‘It was enough to push me over the edge and I dived at him, slamming the laptop he was working on down onto his hands.’
AFTER TWO SEASONS of club racing and a full year competing in National level racing, I had signed back up for another season of the very competitive Junior Superstock series for 2002.
So far, the results had been right enough. Except for a DNF, when I was in second before sliding out, I’d been in the top ten for every round and had three top five finishes, two of them coming back to back before I went to Rockingham for round eight.
This circuit, near Corby in Northamptonshire, is nothing like a traditional British circuit. Then it was still virtually brand-new. All the other tracks that the British Superbike series visit date back to the war or before. Rockingham has huge stands, a big block of corporate suites and offices, and a track that, like some other British circuits, has a few different configurations depending on who or what was racing there.
What Rockingham has, that other UK tracks don’t, is a banked section, like Daytona and American NASCAR tracks. I think they hoped to attract NASCAR races to Britain, but the idea never caught on. The British motorsport fan is spoilt for events and tracks. There can’t be anywhere in the world that has as many motorsport venues packed into such a small area as the UK. When I see the massive stands full of flipdown seats at Rockingham, I always wonder how many of those plastic chairs have actually had a pair of arse cheeks land on them.
2002 was only the second year the British Superbike series had raced at Rockingham and I liked the place. I got on with it a lot better than some of the other racers did.
The meeting was going like any other. Arrive Thursday night; unload; sign on; get my bike, leathers, boots, gloves and helmet checked by the scrutineers; then prepare to ride. As practice and qualifying got under way, through Friday and Saturday, some riders, in all classes, not just Junior Superstock, were out-braking themselves and cutting through the chicane, bouncing over the dirt, rather than sticking to the tarmac. We had to go through a left-right chicane after coming off the relatively high-speed section of banking.
Out-braking yourself happens at lots of tracks and in every type of racing, from novices in their first club race up to the so-called aliens in MotoGP. Every racer is trying to ride at their limit, and there are times when we all think we can squeeze up the inside of the rider in front and block them through the chicane to make a pass. To do this you leave your braking a second later than you did on every previous lap so you can edge in front and take the other rider’s line, meaning they have to back off and you’ve made the pass. But it’s easier said than done. It’s a race. Pride is at stake and everyone is braking as late as they possibly can, and getting on the power as early as they dare. If you’re racing with someone who is at a very similar level – whether you’re racing for first or 15th place – you have to hang your balls out once in a while to get past.
Sometimes, at the last minute, a rider realises they’ve gone in too hot, they begin to doubt themselves and, not wanting to take out the guy in front, they head straight over the chicane to avoid a collision. Of course, there are times they can’t avoid an accident and wipe each other out. I’ve done both.
Racers must have been getting their braking wrong and running over this chicane more regularly at Rockingham, because the Clerk of the Course, the man in charge of the meeting, noticed and sent out a message to all the racers explaining that if anyone cut through the chicane and made up a place they would be docked time after the race. This kind of official stance isn’t that unusual either.
I qualified well and finished the race in second behind Cal Crutchlow, who would go on to be probably the best British Grand Prix rider of his generation. I was well chuffed. I went up on the podium, collected my trophy and was back at the van, packing up with my dad, when one of the marshals came up and told me I was going to be given a ten-second penalty for running through the chicane. I knew I’d done it once in the race, but I had lost time and a place by making the mistake, not gained it. I’d braked too deeply, gone off line, stood the bike up, run over the dirt and grass, still braking as hard as I dared so I didn’t crash straight into the side of anyone when I rejoined the track. After my mistake I was still riding well and got back into the rhythm, trying, and managing, to make up places. I made the mistake early enough to be able to take back the place I lost.
The racing in Junior Superstock was so close that adding ten seconds to my time would put me back to fifth place or something. I was told I could have the decision reviewed, if I paid £100 to lodge an official appeal. The racing authorities always make riders and teams pay to appeal. If you think another team or rider is cheating, you have to put your money where your mouth is. It’s done this way to make people think hard before they start slinging mud. If the accused team or rider is found to be guilty of cheating, the person who makes the complaint gets their money back. If they are not found to have broken the rules, the person who accused them loses money. Because I wanted to disagree with the officials, it was me who had to put the money up.
Coughing it up was the obvious thing to do, because I was right (I’m always right …). So I wrote a cheque and went to see the Clerk of the Course in one of the track offices. I was annoyed, but I knew they’d see my side of things. There had been a simple mix-up, it just need ironing out. No problem.
I waited a while until I was told I could see the official. He asked me, ‘What would you have done if there was a brick wall there?’ Obviously I wouldn’t have ridden through it, I replied. I explained I’d lost time by running off the track, but I got the feeling he wasn’t listening. He was ancient, and I was just a young nobody racer in the Support Class of the big-name British Superbike series. Right from the moment he opened his mouth it was clear I was wasting my time. I was fuming when my so-called appeal was over. When I left the Clerk’s office, one of the race officials, Stuart Higgs, who would go on to be the top man – Series Director of the British Superbike series – said, in a way I thought was very sarcastic, ‘Did you get sorted?’
It was enough to push me over the edge and I dived at him, slamming the laptop he was working on down onto his hands while shouting a few obscenities and telling him, ‘You can shove your series up your arse!’
Pretty diplomatic, I thought. Dad was waiting for me, so he saw it all happen. He quickly put an arm around my shoulder and told me it was time to go. While I was packing up the van I knew the job was buggered. The next day I cancelled the cheque for the appeal I’d made at the track. I didn’t think I’d had a fair hearing, so I didn’t see why I should pay.
I’m one of those people who truly believe that everything happens for a reason. Perhaps this post-rationalising just makes it easier to deal with difficult situations. Whatever it is, this time of my life is a perfect example.
The week after Rockingham, I was entered to race in the Cock o’ the North meeting, at Oliver’s Mount, Scarborough. I’d also been sent a letter telling me I had to attend a hearing at the headquarters of the ACU, the governing body of UK motorcycle racing.
Oliver’s Mount is mainland Britain’s last remaining real road racing circuit (I’m counting Aberdare Park as a park circuit, not a public road). It’s a road, but a road to nowhere really, on a big hill outside Scarborough. For a few weekends a year it’s a race circuit; the rest of the time it’s open to the public to drive or ride around. You don’t need special permission, a ticket or time slot to ride it, just turn off the main road into Scarborough and loop round it, obeying the speed limits and the laws of the land.
They’ve been racing bikes there for 50 years. Once it was a track the world’s elite grand prix racers competed on – thought of in much the same way as the Isle of Man or Monza, but as the top riders became more concerned with the safety of tracks, the Isle of Man and Scarborough began to struggle to attract the international names. The main men really were dropping like flies back then, so Oliver’s Mount, the Ulster GP and Isle of Man tracks were left to British and Irish riders who were either road specialists, had grown up in the era in which being a good TT man was key to being signed by a team or, a bit later, were riders like future four-time World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty, who raced the roads on their way to World Championship racing.
In the 1970s, Barry Sheene used to arrive at Scarborough by Rolls-Royce for a day’s British Championship racing at Oliver’s Mount. At the time, he was at a similar level to Valentino Rossi – world-famous, two-time world 500-cc champion; a guest on primetime TV shows like Parkinson; a playboy recognised by everyone in the UK; the face of Brut 33 aftershave in TV adverts when Britain only had three TV channels. He was bigger than motorcycle racing alone; yet, back then, Sheene, like fellow former world champions Phil Read and Giacomo Agostini, would turn up to one-off non-World Championship races at Mallory or Scarborough for start and prize money. Contracts in MotoGP and World Superbike are so tight now that modern racers could never do that even if they wanted the money, and I’m sure plenty would like it.
When Sheene and real road racing are spoken about together, people often mention that he helped to ensure the Isle of Man TT lost its grand prix status. That might be true, but it was the right thing to do. Whatever people say about the dangers of road racing, at least no one is having their arm twisted to race at the TT nowadays. It’s not part of a bigger championship, like it was from the end of the war up till 1977, when the British Grand Prix moved to Silverstone. Even back in the 1970s, however, only the best six results of a ten-race season counted towards the championship total, so in theory riders could choose to miss it anyway.
The Isle of Man was out of step with the way mainstream racing was developing, and it took the Isle of Man until the early 2000s to realise this and do something about it. In his autobiography, the former TT and World Championship racer Mick Grant put the blame on the ACU for not moving with the times, and it wasn’t until the Isle of Man authorities themselves started having a big hand in the organisation that things really changed.
The TT is still out of step with every other kind of racing, but now that’s seen by fans and the motorcycle industry as a strength, not a weakness.
Still, while Sheene might have hated the Isle of Man TT, he had a soft spot for Scarborough, and he clearly wasn’t short of balls when it came to racing unforgiving circuits. Sheene still holds the record for the fastest ever average speed for a motorcycle lap of a race track, at 137.15 mph at the old nine-mile Spa-Francorchamps, and that was virtually a real road race circuit for most of the lap, because the track left the Spa short circuit for the Belgian roads of the surrounding Ardennes region.
It was my dad’s idea for me to race at Oliver’s Mount. It was one of his favourite tracks, even though he’d been badly hurt crashing there. I’d sent off my entry weeks before the Rockingham laptop incident.
After finishing my apprenticeship, in 2000, I had been working full-time for my dad. As long as I got the work done he was flexible with my hours, so I could go racing. We were quiet during the week on the run-up to the race, and Dad suggested we knock off work early and drive the 50-odd miles up to Scarborough in the van so he could show me round. This was my fourth season of racing, and though he’d been a great help and had come to races with me, this was the first time I remember he’d really tried to share some of his racing knowledge.
Now I realise Oliver’s Mount isn’t the kind of track I enjoy the most, because it’s quite tight and nadgery, but I liked it from the very first lap. About 200 metres from the Oliver’s Mount start line the track funnels into the uphill, left-hand Mere Hairpin, one of the tightest on any track in the world. It is also one of the few places anywhere on the circuit with run-off – somewhere to go if you make a mistake, or someone else makes a mistake for you. Get it wrong anywhere else at Oliver’s Mount and you’re into a fence, a tree or a six-foot grass banking. Just ask my dad.
After the Hairpin there’s the climb up Sheene Rise. It’s nearly as steep as the Mountain at Cadwell Park, and three times longer, and you go under a footbridge and through a tunnel of trees. There are blue and white kerbs on the apex of each corner.
Then it’s through the Esses with a raised banking and hedge on the left. The left-hander leading on to the straight has loads of positive camber, which allows you to exit fast. It’s 180 mph down the not-very-straight straight. Hedges are on one side, oak and cedar trees on the other. The road is smooth by road race standards, but not wide enough for a white line.
I’ve seen this track described as claustrophobic, because the grass banks and trees shadow the track. To me it never feels like anything but home.
Next up is a tight left-hander in front of the café. From flat-out in sixth, it’s back four gears for this corner, then get on the throttle gently past the café and into a slight right before the first-gear left. The right is what I’d call Memorial. Dad’s race career was ended at the tight left directly after it.
The circuit passes right in front of the hilltop café, with its great view of the track one way and Scarborough and the North Sea the other.
Next is a third-gear straight, a right-hand hairpin and a hill down to the left-hand Mountside hairpin.
Two bumps make the bikes wheelie viciously, then there is the new chicane. It’s more of a loop than a chicane and has a tricky off-camber section where it rejoins the straight just before the grid markings and the end of the lap.
The race meeting I’d entered was the Cock o’ the North, a major club event and the middle meeting of the three big ones held annually at Oliver’s Mount. It’s not seen as an International meeting, like the end-of-season Gold Cup, but all the top Irish lads would come over for it. I entered the 1300 cc Open and 600 Supersport classes on the same Suzuki 600 I had been racing for the majority of two seasons, a bike I knew inside out.
I was entered with Jason Griffiths, who was on a Kawasaki, and the massively experienced Ian Lougher was racing for TAS Suzuki. These two, both 15 years or more older than me, were the top roads men at the time. Lougher had won TTs, and Griffiths, after he retired, was regarded as the fastest rider never to win a TT. They were riding for well-known teams and were used to winning. By the end of the two-day meeting, my very first competitive visit to Oliver’s Mount, I had beaten the pair of them.
I was on my Suzuki 600, in very basic Junior Superstock specification, even though I was competing against trick Supersport bikes built using much bigger budgets and more freedom. The only person I didn’t beat in the 600 class that day was Gary Jess, a shit-hot Northern Irish racer. Unfortunately, he was killed later that year, at Deer’s Leap on the Dundrod circuit, competing in the Ulster GP Superbike race.
I finished the day thinking, ‘This is it! This is what racing is about.’ I’d done over a year and a half of National racing, a support class to the British Superbike – probably the most important domestic racing championship in the world at that time. I wasn’t at the pinnacle of racing by a long shot, but I was on a rung of the ladder, and believing that BSB was what motorbike racing was all about. I was even beginning to have the odd thought along the lines of right, the next step is British Supersport – on a higher spec and more expensive 600-cc bike – then after that British Superbike, then maybe into a World series.
I didn’t know there was an alternative. I was developing a mind-set like most British racers, following, or at least trying to follow, the well-worn route of club, National support class, main National class, World Championship. Then I did this Cock o’ the North meeting, a real roads race, and realised there was more to motorbike racing than competing in the British Championship. I wasn’t at the stage where I was thinking I was going to be the next Mick Doohan, but if I’d have stayed on that British National route much longer who knows what daft stuff I’d have started believing. After all, Cal Crutchlow, the lad I finished second to in my last ever Junior Superstock race, has done all right for himself, having signed a multi-million pound deal to race Ducati’s MotoGP bike in the same year another ex-Junior Superstock racer, Tom Sykes, became World Superbike champion.
One of the main things I liked about Scarborough was that everyone was working out of the back of a van or a seven-and-a-half tonner, not big articulated lorries. The BSB paddock was full of fancy motorhomes. There was even more money in that series back then than there is now.
At Scarborough, half the grid will have been on the piss the night before. It was laidback, but the racing was hard. Bloody hard. The racing at the front was as committed as that in Junior Supersport, but on this very different kind of track. When I turned up at Oliver’s Mount I was dead cocky, I thought I’d smoke them all, but I didn’t.
A few key things, those things that happen for a reason, occurred at that Cock o’ the North race meeting. The first was finding this thriving scene of professional racing away from the BSB series. Another was discovering I could cut it racing on this kind of track. The last was a being approached by an Irish journalist who pointed me towards another door I could barge through.
After one of the races, Leslie Moore, the editor of Road Racing Ireland, came and found me in the pits and suggested I should think about going over to Ireland to race. It was an idea that had never occurred to me.
Muir told me about a meeting called Kells that was coming up just the following weekend. Even though I’d never heard of it, I didn’t think to ask him any questions about Kells – the track, the other competitors or anything. I just assumed it would be like Oliver’s Mount. I went home, checked the ferry times and booked a crossing from Holyhead to Dun Loaghaire. Me, my brother Stu and a mate and fellow racer, James Andrews, from nearby Bardney, went over in the Transit, W173 JDO. We docked on the outskirts of Dublin and headed straight for the town of Navan, in southern Ireland.
When we turned up it was a case of right then, where’s the track? The answer was, you’re on it. There was cowshit everywhere. The race paddock was a farmer’s field and people were getting towed into the pits because it had been raining so heavily for a few days before. You know you’re there for the duration when they’re using tractors to pull the racers’ vans into the pits before the meeting even starts.
My mate James was the same age as me, and racing a Suzuki in Junior Superstock at the time, the same class as me, so we took his spare wheels as well as mine, meaning I had tyres ready for every eventuality – rain, shine or anything in between.
I was 20, it was the first time I had ever been to the Republic and it was an eye-opener. Even coming from Lincolnshire the place seemed backward. Though it’s called the Kells Road Races, the race track is actually based around the village of Crossakiel, six miles away.
On our first evening, the night before the meeting started, we went for a curry and waited a lifetime for a meal that cost a fortune. Not a good start, but then we went to the pub and the trip started looking up. Crossakiel, in County Meath, is half the size of Kirmington, but it had three pubs, proper dingy places with sticky floors, but dead friendly.
The circuit itself, I would learn, was typical of a lot of the smaller Irish tracks. Many Irish road circuits are in the shape of a triangle, formed out of three country lanes that intersect with each other. The Crossakiel circuit that hosts the Kells Road Races is one of these. The sections you’d call the straights have bends and jumps on them, bloody big jumps at Kells, but the main corners are the road ends, where one road makes a T-junction with another.
Arriving at Kells, after my success at the Cock o’ the North races the week before, I thought I’d just use my short circuit experience to brake harder than everyone else into these road-end corners and show everyone how it was done. I’d been on the podium in the British Championship and Scarborough, and I knew how hard I could push a bike.
I sat on the grid, bike revving to 6,000 rpm, ready to launch at the first corner. I had it all planned in my head and was determined to brake later than everyone into the first corner of the first lap, but hadn’t accounted for just how bumpy the road was. I was braking hard on these rough country lanes, not much wider than a suburban semi’s driveway, and my back wheel was off the floor. We were approaching Magee’s Crossroads, and I felt if I braked any harder I’d flip the bike and fly over the handlebars, so I released a bit of pressure on the front brake lever and ran on, taking out Richard ‘Milky’ Quayle. We both hit a wall that lined the corner. Milky (so nicknamed because his blond hair and glasses made him look like the Milky Bar Kid) was screaming in his helmet. I genuinely thought, ‘Shit, I’ve killed him!’ It turned out he’d only twisted his ankle, the girl!
Back in the pits, Milky’s sponsor let rip at me, calling me every name under the sun as I apologised. Strangely, he nearly ended up sponsoring me down the line, but we certainly got off on the wrong foot. Milky is now one of the key men in the running of the Isle of Man TT races, so we still bump into each other quite a bit.
After the coming together with Milky I had hell getting the bike back to the pits, because any bikes that crash or break down get pushed into a field and collected later. There are so many races within an Irish meeting like Kells that the next grid is waiting to get out on the road to line up as soon as the previous race finishes. And these road circuits are not like Silverstone, where there are service roads that the recovery trucks can use to bring bikes back to the pits. Eventually, though, we got the Suzuki back and taped the fairing up for another race.
I didn’t know a lot about Irish road racing. I was in the British National series and blinkered to what was going on in Ireland. The road-race scene was hardly reported in the UK at the time. Even the TT was on the wane. Everyone was interested in World Superbikes, BSB and MotoGP, but I’d seen pictures of the Northern Irish race star Adrian Archibald, in his Red Bull-sponsored helmet, and now I was sat next to him, thinking, ‘Bloody hell …’ Archibald was the man in Ireland at the time, a TT contender, who, the following year, would win the 2003 Isle of Man Senior TT. And I actually passed Archibald in my very first race. Unfortunately it was on the way to taking out Milky …
The jumps at Kells were something else, too. I was hitting them flat-out and flying for 50 metres or more. I didn’t have any particular skill, I just wasn’t scared. And that seemed to work in Irish road racing. At least for me.
After the raced where I tangled with Milky, I was out in the support races, for the lower level of racers – where I should’ve been from the start – and won three of them, including the Senior B and the Grand Final B races. After the prize-giving I ended up with a pocket full of prize money and a new outlook on life. We went out on the Guinness that night, got hammered, and drove home the next day, me realising, for the second time in two weeks, that I’d seen the future. I didn’t have to work 100-hour weeks to pay for my racing. I didn’t have to dance on the bar of Chicago Rock Café to the bloody ‘Hand Jive’ all winter, putting money away for tyres that were chewed up and spat out in 20 minutes. I could win a few quid and pay for it that way.
It wasn’t the money that was attracting me to the roads, though. I enjoyed it all. Everyone involved with the race were the friendliest people I’d ever met. They couldn’t do enough for me. That’s why I’ve always had a soft spot for Kells, even though the track’s a bit nadgery compared to the ones I now enjoy the most, the Mountain Course and Dundrod. And the Irish race community lived by a saying I learnt and loved – We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time.
A couple of weeks after the Scarborough meeting, and a few days after the life-changing race at Kells, I travelled down to the Auto Cycle Union’s headquarters in Rugby for a hearing on the whole Rockingham incident. I went with Dave Johnson, who I’d bought my very first race bike from. He came to give moral support, but it didn’t make any difference. I went in front of the board, a spray of Lynx deodorant covering any whiff of nervous sweat. I think I even wore shoes to make an effort, but I was made to feel my crime was worse than Fred West’s. They sent me out of the room while they deliberated and decided to suspend my ACU racing licence for the rest of the season. Weirdly, they gave me the impression the punishment was for cancelling the cheque, not for slamming the laptop on Stuart Higgs’s hands, but I’m sure that didn’t do anything to help my cause.
By this time, I realised that if I did go to race in Ireland it meant I could apply for an Irish race licence, through the MCUI, the Motorcycle Union of Ireland, and not have to deal with the ACU.
Once I had decided I was going to be a real road racer, things moved fast. And again, it was weird twists of fate and chance meetings that brought it about.
James Andrews, who’d helped me out by spannering at Kells, was racing his Supermoto bike at Anglesey in North Wales. I went and spannered for him, to return the favour. During the weekend I bumped into Sam Finley, an Irish fella who ran a small road racing team. We’d had a yarn between the races at Kells. He had someone riding for him at Kells and at Anglesey too.
When we bumped into each other in Wales, we got talking and he asked what I was planning to do in 2003. I told him I was going to buy a bike and do some Irish road races. Sam said perhaps I could race for him. I can’t have taken it seriously, because I never asked for his phone number and he didn’t take mine.
Then, some weeks later, I went with a bunch of mates to watch a big Supermoto race at Mettet in Belgium. We were in a pub at the first corner having a few drinks and there was Sam again. This time we did swap phone numbers. He said he definitely wanted me to ride for his outfit, Team Racing, and asked did I want to go and live over in Ireland.
These random meetings, the last one in a pub in Belgium, led me down a completely different path. I wouldn’t be paid to ride for Sam; it wasn’t that kind of deal. It never entered my head that I would be paid, but I was being supplied a 750 to race, a van to turn up in and the chance to win a few quid in prize money. It meant I didn’t have to buy my own 750. I could race the 600 I’d been racing in Junior Superstock, at Scarborough and at Kells, and also Team Racing’s Suzuki 750.
Sam had a job for me too, so I starting planning for 2003. It meant packing in working for my dad and moving out. I was 22 and leaving home to go to race motorbikes.
So, in the spring of 2003, I moved to Northern Ireland. I originally lived in Sam’s spare room, sharing the house with him, his wife and his kids. He owned a few bits of property, so I eventually ended up moving into the bare shell of a bungalow at the back of a filling station, once we’d got the electricity and water plumbed in. The kitchen and toilet were fitted, but that’s all. The place was renamed the Fungalow.
During the week I worked as a labourer for a building firm that dealt with the maintenance of a casting factory in the west side of Belfast. At weekends I’d race both on the short circuits and the roads.
The ‘shorts’ are what the road racing community call purpose-built tracks, however long they are. Donington, Silverstone, Laguna Seca, Misano, Valencia … they are all short circuits. The racing that goes on in series like MotoGP and British Superbikes is often called road racing, to differentiate it from motocross or any other kind of motorcycle sport that happens on dirt. That’s why the TT and Irish road racing is also known as real road racing. It’s racing on a real road.
Riders in their first year of racing on the Irish roads, are restricted to what was called the Support Class and to bikes no bigger than a 750. They call it the B race at most places now. Somehow, probably because of my good showing at my first Cock o’ the North, I was allowed to race in the main class at Kells, the race where I took out Milky, but the authorities saw the error of their ways and I was in the Support Class for the 2003 season.
Sally, my brother Stu and Shorty, an old mate from Kirmington, came over from Lincolnshire to support me, driving the five hours up to Stranraer for the ferry over to Belfast in my sister’s Vauxhall Corsa. I remember I was up till after midnight preparing the bikes for what would be my first outing for Team Racing, the next day’s race at Aghadowey, a short, airfield circuit that had a bend called Shithouse Corner.
I did well in the Support Class. I was fairly confident, because I had won at Kells, my very first Irish meeting in 2002 – when I’d travelled over with my own bike. Then I won quite regularly through 2003 for Team Racing. The race at Aghadowey didn’t go without incident, though. I crashed three times in a day on my debut for Team Racing. I actually crashed getting from the truck to the pits. Quite impressive.
I also raced at the short circuits of Bishopscourt and Kirkistown. Then the road racing started with Cookstown and Tandragee. Sally would come over to Ireland regularly and do the pit board for us – hold out the bath towel sized board with numbers that would show me where I was in the race and how many seconds the riders in front and behind were away from me. Even then she knew I might not have a long future with this team. They’d bought a few sets of Fandango headsets, with big headphones and microphones so they could talk to each other. They never worked properly and looked right out of place in Irish road racing, more suited to a Formula One pit-lane.
That year I didn’t race at the North West 200, the season’s biggest race in Northern Ireland. My Team Racing team-mate, Liam Quinn, another businessman who owned a company that sold industrial air compressors, raced at the meeting, and I ended up spannering for him. Liam was a good 20 years older than me.
My job was to prepare my Suzuki GSX-R600, that was in the orange, white and black Team Racing colours, for him to borrow and race. Once we were at the track, I was to get the bike through scrutineering, making sure it was safe and ready to race. I understood all that, no problem, but in the week before the race, Liam said to me, ‘Why don’t you try and get the Suzuki 750 engine out of your bike into the 600?’
I was surprised he was willing to cheat so blatantly in a class that was supposed to have standard engines, but Liam explained that plenty of people were already cheating by porting the head of their 600s or changing the cams to gain an advantage, but why mess around like that? The class at that time was notorious, with 600s going faster than 750s. Loads of people were pulling a fast one. Liam’s thinking, he said, was that if he was going to rob the sweet shop he wasn’t just going to just take the penny sweets, he’d have the whole till.
It made some weird kind of logic and he was the boss, so I did what I could. The 750 engine was 10 mm higher, so I made some engine mounting brackets and got it in. It didn’t do him much good, though; he still didn’t come anywhere near the podium.
I never felt guilty about helping him break the rules, Liam’s plan wasn’t keeping me awake at night. Cheating was rife, right up to the top level, in the generation before I got involved, but it’s much harder to get away with things now, at the top level at least. There’s too much scrutiny.
I even rode that bike in a 600 race at Nutts Corner, a short circuit in Northern Ireland. The bike was so much faster than anything else, that I ended up waiting for everyone so it didn’t look too obvious. I planned to win on a dash for the line, but, what I hadn’t worked out was, the finish line was past the braking marker. That meant, every other time I’d crossed the line, I was already braking to slow down for the first corner. This time I accelerated over the line to pip whoever I was racing. By the time it clicked it was too late. and I ended up crashing in a field. That was the first, and last, time I cheated in a bike race.
I made a few good friends early in that 2003 season. One was Martin Finnegan, who would become probably my best mate among the other racers.
I first met him in 2001. He was one of a bunch of lads racing in England under the name Team Ireland. He was with other Irish riders including Woolsey Coulter.
I raced Martin in British Junior Superstock. We knew each other enough to say hello, but not much more until I went to race at Kells in 2002. I saw him there, and he gave me some petrol to allow me to keep racing, because I couldn’t get out of the pits to buy more when I was close to running out.
He was racing the big class in my support class season and we got talking. He was a year older, but he seemed more mature, and was running his own show himself.
Martin came from Lusk, right near the famous Skerries circuit. He was a man mountain, compared to other bike racers. He was built like a house side. He’d grown up racing motocross and he was spectacular on a Superbike. He always looked great in photos, jumping the furthest, right out of the seat, and often with the front wheel crossed up like a motocrosser. He rode the bike – the bike didn’t boss him, that’s for sure. He was a top TT man, on the podium, but never won one. He was also the top road racer from the Republic of Ireland so he always did all right for sponsorship.
I saw Martin the following year, 2003, at the Cookstown 100, the first road race of the year of my first full season in Ireland. I think he told Sam Finley he needed a mechanic for the upcoming Isle of Man fortnight, and Sam said I’d be good for the job.
Martin then asked me to work for him at the 2003 TT, which would be his second time racing there, and I was happy to. I drove down to his place in Lusk, not far from Dublin. I had tea with his mum and dad, then he gave me an envelope full of £1,000 cash to spanner for him for the fortnight. This was before I’d even done anything, and it was more than I wanted or expected, but he wouldn’t take it back. He just said, I want you to do the job right. The friendship grew from that TT.
I’d prep the bikes, which was work I loved doing and took pride in. There was no pressure from that side of things, because I had confidence in my own ability. I would also be one of the three blokes doing Martin’s pit-stops. I did the wheel change for him in the Senior and it was probably the most pressure I’ve ever felt at a TT. I’d rather race the bike than be responsible for changing the wheel. I did it, no problem, but I didn’t like being in that position.
A light goes on, on the top of the historic old scoreboard opposite the grandstand, when each rider goes past Hillberry. The pit crew then know the bike is less than two miles away from the pits. Once I saw the light go on, I got an instant shot of adrenalin. An Arai man, one of the fellas who spend the fortnight servicing helmets for the racers, did Martin’s visors; Martin’s brother-in-law, Alan, did the fuel, and I changed the rear wheel.
As Martin came in, I jumped behind the bike, put it on the rear paddock stand. I took off the nut with a pneumatic ‘windy’ gun; took the spindle out; pushed the wheel forward; unhooked the chain; pulled the wheel out, and placed it down so it didn’t roll away in front of the other bikes all coming in and out of the pit-lane. When the new wheel and tyre go in, you have to be careful to guide the brake disc into the caliper; then you push the spindle through; hook the chain on; roll the wheel backwards; pull the wheel back; put the nut on with the gun; crack it with a torque wrench to be sure it’s tight; check the back brake; take the bike off the stand and then wait for the fuel to finish. The TT fuel systems are different to those used in motorcycle endurance racing. They’re slower at the Isle of Man, taking about 35 seconds to fill up the tank, rather than about five, but that’s a good thing, because it gives the wheel-changers more time to make sure everything is right. You’re still expected to change a back wheel in 20 seconds, though.
Once the fuel was finished I’d give him a push off down the pit-lane, then the three crew would stand there in silence, letting out a big breath of air, before one would ask, ‘What do you reckon then?’ and we’d talk about how the pit-stop had gone.
Martin was dead professional, and when he came in after the race he’d give a list of changes he wanted to make. It was a massive buzz and an education to be involved with a rider who was doing well at the TT. I think it also helped me, in the future, that I’d been both sides of the fence – riding and spannering.
That July I travelled back to the Isle of Man, this time to race at the Southern 100 meeting. It’s a mid-week race, held on the outskirts of Castletown. It would become my favourite race meeting of the year, but the first visit was a disaster.