The Restoration Game:

Bringing the Sheene Machines Back to Life

Fifty years after Barry Sheene made his Grand Prix debut, the bike he made it on has been fully restored to working order and now joins four others in Suzuki GB’s impressive Sheene collection. Now the men responsible for bringing these iconic machines back to life tell us how they did it.

Words: Stuart Barker 

Pictures: Suzuki GB

You’re looking at five of the most significant motorcycles from the late, great Barry Sheene’s career – and the ones he personally cherry-picked to take pride of place in his Australian home. They include the bike on which he made his Grand Prix debut in 1970, the bike he rode in his final season of GP racing in 1984, his two 500cc world championship-winning bikes, and a special big bore version of the RG500 that was built for the 1979 TransAtlantic Challenge series. Together, their estimated worth is around £2.5 million.

            The title-winning Suzuki XR14 RG500s from 1976 and 1977 were shipped to the UK from Sheene’s house in Australia and restored in 2016, while the 1979 Suzuki XR23A (a 652cc big bore RG500) and the1984 Harris-framed Suzuki XR45A were restored ahead of the 2019 Motorcycle Live! show in Birmingham then re-assembled in front of show-goers, and the 125cc Suzuki RT67 was completed and fired back into life in the spring of 2020.

            As far as restoration jobs go, getting your hands on some pukka Sheene machines is as good as it gets but just how easy is it to bring such pieces of racing history back to life? Martyn Ogborne, Sheene’s mechanic for seven years, and Tim Davies, who fronts Suzuki’s Vintage Parts Programme, explain some of the challenges they faced.

‘It all started in 2015 when we were talking to the Sheene family about what we could do to celebrate the 40^th anniversaries of Barry’s world titles in 2016 and 2017’ Davies says. ‘We initially brought his two championship-winning bikes over as part of a big display at Motorcycle Live! in Birmingham. Things just gathered momentum from there when Barry’s son Freddie mentioned the possibility of refurbishing those two bikes. I thought we would never be able to do that because it would be too expensive and we would never be able to get all the parts.

            ‘But I also knew that Steve Wheatman of Team Classic Suzuki and Nigel Everett of Racing Restorations Limited – both of whom we work with a lot – have a lot of spares for those bikes. So, we sent the bikes to Nigel so he could strip them down and see what actually needed doing. I was thinking it would cost about £50,000 to restore those two bikes and that was way beyond our budget. The crankcases on the ’76 bike were in a terrible state but Nigel and Martyn Ogborne knew people who could repair them and the bill was far less than I had anticipated so things started looking more promising and we decided to go ahead with the project.’

‘We did all the work at Nigel Everett’s place because he has a really authentic workshop’ says Martyn Ogborne. ‘When Suzuki GB took delivery of the title-winning XR14s they thought they could restore them in-house but they couldn’t because you need so much specialist equipment. Nigel has a lathe and an incher but, more than that, he has built up a lot of spares because he’s been doing restorations for a long time. For example, we’ve run out of head gaskets for those two bikes. People have tried to make them but always failed. So we semi-repaired them but they still leak a little bit of water – they’re supposed to be changed every 40km, not every forty years!’

Without Suzuki’s Vintage Parts Programme, Davies says these restorations would never have happened. ‘We wouldn’t have had the budget to do it as we weren’t advertising anything or pushing anything so we couldn’t have justified the cost’ he says. ‘But because the programme has been so successful, it has allowed us to do things like this. Restoring bikes as iconic as these is a great shop window for the Vintage Parts Programme and what it’s all about.’

 

The Bikes

1967 Suzuki RT67

This was the first bike Sheene ever raced in Grand Prix. He finished second to Angel Nieto on it in his debut Grand Prix at Monjuich Park in 1970. Barry also finished a close second to his great friend Nieto on this bike in the 1971 125cc world championship on this bike. Sheene bought the ex-factory RT67 in 1970 from Stuart Graham who had finished third in the 1967 world championships on it. The bike – which was also the one Sheene raced in his only TT in 1971 - was restored in the spring of 2020.

‘Initially Freddie didn’t want the RT67 to leave the house as it was Barry’s favourite and was the family’s prized possession’ Davies explains. ‘But he called several months later and said we could have it so that was the icing on the cake for me.’

Martyn Ogborne says the RT67 presented one of the biggest problems of all the restorations. ‘It has a ten-speed gearbox and uncaged needle rollers throughout, so you have to put them in with tweezers and if you drop one it goes in the engine. For that reason, Suzuki couldn’t repair those engines – if one of them seized they just left it and used another one. I realised that if we took the piston pin out the rollers from the small-end bearings would all drop down. So we stuffed the hole in the crankcase full of rags, pulled the piston out and, sure enough, about four needle rollers fell down. We were then stuck for about an hour wondering how we were going to line the piston up when we put it back in without more rollers falling out. I eventually decided to make a little aluminium plug slightly smaller than the piston pin so when we pushed the pin in it pushed the plug out without taking the rollers with it. And that’s how we did it. We had been told it wasn’t possible but we managed to do it. That was one of the trickiest parts of any of the restorations.’

 

1976 and 1977 Suzuki XR14s

These are the bikes that Sheene won his two 500cc world championships on. They were restored in 2016 and have since been ridden on parade laps by Freddie Sheene.

‘The 1976 bike was in the worst state’ Tim Davies says. ‘All the seals had gone and the original oil was still in there and I didn’t think Nigel and Martyn would ever get it running but they did. Out of those two bikes, the 1976 bike is the better one. It runs smoother and it sounds a lot more crisp and responsive when you rev it up.

            ‘Barry had left the bikes sitting in his house just as they were, although we do think he had the ’77 bike refurbished in the late 1990s. It still needed a lot of work but it wasn’t as bad as the ’76 bike.

            Ogborne and Everett would normally be tasked to restore a bike within two weeks but Ogborne says it always ends up taking longer. ‘There’s always complications. For example, the 1976 XR14 has a magnesium crankcase and when we pulled the engine apart I went “Oh my god.” I thought it was dead and would never run again because water had got in and there was a hole about an inch-square in the crankcase. When you take magnesium to be welded people usually say “Forget it” because when you weld magnesium you’re always so close to it catching fire and, if it does, you have to know how to put it out - water won’t put it out.           

            ‘But we took it to Exactweld and the guy there started tapping on the crankcase with a little hammer and by doing that he could tell where he could and couldn’t weld. That made the hole even bigger so I was starting to panic and I said “Is that weldable?” and he said “Yes, no problem.” To stop the crankcase twisting when they welded it, they machined up dummy crankshafts and bolted it all together and used special tools to hold everything in place. When you apply that much heat to magnesium it bends so that’s how they got round it. That was probably the worst problem we had. I was sure that they couldn’t build up magnesium like that because I knew it would twist the crank casings but the guys at Exactweld knew precisely what they were doing.

‘The frames were okay because they were steel. We had oil seals on their way out so we had to do those and the calipers were a mess too. But Suzuki directly copied Lockheed’s designs anyway, so we just used Lockheed ones.

We had the wheels x-rayed to check for cracks but the biggest thing was getting the original factory Michelin slick tyres off the 1976 and ’77 bikes. We contacted Michelin and they told us not to even use the bikes for demonstration laps on those tyres because they would be so damaged internally after forty-odd years. We were warned that they would either delaminate or fracture if we tried running the bikes on them.

            ‘But we couldn’t get the tyres off rims. The first one we tried, we thought we were going to break the rim. We let the air out but it didn’t help and then we tried using a press but it still wouldn’t come off and the wheel began to twist and we thought “Shit, something’s going to go wrong here.” We thought if we could warm them up to a good, high temperature they would become more supple. We were having a good summer at the time so Nigel put both front wheels in his greenhouse. We closed all the windows and over a period of about six hours, managed to heat them up to 75 degrees and then we finally got the tyres off.

            ‘Neither Michelin nor Dunlop make 18-inch racing tyres any more so we had to replace them with Avons. I remember we were so worried about breaking the rims because they were made by Campagnolo and they don’t make motorcycle rims any more. Once we had crack-tested them we just cleaned them all up. They didn’t need repainting – there’s a few scratches on them but we left those.’

1979 Suzuki XR23A

This is a big bore 652cc version of the Suzuki RG500 that Sheene used in the 1979 TransAtlantic Match Race series and in various British F1 races that same year. By boring it out, Suzuki was able to give Sheene a bike that felt very much like his 500cc GP machine but had the extra grunt to compete with 750cc four-stroke Superbikes. The bike was restored in time for the Motorcycle Live show in Birmingham in 2019 and re-assembled in front of show-goers.

‘The chassis didn’t handle the bigger engine well at all’ Martyn Ogborne says. ‘They only made these bikes for three years between 1977 and 1979 and there were no more spares for them so Barry ended up keeping the 1979 bike. After that, four-strokes took over. It was a very peculiar bike to ride as it suffered from understeer. It was fast though – it was so bloody fast. But that was the problem – they were so fast but they were under-braked and they under-steered because the engine was in the wrong place. They would wheelie all the time too because the swinging arm was too short. The trick – which Steve Parrish figured out at Cadwell Park – was to put a 13kg weight just under the headstock, above the radiator. So Barry put the same weight on his own bike and beat Steve in the race! The Japanese weren’t interested in testing it – when we complained about the handling they’d just say that it was built for us so it was our problem. That 652cc engine was built in Japan exclusively for Suzuki GB – nobody else.’

 

1984 Harris-framed Suzuki XR45A

This is the bike Sheene used to take his final Grand Prix podium at Kyalami in 1984. ‘It was originally designed by Suzuki for Randy Mamola to use in the 1983 500cc world championship’ Ogborne explains. ‘Following the announcement by Suzuki in September 1983 that they were withdrawing from all motorsport competition the bike was passed to Barry. In the winter of 1983 Barry, in conjunction with Harris Performance, replaced the aluminium chassis with a steel-tubed copy. The original XR45 engine Mamola had used had been equipped with electronic exhaust valves to vary the exhaust pipe header volume, but these had been removed at some time after October 1983. The restoration was quite straightforward to complete and although the water pump case and bottom hose cover were partially corroded, being magnesium this corrosion was nowhere near as bad as on the 1976 and 1977 XR14 world championship machines. With the bike being seven years younger, welding of the magnesium crankcases was not required.

            ‘The handlebars on this bike are like aeroplane wings! Barry had them set like that to help him steer the bike because he had all the metalwork in his legs after his big Silverstone crash in 1982 so he couldn’t press down on the footpegs to help him turn. He used to double-up the seat padding too because he couldn’t bend his legs so well and that gave more space between the seat and the footpegs. Barry had his footpegs set 20mm lower than Randy Mamola. We dropped them as low as we could while still allowing for ground clearance.’

The bike was restored in time for the Motorcycle Live! show in Birmingham in 2019 and re-assembled in front of show-goers.

What are they Worth?

‘The 1976 XR14 is worth between £750,000 and £1 million and the ’77 bike is also worth upwards of £750,000’ Ogborne says. ‘But if you got two collectors bidding they could easily sell for much more than that, The XR23A didn’t win anything significant and was only made for Suzuki GB so I’d say it’s worth about £150,000, tops. I don’t know what the RT67 would fetch. It is rare but it never won a world title so maybe £100,000 to £150,000. The 1984 XR45A would be worth a similar amount.’

See the Sheene Machines Yourself

Because the COVID-19 pandemic saw the cancellation of so many live events in 2020, the Sheene machines will stay on in the UK for at least another year to allow fans the chance to see them. ‘They’ll be staying with Suzuki GB on long-term loan for the foreseeable future’ Davies says. ‘The RT67 was due to go back but because most of our events were cancelled in 2020 Freddie Sheene has allowed us to keep it a while longer. We hope to take the bikes to the Barry Sheene Festival at Scarborough in 2021 and have them ridden by Barry’s friends and racing rivals like Steve Parrish and Mick Grant as well as Freddie Sheene himself. I would also love to take the bikes to our Suzuki Live track day event. It never ceases to amaze me just how much attention Barry’s bikes get at any show and now that they’re all fully restored and running, it makes them even more special.’