One of the greatest engine tuners of any generation, Tony Scott’s work is synonymous with Honda’s RC30. But Tony won TTs with every manufacturer, in a career spanning some of the greatest names and greatest bikes of the modern era.
Engine tuner Tony Scott, who died in October aged 74, has a record of road race victories second to none. Between 1985 and 2012, his engines took 30 wins at the TT and 24 at the Manx GP – with more than 130 Isle of Man podiums in total across Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Yamaha engines.
Tony’s work also took 18 North West 200s, 19 Ulster GPs and two Macau GP victories in addition to numerous British short circuit championships. He won in every British Championship class, from 125cc two-strokes to 1300cc four-strokes, and took three TT F1 World titles with Carl Fogarty on a Honda RC30.
Although it was his work with Foggy and Honda’s V4 that brought him to prominence in the late ’80s, Tony’s love of bikes and the Isle of Man stretched back to his childhood. Tony’s father had a bike and, as a teenager, Tony built his own trials bikes. He first visited the Isle of Man in 1957, aged 14; by 15 he was working in the motor trade, tuning rally car engines in his spare time.
Tony’s transition to bike engines came in the early ’80s, literally by accident. A bike crash in 1982 left him with a badly injured right arm; as a result he had to give up work. While he recovered he began going to bike races, and started tuning engines for a friend, Keith Nichols, who then started winning. As Tony once explained to PS, “When I was tuning rally car engines back in the day, there were a lot of good engine tuners. When I got into bikes, I thought there’d be just as many – but it wasn’t the case. I was surprised how poor the workmanship was. So we were winning straight away.”
Tony’s early success came with two strokes: “Race bikes were predominantly two-strokes, so I tuned them,” he told us. Tony’s engines took the British 125 and 250 Championships. Around this time, a young rider called Carl Fogarty was doing well on Honda’s RS250.
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