Frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything less appropriate for a nadgery hillclimb course than a 9000rpm redline. I was never going to be in contention for wins, but I always wanted to beat a pair of Morini V-twins that used to appear in the 350cc class. It’s best to have a target if you’re going racing. The Velo had been set up for sliding around the left-hand corners of grass tracks, but it also worked perfectly well on the lefts and rights of a surfaced hill. “Why don’t you have a go? Adrian Kessell is selling one of his grasstrack bikes – perfect for the hills.”Īdrian Kessell was a top name in Cornish grasstracking, and had been running the MAC on methanol, a fuel that gives a really fat midrange punch. I’d been hanging around the west country hillclimb scene for a while in the mid-’70s when Peter Isaac (who was, and still is, secretary of the hillclimb club, .uk) said: I’d bought the MAC – a pushrod twovalve single based on Velocette’s post-war road bike – for £250. The marshals had to clean the cow pats off the road before the bikes could start running. I forget its name, but it was probably a typical 1000-yarder, and part of it ran between farm buildings. We would get a couple of practice runs and two or three competition dashes up the hill. ![]() ![]() “This is the hill.” In the paddock we unloaded the bikes from the van – Patrick’s 750cc Norton Commando, my 350cc Velocette MAC – and prepared for the day’s action. “Is this the approach road to the hill?” I said. Somewhere in the middle of gnarly Somerset, Patrick turned the Transit van off a B-road and squeezed it between the hedges of a narrow lane. Mike describes was the mind-expanding experience of racing the hills on a 350 Velocette on dope
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