Representing motorcycle test riders in our top 50 is Dave Hancock, who was Charlie Williams’ mechanic, sold 40 RC30s over a weekend and test rode the Honda FireBlade three years before it was launched…
A year into his job as one of Honda’s first ever Europeantest riders, Dave Hancock was thrashing a prototype FireBlade at the Tochigi circuit in Japan. It was 1989 – three years before the Blade launched – and Honda’s R&D department had a lot on. The oval-pistoned NR750 was also on test that day. “The project leader asked me if I’d like a go,” says Dave. “I got on the bike, he tapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘Enjoy’.” But Dave didn’t.
“The NR was nothing to do with us because it was done by a small team of Japanese, so I had no idea what to expect. I came back in after a few laps and all the engineers gathered round me. I took my helmet off and the project leader Horiike-san [ex-project leader of the CBR600 and VFR750 who later became the president of HRC and managing director of R&D] asked me what I thought. I said: ‘I don’t like it’. It was horrible. It didn’t handle, it vibrated terribly, the power just stopped suddenly... there was a list of faults I went through. They weren’t expecting that.”
This sort of direct feedback was exactly why Honda had brought Dave into the previously close-knit and secretive circle of Japanese test riders and engineers. Along with two other European riders, Dave had been employed because, due to the hierarchical and respectful nature of Japanese society, Japanese test riders often felt unable to tell senior engineers the unvarnished truth. Honda management
In this setting, the leathers look incongruous but that’s the point: for years Dave was Honda’s UK sales manager, and one of its leading develoment riders realised they needed riders who could speak truth to power. As a straight-talking working-class lad from Stoke, Dave had no problem with that.
“When I heard about the job, I applied immediately,” he says, as we await fish and chips at his local. At the time Dave was Honda’s national sales manager, but he’d spent his early life as a mechanic – spannering for TT-great Charlie Williams for three years – and was a successful club racer, so he thought he stood a good chance of getting his dream job. But nothing happened... for months.
Then, eventually, the boss of Honda Europe rang and asked if he could ride fast. “I said yes, and he told me I’d got the job. Then he said: ‘You need to be at Suzuka circuit at 9am next Monday’. I told him I’d booked a holiday and he said: ‘Change it,’ and put the phone down. So I cancelled it. That was my second marriage gone, though to be fair it was on the way out by then.”
Leaving his domestic woe
