INTERVIEW
He raced everyone from Dave Bickers to Dave Thorpe, scored two GP podiums and was Joey Dunlop’s team boss. We ruin Roger Harvey’s new year diet by dragging him out for lunch
Roger Harvey has had two hugely successful careers: first as a Grand Prix motocross racer, and then as a factory race manager. Walking into his lounge, it’s clear which meant the most to him – right there on a sideboard is a 1979 Maico 440.
“Maico saved my career,” he says, noticing my jaw dragging on the carpet. “In 1978 I moved to Suzuki, but the bike just kept breaking and breaking. At a British Championship round at the end of the year, the rear hub exploded as I came over a jump; I dragged the bike under the ropes and sat on it, watching the race, trying to work out how I could afford a Maico. They were only £1300 or so then, so I was working out what I had to sell to get one. I knew I could do a lot better on it.
“Then a guy in the crowd came up and kicked the front wheel to get me out of my daydream and said: ‘Alright lad?’. It was Jack Hewitt from Hewitt’s Motorcycles [then a huge motocross dealership]. We had a chat about the Suzuki and he said: ‘Come and see me tomorrow morning and I’ll sort you out a Maico’. It was like my prayers had been answered. I turned up at his shop at 6am.”
The problem was that Roger was contracted to Suzuki, so he had to convince Graham Beamish – the former works BSA rider who ran the team – to let him go. It seemed unlikely. “I told Jack I’d have to ask Graham to release me, and rang him that night, expecting a tough discussion. But he was understanding and said: ‘Fine’. It was that easy.
“Five years ago, I found out why. I was chatting to Jack’s son Mike and he told me his dad had rung Graham Beamish before me, and said: ‘You will be releasing Roger Harvey’, because the Hewitts were that sort of people – you didn’t mess. Graham had said: ‘Oh right, will I? OK, no worries Jack’.” And so Roger got his Maico, won an international race the next weekend and his career was flying again.
By then, aged 26, he was a seasoned professional, having thrashed a Bantam around his grandad’s farm as a kid growing up in the Midlands, then started racing when he was 14. “I was desperate to race, but there were no schoolboys’ series back then,” he says, now sitting in his local awaiting a steak and Stilton pie (“I’ll get back to my diet later...”).
“Chris Carter [the fa
