Rod Gould, the 1970 World 250cc Champion, died on April 17th at the age of 80 after a long struggle with cancer. His passing means that there are now no longer any survivors of Britain’s long list of great champions in the premier Grand Prix category of World Championship racing.
Rod’s Racing Start
Rod started racing on a 350cc BSA Gold Star in a production class race at Silverstone in 1961 and immediately showed his potential. The bike refused to fire up right away and he was left alone on the start-line as the 40-strong field accelerated away. But over the course of ten laps of the 1.5mile circuit he slashed through the field to win the 350cc class and finish ninth overall.
1960’s
Five years later he was one of the front runners in the hard-fought arena of UK short circuit racing on 350 and 500cc Manx Nortons purchased from Dan Shorey, his friend and fellow racer from their hometown of Banbury in Oxfordshire. He had also made his mark in production machine racing on a BSA Lightning 650cc twin entered by another Banbury motorcycle icon, Gold Star specialist Eddie Dow. Doing battle with the likes of Mike Hailwood, John Cooper, Percy Tait and Phil Read in the important production bike races at Silverstone, Rod contested the lead with the established stars and finished fourth in both 1965 and 1966.
By 1967 his performances on the BSA saw him signed for the Triumph factory team and, on one of Doug Hele’s legendary 650cc Bonneville twins, he teamed with Percy Tait to win the Brands Hatch 500 Miles, the UK’s premier production class race at that time.
Uniquely, this completed a hat-trick of 500 Miles race wins by Banbury-based riders. Eddie Dow had won at Thruxton in 1955 and Dan Shorey in 1958.
First Grand Prix
Also in 1967, Rod rode his first Grand Prix and on his 500cc Manx Norton finished fifth in East Germany. But it was at the end of that season he took a decision that would change his life. He decided to spend the winter in California, where he won every one of the four races he entered and caught the eye of the US Kawasaki race team, which signed him up for the 1968 250cc race at Daytona, where he would also be riding a factory Triumph in the main 200 Mile race.
Unfortunately, he crashed the Kawasaki while chasing the factory Yamaha of Phil Read for third place and this prevented him from riding the Triumph in the big race. Nevertheless he impressed the US Kawasaki team management enough for them to offer to fly him back later in the season for the small number of road races on the US Championship calendar.
By the middle of that season, however, his priorities had changed thanks to a purchase that he had made in California and shipped back to the UK when he returned from Daytona. This was a Yamaha TD1C 250cc twin-cylinder engine sourced via a friend who was the manager of the Yamaha US race team. It had been made obsolete by the arrival of the TD2 but it turned out to be a purchase that changed Rod’s racing career and was without doubt the thing that set him on the road to his world title.
While Rod was still in the USA, his friend Ron Herring had prepared a Bultaco rolling chassis to take the Yamaha engine, making engine plates from paper templates that Rod had mailed him from California. Within days of Rod and the engine returning to the UK the Yamaha Bultaco was assembled and began winning races!
It also proved to be a genuine contender for Grand Prix places and by the end of the season had taken Rod to fourth place in the 1968 World 250cc Championship! The whole bike had only cost him £250 and, amazingly, the only bikes that were ahead of it at the season’s end were the two exotic and unbeatable V4 Yamahas of Phil Read and Bill Ivy and the factory MZ of Heinz Rosner! Not only that, but Rod had twice put his home-built special on a Grand Prix podium, finishing ahead of Rosner in both Finland and Ulster…
The next 1969 season was one of the most memorable for Rod as he had acquired two new Yamahas, a TD2 250 and a 350cc TR2. On these he was all but unbeatable in UK short circuit racing and established new outright circuit records at every track in the UK where he competed. He even broke the record that Mike Hailwood had set for the fast Snetterton track on the legendary Honda 297cc six-cylinder racer – and beat it by almost two clear seconds!
At Mallory Park, Rod Gould used the 350cc TR2 to sensationally beat Giacomo Agostini on the 500cc MV Agusta – a victory that was undoubtedly a big factor in the readers of Motor Cycle News voting him their Man of the Year.
Things were not quite as successful on the Grand Prix trail, however, as the new Yamahas had proved fast but fragile over the longer distance races. Most pundits in the motorcycle media had forecast that Rod would win a Grand Prix in 1969 but three second places in both the 250 and 350cc classes was the closest that he would get. There were more DNFs than points scored and his GP season was a frustrating one.
1970s
Nevertheless, his efforts had proved enough for Yamaha Europe to select him as one of a number of riders that would compete on Yamaha twins in 1970 under the banner of national importer teams. It was close as one could get to a works rider in the five years between Yamaha Japan pulling out of racing at the end of the 1968 season and returning for 1973.
In 1970, Rod proved that Yamaha Europe had made the right choice by winning six of the twelve races on the Grand Prix calendar, finishing second in two others and third in another. That was enough to win the World Championship although it was not as easy as the statistics indicated. He fought all season long with the reigning champion, Kel Carruthers, and it took a mighty charge around the awesome Parabolica last corner in the Italian Grand Prix to overtake both Kel and Phil Read in order to secure the title.
Percy Tait (left) and Rod Gould won the Brands Hatch 500 Mile Race in 1967
As reigning World Champion in 1971, he found his fiercest rival to be Yamaha’s six-time world title winner, Phil Read. He did win two Grands Prix but, hampered by three non-finishes in the first four races of the season, he relinquished his title to Read, frustrated by the knowledge that a single fourth place from those races would have seen him retain the crown.
For the 1972 season, another player had arrived on the scene – a rider who would become a legend, the “Flying Finn” Jarno Saarinen.
The championship would be fought out between Rod Gould, Phil Read and Jarno Saarinen on Yamahas and Renzo Pasolini on Aermacchi’s new two-stroke twin – and it was Jarno who would reign triumphant, ahead of the Italian. Rod again took two Grand Prix wins and three second places on his way to third in the standings but at least had the satisfaction of relegating Read, his old nemesis, to fourth.
Even more than that was the fact that in the Swedish GP, his last race finish of the year, Rod Gould beat Jarno Saarinen fair and square into second place. It was the last time the Finn was beaten in a 250cc Grand Prix before his untimely death at Monza in May 1973.
Retirement
At that point Rod retired from racing with the knowledge that he was still capable of beating the best. But with his wry and self-deprecating sense of humour he summed up his decision to quit by saying “I was World Champion in 1970, second in 1971 and third in 1972 – so I figured that someone was trying to tell me something…”
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