Scheidegger Is Gone!
SCHEIDEGGER is gone!
HEINZ-J. SCHNEIDER
FRITZ SCHEIDEGGER DEAD at Mallory? It was a shock. I had strolled to the office after the Easter holidays to be shown telex-reports mentioning the death of the FIM world champion sidecar racer. Scheidegger, a friend. The man who had never had a serious crash died on the track on Easter Sunday when his outfit went out of control in the high-speed approach to the Mallory hairpin. And John Robinson, his passenger for the best part of the last decade. was hospitalized with a skull fracture and broken legs. They said the machine's brakes had failed.
I immediately remembered this pair's two greatest races, just as if they were being run before my very eyes once again. First 1964. the season in which Fritz suffered seizure after seizure on his BMW twin. On the sun-drenched Clermont-Ferrand circuit in France, he fought reigning champion Max Deubel and his own hellish pains to a Grand Prix win. This was the race in which he also had to fend off Chris Vincent, on an ex-Scheidegger machine, and the late Florian Camathias. Gasoline leaking from the underfloor tank found its way to a cut knee and burned him mercilessly. The Sunday before he had come off his experimental outfit at Barcelona, losing not only some skin but confidence as well. He would ponder for weeks over the cause of the slightest mishap, especially on every fault in his driving.
The year after, the first of Fritz's two championship seasons, all the opposition was drowned in the wet season GP opener at Nurburgring. Only Fritz kept his kneeler going, driving without goggles through rainstorms for the best of 62 miles to victory, while we all froze stiff on the press stand.
Fie was irritable in the paddock, when the opposed twin wasn't running well. He was likely to say that he was going to give up racing after one of his many nearmisses. But it took more than pain and cold and rain to stop him. The engine had to go completely dead and the distance had to be too far to push home.
Disaster fell upon the Scheidegger-Robinson team last fall, when petrol politics threatened to rob him of his only TT win at the Isle of Man. The suspicion of having cheated took many customers away from his Swiss garage-cafe business near Berne, slowly built up over the years by him, his wife and passenger, John. Fortunately, they were exonerated, but the incident had taken its toll.
The champion spent a great deal of the winter in the hospital; the kneeler crouch was said to have been a contributory cause for his ulcers. John Robinson also had been to the hospital for removal of a troublesome knee cartilage.
Only 10 weeks ago they decided to go for the championship a third time. A 700cc ex-world breaker BMW special in a superlow frame was built for unlimited events in England, and work also began on a twostroke four. With BMW factory support and a short-stroke 500, they planned to contest all the 1967 classics.
But it happened. In the first race of the season at Mallory Park, at the age of 36 — leading the pack — his plans came to a sudden end.
I cannot help ending with that common phrase, but I mean it: I will not forget Fritz, the friend who remained a friend after he won his titles, nor will I forget his mechanical marvels he used to race and worry about, or the unique language conglomerated from English and Swytzer Deutsch by which he and teammate Robinson used for its communication. ■
