In the course of his career Barry won considerable silverware, garlands and accolades. The 1976 500cc Austrian Grand Prix was no exception: the talented Suzuki rider romped to victory.
In the course of his career Barry won considerable silverware, garlands and accolades. The 1976 500cc Austrian Grand Prix was no exception: the talented Suzuki rider romped to victory.
BARRY
It would be underselling Barry Sheene’s appeal to hail him as a household name. He was also a sporting icon from palace to pub, a lovable rogue who mixed hair, flair and devil-may-care brilliance. In the 1970s he was as much a part of Britain as glam rock and the three-day week, and when Barry famously flicked a playful V-sign to Kenny Roberts during an epic 1979 Grand Prix at Silverstone it showed how this natural entertainer scarcely needed to lift a finger to forge his way into the public’s hearts.
To be a truly household name you need to live beyond the narrow confines of your sport. So as well as the two 500cc world titles, Barry was the maverick who drilled a hole in his helmet so he could sneak a pre-race smoke; the ‘bionic man’ who came back from two mindboggling, and body-shaking, crashes; the Brut-splashing Jack the Lad who plundered life.
As time went on people likened him to George Best, sometimes dubbed the fifth Beatle and a star who mixed sport with women and drink and designer clothes. The comparison worked in terms of their shared appeal, both to legions of women and marketing men, but where there was a whiff of tragedy about Best, Barry refused to let anything beat him.
The miracle of his consummate 1976 500cc world title was that it came a year after he emerged from the mangled wreckage of his 175mph crash at Daytona, where he broke his leg, six ribs, his back, a wrist and his collarbone. When he came to in hospital the first thing he did was ask the nurse for ‘a fag’.
As he fought back from his second news-making crash in 1982, he put a teaspoon up his rear to help his damaged bowel and proposed to Stephanie in a hospital toilet. It summed up the resilience and earthy romance of a man who had certainly never had a silver spoon in his mouth.
Barry was no saint and for every achievement like his 137mph record lap at the treacherous old Spa-Francorchamps circuit there was a TV thrown from a hotel window. He was the almost-cockney rebel who drove a Rolls Royce but remained a blue-collar hero.
Yet he was the purest of competitors. Freddie Spencer, twice a 500cc world champion himself, still remembers fondly that it was Barry who hugged him after his first GP win. Kenny Roberts once told me: ‘I could not have had a greater rival when we went to battle.’
The TV adverts and hospital dinners sometimes masked the breadth of a rare talent. Barry had substance as well as style and knew how to develop a bike after years spent taking them apart with his father. He was a hands-on, oily-fingered star who excelled in the wet and was jaw-droppingly brave.
Barry believed in living life to the full, whether this was pulling wheelies on his pit bike in the paddock or playing pranks on his rivals or meeting organisers. One of his mischievous tricks was to make out that something was wrong with a rival’s bike moments before the start of a race to try and steal a psychological edge.
He died too young, but lived at least two lives and his legacy endures. ‘I loved Barry,’ said Valentino Rossi, his natural successor as a champion showman. They had become good friends and Rossi met with Barry two months before he passed away. Rossi recalled, ‘I think maybe he knew he was close to the end, but he said, “Come and have some fun.”’ And this wonderful private gallery of photographs shows Barry certainly had fun.