Like most motorbike racers, Bob McIntyre cut his teeth in scrambling at local events at the weekends in the late 1940s, and even when he had moved on to bigger and better things, he would sometimes pass up the chance of making good money in professional races to appear at Scottish events just so that he could please his Scottish fans.
Indeed, one newspaper article from the time of McIntyre's death tells the story of how he had just returned from competing in a Grand Prix race and turned up at a cross-country scramble organised by his first motorbike club Glasgow Mercury in a farmer's field near Newton Mearns.
 |  |
Photo courtesy of McIntyre family | |
|
He rode AJS bikes, joining the works team in 1954, but became increasingly exasperated with the bikes' failings, particularly the suspension units. He teamed up with former motorbike racer Joe Potts, who ran funeral undertaking and engineering businesses, and in Potts' Bellshill workshop they tuned the bikes to suit McIntyre's racing style. Mac worked as a mechanic for Potts and in return was sponsored and supplied with bikes for racing, most often Nortons. McIntyre found that the single-cylinder Nortons handled well, but were out-powered by the foreign bikes such as the Italian Gileras and the Japanese Hondas.
Mac's racing career was not made easy by the Scottish authorities and the poor racing infrastructure north of the border. He and the Potts team would need to drive down to England to test out their bikes on airstrips and racetracks. He once told a reporter: “It takes a minor miracle for any Scot to get places in racing. We've got plenty of good lads, but they have to fight every inch.” Sometimes, it was not possible to test the machines properly and so McIntyre would be racing on bikes that were not running or handling optimally.
It wasn't just the distance to the race events that was the problem for McIntyre, but the fewer commercial opportunities and poorer industry support too that put Scottish riders at a disadvantage. It took a while for the contracts for using certain brands of oil, brakes, plugs and tyres to come through.
With sponsor and tuner Joe Potts and his team mechanical team of Charlie Bruce and Pim Fleming, the Bellshill team would take Norton works bikes and calibrate them in such a way so as to maximise their power. McIntyre had a great instinct for motorbike engines. At the 1959 TT, for example, in horrendous conditions, after the first lap McIntyre was lying third.
