Both sports had their origins in the early years of the last century when motor cycles were raced on the pony trotting tracks of America, Australia and some European countries. Dirt track racing as it was known gradually evolved into speedway, but some of those early pioneers of track racing preferred to race on grass and 'down under' in Australia the magnificent one mile track at the Newcastle Show Ground was a popular venue for grass racing way back in 1917.
In Great Britain at that time the whole emphasis in motor cycle sport was on speed. Roads were closed and races held, but speed hill climbs dreThe history of Grasstrack racing is mixed with the story of speedway. w the biggest crowds. Who could not be thrilled by the sight of a machine hurtling up a steep loose surfaced climb with the courageous rider only rarely in complete control of his mount.
The machines of the day were certainly fast but they handled badly, and possessed inefficient brakes. The events lacked even the most elementary safety precautions and crowd control was non existent. Inevitably there were accidents involving competitors and spectators, and after a succession of unfortunate incidents the controlling body of the sport, the ACU, acted in 1925 and placed a complete ban on all such events.
To the sporting motor cyclist this action was disastrous, but such was the determination to race that if the public roads were no longer available then why not take to the fields ? Twenty thousand people at an agricultural show in Cambridge had watched motorcycles racing on a grass circuit in 1923, but it was not until 1927 that the organised sport of grass track racing really came into being. It was not easy to obtain permission to race on privately owned fields, but in that year the Whitgift Club received consent to use a former golf course near Croydon.
A one mile circuit was laid out on the side of a steep hill, and a huge crowd turned up to see the racing. They showed scant regard for their own personal safety and frequently crossed the track to secure another vantage point while racing was in progress. Fortunately there were no accidents and the day was pronounced a great success by both competitors and Spectators.
A few weeks later another event was staged at Hurst Park in Surrey. Racing took place on a 400 metre track in the paddock, more usually the scene of sedate parades by race horses! This time the crowd was kept well away from the actual course, but all could see that here was a new exciting sport.
It was not long before the sport spread to other parts of the country, but there was little uniformity among the circuits with tracks ranging in length from 400 metres to nearly 2000 metres. Many followed the example of the Croydon track and included steep climbs and descents more akin to today's motocross courses.
In February 1928, a historic meeting was held at Belle Vue Manchester where racing continued into the evening and acetylene flares were used to illuminate the circuit. Certainly this was the first ever floodlit grass track event.
With more than one hundred motor cycle factories in Britain alone, it was no surprise that spectators were bewildered by the variety of makes racing that day. Douglas, Rudge, Levis, Harley-Davidson, Royal Enfield, AJS, Ariel, Norton and Scott were just a few of the names contained in the programme.
Machines were ridden to the circuit, stripped of all unnecessary equipment, raced, and then ridden home again! There was frantic work in the paddock before racing started as ingenious and often crude devices were fitted to the tyres to combat skidding. Rope, chains, or leather straps wound round the tyre, were commonly used, while some competitors used bolts fixed through the tyre itself.
Speedway had arrived in Britain in 1928 and grew rapidly in popularity but grass track continued to flourish with no shortage of clubs willing to organise events to provide a day's racing for their members and thrills aplenty for the many thousands who went along to watch.
By 1931 there were so many events that the ACU considered the moment had arrived to introduce rules for the sport. A comprehensive set of regulations was produced which for the first time established separate capacity classes to ensure close racing. Another rule banned all forms of anti-skid devices.
Grass track racing was then, and remains, a relatively cheap form of motor cycle racing and there were many stars of speedway, scrambles, and road racing who either started their careers racing on grass or continued to combine their love of grass track with other forms of motor cycle sport.
Before World War II interrupted the sport such famous names from the past as Jock West, Harold Daniell, Eric Oliver, Les Graham and Stanley Woods all starred on grass. Eric Oliver, for example, was as brilliant with a Norton powered sidecar as he was with his JAP engined solos, and scored many victories in both classes. He was a Brands Hatch record holder before World War II and when hostilities ceased he carried on his winning ways at the famous track before devoting all his efforts to road racing where he ultimately won the World Sidecar Championship.
The names of John Surtees and Mike Hailwood feature in motor cycling's hall of fame, but their fathers, Jack Surtees and Stan Hailwood, were at one time top grass track sidecar drivers. Jack won many races with his Norton outfit and young John was occasionally called on to act as passenger. Stan Hailwood's successes were scored with a Cotton outfit, and he was a trend setter in the thirties for the colourful riding gear familiar today. He and his passenger invariably wore immaculate white overalls!
Sidecars had always been a great attraction from the earliest days, the intrepid acrobatic passengers thrilling crowds with their contortions aimed at keeping the sidecar wheel in contact with the ground. Technical ingenuity and innovation has always been a highlight of the sidecar fraternity, and included in that 1928 Belle Vue meeting was an outfit with a banked sidecar and sidecar wheel drive!
Thirty six years later former solo star Arne Hendricksen fuelled the flames of controversy when he appeared with a Hagon solo machine to which he had attached a sidecar by means of horizontal hinges. Driver and passenger rode astride the bike and controlled the angle of lean by means of their left legs which rested on the rudimentary sidecar platform. Despite having a power unit of only 500cc, half the size of many of their opponent's engines, the JAP outfit was an immediate winner. Hendricksen hoped that his example would be followed by others and lead to the establishment of a special class for these machines. His rivals were vociferous in their objections claiming that the outfit was a freak, and that its unusual racing line through corners presented a safety hazard. The ACU Grass Track Committee took heed of the protests and Hendricksen's winning ways ended after just a few weeks when it was ruled that the sidecar should be rigidly attached to the machine.
Banking sidecars had long provided spectacular racing on the continent where the passenger sat in the sidecar and controlled the angle of the sidecar by means of a wheel. This demanded total co-ordination between driver and passenger, but with the pair working in unison extremely high cornering speeds could be maintained. A number of serious accidents resulted in the outfits being banned from international competition in 1974.
In Britain, where the sidecar capacity limit for many years was 1300cc, competitors resorted to many different types of engine unit in the elusive search for more speed. Volkswagen, Ford and Hillman car engines were all tried in outfits with varying degrees of success, while Bruce Ford-Dunn persevered for several seasons with a two-stroke unit which had first seen service in a Saab car. The use of these big engines resulted in heavy outfits and the normal safety ropes at the trackside were not always capable of stopping the monsters when they went out of control.
Once again the ACU stepped in and down went the capacity limit for unsupercharged outfits to l000cc. The variety of engines in use remained as great as ever, although Triumph, once the most popular power unit, is now in danger of being supplanted by Weslake, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Laverda and Honda engines. At one time the mighty Vincent twins, and even Ariel square fours, were to be seen powering outfits in sensational style!
For sidecar racers the paramount problem had always been the direction of racing! On the continent the sidecar was on the right of the machine and racing was in an anti-clockwise direction while in Britain, where sidecars were mounted on the left side, the major championship was contested in a clockwise direction. There remained, however, in the South Eastern and South Western parts of the country, deep rooted support for racing in an anti-clockwise direction, Protagonists of lefthanded racing claimed that their direction was more interesting for spectators who preferred to watch the man in the sidecar working hard in the corners. They maintained that the passenger on an outfit in righthand racing spent most of his time riding pillion behind the driver! The clockwise drivers contended that their direction of racing was faster and that nothing could match the sight of a closely packed bunch of outfits power sliding through bends! The arguments continued, and so did the racing.
The pre-war boom in speedway lured many top grass track riders away to a lucrative career on the shale, but many returned to their first love each weekend using their speedway machines. These stars certainly attracted the crowds but their rivals did not always welcome the presence of the much lighter and usually faster track bikes. These machines threatened to dominate the awards lists but the introduction of chicanes incorporating a right hand bend was considered to be a simple method of handicapping the bikes designed exclusively for anti-clockwise racing! The star riders retaliated by raising the right side footrest and they were immediately able to tackle these 'strange' bends with ease!
When the sport resumed in 1946 it was obvious that the speedway type bike was going to stay and very soon paddocks were full of specials built on the lines of track machines. It is ironic to record that some fifteen years later, motocross aces Don and Derek Rickman found themselves unpopular in some quarters when they rode their famous Metisse scramblers to victory in a number of grass track events. Their opponents claimed that the machines were a hazard to the broadsiding tactics used by the riders of speedway bikes!
The advent of speedway style machines, more at home on a flat oval track than a grassy hillside, did much to hasten the demise of 'mountain' circuits such as Brands Hatch which was surfaced for road racing in 1949. Effective rear suspension was considered essential in order to cope with bumpy fields and the successful conversion of an Excelsior speedway bike by the Gould brothers, George and John, inspired others, and was noticed by a young rising star of the grass track scene, Alf Hagon.
Hagon had started racing in 1947 at the age of fifteen with a New Imperial. Rudge and Matchless machines followed before he switched to BSA specials fitted with JAP 350cc and 500cc engines. Hagon, a talented engineer, was convinced that his BSA machines were too heavy and supported by a Hornchurch dealer, Tom Kirby, who later became famous as a road racing sponsor, he developed a fully sprung but lightweight machine to house his JAP engines. Called Kirby Specials, Hagon's machines recorded a staggering list of victories, including no fewer than eleven National titles. The 350cc class title was retained by Alf for six successive years, and it was no surprise that Hagon insisted on retaining the riding number 350 wherever he raced. In addition 'to these National titles Alf dominated Centre Championship battles for many years in the Eastern, South Midland, and South Eastern Centres.
Hagon's vanquished rivals clamoured for replicas of his winning machines and in 1960 he established his own engineering works in Leyton to produce grass track bikes, and racing components. His products have been exported to more than twenty nations, and German ace Egon Muller held the 1000 metre sand track speed record at one time, established on a Hagon machine.
Just as Alf Hagon ruled supreme in the home counties, so Lew Coffin was 'King' of the West Country. Coffin, from Sherborne in Dorset, started racing in 1945 and thirty two years later at the veteran age of fifty five he was still hard to beat! He won the South Western Centre Championship for the eighth time at the tender age of fifty four. His unique ability to shrug off the effects of advancing years had been the despair of many young riders. Thirty years before he was riding against, and beating, their fathers! Surprisingly in such a long and illustrious career Coffin had never won a National Championship but on the continent he had earned an enviable reputation on 1000 metre tracks. He made a sensational international debut in 1958 when he defeated the reigning German Champion, Josef Hofimeister. Since then he had crossed the channel many times and often returned with the victors laurels.
Lew Coffin was often watched by a young lad who was too young then to ride a motor cycle. He pedalled around Kent to watch the grasstrack stars and as soon as he was old enough to obtain a licence a BSA Bantam was acquired and he joined them on the track. His name was Don Godden. He quickly showed his potential and the uncompetitive Bantam was soon replaced by JAP power. Like Hagon, Godden won many National and Centre championships and also took the continent by storm when he won the European 1000 metre title in 1969. He too, produced his own frames and soon found a ready international market for his race winning products. His immaculate DGS (Don Godden Special) machines were designed for JAP engines, but in the autumn of 1975 at the Lydden circuit Godden revealed for the first time the Weslake engine housed in his DGS.
It was an impressive baptism for the new engine which had been completed only hours before the event. Until sidelined by battery failure the Weslake had shown tremendous potential. Since that October day intensive development took the engine to the point where it later rivalled the magnificent Czechoslovak Jawa, and was a worthy replacement for the JAP motor which, for more than forty years, was the first choice for most grass track and speedway riders.
The close links between speedway and grass track have always remained, but crowded international fixture lists later made it difficult to star in both sports. In addition there was the added attraction of continental racing. Bahnsport, racing on 1000 metre sand or dirt tracks drew vast crowds and offered considerable financial rewards the top grass and speedway riders.
World Speedway champion Ivan Mauger took the world 1000 metre sand track title three times, and was equally successful on the British equivalents of these long tracks.
The gradual spread of towns and cities presents organisers with increasing problems in the quest to find suitable fields, and to retain existing circuits. The future trend may be towards permanent circuits, and already events have been held on the former trotting tracks at Hereford and Chasewater, but then the sport started on trotting tracks more than sixty years ago!