Barnham racer Neville Busson back on track with championship win after 42 years

Motorbikes have always been a part of Neville Busson’s life and in his blood.

Growing up in Accrington, Lancashire, before moving with his parents ‘down South’ to Woolpit when he was 10, he said his dad was his inspiration that lit his passion for the sport.

“When I was a kid, dad always had bikes. He had such an interest in racing and even when I was very young I would be out there tinkering with them,” he said.

“I got the chance to go racing at about 17 or 18, I thought I would have a go at it and took my road bike to my first race.

“Eventually, I ended up selling that for a MT125 racing bike from John Banks Honda and it just went from there.”

That was 1979, Neville said, but what he did not realise back then was that at the age of 20 and only in his second full racing season he would win the Yamaha Marlbro Clubmans Championship.

He said: “In 1980, it was sponsored by the Daily Express and one of the biggest national championships in the country at the time.”

Circuits included Brands Hatch and his beloved Snetterton, before he took overall victory at Silverstone.

But in 1983, Neville gave up racing to start a family.

He moved to Barnham with his then wife, working at Jeyes, in Thetford, and had three children.

Though he said he continued to have bikes, he said he never thought about getting back on the race track.

Fast forward 34 years – Cadwell Park circuit, Lincolnshire, 2017.

Neville was with his friend, Richard Rudling, from Thetford, and was given the chance to ride a Pro-AM bike.

“I never really pined for the racing side of it for all those years, but after that ride I had a taste for it and was well and truly bitten by the bug again.”

The pair bought a Honda MT125R, basically the same model that Neville, now in his late 50s, had raced more than three decades before and started to compete in the Classic Racing Motorcycle Club’s (CRMC) Post Classic 125 class.

Neville’s championship volunteer race team around the seven circuits includes Richard and his wife and son, Sarah and Simon, as well as Richard’s brother Ian.

And with Neville, now 62, also racing while working 12-hour shifts as an engineer at British Sugar, in Bury St Edmunds, it has not been easy.

He said: “It has been very hard work at times, especially if we have a long journey to say Pembrey in Wales after work.

“When we raced at Anglesey this year we didn’t get away from there until about 6pm and then we had a six or seven hour drive back due to traffic.

“But the support I get from the team is so good. It would be virtually impossible without them, they are such a massive help.”

And this year the work well and truly paid off as Neville finished a 42-year wait for another championship by clinching the title at Snetterton Circuit.

“In some ways it felt better this time around, I think I was more in a position to enjoy it,” he said.

“When you are young you are always aiming for something more, the next step if you like, but I am too old for all that these days.

“This has been what we set out to try an achieve when we got back into this.

“When I was young I was thinking of the next big thing – you win a club championship, then you want a national one and a European one.

“But this time around I have life experience to really enjoy this one a lot more.”

But this victory will not see Neville leave the track again.

He said: “I would like to do the championship again next year, obviously I am getting older, so we will try to do most of the rounds.

“I still really really enjoy it, when you are racing it is an incredible buzz and that freedom on a circuit racing a bike, there is no other feeling like it and I want to keep having that.”