Ankoné: “Blisters on my bum at Spa-Francorchamps”

Ankoné rode his last full GP season in 1976 and celebrated his one and only rostrum finish at a Grand Prix – at Spa-Francorchamps. “I was close at Brno and Imatra and I set the fastest race lap on a slick tyre at a wet Nürburgring”, recalls Ankoné. “But that 1976 race at Francorchamps was the only time I finished on the box.”
A week earlier Ankoné encountered technical problems on his Suzuki RG500 during the Dutch TT at Assen. “I'd qualified on the front row, but during the race the bike was firing on two cylinders from time to time due to a faulty ignition. The Japanese Suzuki engineers thought I'd done something wrong and they had no spare ignition at hand. Shortly before the Belgian race I drove to Kröber in Germany and they made an ignition unit specially for me. And it worked, because the bike had considerably more bottom power”, smiles Ankoné.
At Spa-Francorchamps the Dutchman also qualified on the front row in the soaring heat along with polesitter Barry Sheene. Because of the extremely high temperatures the organizers decided to shorten the race. “But I still had my fair share of problems”, says Ankoné. “The tailpipes of the exhausts pointed outward and they got so hot that I had blisters on my bum after the race! I was able to keep up with the factory Suzukis of Barry Sheene and John Williams until the bike started to develop some problems. I was afraid it would seize, but fortunately I made it to the end of the race. In the last lap I saw Sheene struggling to reach the finish too with similar problems not far in front of me. So maybe I could have finished even higher up the order, if...”
Nevertheless, standing next to winner Williams and world champion to be Sheene on the rostrum Ankoné realized he had done an outstanding job by beating Grand Prix winners like Michel Rougerie, Tepi Länsivuori, Dieter Braun and Chas Mortimer. “Back then Grand Prix racing wasn't as professional as it is now. My mechanic Gerrit Veldscholten and I put three bikes in the back of our van and drove to the races. Standing on that podium, yeah, that felt really good.”
During the first weekend of July Ankoné's thoughts will undoubtedly wander back to that race, 35 years ago almost to the day. He will ride a Suzuki TR500 at Spa-Francorchamps. “That's a fairly exclusive watercooled twin that I raced in 1974 but I had to sell it to pay for the RG. Some seventeen years later I was able to buy back the bike and Gerrit and I restored it to its old glory. I've been doing demos now since 1998 and I've become somewhat of a Bikers' Classics regular. Spa-Francorchamps is still a genuine circuit and it really has something special. At Francorchamps we really get a chance to seriously gas it!”