A fairly good article from The Telegraph

Jack Findlay
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 04/06/2007



Jack Findlay, who has died aged 72, raced in Europe for 20 years and became the most famous member of the "Continental Circus" - the group of riders who travelled from race to race eking out a dangerous living on the meagre "starting money" paid by race organisers.

They travelled by van, which doubled as transport and accommodation; bought and maintained their own machines; and often raced when recovering from injury. Findlay arrived in Europe in 1958 and served a five-year "apprenticeship" before he won his first race, the 500cc class at Le Mans in France early in 1963.

Cyril John Findlay was born at Mooroopna, Victoria, on February 5 1935. He adopted the name Jack when he assumed his father's identity in order to obtain a racing licence when he was just 15, two years under the legal limit.

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On leaving school he joined the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as a trainee accountant, combining his work with racing until the end of 1957. Despite his lack of success on home circuits, and a limited budget which restricted him to second-rate machines, Findlay decided to sell up and go to Europe to join the Continental Circus.

He travelled by ship, got a job at the BSA factory in Birmingham and bought a 350cc Manx Norton. That first year, 1958, he could afford only a single bike and raced it in both 350 and 500cc classes because race organisers insisted on two starts.

He added a 500cc Manx Norton to his stable for 1959, but was only a mid-field runner until 1963. Indeed, at the end of 1962 he nearly quit and went home - but Lew Ellis, the competitions manager for Shell, offered him financial support and brokered the deal whereby Jack obtained the McIntyre Matchless, which had become available following the death in a racing accident of Bob McIntyre.

The acquisition of this machine transformed Findlay's career. From also-ran he became a regular winner of lesser races and was consistently placed in world championship races. He finished third in the 1966 table, fifth the following year (despite suffering a fractured skull mid-season), and was runner-up in 1968, beaten only by the multiple world champion Giacomo Agostini on his factory MV Agusta.

By this time the elderly Matchless, which Findlay maintained himself without the aid of a mechanic, was being outpaced by the new wave of racing bikes. So for 1969 he accepted the offer of sponsorship from the Italian Lino Tonti to race one of his new 500cc twin-cylinder Linto machines.

It proved a mistake. The Linto was hopelessly, and dangerously, unreliable and Findlay reverted to a Matchless-powered Seeley mid-season. When his Italian partner Daniele Fontana's project to build a three-cylinder racer, named the Cardani, failed to live up to expectations the partners were forced to think again.

By this time Findlay had moved to live in Milan with his French girlfriend, Nanou. He and Fontana realised that the future lay with two-stroke racing machines, and they set about building a racer for the 500cc class based on a Suzuki road-engine in their own frame.

At that time no racing parts were available from Suzuki, but their efforts were so successful that, in 1971, Findlay won the 500cc class at the Ulster Grand Prix. It was both his and Suzuki's first 500cc world championship race win. This success won his support from the Italian Suzuki importer, who sponsored Findlay in some 750cc races in 1972.

On the fearsomely fast, but poor-handling, Japanese machine he finished third in the Formula 750 Isle of Man TT after race officials, frightened by the sheer speed of the bike (he clocked 164mph through the speed trap, the fastest recorded up to then) pleaded with him to "take it easy".

For 1973 the Italian importer supplied him with a semi-works twin-cylinder TR500, and on this Findlay achieved a lifelong ambition when he won the Isle of Man Senior TT. This led to the factory signing him as a member of a three-man team to race the new four-cylinder RG500 in 1974 alongside Barry Sheene and Paul Smart.

It was a year of teething troubles and, although Findlay finished fifth in the world championship, ahead of Sheene and Smart, he was then fired, probably because he would be 40 before the start of the 1975 season.

Determined to continue, Findlay and Fontana bought a TZ750 Yamaha and worked to improve both the power and the handling. They were so successful that Findlay won the F750 championship, beating Sheene by a single point. He continued to race with limited success for a further two seasons.

In 1977 Findlay suffered a second fractured skull in a high-speed crash at Imola caused by a collapsed rear wheel. Although he was racing again within weeks, age and the expense of maintaining the new and temperamental two-stroke racers were against him. He finally quit, at the age of 43, after the 1978 German Grand Prix - almost exactly 20 years after making his European debut and 28 years after his first race in Australia.

Having split from Nanou, Findlay married Dominique Monneret, widow of the French racer George Monneret. They lived at Vaucresson, near Paris, while he helped Michelin to develop tyres for road machines. He gave this up after a high-speed crash in 1987 and became technical officer for DORNA, the Spanish-based company which promoted the world championship series that mutated into the present Moto GP set-up.

In retirement Jack Findlay and his wife divided their time between Vaucresson and an apartment at Mandelieu, near Nice, where he died on May 19.