The King’s Lynn incident wasn’t the only occasion when Barry found himself with a spot of car trouble. He very nearly drowned after some hire-car antics in Italy in 1974 went overboard – quite literally. Sheene was fooling around in the Fiat with fellow racers Kenny Roberts and Gene Romero, experimenting with a somewhat unorthodox driving method: Roberts took the wheel, Romero operated the foot pedals and Sheene applied liberal and erratic doses of handbrake at his leisure. The result was predictable, even if the location was a little unusual: the trio ended up in a canal, the Fiat turned upside down and sinking fast. Romero got out relatively easily but Barry was temporarily snagged up in the very handbrake he had so recently been abusing. He, too, eventually got out, but he still had to rescue Roberts who was calling for help, trapped in the quickly submerging vehicle.
On another occasion, again in Imola, Sheene parked his hire car in the town square unaware that the market was due to take place the following morning. When he returned to the car he found stalls all around it, one in particular utilizing the bonnet. Oblivious to the jeers of the traders who were convinced that Sheene was going nowhere until the market was over, Barry simply climbed into the car, floored the accelerator and smashed through the stalls. Dumbfounded pedestrians could well have been forgiven for thinking a James Bond movie was being filmed in their home town. After all, the two did have a certain number in common.
Sheene’s laddish behaviour might have continued unchecked, but his womanizing days came to an abrupt end in late 1975 when he met Stephanie McLean, a 22-year-old glamour model, former Playboy bunny girl and star of the classic Old Spice surfing advert. Stephanie was at the time married to top glamour photographer Clive McLean, with whom she had a five-year-old son, Roman. Such was Sheene’s standing as a national celebrity in early 1976 that a picture of him stepping out on town with Stephanie made the front page of the Sun – a somewhat dubious honour reserved for ‘class A’ celebrities and a sure sign that Barry was now a household name, in Britain at least.
Barry first met Stephanie at Tramp while he was still on crutches. She had seen the Thames Television documentary surrounding his Daytona crash and asked to borrow his leathers for an October modelling assignment which Sheene himself attended. He was instantly smitten with Stephanie and appeared to give up his womanizing almost overnight, even if such a drastic change of lifestyle threatened his image. ‘I couldn’t give a monkeys about the bachelor playboy image being ruined,’ he said. ‘The image was only there because that’s what I was like.’ Sheene later admitted that settling down to a one-woman relationship wasn’t as difficult as he thought, although his very words seemed tinted with an air of nostalgia for good times past. ‘With a massive list of conquests behind me, I knew I had completed all the running around I had ever wanted,’ he said. ‘Since settling down to a steady relationship with Steph, I have never once yearned for those wild times: the days of the paddock groupies; the passionate notes waiting for me when I returned to hotels after a race; the women who simply wanted to experience sex with a celebrity. All that is behind me now.’
Meeting Steph might have marked the end of Sheene’s direct involvement with other women, but it certainly didn’t stop other girls swooning over him, or even rowing over him. At Cadwell Park in 1976, two girls had a stand-up fight outside Barry’s caravan as they fought to get near him for his autograph, and on another occasion a girl approached Barry wielding a pair of scissors in a desperate attempt to snatch a lock of his hair. It was the kind of behaviour previously reserved for rock stars, and it prompted the media to refer to Sheene as a rock star on a bike.
Barry certainly lived up to the tag in 1979 while staying in a five-star hotel before that year’s French Grand Prix. Trying to get a good night’s sleep before the race, Barry became increasingly annoyed with the band playing at full volume downstairs. When a phone call to the manager had no effect, in protest Barry emptied the contents of his mini-bar over the balcony near where the band was playing, but again to no avail. When another call to the manager failed to subdue the noise, Sheene performed the classic rock star attention-grabber: the 26-inch colour television was lobbed out of the window and it shattered into a million pieces, loudly enough to be heard over and above the offending band. They stopped playing straight away and Barry got his peaceful night’s sleep. In fact, he got more than that. Upon returning to the hotel after the race, he found that a new television had been placed in the room along with an ice bucket and two bottles of champagne by way of apology on the management’s behalf for permitting so much noise at the dance.
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