Whatever else you can say about maverick motorcycle millionaire Simon Fourie, he’s never boring. As a penniless law student and apprentice public prosecutor in Durban back in the 1970s, he moonlighted as a taxi-driver to fund his expensive motor-cycle racing addiction. He soon discovered that most of his clientele were sailors who wanted to be taken first to a bottle store, then to a brothel. “I reckoned I could save them time and money and make a little on the side for myself by stocking my taxi’s boot with bottles of brandy, so I ended up running a mobile shebeen,” remembers the energetic 62-year-old.
In 1975 he took over Bike SA, a motorcycle magazine that refused then, as it still does, to acknowledge the conventions of acceptable grammar and spelling. Today it is the oldest and most successful magazine of its type in Africa.
Fourie’s incomplete legal training came in handy in the 1970s, when the Durban-based Sunday Express claimed that South African motorcyclists were killing and maiming themselves in droves. A deeply offended Fourie provided them with statistics to prove that they’d exaggerated the problem, but the newspaper refused to print a retraction. So he took them to court.
Fourie’s prospects of winning looked slim when he arrived at Durban’s Supreme Court in a wheelchair. “I’d fallen off my motorcycle and broken seven bones racing at Kyalami the week before,” he remembers. The judge, woefully misinterpreting the scene, upbraided the newspaper’s legal team for being unnecessarily dramatic in dragging this pitifully battered witness into court to prove its case.
He had to apologise when it was pointed out that the plaster-encased individual was in fact the complainant. At one stage, Fourie became so incensed by what the opposition’s lawyers were saying that he tried to stand up in his wheelchair to object, and, much like he had at Kyalami the week before, plummeted to the ground.
The injured man shrieked in pain when the court orderlies rushed forward and tried to pick him up by his broken arm, but the spectators’ concern changed to howls of laughter at his next words. “If you don’t mind, your honour, I’d like to address the court from the floor.” Fourie won.
“I haven’t been to hospital yet this year,” says Fourie, whose family keeps a special sign to stick on his ward’s door, with clear instructions as to how he expects to be treated whenever he’s hospitalised. “There’s a long way to go yet, so there’s still time. Last December I ended up in hospital after my first bike accident on the road since 1969 — I broke my shoulder and a bunch of ribs when a car turned out in front of me.”
Fourie, who won the South African Formula One motorcycle championship in 1978, still races, and has broken just about every bone in his body at least once.
“I don’t know how many in total — probably all of them. My best was seven in one accident,” he quipped when I asked him for details. “I get to go in lots of helicopters, though.”
Fourie’s accident history seems to have possessed him with extraordinary powers of recovery. Four months after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery a couple of years ago he entered and finished the gruelling Roof of Africa Rally. “That was when my rehab program said I could start thinking about engaging in sex, walking two kilometres, or cycling slowly for six minutes,” he snorts.
In the late 1980s he achieved international notoriety by breaking somebody else’s bones. At a superbike launch at the Salzburgring Grand Prix circuit in Europe, he collided with a prominent British journalist at 200km/h, and broke his leg. The organisers banished Fourie to the trackside, while his victim went off to hospital. “The British motorcycle mags all wrote about it and called me “the brainless Boer,” he remembers proudly. “It was fun!”
Fourie’s also been known to demolish the odd car. “I wrote off my BMW M3 when I spun it into a culvert on the way to Welkom last year,” he says.
“I must phone and tell John Robbie.” Why Robbie? Because he and Fourie have been arguing about speed for years. “He has this stupid radio programme where he gets on to something and goes off at the deep end with half the facts — he doesn’t give anybody else a chance to speak. He phoned me on-air to complain about motorcyclists doing 200km/h on breakfast runs. I told him we don’t do 200, we do 300. Most people get killed at 60km/h, not 300.
“Drunk pedestrians make up half of our fatalities each year, but Robbie doesn’t go after them because it’s politically incorrect. If he really wants to make a difference he should look at that.”
When Robbie pointed out that a pedestrian struck by a bike travelling at 200km/h would be killed, Fourie agreed, but added that any pedestrian hit by a motorcycle travelling at 120km/h would end up just as dead.
Fourie’s not the kind of person to let convention or danger get in the way of a good time. After rain interrupted a kids’ soccer match at his home, he moved the furniture into the garage and painted goalposts on the lounge walls so that a result could be reached.
In 1986 he and a friend made headlines when they crashed a microlight aircraft at the start of a national off-road race, escaping unscathed after clobbering a bakkie and a minibus at the trackside, only to face the wrath of the outraged near-victims who’d been sitting on the vehicles at the time.
Despite his disregard for the law, Fourie has some curiously old-fashioned values. A virtual teetotaller, he never uses foul language, and doesn’t enjoy it when other people swear in front of women or children. When a local drive-in theatre ran a movie with lots of loud obscenities that could be clearly heard chez Fourie, the outraged father drove to the scene of the crime and parked outside the theatre, shining his headlights on the screen and hooting furiously. “They haven’t done it again, ” he remembers.
Fourie reckons he’s the luckiest man alive, because he does what he loves and makes a lot of money out of it. He’s a wealthy man, owns a collection of about 150 motorcycles, and exerts enormous influence in the motorcycle community. Apart from running his motorcycle and quad magazines, he organises three motorcycle rallies and two bike and quad runs through the Namib Desert annually, as well as the Woodstock music festival at the Hartbeespoort Resort, which he now owns.