Where did you go from there; you were involved with Team S Equipe weren't you? It was Arthur Francis who came up with that. We'd met him at previous events John and I had always performed well at Snetterton and Arthur was quite keen to win the event.
At one stage (either late 1966 or early 1967), neither John nor myself had bikes for some reason, so I rang Arthur and asked him if he had any spare Labretta we could use for Snetterton? We borrowed a TV200 S-Type which we won the event on, and that's really where it all started; we were together from then on, riding bikes for Arthur.
All this took place before the Motogiro. I remember because the regulations for that got misinterpreted. It said that in a team, there had to be three different capacities of bikes (a 125, 150 and a 200). The bike I had was a 200 and we were teamed up with Harvey Watt, who had a 125; John also had a 200, so Arthur prepared me a 150. Then shortly before we were due to go, the Lambretta Concessionaires reread the regulations and decided that they applied to works teams, not a club team - which was what we were.
Arthur asked if I wanted to switch back to a 200, but I said no because of the short time span for preparation a mistake on my part because I ended up competing against the 200s on a 150. That was the bike I took to the Isle of Man in 1967.
Then I did it in 1968 on DRO 62F (which now belongs to Ian Cunningham). We decided as a team that 125 scooters were the right choice of bike and that's when Arthur came up with the idea of forming Team S Equipe.
Arthur was quite artistic and designed the banners in fact, I still have my original one, made by Arthur. John's also got one with his name on it; for the first year they didn't have names on (these were added for the second). That year the full team was John, myself and Neville Frost (who did the Motogiro with us as well).
How long did Team S Equipe run for? We didn't go back to the 1oM after 1969 don't know why and that was about it for Team S Equipe, so we only did it for two years. During 1969, we used DL (GP) 125 scooters with consecutive numbers and were joined on the team by Nick Barnes who worked for Arthur before joining the Lambretta Concessionaires, then Suzuki until his retirement.