The Place

I am about to post a thread about a guy I know very little about but his contribution to sidecar racing left quite a mark on most of us who were fortunate enough to be around when he was at his creative best.

I came across George and his passenger at that time Steve Parker on a few occasions and was more than impressed with George's improvements to the the bodywork of his LCR machine they used in the Euros of the Early Nineties ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,and then later to see his handy work with a uniquie machine after many years of knowing of it's existance.



I was even more facinated when I came across one of his creations at last years Aintree Free practice day before their opening meet of the season. This machine was origionally supposed to fill the gap between the F2 350cc machines and the 600 4 strokes, once the 600's got going ......

George IMHO wanted to create a machine light enough to compete with the 600 but initially by using 250cc 2 stroke Honda V-Twin motors would simply fit into the formula, but with the development of the 600cc engines George was forced to use the more powerful V-Twin 500cc BUT this would make it in -eligable to race in the F2 Catagory from now on it would have to compete in the open class......It was in effect a SUPER F2 provided HRC would continue to supply the motors but this was a not to be.
Even so it has to be one of the best looking 2 stroke production racing engines ever made, added to this sidecar it was one of the most impressive 2 stroke machines ever made.

The chassis as you would imagine was a work of art with a V-Twin 500 Honda as taken from the GP machines as raced by Taddy Okada in the mid 90's , later by Joey Dunlop at the IOM. you may remember the machine more so when John McGuinness rode the Vimto backed machines...


The noise this thing made was just the insentive I needed to find it and check it out....it turned out the guys who now run this machine have managed to buy most of the EX-vimto/HRC motors but were worried about the number of useable cranks left in the UK .





But who are this kevlar suited Yorkshire crew ?



And a close up of what you would call a proper racing machine....



Regards


Fritz,,,,,,,,,,,

You Chaps will know more about this machine than me..........

To George himself,
if you are online, "Spiegelein und Kartoffelsalat" do you remember St. Wendel in Gemany 1988?
Give me a message.
Bye Eckart

The Olroyeds!(not sure about spelling, sorry)

We were at Silverstone in 2001. George had two outfits at the meeting. I can remember something happened when braking at the end of the Club (National ?) back straight and they went off the road through one of those polystyrene markers. We helped George load the van after, the 250 was on a rack above the bigger outfit ,both in the back of a Transit. Is my memory playing tricks or was the bigger outfit a Krauser with a cylinder chopped off. Im sure George said he had sourced the motor from Steve Webster. Both bikes looked like the outfit the Oldroyds have.

I think Steve Webster rode it at the festival a few years ago

The original outfit dated from about 1992 with a TZ250 engine in it. Don't think it was raced much until the mid / late 90's though when it's capacity was increased to 350 to stand more chance against the 600's. I think a guy from Oxfordshire called Tony Hewitt still has this bike and races it occasionally in F350.

George built the 2nd bike with a 3 cylinder 500 in (probably a modified Krauser as Geoff said). This is the bike that Ian & Andy Oldroyd put the NSV500 in. Think their original Honda motor came from Padgetts & was from one of their ex GP bikes.

The 2 stroke guys on here will correct me if I'm wrong.

george made some of his engines from scratch as i remember! he only lives down the road from hear and has a reputation of being the best engineer around! he dose have a website that goes into details about the engines that he made\makes it was linked on a different post not so long ago.

http://www.georacing.co.uk/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

hi all yes i have georges 350 outfit and it is a work of art it is actually a tz250 v twin bottom end with georges own barrels he had cast which brought it up to a 350 ,the oldroyd brothers bought the rolling chassis of george and modified it to take the honda 500 engines as george still has the 3 cylinder motor in his workshop this also is a very fast engine but not sure what it is based on but i know it has his own barrels on it

I passengered Webbo on it at mallory 99 on a test day ...... Couldn't believe how good that chassis handled ........ What a laugh we had that day

To complete this thread I finally got round to copying a ( Fuji-chrome ) 35mm slide from 20 years ago to be exact and found this example of George's work which at that time was as revolutionary in respect to any thing seen before ,,,,The sides enclosing the cockpit were at least 3 inches higher than your standard fairing ( hence the screen)..




I hope this photo does this outfit the justice it deserved....

George's passenger was a young chap called Steve Parker who later that year went on to being awarded a Euro win at Donington after Darren and Sean Dixon and Derek Brindley and Nick Roche were excluded from the results after cutting corners in a rain drenched race. My self and Mr Apple failed yet again to qualify , so I was relagated to watching from the main grandstand...


Regards


Fritz,,,,,

Mike Cookson had one of his fairings so did Tony Baker thought they looked great

the man is still a genious i was at his house last friday dropping a barrel off an he showed me the bultaco 125 race bike he is making from scratch all i can say it was bloody awsome