‘Rather than bide my time and weigh up the options, I let my “inner chimp” get the better of me.’
AFTER WORKING AS a mechanic for Finnegan at the 2003 TT, I was back in action racing myself and, only a few weeks later, on the ferry to Isle of Man to race at the Southern 100 meeting. It would be the first time I raced on the Isle of Man.
The Southern is another real road race held on the same small island as the TT, but it’s a very different event. For one thing, it’s on a completely different circuit. The Southern 100 takes place on the historic 4.25-mile Billown Circuit that runs through Castletown and the surrounding countryside. It’s also a lot more low-key, and happens mid-week, with the big race on the Thursday. And, crucially, it’s a mass-start race, not a time trial like the Tourist Trophy. The bikes line up in rows on a grid and fight for position into the first corners. First across the line wins. It attracted the top road racers then and still does now.
I made a good start on my first visit to the track. After Wednesday night’s Senior race I was on the podium, third behind Ryan Farquhar and Jason Griffiths on the 2001 Suzuki Superbike my dad had sold his road bike to buy me. Because this was the Isle of Man, not Ireland, and the race was run by a different governing body, I could take part in the big feature races and on a 1000-cc bike, where, in Ireland, I was still limited to a 750-cc. Because I wasn’t limited to the Support Class I was going into the final race, the big one on Thursday, thinking to myself, ‘I can win this.’
Looking back, I was riding wild. I might have been getting good results, but I was pushing my luck. More experienced road racers, men I respected, like Finnegan and Richard Britton, had noticed the way I was riding in the Support Class races in Ireland and took the time to tell me I had to calm down. Keep riding like that and it’ll catch up with you, I was told. They were saying it in a jokey way, with smiles on their faces, but they were serious. I know they cared or they’d have kept their mouths shut, but they said it in a way that showed they weren’t telling me what to do, just giving me something to think about. I might have nodded to say I heard them, but I wasn’t listening.
I was riding by the seat of my pants, loving the buzz and winning the support races, but I was taking too many chances.
I lined up for the Championship race, as they call it, which that year was sponsored by the Ronaldsway Shoe Company. I looked across and saw Ryan Farquhar next to me in the purple and turquoise colours of McAdoo Racing. Farquhar was already a big name in road racing, and the Northern Irishman would go on to win more Irish road races than anyone in history. Being cocky and over-confident, though, I reckoned I had the beating of him …
Farquhar got a characteristically good start, but I was in second place behind him. Rather than bide my time and weigh up the options, I let my ‘inner chimp’ get the better of me. I have a handle on the chimp now, and a better understanding thanks to having read the book The Chimp Paradox by Dr Steve Peters. The inner chimp is this primal, prehistoric part of our brain, which makes rash, heat-of-the-moment decisions. I don’t make those kind of decisions during races now, but I still did then.
I was following Farquhar going into Iron Gate, a sort of downhill kink, one of the quickest bits of the course, where you are in top gear, then braking and shifting down to third for a right-left, a section lined with stone walls. Jason Griffiths, Martin Finnegan, Ian Lougher and a dozen more were nose-to-tail behind me.
But it was to be one of those moments when my enthusiasm outweighed my skill. I was looking to pass Farquhar for the lead, but I was nowhere near close enough and I braked way too late. I was trying to make up too much ground on him. I was coming from so far back I didn’t even get alongside him before I ran out of tarmac, lost the front end and slid feet first straight into the wall. I was lying on the edge of the road, with a newly broken tibia and fibula, bikes everywhere, because it was still the first lap of the race when everyone is bunched together, not having had time to spread out. It could’ve been carnage. I nearly, so nearly, took Ryan out.
I was taken to Noble’s Hospital, where I was operated on and kept in for a week. Dad drove out to pick me up and take me back to Kirmington. Breaking my leg obviously threw a spanner in the works for much of the rest of the season.
I was supposed to race at the Manx Grand Prix in late August, but although I could walk, no doctor I visited would pass me fit to race a motorcycle and I missed out. So my focus changed and my next target became being fit for the Scarborough Gold Cup meeting, the big one, in September.
Still, the two English-based doctors I visited wouldn’t pass me fit to race at that meeting either. They could see I could walk, just about – I made sure I hobbled in without the help of crutches – but because my leg had been pinned and still had the metal freshly fitted, they weren’t keen on signing me fit to race a Superbike. They had quite valid reasons and my leg was still very sore, but I was dead keen not to miss any more races. It wasn’t like I was involved in a season-long battle and needed to get back in action to try and clinch a championship. I just loved racing, and even having a broken leg wasn’t enough to put me off.
While I worked out what to do, I was rebuilding and developing my Suzuki GSX-R1000. I’d ported the cylinder head, carefully grinding away metal to change the shape of where the air and fuel mixture enters the engine and the exhaust gases leave it, so it made more power. I put different camshafts in and prepared to build it all up ready for the Scarborough Gold Cup. The bike would be ready, even if I wasn’t.
It was during these weeks that I met one of the people who had a big influence on me. I needed a cylinder head skimming and couldn’t find anyone locally who I trusted to do it. My dad remembered someone he half knew through racing and it turned out to be Chris Mehew – one of the best motorcycle engine tuners in Europe.
I rang him and arranged to visit his workshop in the nearby village of Ulceby, North Lincolnshire, riding over on my brother’s Peugeot Speedfight 2 moped. Walking through the door of Chris Mehew Engineering nearly knocked me off my feet. From the outside his workshop was a weird-looking place, like a bunch of Portakabins all bolted together. It felt like a 1970s primary school, but the machinery he had there included lathes, valve seat cutters, milling machines and all kind of grinders – some of the stuff I’d never seen before, but I was immediately fascinated by it. There was a £30,000 Reve Red Bull Ducati Superbike engine sat on a bench, from the team that won that year’s BSB title with John Reynolds, and Mehew wasn’t making anything of it. He was busy when I visited, but the politest man I have ever met. He’d turn around to do something, and as he did, he’d say, ‘Excuse my back.’
Mehew had raced when he was younger, but then become a race mechanic, before working on the wildly ambitious Elf Grand Prix project. As I got to know him better he’d tell me stories of the incredible lengths they went to for that project. He was working so hard on it, he lost stones in weight. He would work on the Elf till he fell asleep at the bench, then lie down in the corner of the workshop for a few hours, get up again and get straight back to work.
I eventually ended up doing the odd day’s work with Mehew for a couple of months, three days here, two days there – five days if he was stacked out. I was still working at my dad’s too, in a pot, or cast, with a rocker on the bottom, so I could walk about. I’d be under a truck trying to get a gearbox back in. A Scania gearbox weighs more than a ton. It’s raised up to the truck on a gearbox lift, but you have to wrestle it into position. I was on my back with my foot, encased in its plaster cast, jammed under the gearbox as I tried to get the shafts lined up, with oil running down my leg, covering the pot. Not clever.
During the six weeks I was out of action with my broken leg, I was itching to see what difference all the tweaking had made to my Superbike, but I still hadn’t been signed off to race.
I spoke to a few lads and was told there was a doctor in Northern Ireland who understood bike racers and might sign me off. Fred MacSorley worked at many of the Irish road races as a travelling doctor, riding around the circuit on a bike in his orange helmet, ready to be on the spot if a crash occurred. He would have seen some sights in that role, there’s no doubt about that. MacSorley was a normal doctor too, so I arranged an appointment and booked the ferry for Ireland. The plan was to visit the doctor, get signed off and go surfing, up on the north coast, with my mate from Lincolnshire, Jonty Moore. I was also going to race my dad’s Rob North BSA at the Killalane road races, just to get some time on a bike without too much pressure. I hadn’t raced for something like six weeks and the Scarborough Gold Cup was the following weekend.
We found Dr MacSorley’s surgery in Portadown, just near the Tandragee road race circuit. I walked into the doctor’s office and told him I was here to be signed fit to race. Dead nonchalantly, he said, ‘No problem, just climb onto the bed, and jump off landing only on your bad leg.’
The bed was the doctor’s examination table, and seemed much higher than a bed you’d sleep in at home. We both knew this was going to end in one of two ways: either the leg had mended and was strong enough to take my 11-stone weight, landing from three and a bit feet, or it would break again. If it was the latter, at least I was already in the doctor’s surgery.
I didn’t know if it was strong enough, but I hadn’t come all that way to bottle out, so I climbed on the table, bent my good leg up behind me and held it with my hand, took a breath and hopped.
It hurt. It hurt like hell, but it held in one piece and I got the all clear to compete. A few days later, I raced at Killalane on my dad’s BSA Rocket 3, only the second time I’d ever ridden it.
I’d broken my right leg and the old Brit bike had a right-side gear-shift, not left-side like a Japanese bike. Normally I prefer right-side one, but not this time – my injured leg was getting some stick. At times I was sure I could still feel things moving around, like a bag of wet gravel. I managed to win the classic race, and that was the last time that bike has ever been raced.
After my crash at the Southern 100, when I was laid up in Noble’s Hospital for a week, Sam Finlay had taken one of my bikes and all my tools back with him to Ireland. It was when I was back in England that my Suzuki GSX-R600 race bike and my Snap-On tool-chest, full of thousands of pounds’ worth of tools, were nicked from Sam’s place.
He’d bought a brand-new Suzuki GSX-R1000, and he gave me that as a replacement for the tool-box. It was worth less than the tools that went, but I didn’t have much choice. We had sold the Suzuki I’d raced at the Southern 100, so Dad had his money back. Then the 600 that had been stolen was recovered, so I had two Suzukis: the new 2003 GSX-R1000 from Sam and my faithful old 600, but with no tools I felt as though my hands had been cut off. At the time they were just about everything I owned in the world.
At least now I was officially fit for the big Scarborough meeting, even if, in reality, I was still way off 100 per cent.
Like I said, I clicked with Scarborough straight away and I’ve always had a soft spot for the place. I’d already won the Cock o’ the North on the GSX-R1000 earlier that season, but this was the big one, the Gold Cup.
The Team Racing crew came over and Dad and my little sister, Kate, were there too. Every time I got off the bike, after every practice or race, someone would have to pull my boot and sock off and yank up the leg of my leathers so I could dunk my ankle in a bucket of freezing cold water, just to try and ease the pain.
In 2003, Prince Philip handed out the trophies at the Gold Cup, and he gave the biggest one to me after I beat a field including Ian Lougher, Jason Griffiths and Ryan Farquhar. The last time they’d seen me I was skidding along on my arse towards a drystone wall on the Southern 100 course. This was the biggest win of my racing career to that point, and it was also the end of the road for me and Team Racing.
I only stayed with Sam Finley for one year. We didn’t see eye to eye. His management style could be summed up like this: we either did things his way or no way. I had too many of my own ideas of how things should be done, from my time racing self-supported in England, to agree with everything. Sam also kept wanting to take me to the barbers to get my hair cut! But we get on a treat now. Both Sam and I know that if it wasn’t for him things probably would have still worked out for me, but it would have taken a lot more effort on my part to get things to move along, so I’ll always be grateful to him.
By this point I’d totally turned my back on the British National racing scene. I was racing and living in Ireland and loving it. Racers have to re-apply to their governing body for a licence every season, and I’ve had an Irish licence ever since. I won’t go back to having a British ACU licence while there’s a choice.
The atmosphere at races in the south, in the Republic, was slightly more laidback, though events in the north were hardly full-on. And in the south we’d race on a Sunday, where in the north the races were, and still are, always either mid-week evenings and Saturdays. No races are held in Northern Ireland on a Sunday for religious reasons.
I was once asked to tune an engine by Paul Cranston, a well-to-do Irishman who would always run around in a scruffy old van. He must have been 50-odd the last time I saw him, but was still racing all the Irish National meetings. When I collected the engine I was tuning for him, we discussed what he wanted doing and when he needed it finishing for. Then, just as I was strapping the motorbike engine in the back of my van, he took me by the elbow, led me to one side and just whispered, ‘Do us a favour, don’t work on that engine on a Sunday.’ He looked me in the eye till I nodded that I understood. It was almost like he was half embarrassed to say it, but he had to. Some people take their Sundays very seriously in the north. Winston McAdoo, a well-known name to Irish and TT fans, ran race teams, with riders like Ryan Farquhar, Ian Hutchinson and Conor Cummins, and supported Michael Dunlop too, but he’d never let his bikes be raced on a Sunday, so anyone who wanted to race at Scarborough, or in the Republic, would need to do deals with two teams to have any kind of meaningful season. While I’m not religious in any way, I can admire commitment to principles like that.
For the 2004 season, I joined Uel Duncan’s team. Uel was a fixture on the Irish roads scene. He had been paralysed, and was in a wheelchair, after a crash in 2000 during practice for the Ulster Grand Prix. Up until then he’d be a regular top six man on the roads, knocking on the door of the podium places, but often edged out by Archibald and the other top Irish racers of the time – Richard Britton and Darran Lindsay. I had never seen him race, but I had heard he was fast but a bit wild. He had loads of experience, which helped me. Specifics about gearing, lines on the road, how to take the jumps …
He always had a well-run team and was good at spotting talent. Cameron Donald raced for him, and so did Keith Amor and Les Shand.
The deal with Uel came about through Paul Phillips. Now Paul is one of the top men at the TT. He’s employed by the Isle of Man government and has helped make it the financial success it’s become in the last few years. He realised it wasn’t living up to its potential and knew what to do about it. He made some decisions the old hands and the hardcore didn’t always like, but no one can argue with the success he’s brought.
Under Paul’s direction the TT has also done a lot to try and make the race safer for riders and spectators. He made the organisation concentrate more on making sure riders coming to the TT are up to speed and know where they’re going before the first night of practice. He’s also worked more closely with the marshals. The TT can never be as safe as a track like Silverstone, but Paul and his team have done a lot, no doubt about it. Back, in 2003, he was a mad-keen race fan and ran a website called realroadsracing.com. I used have one of the website’s stickers on my helmets. We were good mates, and he advised me to go to Uel Duncan’s team, so I did and it was the right move.
Me and Martin Finnegan were the only racers at Paul Phillips’s wedding, but more recently my relationship with Paul has gone pear-shaped. I still think the man is spot-on, and I’ve never had a bad word for him. I’ve had success outside the racing world, since the 2009 TT, off the back of North One Television and their coverage of the TT, so I don’t know if Paul or his department think I owe the TT more than I think I do. They want me to turn up at all the press gatherings, but I don’t want to because I don’t enjoy them. I do press stuff that I think promotes the races I’m in, but I’m not a performing monkey, that’s going to every TT press event. Simple as that.
A turning point for me, regarding the TT, was in the spring of 2011 when I was over in the Isle of Man for the press launch of that year’s race. I was told to get up to the top of the Mountain for seven o’ clock in the morning for a group photo with some other riders as the sun was rising. I got up early and cycled to the meeting point, but only the photographer, Stephen Davison, was there. All the other riders had been on the piss the night before and didn’t bother getting out of bed. I waited for everyone to eventually turn up, did the photos, and then we were supposed to be at the bottom of the island to do another thing, but I thought, ‘Fuck that. You kept me hanging about here, I’ve got other things to be doing.’ That was the beginning of the end for me and the TT lot.
Then, in 2012, the TT press office said I was racing at the Classic TT, in August of the following year, when, as far as I was concerned, it hadn’t yet been agreed that I could compete on the bike I wanted to race – we were still talking about it. Once something has been announced like that, if I decide I don’t want to do it for any reason, it looks like me letting everyone down and turning my back on the TT and its fans, but this situation all came about because someone jumped the gun with a press release.
I didn’t think they’d been straight with me, so instead of doing an hour on the TT stand at the Motorcycle Live show in 2012 at the NEC, I told them I’d do half an hour, on principle. Then it all got very personal. I felt people from the Isle of Man were claiming I’d said stuff that I hadn’t. It’s a shame it’s gone like this. But they have more to worry about than me, and I have more going on than the TT.
None of that was an issue when I signed for Uel. No one knew who I was and I hadn’t raced a TT.
Uel’s team was sponsored by Robinson’s Concrete, and when I joined the team, Johnny Ellis, who I had done my apprenticeship with at John Hebb’s Volvo truck yard, moved over with me for the race season to be my mechanic. Johnny and I lived in a few different places, but for weeks, on and off, our home was the race truck, a big old Mercedes, parked at the concrete yard. Gareth Robinson’s dog, Blade the Spaniel, came to live with us.
We’d knock off at six or seven o’ clock and then we’d go out on Johnny’s motocross bike that he brought over from home. I’d have a go, but I always get the sound of ambulances ringing in my ears when I ride a motocrosser. We never went to the pub, but one of the team’s sponsors enrolled us in a gym and we even went a couple of times. We’d potter about getting the bikes ready. Johnny is as anal as me when it comes to getting bikes right, so we’d spend nights just getting things as right as they could be.
From time to time we’d stay in a flat owned by one of the sponsors, if it wasn’t being rented out. We thought we’d made it. When we were living in the truck I’d sleep on the bench seat in the van’s kitchen, with the dog on top of me, and Johnny would be up on the bed in the Luton bit above the cab.
Johnny and I would maintain the fleet of concrete mixing lorries. All the money I earned I would give to Johnny to be my mechanic at the races. I raced my 1000-cc Suzuki, in Robinson’s colours, Uel’s 600 and Gareth Robinson’s Superstock 1000, basically his road bike. All painted in red and blue.
My GSX-R1000 had been updated over the close season. It had a Spondon swinging arm in it, and my Uncle Rodders, who isn’t really my uncle but is my dad’s cousin, cast me a subframe to hold the seat and move my body position more over the handlebars.
The other big change for 2004 was the fact that I was out of the Support Class and into the main feature races with the cream of the world’s road racers.
I’d obviously watched the likes of Farquhar, Lindsay, Archibald, Finnegan and Britton race. I’d even beaten a few of them the odd time at Scarborough and the Southern 100, but to be racing them on tracks they’d grown up on was another massive eye-opener. I’d been around them and racing on the roads for a year, but I didn’t realise just how hard those boys were riding. It was an education.
I hear it all the time, from people who think they know what they’re on about, but don’t have the first clue, that road racers aren’t pushing as hard as short circuit racers. They say stuff like they’re only riding at 90 per cent, but they really don’t know what they’re talking about. The lads that are winning the big races in Ireland are pressing on, riding as hard as is humanly possible without crashing. They might not be leaning over as far as a MotoGP rider, but that’s because a road covered in cowshit with a huge dip in the middle of it doesn’t have the same level of grip as a GP circuit. Those boys were, and still are, hanging their balls out to win. If they don’t, some other hungry young bastard who thinks he is invincible will cut them up and leave them in the dust. And those fellas were racing to feed their families. Especially a rider like Farquhar – this was his job. For much of his career, Ryan didn’t have a plan B or a big sponsor to cover costs if he had a few bad meetings. He was racing for prize money, as his family’s breadwinner. He wasn’t handing wins to any bugger.
After winning a lot of races in the Support Class, I struggled for much of 2005, my second season with Uel. It was tough going in the National Class. Farquhar, Archibald and Britton were doing the winning. I was a top six man, if that. I was loving it, but I was out of my comfort zone. It was a hell of a step up from the Support Class. I knew it was going to be tough, and I never imagined I was going to be at the front, but by the end of the season I surprised myself by how much I’d come on. I had learnt a lot from the other riders. I learnt just how hard I had to push to stay in touch. I thought I was pushing hard before, but no. I was always strong on the brakes, but the top men would be berming kerbs and hedgerows, dust flying off their elbows and knees, and they would be hitting jumps much faster than I was before. It was bareknuckle stuff.
The bikes would be getting so out of shape, but you couldn’t back off if you wanted to have a hope of winning. We would race every bit as hard as the British Superbike racers would at Brands Hatch or Donington, but the bike didn’t know where it was going because the roads were so rough.
The other thing that meant a lot to me was the Irish fans. They would appreciate that I was over from England, committed to racing in Ireland and trying to make a go of it. Joe Coleman and Will and Rosemary Graham, racing enthusiasts from up near Cookstown in Northern Ireland, used to give me sixty or eighty quid every other meeting just to help lighten the load. And they weren’t squillionaires, but any stretch, just good folk who loved their racing. Me and Johnny were living on breakfast cereal or, if we were flush, the odd microwave meal we could cook in the truck, and we would go to the Grahams for a feed. We couldn’t wait to get round there. We were fed and watered like kings. Joe Coleman was their next-door neighbour and we’d go there too.
When it came time to race, our truck, that was our home for much of the time between the races, would be loaded up with bikes. Then we’d leave on a series of little road trips. We had no insurance, no MoT and no tax. We’d been given red diesel and did not give a damn about any of it. We would drive this dodgy truck all the way to Scarborough and back like that, never worrying about what might happen if we got pulled over, and surviving because we never did.
It was like the student life Johnny and I never had, because we’d become apprentices straight from school and stayed living at home. But it was better than being a student, because we didn’t have to go to university, we were getting paid and racing bikes. It was the whole carefree feel of being between adolescence and proper adulthood – with all the bills and worries that come with that – that made it so special. And we were doing what we loved. Johnny has said he looks back on those days as the time of his life, because it was just so simple. We had nothing to worry about and we were on this adventure.
I managed to get an entry into the 2004 Isle of Man TT without having to miss another year and cut my teeth at the Manx Grand Prix. Back then, the TT used to want riders to race at a Manx Grand Prix first, but that wasn’t a hard and fast rule, just a recommendation. And I was ready for the TT.
Me and Johnny drove to the Isle of Man straight from racing at the North West 200. Since then there has nearly always been a week of work between leaving the North West and travelling to the TT for the first evening of practice, but that year the Jurby roads meeting was being held in the North of the Isle of Man and I had an entry.
There was drama before we even got to the ferry. We were driving to Belfast from Londonderry in the race truck that was fully loaded with everything except a tax disc, when we came to Glenshane Hill. This hill was so steep, and the truck so heavy, I had to brake going down it or the revs got too high for the diesel engine. For some reason I thought it would be clever to knock it out of gear and coast down, ticking over in neutral. The next thing, Boom! A tyre has blown out and ripped part of the bottom of the truck out. Luckily the only two people on board were both truck fitters, so we got stuck in. Uel sent a spare tyre and we got it fixed, slept on the docks and arrived at the Isle of Man a day later than expected, but still in time for the start of practice.
The Jurby meeting is a race that’s hardly known even among road racing fans, but I remember it as being a big breakthrough for me. The track, near the village of Jurby in the north of the island, is wide, but it’s probably the roughest racetrack any racer of my generation will ever compete on.
During practice I couldn’t hold on to the bike as the handlebars were trying to jump out of my hands, and I was thinking, ‘If I can’t cope with this, how will I manage in the TT?’
Luckily the practice sessions were long enough for me to try a few things with the bike. I worked out that the bumps were coming so fast that the suspension hadn’t recovered from one pounding before it had to deal with another. This meant the forks and rear shock were getting backed up.
When you’re working for a high-level team, like TAS Suzuki, you’ll have a suspension man from one of the suppliers – Öhlins, Showa or K-Tech – working with you, and it’s they who change the front or rear springs, the shims that let the oil flow past or the oil level. There are a thousand different variables. Some alterations require the forks or shock to be stripped to change them. I tell them what the bike is doing, then stand back and the mechanics are on it, changing the forks and rear shock in minutes. But there are smaller, but still very significant changes, that can be made with a spanner and a screwdriver. And this is what I set about doing between the practice sessions at Jurby.
Not having a crew of experts, I had to work it out for myself that backing off the rebound damping might help. In very basic terms the front and rear suspension of a racing motorcycle is provided by springs that have their rate of compression and rebound damped by pistons moving through oil. If you didn’t have the piston and oil, the bike would bounce along like a pogo stick. When the bike wheel hits a bump the springs compress. By adjusting the compression damping you can set how quickly it compresses. With loads of compression damping the spring compresses very slow and therefore feels firm. A lot less compression damping and the suspension feels softer and spongier.
Rebound damping controls how quickly the spring returns to the length it was before it hit the bump. If you push down on the seat or tank of a bike set up for a smooth short circuit (or a standard road bike) and compress its suspension, when you let go the bike comes up in a slow and controlled way. You do it on my TT bike and it rebounds a lot faster, almost at the rate of the spring, with next to no damping.
The problem I had at Jurby was the frequency of the bumps, and the amount of rebound damping I had was causing the suspension to bottom out. There was no more movement to be had and the bike became close to unrideable. The suspension was no longer moving to keep the tyres tracking the road. Instead, it was just bouncing off it. Do that when you’re leant over going through a 100 mph plus corner and you can imagine what might happen next.
When I wound the rebound completely off, so that after dealing with a bump the springs were as close as they were ever going to be to a pogo stick, the bike was transformed. The suspension would hit a bump and the damping would control the speed at which the spring would compress, but it would return to full length extremely quickly, with very little control, to be ready to deal with the next impact. Then the bike handled OK and I won the big race of the meeting and started thinking about the TT.
One of the Uel Duncan team sponsors that year had a house on the Isle of Man and he wanted it painting. He paid me a tenner an hour and it took me two weeks. It’s on Bray Hill and I regularly look at it when I pass. I still try to line up a job like this when I’m over for the TT now. It stops me getting bored, and I can paint a wall while thinking through the race or a problem with the bike. Or I can just let my mind wander.
For that 2004 TT, John McGuinness was the main man. He’d taken over that position from his good mate, David Jefferies, who had died after crashing in practice the previous year. McGuinness would become the leading TT racer of my generation. He was the man to beat, on the Superbikes at least – the races I always thought were the big prizes – that year and every other year I turned up to the TT. Of course, there were other great TT riders through all those years, the New Zealander Bruce Anstey for one, but it was always the big fella from Morecambe who I knew I had to beat to win a TT on the big bikes.
McGuinness has the ability to always look like he’s riding to the shops, even when he’s on lap record pace. He also looks, especially now, like he could do with a couple of passes through the bacon slicer, but he proves you don’t have to be someone’s idea of a stereotypical gym-addicted motorbike racer to be fast. I think I wind him up, without even trying, but I don’t mean to. I have massive respect for the man.
People have asked me if the death of the leading man and lap record holder, David Jefferies, affected the way I approached the TT. They wonder if I had thoughts like, ‘Well, if the very best around here can get it wrong and be killed, what chance do I have?’ But thoughts like that never entered my head. I don’t know if anyone was killed in my first year there. If they were it can’t have affected me, because I don’t remember it. I’m not being heartless, it’s just the way I approach it. I’m not trying to deal with the death or crashes in any particular way, it’s just how I naturally react. I can’t pretty it up.
I was nervous of the task ahead, but not scared. I’d done massive amounts of preparation. In a weird way I think I knew the track better then than I do now. I knew the place inside out, from watching Duke videos of other racers’ onboard laps religiously to see what lines they took.
I was doing five laps of practice every night and that helped me go so fast, so soon. Because the way they’ve changed things at the TT, no one gets five laps of practice in a single session now.
My main mechanic was Johnny, and my dad was there too. Mates from Lincolnshire, Benny and Dean came over as well. I’d sleep in the back of the truck while the other lads would be out on the beer and then top and tail in the beds in the front of the truck, like sardines in a tin.
One of them lost their key to get in the side door, so they were trampling over me in the back, sometimes with a bird in tow, pissed as handcarts at silly o’ clock in the morning. I wouldn’t be annoyed. It made me laugh. I miss that kind of thing, to be honest.
My sister, Sally, also came over to watch. As soon as she got off the ferry she went up to Signpost Corner, on the outskirts of Douglas, and her first sight of me was braking like mad and overshooting the corner right in front of her. The friends who had come with her used to tease Sally, because she’d sit for the whole race with fingers on both her hands crossed.
Despite that, I started the week well, coming 12th in the Superbike race from 24th on the grid. My first TT.
I wasn’t like some of the newcomers who race now. Lads are racing at the TT who have never raced on the roads; they’ve done all their racing on short circuits. They might have done the North West 200 a couple of weeks before, but that doesn’t prepare you for the TT. I was nervous, but not over-awed by any of it.
I had a couple of DNFs. I broke down in the Production 1000 – that is now the Superstock – because we didn’t put enough petrol in the bike. That year there were two 600 races, like there are now, but one was the Production 600, while the other was called the Junior (though there were no age restrictions – the name was a hangover from history). The Junior had the same rules as the current Supersport 600, so we had to change the engine between the two races. In one of the races the tilt switch, that stops the engine when the bike falls over, was faulty and kept cutting out every time I braked into a corner. We had a faulty switch in practice and changed it for a brand-new one – which turned out to have exactly the same internal fault.
In the Senior I started in position 29 and finished seventh after doing a massive amount of overtaking, compared to what the front runners have to do. Setting off at ten-second intervals, if you’re faster than those in front you’re catching them and overtaking them. Dealing with that is a skill in itself. If you don’t overtake them soon, your pace drops to theirs and it’s a struggle to raise it again. That’s happened to me. You have to be ruthless, but you don’t want to cause a problem.
I was racing a 600, a Superstock and a 1000-cc Superbike. Road racers are different to World or British Superbike riders or modern grand prix racers. Those fellas ride one bike all year, spending their practice sessions tweaking it in the tiniest ways to make it the least compromised it can possibly be. Real roads guys are racing three or more different bikes in a single day.
At many race meetings now I’ll race a Superbike, with over 210 bhp, running on slick tyres. I’ll also race a Superstock 1000 on treaded tyres and the Supersport 600, a really trick bit of kit, with fancy ignition, but much less power and weight than the 1000-cc Superbike, meaning it needs a very different riding style. The Supersport 600 – that all of us in the team refer to as ‘the little bike’ – runs on treaded, road legal tyres, not slicks.
Some of the other real roads riders will also compete on a Supertwin – the 650-cc, two-cylinder racers, like Suzuki SV650s or Kawasaki ER-6s – or 125s, little two-strokes.
During that first TT, I had a big moment. I was on the straight before Glentramman, one that doesn’t really have a name, and hit the kerb. It’s a straight, but the bike got into a bit of a tankslapper. This is where the motorcycle is going more or less in a straight line, but the front wheel is shaking violently from one side to the other. It’s called a tankslapper because when the wheel goes from side to side, so are the handlebars you’re hanging on to, and they whack your arms against the petrol tank. Sometimes a tankslapper is so vicious it won’t straighten out before the next corner and you’ve had it. The bike obviously won’t steer when the front wheel is going mental. Other times you can loosen your grip on the handlebars and the gyroscopic forces of the spinning front wheel will bring it back in line. Little tankslappers are nothing unusual at the TT.
Where this one happened was a section taken flat-out in sixth gear, as fast as the bike will go. Normally, I’d be right in the middle of the road, but because the bike had got a bit lively, and out of my hands, it had sent me off line and I was in the gutter, tyre hard against the kerb – but the next thing I know I’m back on line, going in the right direction, full on the throttle, wondering how I’d got away with it.
I just thought, ‘Hell, that was amazing!’ I thought it was ace. From that moment I went even harder. It was the buzz of that near miss, of being so, so close to disaster, to be risking the whole lot, but getting away with it, that I’ve been chasing ever since.