the fink
In lieu of…
Bikers Corner
’n Boer Maak ’n Plan
by Gavin Foster
In the days before motorcycles became expensive digitally-coded
appliances and a Right to Repair Campaign became necessary, you
could give a South African – or ex-Rhodesian – anything broken and
he’d fix and probably improve it using some bloudraad, a bit of duct
tape and a pair of pliers. In the high-tech world of motorcycle racing
Back in the ‘50s Jannie Stander
converted a very ordinary overheadvalve 350cc Velocette road bike into
a fire-breathing double-overheadcamshaft monster called “Boksnot” that
brought him multiple SA championships
before he took it overseas to beat some
of the best riders in the world. Ten years
later Rhodesian Geoff Lacey kept the
tradition alive when he breathed upon
another old Velo for his countryman,
Alan Harris, who subsequently outpaced
the factory Velocette racers in the UK by
a wide margin.
As technology advanced, so did the
technical boffins. In 1969 a very talented
man called Charlie Harris of East London
melded two Yamaha 250cc two-stroke
twins together to provide an extremely
rapid four-cylinder 500cc racebike for Ian
Scheckter – later of Formula One fame while in 1979 Pinetown’s Tommy Johns
and Ophie Howard built Mike Crawford
a livelier chain-drive version of Yamaha’s
behemoth shaft-driven XS1100 tourer,
that won every F1 motorcycle race it
entered.
On the international stage four-times
world champion Kork Ballington owed
much of his success to his brother, Dozy,
an NCR adding-machine technician
who just happened to be a genius at
getting motorcycles to go faster than
the factory ever could, reliably. Other
Rhodies and South Africans who
made their indelible marks as Grand
Prix engineers were Nobby Clark, who
prepared factory racebikes for Hailwood,
Roberts, Agostini, Sheene and a
host of other world champions, and
ace Yamaha race mechanic Trevor
Tilbury, who played a major role in
hand-build