I had been thinking about packing in road racing on and off since the 2014 TT. Probably even before that. If I’m on the ferry home from the Isle of Man and having to ask myself the question, ‘Did I enjoy that?’ – no matter what the answer is, if I’m even having to ask myself that question, is it really the right thing to carry on doing? And when the answer to the question is, ‘No, I’m not enjoying it’, then something has got to change. But then I’d go to three of my favourite races, the Southern 100, Armoy and the Ulster Grand Prix, and I’d be back into it again, which would make me feel positive about racing into the next year, and at the Ulster meeting I’d normally sign up with Philip Neill, the TAS team manager, for another season.
I wasn’t thinking about stopping racing completely, just trying to work out if I could miss the TT and the North West. But then I’d wonder which serious team would want a road racer who isn’t going to compete in the biggest meetings of the road racing year? So perhaps it would be the end.
When an interview in The Times, in February 2015, reported that I was packing in racing, stopping filming anything for TV and all this, that and the other, everyone started saying I was retiring, but I hadn’t put it like that at the time. I was only ever talking about the TT and giving TV a rest for a bit after a busy year of filming in 2014. The interview took place after I’d signed for TAS, but if I really had had enough I wouldn’t go to the TT, contract or no contract. If I backed out, it wouldn’t be in a cowardly way or to join another team, it would be because I realised enough was enough. I’ve always said when it stops being fun I’ll stop doing it. It’s not my bread and butter, so I don’t have to do it. But I suppose it made a better headline if it sounded like I was going to jack it all in.
Even if I did stop entering road races, I had it in my head that I’d still race other bikes in other types of events. I still love the Southern 100, but only when I’m competitive, and to be on the pace you have to be racing regularly on the roads. If the only road race I did every year was the Southern 100, I wouldn’t be quick enough. I like the idea of a season of World Endurance Racing. I’ve done Le Mans and the Bol d’Or 24-hour races, and I like the whole team effort involved in a race like that. I’d like to race the Suzuka 8-Hour in Japan, and that’s part of the World Endurance series. I’d do Pikes Peak again, too. I’d still race dirt track. I want to be good enough to race the Peoria TT in the USA. That’s a big goal of mine. What the Americans call a TT and what those of us who have been brought up with the Isle of Man think when we hear TT is totally different. Peoria is part of the American Grand National dirt track championship. It’s a dirt track race with one jump.
When I try to weigh up whether or not I want to race the Isle of Man TT, I think about the last one I really enjoyed and that was the first year with the TAS team in 2011. A bit of that enjoyment might have come from me proving that I still had it after the 2010 crash. I knew my head was alright, but it was still good to have a fast lap of the TT under my belt, be on the pace and not be scared, apprehensive or distracted by what happened at Ballagarey the year before. The final hour of the 2014 TT was the other side of the whole TT experience. I was trying to load up my van, leave the pits and catch the ferry, and it was just hard work. I had just finished third in the Senior, I’d had an alright TT results-wise and should have been pleased with what the team and I had achieved, but any gloss there was from a job well done was taken off sharpish by people being rude when I was trying catch a ferry and get home after a long two weeks. Before the 2015 season started I already had a feeling I wasn’t going to enjoy the TT. Even so, it’s like a 24-hour mountain bike race: during it I’m not enjoying it, but after it I know I put all that effort in and got something out of it.
I still want to win a TT, but after the 2014 TT I felt I’d gone as far as I could with the Suzuki I was riding for TAS. The GSX-Rs were fast and well sorted, just not fast enough. I was always the first home on a Suzuki superbike in the races I finished, and beat every team-mate I’ve had at the TT on the big bikes, either the superbikes or superstockers, again in the races I finished. William Dunlop beat me on the GSX-R600 in 2014, though.
The financial crisis hit the Japanese sportsbike market hard and all their development slowed. There was no word of a new or radically improved GSXR-1000 coming any time soon, so the basis of the bikes I was racing was getting left further behind. I want to go to the Isle of Man thinking I can win. I don’t want to spend two weeks of my life over there just making up the numbers.
Something had to change, and it did when TAS’s team manager Philip Neill told me they were splitting with Suzuki, who they’d been with since 2000, to run BMWs instead. Up until I got the phone call it had all been ‘he said, she said’. Would Paul Bird or Buildbase or TAS become the official BMW-supported team? But in early December Philip confirmed that TAS had been chosen. The challenge of riding the BMW gave me the reason to continue for another year at least.
If TAS had have stayed with Suzuki for another season, then it’s pretty likely 2014 would have been my last Isle of Man. I didn’t want to race for any team other than the Northern Irish lot, and I felt I couldn’t do anything more than I had already with the Suzukis as they were. It didn’t leave me many options.
In the road bike world the BMW has kicked the arse of the Japanese since it was launched in 2009–10. Not on the racetrack, because the Kawasaki had been very successful too, but in all the magazine tests and also in terms of sales. I had only ever had a short ride on a BMW S1000RR, when it first came out, but the standard road bike, that anyone could buy out of a showroom for £12,000 or summat at the time, felt quicker than my tuned, mega-money TT superbike. Then Michael Dunlop got on the BMW for the 2014 season, with BMW backing, and won a TT the first time out. (He’d won on other makes too. Never a Suzuki, though.) I beat him at other races that season, and the BMW seemed to struggle at some tracks, but it went well around the Isle of Man.
I don’t know what happened between BMW, Michael Dunlop and the Hawk team, who did such a good job at the 2014 TT, but they split. That left a gap for TAS to move in. Michael signed to race for Shaun Muir’s Yamaha team, and William Dunlop and I would be on the BMWs.
The news of the BMW deal changed everything. I don’t want any regrets when I finally do stop racing. I know that if I didn’t race a TT with the TAS team and BMW, I would grow old a miserable bastard thinking ‘What if? What if?’ – so I decided to do one more. That way I shouldn’t have any regrets. I’ve got everything set out in my head. I know why I’m going to retire. I know why I’m not going to enter a particular race or why I am going to race another. Nothing is spur of the moment; even though some rare thoughts go through my mind, everything is calculated before I go ahead and act on them. It is hardly rocket science, though. It’s just considered.
In the area of motorbike sport I’m involved with, all the road racing team announcements usually happen a good while after the MotoGP and World Superbike teams finalise their team line-ups. I don’t know why, because TAS are hardly waiting to see if Marc Márquez is available before deciding to stick with me for another year. It’s just the way it is and it’s no skin off my nose. It always gets sorted out.
A few weeks before the TAS and BMW news broke, there was an announcement that Ryan Farquhar was returning to race superbikes at the TT. He had retired after his uncle, Trevor Ferguson, died racing at the Manx Grand Prix in 2012. Farquhar made the decision to pack in just after the fatal accident and it was totally understandable. He was even quoted as saying, ‘I’m finished with racing. I’ve been racing a long time and I’ve lost a lot of friends in that time, but it’s different when it comes to your own doorstep.’
The quote continued, referring to the accident: ‘What I have witnessed in the past 24 hours I’ve never seen before. It’s the people who are left behind who suffer the most. Trevor probably didn’t know anything about the crash, but the people left behind are hit the hardest.
‘His wife and girls are in pieces. I don’t ever want Karen and my two girls to ever have to go through something like that. This is a sport I love, but I can’t risk putting my family through something like that any more – I have to think of them.’
Ryan had been racing a long time and has two daughters. After he stopped racing in 2012 he continued to run his own KMR team and had some high-profile success, but a while later he announced he was making a comeback and would ride the smaller bikes, the Kawasaki 650 twins he had developed and had won a lot of races on. Then came the news he was coming back to race the superbikes at the 2015 TT. He added, ‘I’m not going out there to waste tyres and fuel.’
When I found out about his decision it made me think, Spread your wings, boy. Farquhar is a clever bloke, a good bike builder; I just hoped he’d get out of it. It seems he’s been blinkered, indoctrinated into the motorbike world. Like he can’t see past his nose end. He had got out alive. I’m not trying to make road racing sound like someone signing up for their tenth tour of Afghanistan, but quit while you’re ahead. And it looked like he had. He’d had a mega career, he won more Irish races than anyone ever has, and probably ever will. But it seems he hasn’t found anything to replace the buzz he got from racing. He got massively into clay pigeon shooting, but that obviously hasn’t filled the hole. My advice would be, Keep looking for something else.
I look at my fellow racers and think, That is not what I want to turn into. That’s another thing that is pushing me away from road racing. By moving on and doing something else, I’ll stop falling into that trap. But one more time wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Another rider who has been doing it a long time and doesn’t seem to be thinking about packing racing in is John McGuinness. The man is a legend, but he went down in my estimation at the 2014 TT. During the Superstock race I pulled up at Parliament Square in Ramsay, when the front wheel spindle nut came off. The person who saw that nut fly off was mega. They not only saw it and knew what it was, but they had to be bloody confident to tell a marshal to black flag me, and ruin my race. Fair play. I’d like to meet him or her. I wouldn’t have the bollocks to do what they did. If I was spectating I’d convince myself into thinking it couldn’t have been a wheel nut …
The reason it came loose enough to fall off was because I’d asked for a slightly softer setting on the front forks. When the bike was hitting the bigger bumps the forks were cracking off the bottom of the stroke. That was happening right from the start of the race. The impact of the forks bottoming out twisted the fork slightly and allowed the nut to work loose. I’m not trying to convince myself, so I can trust the team again; I know that is a fact. Anyway, four clamp bolts in the bottom of the fork legs hold the front wheel spindle, so it wouldn’t have gone anywhere, but the marshals did exactly the right thing. I could’ve finished that race, and nobody would have died and no one would’ve been any the wiser, but I’m pleased whoever noticed it spoke out. Still, without being over-dramatic, I know who tightened up that bolt and I still trust him with my life.
Anyway, in that Superstock race the black flag was waved at me halfway through the third lap. The black flag is to tell a rider to stop straight away, normally because there is something dangerous about them or their bike. It only applies to the racer it is shown to, and usually another marshal holds a chalk board with your number scrawled on it to make sure you know it’s you, so you’re not left thinking it might be a rider in front or behind you.
I’d had my one and only pit-stop of this four-lap race and I was running second, third, fourth – nip and tuck, nowt in it between three or four of us. After I pulled out of the race I was having a brew, waiting for the race to finish, so I could get picked up and taken back to the pits, when McGuinness came through on his last lap. He was riding injured, after damaging his hand crashing a dirt bike in the winter, and hadn’t been right for the whole of the TT, but he came through waving at the crowd. He was still in the top ten, but I thought, What the fuck are you doing? We come here to race and try our hardest. You don’t wave at the crowd unless you’re winning by a country mile. You can’t blame him for not riding balls-out, because his wrist was in bad shape, but he’d only come for the money and he was trying to soften the blow by waving when he’d made himself look daft.
I still have a massive amount of respect for McGuinness’s achievements; the list of TT race wins speaks for itself, and he won the TT Zero race on the Mugen Shinden that week; but I just have a bit less respect than I did have. I would have had more if he hadn’t raced at all.
So, for now, I’m still an Isle of Man TT racer. My entry is in and accepted and I’ll be running number eight.
One complication about TAS changing from Suzuki to BMW is the fact BMW don’t make a Supersport bike. This means at race meetings where I would normally race Superbike, Superstock 1000 and Supersport, I no longer have a default little bike for the Supersport races. If you race for Suzuki you have their 1000 and 600. The same with Kawasaki, Yamaha and Honda.
Ideally Philip Neill would prefer me riding nothing in the Supersport class, but that doesn’t appeal to me. At the TT racing the extra class is pretty important to a rider because it gives you more laps during the two weeks you’re there. You have more bikes to concentrate on setting up, but the trade-off with the amount of time you spend on track is worth it, I reckon.
Philip Neill’s second choice would be for me to ride one of the TAS Suzuki GSX-R600s they already have from 2014. Riding one of last year’s 600s wasn’t floating my boat either. It’s outgunned now. William got on the podium in 2014, but I was sixth and tenth in the races I finished. This might be my last TT, so I wanted the right bikes. That meant I had to start looking for a 600 to ride.
In the background of this was an interesting offer from Metzeler, the tyre company I’ve used for years. Their idea was for them to organise an opportunity for me to try and break the motorcycle lap record at the Nürburgring. I’d get a crack at trying something I’ve been interested in for a while, and Metzeler would use the record attempt to promote their tyres.
The Nürburgring was originally built in 1927 as an alternative to racing on the public roads of the area. There’s a modern F1 grand prix track there too, but the track I’m talking about is the Nordschleife.
Like the Isle of Man TT course, the Nürburgring Nordschleife is now a public road. It runs through forests. When it was built it probably didn’t seem any more dangerous than any other racetracks, but it got a reputation and the Formula One driver Jackie Stewart nicknamed it the Green Hell. Back when driver safety wasn’t any kind of priority it wasn’t marshalled properly, so if someone had an accident, it took a long time to get to the injured driver. Sometimes cars would crash and the authorities didn’t even know until the team realised their car and driver hadn’t come through on schedule.
Now it’s a toll road and a bit of a do-before-you-die destination for bike riders and car drivers. You can buy a ticket to do a lap of the track and fill your boots. There’s no speed limit, but on a public day there are no marshals or ambulances and there’s all kinds of vehicles out on track, from Porsche Turbos to tourist buses, all doing massively different speeds and taking different lines.
The more I thought about Metzeler’s idea, the more into the whole thing I got. I’d been learning the track for months. I watched an on-board video of the current motorcycle lap record on YouTube in my break. The record is held by an English fella called Andy Carlile. I don’t know him well but I’ve met him and he’s a good old boy.
There might have been someone quicker round there, but there’s no evidence of it. The fastest recorded motorcycle lap is Andy Carlile’s at 7 minutes 10 seconds, set in 2012.
The record was set on a regular public day. Carlile passes five bikes and three cars. I don’t know what time of day he did it, but I reckon it’s early in the morning. You can never do a full or flying lap of the Nürburgring on a regular day, because you enter the track after going through a car park-style barrier, and then, at the end of the lap, you take a slip road back into the car park. So the lap is recorded from ‘bridge to gantry’. It’s set from the time you go under a footbridge, just after entering the track, to the time you pass under the gantry where you have to start braking for the car park. You can’t pass the car park. The bridge to gantry lap is supposed to be 11.9 miles.
Metzeler had started talking about renting the track. Lots of car companies do that for testing and filming, but I wanted my attempt to be under the same conditions as Andy Carlile’s – open to tourists, with the chance of traffic to deal with.
When we told the TV lot at North One about the idea they were dead keen on filming it. Then Andy Spellman got talking to Triumph headquarters at Hinckley about the whole Nürburgring thing and they said they’d do anything they could to help, supply a trick bike, using Metzeler tyres of course, and all this and that. It was suggested they could supply a supersport bike for the TT as well.
I reckon I could get a BMW S1000RR to ride at the Nürburgring pretty easily. TAS would be all over it and BMW too, I would have thought, but I preferred the idea of a British bike and a British rider taking on a German track. I like that the Triumph’s triple engine is a bit different too, not the regular superbike four-cylinder. I know the Triumph 675 is fast, but it’s not as fast as a BMW S1000RR, so why not get the fastest bike possible? I originally thought that. I was even thinking about building a bike with a supercharger on it. Then I consider using my Pikes Peak bike, the Martek with its turbocharged Suzuki 1271 cc engine, but it’s not all about speed around the Nürburgring.
The track flows and is similar to the TT – both are about momentum and rolling through the corners, not braking almost to a stop and accelerating hard out of hairpins. It’s about maintaining momentum, the kind of riding I like. There is only one little bit where it’s head down, arse up, elbows and knees tucked in, so you’re not going to gain much by having a million horsepower. You need good, usable power and nice handling. The record is set on a Yamaha R1, making 150–160 horsepower. A really good Triumph Daytona 675 can make 142 brake horsepower, and weighs less than the R1.
Andy Carlile lives near the track, or he did when I met him, and he’d moved out there in 2007 with the single aim of becoming the fastest man on two wheels around the Nürburgring. That was his sole focus, but the reason I think I can go out a few weekends in the summer, then have a go and beat his record, is because I reckon I’m a better rider than him. Valentino Rossi is a better motorbike racer than me and I’m a better one than Andy Carlile. I see it as a cold, hard fact. I watch the on-board video and see he’s not applying the TT mentality to the job. Cadwell Park mentality isn’t the best for the Nürburgring. And his technique is closer to Cadwell than Isle of Man. He’s having the back end chattering, skipping on the brakes, into the slow corners as he locks the back brake up, when really it’s about braking early and carrying the momentum through the corner onto whatever straight follows. He knows the track miles better than me and he’ll be miles faster than me to start with, but I will beat him. His lines are good, but his momentum isn’t as good as it could be.
I’d watched the video 20 times before I started seeing where I could be quicker. Up till then I thought, He’s bloody good. Now I watch it, and while he’s still bloody good, I know all his mistakes. Maybe he’s already broken his own record and is keeping it quiet until someone breaks his 7 m 10 s lap.
Metzeler had got a fair way down the line with organising everything, when the folk at the Nürburgring shit themselves. After seeming like they were all for it, they got in touch with the tyre company and said, ‘We don’t want any motorbike records breaking around here. The track’s not designed for motorbikes.’ So that immediately put a stop to the TV programme. North One is a proper company and couldn’t be involved with something that had been officially blocked, but I still wanted to do it anyway and it might turn out better for me. The TV lot wanted me to attempt the record in April 2015, but I wanted to go for it later in the year, to give myself more chance to drive over there with the bike in the back of the Transit and do practice laps. And the weather is unpredictable in April. Leave it till later in the year and I’d have more luck getting a better day. Doing it to my own timescale would give me the summer to plan, go and do laps to get up to speed and hopefully break the record. If I could fit it all in.
After they heard there wasn’t going to be a Channel 4 TV show about the attempt, Triumph seemed to lose a bit of interest unless I was tied into some commercial deal with them, and I wasn’t mad keen on that. The whole Nürburgring thing had escalated from the original idea, so it was no bad thing, but it was the middle of February, I was without a supersport bike for the TT and the Nürburgring was all up in the air too. I had to get some irons in the fire.
Back at the 2014 TT, I was in one of the two Supersport 600 races when Gary Johnson passed me on Sulby Straight, one of the fastest parts of the TT circuit. I’m not taking anything away from him, because he was riding well and went on to win the race, but I was tucked in, arse on the back of the seat to be as aerodynamic as possible, not hanging around, and the Triumph came past me so easily I thought, Bloody hell! So when I started thinking seriously about supersport bikes my first call was to the people who built his race bike, Smiths Triumph.
Before I spoke to them I didn’t know that much about their set-up, but I knew they were in road haulage. Then I found out they have a load of businesses and one of them is the race team. The team is run by the company founder’s daughter, Rebecca Smith. They’d been in business as a race team since 2010. Their first year on the roads was 2014, when they won a TT. I also knew John Trigger builds their engines. I made my first call to them in the middle of February, saying, ‘You’ve got proven bikes. I want to buy one.’ They quoted me silly money, £36,000 or summat for a Supersport 600. And it was one of last year’s. Ten minutes later they rang me back and asked if I’d race for them. I didn’t give them an answer there and then, saying I’d think about it.
The following week I was in work at Moody’s on Monday, then filming Tuesday and Wednesday, then back into work Thursday morning. Moody came in at dinnertime and said, ‘What are you doing tonight? How are fixed to go to Holland tonight and come back Saturday morning?’ He wanted me to go out with him to Holland and pick up some Scanias he was buying over there and selling over here.
Me, Moody and Darren, who owns Kelsa, a company that make all the truck light bars, all went out in the Transit and two of us drove trucks back, with me driving one of the Scanias. It was a two-pedal and beautiful to drive. None of the big V8s have a gear lever, it’s all computer-controlled because they have that much torque there’s too much chance of abusing the gearbox. The log men, the drivers who transport loads of tree trunks out of the forests, want three-pedal, like a regular manual car, because they need a bit more control when they are on dirt roads and struggling for traction. General haulage and fridge work drivers choose the two-pedal option.
The reason this trip with Moody to Holland is relevant, and thanks for bearing with me, is the boss of the Scania place we were collecting the trucks from. He didn’t know I was into motorbikes, but for some reason we got onto the subject and it turns out he knew someone at Ten Kate. A tuning company based in Holland, Ten Kate run a team that has won seven World Supersport world titles and one World Superbike championship, all with Hondas they’ve tuned and prepared themselves. James Toseland won the 2007 World Superbike championship on one of their Fireblades, and they’ve had loads of top riders race for them including Leon Haslam and Jonny Rea.
The Dutch Scania bloke said he would have a word with them about a TT bike. A few minutes later he came back and said Ten Kate would build me a Honda CBR600 Supersport but they wanted to meet me face to face and it would cost €35,000. So, at that stage, if the Smiths Triumph thing didn’t happen I could go out the following Monday and order a bike from Ten Kate.
Mates have asked why I didn’t buy a road bike, tune and build a good Supersport bike myself, and you might be wondering that too, because in the past it was the way I’d try to do things. The reason I wouldn’t do that this time is: if I built the bike it would be quick, but my Honda wouldn’t be as quick as Ten Kate’s and my Triumph 675 wouldn’t be as fast as Smiths’, because they’ve been working with those bikes for four seasons or more and they’ve been right round the houses with them, trying different port shapes and cam profiles … So there’s no way I’m going to get mine as good as either of theirs with the first bite of the cherry.
I had the Smiths and Ten Kate options to consider when another Supersport bike offer came in. And when it did, it made me wonder, in a roundabout way, if it’s me getting old. I’m not stuck in my ways, I like to think I never would be, but while I was trying to sort all the 600 job out, Taylor Lindsey got in touch. They are a building company from Lincoln and a big way of going. They also have a motorbike team. The owner of Taylor Lindsey said, ‘I heard you’re after a 600. Why not ride ours?’ My old mate Ivan Lintin, also known as Ivor Biggun, rode for them in 2014. He had a good 600, so I was interested. We got talking about this and that and the Taylor Lindsey man said, ‘The best thing to do is come over to Lincoln, have a coffee with us and we’ll have a yarn about it.’
As soon as he said that, the deal was over. I knew I wasn’t going to ride for him, because he said coffee, not tea. Loveliest bloke in the world, offering me to ride his motorbike, but as soon as he said that sentence it was like a default in my head. You don’t meet up to go for a coffee! Not in Lincolnshire. You’ve been watching too many episodes of Friends! Meeting up to go for a coffee? People don’t do that in England. Well, I know they do now, but only because they’ve been watching too many American TV programmes. If he’d have said, ‘Come over to Lincoln for a brew,’ I might have been riding his motorbike at the TT. It niggled me for days. It wasn’t until I had seen beans on toast on the menu of a café in Liverpool that I felt everything was alright again.
A couple of weeks after my call to Smiths Triumph I arranged to go and visit them in Gloucester. I had a £203,000 Aston Martin Vanquish Carbon Edition, that the Sunday Times had organised for me to test, but I left it at home and went in the van with my dog. I had arranged to meet Rebecca Smith. She’s 25 and seems to know exactly what she wants, and that’s to organise a motorbike racing team as efficiently as possible. When I talked to her I knew she was spot on. When her mum walked in, Rebecca said, ‘This is my mum. She wants to know about you wanking in the back of your van.’ I knew I was on the right footing when she was talking like that. She mentioned that Nigel, the dog, had a hard-on too. She doesn’t just manage the racing team, she is involved with all the family businesses and runs a farm with 70 cows and calves on it, with her boyfriend. She’s got at least as much going on as I have.
Rebecca’s dad, Alan, has 250 wagons. Skip wagons, uplifters, and they do demolitions too. They’re not messers. Alan came in wearing an old duffle coat, with ten dogs all following him round. He was driving a 51-reg Hi-Lux, so I was glad I hadn’t gone in the Aston Martin. I liked him from the off.
Alan Smith was into his motocross, a national level racer. The family business started sponsoring a local national road racer, Dan Cooper, by buying him tyres. When the team he was riding for starting mucking about, the Smiths ended up running the team for him and another rider, Matt Whitman, whose team had also folded. Alan threw his daughter Rebecca in at the deep end. She was only 19, but she was managing a two-rider team in the British Superbike paddock – one in Supersport, one in Superstock.
They’ve been at it five years now and they’ve won two British championships and a TT. They’re right people. They’re not a team that goes racing every year and every winter they need to go looking for sponsorship. They are a haulage-cum-skip-cum-demolition company that happens to have a racing team. They don’t need to attract sponsors, they fund it themselves and they’ve got good ones through their other businesses. But they’re not playing at it. So we did a deal.
When the news got out, it was reported in a paper that Gary Johnson was surprised that Smiths Triumph had decided that they wanted me to race for them rather than him, the man who got them the win in 2014. The newspaper quoted Johnson saying something like if we were team-mates he’d ‘mentally destroy’ me before the race. I don’t know how he’d do that. I don’t know how I’d go about mentally destroying someone else. I know that I don’t have all my eggs in one basket so I don’t have to ask for a squillion quid to race someone’s bike, which is the real reason the Smiths didn’t do a deal with him. They weren’t willing to pay what he was asking.
Racing two bikes with two teams is something I’d never done before, but plenty of boys do. It’s the kind of challenge I needed to make me want to go back to the TT, that and the fact these are potentially the most competitive bikes I’ve ever ridden and I’m saying that before I’ve even sat on them. That Triumph’s proven at the TT and the BMW’s not going to be crap. Stewart Johnstone and the whole TAS team will get it to work. They’d get a farm gate to handle. With my input they’ll get that BMW to work. Let’s get stuck in!