Image was always important for Sheene, and his greatest role model was Bill Ivy, whom he had known and admired since childhood, as he admitted in an interview for Duke Video in 1993. ‘I suppose one of the biggest influences when I’d just started racing was Bill Ivy because [he] used to race for my dad and was a good mate of mine and I loved his lifestyle. I mean, he was always surrounded by crumpet, all young ladies. I suppose I sort of modelled myself on Bill in that he always used to dress the way he pleased and his lifestyle was a lot of fun, and the woman side of it was the bit I envied the most.’ Sheene’s former rival Mick Grant witnessed Barry’s dealings with the media first-hand and reckoned he played up this playboy image. ‘He was just very good with the media. He was probably better with the media than he was at riding, and he was okay at riding.’
Anything Barry did to improve his own personal standing and image usually seemed to have a positive effect on motorcycle racing in general. He might have had to get rid of the saucy patches he wore on his leathers (‘Happiness is a tight pussy’; ‘I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse’) once he became famous, but he was still capable of attracting attention to himself as a rider. White leathers when most others wore black, the colourful Donald Duck motif on the helmet, the gimmick of making a victory V sign whenever he won a race (which signified victory to the spectators while appearing as something very different to the riders behind him), a caravan to take girls back to rather than an oil-stained van – all these things helped Barry’s personal pulling power as well as the overall image of the sport.
The caravan was introduced during the 1971 season, and while Sheene himself claimed to have bought it on hire purchase, his brother-in-law Paul Smart said that Barry ‘blew half his money on it’. However it was paid for, it was money well spent, as Smart explained: ‘The only thing he was world champion at was sex. In every country, there used to be a hell of a competition for the girls in the paddock. Barry won, of course. The thing is, he’d never give up. He could have three blow-outs but he’d just keep going until he scored. The caravan body eventually fell off the chassis.’ Years later, Sheene admitted this to me, and the caravan falling apart led to another problem, as he explained. ‘As I was welding [the chassis] I lost the St Christopher my mum and dad had given me for luck. At the very next race [the 1972 Imola GP], my bike seized, threw me up the road and punctured my stomach, so my mum and dad bought me another St Christopher.’
The more polished Barry’s image became, the more ‘crumpet’ he could pull. Sheene’s first serious girlfriend was Lesley Shepherd, whom he met in 1967 when he was just 17. They dated for the next seven years but split in 1974 after a relationship which, by Barry’s own admission, was not quite monogamous. He openly confessed to seeing other girls during his foreign travels of the period, some of whom he’d met on the dancefloor. Like most youngsters who lived through the seventies, Barry Sheene loved his disco dancing. It wasn’t so much for the physical benefits that could be gained from all that strutting under a sparkling glitter ball as the fact that it was an easy way to meet girls – and when it came to that Sheene never missed a trick. When he was recuperating from injuries sustained at Mallory Park and aggravated later at Cadwell Park in 1975, the biggest frustration for Sheene wasn’t his inability to ride a bike, it was not being able to dance: ‘[My] inability to get on that dancefloor made me even more determined to get back to peak fitness as quickly as was humanly possible.’
As usual, Sheene only wanted the best and most exclusive when it came to nightclubs, and his annual membership of Tramp near Trafalgar Square was, as far as he was concerned, £30 well spent. There he could mix with fellow celebrities and, naturally, a bevy of gorgeous models. Barry was never shy about boasting of his female conquests, once professing to be every bit George Best’s equal when it came to hitting it off with top models – and in the seventies when he was at his peak, keeping up with Best was no mean feat. The evidence would certainly seem to support Barry’s claim when one considers that it wasn’t unusual for him to have three women on the go at any one time; he often had to juggle them around to avoid potentially embarrassing double-bookings on the same night. ‘As far as women went,’ he said, ‘I was the man for all seasons. A different girl each night was my regular pattern. There were even weeks when I would be saying goodbye to one young lady, immediately chatting another up on the phone and eyeing the clock to see how soon the third would be arriving.’ Of course, sometimes the double-bookings were intentional. ‘I had tried everything that I had read about and a whole lot more besides. Two women sharing my bed was old hat as far as I was concerned.’ Even when he was fit enough to be at a race track rather than recuperating from injury, Sheene, unlike many other top sportsmen, refused to observe the energy-saving, no-sex rule on the evening or morning before an event. If Barry felt like ‘getting his leg over’, an inconvenience like a motorcycle race wasn’t going to stop him.
During his recovery period in 1975, Sheene found that he had a lot of spare time on his hands, and the most natural way he could think of to fill it was to chase girls. The fact that at the time he was sharing the London home of his great friend and aristocratic socialite Piers Weld Forrester, who was probably most famous for his association with Princess Anne before her marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, made for rich pickings on the female front. Forrester and Sheene received countless invitations to high-society parties and Sheene confessed that the women he met were major contributors to his recuperation process. ‘My favourite part of the rehabilitation process was trying to bed as many women as possible,’ he said. Chas Mortimer, himself the product of a public-school education, admired the way Sheene was able to break down social barriers and become accepted by the aristocracy. ‘There were quite a few people from the aristocracy in those days who used to be associated with racing. Barry would always be up at the Piers Forrester parties in London and he was a great one for hob-nobbing with the landed gentry, and you know what the landed gentry are like when they meet a cockney who appeals to them. All of a sudden, like Michael Caine in the film world, you become socially acceptable, whereas in other spheres of life cockney-ism might not be acceptable for them. Motorcycling tended to be a working-man’s sport and car racing tended to be the landed gentry’s kind of sport. Barry was able to transcend the social barriers, which are very strong in the UK, stronger than anywhere else in the world probably.’
Forrester’s death during a minor bike race at Brands Hatch in 1977 devastated Barry; it was yet another reminder of how dangerous motorcycle racing was in the seventies. According to Mortimer, the dangers of the sport even affected how close some riders got to one another. ‘Barry and I have always got on quite well together, but we were never the best of buddies. We were from the same generation and it was difficult in those days because a lot of people were getting killed and you didn’t want to make too much of a mate of someone in case they got wiped out.’
During the same recovery period, Barry also treated himself to the ultimate status symbol: a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow complete with personalized registration plate, 4 BSR. Racing rival Phil Read already had one, which might have been reason enough for Sheene to follow suit, but he always claimed he was swayed by Rolls Royce’s reputation for reliability than by the status-symbol trip. The only probable reason Barry didn’t buy a Roller any earlier than he did was because he’d lost his driving licence for 18 months