‘The plan was to get their under-age mechanic drinking ten pints of Guinness in one sitting.’
I AM THE son of a motorcycle racer, but I don’t see that as the main reason I started racing. My dad’s influence obviously rubbed off on me in some ways. I’d see the bikes in the shed every day; I’d sit with Dad as he worked on them; and then I’d be aware of him going away to race them. Still, I think I was too young to be really infected by it all when he was racing. The almost constant contact with bikes – my dad’s, my and Sally’s little TY80, and the Kawasaki motocrosser I’d own later – all made me want a road bike as soon as I was 16 and legal to ride on the road, but I hadn’t made the mental leap to believing I’d ever race motorcycles. It just wasn’t on my radar.
I went to some races with my dad when I was young, but not many. We went to the Isle of Man TT a few times, including the last year he raced there, in 1988, but all I remember about that is losing the rag I used to carry round and suck on. I still had it at seven years old, I don’t know why. I lost it on one of the horse-drawn trams that run up and down Douglas seafront. I don’t remember any of the bikes or anything of the racing, just losing this bit of comfort blanket. It wouldn’t be the last time I lost my rag on the Isle of Man during TT fortnight …
My dad smashed himself up later in 1988, and didn’t race again. The accident happened at Oliver’s Mount, Scarborough. He crashed his Yamaha at the top bend of Scarborough, coming past the Memorial, a very tight left-hander. Now I have a lot of experience with that track and I don’t see it as a specially tricky or fast corner, compared to some at Scarborough, but you don’t think you’re going fast until you’re sliding along on your arse.
The thing about the corner is, if you get it wrong you go straight into the trees, and that’s what he must have done. I was seven at the time, and I remember being in the back of the ambulance with him, Mum and Sally. For some young kids it might have been upsetting to see their dad laid out in an ambulance, but everything was so calm and matter-of-fact that it wasn’t shocking in any way.
He had badly smashed his hip. I asked him if he was all right, and he replied, ‘Oh yeah, no bother …’ He gave me his trademark big thumbs up. I realise now he was putting on a brave face for his family. He must have been in serious pain, but he is a double-hard bastard. Mum wasn’t flipping her lid or anything, just thinking about how she was going to cope with work, four small kids and a husband on crutches for a few weeks. She never gets excited, she just gets on with it.
When I saw Dad in hospital, later that week, surgeons had plated up his femur, with screws and brackets. The injury caused him agony for four years, till they gave him a false hip, a prototype stainless steel thing. I think he was one of the first in the country to have a replacement like this, and he said it was better than the original.
The bike he crashed was a Yamaha FZR750RR, quite a rare machine, and he was offered a good deal when he bought it. This, Dad’s last race bike, was Yamaha’s version of the Superbike of its day. Four-cylinder, 100-horsepower, if that; aluminium frame, full fairing and trick flatslide carbs. Good for 150 mph. It was a homologation special, built by Yamaha and sold looking like a road bike with lights, but made almost exclusively for racers to buy and convert into a track bike.
This was the start of the era when production bikes, ‘proddie’ bikes, took over British racing. Proddie bikes have long been part of the racing landscape, but until the 1980s the most important bikes were pure race machinery – designed and built to race, not bikes that were based on converted and tuned road bikes. Machines like Yamaha TZ750s and TZ250s and 350s were made in big numbers, but they were pure race bikes. In the fifties and sixties it was machinery like the Manx Norton and AJS 7R ‘Boy Racer’, off-the-shelf race bikes. There were also bikes that would use tuned road bike engines in special chassis like Rob North and Seeley frames. That all changed in the 1980s, and except for a couple of classics I’ve only ever raced proddie bikes.
After the Memorial Corner crash, Dad made the decision to stop racing, or maybe Mum made his mind up for him, but he still wanted an involvement with racing bikes, so he started spannering for a couple of local businessmen who raced classic bikes.
They had a converted bus, a big old Bedford coach, that could carry four bikes in the back and also had home-made bunk beds, enough to sleep six. They were fixed to the sides of the interior, three on either side, and we called them torpedo tubes.
We would travel to the classic race meets as a group. There would be me, my dad, Ian Clark and Rob Cadle. We did that for two or three years, starting when I was about ten. Dad had built a pair of Triumph classic racing bikes for the other two, Cadle and Clark, who were quite well-to-do. Clark ran a double-glazing company and had a Triumph Trident T150 triple (it had a three-cylinder engine) in a Rob North frame, and Cadle had another Rob North Trident, a ‘Slippery Sam’ replica. The nickname came from the 1970 Bol d’Or race in France when a racing T150 with a knackered oil pump sprayed engine oil all over the rider. Cadle owned a building company.
When Clark bought the brand-new chassis for his racer, my dad bought one from the same company to build a Rob North BSA – the hot bike from the very early 1970s. He’d never race it, but he still owns it now.
Dad built Clark’s engine, and as payment for that and for spannering at the race meetings, they’d buy him parts for his own bike.
Even though Clark was minted, he had to justify the price of his bike to his other half. You could buy these race machines second-hand as complete runners, but if you wanted a new one, you ordered the whole rolling chassis without the engine. You’d then buy the rest of the parts you needed to make it a runner. When the three of them bought these Rob Norths I think you paid something like £6,000 for the chassis, bodywork, petrol tank, wheels, brakes and suspension: basically everything but the engine, carbs, exhaust and electrics. When you’d finished paying for everything, the bike would be well over £10,000, especially if you had to pay someone else to assemble it for you. It turns out that when Clark, one of this pair of wealthy businessmen, told his missus that the Rob North kit cost £300, she hit the roof: ‘Three hundred pounds! For a motorbike with no engine!’ It’s one of my dad’s favourite stories.
Attending these classic events was quite an eye-opener for me. I would see Dad with these other blokes and how he’d behave when he wasn’t just being my dad. I’d be sat in the pub with them and I couldn’t believe he swore so much. He still swears a lot. Not in front of my mum, though.
I went to a few of these classic meets, and eventually he started taking my little sister Kate to some. Much later, in 2008, Kate ended up being one of my mechanics. I don’t think her interest in bikes came from me in the slightest; it just happened that our paths crossed when she wanted to get into spannering.
When Kate started to go to the races with Dad, I was older and doing my own thing. I was mucking about with mates, or else out on my motocross bike or tinkering in the shed on my own.
Though he had bought me and Sally the Yamaha TY80 for Christmas, all those years ago, Dad had never encouraged me at all to start thinking about racing myself. His reluctance was probably down to the money it cost to go racing and the heartache that came with it. He knew all about that, but he’d still reminisce about his racing days. The older he gets, the faster he was … Still, in 1983, a year after I was born, Ian Martin was the first privateer home in the Senior TT on his P & M-framed Suzuki GS1000. He wasn’t shabby.
By the time I was 15, Mick Hand, the son of my dad’s best mate, Jeff Hand, was racing schoolboy motocross, but there was never any mention or even thought of my going racing. It’s an expensive game, even at schoolboy motocross level. If I was going to race it would have to wait till I could pay for it myself. And anyway, it hardly mattered, racing wasn’t on my mind, because as soon as I turned 16, in 1997, I had my road bike, a 1991 Kawasaki AR50 – registration J121 LVL – and that was everything to me.
My mum let me take a day off school to do my Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) motorcycle test. I bought the bike from a lad who worked in the truck spray shop opposite my dad’s work, paying the asking price, £700. I used to see him coming and going from work on it. It was trick. It had an 80-cc engine with a five-speed gearbox in it and a Micron exhaust. It was illegal to have an 80 in a 50, if you were still on L-plates, like I was, but I wasn’t bothered. Then I bored it a mil and ended up with a 93-cc kit on it, cut my own ports in the barrel, fitted a KX60 carburettor and a Nikon pipe. I was always tinkering with it.
I used to think up the maddest stuff to make it faster. I’d experiment, like I did with the lawn-mower engines. I would do things like taking the rev counter drive off because I thought it was robbing power by driving the cable.
The little Kawasaki would do over 80 mph, which was crazy for what was supposed to be a road legal 50-cc bike. I’d ride it everywhere, but it kept knocking the main bearings out because the bottom end wasn’t designed for the power it was now making. Because it was so highly tuned, I had to buy top quality two-stroke oil to mix with the petrol, to have even half a chance of not blowing up every other time I rode it. The only people to sell decent two-stroke oil in my area were Regent Motocross in Goxhill, but they were in the arse-end of nowhere, so I’d ride a 30-mile round trip just to buy my two-stroke oil – always the most expensive they, or anyone else, had.
At 16, I left school and enrolled at North Lindsay College in Scunthorpe on a motor vehicle engineering course. I don’t know what I was thinking, because further education just wasn’t for me. I’d been grafting since I was old enough to be able to, but I thought I had to go to college because everyone else was doing it. It was the done thing. It only took a few days before I started thinking, ‘What am I doing here? This is a load of shit.’ They were either teaching me stuff I thought I would never need or stuff I already knew. And I wasn’t being paid to go. I lasted a month, before I left and never looked back.
I had landed an apprenticeship at John Hebb Volvo, a local truck dealer and service centre. It was here that I started working with Johnny Ellis, who would become my best friend. We already knew of each other, because we’d both gone to the Vale of Ancholme School in the same year, but I didn’t knock around with Johnny at school. He wasn’t part of the Kirmington massive. In fact, when he turned up to school on a motorbike on his 16th birthday, I thought he was a bit flash. It turned out Johnny had been doing the same at this Volvo garage that I’d been doing at my dad’s, working on trucks during weekends and holidays while he was still at school.
John Hebb was a top bloke to work for. At Christmas he’d give each of his employees, including the newest of the apprentices, a £100 hamper. I used to take it home and pass it on to my mum and she would knock the equivalent off the money I paid for my lodging. And at Hebb’s, if you worked on a Saturday afternoon, you’d get fish and chips bought for you. From the age 16 I was earning over £300 a week and spending the biggest slice of it on my Kawasaki AR50. I would regularly work 8am till 8pm five days a week, and on top of that I’d usually do overtime, 6am till 4pm, on Saturdays. During term time we would attend a local college on day release for classroom-based training.
At that time my dad was self-employed, having set up a truck maintenance business on his own. If there wasn’t overtime at Volvo I worked with him some evenings and weekends to earn a few quid extra. One of his regular contracts was a haulage company called A D Jackson, and one of their drivers was called Baz Kirk. He knew my dad had raced at the Isle of Man and got talking to him one evening when I was there. Baz was about 40, not a young lad, and he smoked like a trooper. He was telling my dad he was going to race the Manx Grand Prix that year.
The Manx Grand Prix meeting is a road race, just like the Isle of Man TT, that takes place on the same 37.73-mile Mountain Course as the TT. While the TT is held over the last week in May and the first week in June, the Manx takes place at the end of August. The Manx is run as a time trial, just like the TT, with riders setting off one at a time, or sometimes in pairs, not in a mass-start like a MotoGP or British Superbike race. The difference is that the Manx Grand Prix is aimed at amateur racers on modern bikes and keen classic racers. The Manx GP was always used as the stepping stone to the TT. For years, if you hadn’t raced the Manx, or didn’t have an FIM (Federation of International Motorcycling) international race licence, you couldn’t enter the TT, but that’s all changed now, and although I have raced the Manx on a classic, I made my Mountain Course debut at the TT before I raced the Manx. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Many racers just want to compete at the Manx and never progress to race the TT. They prefer the atmosphere and level of the Manx. It’s like a big club race, but held on the most famous motorcycle race circuit in the world. The Manx also meant that riders who were disillusioned with the commercialism of the TT could still race the Mountain Course, with less of the glitz and bullshit that had developed around the TT.
On the classic side, the Manx GP is the cream of road races. It always attracted very serious and seriously fast classic racers like Bill Swallow and Chris McGahan, but eventually some of the top current TT men were offered rides, like Ryan Farquhar, Michael Dunlop and me. But the Manx wasn’t bringing in enough cash to justify the effort needed to put the race on. It was only attracting something like 9,000 spectators, compared to the 40,000 that were visiting the TT.
For 2013, the Isle of Man Department of Tourism and Economic Development, the government department that promotes the races to bring more money and investment to the island, changed the Manx GP, incorporating a newly packaged event, the Classic TT, into the middle of it. The idea was to try to give it more of a festival feel and bring in more spectators and sponsorship by using the island’s race heritage and the TT name. For the 2013 Classic TT, the Isle of Man organisers brought in a load of a current TT top names like John McGuinness, William and Michael Dunlop, Cameron Donald, Bruce Anstey, Conor Cummins, Gary Johnson and James Hillier to compete against classic specialists like Ollie Linsdell and Chris Swallow.
But that was all in the future. Back in 1997, Baz Kirk was telling my dad he had rented a house on the island and that he was going to do this and that at the Manx. I was listening away, while doing a poor job of sweeping up, and he must’ve noticed me cocking an ear, because he turned to me and said, ‘If you want to come and get mucked in, then get yourself over.’ As soon as I heard those words, that was all I wanted to do.
I booked the days I could get off work, and a few weeks later I jumped in the van with Baz Kirk to head off to the Manx. It would be my first time back on the Isle of Man since I was seven years old. We drove to the ferry, stopping in Settle, Yorkshire to pick up another racer called Adam Knowles and his bike.
Baz Kirk’s bike was a scruffy 1993 Honda CBR600 ‘bitsa’ (made from bitsa this and bitsa that). It seemed to be held together with jubilee clips and cable ties. My role as mechanic was to make sure everything was tight after each outing, change the oil and clean the carburettors out, and give it a wipe down. Then, on the morning of each practice session, I’d queue up and take it through scrutineering for Baz. The scrutineers are set up in a garage under the grandstand, right at the top of the pit-lane and in the thick of things. The scrutineers give each and every bike a thorough check over before every practice or race, ensuring everything is tight and safe. I wasn’t trained for the job, but I was helping where I could.
I’d do most of the preparation back at the house Baz and Adam had rented, but during the time I was in the pits, either in the queue for scrutineering or while Baz was out on the track, I noticed another rider who would stick in my mind for years. Keith Townsend was a dead confident Southerner, who owned a motorcycle shop, and his race bikes were absolutely mint. I think his mechanic used to work for Rumi Honda, the Italian-based World Superbike team. I remember looking at Townsend’s race bikes and thinking, ‘When I get a race bike, that’s what mine is going to be like.’ His bikes did it for me. It was the way the cables were routed and the cable ties were trimmed. You could tell that whoever had built it had a real pride in their work. If a bike looks right, it normally is right. It sounds obvious but there are loads of racers, Baz Kirk included, who turn up with a shoddy bike and waste their money when it doesn’t perform or sometimes even finish the race. Looking at Keith Townsend’s bike was the first time I seriously thought about having my own race bike.
The Manx Grand Prix meeting lasts a fortnight, and I could only be out at the Isle of Man with Baz for the first half, practice week, so I missed his race, but it was still a hell of an experience.
During that practice week, Baz and Adam had to get their eye in for their races, but they also had another target. The plan was to get their under-age mechanic drinking ten pints of Guinness in one sitting. That was the goal for my last night before travelling back home. And I did it.
My mum said later that I went to that Manx GP a boy and came back a man. And it was nothing to do with the Guinness. After I’d been involved with motorcycle racing, really in the guts of it, not just as a spectator, all I wanted to do was race. From then on, I couldn’t stop thinking about racing.
I had only been back from the Manx a couple of weeks when I was in the local pub, The Marrowbone and Cleaver, for my sister’s 18th birthday. I was 16, but I ended up showing everyone I was the man, by demonstrating my new party piece, drinking ten pints of stout. It hardly needs saying, I was absolutely wankered. I can’t even imagine being able to drink that much now.
Somehow I got up the next morning in time for my day release at college. I must’ve still been trolleyed. I’m not proud of it, but this is just what happened. I was riding my Kawasaki to Scunthorpe when I went straight through a junction where I was supposed to be turning right, and smashed head-on into a car at Barnetby Top Services.
I was so loose, totally not on the ball in any way, that I flew over the top of the car, flailed down the road like a rag doll and got up without a mark on me. I was still so, how would you say it, relaxed, that I didn’t even think to tense up before hitting the ground – and, ironically, I reckon that’s what saved me from breaking anything.
The Kawasaki, my pride and joy, didn’t fare as well. It was completely smashed up. It’s never been the same since, but I never sold it. I still have it now, in the vague belief I’m going to restore it one day. The car, a Fiat Punto, was wrecked too. It was so bent out of shape the back doors couldn’t be forced open. Luckily the young lass driving didn’t have a scratch on her.
The police turned up, but I wasn’t breathalysed. I’d had a major let-off in a load of different ways and even then, though I clearly was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I started to realise that things had started to get a bit dangerous. I was riding flat-out, taking crazy chances on every journey. Lots of people have had similar thoughts when they’ve had near misses in life and changed what they’re doing. But my idea of making things a little less risky for myself was not to start saving up for a nice little car – no, I was going racing.
Everything seemed to come together: the accident; spannering in the Isle of Man with Baz and experiencing all that; being mad about bikes, but loving working on them as much as, if not more than, riding them. I wanted to make stuff go faster all the time. Previous to that month, I hadn’t dreamed of being a racer. As a kid I had my motocrosser, the 1986 Kawasaki KX125, a bike that was built for competition, yet I wasn’t that bothered about racing it. But now the switch had been flicked and I was on the hunt for a motorcycle to go racing.