That mythical fearless, fun-loving racer with God-given talent? It was Mike Hailwood

What would — and should — have been Mike Hailwood’s 86th birthday slipped quietly by a few days ago, on April 2. Those of us who care about motor sport history, and about the men and women who shaped it, instinctively want to celebrate such dates with conventional good cheer. But we cannot. For Mike Hailwood, April 2 2026 was not a birthday at all. Rather, it was the anniversary of his birth.

He did not live long enough for birthdays to accumulate into comfortable middle age, let alone distinguished old age. Instead, his life was cut brutally short in March 1981, when he was only 40. He was driving his Rover SD1 along the A435 in Warwickshire — popping out, as it happens, to buy fish and chips, an errand so disarmingly mundane that it makes what followed feel all the more cruel — when a lorry driver executed an illegal U-turn directly across his path. The collision was catastrophic. Hailwood was fatally injured, dying in hospital two days later; his nine-year-old daughter Michelle was killed instantly; and his six-year-old son David was injured, but survived.

The lorry driver was charged, prosecuted, found guilty, and fined £100 — a sum so paltry, even 45 years ago, that it immediately passed into the folklore of injustice that so often shadows tragedy. So, now, instead of 86 candles on a cake, and a raucous evening in a Midlands pub, the kind of celebration that Hailwood so enjoyed, Mike’s family, friends, and admirers, of which there were and still are many thousands, are left with only memories.

But what memories! If one were to compile a list of the greatest motorcycle racers who ever lived, Hailwood’s name would not merely feature; it would loom. For some, he was and still is the best of the best. He won nine world championships, he scored 14 Isle of Man TT victories, and he notched up 76 grand prix wins. He was possessed of a riding style of such natural grace that contemporaries spoke of it in the language of art rather than sport. I sat next to John Surtees at the 1996 Autosport Awards dinner at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, and I remember that he described Hailwood thus: “He made the impossible look easy.” One simply cannot praise a rider — or a driver or indeed any sports star — more highly.

I do not, as a rule, write about two wheels. My Motor Sport colleague, the incomparable Mat Oxley, is your man for that. He has written many beautiful words about Hailwood in the past, and I do not intend to try to augment Oxley’s magnum opus. But I have often been struck by the fact — perhaps inevitable — that, in the shadow of such incandescent brilliance on motorcycles, Hailwood’s achievements in cars have been less frequently examined, and less widely lauded, than they should have been.

While it would be absurd to claim that the man they called Mike the Bike was as brilliant in cars as he was on motorcycles, it would be equally wrong to deny that he was, in four-wheeled machinery, a driver of high calibre. He was much more than capable. At times, indeed, he was genuinely excellent. And, lest we forget, his route to top-tier car racing was necessarily anything but conventional. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not climb the neatly structured ladder of junior four-wheeled single-seater categories, simply because he was too busy conquering the world on two wheels. Transitioning from bikes to the very different demands of cars is no trivial matter. The techniques, the instincts, and even the physical sensations are distinct and different. That Hailwood was able to make that adaptation, and compete at such a high level, speaks volumes about his versatility and his innate racing intelligence.

Consider, for example, the Le Mans 24 Hours. Endurance racing in the late 1960s was no place for dilettantes, for it was an era in which two drivers, not three, were expected to share 24 hours at the wheel. Yet in 1969 Hailwood, campaigning a Ford GT40 with David Hobbs, finished third overall à la Sarthe, and, but for a brake pipe problem, they might well have won. In a race defined by mechanical attrition, strategic nuance, and relentless physical and mental strain, Hailwood acquitted himself with real aplomb.

Or consider the 1971 Italian Grand Prix. Even now, more than half a century later, that wonderful race is spoken of in hushed tones by those who understand what Formula 1 at Monza once was: a slipstreaming battle of almost incomprehensible intensity; in the case of 1971, the first four cars crossing the finish line in a high-speed blur less than two-tenths of a second apart, Peter Gethin the winner, Ronnie Peterson second, François Cevert third, and Hailwood fourth. Yes, he was only fourth, but just 0.18sec behind the victor. It is absolutely no exaggeration to say that he could, with the tiniest shift of fortune, have won that race, for he had led it many times.

Mike was a party animal, and he’d clearly spent the whole night enjoying himself in Amsterdam… Over 75 laps he and I diced nose to tail, and at the finish he was just 1.02sec behind me

Had he done so, it would have been the little Surtees team’s sole grand prix win, and it would have gone down as one of the most remarkable victories in F1 history – even more remarkable than Gethin’s unexpected triumph that day for BRM, for BRM had won grands prix before and would win them again (well, one more, at Monaco the following year). “It was very unfortunate that Mike didn’t win grands prix for us,” Surtees told me over our prawn cocktails in 1996. “He could and should have done, with better reliability and better luck, and, had he done so, we’d have attracted more sponsorship and we’d have consequently made better progress. Mike was my best chance, but then he left for McLaren, which I understood although it made me very sad.” Even without the win, Hailwood’s Monza 1971 performance stands as a testament to his fearlessness, his racecraft, and his innate feel for competition at the very highest level.

If 1971 hinted at what Hailwood might achieve in cars, 1972 underlined it. That year, in a Surtees again, he became European Formula 2 champion — taking maximum points at Rouen, Österreichring, Mantorp Park, Salzburgring, and Hockenheim — a title that, in that era, carried serious prestige. Or, to put it another way, just look at the drivers he beat: Jean-Pierre Jaussaud (second), Patrick Depailler (third), Carlos Reutemann (fourth), Niki Lauda (fifth), Jody Scheckter (eighth), and many more. In the 1970s F2 was a fiercely competitive proving ground populated by drivers of tremendous talent, many of them either already established in F1 or on the cusp of breaking into it. To win that championship was to announce oneself as a driver of genuine substance. And, if that were not enough, that same year, 1972, Hailwood also finished second in the Tasman Series, in a Surtees-Chevy. Again, he did not merely participate; he excelled.

There were signs, too, of something greater than speed: his truly admirable character. At Kyalami in 1973, during the South African Grand Prix, his Surtees and Clay Regazzoni’s BRM collided, which coming-together triggered a nasty fire. Hailwood’s race overalls were set ablaze, but, even so, once he had been doused by an extinguisher-wielding marshal, he ran back into the inferno and helped pull the unconscious Regazzoni out of it, thereby saving his life. For that act of extraordinary courage he was rightly awarded the George Medal, one of the UK’s highest civilian honours for bravery.

It is worth pausing here, just briefly, to reflect on what that says about Hailwood the man. Many drivers of that period were brave — almost by definition, they had to be — but not all of them were selfless. Hailwood was very definitely both.

His F1 record, while not glittering in the statistical sense, contains moments of genuine distinction. He stood on podiums twice in world championship-status grands prix — second at Monza in 1972 and third at Kyalami in 1974 — and once more in a non-championship F1 race: second in the Brands Hatch Race of Champions in 1972. All three podium appearances were well earned. At Brands in 1972 his Surtees’ front wing crossed the finish line just 3.4sec behind the rear wing of Emerson Fittipaldi’s winning Lotus. At Monza on race day he was beaten only by Fittipaldi and Lotus, that season’s all-conquering driver-car combo. And at Kyalami in 1974, having qualified only 12th, he hurled his McLaren through the field to a remarkable third-place finish.

That season, 1974, having spent three years with lowly Surtees — achieving that humble, underfunded, and often troubled team’s best ever results — he wangled his way into a third McLaren, where he would be partnered by two F1 world champions, Denny Hulme and Emerson Fittipaldi. Emerson, a driver of supreme intelligence and sensitivity, was not then and is not now given to idle praise. Yet, then and now, he thought very highly of Hailwood. Here is what he told me when I was ghost-writing his 2014 autobiography, Emmo: a Racer’s Soul.

“I’d qualified third for that race [the 1974 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort], behind the Ferraris of Niki Lauda and Clay Regazzoni, and as usual I went to bed early the night before the race. I slept well — a good, solid eight hours — and, after breakfast on race-day morning, I walked out through the lobby of the Zandvoort Hotel, and to my astonishment I met Mike Hailwood, my McLaren team-mate, coming in. Mike was a party animal, and he’d clearly spent the whole night enjoying himself in Amsterdam.

“He’d qualified fourth — and, as we lined up next to each other on the grid that afternoon, I remember thinking to myself, ‘There’s no way Mike is going to be able to race well today because he must still be shattered from last night.’ But Mike was a one-off. Over 75 laps he and I diced nose to tail, and at the finish he was just 1.02sec behind me.

“Mike was a legend — an utterly brilliant motorcyclist and extremely good in cars, too. Just as important, he was a no-nonsense good-time true-Brit guy, too.”

Fittipaldi’s last sentence says a lot. Hailwood was extremely well liked. That, in itself, was not unusual in F1 50-odd years ago, for many drivers were entertainingly personable outside the cockpit. But Mike inspired something warmer, something closer to affection, perhaps even love. He was known for his modesty, his friendliness, his good humour, his lack of pretension, and his appetite for having fun. He carried himself not like a nine-time world champion, but like a man called Mike, the four words that my old mucker, the late Christopher Hilton, chose as the title of his excellent 1992 biography. It is perhaps no surprise that Hailwood got on particularly well with James Hunt, a kindred spirit when it came to painting towns red.

One can, if one wishes, play the counterfactual game. What might Hailwood have achieved in F1 had he committed himself fully and earlier to a career in cars? Could he have been a grand prix winner? Yes, certainly, for at Monza in 1971 he all but was. A world championship contender? It is an unanswerable question, and perhaps not a particularly useful one. Motor sport history is littered with what-ifs, and they rarely illuminate as much as we might hope.

In the end his story resists neat categorisation. What we can say without fear of contradiction is that, whether on two wheels or four, he was a racer, in the purest sense of the word. The machinery mattered less to him than the act of racing itself – the interplay of speed, skill, judgement, and nerve. On two wheels he expressed that gift with unmatched brilliance. On four, he articulated it differently, but no less authentically.