Racers
remember...
Randy Mamola
I signed with Heron Suzuki for 1980 and the first race I did was the
Transatlantic Match Races, where you used the biggest bike in the
garage, which in our case was the RG700. Well, I’m a 20-year-old
kid, I’ve just signed my first factory contract, here’s this bike with
that big seat and the huge exhausts on it, and I’m thinking, wow,
man, this thing is bitchin’ – and it was! It took me to another level of
racing, but the first Match Races round was at Brands Hatch where you’re going to
lift the front wheel everywhere, and the RG700 really liked to do that a LOT! After
just one race I could see this was going to end badly so I parked it and switched to
the 500, which was already fast enough, and handled properly as well. I never rode
the RG700 again – once was enough!
Steve Parrish
A better name for it would have been the ‘collarbone cruncher’
because it did a good job of trying to finish off my career, as well as
lots of other people’s. I hated the thing!
For some reason Suzuki had decided to make it two inches
shorter than the RG500 –maybe they ran short of material for the
packing cases – and then in ’78 they stuck those ridiculous exhaust
pipes on it. I’ve still got a pair of Gaerne boots at home with the heels
chamfered off which I had to wear to ride the awful thing. You’d smell burning
rubber, but it was your boots that were on fire, wedged up against the exhausts.
It had loads too much horsepower for the tyres, and really the only reason they
made it was because Barry said he wanted more horsepower to compete with
the TZ750 Yamahas, so they gave him this monstrosity. First time I rode it was
at Snetterton one cold, dank March morning, and I distinctly remember hooking
fourth gear just past the finish line, and the front wheel came up in the air big
time, and from that day on I guess I was just a coward with it. My mechanic Martin
Brookman and I devised a way of countering this by hanging a great big piece of
cast iron tubing over the front exhausts, under the radiator. That was much to the
disgust of all the Japanese mechanics, but in fact Barry used to borrow mine to
hang on his own bike when I wasn’t riding, and in the end we made him his own to
stop him pinching ours!
It was a complete triumph of power over handling, and I’m very glad to have
survived it more or less in one piece. At Brands in the Powerbike meeting one year,
I came out of Clearways and highsided it into the barriers, and had barely got up
when Tom Herron landed right beside me having done exactly the same thing on
his RG700. We both broke our collarbones within 10 seconds of each other, at the
same turn on the same bike for the same reason – too much power, too suddenly,
on a nasty old contraption that hadn’t been properly thought out, and was no fun
to ride, irrespective of what Barry thought.Barry Sheene
No question, this was definitely my
favourite bike out of all the ones I raced
back then. It had loads of power and it
was good fun to ride, especially at a big
track like Ricard where you could really
open it out. To be honest, it didn’t accelerate
a lot better than the Yamaha, just the power came in
with such a rush you certainly thought it did! What
was all wrong was the weight distribution – Suzuki
hadn’t worked out that you needed more weight on
the front wheel to stop it pulling wheelies all the time,
so we did it for them. I had a ten-pound cast iron bar
that I got from Steve Parrish, which we used to bolt to
the front engine mounts, and that helped a lot, even if
the Japanese went bloody bananas when they saw it.
They’d been spending millions of yen and hundreds
of man hours whittling away grams of weight with
magnesium this and titanium that, and here we were
stuffing kilos of lead back on to the thing to make it
handle properly.Above Wil Hartog on the XR23B at
Sandown in the 1979 Swann Series
Right Hennen leads Barry Sheene at
Brands Hatch 1977 on Suzuki XR23s