Phil Read MBE 1939-2022: Obituary

Phil Read used to vomit. Often.

When the so-called Prince of Speed (because Giacomo Agostini was its king) was at the height of his powers in the late 1960s and early 1970s most Grands Prix were staged around street circuits, where he knew full well that one mistake might be his last, never mind the fact that he was fighting for FIM world championships, just as Fabio Quartararo, Pecco Bagnaia, Aleix Espargaró and others fight for world championships today.

Read and his rivals lived a knife-edge existence between risk and reward like few before or since. He admitted that the combination of the two often had him doubling up over the toilet before a grand prix, the hideous rush of adrenaline causing him to vomit before he steadied and dressed himself for the fight: pudding-basin helmet and a leather onesie. Not much use when meeting a brick wall at a hundred and fifty hundred miles an hour.

“I was bombing up the M1 when I passed this Lotus doing about ninety. I looked inside and it was Jim Clark”

Despite all this, Read made history. He was the first rider to win the junior, intermediate and senior world championships – 125s, 250s and 500s in those days – an achievement that even now has only been matched by Valentino Rossi and Marc Márquez. That’s how special he was, in an age when every GP season stole several lives and no one seemed to care.

He won eight world titles (two 500cc, four 250cc, one 125cc and a TT F1 crown on the Isle of Man), scored 52 GP victories, between 1961 and 1975, and won eight TTs, riding everything from little two-strokes to big four-strokes

Read was a tough competitor, possibly the toughest of all time. It was probably Read that began the sport’s metamorphosis from the gentleman champions of old – Geoff Duke, John Surtees and so on – to the grinning assassins of today.

John Cowie, a fierce competitor during Read’s later years when the he was back racing in Britain, remembers lining up with him on the grid at Cadwell Park in 1978, when there was a disagreement over the starting rules.

“Read leant over to me and said ‘you ain’t f**kin’ going to win it anyway!’,” recalls Cowie. “I didn’t know the man but he had been one of my idols when I was a teenager. He blew that right there. After he’d thumbed his nose at me he came up the inside of me into the hairpin, shoved me out and out, until I was high and dry, then cleared off.”

This is the attitude it takes to win multiple world titles. However, on this occasion Cowie had the last laugh – he beat Read to that year’s British TT F1 title.

Read was bike racing’s George Best and revelled in the bad-boy image. He named his autobiography after his other nickname ‘Rebel Read’ and he had the accoutrements to go with it. He wore rockstar shades and fur-coats, lived in mansions in London’s stockbroker belt, drove a Rolls-Royce, flew his own private plane, spent his winters skiing in the Alps and water-skiing in Hawaii and had a string of glamorous wives and girlfriends. His living-it-large character brightened the sport for years.

Read was born and bred in Luton, Bedfordshire. He started racing in 1956, aboard a 350cc BSA, encouraged by his mother, a keen motorcyclist. Just two years later he won his first Isle of Man TT, at that time the world’s biggest motorcycle race, and he was on his way

After that TT win he bought himself his first flash motor, a 3.8-litre Jaguar Mark 2, which was soon replaced by an E-Type.

“I remember driving up to Silverstone in the E. I was bombing up the M1 at about a hundred when I passed this Lotus doing about ninety. I looked inside and it was Jim Clark [1963 and 1965 Formula 1 world champion]. I thought, that’s good, I’m a motorcycle racer and he’s an F1 driver, so I’m doing okay.”

At the end of 1963 Read was signed by Yamaha, the third Japanese manufacturer to take on the world, after Honda and Suzuki. The following year he gave the company its first world title, the 250cc. Over the next few seasons the battle between Yamaha’s and Suzuki’s two-strokes and Honda’s four-strokes became the most fabulous, most lethal arms race in bike racing history.

The two-strokes were fast and scary too, prone to engine seizures because the metallurgy and lubrication of the days couldn’t cope with the heat produced by the engines. Riders like Read and Yamaha team-mate Bill Ivy were basically crash-test dummies, developing technology that might kill them at any moment.

“You realised you could get killed, so you lived it up. At one meeting it got a bit hectic, lingerie flying out of the window…”

“I remember my 250 splitting a flywheel at Chimay [a lethal Belgian street circuit, still in use today] at top speed,” Read told me a few years ago. “I felt it go and had the clutch in before it locked the rear wheel and sent me flying. You were always nervous…

“It was new technology, like the moon landing. We were developing multi-cylinder bikes, suffering their idiosyncrasies and their seizures. The Japanese were on a steep learning curve and we the riders were benefitting but also suffering. Seizures were a constant concern, so I still ride with two fingers on the clutch, even if I’m riding a four-stroke on the road!

“We were busy on the bikes and it was hard work – a 1000rpm powerband, about 350rpm between gears, shifting all the time. Hard work but very exciting, with all the hi-tech interest, the sounds, the atmosphere.

“It wasn’t only the engines, though. It was also the awful handling and lack of brakes. I remember during testing in Japan, Bill and I took some Yamaha engineers out to a certain section of the Suzuka circuit to see how the bikes handled. Usually the engineers stood in the pits and the bikes would flash by and look wonderful. Anyway, they came to watch us through the corners, where the bikes were tying themselves in knots, and after two laps they were standing on the circuit, jumping up and down, saying, ’Slow down, slow down! We understand!’.”

With the risks came wild times, because Read and his peers never knew which night out might be their last.

“You realised you could get killed, so you lived it up between meetings. We were like Spitfire pilots. It was like ‘f**k it, we’ve survived another mission, let’s live it up a bit’. It was thrilling to do it but the danger was the terrible problem. You had a choice; you could give it up or you could continue. I just prayed that I didn’t end up dead or a paraplegic. You tried not to think about it, you tried to make the most of it.”

“At one meeting in ’75, me and [Barry] Sheene had got blown off by Giacomo [Agostini] on the Yamaha. MV had brought these promotion girls along, so we were having a bit of a time with them in my hotel room. It got a bit hectic, lingerie flying out of the window…”

During the 1960s arms race Yamaha raced 125cc and 250cc twins in the GPs, so Honda built a five-cylinder 125 and six-cylinder 250. Yamaha responded with a V4 125 and a V4 250. Things were getting out of hand, so at the end of 1967 Honda and Suzuki withdrew. That left Yamaha all alone to contest the 1968 125 and 250 championships, with Read and Ivy.

Because Yamaha had no real opposition it decided to carve up the championships between its two stars before the racing had even started: Read would win the 125, Ivy the 250.

Both men obeyed team orders, until Read wrapped up the 125 title at Brno, Czechoslovakia, with three races to go. A few hours later he dropped his bombshell.

“Bill had been telling everyone, ‘I’m goin’ to win the 250 title, I’m goin’ to beat Ready’. I’d heard all this, so as we lined up for the 250s I said to him, ‘Okay, if you think you can beat me when we’re riding to orders, well, now you’re going have to race me for it’. He said, ‘Ah, f**kin’ ‘ell, Phil’. So we raced, I won and he was second.”