Author Mat Oxley is a writer and former motorcycle racer. He won the 1985 Isle of Man 250 production TT and finished third in the 1986 world endurance championship. He has been writing about motorcycle racing for more than 25 years and is author of Haynes’ acclaimed biographies of modern-day motorcycling kings Valentino Rossi and Mick Doohan.
In 1961, with the Cold War at its height, the East and West were battling for supremacy on the racetracks of Europe. Using technology from the notorious V-1 flying bomb, former Nazi rocket scientist Walter Kaaden helped build the world’s most powerful race bikes for the East German factory MZ. But when their star rider Ernst Degner was poised to win the world championship he defected and sold MZ’s secrets to Suzuki, while his wife and children were drugged and smuggled to freedom through the Berlin Wall.
Suzuki and Degner won the world title the following year and Japan was on its way to ruling the world of motorcycling. Suzuki, then Yamaha and Kawasaki, used Kaaden’s know-how to build world-dominating race bikes and create legendary street machines that made Japan the global force in motorcycling. Degner was now rich and free, but his life took a downward spiral. Branded a traitor by the Communists, he suffered horrific injuries in a fiery racing accident and died in mysterious circumstances.
Here is the whole extraordinary story, from the death-defying antics of the era’s devil-may-care grand prix racers to Degner’s battle for world title glory, his James Bond-style escape from the Communists and finally his lonely, mysterious death. Stealing Speed is a breathtaking story of racetrack heroics and Cold War skulduggery.
Fascinating story in events from over 50 years ago, a must read and not just for motorcycle history fanatics.
Recommended. | 
