Remembering Barry Sheene

MotoGP

Fifty years ago Barry Sheene stood on the verge of greatness, with his first factory Suzuki contract just a few months away. During the final phase of his 14-year Grand Prix career few people knew Sheene better than chassis-builders Lester and Steve Harris, who equipped Sheene’s GP bikes. Steve recently passed away, so this blog is also a tribute to him

Barry Sheene on Suzuki at Silverstone in August 1981

Sheene and his Harris-framed Suzuki RG500 during his final British GP at Silverstone, August 1981. He finished fifth

Bob Thomas via Getty Images

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Back in the spring of 1980 the world’s most famous motorcycle racer made a phone call to a dilapidated corrugated-iron shed in deepest Hertford, north of London. Barry Sheene had a Yamaha TZ500 that handled like a pig and he wanted an aftermarket frame that might put him back on top.

Sheene could have chosen any globally famous motorcycle chassis gurus for salvation, but he chose the relatively unknown Steve and Lester Harris and their business partner Steve Bayford. Over the next few years Sheene grew closer to the Harris brothers than pretty much anyone else. The pair fabricated frames for his Yamaha TZ500s and TZ750s and then for his RG500 when he returned to Suzuki for his swansong seasons.

Harris got to know Sheene’s quirks and his genius and soon began to understand what made the great man tick. Now, for the first time, they reveal what Sheene the man was like, rather than Sheene the pin-up superstar.

Steve Harris
When Barry went to Yamaha at the start of 1980 he was having problems with the standard TZ500s they gave him. He phoned up and said to Steve Bayford, “Hello, it’s Barry Sheene here”, and Steve said, “Yeah, and my name is Mickey Mouse”. He genuinely thought it was a customer having a laugh. Barry said, “No, really, this is Barry”, but Steve continued to deny it until he finally gave us the phone. We hit it off pretty much straight away.

Lester Harris
One of the things that impressed me most about Barry was that he was a superstar and when we first worked for him we were a tiny, tiny business, basically working out of a shed. We were so flattered and we found him a top bloke to deal with.

“He paid us for everything. A lot of racers say, ‘I’m so and so and I want it for nothing'”

Steve
Barry would turn up in his helicopter. He used to land nearby and all the kids would come out of the local river and around there where they’d been getting up to vandalism. If it was my helicopter or yours, you’d never leave it in their care, but he had the way: “What ho, ace. Keep an eye on my helicopter, here’s some stickers”. And they would stand there while he came here for a couple of hours and when he went back they were still there and no one would’ve touched his helicopter.

He would phone within half an hour of the end of every race, telling us, this happened, that happened. Now I think about it we were probably just one of the names on a long list and he rang them all up.

Sometimes he was hyper because he’d had a good result, like South Africa in 1984, when he had that stunning ride to third in the wet, on a production RG500 with our frame, ahead of a load of factory bikes. He knew that was a stunning ride – with all his experience he knew he’d set the benchmark a bit higher that day

Lester
How much of it was his natural personality and how much was cold-blooded, I don’t know, but he was a clever bloke. He made you feel important and valued and therefore you were prepared to do whatever was necessary to help him. Apart from the fact that he was a star you wanted to help him because he was very appreciative of what you did. And he used to pay us for everything. A lot of racers would’ve said, “I’m so and so and I want it for nothing”. We get that all the time; in fact it’s the norm!

1980 Yamaha TZ500 as ridden by Barry Sheene

Sheene’s Harris-framed Yamaha TZ500, which he used in the 1980 500cc world championship

John Keeble/Getty Images

Steve
When we first started working with him, he said before we get going, “I want to tell you that I don’t want anything for free”. He said, “I earn good money doing what I do and I expect you to”.

Lester
That’s what made you warm to him and really put in the effort to do as good a job as possible.

Steve
He would do a GP, get home on Monday morning, then he’d phone and fly up here with a list of bits he wanted by Wednesday. As long as you had them done by Wednesday – which we always did – it wasn’t a problem. If you gave him what he wanted he was ecstatic.

“His public persona was of a happy-go-lucky bloke but he actually worked flipping hard”

He was incredibly fussy about things like handlebars and screen height. He would mess with them for ages, and it was no good saying to him, “That one is exactly the same as the other one, because he wasn’t having it”.

He would say, “I want the handlebars like that”. And if he felt that one set of handlebars felt different to the other one, that’s all that mattered. He pushed all the time to get exactly what he wanted.

Lester
When Steve says he was incredibly fussy, in fact he was ludicrously fussy, because he knew what he wanted. That was the thing, you’ve got this public persona of a happy-go-lucky bloke but actually he used to work flipping hard at getting it right. He was like two personalities. He would spend however long it took to get what he wanted exactly how he wanted it. It’s that single-minded determination that makes the difference.

Some people said he didn’t have a clue about bike set-up, but the fact of the matter is that if he had the bike how he wanted it he could ride fast. The mechanic’s job is to give him that bike; it’s no good saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He knew how he wanted it to feel and, right or wrong, that’s what he wanted.

Steve
There was a couple of times when we did things like alter the wheelbase without telling him. Within two laps he came in and said, “You’ve lengthened it, haven’t you?!”. I was mightily impressed.

Lester
I don’t know much about car racing but I think one of the big differences between car and bike racing is that in cars you can design a car and fundamentally any good driver can drive it fast. But on a motorcycle it’s all about confidence and feel, so if you feel the bike is wrong, then you can’t push; or at least most riders can’t, there are only a few who can. It’s all a bit of a black art getting a motorcycle to work for an individual rider; there is no formula.

Barry Sheene glances at the camera while wearing a crash helmet

Sheene in 1980 – he always knew how to get the best out of people

Bob Thomas via Getty Images

Steve
When he went to Yamaha they were obviously keen to have him on board but they didn’t have any bikes that were good enough for a rider of his talent, because the only works bikes went to Kenny Roberts. So he started off with a standard TZ500 and TZ750. We did a lot of work on them: we built swingarms and we altered the frames to make them stronger.

Then we ended up building a complete chassis that was all ours – different steering-head angle, everything.

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When he got the square-four factory bike [the Yamaha 0W54] in 1981 he was getting plenty of works kit, so he was a lot happier, but we still made him bits like handlebars. He always like our handlebars for some reason.

When he got the V4 [the 0W61] before Silverstone in 1982 we were on holiday, so Spondon [Derby-based chassis makers] modified that frame for him. When I spoke to him about it later [after Sheene’s huge accident in practice, caused by colliding with a fallen bike at 160mph] he said I tried to f**kin’ phone you but there was no-one there. This was well before the days of answerphones and mobiles.

When he went back to Suzuki he was very unhappy with the RG they’d given him, so we built him a new frame. It wasn’t anything that special, just a large-diameter, thin-wall tubular steel frame. Barry didn’t like all the aluminium frames that were coming out at the time. Suzuki gave him a few aluminium jobs that Randy Mamola had used at HB Suzuki. It was when Suzuki got themselves into an awful mess – they made loads of different frames with all kinds of problems. Barry chose a few, tested them and said I don’t want any of them, I want Harris to build me a chassis.

Lester
That was the early days of aluminium frames. People were learning and they were just substituting steel tubes with aluminium tubes, which was ridiculous. We went for a tubular steel frame because we felt it would give the stiffness characteristics that he was used to. We’re still learning how much flex to put into a frame – it’s a black art because even now you get a frame working for one bloke and someone else wants something different.

At that time we were working a lot on rear suspension because suspension technology was a lot cruder. We fiddled around with loads of different rising-rate linkage systems and we did one for Barry that had a rocker at each end of the shock.

Steve
Barry wanted his bikes set up in a certain way. He didn’t care if the bike wobbled in a straight line, he just wanted it to turn quick and fall into corners. I think he probably had some fitness problems towards the end of his career which took it out of him, so he wanted the bike to turn almost on its own and that’s what we gave him.

Lester
He used to say, I don’t care how stable it is, that’s not an issue. For a lot of people it’s the opposite – as soon as the bike gets a bit wobbly they don’t want to ride it and who can blame them?

Lester
Everyone responds to a bit of praise and he would always get round to saying, if we could just alter this and just do that…

Steve
Yes, he’d say, I’ve been thinking… That was always a warning, because when he’d been thinking we knew it was a load of work coming our way. We had to work 24/7. But because of the way he was with people, our blokes would’ve done anything for him. We’d tell them you’ve got to come in on Saturday and Sunday and work till 11 at night…

1984 Suzuki RG500 as ridden by Barry Sheene

Sheene’s 1984 RG500 used a tubular-steel frame, when most riders were switching to aluminium chassis

John Keeble/Getty Images

Lester
And they’d say, “We’re coming in anyway, because we’ve got to get it finished”. There was no question of anyone going home or going down the pub. It was, “We’re doing this for Barry and it’s got to be done”.

Steve
The thing I remember about him more than anything else was the way he could manage people with his cockney whizz-kid way. “What ho, mate”, and all that. People loved it.

“Everything was a competition. If he was here now, he’d say, ‘I bet I can drink more cups of tea than you'”

Barry opened a lot of doors for us. When he was on your side, whoever you were, that would benefit you because he understood the value of PR, because he’d done a good job on himself. He would make sure that everyone knew he was coming here for his bits and why.

When we built his first RG500 he rode it onto the stage at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year do. He said, “These guys Harris are just coming into GPs, watch what they do”, which was very nice of him.

Lester
Once the 1984 season started we didn’t change the RG chassis much. We went through the normal altering the handlebars and all that stuff, which was more like a ritual to him than anything else. He felt that if he had done that it’d be right.

Steve
That RG was a great little bike. I went to Assen with him in 1984 and he was having a fantastic ride, up with Eddie Lawson on the factory Yamaha and Randy Mamola on the factory Honda. He shouldn’t have had that bike as far up the order as he did, then it broke a con rod. That year we put the bike on a dyno. It gave 140 horsepower, about 20 less than the works bikes.

Lester
Barry was a top, top rider. When Roberts came along he eclipsed Barry, but prior to that he was as good at it got.

Steve
We were at the Silverstone international in the early 1970s, sitting on the grass inside Turn 1. Barry was racing his Suzuki 500 twin against Giacomo Agostini on the MV 500. He shouldn’t have won that but he did. There was a grudge match between them – he was riding up onto the paving stones at the edge of the track to get round Ago. We were thinking, he’s going to bin it, big style, but he didn’t. And he got the better of Ago.

Lester
It’s ever so difficult when you get to the superstars: how do you actually judge one against the other? For me, Roberts was one of the best and I’d put Barry knocking on the door, but not quite there.

Steve
I’d put him fourth on riding ability, but as a complete professional motorcycle racer I’d put him on top because he could use people and make things happen. If you ever talk to any of his team-mates they’ll tell you that whenever a box of new bits arrived Barry would open the boxes and say, “That lot’s mine and these two are yours”.

Lester
All top riders are merciless. They are selfish people; they have to be. When you hear people criticising riders for that it’s daft because that’s what makes a champion.

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The thing about blokes like Barry is that they only come along very rarely. He was a star before he was a star, that’s the amazing thing. When we saw him riding as a kid it was quite clear he was a star. Our sister is a couple of years younger than me and she used to show us the teen mags and he was in them all the time, even before he had won anything of note. He was getting stuff done in the media before anyone else in bikes did. He knew how to get everyone on side.

It’s a bit like film stars – you just look at them and they’ve got something intangible and he was one of those. He was definitely the prototype Valentino Rossi. Plus, he had unshakeable self-confidence, absolutely unshakeable.

Steve
You couldn’t go anywhere with him without there being an element of competition – he had to change everything into a competition. If he was sitting here now, he would say I bet I can drink more cups of tea than you can. It was as petty as that. But he had to keep beating people because that’s what motivated him. I remember we were having dinner somewhere and suddenly he goes, I bet I can do more one arm press-ups than anyone else here and he could and he did.