‘I’m not even bothered about being paid to ride, but the bikes have got to be right.’
AS I’VE EXPLAINED, I have never thought too far down the line or planned a career progression. I wasn’t like most UK National racers, who had a dream of winning the British title, being picked up by a World Superbike team – moving to a tax haven, winning the World Superbike title in their second year and then going on to compete in MotoGP. I had no master plan. Thinking about it, there still isn’t one. I would like to win a TT, but I have always been more motivated by the fun I can have racing a motorbike at tracks I love.
I enjoyed Junior Superstock, because I was ignorant of the alternatives. When I raced at Oliver’s Mount and Kells I realised there was another way to race and I preferred everything about it. I was part of Finlay’s Team Racing till something that suited me better, namely Uel Duncan’s set-up, came along. The same with AIM Racing, and they approached me, I didn’t go out looking for a new team.
I am keen to better myself, but enjoying racing is everything. As soon as I stop enjoying it I’ll pack in. I have always wanted to improve my results, because I am competitive and I’m not having much fun if I’m not up the front; being on the pace and having fun are tied together. I have never done a big PR job on myself, gone knocking on doors, promised to do this or that, or bent down to kiss anyone’s arse to get a ride. Teams have always had to take me for what I am and what I thought was best at the time. Fortunately for me, some very good teams have wanted me to ride for them.
Because I never thought of motorcycles as my job, I don’t have to keep racing to maintain some kind of lifestyle or even just to have a wage coming in. After a win I have sometimes said things like the result was ‘not bad for a truck fitter’. This might sound like a throw-away comment, but it gets to the very core of everything. Fixing trucks is my trade. It’s my big picture. I can do other things, but if everything goes to shit, I’ll happily be up at dawn to cycle to work preparing Scanias and Volvos for their next MoT test and truly not worry about what could have been.
I know there are those who think this is an act, all a story to detract from results, when I might have come second best, but after virtually every big race, I travel home the night of the race to be at work at 6.30 the next morning. No one is making me do it. I never wanted it any other way. Yes, I might have bought cars that not many truck fitters could afford, but I paid for them all. And not with inherited family money or bank loans.
So, with this background of a steady day job, if something wasn’t working out with a team, or a good offer landed in front of me, I’d react to the situation. I’m not short of ambition, but neither was I ever driven by a dream of being Valentino Rossi’s team-mate in MotoGP.
That all goes to explain some of the thought process going on at the end of 2009. After three years with Shaun Muir I was looking for a change. Other team managers had been in touch, and I had said I would join Rob McElnea’s Yamaha team. We had agreed everything and done all but sign on the dotted line. The physical signing for me is normally nothing but a formality. I prefer to do things on a handshake, but this time it let me back out at the last minute.
I really like Rob Mac. He was originally from up the road in Humberside and when we were going to work together he lived even closer to me, near Coningsby in Lincolnshire. When he started racing, in the early eighties, he was a steel erector. In the racing world, where riders often spend hours every day in the gym, but are often short and slim, Rob was built like a brick shithouse. He looks like he could eat Dani Pedrosa between two slices of bread.
As a racer he’d achieved plenty, winning in Britain and racing for a few seasons on top factory teams in GPs. He was fifth overall in the 1986 500cc World Championship on a Yamaha, and two years later was the more experienced Pepsi Suzuki team-mate to Kevin Schwantz in the Texan’s first full season in 500s. Schwantz would come eighth that year, Rob Mac was tenth overall. Rob scored a hatful of fourth places in GPs, but never a podium. He was a TT rider with an excellent record, too. He did his first TT in 1979, coming second in the Newcomers Junior. Then he raced from 1981 to 1984, winning three TTs from a total of ten starts. That’s a bloody good wins to starts ratio. Rob was the last ever Grand Prix racer to compete in an Isle of Man TT while having a current GP contract, and he won the big race that year, the 1984 Senior. He actually missed some of practice for the French GP he was entered to race for Suzuki, because he was winning on the Isle of Man. He really was the last of a breed.
McElnea packed in racing in 1993, a leg injury forcing him to retire, and then became a team owner and manager. He always ran Yamahas in British Superbikes and also organised the Yamaha R6 Cup that helped some of Britain’s best young riders really get noticed, riders like Tommy Hill and Cal Crutchlow – who I’d raced in Junior Superstock in 2002.
With Niall Mackenzie, another former GP rider of a similar age who’d returned to race full-time in Britain, Rob Mac’s team won three back-to-back British Superbike titles. After those Cadbury Boost-sponsored years Rob’s teams were regularly in the hunt for titles, but always missed out. Eventually the podiums dried up too and Rob retired from team management to concentrate on his other business, a courier company.
It was in the very lean period of his history that he contacted me to race. I’m not sure if there’s a coincidence there, but it was at the time the profile of real road racing was growing. I wanted to try something different for 2010 and told him I’d race his Yamahas. It was even mentioned in the press that I was joining the team. Then a friend, someone you’d call ‘a racing insider’ told me it might not be the best move for me, and my feet went colder than a penguin’s ballbag. It was suggested the team had a champagne mouth but lemonade pockets. They always looked great, through the Boost and Virgin Mobile days, but I was given the impression they didn’t have the money to make the bikes as competitive as I expected them to be.
I wasn’t looking to get rich, but I didn’t want corners being cut when it came to bike preparation. I don’t give a monkey’s about a fancy race transporter or staying in a nice hotel; I’ll happily sleep in my van, and regularly do. I don’t expect to fly anything other than in the cheapest seat, and I’m not even bothered about being paid to ride, but the bikes have got to be right. If not, everyone is wasting their time and I’m doing a bit more than that. The smallest errors become very costly at places like the Isle of Man and the Ulster GP. There was enough doubt to make me panic and look for an alternative in a hurry.
Mehew had a hand in my plan B, as he had suggested me as a rider to the Irish-based Wilson Craig team, that he had been tuning engines for.
Wilson, a short, grey-haired Irishman, in his sixties, had been running road racing teams since 2008. Before that he’d been one of Uel Duncan’s sponsors, and was when I raced for the Irish team.
When I met Wilson to talk about the 2010 season, I liked his enthusiasm. He had approached me before, offering lots of money for me to race, but then I didn’t want to leave Shaun’s team. Wilson told me his set-up had help from Honda for 2010, with Honda Racing’s top men in the UK, Neil Tuxworth and Havier Beltran, on Wilson’s side. The Irish team would obviously be playing second fiddle to the official Honda squad of McGuinness and Steve Plater, but Wilson’s connections would make sure his team got the right bits for the engine and that they were built properly, ready for racing. Wilson also explained that Simon Buckmaster’s Performance Technical Racing (PTR) would prepare the bikes. Although PTR Hondas hadn’t won a World Supersport title, they’d done everything but that. They seemed to be a well-respected, world-class outfit.
Buckmaster was a former Grand Prix privateer, between 1989 and 1991. He had lost his leg in an endurance racing accident in the 1990s, became a team manager in British Superbike and was now managing the Parkalgar team in World Supersport.
During the short time we were discussing whether the Wilson Craig Racing team and I were right for each other, I met Buckmaster and thought we would get on well. That would be a lesson in not trusting my first instincts.
It wouldn’t take long for Buckmaster and me to start disagreeing about how the bikes I was going to race should be prepared. From what’s been reported you’d get the impression the bikes his company delivered for me to race in 2010 were competitive and the whole problem was my attitude. This is my side of the story.
Wilson said he would let me have the team structure I wanted. After leaving SMR my idea was that I’d run the mechanics. It had worked up to a point in 2009, but I put the failings down to me having to organise the building of the bikes at the last minute, when we were let down.
I would choose the team members and I’d be in charge of them – there wouldn’t be a crew chief, or whatever title the foreman wanted, between the mechanics and the team boss, like there is with most big teams. I was riding the bike, I knew how I wanted it to be, and I didn’t want to waste time and energy disagreeing with someone in the middle who didn’t see it my way. So, the bikes would come from a highly regarded race team, ready for the first session of any race meeting, and from there, me and my mechanics would tweak and try to perfect it for the track and conditions we were dealing with. Wilson said he was happy to work that way.
My mechanics would be the same as the previous season. Danny Horne left SMR to stay with me; my mate Johnny Ellis would take time off work to be my mechanic again; and Cammy would work at the bigger races like the TT.
I was excited. It seemed to be exactly what I was after. I thought we had been trying to reinvent the wheel at times when I was racing for Shaun. To me, keeping it simple was the way to go about the job. We wouldn’t be based in the paddock at the TT. We’d do all our spannering in my friend’s garage again and we rented a house near Bray Hill. That meant we could stay out of the way, concentrate on the job in hand and only arrive in the pits when we were due out on track. If I stayed in the pits we’d never get anything done for people asking ‘Have you got a minute?’
It was going to be a bit like the old days. Not entirely, though. Top road racing bikes had become so complicated – some of the Superbikes were £200,000 bits of kit laden with electronic systems – and the racing itself was so competitive, that it couldn’t be like it was when Johnny and I would drive around in the old race truck and he was my only mechanic. This Wilson Craig team structure was as stripped-back as I thought it could be and still allow me to be in the hunt for international road race wins. It was the way I had wanted it to be for the last couple of years. It all sounded good. Better than good really, but it soured very quickly.
Wilson Craig is a wealthy Irishman who has made his money from trading in potatoes and some canny buying and selling of land. He’s obviously a very good businessman, but, as far as I could see the principles he must have applied in his business life, all the rules, experience and skill, weren’t carried over to his hobby, that is, running his motorcycle racing team. To be as good as he is in business you must have to be ruthless up to a point, but when it came to his team I felt he wasn’t getting what he paid for. He didn’t seem to be aware that he needed to apply the same principles to his team.
I was going to be running Honda CBR1000 Fireblades and CBR600s, bikes I was familiar with as I’d been on them for the last three years with SMR. So I was carrying quite a lot of specific set-up knowledge into 2010.
So far, so good, but the organisation fell at the very first hurdle. Instead of being given bikes prepared for early season shakedown tests I didn’t get to ride the Wilson Craig bikes until the Pirelli tyre test in April. Some riders are out in Spain for pre-season testing from February. I had done that with SMR and would do the same later with the TAS Suzuki team, too. If you’re staying with the same team and the bike hasn’t been updated, it’s not crucial to test too early. I don’t think so, anyway. But if you’re going to a new team with bikes that have been built from scratch, it’s important to get on them early, to start getting them dialled in and flush any bugs out of their systems. It’s reassuring for everyone. Don’t test early and you can be chasing your tail when the season starts.
The bikes weren’t ready for early season tests, but I still wasn’t losing sleep over it. It wasn’t until I rode the Hondas at the tyre test that I began to realise that all was not going to go smoothly.
Castle Combe is regularly used by Dunlop and Pirelli for TT tyres tests. It’s about the only short circuit track in the UK with corners quick and bumpy enough to feel anything like a fast Manx or Ulster road corner. Obviously you can’t test on the tracks I race on, because they’re public roads for the rest of the year, so you’re looking for a compromise – somewhere you can rent, but which is fast and not as smooth as a motorway. I test at smooth, shorter, slower tracks too, but that’s to work out other issues with the bikes, to improve set-up, simple things like the position of the bars and footrests, or for setting up the electronics packages: traction control, anti-wheelie and fuelling maps. At Castle Combe it’s all about assessing the performance and characteristics of the newly formulated rubber.
I arrived at the Wiltshire track, which is just a few miles from Bath, excited to be riding these 600s that had been built for me. In my mind they would be world-beating bikes. In reality, I found they fell far short of that. I knew that to be competitive in World Supersport, the PTR Hondas had to be mustard. The excitement soon disappeared. Never mind being at a private Castle Combe test session, as far as I’m concerned, I could’ve been riding around a supermarket car park and told you these bikes weren’t going to win anything.
The PTR mechanic who had been sent looked to me to have no experience in top-level motorcycle racing. He’d built Transit vans or something and helped a mate who raced a bike, but he didn’t seem to have much of a clue about preparing a bike to finish a TT. Lovely lad, but some of the stuff he did made my blood run cold. If I have to explain the point of lockwiring stuff to the person who is building my race bikes, I don’t have a lot of faith in him.
I felt basic things, like lockwiring, were simply not right. Every race bike, from that of a first-race novice in club racing right up to Rossi, Lorenzo and Marquez, has to have certain parts lockwired. The one many people know is the sump plug. You drill a tiny hole in the sump plug, thread some thin stainless steel wire through it, then twist the wire up, poke the two ends through another hole in either a fin on the engine case or another bolt and twist the ends together tightly before snipping the excess off. You arrange the lockwire in such a way that when it is all twisted up tightly, the bolt cannot move because the lockwire is in tension, effectively pulling the bolt tight. We had it wired the other way, so when the wire was twisted with the pliers it was pulling the bolt slack.
With few other choices, and a pile of tyres to work through and give feedback on, I climbed on the Honda and started riding. It didn’t take long for the 600 to shit itself. The bike hadn’t even survived the first morning of a pre-season test before blowing up. It was my very first day riding for my new team and I was already getting wound up. I rode the Superstock Fireblade for the rest of the day, because the Superbike still wasn’t ready. That night we loaded up the 600, drove back to Lincolnshire, swapped the engine over, then got up at three in the morning, after a couple of hours’ sleep, and drove the 230 miles back to Castle Combe, to do the second day of testing.
I can watch the way someone wields a spanner and tell if they know what they’re doing or not. Danny Horne, who has worked with me for years, can handle a spanner. He likes his hair gel and sunglasses, but just watching him as he fettles my bikes fills me with confidence. That’s the kind of confidence you need in whoever is spannering for you – your life depends on their work. When I was swapping the engine over with PTR’s lad, any lingering doubts I had about him were confirmed. It was clear to me, when it came to top-level racing motorbikes, the fella wasn’t up to scratch, and wouldn’t be in time for the first race. I remember he numbered the plugs caps back to front. To me, this was basic first-week-in-a-bike-shop stuff. He made me nervous. What else might he have done wrong? I didn’t want him working on my bikes.
I have been asked if I would ever work with a complete arsehole if they were the best race mechanic in the world, but I don’t think it would ever happen. Based on my 30 years of experience, the two things go hand-in-hand: if you’re a good mechanic, you’re normally a good bloke; maybe a bit of a weirdo, but still all right. You can be an all right bloke and a terrible mechanic, but it rarely, if ever, works the other way around.
After this test I told Wilson the situation I was in. To me, it was as plain as the nose on his face that he was having his trousers pulled down. I made it clear I couldn’t ride bikes in that condition because I felt they weren’t safe to race, but nothing changed. Perhaps he thought I was making it up.
Because we’d had next to no track time I pushed to race at two British Superbike meetings. We went to Thruxton first, which is a fast track as British short circuits go, but nothing like the TT or Ulster obviously.
I think I qualified on the front row on the Superstock 1000 and inside the top ten on the Supersport bike. And I’m not a short circuit man, but I thought, bloody hell, when I put my mind to it I can do it.
I was running in the top six in the race, then I crashed. I lost the front end going into the chicane and didn’t know why. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong or pushing too hard. I haven’t had many of those. I was obviously too hard on the brakes for those conditions on those tyres. The crash didn’t do much damage to the bike; it just scraped the side.
It was still a constructive weekend. I had some time on the bike, but not loads. The big problem with using a British Superbike race as a test is the fact that you are there for three nights and three days for very little track time. On Friday you get two 20-minute sessions, on Saturday you get one 20-minute session, and on Sunday you get a morning warm-up and one or two 20-minute races, depending which class you’re running in. So, you get less than an hour and a half of track time for three days at a circuit. I could enter a few classes at a one-day club race and get more time on the bike. At that stage of the season a club race would be as useful, because I’m using the race as a test, getting stuff dialled in, not seriously looking at lap times. It’s more about the feel than the times.
Then I went to Oulton Park on the first of May to race during a British Superbike weekend. The North West 200 was ten days away, the start of the TT two weeks after that. Wilson got me an entry for the Supersport and Superbike class in the same weekend. It was going to be a busy weekend, but I needed it. I needed time on the bike.
When the most important bike of my year, the Honda Fireblade in Superbike specification, which I would cane around the island to try and win an elusive TT, was wheeled out in front of me at Oulton Park, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. When I walked around the right-hand side I immediately saw that its exhaust silencer was sticking right out at a stupid angle. The exhaust silencer bracket had been put on the wrong way round. I could have given it to my grannie, Double-Decker Lil, and she would have worked out the bracket was the wrong way round. I had to take a photo of it, because it was such a bloody daft thing for anyone to have done.
Danny remembers the race meeting as an absolute waste of time. He was working on the bikes and coming across all sorts of problems. The clutch levers that had been fitted resulted in two burned-out clutches – two wrecked races. Another engine blew up as well. It was a case of put them in the van and let’s get out of here. We had to strip the bikes and start again. We left Oulton Park early to get the bikes ready for the North West 200.
I told Wilson that I didn’t want anyone else working on my bikes. He could organise getting all the parts, but I would sort out preparing the three of them – Superbike, Superstock and Supersport – with my dad and Johnny helping. I explained everything that I thought was wrong with the bikes to Wilson, but there were others telling him that there was nothing wrong with them and that everything was my fault. I was not happy.
Unfortunately, and confusingly, Wilson was believing them, not me. Why would I be criticising a world championship team before I’d even ridden the bike in a race I was employed to compete in if there wasn’t something badly wrong? It didn’t make sense. Danny, Cammy and Johnny were saying to me, ‘We can’t have them saying all this, because everyone thinks we’re useless.’ I felt the reputation of my lads was suffering because of the actions of others.
Oulton hadn’t shed much light on anything, because the bikes were so far off. Much too soon, it was the middle of May and time for the North West 200 – a vital race to help set bikes up for the TT, because you could really get them wound up to top speed. There are other Irish races before the North West, like Cookstown, but you don’t get the same clues to set-up and performance. The 2010 North West would be a disaster. I crashed the Superstock bike in practice. I tipped in to the last corner too early, clipped the kerb and lost the front end. It was 100 per cent my fault. I reckon my eye wasn’t on the ball. I had so many things to think about and was distracted. I do like to build my own bikes, but I’d taken on too much this time, out of necessity. I couldn’t race these bikes if I didn’t think they were right. All the racers have two arms and two legs, that means so much of racing successfully is in the mind. And mine wouldn’t be on the job if I didn’t have my own lads rebuild these Hondas. This was the first time it struck home that I was making too many decisions and trying to race at the same time. The way the bikes were being delivered to us meant that I had the added pressure of either stripping them to a bare frame and starting again, or at least organising someone that I trusted to do it. Perhaps I wouldn’t have minded this situation if I’d known what I was getting into, but it had been landed on me too close to the TT and I was on the back foot. Also, me, Johnny and my dad were doing it for free while someone was being paid to build what we were spending days and days trying to fix.
I’m someone who likes to have a lot on his plate. I’m happy to have distractions, but this was one too far, and I felt the buck stopped with me, because I’d set up this structure without a crew chief. I was thinking about gearing and gearboxes, concentrating on what I was going to change when I got in the pits, rather than thinking about what I was doing on the track, when I clipped the Coleraine kerb.
The day went from bad to worse. The clutch went in the Superbike, the 600 blew up and I can’t remember the rest of the results. It was a race meeting that was memorable just for being bad. There wasn’t a single positive to come out of it except that I hadn’t injured myself badly crashing. I got back from Ireland on Sunday knowing there was just one week before we’d leave for the Isle of Man TT.
During all this, the pre-production of the film TT3D: Closer to the Edge was going on.
My involvement in the film began around the end of 2009. The boss of North One Television, the company who had taken over the contract for producing the Isle of Man TT highlights programme for ITV, had been approached by an outfit called CinemaNX. This Manx-based film production company was funded, in part, by Manx government money as an investment for the island. CinemaNX were talking about making a film of the TT and approached North One because they had all the footage and rights to the race action shot during the fortnight, action that was crucial to the film.
I was down in London talking to North One Television about their plans to make me a TV presenter. I didn’t honestly think anything would come of it, but if it did it might be fun and I’d earn a few quid, which would oil the wheels money-wise. As far as money goes, my opinion is that you’re better off looking at it, than for it.
The London meeting had been scheduled so that I could also go to the get-together about the film. Andy Spellman came into the meeting with me as an adviser, but we were totally out of our depth. I didn’t have a clue, and all of a sudden we are in a room with people who’ve made films with Christopher Walken and Zac Efron.
When I first met him, I thought Andy worked for North One, because he’d been one of the TV directors that filmed a lot of riders for the 2009 ITV coverage. It turned out he was a freelance producer fresh from the world of Formula One cars – who also had his fingers in other TV projects and businesses of his own. Road racing couldn’t be much further removed from the F1 world, but he must have liked what I said, or how I said it, because he got all revved up to try and get me involved in a TV programme. After the TT in 2009 we met at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and he explained he was keen to act as an agent for me on the TV side of things, before I even had a TV side of things. He said it would be a learning curve for both of us, but he knew the TV and commercial world better than me and he promised he would make sure I didn’t get shafted or involved in anything that would make me look like a dickhead. He added that if I was being a dickhead he’d tell me. I said, ‘You’ll do for me, boy,’ still thinking nothing would come of it.
Back in the meeting, we sat listening to Steve Christian, who was the executive producer of the proposed TT film, and the director, Richard De Aragues, who were doing all the talking. De Aragues had filmed adverts and small projects and I picked up on the fact that this was going to be his first film.
The original plan, as outlined at this meeting, was for Closer to the Edge to be a two-part documentary. The first part was going to be a dramatisation of the 1967 race between two of the all-time greats, Giacomo Agostini and Mike Hailwood. It’s a race that has gone down in history. The film production company wanted me to be a stunt man for it, dressed up as one or both of them. The second part of the film was going to be a documentary of the 2010 TT. In that first meeting they were talking of budgets of 30–40 million quid. Even though most of the talk was going over my head, I was picking up enough to know it was massively ambitious. I was in nod-smile-agree mode. I came out of the meeting thinking, ‘As long as I’ve got a hole in my arse, that’s not happening.’
With this film job and the interest from the TV production company people who thought I could become a TV presenter, I started thinking I was in some kind of Truman Show; like I was the Jim Carrey character, being secretly filmed for others’ amusement, with everyone laughing at me doing these things. The difference between me and the Jim Carrey character, of course, was that everything that happened to me was happening for real, in the real world – sometimes it just didn’t seem like it.
Over the coming months the Closer to the Edge plan was scaled down, but still moving along. In early 2010, I got a call from Andy Spellman saying he thought it was going to happen, but the budget had shrunk a lot. Someone said it ended up costing a couple of million quid, not the mega money they’d been talking about at the start.
As the planning of the film started, the production company said they wanted the bike I was going to race, Wilson Craig’s Honda Fireblade, to have a simple, classic paint scheme. The Agostini and Hailwood part of the project had been dropped, but someone clearly wanted to shoehorn in a visual link to those days.
The problem was, Wilson had a lot of sponsors lined up for the season and the producers didn’t want their logos on the bike. I was also asked if I needed to wear any logos on my leathers, and I must’ve been getting a truck ready for an MoT or something when the call came in, because I just said ‘No’ and signed a contract to say I could ride in plain leathers. I’d forgotten Dainese, Pirelli, Red Torpedo, AGV, Elas … That caused a bit of a headache for Andy Spellman, who was trying to sort it all out.
I don’t know if it was because of the director’s background in adverts, but it was De Aragues who was obsessed with the whole look of the bike and the leathers. There were a thousand emails going back and forth, between the film company and Andy, about these leathers. Dainese weren’t happy about the lack of logos, while De Aragues wasn’t happy with any logo at all. The film director wanted the number 8, that was to be stitched on the back of the leathers, tweaking this way and that. I kept being reminded, by Andy, that I was in breach of two contracts I’d signed – one with Dainese and the other with the film people. I’d shrug.
At times like that I just think, ‘Fuck it, it’ll be right.’ And it normally is. Someone will bail me out, and it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask for permission. If anyone had taken the hump and said they didn’t want to deal with me any more, then it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. The people at Dainese are so nice, the kit is mega, and I don’t want any of them to get into trouble at work over me, but when it comes down to losing a sponsor or something, I’m just not bothered.
Part of me thinks these sponsors have got involved with me and they know what I’m like. In the last couple of years lots of stuff would’ve fallen apart if it wasn’t for Andy, but I would still have had the trucks to go back to and I’d still be racing bikes. When those are the most important things in your life, and they are to me, then it’s difficult for people to hold me over a barrel. I don’t worry about any of the other stuff – TV, sponsors, or whatever – crashing down. In fact, there are times I almost wish it all would.
On the eve of the 2010 TT, because of the state of the bikes and the work needed to ready them, the film wasn’t on my mind. I knew I had to do a few bits and pieces, but I was concentrating on what was right in front of me – three motorbikes that needed sorting.
We got on with preparing the bikes for the toughest test in road racing. The TT can find any weakness in a bike and hammer it till it fails. I was so busy prepping the bikes, right up until the last minute, that I hadn’t even thought about racing them, or how I was going to challenge for a win, until I was on the ferry.