Arthur Wheeler (motorcyclist)
Arthur Frederick Wheeler (August 5, 1916 – June 16, 2001) was a Grand Prix motorcycle road racer. Wheeler gained a reputation as one of the top privateer racers on the Grand Prix circuit.
Born in Epsom, Surrey, Wheeler left school at the age of 15 to be an apprentice electrician and engineer. He began his competitive motorcycling career campaigning a Velocette in grass track racing. Opening a motorcycle shop in 1937, he used his profits to enable his motorcycle racing career. When World War II started, Wheeler's engineering skills led him to being chosen to work alongside Barnes Wallis in developing the bouncing bomb.
After the war, his motorcycle business boomed, allowing him to undertake a racing career on the Grand Prix racing circuit on the European continent. Wheeler won the 1954 250cc Nations Grand Prix at Monza after the dominant NSU factory racing team withdrew from the race. He was a five-time winner of the North West 200 race in Northern Ireland and won the Leinster 200 at least twice. His best season was aboard a Moto Guzzi in 1962, when he won the 250cc Argentine Grand Prix and had a fourth place finish in the Isle of Man Lightweight TT, finishing in third place in the 250cc world championship behind Jim Redman and Bob McIntyre. At the end of that year he retired at the age of 46.
Wheeler continued to develop the long outdated Moto Guzzi (which ceased production around 1953) all through his career, using home built streamlined "dustbin" and "dolphin" fairings and along with Ken Sprayson at Renolds Frames he developed an alloy spine frame with swinging arm rear suspension and oil bearing top tube. Wheeler was a close friend with many of the Guzzi factory riders, and it was through Fergus Anderson that he acquired his first Guzzi from the factory, a pre-war Albatross 250cc, which was to be developed through the 1950s to Gambalunghino spec and beyond. After his win at the Nations Grand Prix it was Moto Guzzi factory rider Enrico Lorenzetti that gave Wheeler his stock of factory spare parts, which enabled him to campaign the Guzzi's long after the official factory team had disbanded.
Read more about Arthur Wheeler (motorcyclist): Motorcycle Grand Prix Results
Famous quotes containing the words arthur and/or wheeler:
“The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
“It ain’t often that a man’s reputashun outlasts his munny.”
—Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818–1885)