Ever since he used a 500cc Royal Enfield single to beat dozens of RG500s in the 1981 Manx GP, Steve has been synonymous with defying convention. He takes time off from his latest project to explain himself
For the last 50 years, Steve Linsdell hasn’t just ignoredconventional wisdom, he’s ushered it to the edge of a cliff, invited it to bend over and given it a kick. From beating Suzuki RG500s at the Isle of Man on a four-stroke British single, to getting points in the F1 world championship on a home-built Yamaha, to turning an Enfield 700 into an unbeatable race weapon, his career is largely made up of well-nigh impossible feats.
Perhaps the most famous example of this commendable determination to disregard common sense, was taking a new Yamaha GTS1000 – the 1994 sports tourer with hub-centre steering – and riding it into the top ten of the Formula One TT three times. “Yeah, I was proud of that,” says Steve, 68, sitting in his workshop eating a bacon sandwich.
“The project started off in 1993, when the [Yamaha] YZF750 I rode in the Isle of Man wobbled. I like both wheels to be on the ground and pointing in the right direction, and with the YZF I could never relax – not a good thing in the TT, where you’re hanging on for so long. I’m not a particularly fit person, but I could manage the TT if I got those little rests.” Steve’s being modest here – with 12 Isle of Man podiums from 85 starts, he did rather more than ‘manage’.
“In 1994 we had a GTS1000 demo bike [in Steve’s dealership, Flitwick Motorcycles] and it was unbelievably stable. That got me thinking. Then Performance Bikes magazine wrote one off and Yamaha gave the wreck to me.” Clearly the only thing to do was turn it into a race bike.
Steve replaced the 100bhp 1000cc engine with his tuned YZF750 motor and spent his evenings removing blubber from the GTS – standard, it weighed 275kg. “It was so big – it hardly fitted in here,” he says, waving his arm around the modest central workshop of his interlinked complex of garden sheds (one is crammed with machine tools, another is a fully equipped dyno room).
“I moulded all the panels together, then had it made from glassfibre s
