Just An Old Green Book
Just an old green book
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
SOME OF MY FRIENDS SEEMED WORRIED lately that I'd grown increasingly morose over the lack of riding during this long, dark winter, and maybe even suicidal. But the fact is I wasn’t really planning to drink that gallon of acrylic enamel reducer—I was just reading the contents on the can.
Still, it lifted my spirits considerably when the mail arrived the other day.
With snowflakes falling out of the leaden sky in desultory fashion, I slid down our icy driveway on the edges of my boots and arrested my descent at the mailbox with a classic stem turn right out of the Hans Tanner Ski Manual.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a package from someone named Mr. Patrick Haley of LaCrosse, Wisconsin. I did a standard herringbone climb back up to the house and opened the padded envelope.
Inside was a green, 127-page volume titled, John Surtees ’Motor-Cycling Book, published in 1961. Inside was a nice note from Mr. Haley saying I might like to add this book to my collection, if I didn’t already have it.
Well, I didn’t.
But if I'd seen this book in 1961 (when I was 13 years old), you can bet that several dollars of my lawn-mowing money would have gone to its purchase. The year of this book’s publication coincided perfectly with my own TNT-like explosion of interest in bikes-followed soon by my first copies of Cycle World bought from the drug store in Elroy, Wisconsin.
Which is another way of saying that John Surtees is one of my original motorcycle heroes. When I discovered the sport, he was already the world’s most famous motorcycle roadracer, just recently retired, making room for a rising young star named Mike Hailwood.
Yes, while I’d been busy mounting playing cards in the spokes of my bicycle, Surtees had been out there running factory Manx Nortons at the Isle of Man and winning world championships with the fabulous MVs. He won his first 500cc GP title for MV in 1956 and then won every 350 and 500 championship from 1958 through 1960. Seven world GP titles.
I don’t know about you, but I haven't won seven of anything in my whole lifeincluding chances to sign up for a free aluminum-siding estimate-let alone world GP titles. When I hit this sport, John Surtees was The Man.
And later, when he switched to F-1 cars
and won a world championship for Ferrari in 1964, he became the only man ever to win GP titles on two and four wheels.
All this was a long way from Elroy, Wisconsin, of course, so I didn’t actually see Surtees in person until 1971, when his twin racing careers were over and he was campaigning F-l cars as director of Team Surtees.
I'd just gotten home from Vietnam the previous autumn and was too restless to go right back to college, so I flew to Europe and bummed around Paris for most of the winter. In the spring, I took a 1000-mile bicycle trip from Paris to Barcelona with my buddy Bill Steckel so we could attend the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuich.
When we arrived at the circuit to watch practice and qualifying, we were amazed to find almost no security around the track. The Spaniards, apparently, were all off at a bullfight. Bill and I were free to wander around the paddock unchallenged.
And one of the places we wandered to was the Team Surtees pits, where a whitehaired John Surtees was directing things.
I stood right next to the man (like Woody Allen's Zelig, inserted anomalously into a historic tableau) while he talked to his mechanics. I was too shy to say anything-or maybe afraid of drawing attention to myself and being thrown out of the pits-so I just watched and listened.
I might also have been afraid to talk to Surtees because I'd recently read a book
by Robert Daley called The Cruel Sport in which he portrayed Surtees as a cold silent man who could harbor a deadly grudge against another driver. What if I said hello and he had me arrested for insolence?
Years later, I worked at Road & Track with Phil Hill, who drove for the Ferrari team and became America’s first F-l champion in 1961. Phil, who is a shrewd judge of character, not given to false praise, told me Daley got it completely wrong. “Surtees is a wonderful guy,” Phil said, “and a great gentleman.”
And so it turned out.
A couple of years ago, I was invited to a dinner at Road America, where Surtees was guest of honor at the Brian Redman International Challenge vintage-car races. I maneuvered things so Barb and I got to sit at the same table with Surtees (only a few people were injured in this scuffle), along with his children and charming wife Jane. And the John Surtees I met was the one Phil described. A true gentleman, lively, articulate, good-humored and still infatuated-after all these years-with motorcycles. He restores and works on bikes as a hobby, including his own original racebike, a 500cc Vincent Gray Flash.
You don't talk to Surtees long before you realize you’re dealing with a racer who has the soul of a mechanic and craftsman, with a deep, abiding love for machinery and its place in history. He’s one of us.
Or, with luck, we are one of him, inasmuch as we are able.
And this past cold winter weekend, I sat down and read John Surtees ’ MotorCycling Book cover to cover. A well-written, fascinating look at riding and racing in the late Fifties.
When I finished the book, I set it down and went out to the workshop, turned up the heat and spent some time dusting off my three hibernating bikes. Suddenly, all my riding synapses were firing again and spring didn't seem so far away.
Funny how energy and enthusiasm can travel across decades, like an echo whose resonance doesn’t diminish with distance or time.
This old green book was like something I'd been waiting for without knowing, and it provided that rarest of all things, a good day in winter, when the driveway is frozen and snowflakes fall silently out of a dark sky. □
