Two quid for an evening with Paul Smart?! He used to pay to see me!!

Boom boom! Sorry, I couldn’t resist that…

You see I was employed by Paul, or more correctly his business partner, Roy Francis, for ten years, starting in March 1984 at Paul Smart Ltd in Maidstone. So over the years Paul (and Roy) must have paid thousands to see me and I certainly didn’t begrudge forty bob on the door in return.  The occasion was the Greenwich MCC club meeting and in truth the £2 actually bought you a strip of raffle tickets in aid of kids’ cancer charity CLIC Sargent.

Paul took us from his beginnings as a young cafe racer in the early 1960s to his fledgling racing days on a 250 cc Cotton, moving on to the Suzuki and Triumph years through Kawasaki to Ducati. He told how the Works Kawasaki Triple handled so badly that he had quietly junked the chassis and had one built by Colin Seeley. After that he won victory for his employer…but got the sack! He also revealed how well he had been – and still is – treated by Ducati after his legendary Imola victory in 1972. Ducati had told him before the race that if he won, he could keep the bike and he took them up on it. It doesn’t seem that long ago that it was up on a shelf in our Paddock Wood showroom, along with Paul’s Trident and some of his other racers. Triumph gave him the North-framed Trident in lieu of back pay I seem to recall. That bike was destroyed in the National Motorcycle Museum fire but the Ducati is now in safe hands at Ducati’s museum.

Paul’s talk brought the spirit of the paddock to life. It was quite touching to hear him speak about his late brother-in-law Barry Sheene and also of his immense respect for Mike Hailwood. With a sort of boyish gleam in his eyes he said how strange it had been that ‘on one hand, Mike was a great mate while on the other I completely put the guy way up there on a pedestal – he was my hero!’

One, possibly tongue-in-cheek question from the audience was whether Paul had ever gone in for any of the training regimes adopted by the riders of today. Paul’s answer was interesting, although he didn’t, of course; he said that in those days you were racing practically every weekend and that in itself kept you pretty fit for competition.

All in all a great evening – made even better on a personal level for me by seeing not only my former boss Roy again (he was there to help Paul with names and dates!) but also my old workmate Andy Joyce who I worked with at my first bike shop job in 1982 and haven’t seen for something like 25 years.

But Paul’s life story was not the only fascinating tale I heard that night.  Chatting to a very nice fella called Dave, he explained how a friend’s father who had raced in the Continental Circus just after the war, had been given by the author a signed copy of a racing yearbook that featured him. Sometime over the following years the book had been lost and Dave’s friend asked if he had any idea where a copy could be found as she had had no luck obtaining one. Eventually Dave spotted the year she was after on Ebay. At £40 it wasn’t cheap but his friend decided to buy it. When it arrived she rang Dave immediately. Tucked in the pages was a letter from the author to her father. It was his original copy returned after all this time.

Now how cool is that?

Cheers Rick