Francis Bradley

Francis Bradley, the 1962 Canadian Road-Racing Champion, was born in Germany and raised in England, and served during the Second World War as a motorcycle dispatch driver. He made his way to Canada, as many others did in the early 1950s, to discover a burgeoning motorsport scene. As so many other Canadian drivers of that era did, he started his competition career through ice racing and went on from there to compete in some of the faster machinery available against some top international competitors, becoming the 1962 Canadian Champion in the process. However, although he was never fully a professional race driver on the track, he was a professional driver on the street as a bus driver for the Toronto Transit Authority! In fact, Len Coates, a sports car–oriented scribe for the “Toronto Star” in the earlier days of the reporting of motorsport events in Canada, called him Canada’s fastest bus driver, a title no other bus driver ever contested. Today, although he is fully retired from bus driving and competitive driving, he still competes in tennis, a sport he plays virtually everyday of the week. Our man John R. Wright caught up with the Toronto native to discuss his interesting career.

Can you describe your first experiences in motorsport in England?