Good Friday will indeed be a good Friday for the Duke family on the Isle of Man - the Geoff Duke family that is. For it is the day when one of the greatest riders ever to push off down the Glencrutchery Road passes not the 11th, nor the 32nd but the 90th milestone.
It will be a quiet family affair at a restaurant in Douglas but it will mark a momentous day - 90 years since Geoffrey Ernest Duke OBE was born in St Helens, Lancashire. And although the great man has experienced indifferent health of late he will enjoy the occasion with his son Peter and wife Daisy.
Geoff Duke became a national hero in the days after the second World War when Britain was recovering from six years of bloody conflict, food was still rationed, television didn't exist and wages were five quid a week(in old money). The Isle of Man TT was the greatest race in the world and as the fifties began it produced the sort of hero the nation was looking for. Young, good looking and, in those days of real austerity, fashionable!
Apart from an ability to ride quicker than anybody else, he was the first to wear black one-piece leathers - made to Geoff's design by his local tailor! Whether or not they increased his lap times, they certainly looked good.
As multi-TT replica winner and friend Bill Smith put it: "Never mind Barry Sheene, Geoff was the David Beckham of his day. Everybody, but everybody, had heard of him"
One of his great competitors at the TT was AJS works rider Bill Doran. His widow, Peggy, still alive, well and living in Shropshire recalled: "He was a charmer. I was engaged to Bill at the time and while the Norton and AJS teams didn't mix much Geoff was recognised as a great rider and an absolute star. He was also a nice man. I met him at a dinner ten years ago and afterwards he wrote to me saying how much he had enjoyed meeting again."
Bill Doran won two Grand Prix races in 1949 and 1951 and was second to Duke on the 350cc world championship in 1951. But his everlasting claim to fame resulted from a crash during TT practice in 1952. The guilty corner was thereafter known as Doran's Bend.
After a spell in the army at the end of the war, Geoff Duke successfully took up trials riding, competing with the likes of Hugh Viney but then had a crack at road racing and was an instant star winning the 1949 Senior Clubman's TT and the Senior Manx. He was signed up by Joe Craig, the Norton works team boss, finishing second in his first TT, the 1950 Junior, then breaking lap and race records to win the Senior.
In 1951 he was voted Sportsman of the Year, awarded the RAC Segrave Trophy and, two years later, awarded the Order of the British Empire. It was then he moved to Gilera and won three world 500cc championships on the trot. In 1955 he led a threatened riders strike at the Dutch TT and was banned for six months, scuppering his chances of a fourth world title in 1956 (won by John Surtees); and for a few minutes became the first rider to lap the TT circuit at over 100mph, only to be disappointed when the timekeepers adjusted their watches which gave a speed of 99.97mph. It as cracked two years later by Bob McIntye on a similar machine.
Geoff Duke retired from racing in 1959 but remained interested in racing and was involved in a Gilera comeback on 1963, under the banner Scuderia Duke, with John Hartle and Phil Read taking over from the injured Derek Minter, who crashed in TT practice. Hartle put up a creditable performance finishing second to Mike Hailwood(MV) in the Senior and a similar position to Jim Redman(Honda) in the Junior. He then concentrated on business on the Isle of Man, including owning an hotel, and helped his son Peter achieve great success with Duke Video, an entertainment publisher specialising in motorsport media.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Paul Butler, former Race Director of MotoGP, is someone who knows more about motorbike
racing than most having arrived on the scene as Dunlop competitions manager in the sixties. The premier class has received severe criticism of late, not least from Valentino Rossi who described it as "boring" and Carl Fogarty who intimated it was finished although using a slightly more extreme term also beginning with 'f', but Butler is optimistic and referred to the practice in F1 car racing of leasing engines.
"It's not new. There was a time, in the good old two-stroke days of the eighties, when Yamaha provided engines and Serge Rossi had Roc chassis and Harris also. They were competitive on lap times and quite similar to the Caterham's and Lotus' today in F1.
This is a model that Dorna are very well aware of. They realise the problems that motor cycle racing is facing. They want to encourage competitiveness. Now that they are responsible for both championships they will want to create a balance between the two. Right now the very small differences in technology can make a difference. If you listen to Valentino talking about acceleration, you realise the Honda gearbox is a very significant factor.
My personal view, and I think it has been the view of the teams from the beginning, is a constructors solution. if you go back to F1 in the eighties, that was the their model that Ecclestone had created and it was called, and still is, a constructors championship. The dream for Grand Prix motorcycles at the time was the same but it wasn't possible to achieve and since that time the manufacturers, as opposed to the constructors, have been supplying the meat of the field.
Is it possible that Yamaha and Honda could do what Renault and Cosworth do in F1, leasing engines to chassis manufacturers? Without a doubt, yes. We have got the model in Moto2 and Moto3 already. While Moto2 has one make of engine, it is relatively free as far as chassis design is concerned and quite a number of excellent designers have emerged. Moto2 was the first step, Moto3 the second and having multi-engine suppliers it is closer to what MotoGP might become.
Think about it.
YOU COULDN'T BELIEVE IT!
It is hard to say this, but a motor race somewhere in the Far East and attended, it seemed, by almost nobody, offered more excitement and controversy than anything we have seen in our sport for a long time.
Sunday's F1 race in Malaysia had wheel-to-wheel racing for the lead between two warring team-mates, apparently oblivious of team instructions, followed by a television confrontation and then a grovelling apology from the current world champion (nobody believed him!)
The controlling authorities were, no doubt, hating the melodrama being broadcast over the world but you can bet that ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone was loving it as audience numbers went through the roof.
From being one of the most boring spectacles on the planet, F1 has turned itself - by accident or design - into something interesting and, occasionally, exciting. It has that the spectacle is everything and technicalities which don't add to that, like traction control, should be discarded. Others which allow drivers to temporarily boost speed and therefore makes racing more competitive for lower teams have been introduced. It seemed like technical gobbledygook at the time but it appears to be working.
And then we have confrontations which are certainly not part of the plan but are allowed to be played out on front of the television cameras. This, no doubt, causes the blazer brigade to shudder but the executives at SKY would be dancing with delight. They're picking up the tab - and a pretty big one.
What have organisations like Dorna to learn? As Paul Butler points out elsewhere in this column, MotoGP has to revert to a constructors championship with competitive engines being available to be leased at a reasonable price. And as Carl Fogarty colourfully recalls in this weeks issue of BikeSport News he and his fiercest competitors actively disliked one another, to the point where he tried to run John Koscinski off the track!
Too much love is not always a good thing!
