The road trip out to Spain for the Superprestigio in the middle of December would normally be the last motorcycle competition of my year, but I’d had an invite out to race in New Zealand on Boxing Day.
There are only a handful of places in the world where motorbike races are still held on public roads. Ireland and the Isle of Man have the most, and they are the biggest and most famous, but there are also real road races in Belgium, Germany, Pikes Peak in America, the odd one in Spain or Portugal, Macau, and one or two in New Zealand.
I first raced at Wanganui in 2005, when the Kiwi racer Shaun Harris asked me to go over. Shaun had raced over here and at the TT a load of times and we talked at races, so I must have stuck in his mind as someone up for the craic.
I didn’t race at Wanganui after that first time until 2013, when I was invited back by the organisers. Julie and Alan, also known as Flea – who is a former New Zealand 125 champion – are the couple who do the lion’s share of the organising of the Tri-Series, a three-meeting series that takes place in New Zealand. The New Zealand national series, the equivalent of British Superbikes, is only four rounds and the Tri-Series runs before it, but it seems bigger than the national series in terms of interest, because the Tri-Series has the Wanganui race, the biggest and most famous race in New Zealand.
The three meetings of the Tri-Series are held at Hampton Down, Manfeild and Wanganui. The first two are short circuits, purpose-built circuits like Brands Hatch or somewhere, while the Cemetery Circuit at Wanganui is a road circuit through the town. Wanganui is the only race meeting I compete in, and I race both on modern superbikes and classics.
I don’t get any start or appearance money, but I get flights covered for me and my dad. In 2013 Julie and Flea gave me some expenses, even though I didn’t ask for or expect any, but for 2014 I said not to give me any money, but get us better seats on the plane if they could. You’re sat on a plane for over 50 hours in the space of ten days and my dad, though he’s as strong as an ox, is getting on. He was 67 when we took this trip. We ended up flying premium economy with Air New Zealand. That way we had a bit more leg room, a bit more elbow room and a proper metal knife and fork. Terrorists don’t fly in premium economy, obviously.
For the 2014 race we flew out on 17 December. When we got to Heathrow airport I drove to the long stay car park and my dad piped up, ‘Why don’t you go in the short stay?’ I told him because it would cost a bloody fortune. And he replied, ‘You can afford it.’ I won’t forget that, but I wrote it down anyway. Bugger me! I went to work at half-five this morning to work for £12 an hour – I’m not going to waste it on short stay parking. And we had all the time in the world, anyway. Ten days in the short stay? That would’ve cost a grand! I always park in the cheapest place if I can. I don’t know what he thinks I think, but I noted it for future reference.
One reason I like going out to this race is because I get to see Benny, one of my real good mates from growing up. He emigrated out there earlier in 2014. Another reason is that I don’t see much of my dad any more and he’s right into the trip out there, so we go together. I did wonder if my mum would be bothered about him being away for a lot of the holidays, but Big Rita seems all for hoiking him off for Christmas.
Because of the length of the flight and the time differences, we set off on Wednesday the 17th and landed in Auckland at 8am on Friday morning, after a four-hour stop for refuelling in Los Angeles. Once we landed in Auckland, we caught another one-hour flight down to Wanganui.
Wanganui is on an estuary, on the west coast of the North Island. It’s a pretty small place of about 40,000 people, but has a fair bit of tourism going on. I get the feeling it’s a bit of a retirement spot. There’s not a lot going on there.
I could have organised things a bit better, because the next day we drove 250 miles back to Auckland, where we had flown in to, to see Benny. On the way, because I was out there with me dad, I thought we had to go see summat a bit touristy, so we visited Waitomo Caves. They’re famous because they have glow-worms in them. The glow-worm is tiny, the size of a larva or a maggot, and the snot that comes out of its arse is what glows. Not my cup of tea, to be honest, but we both like a bit of culture and Dad likes to see the touristy side of things now and then.
Benny is an old mate, but not one of the Kirmington lot. If he was Kirmington he’d have never left, obviously. He went to the rival secondary school. I went to the Vale of Ancholme, in Brigg; he went to the Nelthorpe. I had a Kawasaki AR50 (with an 80 cc kit …) and he had a really trick Fizzer, a Yamaha FS-1E. He knew about my legendary AR and I knew about his legendary Fizzer, but we never actually raced each other. We never worked together either, but we met because we did our apprenticeships at the same time and I got to know him well at college where we both did our day-release. I was working for John Hebb’s Volvo truck yard and Benny was at Gallows Wood Recovery, where I had done my work experience when I was still at school.
When there’s a real bad car crash and it’s obvious the people in the car are dead, the emergency services don’t cut the dead bodies out at the scene of the accident, they transport the car, with the victims still inside, to a garage. Gallows Wood, where Benny worked, was one of these depots. It sounds grim, but the cars could be there, stored in the workshop, for a couple of days until the recovery crew could come and cut the bodies out, with Benny and his workmates spannering next to the crashed cars. They’d be under a tarpaulin, but still … Once the remains have been removed, the cars are moved out to the yard. When I did my work experience there I had to walk past all these smashed-up cars to get to the tea room. Sometimes there would be gizzards and stuff left in the cars and in summer it could get a bit ripe. Later, when I left John Hebb Volvo to go work for my dad, Benny went to Hebby’s. So that’s Benny introduced.
Four million people live in New Zealand, half of them in Auckland where Benny is, and I don’t think he’s totally sold on the place. The grass is always greener, isn’t it?
The first night we had a barbecue, then the next day I went to Rotorua with me, myself and I for some mountain biking on the trails they have down there. Dad stayed back at Benny’s, sunbathing and reading his book about the V-Bombers, the Vulcan, Victor and Valiant.
I hadn’t done any research, but I knew Rotorua was well-known as being a good place to mountain bike. In 2006 it hosted a mountain bike world championship, so I thought there’d be a decent mountain bike shop, and I knew most bike shops in areas like this have a rental desk. It turned out I was right, so I hired a bike, a Giant, a trick thing, but not as good as my Orange.
Rotorua is about 140 miles from the centre of Auckland. It’s a big spot for tourists because there’s lots of geo-thermal goings-on, like geysers and bubbling mud pools. The sulphur that comes out of the ground smells of rotten eggs.
Riding around Rotorua reminded me why I like riding my mountain bike. It purged the system. My dad’s the man, but he does annoy me. I respect him, and I feel an idiot for being wound up by him, but I still can’t help it sometimes. It’s things like the way he stirs his coffee. He has to stir it for 30 seconds and clank the spoon on the side of the cup as many times as is humanly possible. There is absolutely no reason to do that. I’ve told him it is impossible to make more noise than he does with a spoon and a mug. Just stir it! That’s all you need to do. When I worked with him I couldn’t say that because I knew it would turn into a raging argument. And the way he eats a yoghurt and scratches every last molecule of yoghurt out of the pot! It. Drives. Me. Fucking. Crackers! The thing is, on this trip he told me he does it because he knows it annoys me. That makes it even worse!
We didn’t have a cross word in New Zealand, because I could get on the bike and escape for a while. He’s me dad, we don’t need to fall out, but for him to say he did these things because he knew they annoyed me took some swallowing.
Between visiting Benny and the Boxing Day race at Wanganui, I had a trackday at the Manfeild circuit to get used to the bike I was racing, and I was also going to tick something off my Do Before I Die list: ride my favourite bike of all time, a Britten.
Before that though, I got to know the Manfeild track on the bike that had been arranged for me to race, the spare Suzuki GSX-R1000 of a local racer called Sloan Frost. The bike was superstock spec, not a full superbike, but you don’t need any more than that for the Cemetery Circuit. It’s only a 40-second lap and only needing second and third gears. You only change gear twice per lap. I had a few sessions on the Suzuki, just to get into it, and then it was a big moment in my life: my chance to climb on the Britten.
John Britten built this bike from scratch and did things that were totally different to every race bike manufacturer at the time. But it wasn’t just different for difference’s sake, it worked. It won races.
I like everything about it. I like how it was built, how it looks. Lots of people think the whole story begins and ends with John Britten, a man in his shed who built this amazing bike, but the more I learn about the bike and the story behind it, the more I realise it wasn’t just him, though he was the man who had the drive to make it happen. He had the vision, but not the complete vision. He stoked the fire for all these local people to channel their energy into one motorbike, whether it was the man doing the casting, the cam design, the fuel injection system, the carbon fibre, the suspension. John Britten was the driving force, and a bloody legend, but he also had help from a lot of clever people.
There’s a British ex-pat, called Steve Roberts, who is part of the story. He had a bike that raced at the TT in ’82 or ’83 with a Kiwi rider on board. It was called the Plastic Fantastic, and it was a monocoque bike. By monocoque I mean the bodywork also forms the rigid frame of the bike. The vast majority of motorcycles have a frame that the engine is bolted into and the front and rear suspension fastens to. On to the chassis goes the petrol tank and any bodywork or fairing, but monocoque designs are different. Roberts’s Plastic Fantastic wasn’t the first or most successful. Peter Williams, a total legend, built and raced a Norton Monocoque that won the 1973 Isle of Man Formula 750 TT.
Steve Roberts moved out to New Zealand when he was in his twenties and he must be 60-odd now. I met him and saw the Plastic Fantastic and I could see right from the off that Britten took a lot of inspiration for his bike from this one, but Steve was so humble he wouldn’t take any credit. The Britten was only inspired in part by the Plastic Fantastic, but the way Britten put the rear shock in a different place and made the monocoque chassis, using the engine as a stressed member, was similar. I’m not taking anything away from John Britten. What a feat to build a bike like he did.
I’ve virtually worshipped the Britten since I first read about it in Performance Bikes, but the first time I had seen one in the flesh was at the Ulster Grand Prix in 2013. Kevin Grant is the Kiwi who owns this one, one of only ten in the world, and had brought it over for the TT, the Classic TT, the Ulster Grand Prix and the Goodwood Festival of Speed. He was doing a bit of a tour with it, and that was the right thing to do, I reckon. There’s ten in the world and Kevin is the only owner who lets his out to be ridden as it should be. All the others are sat in museums doing nothing.
I had a sniff of buying one a couple of years ago, but I had to pass on it and that was the sensible thing to do. The bike was a hell of a lot of money and it ended up going to America, unfortunately. The Yanks keep buying them. I don’t regret not buying it, but I do wonder when another is going to come up.
When it came time to ride the Britten, Kevin, the owner, let me warm it up on its stand. Before it had even moved an inch I was amazed by the feel of the throttle. This thing was so sharp. There’s no weight to anything in the engine and the throttle response was incredible. It sounded like a Formula One car.
I’d learned the track in the morning on the Suzuki I was going to race at Wanganui. Manfeild is only a short track, but there’s a heavy camber on everything, so you could really pile into corners. The surface was a bit rough, with potholes and gouges from car crashes in it, but nothing to worry about.
Before I went out Kevin had said, ‘You’re running it in.’ It had been rebuilt after it had been in Europe the year before. He has to have the pistons specially made for it in England. Kevin made his money from making carbon-fibre wings for planes and obviously had a few quid, but he didn’t shout about it.
I was really nervous. You would be – this is a £300,000 bike. You can’t get bits for them if anything goes wrong. I did five laps, and took it steady because of the fresh engine.
When I came in, Kevin said, ‘You didn’t rev it very hard.’ I told him I wasn’t going to, explaining I was showing it some respect. He looked at me and said, ‘Lick her on, mate, you’re alright.’ I didn’t need telling twice.
The Britten would rev to 11,000, but they set the rev limiter to 9,500. So I went out the second time and let it have it. I revved it out all the way. It was the strangest feeling. Once it got above 7–8,000 rpm the bike felt like it had a supercharger on it. I could feel the harmonics of the airbox under my legs, the pulsing of the airbox, and it seemed to leap forward. The faster I went, the faster it went. Really, the power should’ve been tailing off, but it just kept pulling. It was the strangest feeling.
I wasn’t going for it, going for it, but I was pressing on a bit. It would do anything I wanted. I could brake later. I could let off the brakes sooner. It was egging me on, but I only wanted to go so far. This ride wasn’t about lap times, but I was more impressed than I thought I would be. I was totally prepared to be disappointed, but it was quite usable. It would tick over like a road bike and you didn’t have to rev the nuts off it to get it to move from a standstill. It went so much better than I thought it would for a 20-year-old bike.
I’d been on the track in the morning on a current Suzuki GSX-R1000, the make of bike I had raced at the TT and everywhere else for the previous three seasons. The Suzuki, in superstock form, weighs about 190 kg and makes 170-odd horsepower, while the Britten had 165 hp and weighed 135 kg. The 2014 Suzuki had the potential of 20 years of difference, so it should have felt day and night better, but it didn’t. The biggest difference was the feel of the front end, because the Britten has girder forks and doesn’t dive on the brakes. You need to recalibrate the brain to get the most out of it. They reckon that this is a better design of front suspension for a motorbike, because you’ve got constant geometry, but hardly anyone uses it.
Virtually every bike, except for some BMWs and a few oddball contraptions, have telescopic front forks. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 125 commuter bike, a Royal Enfield or Marc Márquez’s HRC Honda grand prix bike, they all have telescopic forks, so it’s what everyone gets used to. As soon as you pull the front brake lever on a bike with traditional telescopic forks the weight is thrown forward, making the forks compress and changing the geometry of the bike. It’s what every racer is used to but it’s not ideal. The Britten just stayed flat, not diving onto its nose when I got on the brake. There is a little bit of transition, but hardly any.
My mate, the tuner and engine builder Chris Mehew, worked on the Elf grand prix project in the 1980s. The oil company poured millions into building grand prix bikes that tried to do things differently to every other bike out there. They experimented with unusual front suspension designs, like hub-centre steering. It was more radical than Britten’s girder design, but it shared the same lack of dive on the brakes. Mehew told me once that you need someone who has never ridden anything but girder-style forks to really exploit the handling of a bike like this. Get them young, so they don’t ride anything else, and they will be world champion. The science of it proves it’s a better design, but it’s just getting your head into it after years of being used to telescopic forks and the weight transfer you get from that set-up.
After ten laps on the Britten I could understand what Mehew was saying. It is such an alien feeling, because compared to what I’m used to, there is no feeling because nothing dives. It made me think, If there’s ever a reason for having a kid … I’d build flat trackers and mountain bikes with girder forks. But a normal motorbike? You’re not going on it.
I love that Kevin allows his Britten to be ridden, and I thought that before I even got a chance to sit on it. These bikes need to be on the track so people talk about it like I’m talking about it. It was a proper dream come true.
After the test I drove back to Wanganui and got done for speeding. Writing this reminds me I forgot to pay the fine. I’ll have to get onto that.
By 23 December, we were back at our hotel in Wanganui. We had a suite-type family room with separate bedrooms and then a room to sit and watch TV in or read. Last time me and my dad came out to Wanganui we had a twin room and I ended up sleeping in the corridor for a week because my dad snores so loudly. Perhaps that’s why my mum is happy for him to clear off. He thinks it’s funny, but he snores like hell. I think he’s going to inhale the curtains.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, we watched a documentary on the Arabic TV channel Al Jazeera. I don’t have a TV at home, so when I’m in a hotel I watch quite a bit of telly if I’ve got the time. I got into Al Jazeera when I was in India. This documentary was about al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, and it was fascinating because it painted a wholly different picture to what you’d see or hear on UK media. I’d heard a radio show on BBC Radio 4 about the Lockerbie bomber, and their conclusion was totally different.
My dad is brainwashed by the BBC and he wasn’t keen on watching Al Jazeera at first, but I told him it was just a different point of view to what he’s used to. The only news any of us get to see is what they, the broadcasters and the governments, want us to see. It’s all versions of propaganda. In the end he was converted.
My view on the news and media has been changed by Orwell’s 1984. How I see it now, the whole idea behind cheap beer, football and The X Factor is to channel the energy of the masses. By getting us to vent our energy into getting excited about who is going to win X Factor or the Premier League is what the powers that be want. If we didn’t have these trivial things to get excited about, the proles, us, the masses, would have enough energy for a mass revolution. I don’t know what to do with this new view on the world I have. As I tell people, I’m not clever enough to deal with the ideas these books are filling my head with, but I do see things a different way since reading that book. It has changed my life.
Back to the motorbikes … The Wanganui race is always on Boxing Day, so Christmas Day is more like a normal day. Sandra and Stu are another two of the race organisers and they invited me and Dad to go to their relatives’ house for Christmas dinner. It was a dead laid-back barbecue. Sandra’s brother was just getting into endurance cycling and he was telling me about a race around Lake Taupo that sounded like ideal preparation for a big race like the Tour Divide – which I’ll be coming back to.
That afternoon I went to scrutineering, where I bumped into Billy Redmayne. I had met him before at the Isle of Man. He won the 2014 Manx Grand Prix Newcomers. He’s a real nice Manx lad and was there with his mates, who were all Paras and sound lads. I took Billy for a few laps round on pushbikes, because I’d been before. Then we went to the pub and talked about conspiracy theories. They had a few, like how they reckoned the Twin Towers wouldn’t have collapsed like that because of the burning temperature of steel compared to aviation fuel and the towers were actually brought down by a controlled explosion. It was a brilliant way to spend Christmas Day afternoon.
You have to pay to get into the Wanganui race. In Ireland and the Isle of Man, all the races are free to spectate, unless you want to go in the grandstands, but in Wanganui they put shipping containers across all the roads leading to the part of the town with the track, so there is no way in without paying. On Boxing Day morning I got lost trying to reach the pits. We were driving around in the little Suzuki Swift we’d been loaned and I didn’t know which one was the pit entrance and I couldn’t get in at first, but everyone was dead helpful.
The race is a mass-start of 35 or so riders. The crowd is really close to the track in the start line area, behind a barbed wire fence. Last time I was there I was on the start line, not exactly trying to psych myself up, but seeing what’s happening and getting in the right frame of mind, when a bloke in the crowd, pint in his hand, called over, ‘Are you alright, mate? Have a good Christmas?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Spot on, thanks.’ And then the flag dropped. It was a bit odd.
The name Cemetery Circuit sounds a bit masochistic, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It’s called that because there’s a boneyard on the left and right-hand sides of the track.
This is what a lap is like. I don’t remember any of the corner names, because they’re named after local sponsors, so you have the Mars Petcare Turn and the brilliantly named Hookers Transport Straight, though one is named after racer Robert Holden, who was born in England but emigrated out to New Zealand with his family when he was a teenager.
The track starts on a steep downhill section that leads into a tight right, with a real steep camber up to the centre of the track. This bend has storm drains in the gutters that stop you going right to the kerb. Because of the crown in the road, you end up jumping out of the corner like a bloody supercross berm. Then you’re on a real short straight that you don’t need to be changing gear on. You’re in second gear, going into the next tight right-hander. It’s another road-end junction, with a steep camber so you don’t want to apex tightly. You end up jumping out of this one too and exit onto a longer straight. This one is long enough to get into third gear. I brake up to the tramlines, then let off to go over them, thread through the right-left; past the Cemetery and then the pits, that are on your left at that point. Up next is another 90-degree right-hander, that is a flat, normal sort of corner. I’m still in third gear, braking into another 90-degree right-hander, then a long right-hander. I go back to second gear for the next tight left, that leads back onto the start–finish straight, where I grab third on the Suzuki on a flying lap.
All the overtaking is done on the brakes. You have to fire it up the inside, screwing up both yourself and the person in front. If you’re coming up the inside, to make what they call on the telly ‘a block pass’, you’re on the wrong line for the corner, but the rider on the better line can’t turn in because there’s a bike in the way. It’s not the quickest line through the corner, but there’s no other way to pass unless the person in front makes a mistake.
Wanganui is a tough race. The locals are bloody fast. No one’s hanging about and I did shit in the races. I go out there on bikes I don’t know, so it’s not easy. Two years ago, when I did it last, I didn’t get on the bike I was racing until the morning of the race. I did two five-lap practices and then it’s straight into the races. This time I got a practice at Manfeild, where I rode the Britten, but it didn’t make a lot of difference.
I qualified seventh or eight, on the third row. And came eighth or ninth or summat. The locals are on it and I didn’t feel comfortable on the bike I was borrowing. They’d fitted Pirellis, because that’s what I’m used to (Pirelli and Metzeler are the same company, but which name is on the side of the tyres just depends on which brand is getting a marketing push that year). But just because it’s a Pirelli doesn’t mean I’m going to get on with it. I hated the feeling of the control tyres they make for the British Superbike series. It just collapses on the brakes. I couldn’t deal with it or ride around it. They make the tyres so they collapse like that, so you have a relatively large footprint of rubber on the track, but I find it hard to turn in. Pirelli Metzeler ended up making a special tyre for the roads that was a stiffer construction, with a cross-belt, which is like twice the plies and it gives a real firm feeling in the front. A lot of the road racers don’t like it, but I love it. I couldn’t get that tyre out in New Zealand, and I missed it. Instead, I had to hold onto the brake to get it around the corner. My style over here is let go of the brake and just keep turning the front in. I wasn’t willing to hang my balls out. Sounds sad, doesn’t it? But tomorrow’s another day. Perhaps the organisers are fed up that I’m not battling at the front, but I tried as hard as I could. I didn’t ride like a fanny, I was pressing on.
I also raced a classic and won both races. I raced a Manx Norton too. One built by UK specialist Andy Molnar. I was going to race one of his Manx Nortons at the Classic TT of 2013, but I was excluded from the meeting because I missed the first practice. I’d told the clerk of the course I couldn’t make the first practice, and was told it didn’t matter, as long as I got along for the next one, but when I turned up at the Isle of Man I was informed I wasn’t allowed to race. I think the TT were trying to teach me a lesson, but I had discussed it with the clerk of the course, the man who runs the meeting, and he said it was alright. I didn’t make a fuss. Maybe they thought I was disrespecting the competition by missing the first practice, but that wasn’t my intention. Surely it was me who was missing out by not practising. I was hardly going to be a danger to anyone else because I hadn’t done one session. I’ve raced classic more than a lot of those boys and I know my way around the place. I wonder if they’d have let Valentino Rossi race if he could only make it over for the second session of practice (not that I’m comparing myself to him).
At Wanganui I did better on the classic than I did in the Superbike race, beating the local champion, who was racing a 650 Manx, when I was riding John Marsh’s 500 Manx. John Marsh owns a car garage and had this classic race bike he lets people race for him. Flea had come to me asking if I was interested in racing it, and I was up for it.
I was going hard enough in the race that I lost the front a couple of times, but the old bike, at slower speeds, was giving the confidence to push that hard and stay on. When I’m not getting the confidence I won’t push. It was the bike owner’s 70th birthday. John said it was the best 70th birthday he’d ever had. It was only a while later that it clicked: it was the only 70th birthday he’d ever had.
That night was an awards evening in a function room at the Wanganui Jockey Club, the local horse racing track. I handed a few trophies out, and then another member of the club that organises the race turned up in a 1940s Chevy truck that was on airbag suspension, so I had a good look around that.
The Paras I’d been talking to the day before were there and said they were going to the Red Lion. I’m not much of a boozer, but my dad was up for it. I went back to the hotel and read up on the CNC programming system for my milling machine. I’ve no idea what time he came in, but we were both up in time for the flight back to England after what had been another memorable trip to New Zealand.