The Place

Rear wheel steering from Derek and Bryan!
Assen 1984

Aah, bugger, we even looked into rear wheel steering in the 70'. But that was too radicle, Honda came out with a road car with rear wheel steering/moving but this was at low speed, worked o/k for parking. But outfits/cars with rear wheel steering at speed would be unstable, think of a forklift truck going quick & trying to turn.

I think we're going off topic but it's saturday night
my mate had a 4ws Honda. We pulled up in a petrol station in Northampton and the pump was on the wrong side, so he drove forward 5 yards (not blooody metres!) and did a 180 in the forecourt to the pump next to us, strangest thing in the world being sat in the back of it).


Innovation is good in sidecars Ian, and it would be great if everyone could build their own sidecars like dad did, if they could innovate and do different stuff, but then (and correct me if I'm wrong) I feel that formula racing promotes the driving side of it. It's not easy to get the balance between the two. If you let engineers run racing you end up with wildly different machinery and inconsistent racing, if you promote formula type racing it's good for the racing side of it.
The compromise isn't simple but it's out there. .
hopefully this thread is obscure enough that nobody is reading and finding my 'saturday night misspelling and rambling'

steve-e wrote:Doug Young was another interesting one - the kart type thing with no suspension.

Look what I've just found

http://www.younggunsmotorcycles.co.uk/id14.html

The 2 seperate World Championships soon died out due to lack of entries. However it produced
many technical inovations such as sidecar wheel steering and short and long wishbone type
machines

Bill Boldison and myself raced Bill Copper's Difazio steered outfit in the B2 British G P
at Silverstone. It was without doubt the best steering outfit I have ever raced.
We were going great and up to 8th place when it started raining. As we had no wets we
kept going and aquaplaned off at Stow corner. The outfit plus Bill and I ended up entangled
in the chicken wire catch fencing. When we extricated ourselves Bill said "lets have another go,
that was fun", so off we went,only to crash two corners later.The bike spun off into a cornfield
on a flat out left hander and we lay on the track. After the race we had to ask the marshalls
to help us look for it

It was such an improvement on the B.R.M machine which we intended racing, but which we felt
too unpredictable.

I then lent the B.R.M to Bill Cooper who tried to develop it without success. He had a couple of
accidents on it. Fred Brindley then purchased it and told me later he had made it into a coffee table.
as it was no good for anything else.

see that should be front page in itself

Dick, if it is wrong tell me to pull it later 8)

Going back to sidecar wheel steering, we built an outfit with 10" Tyrell (6 wheel) Formula 1 tyres which had the (steering) sidecar wheel at half-wheelbase. We thought it was the way forward, but soon learned otherwise! Dennis Keen was pretty impressed when we went round Lodge at Oulton Park with the front wheel airbourne.
Shame, really, a lot of time and money wasted. I guess that would have been around 1975-6.

I remember it well Andy, do you have any pics of it you can post.
Think we shared the same passenger at one stage, Colin Bairnson.

ianw wrote:I remember it well Andy, do you have any pics of it you can post.
Think we shared the same passenger at one stage, Colin Bairnson.

Hi Ian
I've got some photos, I'll have to get them scanned (pre-digital!) I've also got the article that MCN covered the initial build of the outfit so I'll try to get that on as well.
Colin chaired with me for a while, he drew the short straw as it was while I was running the Tyrell wheeled outfit, and so didn't get any good finishes. By the time I realised the error of my ways Colin had moved on and Steve China took over.

Hi Andy

The Tyrrell wheeled outfit was 1978 when my father sponsored you. I have some good photos that were taken at the first meeting at Staverton. I will try and scan them and send them on. Tim was in the chair at the time. I recall that there was a problem at Oulton with the front fairing that rubbed the tyre and turn a slick into a grooved tyre.

Finally got some pics. We didn't take many as we were too busy trying to get the thing built and it was before digital photography came along. The final shot is the last outfit I raced, with passenger Steve China and eventual purchaser Malcolm Aldrick.

ianw wrote:There was no greater innovator, bender of the rules than Rolf Biland. Whenever the rule book was altered to bring Biland back in to line with convensional thinking, bang, he came out with something different again. Rudi Kurth was his early inspiration & then he was aided by Louis Christian. Rolf Biland single handedly progresed, some may say, ruined sidecar racing. Innovation has slowed down since he left the scene.

How true, friend of mine was the sidecar scrutineer (and a very good one at that) at the Siverstone GP - he hated Biland's continual rule bending, so he unzipped "the bag" and said, "That's illegal", ho ho ho what a storm broke, all sorts of "protests", friend got told by the FIM steward to zip up the bag and keep quiet, he kept saying "but its illegal". All got blown over.

The friend hated the fact that everyone else operated within the rules but Biland continually tried to operate outside the rules in order to gain the advantage assisted by his large (compared to others) sponsor deals.

I agree with the friend and not the general slidey consensus, Biland was a great ideas man, but please operate within the rules, like everyone else - that way lies true innovation.

Anyway, all Biland ultimately ever did was reduce the people coming into top flight sidecar racing because of the hike in the money involved, I ask the question, how is that a good thing?

Got to disagree with you Phil, money has always ruled.
I remember a certain rider ( rich ) in the 1980's who had 3 chassis built by 3 different constructors in the same season, he went for "flavour of the month"!

Great pics & article Andy.

Whatever you think of Biland as an inovater/constructer you have to admit he was probably the best driver there has ever been,in fact if hed inovated less,and concentrated more on the driving he probablly whould have won more!

Andy, I remember you & the passenger were very high on the bike, do you think that had anything to do with the way it handled?
Still a lovely looking chassis