Mike Burrows obituary

In 1992 Mike Burrows, who has died age 79 of cancer, watched Chris Boardman win the 4,000-metre individual bicycle pursuit final at the Barcelona Olympics. Boardman was riding the Lotus 108 model that Mike had developed with Lotus Engineering, and the combination won Britain its first Olympic gold medal in the sport for 72 years.

Mike’s background as an engineer lay in running his own company in Norwich in the 1970s, producing packaging machines. When his car broke down he took to cycling, devising his own recumbent bicycles and tricycles, with the rider lying back for optimal aerodynamics and having the pedals in front, rather than below.

He considered that the bicycle’s established form was too widely taken as given, to the detriment of innovation. The increasing interest in a wide range of human-powered vehicles in the 1980s liberated his imagination to the point that he could joke: “I’m not the best bicycle designer in the world, I’m the only bicycle designer in the world.”

His breakthrough came from looking beyond the metal – usually steel – tubes that bicycles were conventionally made of. A friend’s father in the aviation industry supplied him with some off-cuts of carbon fibre.

Impregnated with resin, this could be moulded into a strong aerodynamic shape, ideal for track racing. The term monocoque is used for a structure whose loads and forces are held together within a single skin, and Mike said that the imaginative leap needed for his novel vehicle came from seeing a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth.

When, in 1985, the British Cycling Federation put Mike’s monocoque bicycle to the sport’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), based in Switzerland, it was rejected. But Mike’s friend Rudy Thomas,