A calm moment during the fiery years when Phil Read and Bill Ivy were partners in the Yamaha factory team. Little Bill won the 125cc championship for the factory in 1967. It was to be his only world title because he was killed during the 350cc East German Grand Prix at Sachsenring in July 1969 after switching to the Jawa factory.
I suppose the rider who has really made his mark on me is Phil Read. He was going strong when I first saw him and by the way he is riding on British short circuits and in the Isle of Man I see no reason why he should not be going as strong as ever if, or when, he decides to make a Grand Prix return.
It was personally a sad moment for me when he walked out, or drove out, of championship scene during the Belgian GP in 1976. After Friday practice on his 500cc Team Life Suzuki Phil decided he wanted to go home to his children in Oxshott. After some differences of opinion with his late wife Madeleine at the hotel later in the evening he got in his Rolls Royce and headed for the coast, alone. The following morning he was back home.
And so the man who won the first eight world titles in 1964 with a 250 four cylinder works Yamaha was in the hunt no more. His greatest year for me was 1971 when, under the full influence of Madeleine for the first time, he won the 250cc world title on a private Yamaha in the face of renewed Yamaha factory involvement.
Controversial throughout, Phil was at the centre of more than one storm during his Grand Prix career. There are suggestions that he did not play the game when he was riding alongside Bill Ivy in the Yamaha team and that he defied factory instructions to win the 125cc and 250cc world titles in 1968. Then of course there was the MV interlude when he took over from Agostini in 1974. After being taken on as second MV rider towards the end of 1972 Phil started to look for a thing he had always wanted in racing, the 500cc world championship.
He got it the following year while riding as Ago's teammate and that was enough for the italian who quit the homeland team he had been winning titles with for nine years and went to the Yamaha camp that once housed Phil. The idea was to get the 500cc title away from the italian factory but it was not to be in 1974 when Read on the lone MV kept his grip.
Then in 1975 another milestone in Grand Prix history, Yamaha gained the 500cc title for the first time thanks to Ago who chalked up a surely unbeatable record of 15 world championship wins.
There is no doubt that the double 350cc and 500cc championships that came his way in the later part of of the sixties and early in the seventies were easily come by. There simply was no competition for the all conquering MVs especially in the 500 class where opposition for much of the time was coming from elderly Manx Nortons and G50 Matchless machines once the Honda had been withdrawn and Benelli had give up a game effort to get their four cylinder on a par with the MV.
As Ago once said to me in Holland after displaying his usual style of hanging back for half a dozen laps before blasting by the opposition: "I like to play a little Brands Hatch before I win".
It was the fact that winning had become so easy that upset Ago when Read joined MV and things did not go all his own way, "I did not want to leave MV but the pressures within were too strong for me", he said at the time of his move to Yamaha.
