Receiving unsolicited emails and images through the office in-box has proven one of the most satisfying parts of running a motorcycle magazine. over the past decade and a half, we’ve opened messages containing some truly odd requests (including one from a reader who sincerely wished to see our female contributor’s mud-wrestle each other!0 to some genuinely useful, eye-opening information.
The images here represent the latter, as we had little idea where the motivation for motorcycle track days came from. Thanks to veteran Ton-Up Boy Mike Cook, we learned that the first time professional racing circuits opened their doors to ordinary street riders came in 1965 in Jolly Old England. Cook wrote us a few years back to explain that so many of his generation of fast street riders were getting hurt, fined or killed in roadway accidents, that a group of rockers approached the management at the Silverstone Racing Circuit about having a go. In an age when people who rode motorbikes and dressed in black leather were portrayed in the British (and US) press as anti-social hooligans, it must have been a tough sell to say the least. Still, the youthful riders pressed on and spoon, tracks from Brands Hatch to Silverstone were throwing open their doors to groups of cafe racers eager to ride in an environment where gravel, cops and inattentive car drivers couldn’t ruin the show.
As you can see from Cook’s incredible images, the first forays onto a closed circuit proved incredibly exhilarating and, at times, full of tough lessons. “There were some of the fastest blokes from the cafes having a tough time keeping their wheels on track, and some unexpected results from ordinary blokes you’d never suspect of being genuinely quick ’round a circuit,” he told us. It’s interesting to see how many of these early track day riders were dressed in jeans and ordinary street riding gear as leather racing suits were prohibitively expensive for working-class rockers in the 1960s. Still, some of Cook’s crowd stuck with track riding, becoming seasoned professionals in the process. Some, like Dave Croxford, went on to become successful professional roadracers, winning Isle of Man TT races and national championships.
Hats off to this crew for creating a template for a riding experience that’s still getting fast street riders to a safe space all these years later.