01 Jul RIP SIMON FOURIE
Love him or hate him, you couldn’t ignore Simon Fourie, who passed away on June 25 at the age of 82 after a life lived flat out, every day. A true gentleman who rarely drank and strongly disapproved of foul language, he had a wicked sense of humour and delighted in winding up anybody who took themselves too seriously.
Lawyer, writer, publisher, racer, promoter, activist and holder of the unchallengeable record between Durban and Johannesburg (two hours 59 minutes, city hall to city hall, set in 1988 on a Suzuki GSX-R1100), Simon Fourie lived and breathed motorcycling.
As a penniless law student in Durban in the late 1960s, he moonlighted as a taxi driver to fund his fledgling racing career. Since most of his clientele were sailors who wanted to go first to a bottle-store and then to a brothel, he decided to save everybody time and money by stocking the boot of his taxi with bottles of brandy.
“I ended up running a mobile shebeen,” he recalled later.
His first brush with fame (or should that be notoriety?) came in January 1970 when his temperamental 350cc Yamaha TR3 crashed and burned on its debut outing at the Roy Hesketh circuit in Pietermaritzburg, and Simon was caught on camera legging it away from the burning wreck.
Already a contributor to the then-new BikeSA motorcycling magazine, he took over as publisher and editor in 1975 after the death of its founder in a motorcycle crash. Reflecting Simon’s total disregard for convention, in both subject matter and grammar, it soon became the biggest-selling motorcycling magazine in South Africa and remained so until its demise in 2016.
And always, always, there was racing and crazy riding stunts. Simon entered the 1975 Roof of Africa, the world’s toughest off-road motorcycle race, on a Honda 750 Four – and finished! He won the South African F1 Motorcycle championship in 1978 and continued to race throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.
Simon did more than write about the biker lifestyle, he lived it; he was the founder and promoter of the Rhino, Impala, Paradise and Scooter Rallies, the convenor of the annual Namibia Desert Run, and a lifelong activist for motorcyclists’ rights, whether it be lane-splitting or the right to ride a motorcycle on Johannesburg’s M1 freeway.
It’s difficult to overstate just how much influence this man has had on three generations of South African bikers; he walked the talk, rode the impossible rides and made bikers everywhere believe in themselves as a community.
Our thoughts are with his son Donovan and the Fourie family at this sad time; wherever South African bikers get together over a glass and a braai, he will be remembered.
