BETWEEN THE PUBLICATION of the hardback of the last book, Worms to Catch, and the paperback version going to print I’d been asked to write another chapter to update readers on what was happening. The final chapter of the paperback was me explaining that I was signing for Honda to race the new Fireblade. Neil Tuxworth, Honda Racing’s top man in Britain, had been visiting me, planting the seed of the idea of me riding for Honda on the roads. It got the gears turning. I couldn’t stop thinking, You’re a long time dead, and I’d returned to the thought of not wanting any regrets when I was too old to race. I don’t know what had changed from the summer, when I’d been riding from Canada to the Mexican border on my mountain bike, following the route of the Tour Divide on my own. Back then I knew I was done with serious motorbike racing. I wasn’t done with bikes or racing, just the level of road racing I’d got to and the parts of it I wasn’t enjoying. I was finished with it. I told everyone. I wrote it in the book. The Tour Divide made me think I should’ve packed in racing for teams years ago. There it was on paper.
Then there was this new 2017 Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP2 on Dunlops, and I thought, Fuck it, I’m going to do it. This was the very same package that John McGuinness and others had used to win races for years. I’d always be wondering, What if …? if I didn’t try it. No one I knew thought it was a good idea. Not one person. They all reminded me that I was so convinced when I’d come back from the Tour Divide that I’d made the right decision to pack in, but I couldn’t see beyond the opportunity in front of me. And who has never changed their mind? I was in.
The road racing I’m involved with is all production bike-based. By that I mean the bikes start life as road bikes anyone can buy from a dealer. The bikes Valentino Rossi and Marc Márquez and the rest of MotoGP boys race look like TT bikes or World Superbikes, but they’re pure race bikes, built in batches of two or three at a time with no parts shared with road bikes. MotoGP bikes are slightly faster around a track than racing Superbikes, that are built from a road bike, but not by much.
This is worth explaining because when a brand new road bike is released, race teams around the world have to wait for the factory to build the bikes before they can get hold of them to carry out all the changes they need to turn the road bike into a race bike and start testing. The road bike my 2017 race bikes were based on was the special edition of the regular CBR1000RR Fireblade, the Fireblade SP2. It was ready later than the regular Fireblade, so when it eventually arrived at Honda Racing’s UK headquarters, in Louth, it felt like everything was happening at the eleventh hour.
There were three different levels of Fireblade in 2017. The regular one was called the CBR1000RR Fireblade. There was a fancier one, the CBR1000RR Fireblade SP, and a top of the range model, the CBR1000RR Fireblade SP2. Compared to the base model, the Fireblade SP had semi-active Öhlins suspension, different brakes, a load of electronic rider aids, a titanium petrol tank and a lighter battery. On top of that, the SP2 had a slightly different cylinder head, bigger valves and different wheels. If you went into a Honda dealer to buy the Fireblade SP2 road bike, they’d want £22,500 off you and there aren’t many road bikes that are as trick.
The first chance I’d get to ride it was at a four-day test in the middle of March, which is about when I’d get on any team’s bikes for the first time, so the timing wasn’t a problem. What was a problem was the fact the Hondas we’d be riding weren’t built into full Superbike racing specification in time for this test. That meant I’d be riding the Superstock, not the Superbike versions. These two different classes are both based on the same road bike, but the Superbike is a lot higher state of tune than the Superstock, and the rules allow a lot more modifications from the road spec, so it can take a lot longer to get the ideal settings.
The test took place at Circuito Monteblanco, near Seville, over by the southern end of the Portuguese border, a track I’d never been to. I drove down in the Transit with Francis (who smacked Nigel the dog in When You Dead, You Dead, if you remember). I could have flown out, but I had my Martek in the van because I was supposed to be doing a track test story with Performance Bikes magazine, me racing the Martek against Kawasaki’s supercharged H2 road bike at the Almería circuit.
Even though Francis lost his wallet in a Spanish petrol station on the way down there, we made real good time. He was annoyed – he’s a Scotsman, course he was annoyed – but we didn’t have time to go back. We ended up stopping at a hotel the night before the test, a few hours’ drive short of the circuit. Because I had my Martek and tools in the back of the Transit I ended up kipping on the front seat of the van while Francis stayed in the hotel. I sleep the best in my van. I loved all that and had missed that part of the racing – the road trips to testing, driving out to Spain to do a job. No bullshit, just riding plenty of laps, working with the mechanics to improve the bike, then going out on track to do it all again, riding till the tank was empty.
I’d never been to Monteblanco before, but Honda go there every year. It’s cheap to rent the track, compared to other Spanish circuits, and they can do what they want there. Because they’ve done their pre-season testing there for a few years they know what times the previous bikes have done, so they’ve got a measuring stick, which is useful. Honda’s world endurance and road racing boys were there: John McGuinness; Jason O’Halloran, the Australian-born British Superbike racer; Dan Linfoot; Lee Johnston and a couple of other Honda teams were sharing the test.
Like I explained, we only had the Fireblade SP2 in Superstock specification for this test, the one a lot closer to the road bike spec, but any time on the bike was handy.
I hadn’t been on a race bike for 18 months and I expected it would feel like it was ripping my arms out and battering me with the messy ends for the first few laps, until I got acclimatised to a modern race bike again, but it was … just all right. I told my foreman in the team, Roger Smith, that I thought it was slow. He pointed at the van with my Martek in it and said, You’ve been riding that, haven’t you? And I had, but not much, only a couple of laps on the test track. I know bikes enough and I can evaluate them pretty well, so I knew my gut feeling wouldn’t be too far off.
I kept riding and loved the whole experience of being a part of the team. I loved them listening to what I was saying and me listening to what they were saying. There was no tension being in the same team as McGuinness. I might have said some things in the past that he didn’t agree with and he’s probably done the same, but he knows I have massive respect for him and, not just that, I like the bloke, too.
McGuinness wasn’t having the best time at Monteblanco, though. He had a few issues including the front brake sticking on and nearly chucking him over the handlebars, and then I came off at the end of the first day.
I have less experience with Dunlop tyres, because most of the teams I was with had deals with Pirelli and Metzeler, and each manufacturer’s tyres have different characters. Some have less ultimate grip, but when they start to slide they’re more predictable, so you can keep them sliding and not feel like it’s going to spit you off. Other manufacturers’ tyres have more grip, but when they do eventually let go, it’s a lot more sudden, harder to predict and harder to control. I didn’t know where the limit of these new tyres was so I kept pushing, was trying to get a slide or summat, to let me know where the limit was, then I ended up on my ear, thinking, Oh, that’s way before where I thought the limit would be.
Then McGuinness crashed, and he’s not a crasher. He didn’t hurt himself and he hardly marked the bike. I was new to Dunlops, but he knows them back to front and said he didn’t like a particular front tyre, so we stopped using it. There are lots of different compounds (that means the recipe of the rubber; it’s not rubber, but let’s not get into that) and different constructions (that’s how stiff the carcass of the tyre is, the carcass being the metal, Kevlar and/or canvas that the ‘rubber’ tread is bonded to). Tests like this include trying new tyres out, so it wasn’t too unusual. That’s what testing’s for.
I was enjoying being part of the team more than I was enjoying riding the bike. The quickshifter wasn’t working and the blipper didn’t work. You could say that’s all part of the process of developing the bike, but it shouldn’t really be. It’s a road bike, so it should work, but there were no alarm bells; because this was Honda, it’d all be right. It took for me to get the wiring diagram out, find the quickshifter on it and say, ‘Why don’t we solder this wire to that wire?’ to try and sort it. We got mine working and we did the same to McGuinness’s. Without the quickshifter working the test is a bit pointless. This bit of kit has been used on race bikes for years and even some road bikes come with them.
The quickshifter is a sensor fastened to the gearshift pedal that cuts the ignition when it feels the rider’s foot shifting gear. It means that a bike will change gear smoothly with the throttle still open. On a bike without a quickshifter you have to chop the throttle to take the pressure off the gear selector to shift smoothly. Not only is a quickshifter fractionally quicker than shifting normally, it changes so suddenly that it keeps the bike more settled on its suspension, there’s less weight transfer than if you had to roll the throttle off and there’s less load on the front tyre. When you’re shifting down the gears, from fourth to third to second, another message from the ECU – the electronic control unit, the bike’s brain – ‘blips’ the throttle for you to match the engine and gearbox speed. In the past riders would do it themselves, give the throttle twistgrip and a little tweak, but with advanced electronics and fuel injection the ECUs can do it for you. But the blipper wasn’t working either.
So, without the quickshifter you’re not testing the bike how you’d race it. It’s pointless really. We were knocking the rust off, but not a lot more.
Even with these niggles I did a lot of laps, 100 a day for the four days I was there, and I felt it. There are motorbike riding muscles that I hadn’t been using for a year and a half, and this was all part of the process of getting back into it.
While I was doing all those laps, I was trying to convince myself I was enjoying it, but I wasn’t. I was loving sussing out wiring diagrams and soldering bits, but not the riding.
At the end of the test, we loaded up for the drive to Almería to meet Performance Bikes magazine for the Martek track test. We got over the mountains, near Gibraltar, and it was pissing it down. I thought it would be all right the next day, because the track is in Tabernas, mainland Europe’s only official desert region, but it wasn’t. It was chucking it down again, so I got the Martek out of the van for a few photos in the car park, loaded it back up and we set off on the 24-hour drive back home. On the drive back to England I hoped I’d have the feeling that I’d really missed riding, but I didn’t.
We didn’t test again until Castle Combe, near Bath, on 4 and 5 April for the annual Dunlop two-day tyre test. The weather was cracking, and it was my first time on the newly completed Superbike, but I was underwhelmed again. I was thinking it was going to be something special – it was an HRC Honda Fireblade – but it felt like just another Japanese Superbike.
I made some notes in my diary: First run on the Superbike. Blipper not working. Not quick. 93 laps. McGuinness crashed on second day, dislocated thumb.
I was in the pits when he crashed, changing something on the bike, when someone told us not to go back out; something had happened. McGuinness had hurt his hand. I didn’t get the chance to talk to him on the day of the crash, because he was taken off to hospital and he was still there when I set off home.
So this is two tests, two different specifications of the same bike, one Superstock, one Superbike, and all the bikes had electrical issues. Not only that, we’d had two tests and John McGuinness had crashed at both of them. I nearly crashed at Castle Combe, but didn’t. It was close enough for the airbag to go off in my Dainese D-Air leathers. The gyros and processors in the leathers were so sure I was about to hit the deck that they triggered the airbag, which is around the shoulders and neck, to protect me from the imminent impact. You need a big moment to set it off. I’ve never done it before, or since. I was in the fast right-hander, coming on the start/finish straight, when it bucked me out of the seat.
The whole point of these tests is to push the limits and then step back from them, but the McGuinness crashes were more of a concern, because the cause of them was still a mystery.
I was back at Moody’s for a couple of days at work, before McGuinness and I flew out to Japan to test the Mugen Shinden electric TT bike. Honda’s official TT racers also race the Mugen in the TT Zero, the one-lap TT race for electric bikes. I’d been to Japan twice before, both times sent by Performance Bikes for launches of new bikes. I really like the place, partly because it feels so alien, and this visit was just the same, with the bogs that wash your arse and the people are so polite.
As soon as we landed we were taken to the Honda museum at Motegi. I was dead impressed to see that the Honda NR500 was in pride of place, because it was one of Honda’s biggest failures. Honda had always been committed to four-stroke engines, but two-strokes were dominating motorcycle grand prix racing. All things being equal, and in very basic terms, a two-stroke engine can make more power because it is firing every second stroke, while a four-stroke is only firing every fourth stroke. By this era bikes were limited to a maximum of four cylinders and an upper cylinder capacity of 500cc, so Honda came up with the idea of making odd-shaped pistons, what all the British magazines described as being the shape of a Spam tin. The idea was to increase the valve area of a 500cc engine. Bigger valves can pass more air and fuel into the combustion chamber and can make more power. Combine that with higher revs and they might make a four-stroke engine that can compete with a two-stroke.
The bike was a disaster, its results were terrible, it was unreliable. It was too ambitious, but it was brave. And here it was, right in the middle of the corporate museum. I took that to mean that Honda had learned loads by failing and were proud of trying. And I liked that.
This wasn’t a big part of me joining Honda, but getting to race the Mugen Shinden was definitely a bonus. It has been developed by Mugen, but it’s closely related to Honda. I tested the bike on track. It’s a beautiful piece of kit, and fast, but it is heavy, weighing 248kg, where the minimum weight limit of a Superbike is 168kg. It weighs so much because of all of the lithium-ion batteries it needs to shift as fast as it does.
McGuinness was still suffering with his dislocated thumb, so he hardly rode the Mugen in Japan, but he knew the bike inside out because he’d raced it a few times at the TT already. All that had changed from the bike he’d raced the previous year was a new front mudguard and how quickly the battery could charge. They hoped the mudguard would make some aerodynamic improvements, but it was hard to tell because we were testing it at a go-kart track.
Back home there were plenty of tests arranged for me on the Superbike, so there was no lack of time on the bike or lack of effort from Honda Racing. The next test was at the Oulton Park race track, Cheshire, where I stopped off on my way to the Tandragee 100 road races near Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, being held on 21–2 April. I tested the Superbike at Oulton, but I would race the Superstocker at Tandragee.
One of the reasons I went back to Tandragee was because I didn’t race the TT in 2016. I was cycling through America on the Tour Divide instead. If it’s either your first year at the TT, or you missed a year, you have to get signatures on your race licence to be given a start permission for the TT. This is what everyone is supposed to do to prove they’ve got enough experience to race there. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee safety, and the TT and the ACU (the Auto-Cycle Union) know I knew my way around the place. Also, because I was racing for the official Honda team it would only need a phone call to get me permission, but I didn’t want to owe any favours or be open to anyone coming back and saying, ‘Well, we broke the rules to get you your start permission, so can you just …?’ I wanted to tick all the boxes and get all my signatures, six of them, to show six national level finishes, between the end of one TT and the start of the next. I already had one from New Zealand, where I’d raced in November 2016 on my Martek, so the races I chose were Tandragee, Cookstown, Scarborough, and two races from the North West, because there are two different race days.
At this stage, six weeks before the TT, the team still weren’t 100 per cent sure they had fixed what had caused McGuinness’s Castle Combe crash. Nothing had been mentioned publicly, and never would be – until now – but the team told me they wanted to check a few things before I competed at Tandragee, which would be the first real road race the 2017 Fireblade SP2 would take part in. I knew what they were really doing: checking it wasn’t likely to spit me off into a field.
It’s worth explaining that the 2017 Honda Fireblade, like lots of modern bikes, has what they call a ride-by-wire throttle. What that means is there is no mechanical link between the twistgrip throttle, that the rider twists back and forward to increase or decrease the revs of the bike, and the fuel injection system. For most of the previous hundred and whatever years of the history of motorcycles, there’s been a cable, or two, between the throttle and the carb or fuel-injection throttle bodies. It’s a mechanical connection between the rider’s hand and the fuel system.
With ride-by-wire systems, the twistgrip looks the same, and feels the same, but instead of cable there’s a potentiometer that measures the movement of the grip and sends an electrical signal, via the ECU, to a stepper motor that opens and closes the throttle bodies. The reason for this extra complication, compared to a cable, is that modern fuel-injection systems can work more closely with all the new, more sophisticated traction control and wheelie control systems.
Modern fuel systems can overrule what the rider is asking for to deliver a smoother and safer ride for road riders and racers. But there is also the possibility of the motorcycle overthinking or misinterpreting what the rider wants. This meant there was a question mark over what the ride-by-wire throttle was doing.
The throttle takes a lot into account. When the bike feels the rider’s foot changing down a gear, the ECU automatically ‘blips’ the throttle; it acts like the rider giving the twistgrip a short, sharp turn. It does this to load and unload the gearbox’s dogs, the meshing gear teeth, momentarily for a smoother gear change. Some sportscars do it automatically. Before these electronic blippers, riders would do it themselves, while on the brakes into a corner. The engine knows, in the time of that blip, the gear selector barrel should move from third to second, or whatever gear, but it doesn’t just see third gear and second gear, it knows every increment in between. It sounded to me that when McGuinness had crashed and dislocated his thumb he was going down the gears to enter a corner, and the gear hadn’t fully engaged, so it had kept blipping. He’d closed the throttle, but the ECU had kept it open while he had the bike leant over, and he’d lost the front end. Like anyone would. It was a really clever system, but the program needed rewriting so it couldn’t happen again.
I was given the all-clear to race, so I set off for Ireland. Someone told me I hadn’t raced at Tandragee since 2005 and when I got there I couldn’t work out why it had been so long. It’s the most hardcore road race of the lot. It’s amazing and the kind of track I love racing on.
Practice was Friday 21 April, the race the next day. The races in Northern Ireland are different to most of those elsewhere in the world, because they don’t race on Sundays out of respect to the religious.
Even though I loved the whole event, and being back on the Irish roads, I struggled. I can’t even tell you where I finished, but I was off the pace. I bet people thought it was because I’d had a year off from racing, but it wasn’t.
After Tandragee I got a ferry out of Belfast at eleven that Saturday evening, drove through the night and got to Scarborough at six in the morning for the Scarborough Spring National Cup as well. I was doing loads of riding. No one could accuse me of not putting in the hours in the saddle.
My results at the two Irish races and Scarborough were terrible. Bloody terrible. McGuinness hadn’t competed at those races – he very rarely did – and it never usually affected his performance; he’d been the man to beat for years. Everyone who wanted to do well at the TT always raced the North West 200 in Northern Ireland, a couple of weeks before the start of the TT. It’s never been a favourite of mine, but I’ve done all right there over the years. I’d talked myself into feeling optimistic about the 2017 race, but that didn’t last long.