Navigation Menu
RG Racers: David Howard
Early racing days of an epic bike builder!
1000 thanks to Dave for taking the time to put together his memories of racing, and of how the RG500 fit into all that. Click photos to enlarge, most will do so in a new window.
(If you raced an RG500 please drop me a note, I'm trying to collect as many RG racer stories as I can!
Randy Norian - rg500delta@mac.com)
After much prompting and encouragement from Randy I have finally got around to writing a small memoir of my Suzuki Gamma experiences.
It all started in the spring of 1979 when I was working in Liverpool as an apprentice river pilot, I had a week off work and with a friend we went for a blast around the back lanes of Cheshire we ended up at the house of TT racer and all-round great guy Charlie Williams. Charlie was a friend of a friend and through him I met Suzuki works rider Stan Woods this got me interested in racing, so a couple of weeks later I popped along to Oulton park to watch Stan racing.
What an eye opener, on that day I saw Barry Sheene riding his RG500 in the Transatlantic Trophy, what a fantastic bike he had, as a road rider on an old RD400, the RG500 that Bazza was on was, to me the most exotic fantastic bike I had ever seen, I had to have one.
As an apprentice naval officer I was on mega star wages (£23) a week, getting the required thousands for an RG500 race bike was going to be a challenge. Over the next few years the dream of owning an RG500 didn’t fade, I went off to sea and saved my money, as I travelled around the world I visited some amazing places and got to see racing in Daytona, the Castrol 6 hour in Australia and some amazing street racing in New Zealand I was very single minded and the dream lived on.
By 1981 I was racing an RD250 which was swapped for a 250LC then in the summer of 83 the RG250 was announced, I bought mine on the 4th September for £1400 on the first day they went on sale in the UK – A146KBV this was a very exotic bike in the early 80’s, I loved it but it was not a 500, Suzuki weren’t trying hard enough. I remember going to the 1984 British grand prix at Silverstone and seeing the prototype RD500 LC and thinking if only Suzuki would make an RG500 road bike, at that time I just couldn’t see that happening.
Move forward to mid/Late 1985, I was working in Germany and I remember seeing a German bike magazine with pictures of the prototype RG500 and GSXR750 – I had to have one.
A few months later back in the UK, the Gamma had been launched at the bike show and I got the opportunity to buy one of the Suzuki Press Test bikes £3300 and it was mine (Half my annual salary at the time.)
I thought this was a standard bike, it looked standard, however the test fleet had been ‘breathed on’ and the bike was a rocket, I picked the bike up in August and raced it for the first time two weeks later at Mallory park in Leicestershire.
The bike was in completely standard trim, standard bodywork, shock, forks etc. the only change was a Michelin TG22 rear tyre. First time out and I got two wins with a lap time of 55 seconds which was pretty quick. I realised how fast the bike was when I passed the Fowlers of Bristol Yamaha 500j on the back straight. The bike did have some scary short comings, the lower pipes ground out alarmingly, the rear shock got coil bound then would let go causing a couple of alarming slides on the exit from corners, and probably the scariest problem was the brake fade, after three or four laps the brake lever would come right back to the bar and stopping at the hairpin was exciting.