Mike Hailwood at Assen in 1967, the last year he raced in the world championship.. Photo: Jack de Nijs / Anefo, Nationaal Archief
Isle of Man, June 1978. Mike Hailwood is 38, balding and limping from a car racing crash, and he hasn't raced the TT for eleven years. The bookmakers doubt him. The crowd lining the Mountain Course does not. He is on a red and green Ducati 900 entered by a Manchester dealer, in the Formula One TT, and his main rival is Phil Read on a works Honda.
Hailwood laps at around 110 mph (177 km/h), the fastest he has ever been around the island. Read started ahead of him, so when the commentators announce that Hailwood has caught and passed him on the road, the cheering spreads around all 37.73 miles. On the fifth lap Read's Honda breaks down.
Hailwood wins. On Glencrutchery Road, grown men cry, and so does Mike the Bike.
Who Mike Hailwood was
Stanley Michael Bailey Hailwood was born on 2 April 1940 in Great Milton, Oxfordshire. His father, Stan, was a former racer who had built King's of Oxford into one of Britain's biggest motorcycle dealers and become a millionaire.
Stan bought the best machinery money could find, and the paddock noticed. The Honda rider Jim Redman nicknamed him "The Wallet", according to Mark Gardiner's account for Common Tread. Mike's private schooling and posh accent did not win him friends among working-class rivals either.
Mike Hailwood started racing at 17 and was 19 when he won his first world championship race, the 125cc Ulster Grand Prix of 1959. Off the bike he was shy, and he never took the fuss seriously. He liked to describe himself as "just a bloke who rides bikes".
1961–1967: Mike Hailwood's nine world titles
Mike Hailwood's breakthrough came at the Isle of Man in June 1961. He won the 125cc, 250cc and Senior races, becoming the first rider to win three TTs in one week. That year he also won the 250cc world title on a privately supplied four-cylinder Honda, the youngest world champion up to that time, according to MotoGP's Nick Harris.
From 1962 he rode for Count Domenico Agusta's MV team and won the 500cc world title four years in a row, from 1962 to 1965, the first rider to do so. In 1966 he went back to Honda and won the 250cc and 350cc titles that year and again in 1967. At Assen in 1967 he won three Grands Prix in one day.
The one prize that escaped him on the Honda was the 500cc crown, which Giacomo Agostini and MV Agusta took in both 1966 and 1967. Honda pulled out at the end of 1967. According to Gardiner, the factory then paid Hailwood not to ride for anyone else in the world championship.
Hailwood left Grand Prix racing with nine world titles, 76 Grand Prix wins (37 of them in the 500cc class) and 112 podiums. He had won 12 TTs, more than anyone else in the years when the TT counted for the world championship.
Cars, Kyalami and the Nürburgring
Mike Hailwood spent the next phase of his career on four wheels. He started 50 Formula 1 Grands Prix, for teams including Surtees and McLaren, and finished on the podium twice.
His most famous moment in a car had nothing to do with results. At the 1973 South African Grand Prix at Kyalami, his Surtees collided with Clay Regazzoni's BRM, which caught fire with the Swiss driver trapped inside. Hailwood ran to help. His own overalls caught fire; a marshal put them out, and he went straight back to pull Regazzoni clear. He was awarded the George Medal, the second-highest British award for civilian bravery.
A year later, at the 1974 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, he crashed and badly damaged his right leg. His Formula 1 career was over. The injury also meant that, when he came back to bikes, he needed the gear lever moved to the left side.
The 1978 comeback: Mike Hailwood and the Ducati
Mike Hailwood's return to the Isle of Man came at a low point for the event. After a run of deaths, the top riders had boycotted the TT, and it lost its world championship status after 1976. To keep it alive, the FIM created Formula TT, a set of single-race world championships for bikes with production-based engines. Phil Read won the first Formula One TT in 1977 and was unpopular for it, because fans blamed him for the boycott.
Hailwood tested his nerve quietly. During the 1977 Manx Grand Prix he lapped the course on a Yamaha with a film camera on board, posing as an American documentary-maker. Later that year he shared a Ducati 750SS in the Castrol Six Hour race in Australia and found it a bike he could get on with.
Steve Wynne of Sports Motorcycles in Manchester had nearly beaten Read in 1977 with Roger Nicholls on a Ducati. Hailwood agreed to ride for him for a very small fee. Wynne ordered special 900s from Italy, and Hailwood's got a left-side gearshift.
After the 1978 win he came back once more in 1979 and won the Senior TT on a Suzuki RG500. It was his 14th TT victory, and his last race on the island.
What Mike Hailwood left behind
Mike Hailwood is still the yardstick for riders who can do everything. Agostini won more world titles, 15 to Hailwood's nine. Hailwood won more TTs, 14 to Agostini's 10. He won world titles in three different classes and he won on the island 18 years apart.
His 1978 win did more than make headlines. It gave Formula TT the credibility it had lacked and showed that the TT could survive without the world championship. In 1979 Ducati put a road bike on sale in his honour, the 900 Mike Hailwood Replica, painted in the red, green and white of the Sports Motorcycles racer. That year he also received the Segrave Trophy, and in 2000 the FIM named him a Grand Prix Legend.
Hailwood did not get the long retirement he had earned. He died on 23 March 1981 after a road accident near his home in Warwickshire, aged 40. His nine-year-old daughter, Michelle, was killed in the same crash.
He spent his life insisting he was just a bloke who rode bikes. The bloke won 14 times on the hardest circuit in the world, the last one at 39.
Quick answers
How many world titles and TT races did Mike Hailwood win?
Mike Hailwood won nine world titles: the 250cc in 1961, 1966 and 1967, the 350cc in 1966 and 1967, and the 500cc from 1962 to 1965. He also won 76 Grands Prix and 14 Isle of Man TT races between 1961 and 1979.
What happened at Mike Hailwood's 1978 TT comeback?
In June 1978, aged 38 and eleven years after his last TT, Mike Hailwood won the Formula One TT on a Sports Motorcycles Ducati 900. He caught and passed Phil Read's works Honda on the road, and Read retired on the fifth lap with a broken bike.
Why was Mike Hailwood awarded the George Medal?
Mike Hailwood received the George Medal for rescuing Clay Regazzoni at the 1973 South African Grand Prix. After their cars collided, Regazzoni's BRM caught fire. Hailwood's overalls caught fire too, but once a marshal put them out he went back and pulled Regazzoni clear.
What is the Ducati Mike Hailwood Replica?
The Ducati Mike Hailwood Replica is a road bike Ducati introduced in 1979 to celebrate Mike Hailwood's 1978 Formula One TT win. Based on the 900SS, it wore the red, green and white colours of his Sports Motorcycles racer.
