Stuart Barker - Barry Sheene 1950–2003 - The Biography

Despite his attachment to Stephanie, Barry’s eye for the ladies did not go unnoticed by the organizers of the 1977 Miss World competition. In an era when the contest was a worldwide must-see television event, Barry was asked to cast his expert eye over the contestants. After Mary Stavin (who would later date the aforementioned George Best) won the event, the press asked Barry to dance with her while they took some pictures. Stephanie at that point promptly left the building, leading observers to believe she was in a jealous rage and had stormed out on Barry. According to Sheene, however, Steph was just tired of all the media attention and had decided to leave for a bit of peace and quiet. The press didn’t buy it, but either way it meant more mainstream publicity for Barry as most major newspapers ran a story on the incident the following day.

As infatuated as Sheene was with Steph, and as much as he claimed to have ‘retired’ from his sexually rapacious lifestyle, he still found it impossible to let go of his bachelor status when push came to shove in 1976. Speaking to Thames Video in 1990 for The Barry Sheene Story , he explained, ‘We were due to get married in 1976 and everything was planned. We were living in Putney, and three days before we were due to get married I was lying in bed that night and I thought, “I can’t get married. I’m scared to death of getting married, I really can’t.” I said to Steph, “Look, I can’t get married. I can’t do it. I love you, I adore you, you’re the best thing since sliced bread, but I don’t want to get married.” Obviously for Steph it was quite upsetting, you know, because she thought, “Oh, Christ, what’s going to happen now? I’ve split up with my husband, got a divorce, and now he doesn’t want to marry me.” You know, why wouldn’t I want to marry her? Obviously [it looked like I] didn’t want to be with her but that wasn’t the truth, I was just scared to death of getting married. So it was a bit of an uneasy period for the next couple of months.’

Sheene did remarkably well to keep this story from the press at the time; it would have been the celebrity marriage of the year had he been able to go through with it. But he still had Steph to deal with in what must have been an uncomfortable situation. ‘Steph took it really fantastically well,’ Sheene continued, ‘there’s no two ways about that, and so after a few years it was all forgotten and we agreed to get married when we wanted children. At the end of 1983 we were talking, and I always intended to give up racing at the end of 1985, so I said, “What we should do is, we could get married now, start to try and have children, that’d be really nice.” So we organized to get married on 16 February 1984 and then we started [trying to have children]. Steph had gone off the pill sort of three months beforehand, and we thought, “Right, we’ll start trying for kids now,” and the very first time we did it without protection she fell pregnant and Sidonie was born nine months and three days after we got married.’

After Sheene fell for Stephanie, a new passion for flying helicopters filled the women-chasing void. He might not have been any good at school, but Barry displayed his potential for learning by sitting and passing his helicopter pilot’s licence with ease and in record time – just three weeks. The instructors at the flying school said it couldn’t be done in that timeframe, but Sheene insisted it had to be because that was all the time his hectic schedule would allow. Barry passed his final exam on the very last day of his three-week course in the winter of 1980–81.

Today, many motorcycle racers – Mick Doohan and Jim Moodie, to name just a couple – fly helicopters, but back in 1981 Sheene was, as usual, the first. For anyone used to handling a motorcycle at 180mph, learning the physical aspects of flying helicopters appears to be relatively easy, but what was outstanding about Sheene getting his licence was that he managed to apply himself to studying for and passing all the written examinations. Just as he had demonstrated with languages, Sheene proved once again that it wasn’t a lack of aptitude for learning that had kept him back at school, it was simply because he didn’t want to be there. The late Steve Hislop, eleven times TT winner and twice British Superbike champion cast some light on the scale of Sheene’s achievement. ‘You have to be very committed with your studying if you want to fly a helicopter as you have to sit exams in air law, navigation, meteorology and all sorts of technical stuff like flight performance, planning and human performance. And you also have to type-rate for different kinds of helicopters [like passing another driving test every time you change car]. I know that Barry has flown Enstroms, Jet Rangers, Agustas and Hughes 500s, so he would have needed to type-rate for each one.’ Just months after being interviewed for this book Steve Hislop was tragically killed when the helicopter he was piloting crashed near his home town of Hawick on July 30, 2003.

Sheene had previously owned a Piper Aztec aeroplane, a light, twin-engined six-seater which he often hired out for charter work to earn some extra cash, but he sold it in 1982. Having found light aeroplanes unpractical for flying to race tracks where there is not always enough room to land, Sheene bought himself an Enstrom 280 Turbo three-seater helicopter capable of almost 120mph. He singlehandedly set the trend for turning up at bike meetings from the air, thus avoiding the queues, cutting down on travel time and further enhancing his image while he was at it. There was another practical side to buying a helicopter, as Sheene explained to Thames Video. ‘I spent money on cars, which was a total waste of bloody time. At one time I had a bloody Rolls Royce, a 500 Mercedes, a 928 Porsche. I walked outside one day and thought, “What on earth do I want this for?” So by the next day I’d got rid of two of them and I bought a helicopter. The helicopter was something that enabled me to do five or six things in a day, and it was productive because in a week I’d be doing 30 things that I got paid for so it was something that earned itself a living.’

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