Time tends to compress ones memory so it seems strange to think that it was nearly 40 years ago (August 1986) that the last motorcycle grand prix race featured a push start. The above photo, from 1977, featuring all of the great names of the era, illustrates how frantic the process was and also hints at how dangerous it was, which is one of the main reasons why the practice was abandoned. This is not to say that the clutch starts that replaced the practice is a LOT safer, heck, we’ve seen plenty of start line dramas, haven’t we?
Any practice that involves slow-moving motorcycles and fast-moving motorcycles in close proximity is going to have elements of danger, that is very clear. Wayne Gardner experienced such a drama himself in 1986 when his notoriously hard to start NSR500 bogged down at the start and he was clipped by a rider who’d got a screamer of start from the back row. The bike hit Wayne’s leg and the resulting knee injury put him on the sidelines for a month, so the days of the push start were certainly numbered.
That said, the practice had its fans as well as its detractors. Riders who seemed to have the magic touch when it came to push starts absolutely loved it as a good start could gain you a few seconds on the pack before you even got to the first corner. One such rider was Wil Hartog, the “White Giant”. This Dutch rider rode an RG500 Suzuki and, if he was on the grid, you could be pretty sure that he’d be first into turn one. Unfortunately for Wil, despite being very talented and having excellent machinery, he was also well over 6 feet tall and pretty beefy to boot. His early advantage at the start was usually eaten up pretty quickly once the entrants who had better power-to-weight ratios got moving.
I’m fortunate that much of my early days of watching road racing saw push starts being the norm. Some of the detractors of the process used to say that it was an unfair system because a rider who could start well could easily beat a better rider whose starts weren’t as good. This was, in the immortal words of Colonel Sherman Potter, horse hockey. It was part of the game and part of racing. Do it right and you had an advantage, do it badly and it was just too bad.
There were several preferred methods of doing the push start. Most common was the one where the rider would stand on the left-hand side of the bike and then, when the flag dropped, he would push the bike forward until it had enough momentum, dump the clutch and fire the engine (hopefully). Once the engine fired, he would swing his leg over the seat and race away.
If you were super confident of your ignition, your engine’s mixture and your technique (and a million other variable factors) you could sit on the bike and, when the flag dropped, you could “paddle” a few steps until the bike fired and then you’d be away. This led to faster starts but could also leave you stranded if the bike didn’t fire, there was, after all, a limit to how fast you could paddle.
My memory is a little vague (mostly) but I recall that it was only the racing bike races where the riders had to do a push start, though I THINK I recall some production and superbike races where the practice persisted. In retrospect I certainly feel sorry for riders who had to push start Kawasaki 900s and Honda 750s.
Organisers realised this and replaced the starting system for the big bikes with what became known as “Kick or Electric Start” races. At the end of the warm-up lap the bikes would roll down to their grid position and the engines would be turned off. At the drop of the flag riders could either kick start or electric start their bikes. So the starts became, in effect, a clutch start race.
The Castrol Six Hour Race, for example, was one where this was the requirement. In this case it was a little different. The bikes, fuel tanks topped off to the tippy, tippy top, were pushed out of the pits by a member of the pit crew and placed in position for the Le Mans start. The tank would be covered again by an icy blanket to try and prevent evaporation of fuel during the drawn-out prelude to the race and, when the flag dropped, the riders would run across the track, hop on, turn on the ignition, hit the button and it was go. This procedure led to some funny incidents.
For a start, any Ducati rider was at an immediate disadvantage because the 900SS only had kick starts so it was a common sight to see a Ducati that had qualified well up on the grid, staggering away from the start well down in the pack which was made up of Japanese bikes that all had electric starts.
However, this did not always happen. Famously, in the 1979 Six Hour, Kiwi rider, Graeme Crosby, who had done a 57.7 to equal Dennis Neill’s pole time bogged the start and had to fight his way back up through the pack. At the first pit stop, when asked what had happened at the start, Croz fessed up to not having turned the ignition on.
Scrutineers were present on the grid and would randomly go to a bike and press the electric start button just to make sure that the ignition was “off”. This also happened at regular race meetings where KOE starts were not allowed. If an engine DID fire up when the button was pressed, the offending rider would be ushered to the back of the grid!
While push starts were a exciting part of the racing during this time, in the end, the need for safety outweighed the tradition of the rider having to do all the work and now the whole thing seems just like a quaint anachronism.