CIRCUS LIFE -Australian Motorcycle Racers In Europe In The 1950s.

Description

CIRCUS LIFE – Australian Motorcycle Racers In Europe In The 1950s.
By Don Cox.

Welcome to the gypsy world of the Continental Circus private entrants in the 1950s, racing for a living – some on the road with their mates, others with their new brides. Drift a Manx Norton flat out with Bob Brown at Spa-Francorchamps. Learn the Isle of Man Mountain section with Maurie Quincey. Race against the works BMW sidecars at the Nürburgring with Bob Mitchell. Take on race organisers over starting money with Jack Ahearn and Keith Campbell. Cure an electrical problem with your teeth, as Eric Hinton did, or mend a broken gear linkage with fencing wire. Cross the mine fields into East Germany, where one wrong move could put you in a gulag. Experience the highs, lows and scary hospitals – stories even the men who lived them reckon people would not believe.

Don Cox had his first taste of motorcycling in the 1950s as pillion on the family’s sole motorised transport, his father’s Velocette. In his early teens, Don read everything he could find on bike racing in the local library, and has been an avid researcher ever since. Inspired as a spectator at the 1976 Australian TT at Laverton and the Australian GP at Bathurst, he wrote his first motorcycle-racing story for his university newspaper. He began writing for specialist motorcycle publications the following year, predominately REVS Motorcycle News, and Two Wheels, to which he still contributes. Circus Life is his third book and first self-published work, having co-authored Australian Motorcycle Heroes 1949-89 with Will Hagon and written The Aussies And 2NZ Blokes in 1997. A fourth book is already in the pipeline.