I wasn’t looking forward to the 2015 North West 200. I think if I really put my foot down the TAS team wouldn’t make me go, but I didn’t force it this year. Everyone thinks that you have to go to the North West for preparation if you want to put a good show on at the TT and perhaps I was just following that thinking. Now, having been, I couldn’t give a damn. It’s a week off work to ride for a couple of hours on Tuesday, same on Thursday plus a couple of races that evening, then the races on Saturday. Cookstown fitted as much racing, if not more, into one night and one day. I know they’re two very different races, but things could be tightened up at the North West. It is Ireland’s biggest race, and one of the largest spectator events in the whole of Northern Ireland, and it’s set up to bring money into the local economy, so it makes sense to string it out to keep fans in the area.
The main man is Mervyn White, and he makes a good job of organising a big race meeting, but from where I’m looking, he doesn’t seem to want to delegate responsibility, so every decision is on him. That means the organisation becomes bloody painful at times. I don’t mean it’s badly organised, because it isn’t. It is a massive event, held over a large area – the track is 8.97 miles long and touches the outskirts of three towns. Tens of thousands of fans all watch, with who knows how many more watching it on BBC Northern Ireland’s feed on the internet. What I mean when I say it’s painful is how long it takes to get a race off, from leaving the pit, to actually starting the race. You go out on a warm-up lap, then you’re sat on the grid for another ten minutes while it feels like someone somewhere is making their mind up. At Cookstown, or my favourite race, the Southern 100 on the Isle of Man, they get through the races one after another, no messing. But I’m comparing the North West 200 to an Irish National race, when Mervyn and the other folk who run the NW200 want it to be compared to the TT. That’s fair enough, a few years ago the NW200 was seen as a bigger race in a lot of people’s eyes, including those who were running MCN. And, as always, I’m only talking for myself. It might suit all the other riders and teams to be away for a week just a few days before they have to go to the TT for a fortnight, but it’s not good for me.
The NW200 organisers all mean well, there is no doubting that, and it is bloody difficult trying to organise any real road race, never mind one the size of this one, so I want to make it clear they do a great job in tough circumstances.
The weather’s not been kind to the North West the last few years and they’ve have had a few big crashes and even deaths. There were no fatalities in 2015, but my mate Stephen Thompson, a Northern Irish lad and a really funny bloke, had a bad crash. It happened at the fast kink after the first-gear York Corner on the way up to Mill Road Roundabout. Stephen, Dean Harrison and Horst Saiger were all involved, but Harrison was lucky to get away without injuries. Stephen had the worst of the injuries and his arm was badly damaged, then I heard it became infected, and surgeons decided it was best to amputate it after a couple of operations couldn’t mend it. A spectator was hit by a flying bike and it wasn’t looking good for her either, but she was on the mend when I wrote this.
So, obviously it could have gone a lot worse for me, but I still didn’t enjoy much about the racing this year. I liked being in Ireland, though, and I made the most of the Wednesday and Friday, days you do nothing at the North West. On the Wednesday, a mate of mine called Glyn Moffitt took me around the Crosslé car factory in Holywood, County Down, near Belfast City airport. Crosslé have been making race cars since 1957. My mate Glyn is a proper signwriter and he does some work for them. Crosslé were once at the cutting edge, winning Formula Ford races and championships around the world, and now they’re still making the trick, classic-looking race cars. They’re proud to say they’re ‘the longest surviving customer racing car constructor in the UK’.
From there Glyn took me to Cooke Brothers Engineering, a big industrial engineers in Newtonards, just 15 minutes away. Cooke’s have a lot of the big machinery out of Harland and Wolff when the shipyard has sold stuff off. They have a massive engineering shop, with what looked like 20 or 30 blokes working on the shop floor. I was gobsmacked. I had some right interesting conversations with the lads there, but there was one fella who will stick in my mind a long time. He was shorter than me, and not built much heavier than me. He was knocking the end off a hydraulic ram with a sledgehammer. The end is threaded on, but it gets stuck fast and needs a whack to free it. A hell of whack.
Anyone working in the truck game needs to know how to swing a sledgehammer, and I like to think I do, but the way this lad went at that digger was the most committed I’ve ever seen anyone with a 4 ft sledgehammer. And it wasn’t a small one. It must have been a 20 lb hammer. I can swing a sledgehammer, but I couldn’t swing it like he could. He was taking two steps in to get a bit of a run-up, and timed it right to hit the end of this hydraulic ram dead-on. He had a target about the size of the palm of your hand, and if he didn’t hit it square on he’d make a write-off of the ram – costing a good few grand.
You would not want to be in the way of that man. He meant business. There were a few things that impressed me that week: the Crosslé factory’s attention to detail and the old-schoolness of it, and the whole set-up of Cooke’s Engineering, but that man with that sledgehammer took the biscuit. I was Sunday league compared to him. He was the man.
Back at the track, the organisers wanted me to do something for the BBC Northern Ireland telly coverage of the race, so I did that. They had me driving up and down the beach in a nice John Deere tractor talking to a presenter lass, so that was alright and everyone was happy.
Then, during practice, I came in after a lap and Stephen Watson, the grid presenter, asked how I was getting on. In the heat of the moment I told him I was bored to back teeth of riding through bloody chicanes and that I had no interest. Up to top gear, back to bottom gear for a chicane. Up to top gear, back to bottom gear for another chicane. Now, perhaps I shouldn’t have said it, but I genuinely felt it at that moment, and still stand by it now. It upset a few people, but I was still revving from being on the bike at 200 mph. I didn’t have the peace of mind to remember my mum’s advice: if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
I stayed with my mate, Paul Dunlop, who lives not far from the track, and on Friday I drove down to Rostrevor, on the border near Newry in County Down, where I rode my mountain bike on my own for an unsociable four or five hours. After that I crossed into the Republic, picked Sharon up and went for an ice cream and some tea on Skerries seafront. From there we went to McElvaney’s truck yard. Moody had told me he’d seen a restored Scania 143 at Truckfest, the big truck show in Peterborough. He reckoned he’d never seen anything like it. It was about the time we’d just started restoring a 143 for a customer. Moody doesn’t get excited about anything, so it must have been good, for him to tell me about it. He didn’t know whose it was, but I tracked it down to McElvaney’s, the official Scania dealer for the south of Ireland, who are based in Monaghan. There used to be an Irish national race in the same town, and it was one of my favourites.
The boss, Mr McElvaney, knew I was keen to see the 143 because Patrick, a truck fitter I’d met at Cookstown, had been in touch with him. So through this fella and that fella I got to meet them at about nine at night. And it was worth it. It was a 143H, the heavy-duty chassis. Nearly everything in the UK is a 143M – the motorway chassis, but Scania Sweden wouldn’t send the M to the Republic because the state of the roads was so bad. The restoration work was more than impressive and this 1996 truck was the best I’d ever seen. It’s a bold statement, but the 143 we’re doing for a customer is going to be even better. The 143 500 is a legendary truck and boys in the haulage game want them for shows. They’re into their trucks like some motorbike shop owners are into old bikes.
McElvaney’s yard must have made an impression on me, because months later I was literally dreaming about his industrial parts washer. I’ve got to get a grip.
That night we went back to Paul’s ready for the races the next day. By this time I’d had a practice at Kirkistown on the superbike and that had all gone well. Even saying that, honestly, it never entered my head that I was in with a chance of winning at the North West. For the last few years I’ve used it as a means to an end to prepare for the Isle of Man, but I don’t see it like that any more and it’s become a pain in the arse. It didn’t help that I was made to say sorry to this man and say sorry to that man in front of the TV cameras about my thoughts on the chicanes that I’d come out with. It had made the back pages of the local papers and it shouldn’t have done. The stories should be about whoever is doing the winning, not me spouting my mouth of. Perhaps that’s a reflection on the quality of the racing. If they’re having to talk about what I said, there’s obviously nothing better to write about.
Mervyn White wasn’t happy with me, but if they’re not happy with what comes out of my mouth they shouldn’t allow the TV bods to come and stick a microphone in my face the second I come in from practice when I’m all revved up after being on the bike. I don’t know if people want the riders to have opinions or not. I think they just want yes men and I’m not one of them. If you’re not happy with my opinion, then don’t ask for it. If you want someone to say everything is fantastic, when it isn’t, then ask someone else. I thought honesty was the best policy, but obviously not in TV land.
I like being with the team, Phil, Denver and Mark, wherever we are, but riding round that track isn’t fun for me. Philip Neill, the team boss, was even telling me to just get through the week in one piece and get to the TT. The year Conor Cummins rode for TAS, 2012, he got taken out at Mather’s Cross chicane, broke his wrist and buggered his TT up. He didn’t ride a single race at the Isle of Man TT because of it, and that’s the biggest race of his year. Once you’re at the TT no one even remembers what happened at the North West. Plus you get good short circuit lads, like Alastair Seeley – who was racing the TAS BMW – who go bloody well at the North West, but then they’re not worried about the TT. Seeley’s big race of the year is the North West. He’s a very good short circuit Superstock and Supersport rider too, but I’d say the NW200 is what earns him decent prize money and helps get him signed to teams for the following year. He doesn’t do any Irish national stuff or the TT – this is his only road race.
I started the Superbike race from the fourth row, and didn’t even know where I finished until I checked when I was writing this. I came in eighth, one place behind William Dunlop. TAS rider Alastair Seeley won it and came second to Lee Johnston in the Superstock race that I didn’t finish. I didn’t enter the Supersport race that the big crash happened in, because the Smiths team didn’t travel to the race. Maybe that was a stroke of luck.
I left Northern Ireland thinking I’m not going back to the North West 200 – and I have to up my sledgehammer game.