‘King’ Kenny Roberts is one of the greatest motorcycle racers of all time: huge talent, fiercely intelligent, unmatched technical knowhow and happy to do evil things to his rivals, as and when required.
Here’s the three-time MotoGP champion talking about racing dirt track in the USA, before he came to grands prix and showed Europe how to ride.
“One time going through a turn I felt this guy’s clutch lever on my right foot, so I just gassed it and flipped him off,” Roberts told me a while back. “He came over afterwards and wanted to know why I’d knocked him down, and I said, ‘Well, the reason I knocked you down is that you put your clutch lever on my foot’, so he started shouting that I’d knocked him down and I said, ‘Yeah, and next time you do that I’ll knock you down again’.
