Barry Sheene

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Barry Sheene

Barry Sheene.
Motorcycle Grand Prix Career
Nationality	British
Active years	1970 - 1984
Team(s)	Suzuki, Yamaha
Grands Prix	102
Championships	500cc - 1976, 1977
Wins	23
Podium finishes	52
Pole positions	19
Fastest laps	18
First Grand Prix	1970 125cc Spanish Grand Prix
First win	1971 125cc Belgian Grand Prix
Last win	1981 500cc Swedish Grand Prix
Last Grand Prix	1984 500cc San Marino Grand Prix

Barry Sheene MBE (September 11, 1950 – March 10, 2003) was a British former World Champion Grand Prix motorcycle road racer.

[edit] Biography

Sheene was born in London, England the second child of parents Frank (resident engineer at the Royal College of Surgeons) and Iris. His early years were spent in Queens Square, Holborn.

He became the British 125cc champion aged just 20, and finished second in the World Championships for that class a year later. A spectacular crash at the Daytona 200 in 1975 threatened to end his career, breaking his left thigh, right arm, collarbone and two ribs, yet he recovered and was racing again seven weeks afterwards.

In 1976 he won five 500cc Grands Prix, bringing him the World Championship, a feat he repeated the following year with six wins.

After the 1979 season, he left the Suzuki works team, believing that he was receiving inferior equipment to his team-mates. He shifted to a privateer Yamaha machine, but soon started receiving works equipment. A 1982 crash largely ended Sheene as a title threat, and he retired in 1984.

Sheene was a colourful, exuberant character who used his good looks, grin, and Cockney accent to good effect in self-promotion, and combined with an interest in business was one of the first riders to make large amounts of money from endorsements. He is credited with boosting the appeal of motorcycle racing into the realm of the mass marketing media. He also tried his hand as a TV show host and starred in the low-budget film Space Riders.

He moved to Australia in the late 1980s in the hope of relieving some of the pain of injury-induced arthritis, moving to a property near the Gold Coast. He combined a property development business with a role as a commentator on motor sport, first at the Nine Network with the famously loud Darrell Eastlake, then moving with the TV coverage of the motorcycle Grand Prix series to Network Ten. Sheene's commentary style was idiosyncratic, to say the least. Never letting the audience wonder for a minute exactly what he thought of a rider, bike, or team, his biases were completely transparent. He combined insight into the skills of riding, and the vagaries of the professional circuit, with a penchant for the occasional double entendre delivered with a trademark grin.

In later years, Sheene became involved in historic motorcycle racing, usually thrashing the awed amateurs behind him. A little-known piece of trivia is that Sheene invented the motorcycle back protector, with a prototype model he made himself out of old helmet visors, arranged so they could curve in one direction, but not the other. Sheene gave the prototype along with all rights to the Italian company Dainese - they and other companies have manufactured back protectors since then.

He died of cancer, survived by his wife Stephanie and two children.

Following reconstruction of the Brands Hatch Circuit in England for safety concerns after requests by the FIM, the Dingle Dell section was changed for safety, and shortly after Sheene's death the new section was renamed Sheene's Corner in his honour. The FIM named him a Grand Prix "Legend" in 2001. At the 2004 season, V8 Supercars Australia made a memorial medal calling it the Barry Sheene Medal

[edit] Motorcycle Grand Prix results

Year	Class	Classification	Machine	Victories
1971	50 cc	7th	Kreidler	1
1971	125cc	2nd	Suzuki	3
1974	500cc	6th	Suzuki	0
1975	500cc	6th	Suzuki	2
1976	500cc	1st	Suzuki	5
1977	500cc	1st	Suzuki	6
1978	500cc	2nd	Suzuki	2
1979	500cc	3rd	Suzuki	3
1981	500cc	4th	Yamaha	1
1982	500cc	5th	Yamaha	0
1984	500cc	6th	Suzuki	0

Preceded by Giacomo Agostini

500cc Motorcycle World Champion 1976-1977

Succeeded by Kenny Roberts

[edit] External links

• Barry Sheene at the Internet Movie Database
• Stephanie McLean on her husband, Barry Sheene