Roger McCleery's racing legacy: From motorcycle champion to motorsport commentator
After a few cranks, the V6 engine in the blood-red Alfa Romeo splutters to life, angry at being woken so quickly from its slumber in the garage of an East Rand collector. It simmers down to a grumpy rumble as if throwing out the challenge: Okay! Who wants to race?
As he watches and listens, there’s a rapt schoolboy-like smile on the face of Roger McCleery which, at 90, just proves the truism that once a petrolhead, always a petrolhead. But there’s more than a trace of parental pride there, too, because this 3.0 litre GTV is McCleery’s baby.
It was his brainwave, back in the early 1980s, to take the specially race-modified engine and stick it into a limited production run of 210 of the cars in South Africa, to make it eligible for saloon car racing. In the process, though, it became world-renowned and sought after as a classic.
“In those days, South Africa was a world leader in this sort of thing – because we had the vision, the engineering ability and we weren’t scared to do something no one else was doing.”
The Alfa was one in an array of unique-to-SA Fords, Chevs, Datsuns (later Nissans) and BMWs which set the local racetracks alight and the hearts of motor racing fans pounding.
McCleery has lived to see the GTV 3.0 toasted by classic car aficionados and fetch prices of upward of a R1 million locally… and more overseas. But that is only the tip of a very massive automotive iceberg for the man who, at various stages in his long career with wheeled transport, has been known as “Mr Motor Cycle” or even “Mr Microphone” after a long spell as the country’s top motorsport commentator.
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It’s all long way from the small town of Bangor in Northern Ireland where McCleery was born. His father, an electrician and later a bomb aiming instructor in the SA Air Force during WWII, brought the family out to SA just before war broke out in 1939, when Roger was just five.
Growing up in Cape Town, the young Roger became addicted to motorbikes and perched precariously atop a skinny, small screaming bike, adorned in leathers and goggles, made a name for himself on local circuits, picking up six Western Province Motor Cycle Championships.
“When I heard that Honda was coming to South Africa, I knew I had to be part of it,” he said, recalling that, back in the early ’60s, the Japanese bike maker had established a global reputation as a giant killer with its tiny, high-revving bikes which were masterpieces of engineering.
Establishing the Honda name, through importers Midmacor, meant “travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometres around the country in my Valiant”, he recalls, adding “most of the time it was footflat…”
Later, he moved from Honda to Alfa Romeo and then to Nissan, before setting up his own PR and marketing company working out of his home in Fairlands, Johannesburg.
All the while, though, his motor mouth was to be heard commentating at track events, then on radio and later television, where he was involved in the first televised SA Grand Prix.
His commentating work took him around the world, too, and as a motorsport writer he got to meet some of history’s racing legends, both on two wheels and on four. He chuckles now at the memory of how he ruined a then young Jackie Stewart’s commentating debut by pointing out to him that SA’s Jody Schekter had actually won the race he was calling – and not finished second. Stewart was mortified.
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So, would you say then that Schekter – SA’s first Formula One champion – was the best drive this country has produced?
“You know, he was brilliant, but when I asked him once, he said his brother Ian was quicker… but that he was luckier!”
Having been in cars with the legendary track and rally ace Sarel van der Merwe – and witnessed vehicles defying the laws of physics under his hands – McCleery has to admit “the man was, and is, a genius…”
When it comes to singling out the best motor racing driver of all time, McCleery has to think for a bit. He’s interviewed them all – from Juan Manuel Fangio to Michael Schumacher to Ayrton Senna – but he says “Senna would have to be the best…”
He was watching on TV when Senna’s Williams left the track at the Tamburello corner of the Imola circuit during the San Marino Grand Prix on 1 May 1994.
“When I saw them lifting him out of the wreckage, I said to the others: ‘He’s gone.’”
McCleery acknowledges the danger is part and parcel of motorsport, although that never deterred him in his racing days – and he was only too delighted when his son Grant followed in his tyre tracks. Grant became the first South African to win championships on two wheels and on four and his legendary car control even drew approving comments from a European F1 driver brought out to SA for the launch of the then Opel OPC performance model.
“That man can drive!” the F1 driver said after McCleery Jnr bested his time on a handling circuit.
These days, the older McCleery enjoys the achievements of his children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. He still does a radio programme on motoring on Radio Today and keeps up to date with news and world events.
He’s thankful to have had a full life. “We got paid to travel all over the world!” he says.
He still drives himself around – on four wheels, not two.
“These days, I have to have an automatic gearbox, though… and a small car.”
Surrendering gracefully the things of youth is easier when you’re into your 10th decade of a very full life.
