With the real road race season finished back in August, as fas as I was concerned, I was keeping my hand in with a bit of dirt tracking. I did my first dirt track race, on a borrowed CCM450, at Mildenhall speedway track back in 2009. I did another one at Scunthorpe on another borrowed bike a while later, but I didn’t get the attraction of this style of racing when I first started and wasn’t in a rush to go back. That all changed when I started riding with local lads on tracks they’d made on their farms. The more I did it, the more I liked it, and now I bloody love it. There are a few reasons. I can just go and ride my bike with no one watching. No one needs a squillion pounds for a bike, because you can dirt track on a 100 cc Honda, have fun and learn a lot. I don’t need to wait for a track day at Cadwell or wherever, I just go to a farm five minutes up the road, oil my chain, check the oil and that’s it.
On paper, dirt track, also known as flat track, is as simple as bike sport gets. It’s raced on an oval, anything from a couple of hundred yards to a mile-and-a-bit long. You set off and go anticlockwise till the flag comes out. The reason it doesn’t get boring is because the track conditions change during the meeting, and also from one part of the track to the other. You can have so much grip that you’re scraping the footpeg, then on the next lap you can be on a slightly different line and have such a lack of traction the bike is sliding and spinning up like mad. One part can be like concrete, while a foot to the left it’s like trying to ride on marbles. And dirt track bikes don’t have a front brake, so you’re braking with the rear, losing traction, then turning with the throttle to slide around the corner. Trying to master that and get on the throttle earlier is what keeps me interested.
I don’t get a massive buzz from dirt track, but then I only get that from road racing when something goes pear-shaped. It’s just good riding. Now all the bullshit associated with me going road racing is outweighing the pleasure of that anyway. Most of the time that I’m dirt tracking, I’m not racing, but just doing laps on my own or with a couple of lads on Tim Coles’s farm. But saying I don’t get a buzz doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it. It’s different and I can get the same satisfaction and the same love of bikes from dirt tracking in a mate’s field as I can from an international road race.
When I want to go riding I give Tim Coles a ring to see if his track is dry enough and go by myself. Sometimes there are lads already there, sometimes they come later, and other times I’m there on my own. Tim’s nephews, Tim and Tom Neave, live locally and have taught me loads. They are two of the top dirt trackers in England, so I’m not as good as them. When I started they were another league to me, but now I can ride with them, keeping them in sight as they edge away. Soon I’ll have my own track.
Tim and Tom are in their late teens now, but you wouldn’t say they were more than 16, because they grew up in an even smaller village than I did and they’re not streetwise or trying to be cool – they are grafters. They’re regularly up at daft o’clock harvesting or feeding the cows on their dad’s farm.
I’ve never got involved with up-and-coming riders, because I’ve been doing my own stuff, but I help these two out. They’re all ears for what’s going on and I buy their race tyres for them and rebuild engines now and then. It’s nice to put something back in the sport, but I’m doing it because I like them.
A lot of the grand prix riders now ride dirt track to practise between races. Marc Márquez has been doing it since he was a kid, and Valentino Rossi’s taken it up in the last few years, building his own track at what he calls his ranch on the outskirts of his hometown, Tavullia. And because the top GP men do it, a load of the other racers are doing it.
Dirt track, as we know it now, is originally an American sport, but the Brits and Australians have been racing dirt track for nearly a century. European grand prix riders’ and fans’ interest in dirt track really started in the mid 70s when Kenny Roberts Sr came from racing on the dirt in America and was immediately competitive in Sheene-era grand prix racing. Roberts had road raced in America too, but he educated everyone in a new way to race a motorcycle. Back then, when Roberts and boys like Freddie Spencer came into GPs, these young Americans were almost crashing on every corner, but getting away with it. It was controllable crashing. That came from dirt track, because these riders were used to both wheels sliding at high speed. They’d chuck their heavy dirt track bikes into the corners at 100 mph, both wheels sliding, front wheel turned on the opposite lock, foot on the floor, back wheel spinning. And they’d been doing it since they were 14 years old or even younger.
Whoever was following them in the race must have been thinking they were going to crash, because they’d never seen anything like it, but they’d save the crash and go faster because they were riding beyond the limit of the tyres. The Americans that dominated road racing in the 1980s and early 1990s – Kenny Roberts, Freddie Spencer, Randy Mamola, Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey – were all dirt track racers before they went road racing. The same with Nicky Hayden more recently, and the Australian, Casey Stoner, was a dirt tracker too.
But over the years bikes and tyres evolved in a certain way, and kids started road racing earlier and earlier, and that meant the European way, being inch-perfect and looking very controlled and precise, came back as the way to go fast, with everyone trying to use that style. Five years ago this European way of racing was the way to race a grand prix motorcycle. It was the style used by Jorge Lorenzo, Rossi and Pedrosa and was this inch-perfect, wheels in line, scratching their bollocks off way of lapping, but not a wild style that would make you raise your eyebrows if you saw it on telly.
That style looked set until Marc Márquez came into MotoGP in 2013, and started riding the big bikes really aggressively and winning from the off. You just have to look at the way he rides. He’s wild, and it’s the same style of two wheel drifts and controllable crashing, learned on dirt tracks, as the Americans brought over in the 1970s and 1980s. It is Márquez’s influence that has caused the whole thing to go full circle. But that’s not the reason I got into dirt track. As I said, I like it for what it is, just riding bikes.
I built my first dirt track bike in October 2013. It was a 2010 Honda CRF450, but I sold it when I ended up with a Suzuki RMZ450. The Suzuki was the bike I used when trying to break the record for riding on water in the first series of Speed. During the filming Suzuki promised to give me the bike. I never asked for it, but they could hardly sell it after what I’d done to it. After we finished the filming I asked if I was alright to take it and they said no, they needed it for something. Then, in the next breath, they asked me to do two press days at the NEC for them. This wasn’t anything to do with the TAS team I race for on the roads, it was Suzuki GB, but it made me think, You promised me something that I didn’t even ask for, then you say I can’t have it, but I need to do press for you, when I don’t even work for you? I never worked for Suzuki, I was always contracted to TAS directly. Anyway, I ended up doing a bit for them and got the bike that had been to the bottom of a Welsh lake a few times. I turned that motocrosser into a dirt tracker by lowering the suspension and swapping the wheels. I rode it for the first time at King’s Lynn in the Dirt Track Riders Association championship and won the Restricted class (for riders that hadn’t been in a UK final). I thought that it was the tool for the job and sold the Honda to my mate, and British Superbike racer, Matt Layt.
The highest profile dirt track race in the world is the Superprestigio in Spain. Even though the only place professional dirt track races take place is in the USA, the Superprestigio gets more attention than American races because it was Marc Márquez’s idea and he put his weight behind promoting it and attracting some big names.
The idea is to invite top racers from the three grand prix classes and other riders from all sorts of different bike sports and for them all to race dirt track on an indoor circuit in Barcelona. It happens in the close season so the GP riders (and their team bosses) are less worried about getting spannered. Apparently the original Superprestigios happened years ago, but the first one of the new, Márquez era was in January 2014.
No one wins any money or is paid to race at the Superprestigio, it’s a big thing just to get an invite to be involved. The Neaves and some other British lads went out to race the first one. When it was announced in July that another was being held in December 2014, I wanted to be included.
To be invited was a big deal and it was Gary Inman, a journalist who I’ve known a long time, who helped me get an invite. He’s been an amateur dirt track racer in the UK and runs a magazine called Sideburn that does loads on dirt track. He had been out to report on the first Superprestigio and got the event loads of coverage when not many other journalists went, and he asked the organisers if there was a place for me. I was really honoured when they said yes.
Me and Matt Layt were riding together at a practice day. I had the chance to get back on my old Honda and it felt miles better than the newer Suzuki I was riding. It felt so much tighter and more precise. I asked to buy it back, but Matt wouldn’t sell me the bike, so I sold the Suzuki and bought a brand-new 2015 Honda CRF450 and started converting it.
Pikes Peak had brought home to me how much more enjoyable it all is if I actually build the bike I’m going to ride, and preparing for the Superprestigio gave me the same feeling, though the Honda dirt tracker didn’t take a fraction of the work it took to prepare the Martek. I only sold the Suzuki and bought the new Honda because I was going out to this big race.
I made an adjustable suspension linkage; James Wood, who used to work for Honda, lowered some old oil forks; I fitted a Suter slipper clutch, bought 19-inch wheels for dirt track tyres, from Talon, and took the front mudguard off. You shouldn’t have a front mudguard on a dirt tracker, they don’t look right. I paid for it all, instead of trying to get deals, because I didn’t want to end up owing anyone any favours for this bike.
The Superprestigio takes place in Barcelona and there are a few days of free practice on an outdoor track an hour from the city centre, before the night race on Saturday 13 December. I could have probably have flown down and got one of the other lads to take my bike, but I wanted to drive to Spain, and Tim Coles and Peter Boast came with me in the Transit.
Boastie is Mr UK Dirt Track. It might be a bold statement, but you could say that the Superprestigio wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for him. Boastie would never say that himself, though. He wasn’t the first to bring the idea of dirt track from America to England, but when he did, in 2006, his enthusiasm for the sport, and determination to make sure it wasn’t just a flash in the pan, meant it really caught on in Britain for the first time and then in Europe. Dirt track is left field now, but it was even more of a minority sport then. There had been a race series in Italy in the early 1990s, but it had faded away, so when he started his dirt track series in the UK, using the speedway tracks we have plenty of in England, a handful of hardcore racers would come from Italy and Switzerland. After a while they got their own scene in Italy, and one of the racers who used to come to Boastie’s British championship, an Italian called Marco Belli, helped Rossi get his ranch up and running, so it’s all linked. Boastie decided to travel to the Superprestigio to act as a bit of a team manager and spare pair of hands for the British riders.
I have known him for years because my dad would MOT his truck, but he’s a legend around Lincolnshire thanks to his motorbike racing career. He’s done everything. He is Lincolnshire through and through, he speaks the lingo, he’s a real yakker and he is into the rarest stuff. He had his motorcycle Top Trump cards with him and we had a few games while we were waiting to drive onto the train at the Channel Tunnel. Boastie is the man, as far as I’m concerned.
Tim was already used to how I do road trips, but Boastie wasn’t. I get the idea Boastie would prefer to stop every couple of hours for a bloody café latte. The rules on my road trips are: don’t drink, don’t piss, because we’re only stopping for diesel.
On a trip like this I’m licking on, doing about 90 mph through France and Spain, so the Transit does 500 miles to a tank. We have to slow down for the tolls, so it’s about six hours between stops. That’s how we drove down to Barcelona, three of us across the front of my Transit.
We had three days of practice at a track called Rancho Canudas, an hour away from Barcelona. It was made to be an exact replica, in size, shape and diameter of corners, of the track that we’d race indoors at the Superprestigio. They prepared it like that so riders could gear their bike, choosing the right sprockets and set-up, and get their eye in. All the top men were there, except Márquez; he was at his own track. I got talking to the American 2013 and 2014 dirt track champions, Brad Baker and Jared Mees, a pair of really nice blokes. They were faster than me, of course, but the difference wasn’t night and day. Every time they came past I’d try to follow them and learn a bit. The biggest thing I learned was how they were getting on the throttle. They’d go into the corner, knock the back brake to get the bike a bit sideways, and then be on the throttle while it was still sideways, whereas I’d let it line up a bit before getting back on the throttle. They had so much feel and their body position was different. They were doing just lots of little things differently to me.
I had three days of riding, before going back to our hotel in Barcelona every night. Me, Tim and Boastie would go out for something to eat, and it is a bloody nice city. Then, on the Friday night, all the riders had five minutes of practice before qualifying started on the Saturday morning for the Saturday night race.
The race is held in a municipal stadium, the Palau Sant Jordi, that was built for the 1990 Barcelona Olympics. It’s at the top of the hill in Montjuïc Park. Until about 40 years ago the looping road up and down the hill was used as a car and motorcycle road racing track, and it hosted a famous motorcycle endurance race. Laverda even named a motorcycle after the place.
There were a total of 48 riders entered into two classes, 24 in each. The Superprestigio class is for GP riders from MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 and other short circuit racers. The current three world champions were all racing: Marc Márquez, his brother Alex, who was the 2014 Moto3 champion, and their mate, Tito Rabat, the Moto2 champion. Scott Redding and Bradley Smith were in that class. Scott Redding came up to me at the practice track and said he’d watched the telly programmes and liked them, which was a nice thing to hear. He’d borrowed a bike off a mate and just come and raced it. I got the impression he thought the race was more laid back than it actually is. Márquez was taking it bloody seriously.
I didn’t speak to Bradley Smith. I’m not the kind of person to go up and introduce myself and he might not be either. I don’t know him, but seeing him driving around in a van with a number plate that reads GO BRAD said a lot to me. What made it even worse was it was on a Volkswagen Transporter and I tar all Transporter drivers with the same brush. I know I had one, but that was before they were the emperor’s new clothes.
In the race I was in the Open class with the dirt track specialists and off-road champions. There were three Americans: Jared Mees, Brad Baker and Shayna Texter, a young woman racer who has won big races in the support class out in the USA. There were a load of fast Spanish and Italian lads; top enduro man Taddy Blazusiak; long track champion Joonas Kylmäkorpi; supermoto champion Thomas Chareyre and the best British lads: Tim and Tom Neave, Ollie Brindley, Alan Birtwistle and Aidan Collins – but Collins spannered himself at the practice track and was too injured to race. These were riders who were at the top of their game in enduro, supermoto and dirt track. I’m not the top of any sport, so I don’t really know why I was invited. It meant I was going into it with no expectations. I was just going to ride and, hopefully, enjoy myself.
For this indoor motorcycle race the pits were underneath the stands. And the riders were jammed in like battery hens. Opposite me was the world supermoto champion Thomas Chareyre, a bit further down was Bradley Smith. Ten yards further on was Márquez and his brother. On the same side as me was the American Mees. All the European dirt trackers and some of the Moto2 and Moto3 riders were in another pit just next door.
Right next to me was a British rider I was pleased to meet, Christian Iddon. He’s a legend, in my eyes, because of what he can do with a supermoto … He’s four or five years younger than me, but packed in supermoto racing when he was at the top and went into short circuit road racing. He has won some supersport races, but not consistently. So I had Christian Iddon on one side of me and the Australian, Troy Bayliss, on the other. Bayliss is a three-time World Superbike champion and had won a MotoGP race for Ducati. He was a car painter and became a professional bike racer later in life, off his own bat. He’s proper. He was there with his own bike, that he pointed out he’d bought with his own money, and had shipped over from Australia. He made sure I knew that, but I appreciate that dedication. He shaves his armpits, though. I didn’t get that.
There were a couple of short practice sessions on the Saturday morning, then it was straight into the two timed qualifying sessions.
Brad Baker set the fastest lap, but he was pushing hard, crashed and broke his shoulder, putting himself out of the race he had flown from America to compete in. He was the favourite for the win, having won the first one in January. The fastest qualifier behind him was Tim Neave, one of the twins from near me in Lincolnshire. Then it was 2014 American dirt track champion Jared Mees ahead of Marc Márquez, with Tim’s brother Tom just behind Márquez. It was brilliant qualifying by a couple of Lincolnshire lads.
I didn’t have expectations, but I did shit. I’d learned loads riding for three days at the track in Spain, but as soon as I went to the stadium I forgot it all, and went back to how I was riding before. I felt the pressure of riding in that place. Not the crowd, because they didn’t know or care who I was, just the company.
I don’t get nervous before a road race, but I was nervous here. Someone was sticking a camera right in my face, and I hit his lens with my arm when the motocross-style starting gate dropped and the first race started.
There was no game plan for the races – you couldn’t plan, the racing was so hard and close – so I just went out as fast as I could go. I slid off a couple of times in practice, but not in the races. I didn’t want to look stupid. I was slow, but I wasn’t a million miles off.
I might not have been the fastest, but I reckon I looked the part. I was riding my own Honda CRF450 and Dainese made me some special leathers that looked like old Freddie Spencer Honda ones. I love the whole look of dirt track and had seen photos from Peoria in the 1980s, where Honda riders like Bubba Shobert and Ricky Graham raced. I loved the look of their old-school leathers, with the number on the back. I was going to have Honda on the front, but Spellman pointed out that would cause trouble with TAS and BMW, so Dainese ended up putting GUY on the front, that I’m not keen about. Gary Inman pointed out it should have said KIRMO, but in Honda writing, as a reference to Kirmington, the centre of the universe.
I didn’t make it into the finals, but I still loved the experience. Of the British dirt trackers, Ollie Brindley and Alan Birtwistle made it into the Open final, with Ollie coming fourth to go into the grand final. Bradley Smith qualified for his final and through into the grand final too, riding really well.
I stood and watched the final next to Bayliss, Boastie and Tim. That was another great thing about the event: when I’m in Barcelona at a bike race with three Spanish world champions, no one gives a fuck who I am. I loved that.
Before the event, I wanted Brad Baker to win the grand final, but he’d spannered himself. So then I wanted Jared Mees to be Superprestigio champion. It’s a dirt track race, so you should have a dirt track racer win it, but Márquez won. It’s not right to have a MotoGP rider beating a dirt tracker, but he rode hard and deserved it.
Márquez is special and he had a trick HRC engine in his bike, I could tell just looking at it and noticing things like the hydraulic clutch.
Oliver Brindley was the top British rider, coming sixth in the grand final, an impressive result considering he’d broken his shoulder in a qualifying race, when he crashed into Boastie’s bike after he’d been taken out. That was only a few weeks before and Brindley is only 16. Tim and Tom gave so much promise, qualified brilliantly, but then it all turned to shit. Perhaps they were like me, feeling the pressure.
I thought it was a brilliant event for the whole of motorcycling, but dirt track especially. I can’t think of a ball sport equivalent – for which you could take a top footballer, top tennis player, top rugby player, put them all together and make them compete in something where they would all be so evenly matched as we were and for it to be a proper event worth paying to watch. The motorbikers were all from different disciplines, but all chucked into this one oddball event, and they were all there or thereabouts.
The race finished at 10pm, and we got the van loaded up and were on the road for 11pm. Because we didn’t stop for anything but diesel, we were at Calais at ten the next morning. Boastie had to drive the last stretch in France from Paris to Calais. I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I climbed in the back and had a couple of hours’ kip. Then I was alright to drive from Kent to Lincolnshire.
Boastie only realised when we got back to England why I do road trips this way. As soon as you start stopping, the average speed drops massively. All the other lads stayed in Barcelona and by the time they’d got up in the morning, got to the airport, and had to drive home from the airport, we were already home. We were home at two on Sunday afternoon.
I cut the lawn thinking, What a week off. If I had to make a choice between the Superprestigio and the TT, I’d go to Spain. It was a cool thing to be involved in.