Clive Padgett & The Padgett’s Racing Story

Sixty-odd years, three generations, a fairytale clean sweep and more legends through the door than most factory teams manage in a lifetime. We met Clive Padgett at the TT this week. Here’s the story of the most quietly remarkable family in road racing.

There’s a bloke who wanders the TT paddock who’s had Hailwood, Read, Hislop, McGuinness, Hutchinson and Anstey ride under his name, and you’d walk straight past him if you didn’t know. No swagger, no entourage, no PR minder hovering. Just Clive Padgett, leaning on a van, happy to talk bikes with anyone who stops. The man who’s been called the nicest in the paddock, and after meeting him this week, we’re not about to argue.

It started with a shop in Batley

Padgett’s wasn’t born on a racetrack. It was born behind a counter. Peter Padgett and his brother Don set the business up in Batley, West Yorkshire, back in 1958, starting out as a Yamaha dealership. Honda followed in 1960, Suzuki in 1963. The shop came first, the racing came out of it, and that order of things has never really changed. For decades the team was funded by the shop the racing had spawned from, not the other way round.

One detail tells you everything about how seriously they took it: in 1993, working with Honda Japan, they set up the first and only HRC Service Shop outside Japan. A family motorcycle business in West Yorkshire, trusted by Honda Racing Corporation to do work nobody else on the planet was allowed to. That’s not a sticker on the fairing. That’s earned.

Riders first, results second – and the results came anyway

The racing started in the 1960s, sponsoring riders on the short circuits and the roads. The first TT podium landed in 1971, Welshman Gordon Pantall second in the Junior. By the early 70s the names getting on Padgett’s machinery were proper heavyweights. Eventual seven-time TT winner Mick Grant took a pair of podiums in 1972, and Phil Read gave the team its first TT victory the same year in the Lightweight race.

Then the family’s focus turned inward, to Peter’s son, Clive. And this is where the story gets personal.

The rider Clive could have been

Plenty of people know Clive Padgett the team boss. Fewer know Clive Padgett the prodigy. In 1977, aged just 19, he took the 250cc British Championship, and he remains the youngest British champion in the class to this day. He moved up to Grand Prix and was quick straight out of the box.

Then it ended the way too many of these stories end. A crash at St Joris in Belgium left him with a badly broken arm and nerve damage. He kept trying. He even Velcroed his glove to the throttle to hold on. But the body had made the decision for him, and he was forced to step away from riding. The talent didn’t disappear, though. It just moved from the saddle to the pit wall, and the sport is arguably better for it.

Triumph and heartbreak in the same week

As Clive’s riding career closed, his younger brother Gary’s was opening. Gary won the Manx Grand Prix in 1980, stepped up to the TT, and took his first win in the 1982 Formula Three race. Through the 80s the podiums kept coming, Gary out front, Yorkshireman Phil Mellor on the books, and the sidecar pairing of Dennis and Julia Bingham adding to the tally.

By the middle of the decade Gary was the real deal, the kind of rider who could throw a leg over almost anything and run at the sharp end. A second TT win had eluded him through mechanical gremlins and bad luck until 1986, when he finally got back on the top step in the Production race. Days later, he was killed in a road traffic accident.

You don’t gloss over a thing like that. It gutted the family and the team, and they stepped away from racing for a while. That they came back at all says something about what the sport means to them.

Back on top, and a golden run

Padgett’s were winning at the TT again by 1988, Dave Leech doing the honours. Through the 90s the talent kept flowing: Steve Hislop and Jim Moodie both took Junior race seconds, and Moodie grabbed a Senior podium in 1997 aboard an exotic 500cc V-twin Honda. The turn of the millennium saw a tilt toward the short circuits, with Nigel Davies and Richard Britton keeping the TT podium streak alive.

Then came the modern era, and it’s a roll call that borders on absurd. In 2007 Honda’s Neil Tuxworth approached Padgett’s to run John McGuinness. By 2008 they were the lead Honda team at the TT, and McGuinness rewarded them with a Senior win. In 2009 Ian Hutchinson joined and immediately won the Superstock and opening Supersport races.

And then 2010. The fairytale. Hutchinson won all five solo races in a single week, a feat nobody had managed before and a measure of both the rider and the immaculate preparation behind him. As if that wasn’t enough, Padgett’s-supplied engines carried Klaus Klaffenbock to both Sidecar wins that year too. A clean sweep barely covers it.

The Anstey years and a MotoGP bike at the TT

When injury sidelined Hutchinson, Bruce Anstey came in for 2011, and the friendly, family-run Padgett’s setup rejuvenated the Kiwi’s career. Supersport wins in 2011 and 2012, McGuinness taking the 2012 Superstock, podiums stacking up. In 2014 Anstey put the outright lap record in his pocket at 132.298mph, the first time it had left McGuinness’s name since 2004, and 2015 finally brought him the big-bike Superbike win he’d chased for years.

Then there’s 2016, the year Padgett’s wheeled out a Honda RC213V-S, a road-going version of Marc Marquez’s Grand Prix bike, for Anstey to race down Bray Hill. As Clive told it, the idea came over a few pints of Guinness with a customer who’d bought one and wondered aloud what one would look like going down the Hill. Only Padgett’s could have actually made it happen. That’s the team in one anecdote: rooted in the shop, mad enough to dream big, and connected enough to pull it off.

Still in the fight

Anstey’s 2015 Superbike remains the team’s last solo TT win on the record books, with serious illness keeping him out in 2018 and 2019. Conor Cummins picked up the baton with a run of Superbike and Senior podiums, and more recently Davey Todd carried Padgett’s colours from 2019 to 2023, taking his maiden TT rostrum with the team in the 2022 Superstock before the squad backed him to a British Superstock 1000 title. Todd has since returned to the fold for the Supertwin class on the Paton, the team’s first foray into that category.

Why Padgett’s matters

You could measure Padgett’s in numbers. Thirty TT podiums since 2008, a dozen of them wins, four Classic TT victories. A clean sweep in 2010. The youngest British 250cc champion ever still answering the phone. But the numbers miss the point.

What makes Padgett’s the team it is, is that it never stopped being a family that happens to run a bike shop. No corporate machine, no manufactured mystique. Just genuine knowledge, hard graft, the odd flash of brilliant madness, and a willingness to give a rider a home rather than a contract. Hutchinson, Anstey, McGuinness, Cummins, Todd, they all talk about the same thing: the feel of the place. Mates first.

That’s a philosophy we happen to share. So if you bump into a quiet bloke leaning on a van at the TT next year, stop and say hello. You’ll be talking to one of the most important figures British road racing has ever produced. He just won’t tell you that himself.

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