My Passion With Shelli Cooper

Five years ago I had never seen a racing sidecar outfit. Like most people, sidecars to me meant Wallace and Gromit.

My great-granddad and my granddad both had motorbike and sidecars and we have the obligatory photographs of the whole family piled on to it, including the dog. But no, this is different. Very different in fact.

My first introduction to this strange and wonderful sport was when I went to a race meeting with my friend, Nick. He raced classic sidecars and then Formula 1 sidecars professionally in his younger days and wanted to show me what he was talking about when he told me his tales.

My first impression of the 1970s purpose-built racing machine he pointed out to me in the paddock was a very low motorbike with a tea tray on the side, the whole thing only three inches off the floor.

It got more alarming when he asked his friend and world class sidecar passenger Andy ‘Bludge’ Smith to show me the positions the passengers adopt in order to stop the machine from turning over when racing round corners. Well, I had always been quite supple but my reaction to the contortions I was supposed to achieve was “that’s not humanly possible”.

Half an hour later we were trackside and I was watching these bizarre machines and their acrobatic riders and passengers racing hell for leather down the back straight at 145 miles per hour. My reaction: “They are nutters – all of them.”

Somehow, a year later, Nick had become my fiancé and we had bought a 1972 classic racing machine and entered it into the Classic Racing Motorcycle Club’s sidecar championship under the On the Edge Racing category.

We finished seventh in our first year, the highest placed novices.

Last year, our third season, we achieved a third in the European Vintage Cup and, with some financial help from Roger Collett, our marvellous sponsor, are planning to race in Denmark this year.

Sidecar racing is the most fantastic sport both to participate in and to watch.

The machines race extremely closely: being three times as wide as a race bike they often head into corners two and three abreast, braking so late that you think they’ll never get round the bend.

Passengers lean over the back of the driver through right hand bends but for left handers slide their bottoms out in front of the chair wheel and down onto the tarmac – at 140 mph.

And the machines slide as the drivers drift the back ends round to get the best exit speed.

As Nick says: “It’s not ballroom dancing, with drivers being prepared to ‘trade paint’ in order to hold track position.”

I have made some of the best friends I have through racing. I can’t imagine life without it or them.