nothing could prepare Parrish for the reality.

“I remember it vividly – the main thing was the daunting speed of the place,” says Parrish, who was riding a year-old ex-Sheene factory RG500. “I remember riding through that long right-hander through the village of Burneville, thinking, ‘Fuck me, if it goes wrong here… this is just lunacy’. That corner was like an enormous Gerrards [at Mallory] – well over 100mph [160kph], but with no run-off whatsoever. Then there was that nasty fourth-gear kink on the Masta straight. That was one of those hold-your-frigging-breath-and-get-through-it corners. I suppose the good thing was there wasn’t a lot of corners to remember because most of the lap was just pinned.”

“He asked us if we’d fixed the problem and we said ‘yeah’, so he said, ‘okay, let’s do it’, We had to know that if we lied to him we could kill him, simple as that.”

Baker, another street circuit virgin, also made his Spa debut that July. “I went around in my car before practice,” says the American. “My first thought was, ‘Oh God, what have I got myself into here?’. It was pretty scary. The thing was that however dangerous it was, you had to keep your corner speed up because with the 500 engine’s power characteristics that made a huge difference in lap time.”

Spa had only one slow corner – the final La Source hairpin, taken at 20mph [30kph]. Parrish remembers being so ‘speed drunk’ that it was very tricky to judge his speed into the corner. “Then you’d have an awful lot of clutch slipping out of there because of the ridiculously high gearing you were using.”

Sheene didn’t start the 1977 Spa GP from pole. He got stung by a hornet during qualifying and ended up second behind Suzuki privateer Philippe Coulon. In fact the hornet was the least of his problems.

These were days of spiralling two-stroke engine performance, which had the tyre companies and chassis makers struggling to keep up. Only two years earlier Sheene had come close to death at Daytona when he was flung down the road at 170mph [275kph] after his rear tyre popped.

At the end of Spa practice Sheene’s mechanics were shocked when they noticed a groove down the centre of his rear slick and a small pile of rubber debris stuck to the swingarm. The sustained high speeds – his RG was geared for almost 190mph [305kph] – had grown the tyre until it chafed against the swingarm, threatening to rip the tyre apart.

“Barry wasn’t impressed when he saw that – it was a shock because it was, ‘here we go again’,” recalls Ogborne who believes Sheene’s Daytona crash was caused by the same phenomenon. “The problem with the old cross-plies was that they had so much rubber on them that the tyres would grow far too much. So it was, oh shit, get all the swingarms out, get the grinders out and grind the chain adjustment slots so we could pull the wheels right back.”

While the mechanics worked on that bodge, Sheene had a brainwave that he hoped might solve another chassis nightmare. Through Spa’s high-speed direction changes he had noticed that when he yanked the handlebars the front wheel didn’t respond accordingly. He realised that most of his input was being soaked up by fork twist.

“It was Saturday evening and Barry disappeared for several hours,” recalls Brookman, who was looking after Parrish’s bikes at the time. “He came back with a piece of quarter-inch aluminium plate that had been heated and bent to loop round the forks.”

Sheene had invented the fork brace. “That was the thing with Barry – he was always looking to have something that no one else had,” adds Brookman. “He would always find someone somewhere and do something a bit different to everyone else. He did the same with Kenny [Roberts] when they were both at Yamaha. That was just Barry.”

Sheene didn’t let the tyre worries put him off in the race. “He asked us if we’d fixed the problem and we said ‘yeah’, so he said, ‘okay, let’s do it’,” adds Ogborne. “It was done on trust – his mind had to be completely free. We had to know that if we lied to him we could kill him, simple as that.”

The race was no pushover. Another RG500 privateer Michel Rougerie led Sheene most of the way, while Baker fought back from a sluggish getaway, his  piston-ported OW35 always a lazier starter than the rotary-valve RG.

“This myth about his mechanical ability, I don’t know how much of that stood up, but he was a brave little bastard and he just wanted to win.”

Meanwhile Parrish found himself embroiled in an epic battle for third with former champion Giacomo Agostini, third factory Suzuki rider Pat Hennen and Finnish privateer Tepi Lansivouri.

“It still stands out in my mind because I’d never slipstreamed so closely in my life. You were inches from the other guys, staring at their exhaust pipes. We were doing these ridiculous leapfrogging manoeuvres – you’d slipstream past someone, then he’d come back past you, then you’d go past him again. And you were doing this with your finger on the clutch in case your engine seized, while looking at the other guys’ tail pipes, watching for the tell-tale puff of blue smoke that told you their engine was seizing.”

Slipstreaming was such a big deal at Spa that clever mechanics prepared for it. Over-gearing could help a rider take advantage of a tow, while extra fuel was vital in case the rider spent too much time giving rivals a tow. At Spa, Sheene’s RG used an eight-litre auxiliary tank in the seat hump, in addition to the usual 32-litre fuel tank, very nearly twice the fuel load of today’s MotoGP bikes.

“When you got a tow it was a big advantage because not only does it push you forward it pulls the other guy back,” says Ogborne. “But we also dreaded the slipstream because, fuck me, did the bikes drink fuel when they got slipstreamed!”

On the penultimate lap Rougerie was still ahead. “Michel was giving Barry a real run for his money,” says Brookman. “Then Rougerie’s bike broke, maybe because he’d been towing Barry along, which would’ve made his engine work harder.”