Today in motorcycle history, April 3-13, 2015

  Today in motorcycle history will be on vacation until Monday, April 13.  Flat roads, warm nights and cold beers beckon... 




  Today in motorcycle history proudly supports the National Association for Bikers with a Disability (NABD). www.nabd.org.uk

Today in motorcycle history, April 2, 1940

  

  The man many call the greatest roadracer ever, Mike Hailwood, is born in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, UK.

  Mike Hailwood was a nine-time World Champion, including four 500cc titles in succession. In six years he won an astounding seventy-four Grand Prix. He won Grand Prix races in each of the 250cc, 350cc and 500cc classes, including winning Grands Prix in all three classes in the same season, a record five times. Five times he won all three classes in a single day.

  At Daytona in 1964 Hailwood set a new one-hour speed record on an MV 500cc, recording an average speed of 144.8 mph at Daytona.

  He came out of retirement at the age of thirty-eight and won the Isle of Man two years in a row.


   A natural-born rider and owner of steely determination, there is no better example of that than the 1965 Isle of Man Senior. At Sarah’s Cottage he crashed his MV, yet somehow managed to restart the engine. With a broken wind-screen and flattened exhaust megaphones, not to mention a bloody nose - he slid in for a pit stop to straighten his bent handlebars and then blasted off to win the race.

  He would win the Isle of Man fourteen times.

  Stanley Michael Bailey Hailwood, MBE, GM (April 2, 1940-March 23, 1981. 

  Today in motorcycle history proudly supports the National Association for Bikers with a Disability (NABD). www.nabd.org.uk