INTERVIEW
One of Britain’s most jovial and prolific motorcycle journalists explains how always saying yes took him from being MCN’s amateur stuntman to owning 30 bikes
Interview: JOHN WESTLAKE Photography: BRIAN CRICHTON ARCHIVE, JOHN WESTLAKE
Few motorcycle careers contain as many scrapes as Brian Crichton’s. The former editor of Classic Bike has fallen off the top of a White Helmets display team pyramid, suffered a 130mph tank slapper on the M1, been stopped by police while lapping Snetterton, had his leg broken during an endurance race before he even got on his bike and once inadvertently bought three MZs.
Wiping away tears of laughter after yet another anecdote, I put it to Brian that most of his adventures stem from an inability to say no. “I think you’re right,” he says, grinning. “A lot of my career has been based around saying yes. Especially in my early days working for Motorcycle News – I said yes to everything. For example, the first competition bike I rode was when Mike Nicks [former MCN editor and CB editor] asked if I wanted to report on a sprint. I said yes – then asked what a sprint was. I went to the event and one of the riders was Denis Jenkinson [famously Stirling Moss’s navigator when he won the Mille Miglia], who offered me a go on his Triumph twin special, which was really fast. I said yes, obviously, despite not having a clue what I was doing. I could see this airfield going into the distance, so that’s where I rode. I didn’t know you were meant to stop after a quarter of a mile. I got to the end of the runway and thought I’d better turn back. Denis must have thought I’d stolen it.”
It was a similar story of hope over experience with the Royal Signals White Helmets display team, again during his days on MCN (where one suspects the management rather took advantage of Brian’s enthusiasm for, well, everything). “I agreed to ride in their pyramid, so I clambered up the backs of the riders and got to the top. Thankfully I was a lot lighter back then, so it wasn’t too arduous for the boys underneath. It wasn’t the full pyramid you see in public displays, but it was still quite high.
“The lead rider had told me that he’d say: ‘Steady, steady, stop’ and on the first ‘steady’, I had to jump back to land behind the bikes. On the second ‘steady’, the next rank would jump back, and on ‘stop’ the bikes would come to a halt and the final layer would jump off. I thought: ‘Well, within a few minutes I shall be on my way to hospital’.
“The problem was that I thought he’d say: ‘Steady... steady... stop’ slowly, but he rushed so I wasn’t ready. The whole pyramid collapsed underneath me before I jumped, and I tumbled down on everyone else. The lads broke my fall, so I got away with that one. I had a fantastic time on MCN. It was like a chimpanzees’ tea party.” Brian was also saying yes to testing road bikes, though here he was on safer ground because he’d been riding ever since he’d had a go on a mate’s BSA Bantam, aged 16. “From that moment it’s been bikes ever since,” he says between mouthfuls of burger at his local. As soon as he saved up, he bought a 75cc Bianchi Gardena two-stroke, then a 250 BSA C11G, then an ES2 Norton with double adult sidecar for £15. By the time he joined MCN in 1971, aged 22, he had a BSA A7 Shooting Star chopper which he’d ridden to the south of France. “Because I was young and keen, they’d say:
‘Will you report on this motocross race in the west country, and while you’re at it, ride this Benelli Six down and do a test report?’ So off I went. The Benelli was very smooth, but it was heavy and if you went flat out – which I always tried to – the handling wasn’t up to much. You had to be careful with it.
To read more, head into stores and grab the latest issue of Classic Bike, or why not subscribe today and never miss an issue
