Triples Who's Who

Triples Who's Who
Honorary Members & Famous Faces

Fred Swift

Fred Swift worked in Experimental at Triumph, fettling works-racing Bonnevilles, including John Hartle's 1967 TT winner, before becoming embroiled in preparing and occasionally test riding the North-framed Triples.
Super-quick stripdowns were a Fred Swift speciality. When Percy Tait had an exploratory outing on a production racing T150 in mid-1969 at Brands Hatch, it was found in practice that his gearing was far too high for him to stay with the pack of twins.

Fred changed the gearbox sprocket in the hour available before the race, an extraordinary achievement given the complexity of this particular operation on the Triple.

At Daytona in 1970, he actually rebuilt David Aldana's engine on the morning of the race. Aldana's BSA had holed a piston in the final morning's practice session, and Swift rebuilt the top end with a new barrel while the metal was still almost too hot to touch. Fred became Paul Smart's regular mechanic, and the two men have remained good friends. Fred remembers that in Florida in 1970 a long swinging arm was tried on Mike Hailwood's BSA but the former champion said he couldn't detect any difference in handling. 'But his lap times were worse, so we knew it was not an improvement. Hailwood was so consistent that you could learn as much from checking his times as by talking to him. Gary Nixon was very similar,' Fred recalled. He moved on to Kitts Green after the Meriden closure, to get involved in NVT's rotary engine project for seventeen years, until being made redundant by Norton's Shenstone factory in 1990.

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Ron Barrett