Burning Rubber: Hailing Hailwood's greatest comeback

As the countdown to Michael Schumacher's return to frontline Formula One racing gathers momentum it has sparked a good many memories of so-called amazing comebacks.

But none has focused on the greatest and most courageous motorsport comeback of them all - bike racer Mike Hailwood's reappearance at the Isle of Man TT, the most dangerous race in the world, in 1978.

Consider the situation:

Mike the Bike had a limp so bad from an F1 smash that cut short his career he could hardly walk, he was in his 39th year, he was unfit and overweight and had not raced motorbikes for 11 years. And he was newly married. He had more than 100 committed riders to challenge and beat over an open-road 37 3/4 mile circuit on which more than 220 competitors - including a woman sidecar racer, Marie Lambert - had been killed.

He had not even told his bride Pauline, mother of their two children, that we was going to do it when he left his home in New Zealand to travel to the tiny island in the middle of the Irish Sea for a look-see six months ahead of the June event.

I was my best friend Mike's manager and, I have to confess, the unwilling organiser of the whole show which, when I leaked out the news, caused a wave of excitement and a rush of bookings for the holiday isle that was unprecedented.

When the painfully modest Mike, whose heroism had earned him the George Cross, the UK's highest gallantry medal, for rescuing F1 racer Clay Regazzoni from a blazing car, limped off to mount his Ducati and mix it with motorbike racing's toughest men, I am sure every watcher's heart fluttered.

I know mine did and the next two hours or so, as Hailwood fought off and mastered his own physical setbacks and conquered whatever demons may have haunted his confidence, were probably the most gruelling I have ever suffered. I need not have worried.

It was a major championship, a one-off race that carried with it the world title, and the first race of a week jampacked with two-wheeled events. None of them, however, with the focus of Hailwood's comeback charge. And what a charge. He won. But not only that he shattered the lap and race record and left a trail of regular full-time professional racers and champions gasping in his wake. It was his 13th career win at the TT - Tourist Trophy - races and I would suggest his bravest and definitely the most dramatic as the many thousands of privileged fans there for the spectacle would testify even after all these years.

The parties went on long in to the night with Mike mobbed at every step he took, with me alongside and his winner's silver trophy, a gift from him, pressed into my grasp.

"How do you do it?" asked second-placed John Williams, a regular winner.

"Dunno, mate, it must be something they put in the tea," was Mike's typically shy answer.

What a man, that Hailwood. What a memory. And what a comeback. It is a shame that it has passed without recall in the hullaballoo surrounding Schumacher's return.