Pecco Bagnaia won the 75th MotoGP crown – meet the WW2 bomber pilot who won the first
MotoGP
This is the extraordinary story of Les Graham, the decorated RAF Lancaster pilot who won the inaugural MotoGP world title, was ‘the greatest of all MV Agusta riders’ and lost his life on one of MV’s first MotoGP bikes
Graham enjoys a smoke by his Lancaster, while sitting on enough high-explosive bombs to blow a V-1 launch pad to smithereens. Four years later he was 500 world champ
Graham family archive
Les Graham was part of that special breed of motorcycle racer whose careers were interrupted by the Second World War. That was quite a life: to race on lethal street circuits in the 1930s, fight and survive a war and then happily stare death in the face all over again.
There were many hundreds of racers – on both sides – who lived this extraordinary life, but only one of them became a 500cc/MotoGP world champion.
Germany’s pre-war grand prix winners George Meier and Ewald Kluge both continued racing after the war, but they were on the way down, not on the way up. Graham, however, finally got the chances he should’ve got before the war and went on to win the inaugural 500 world championship in 1949.
“All of a sudden we were upside down and hurtling towards the ground”
War and racing — in those days of unforgiving street circuits — shared some things in common. Certainly, motor sport comes closest to fitting George Orwell’s declaration that “serious sport is war minus the shooting”. Not only is there risk of death, but also the exponent’s chances of survival and success depend on an ability to work with machines.
Graham could certainly work with machines. On a motorcycle he was renowned for his talent for effortlessly riding on the very edge, probably the result of his varied upbringing in grass track, sand racing and road-racing. Before the war he rode for Birmingham-based manufacturer OK Supreme and assembled engines for the company, so he knew how things worked.
Both these factors played a vital part in the wartime events that won him the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) medal, awarded for “exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy in the air”.
Flight Lieutenant Graham flew Lancaster heavy bombers over Germany and Nazi-occupied France, attacking everything from Luftwaffe fighter bases, U-boat pens and V-1 bases to Wehrmacht tank and artillery positions and synthetic-fuel manufacturing plants.
Steely expression on his face, vice-like grip on the handlebars, Graham fights the MV down Bray Hill in the 1953 Senior TT. Moments later he crashed and died instantly
Graham family archive
The losses suffered by RAF bomber crews were horrific – 45% were killed in action – the worst in any branch of the British military in either world war. During Graham’s first series of thirty sorties, his 166 Squadron lost 182 men, more than half its original strength.
Unlike the RAF’s glamorous fighter pilots, who were the knights of the sky in their Spitfires and Hurricanes, bomber crews were essentially long-distance truck drivers delivering a lethal cargo, waiting to be jumped by fighters or pummelled by flak. Lumbering along at 250mph they were sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe’s 350mph Messerschmitt ME109.
Graham was at the controls during a raid on the vast U-boat submarine pens in Bordeaux on August 12, 1944 when a Lancaster flying immediately below him blew up. The force of the blast flipped Graham’s Lanc onto its back, dumping him out of the pilot’s seat.
“All of a sudden we were upside down and hurtling towards the ground,” recalls Graham’s navigator Bill Bissonnette, in Matthew Freudenberg’s biography Les Graham: A Life in Racing. “As we flipped over, Les spilled into the centre of the craft and I thought our end had come. Les was scrambling about, draped over the throttles and trying to reach the stick. Finally he got his left hand on it and managed somehow to pull us out of it.”
This deed won him the DFC.
Three days later Graham was instructed to orbit the target area and photograph the damage following a raid on a night-fighter base. Inevitably his plane was peppered with flak and lost a wheel, so landing was going to be a problem.
Bissonnette again, “Somehow Les managed to drop the port wing so it barely cleared the ground and landed the Lanc like a bicycle on the port wheel and the tail wheel”.
Graham (right) and MV engineer Magni laugh off the oil leak that cost them the 1952 Senior TT. Reg Armstrong (15) won the race on a factory Norton. Geoff Duke (centre) led until his Norton’s clutch broke
Graham family archive
Graham was demobbed in 1946 and had no doubt about what he would do next.
Machinery, however, was a problem. He had to make do with a borrowed Norton, until his prayers were answered when newly-appointed AJS race chief Jock West (an RAF Wing Commander during the war) came looking for him.
In the late 1930s West had ridden supercharged twins for the Nazi-backed BMW factory team. At the Donington Easter meeting of 1939, less than six months before war broke out, he spotted Graham riding his OK Supreme sideways through Redgate corner. There and then he made a mental note to help this youngster get better machinery.
The MotoGP world championship – originally the 500cc world championship – celebrates its 75th season this year. This is the story of the inaugural 1949 season
By
Mat Oxley
AJS had big plans after the war. While the factory worked on military contracts during the conflict, its motorcycle engineers looked forward to better times by designing a supercharged, parallel-twin 500cc grand prix bike during their spare time. Only one problem, the FIM banned supercharging from racing in 1946, because such technology had no place in a war-broken Europe.
Thus the E90 twin – with unusual spiky cooling fins that earned it the nickname Porcupine – became a conventionally aspirated twin and was thus forever compromised, so it never became quite the machine it should have been.
Nonetheless, by 1948 the bike was running well enough to allow Graham to lead the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, until a spark plug failed. And when the FIM announced the creation of the first world championship in February 1949, AJS had good reason to believe the Porcupine would have a good chance against the Norton singles, Moto Guzzi v-twins and Gilera fours.
June’s Isle of Man TT – the first world-championship motorcycle race, 75 years ago next year – confirmed their hopes. Graham led the Senior TT by over a minute as he swept through the final lap, waved on by fans. Then at Cronk-ny-Mona, just two miles from the chequered flag, his engine died. A magneto shaft had sheared.
Graham and his factory AJS Porcupine twin on their way to the first 500cc/MotoGP title in 1949
Graham family archive
Graham reacted to his DNF with equanimity, as he always did when luck turned against him. No doubt, wartime adversities made such setbacks easier to handle.
Reliability was a serious problem with the Porcupine, usually due to the failure of low-quality proprietary components, about which the penny-pinching AJS owners did nothing. They wouldn’t even let Graham and his team-mates replace the bike’s hopeless ‘candlestick’ rear shocks. This infuriatingly blinkered management attitude led to the collapse of the British motorcycle industry.
Graham made up for his TT disappointment with wins at Berne in Switzerland and at Clady in the Ulster GP. With only the Monza season finale to go he had a real chance of taking the title ahead of main rival Nello Pagani. The only question was how the AJS would cope against the Pagani’s Gilera at super-fast Monza. Norton was so certain of humiliation at GP racing’s fastest track that its team didn’t even bother turning up.
In fact the AJS had very nearly as much top speed as the Italian four – at Clady, which included a seven-mile straight – the bike was just one mile an hour slower than the 120mph Gilera.
The Monza race was a classic slipstreaming brawl, with Graham fighting back and forth with Gilera’s three riders: Pagani, Arciso Artesiani and crash-happy Carlo Bandirola, nicknamed Bouncing Bandi. In the closing stages Bandirola lived up to his name, trying a crazy move on Graham. He crashed and took the Brit with him. Meanwhile Pagani romped home to win.
So, who was world champ?
Pagani had scored nine more points than Graham, but GP rules of the time allowed riders to drop their three worst scores from the six races, so Graham took the title by a single point.
The Merseysider still ranks as the oldest winner of the class of kings. He was within days of his 38th birthday when he was crowned, although 37 wasn’t considered old at the time because many of his rivals had also raced before the war.
Six years after Graham left the RAF he was still flying. By 1952 he had turned the MV 500 into a competitive bike and led the 1952 Senior TT
Graham family archive
Graham’s name may be cast in history as the first premier-class world champ, but he had a miserable title defence in 1950. Once again luck and the AJS management were against him. By the end of the season he had had enough, so he accepted an offer from Count Domenico Agusta.
At this time MV Agusta was not the dominant racing force it later became. The factory’s first 500 four – designed by Gilera’s Piero Remor, who Agusta had poached from his biggest competitor – had made its debut at Spa in 1950 and the following year still featured shaft drive and torsion-bar suspension. The bike handled atrociously and was so fragile that Graham failed to achieve a single finish in the eight GPs of 1951.
This is when his technical knowhow really came in handy. Although the Count was an engineer he was also a control freak who insisted on being in charge of development. However, even he realised that Graham’s knowledge and intelligence offered a better way forward. The pair became such good friends that the Graham family set up home in the Count’s holiday villa near Lake Lugano, which became known as Casa Gram.
Graham was given a free hand with development and, step by step, improved the MV’s engine and chassis, using his almost two decades of racing experience. Cylinder bore was reduced to cure piston failures caused by increasing power and heat, chain final drive replaced the shaft and smaller wheels and a duplex frame were introduced.
Graham’s dirt-bike background gave him a preference for longer travel suspension, which he gained by using hydraulic rear shocks and Earles front forks, designed by former Velocette engineer Ernie Earles.
Detail from Graham’s WW2 pilot’s logbook, August 1944, including the Bordeaux raid that won him the Distinguished Flying Cross
Graham family archive
Finally, by the end of 1952 the MV was good enough to beat the dominant Gileras. Graham beat that year’s champion Umberto Masetti at Barcelona and, most importantly at Monza, where Gilera was so incensed it put in a protest, claiming MV was using an oversize engine.
The 1953 season promised a straight head-to-head between Graham and Gilera’s new signing Geoff Duke, who like Graham had abandoned a British factory and gone Italian. Duke had won the 1951 title for Norton, but company bosses treated him with disdain. When he suggested to managing director Gilbert Smith that Norton needed a faster, more advanced machine like Gilera’s rapid four-cylinder 500, Smith told him that he should attend fewer dinner dances.
The day after claiming a long-awaited first TT victory in the Ultra-Lightweight event, aboard MV’s 125 single, Graham crashed the 500 at the bottom of Bray Hill during the seven-lap Senior TT. He was killed instantly.
The cause of the crash, although never fully proven, was probably the MV’s Earles forks, which jammed when they reached full compression in the Bray dip.
