Hanging on to the “Staffordshire Engine”

Phil Bayton, the “Staffordshire Engine” was one of the top home-based pros of the 1970s and 80s.

He gave me a pasting in a 2-up GP Des Gentlemen hilly tt at Harrogate, over the Yorkshire Moors, during the Harrogate Cycling Week in the mid 1970s.

When the event organiser told me he had paired me with Bayton, I thought, no, he’s pulling my leg.

He wasn’t. I was to ride with a guy who a few years before had finished 4^th in the 1972 Munich Olympic  Games road race.  He was a Star Trophy winner (the season-long competition based on the leading UK road races); had placed 3^rd and 4^th on Milk Race stages and turned pro for Raleigh in 1973.

Bayton and his Raleigh team-mate Dave Lloyd are remembered for their famous 100 mile long breakaway together in the opening Spring Classic of the Continental season, the famous Milan to San Remo.

That they would eventually be caught was beside the point – their huge effort earned Raleigh a lot of publicity. And it led to invitations to other events, in which  the pair shone. They were third in famous two-up Baracchi Trophy won by Italy’s Felice Gimondi and Colombia’s Martin Rodriguez.

In 1982, Bayton won the British criterium title.

He was one of most exciting riders of his era.  He would go from the gun in criteriums, hence the nickname,  “Staffordshire Engine”. His sheer aggression at the head of a race was a delight to behold – for spectators!

But not when hanging on to his back wheel by the skin of your teeth in that Gentleman’s TT at Harrogate!

They’re meant to be light-hearted races, Gentlemen TT’s, where a younger rider paces an older one – usually a veteran. In this case, members of the cycle trade and cycling press.

The rule is you are not allowed to overtake the rider doing the pacing. No trouble there, then!

It was the hardest hardest 24 minutes of my life, or whatever our time was for the 10 hilly miles.

Although I still rode long distances, I hadn’t raced for two years….I was only a third category amateur!

Bayton had already ridden a 60-mile pro road race in the morning but that merely served to warm him up for our encounter.

Colin Lewis, another legend from those days – he twice won the British road race title and rode the Tour de France - spied us in the first mile. He could see from my body language that I was already in difficulty. I glimpsed him coming down the opposite way. He plainly considered Phil to be going far too fast.  He wasn’t wrong!

“What’s Phil playing at,” Lewis said to himself.

A spectator awaited us further up the climb. This was Hampshire’s Chris Davies (CCP) who called out encouragement.

CCP is a proud member of the 300,000 miles club.  By 2010 he had ridden three times that figure – 900,000 miles!

He was still some way off that back in the 1970s when I spied him at the roadside watching Bayton pulverise me on the long slope.

“Up, up, Keith. Up, up, Phil,” CCP called out in those polite tones of his,  which would not have been out of place at the Henley Regatta.

Perfect diction.  Every word pronounced clearly, in that dark brown radio voice of his. He was a regular on local radio with his cycling news.

Bayton, who didn’t know CCP, clearly thought he was a toff and turned his head to me and called out:

“Who the …. was that.”

If it was possible to laugh at the same time as dying the death, I proved it then.
But to answer was impossible.  Gasping for air, legs burning, it was all I could do to hold the Engine’s back wheel.  By contrast, Bayton was riding on the tops, gazing at the wide and beautiful expanse of moorland.

In the downhill finish I was revving my legs off on 52 x 14 which was far too low.

“For God’s sake, Phil, ease up.!”

He looked back and  grinned.

As I recovered, bent over the handlebars, he laughed and joked:  “That was for that report you wrote in so and so, and then there was that race report in…..….”

Well, I think he was joking!