“Breakfast was a couple of cans of baked beans, heated up on the Primus stove”
MAT OXLEY
Half a century ago it wasn’t easy being a grand prix motorcycle racer, unless you had the backing of Count Domenico Agusta, founder of MV Agusta, whose patronage made Giacomo Agostini the most successful grand prix rider of all time. An American journalist who spent a few days living la dolce vita with the Italian heart-throb described Ago’s life thus: “to race and skid and crash and then make love and drink wine”.
The poorer privateer riders did more racing, skidding and crashing than Agostini, but less making love and drinking wine.
Among them was Ginger Molloy, a tough New Zealand coal miner who in 1963 loaded his Matchless G50 onto a boat in Wellington and six weeks later rolled it down a ramp at Southampton docks. Molloy spent the next eight years as a member of the so-called Continental Circus, plying his trade mostly around deadly street circuits, trying to stay alive and make enough money to put petrol in his bikes and food in his mouth.