‘But it wasn’t all motorcycle racing and picking up vomit. About this time I was invited to an orgy …’
HAVING DECIDED I was about to start racing, I needed a suitable bike. Even if it hadn’t been stoved into the front of a Fiat Punto, my Kawasaki AR50 wouldn’t have cut the mustard. Because I was so fired up, it didn’t take me long to find what I reckoned was the perfect machine. And it was through yet another connection in the local haulage industry.
It was 1999, and Dave Johnson, from just up the road in Killingholme on the Humber, was being tipped as the next big thing. Dave was the same age as me, 17, and dead confident, but not in an annoying way. He was selling a 1997 Honda CBR600 F-V, a popular road bike that had been converted to race. This Honda had survived two hard years of competition, and was a bit rough, but it had all the right bits fitted to it, like Spondon front brake discs, and it came with a spare pair of wheels for wet tyres. Crucially, for a race bike, it was fast.
I did a quick test ride out of the back of his house, but it was a bit pointless. I wouldn’t know a good CBR600 from a bad one. Coming straight from a bored-out 50-cc two-stroke, I felt like I had been strapped to a rocket. And, anyway, I had already made up my mind. I paid the £3,000 asking price, with £2,000 coming from my savings and my dad loaning me the rest.
Dave was selling the bike because he had been signed for the Honda Young Guns team. He’d already made the step from paying for everything himself to having ‘a ride’. By that I mean he would turn up to race a bike he didn’t even have to buy. In other sports, he would be at semi-professional level.
Dave’s dad, Keith, had plenty of money, but he was as rough as arseholes. Keith ran a haulage company called Old Goat Trucking, serving the docks and transporting imports and exports to and from the Humber ports. Fifty per cent of the time, the guys who run these companies are rum buggers, and Keith was the definition of rum. His son Dave was rum, too, but not in the same league as Keith, but both were right blokes, a hundred per cent.
Keith’s nickname was Animal. He was skin and bone and looked like he’d have a bath once a year, whether he needed it or not. He would always call his wife the Old Crow in front of everyone.
A lot of people who run haulage firms, or, perhaps I should say – so I don’t offend too many people I still deal with – a lot of people who were running haulage firms back then, were turning over massive amounts of money, but they weren’t clever enough to handle these sums. I would see it all the time. Anyway, Keith wasn’t one of them. He was doing all right for himself and was happy to spend some of his earnings on his lad’s motorcycle racing.
We quickly did the deal, and I took the bike away that night. I kept in touch with the Johnson family, and Keith helped me out for a couple of years. He gave me bits of advice and, later in that first season, he paid the hundred-odd quid for a track day so I could have some practice away from an actual race weekend.
Even if Keith did help get his lad get into racing, it wouldn’t have made any difference if Dave didn’t know what he was doing, and he was obviously talented. Dave would progress to race for the Red Bull Ducati team in the Supersport class on the 748. If you do well at that level, the next step is usually racing in either British Superbikes or going into the World Championship in the Supersport class, where it’s all becoming a serious career.
Supersport, Superstock and Superbike are descriptions that are used a lot in the race sections of this book, so it’s worth explaining them here.
Supersport is a class for 600-cc motorcycles. It has long been thought of as a stepping stone to the bigger bikes of the Superbike class, but because 600-cc bikes became so important to the Japanese manufacturers’ sales figures, the Supersport bikes got more and more advanced, until the top teams were spending hundreds of thousands on them. Of course, a very basic bike, like my first Honda CBR600, could also race in Supersport. This class of bikes run on road legal tyres, though now they’ve developed to the point where they look like slicks with a few slash marks cut into them.
Superstock is a class where the budgets have been kept tightly under control. There are Superstock 600 and 1000 classes run in various championships around the world, but at the current Isle of Man TT races the Superstock class is for 1000-cc machines only. A Superstocker is very close to the specification of a road bike. Like all race bikes, the original brittle bodywork is swapped for a fairing that is lighter, tougher and less expensive to replace. Lights and mirrors are removed, too. Tuning is forbidden, but a relatively cheap ECU (Engine Control Unit – an electronic gizmo that helps give you optimal engine performance) is installed to change how the fuel injection works. The exhaust is swapped, and so are the rear shock absorber and the front fork internals. The Superstock 1000 has less power than a Superbike – although still over 180 bhp – less vicious power delivery, and the suspension, wheels and brakes are not as high specification and nowhere near as expensive. The Brembo brake calipers that we run on the Superbike cost over £4,000 a pair. The Superstock 1000 uses the brakes the £11,000 road bike comes out of the showroom with. The Superstock can’t have any of the electronic ‘rider aids’, like traction control, that the Superbike has, unless it comes as standard on the showroom bike.
The modifications we make when prepping the Superstock bike are regularly made by thousands of keen road riders to the bikes they ride to the races. Superstockers run on the same kind of road legal tyres as the Supersport class.
The Superbikes are referred to as a ‘silhouette’ class. It means they must look like the road bike they’re based on, but that leaves a massive amount of room for interpretation. The Superbikes raced at the TT and other road races are currently a higher specification than those raced in the British Superbike Championship (BSB) races. Superbikes have seriously tuned engines; advanced, bespoke electronic systems; completely different suspension units, brakes and wheels; and petrol tanks are altered to hold more fuel and even position it differently to its road bike brother for improved weight distribution. Hundreds of parts differ. Superbikes also run racing slicks, in the dry, or specialist racing tyres in the wet. Some teams spend up to £200,000 building a competitive TT Superbike, where a Superstocker could be built for less than a tenth of that. Superbikes also need a team of mechanics, including suspension and electronic experts, to really squeeze the most out of them. In the road race world Superbikes are often just called the big bikes.
A while after buying my first race bike I remember going to Cadwell to one of the British Superbike meetings. I went with mates and camped there to watch a couple of days of racing. The first thing I saw was the Australian Troy Bayliss come over the Mountain on the orange INS Ducati. It blew my mind. Bayliss was obviously something special. He wouldn’t be in England long before he moved into World Superbikes and became champion, but it wasn’t just him who was impressive. They were all incredibly fast and, on top of that, I was amazed how professional everything looked. I tracked down where Dave was pitted and went to see the lad whose bike I’d bought. By then he was part of this really professional-looking team. I struggled to take it all in. I was in awe of it.
Dave was team-mates with James Ellison in the Young Guns Honda squad (and James and I would be team-mates for a season, years later, when we were both racing for Shaun Muir). James subsequently had two spells racing for privateer teams in MotoGP, and for very good teams in both the British and American Superbike series and World Endurance. He was still winning races in 2013. Back in 1999, when they were starting out, James and Dave were at the same level, but sadly few people remember Dave Johnson’s name now.
This wasn’t the be-all and end-all, but I don’t think having a dad as blunt as Keith helped Dave when he began to get involved with those bigger teams. His dad would call everyone a See You Next Tuesday, whoever they were. I liked Keith – you knew where you stood with him – but I can see why some people might not want a person who had earned the nickname Animal around their swanky Superbike pits.
Another thing that derailed Dave’s motorcycle career was finding out there was more to life than racing bikes. It had been all he’d known, and he was mega talented, but then his eyes were opened to other things. He discovered he liked beer and women, too. Finally, a family tragedy finished him as a racer, or seemed to from the outside. Dave’s younger brother, Ally, died in an accident with a bonfire. Ally was 14 or 15 at the time and it really affected all our family too. I haven’t seen Dave for years and years, but I do know he’s a truck driver now.
My own effort was a little different from the team set-ups I’d seen at the Cadwell Park British Superbikes round, but I was still trying to look as professional as I possibly could. Even though I’d never raced a bike in my life I still managed to get some backing. My first sponsor, besides my dad, was Bill Banks of local company BB Haulage, who gave me £1,000 to go towards my first racing season. It didn’t take long to spend that. I was earning decent money too, and my bike was mint. A mate of my dad’s had painted it. It was blue (paint code RAL 5017, if you’re interested) with lime green wheels. A truck signwriter stickered it up for me. It said Guy Martin on the tank, which was a bit much, I thought.
I had the sense to do a track day before my first race. It was at Mallory Park, Leicestershire, on a Wednesday afternoon. There were dozens of track days going on every month, when road riders could get out on track and wring the neck of their bike without fear of the law or a car pulling out on them, but this Mallory date was the regular weekly track session exclusively for race bikes and riders with ACU competition licences. Back then, to get a race licence you just had to send off your application form with a cheque and proof of a recent eye test, but now you have to sit a test before they’ll give you one.
I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep the night before the track day. I went out with the experienced 125s and the handful of other novices and got through the day without crashing, but I didn’t have a clue what the racing line was. Looking back, I didn’t have a clue what a racing line was. I can’t imagine how slow I must have looked. And no, I didn’t scuff my pristine kneesliders. I didn’t get my knee down for a year. Still, a few days after the track day I was set to make my racing debut.
My very first race meeting was run by the Grantham and Pegasus Club and held at my local track, Cadwell Park, near Louth, Lincolnshire, just 20 miles from Kirmington.
I had ridden the track just once before. I had been round it on my dad’s Rob North BSA classic race bike, his pride and joy, at an owner’s club rally the previous year. I stalled it over the Mountain, and because his hand-built British bike was bigger than me he had to run out on to the track and rescue me. That, and a few times spectating, was the sum of my experience of this very challenging track.
Cadwell Park, as the name suggests, is what the British call a park circuit. It is in the same family of circuits as Oulton Park, Donington Park, Mallory Park and Brands Hatch. You can pretty much split Britain’s race circuits into two camps: the park circuits and the airfield tracks, which were developed from disused World War II runways. Where the airfields, like Silverstone and Snetterton, are as flat as a pancake, the park circuits have big changes of elevation, as the layout was designed to make the use of the surrounding landscape. Cadwell does this in a more extreme way than any UK circuit, with the Mountain now acting as a short runway launch pad for powerful Superbikes. If you’ve never seen it, don’t expect Mont Blanc – Cadwell’s Mountain is a short, sharp hill.
In the run-up to my debut Dad hadn’t given me any advice at all. And I hadn’t asked. I don’t resent that. I had to work it out for myself. Perhaps he thought I’d picked up more than I had done from going to races with him. If so, he was wrong. I could not have been more green going into my first actual race. And I knew I’d be racing. There was no need to qualify. Paying your entry fee guaranteed you a place on the starting grid as long as you made it through the short practice session in one piece.
Dad drove me to the race, but I turned up not knowing a thing. I was going from riding an AR50 – a hot one, mind – commuting to work and back, to racing a tuned Honda CBR600 – a 140 mph Supersport bike – for my very first race. I know now that I should have started off with a smaller 125, a lighter machine with not much power that I could use to get into the rhythm of racing while I was learning the precise lines needed to have half a chance of survival. But that’s only with hindsight. Instead, I was in at the deep end, racing a bike that was so fast and intimidating that it took all my concentration just to stay on the track.
I scraped through the short untimed morning practice and then was told I had to blindly pick a peg with a number on it out of a bag. This was the way the club decided places on the starting grid. When my race was called, I pulled on my helmet and rolled down to sit in the holding area, under the trees, next to the café. The bikes all around me were being revved to warm up and I waited, in a fog of fumes, not knowing what to expect. I was buzzing with nerves and excitement as the previous race finished and the riders funnelled off the track, a marshal in orange overalls directing them up the narrow return road, through the trees and into the paddock high above the start line. My exact position on the grid hasn’t stuck in my mind, but I was somewhere in the middle, surrounded by blokes who had been racing for years. I took my place, one foot on the floor, arms bent, eyes staring at the flag. As the rules demanded, I wore an orange bib over my leathers, to show everyone I was a novice rider.
Although I don’t remember which row of the busy grid I was on, but I won’t forget what happened as soon as the flag dropped. I got a surprisingly good start and was determined to make an impression. I truly was young, dumb and full of cum. I was in the mix through Coppice, the first corner that sweeps uphill to the looping right-hander, Charlies. Soon I was flying down Park Straight, knees and elbows tucked in to be as aerodynamic as possible, managing to pass a load of bikes, thinking, ‘Check me out!’
What I didn’t realise was that everyone else was hard on the brakes for Park, the sharp right-hander that was approaching at 100 mph plus. It was the third corner of my very first race and I crashed, taking three other lads out. Less than 60 seconds had passed since the flag signalled the start of my racing life and I had barely covered a third of the 2.2-mile circuit. My introduction to bike racing looked like a bomb scene. It was absolute carnage. My bike, the Honda CBR600 I’d spent weeks preparing, and all my money, went end over end. The impact ripped the petrol tank off and bent the forks. Luckily I didn’t injure anyone in the crash, and they were all standing when I went round the pits apologising without making eye contact.
Still, the thought that I might not be cut out for motorcycle racing never entered my head. I was never a natural. I realised that early, and have never kidded myself into believing anything different. I’ve had to work at it. My brother, Stuart, is the one with the racing talent. He started racing in 2003, when he was 18, after seeing the craic I was having. He raced Supermoto, then Honda Hornets and Superstock 600s. He crashed a lot, but he was fast straight away, and they say it’s easier to stop a fast racer crashing than make a steady, but safe rider into a race-winner. I was both slow and dangerous, but I wasn’t going to give up. What I didn’t have in talent, I made up for in knuckle-headed determination.
I made my racing comeback a month or so later after saving up to mend my Honda. Mum took me to the race in M303 GRH, my dad’s works van, a really nicely sign-written Ford Transit. Even though I had a racing licence, I still hadn’t passed my car driving test at the time, so Big Rita drove and sat reading Woman’s Own while I raced. She supported me like this even though she didn’t even want me to start racing in the first place. This was the first of many years during which she would have the dilemma of supporting me in something she’d much rather I would just pack up. She would be on edge, biting her nails, while I was doing what I loved.
My second competitive outing was at Mallory Park, Leicestershire. It was a circuit I knew like the back of my hand after that highly successful half-day ACU track day. Despite that, I crashed again, but this time it was just a stupid one coming out of the Hairpin and I didn’t torpedo anyone else. I did finish the day’s other race, well down the field, but anything was an improvement at that stage.
I crashed 13 times in my first year, sometimes twice in a meeting, because I definitely didn’t do 13 different race meetings that season. It was costing me a fortune.
For the last meeting of the 1999 season, back at Cadwell, I bought a cheap tyre from a bike shop in Grimsby. The Michelin Pilot Sport had been sat there for a while, which is never good for a high performance tyre, but I didn’t know then that tyres went off.
Even after I’d done practice and a couple of races on the tyre, it still looked like brand-new, not a mark on it. This tyre was so old, it was obviously rock hard, but back then tyres were just black and round as far as I was concerned. I must have been half pleased that it was lasting so long, so I wasn’t having to cough up yet more money to replace it. This early in my racing life, I wasn’t listening to the messages tyres were giving me and couldn’t tell if one tyre was better than the other.
I learnt the hard way that this wasn’t a good one. I highsided out of the Gooseneck and badly twisted my ankle. I had seen and read plenty about highsides. It was something Grand Prix riders had to deal with. For those who’ve never heard the term or seen a highside, they begin when a bike is leant over, going through a corner and the rear tyre loses grip and starts to slide sideways. If it just continued to slide, the bike would fall onto its side and the rider would suffer a comparatively gentle lowside crash. When I say, ‘I lost the front end,’ it means exactly the same but with the front tyre. I lost the front end in 2010 TT at Ballagarey, the crash that ended with the fireball …
During cornering both tyres are being asked to grip while the bike is leant over and the weight of the bike and rider is pushing the tyres across the surface of the track, not down into it. When the front tyre loses grip, the bike slides off line. If a bicycle rider slides off going around a wet corner, as you see in the Tour de France, they always have what a motorcycle racer would call a lowside. If you’re ever going to crash a motorcycle, a lowside is usually the lesser of all the evils on the menu.
Sometimes, though, halfway through its sideways slide, the rear tyre starts to grip again, the sliding comes to a sudden stop, and the sideways energy combines with the spinning of the rear tyre to cause a vicious and dynamic change. The pairing of bike and rider goes from leaning on its side to being stood upright and the rider is flung up into the air. A really powerful bike highsiding in a fast corner can chuck a ten-stone rider well over a couple of metres out of their seat and fling a 140 kg bike a similar distance off the floor, before they both come crashing to the deck. You’re very lucky to survive a highside without an injury. And I wasn’t lucky.
I landed heavily and thought I’d broken my ankle. The next day I went to work as usual, but I was as white as a sheet and couldn’t do anything, so my Granddad Martin took me to the hospital. It turned out I hadn’t broken anything, so they strapped me up, gave me some crutches and sent me on my way. Those became the family crutches. Since then my brother has used them, and I had to have them back off him when, in 2011, I had a blood infection that caused my knee to swell up and I couldn’t walk, meaning I missed the Scarborough Gold Cup that year.
Clearly, these crashes weren’t putting me off. In fact, I was determined to go even quicker. I would read any magazine I could get my hands on that covered bike racing. I had read in one of them that the highly respected Dutch team, Ten Kate Racing, changed the cam timing of their World Supersport bike from circuit to circuit. They had 600-cc Hondas, and so did I, so I thought I would try this in-depth and very high-level tuning method too, but I didn’t know a thing about it. It was only years later I learnt why they did it. In that first season I genuinely wasn’t bothered where I finished. I was racing and that was it.
I got the odd top-ten finish that year, competing in the bottom rungs of the British motorcycle racing ladder. This was hobby racing, for fun and a plastic trophy if you were lucky. When I raced with the New Era, a bigger club than Pegasus and District, I might get in the top 15. I had not bothered the podium in the slightest, but I didn’t care one bit. The next year, 2000, I had the same attitude. I had passed my driving test by then, so I could drive myself to meetings and friends would come with me.
One time, I took a bunch of mates to a race at Mallory Park. We were nearly at the track, having just gone through some traffic lights, when we were overtaken by a nutter in a Yugo, a Yugoslavian jalopy, one or two steps down the quality ladder from a Lada.
He’d gone the wrong side of the traffic island through the lights – obviously a man in a hurry. A couple of miles later, we went round a corner and there’s a bloke stood in the middle of the road with a blank expression on his face, holding a car door that was no longer attached to a car. Up the road, buried in a hedge, was the Yugo. The bloke holding the door must have had his car sideswiped just as he was climbing in. His car was absolutely battered, all leant over to one side where the suspension had collapsed from the impact, but the windscreen wipers were still going. We didn’t want to hang around for the police to arrive, because I had so many lads in the back of the van, but as we drove past, my good mate Johnny Ellis wound down his window and said, to the dazed fella with the car door, ‘You want to turn your wipers off, mate. You’ll flatten your battery.’ That was it – we were in tears for the rest of the day.
Memories like that sum up the time. I was racing for the craic. There was no pressure, just pure fun.
I didn’t crash as much in that second season, but I still didn’t know where the line was. I’m not talking about the racing line now. I was picking that up, slowly. I mean the line you can ride up to and if you pass it you might crash. This isn’t a line on the track, it’s not something you can see or touch – it’s ‘the edge’, I suppose, and where it was depended on the conditions, the bike and my skill at the time.
Now I know where my line is, I can sense when I’m right up to it, and if I have to go over the line to get past someone I know I’ve taken a risk. Crossing the line doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to crash, but it means I’m pushing my luck, something you’ve got to do in races from time to time.
Back in the club racing days I just went as fast as I dared, and if I crashed it came out of the blue. I often knew why and how I crashed – I’d lost the front end by being too hard on the brakes leaning into a corner or whatever – but I didn’t really know what to do to stop crashing. People I was racing against were still riding miles faster than me on the same bikes and the same tyres. We both had two arms and two legs, so I had a lot to learn.
I wasn’t being methodical or thinking deeply about racing. I didn’t have any mentors pointing things out to me. Racing was just something to do. I didn’t care where I finished until about two-thirds of the way through that 2000 season, when I won the Yellow Belly. This was a race at Cadwell Park exclusively for riders who live in Lincolnshire. It used to be annual and it’s a race a lot of very good riders have won: Steve Plater, Roger Marshal, Roger Burnett … From that win onwards a switch was flicked and I was hungry to do well. At the end of the year I went to a meeting at a miserable Snetterton held on a grim October day, with the rain coming in sideways, and won a couple of races. Keeping up my impressive record of crashing, I still managed to slide off at some point that day.
By the end of 2000, I had done two full seasons of club racing, the highlight being the Yellow Belly win, but there wasn’t much else to write home about. Club racing is different to the racing you see on TV. It’s hobby racing, purely amateur. You still get club racers who spend a squillion quid on their bikes and equipment, but their ability doesn’t allow them to move up to the National classes – the championships for the best riders in Britain. The comparatively big budget club racers are happier finishing near the front of a club race and going home with a plastic trophy than going up a league, racing a much better calibre of riders and finishing nowhere.
After my two seasons of club racing I was thinking differently. Now I seriously wanted to improve. It had gone beyond having a bit of fun with my mates, so I decided to make the step up to National level for 2001 and enter the Junior Superstock class I’d read about in Motorcycle News. Club racers want to win, but it’s for fun; it’s regional, often lower-budget racing. It’s the equivalent of Sunday League football. National level racing is like the football league structure, with the British Superbike class being the Premier League, Superport being Championship, Superstock being League One and Junior Superstock being League Two or even the Conference League, but still a team that could hammer a Sunday pub team. In club racing, I’d usually turn up early on the morning of the race and leave for home in the evening. For National racing I was away from Thursday night or, if the race was local, Friday morning until Sunday night. I would also be racing at a lot of unfamiliar tracks in the National championship. I’d only raced at three or four different tracks during my club racing years.
Junior Superstock was a new class that was part of the British Superbike race weekend. It was for Superstock 600s, with the Superstock rules enforced to keep the budgets down. You could change the exhaust end can, and Micron sponsored the series so you got them dead cheap. Pirelli supplied the control tyres at a good price, and everyone had to use the same tyres, but riders could choose to buy and race the suitable bike from Suzuki, Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Triumph or anyone else who made an eligible 600-cc Supersport bike. A much cheaper race fairing replaces the standard plastic bodywork. Racers always sell ‘on the road’ bike components, like bodywork, lights and mirrors, to people who have crashed on the road, to help fund the bits the racers needed to convert their bikes to a racing spec. And to be classed as a Junior, for this new series, you had to be 16 or over and 23 or under.
It seemed, from reports in magazines, that the Suzuki was the bike to be on that year, so I sold both the Honda CBR600, that would be out-gunned in this new series, and my Vauxhall Astravan to buy my own brand-new 2001 Suzuki GSX-R600K1for £5,700 cash. From now on I would be racing in classes where only the current bike would really cut it, so I was back to borrowing Dad’s work van for race weekends and cycling if I needed to get anywhere else.
Even though I was making a big step up, Dad still wasn’t offering me any direction with my racing. He was helping in lots of other ways, buying me the odd set of tyres, and he helped when I needed it, often coming to races with me, but he wasn’t saying, ‘You need to do this … You need to race here to get on.’ I’m sure he would have if I’d asked, but I never wanted to. I was happy all the drive was still coming from me.
Eventually, he’d sell his own road bike, a Honda VFR800, to help me buy a race bike, and that caused a lot of grief in our house. Mum didn’t think he should be encouraging me, so she gave him the silent treatment for weeks. It wasn’t a case of her being upset that Dad was spending money on me that should have been spent elsewhere. It wasn’t stealing food off the table. If he’d sold his Honda to buy me a car or van to get to work and back, it wouldn’t have caused the same trouble, but Mum didn’t want him encouraging me to race. Sally and I remember it as a very awkward time.
The first race of the 2001 season, and the new Junior Superstock series, was at Donington Park – then the home of the British Grand Prix and so, arguably, the most prestigious track in the country. The pit and paddock were full of race transporters. Artics for all the British Superbike teams and some of the leading Supersport teams were parked in perfectly neat rows. Steve Hislop was on the Monstermob Ducati, John Reynolds and Sean Emmett on the Red Bull Ducatis; James Haydon and Jamie Robinson were riding for Virgin Mobile Yamahas … The riders were well-known on the British scene and most of the big names were back in the UK after racing on the world stage. These riders were on the covers of the magazines I lapped up, and now, while I wasn’t racing against them, I was in the same meeting as them. That would never happen in club racing. I was a bit starry-eyed. I’d turned up in M303 GRH with the wobble-box behind it, a caravan. When I opened a Biffa dustbin to put an empty carton of milk in it, there was a Virgin Mobile Yamaha R1 Kevlar fairing that had been dumped in it after one crash. I took it and cut up the fairing to make lightweight brackets for my bike.
Some of the established Superbike and Supersport teams had entered young lads into the Junior Superstock class, so right from the off I was up against riders who were racing as part of the famous teams, and while the Junior Superstock riders were down the pecking order of these squads, they were being kept an eye on and had the back-up of some very knowledgeable blokes – both on the riding and set-up side. Crescent Suzuki were sponsored by Q8 and Clarion. They had John Crawford and John Crockford, and James Hutchins was on the Junior Superstock bike that looked identical to the Superbikes. They looked proper.
If you look back at the riders who lined up in Junior Superstock that year, it was quite a group of riders: Tom Sykes, Tommy Hill, the late Craig Jones … They all turned out to be class acts, British or world champions or at least in the hunt for titles. It seemed lots of the top lads, who were still unknowns then, were riding for teams, even at that stage. It was obviously a massive leg-up to their careers. There weren’t many other lads doing it like me, without much support and out of the back of a Transit van. One who was doing it that way, out of his own van, was a bit older than me, a rider I’m still mates with called Matt Layt. Ross Conley was another.
To register to race in Junior Superstock meant committing to the whole season. It wasn’t like club racing, where you simply entered two or three weeks before the next race and if you didn’t have any money you missed the race. The company running the British Superbike series wanted £1,800 up front from anyone running in Junior Superstock. On top of that was the expense of the bike, tyres, oil, fuel, brake pads, travel, food, leathers, helmets, boots, crash damage …
That first Junior Superstock race was daunting. I’d never had to qualify before, but now I had to ride in a timed session to determine my place on the grid for the race. In club racing it was either a case of pulling a peg from a bag or the grid was determined by championship standings. Now I was racing against hungry young lads with one-track minds. They might have been the same age as me, but they were different. They all had a career progression in mind. They were already behaving like professional racers, some not even working for a living. A few had personal trainers and were under the wing of the biggest teams in Britain, being nurtured. They knew where they wanted to be. I didn’t even dream about progressing, I was just thinking about that weekend.
Very rapidly, the series turned out to be a crash-fest. It was a popular class, with up to 40 riders trying to qualify and race. There were bikes everywhere and there was regular mechanical carnage. It wasn’t too long before the class was given the grim nickname, Junior Suicide.
I was up into sixth in that first Junior Superstock race before I binned it. But riding that close to the front made me think, ‘I can do this.’
Actually doing it was still a way off, though. For the rest of that 2001 season I never got that near the sharp end again. I was in the points at the second round, Silverstone, finishing 14th (points were given down to 15th). I only had two non-point-scoring rides (meaning either a DNF – Did Not Finish – or outside the top 15) in the 13-round season, so at least I was consistent. My best result was a seventh, at Mallory Park, and I finished 12th overall in the season-long championship. I might have only scored a couple of top ten finishes, but I never gave in. The champion that year was Ben Wilson, another Lincolnshire lad, from Boston, who would become a British Superbike and Supersport regular.
During the season Johnny Ellis, my mate from John Hebb Volvo, started coming to every race with me to be my mechanic, something he would do on and off for my whole racing career to date. My dad would come to a lot of the races too, but not all of them.
Racing at National level was a massive learning curve. Now I had to turn up on Thursday night, for official practice on Friday. There’d be two qualifying sessions on Saturday and the race on Sunday. Even though I’d been there from Thursday night, the Junior Superstock was always the last race on Sunday. There was so much carnage they couldn’t risk putting it on between the two Superbike races. If there was a massive Junior Superstock pileup, as there often was, there could be oil, petrol and wreckage all over the track and they didn’t want that delaying the main event, the star race most spectators had paid to watch. So, race day was always a long one.
Many of the lads I was now having to race had already been on the National scene. They’d raced in the Superteen series, on 125s, when I was club racing. Superteen was the launching class for up-and-coming riders. Racing those fellas really made me progress. I watched what they were doing and realised I had to copy some of it. I could watch their lines, their tactics, their body position, everything. I was a sponge, taking it all in.
I learnt so much in that first year of British championship, because everyone else was so much faster than me. I had to learn, and fast. Sink or swim. I couldn’t believe how much of a gap there was between club racing and this. I had an idea National racing would be quicker, but not by such a massive percentage.
I still crashed regularly enough, but less often in the races. I’d got an idea of what I could do with the bike. I realised that just because I was getting my knee down it didn’t mean I was going fast. I could be leaning less, putting less stress on the tyres and still lapping quicker.
The level of the competition and the ambition I was beginning to develop, a fairly simple desire to run at the front, meant I was spending a fortune. I had worked all winter, between the end of one racing season and the start of the next, doing several jobs just to save up enough to be able to race through the summer.
I was still doing my day job, which was fixing trucks obviously, but that alone wasn’t enough to pay for this level of racing, even though I was living for cheap at home. So I had to work three jobs for nearly six months, throughout the winter, before the season started.
One of the drivers whose trucks we fixed also worked on Immingham docks driving coal lorries. Down on those docks is a two-mile private road. The ships would arrive from South Africa or Poland, full of coal. A big crane would go into the belly of the ship and fill a hopper, and trucks would drive under the hopper and be filled up. From there the articulated trucks would be driven to the grading plant, at the other end of the dock road, and tip the load. Between every load, the driver had to climb up on the back of the trailer, yank a heavy cover over the top of it, and tie it down, so the coal dust didn’t billow out and cover the hundreds of brand-new cars that had also been unloaded and parked on the dockside. It meant there was a physical side to the work too – it wasn’t just sitting in the cab listening to Zane Lowe.
Because it was a dock road, not a public highway, drivers didn’t require the Class 1 licence they would need to drive an articulated truck on the road, so I ended up being one of the drivers there, doing a 12-hour shift for £80, two nights a week. I’d transport 35 loads on a shift. I was living on Pro Plus caffeine tablets and two or three hours’ sleep a day. But, heck, I was earning. For a time a fella who worked there would hand out tablets he said were EPO – the drug that Lance Armstrong and loads of other athletes have been banned for using – which he said he’d mixed with caffeine and aspirin. I don’t know if that’s really what the stuff was, but it would keep me going all night and there was no comedown.
At weekends, I was also working at the Chicago Rock Café in Grimsby. My big sister Sally worked there. She had been away travelling, to Australia, Malaysia and Thailand, and got a job at the bar when she landed back in Lincolnshire. She loved the place and quickly worked her way up to deputy manager. She also got me a job glass-collecting on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Thursday was £1-a-drink night. In Grimsby. I’ll let you chew that prospect over for a minute …
I would keep busy, wiping tables, collecting glasses, then I’d climb in the Biffa bins and crush everything down so they could pack them even more full. A memorable evening was when someone ralphed against a window where people queued up to get in and it was my job to pick up all the half digested chicken.
It was always kicking off in the bar, too, but just among the customers. The staff didn’t get dragged into it.
The Chicago Rock Café didn’t just rely on £1 drinks. It also had a gimmick. When certain songs came on, the staff would have to climb on the bar and start dancing. ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, ‘YMCA’, ‘Greased Lightnin’’, ‘Hand Jive’ … I was a bit reluctant to dance on the bar, so I would make sure I looked busy when the trigger songs came on. I couldn’t always escape, but I never learnt the right moves.
All this was just so I could afford to race my bike. I needed to do it. Club racing was an expensive pastime; National level racing was something else again.
In club racing, I’d use whatever brand name tyres I could get on the cheap. In Junior Superstock, I had started using four brand-new rear tyres and three fronts in a weekend, just to be in the hunt. That’s over £500 on tyres every race weekend, plus fuel for the bike and £100 on diesel to the track and back.
In the second year of Junior Superstock, the control tyre changed to Dunlop and I soon noticed a massive difference in the way the bike behaved and the feedback I could feel from the tyres. I could predict if they were about to slide, and even started controlling slides, whereas before, at the first hint of a slide, I’d close the throttle. 2001 was when it really clicked what a difference tyres could make. By this stage I’d learnt a lot and the tyre suited me.
But it wasn’t all motorcycle racing and picking up vomit. About this time I was invited to an orgy …
A bunch of us were hanging around at a friend’s house, when another mate of ours – let’s call him Dave for reasons that will become clear – turned up with a new girlfriend. It turns out she was very open-minded and was as keen to experiment as Louis Pasteur. She wasn’t hard to look at and basically invited the five of us to get to know her better. A lot better. None of us had a house or flat of our own, so it was decided that my works van, W173 JDO, would be the ideal passion wagon. We’d meet the next day and go do the business. I thought, ‘Mint, I’ll have a go at this.’
The next day I turned up with the van and was the only one there until ‘Dave’ arrived with a mattress under one arm and his other round his girlfriend, a tube of lube stuffed in his pocket. That there were only three of us didn’t seem to put a dampener on proceedings, so we drove off to find a suitable spot.
As I explained earlier, I’ve never been that bothered about shagging, and being in the back of a works breakdown truck that stank of gear oil wasn’t doing it for me, so there was this weird scene of me sat in the buff, except for my socks, on the wheel arch in the back of a Transit van eating a Mars Bar, watching Dave rattle into his new girlfriend. I was never more than a spectator, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves and it all ended well because the two of them were still together years later.
Back in the world of racing, I signed up for the 2002 Junior Superstock series. My Suzuki GSX-R600 was still the current model, so it just needed a thorough going over before the season started.
At the first round, I was ninth, not much better than the previous year, but at the next race meeting, Brands Hatch, I was running second when I slid off. I came away with no points and a scuffed bike, but proud that I had put in the fastest lap of the race. Next up was Donington, and I was fourth when an oil spill meant the red flag came out to end the race early. Then followed a pair of ninths, another fourth and a fifth.
The racing was so close, the bikes being very evenly matched, that you had to be aggressive to get a decent result. I don’t mean you had to ride dirty, but if you didn’t attack at every opportunity, someone would do it to you and you’d be nowhere. It wasn’t the kind of racing where you could make a break or plan a move for a lap in advance, but I was beginning to get in sight of the podium. Then, at the very next race, an incident occurred that would change the course of my life.