‘A death can happen in a race meeting and it barely sends one ripple through my part of the paddock.’
WHEN WE ARRIVED on the Isle of Man we had to drive straight to one of my long-term personal sponsors, Gary Hewitt of ELAS, to borrow parts out of a bike he had on display in his house. Gary had bought my 2009 Fireblade race bike, from Shaun Muir, to put on display in his house, and I wanted to borrow the swingarm out of it for the Wilson Craig bike. It was the same swingarm I’d bought from Spondon. We went to Gary’s directly from the ferry, and then it was finally time to ride …
After the first night of practice, I told the lads we had a lot to do. I knew then it was going to be a long and tough fortnight. The lack of high-speed stability made the Superbike very hard work through places like the 170 mph right-hander at the end of the Cronk-Y-Voddy straight. The bike was dead nervous and lacked accuracy. I had to fight it, and that, in turn, was making me suffer from arm pump.
When you’re hanging on for grim death on a bike that isn’t handling right, the muscles in your forearms are doing a lot of work and they demand a lot of blood. Because you’re tense, the blood can flow in, but it struggles to flow out. This means your muscles go absolutely rock-solid and your hands go numb. You end up with no feeling in your hands and fingers, so you can’t judge how hard you’re pulling the brake lever, or how hard you’re gripping your handlebars. Arm pump also alters your position on the bike, as you can’t fully commit to hang off the side of the bike through corners because you can’t feel the ’bars. It’s not a nice feeling, but I hadn’t suffered with it for years.
Riding the bike with a full tank of 24 litres of fuel on board totally changed the bike’s character too.
My idea that year had been that I’d make all the decisions so I didn’t have to explain everything to a middle-man. It sounded like a great idea, but the decisions were coming thick and fast as we’d been dropped in it, having to prepare the bikes ourselves, because of how we felt about PTR’s preparation. The lads, Cammy, Danny and Johnny, were asking me everything about setup – stuff they’d normally ask me about, but I had my head full of all the prep I had to do as well. They knew exactly what they were doing, but mechanics need guidance for set-up. That comes from the rider, but it was taking too much time and thought to explain everything when we had so much else to do. Do we put another clutch in it? What’s the gearing? Do we change the rear ride height? I was racing three bikes – Superbike, Superstock, Supersport, as usual.
At many race meetings 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 and 250s, little two-strokes.
To be competitive in all the classes, you need to be able to switch from one riding style to another without even thinking. A rider must be able to deal with braking markers changing – literally where you have to brake to make it around the corner in one piece. The racing line and turn-in points alter. Even the overtaking opportunities can differ. And the way to set up each of these bikes to get the best out of them is different too.
Having said all that, we put the hours in during practice week, and by the end of it I was feeling some kind of confidence. I had done a 128 mph lap, but Hutchie and McGuinness were doing 130s.
My girlfriend, Kate, had sorted a house for us to all stay in: me, her, the three mechanics, but I ended up sleeping in a mate’s camper van in the bottom paddock and, some nights, in my own van, down on the Southern 100 course. All my mechanics are top lads, but I needed my own space. They all knew me, and that I was weird, so I don’t think they took it personally.
The first race of any modern-era TT is Saturday’s Superbike, now a six-lapper for the 1000-cc bikes, machines that are more powerful and using more advanced technology than British Superbikes do on comparatively safe short circuits.
After the grief of the season so far, working so hard to get the bikes something like ready, I went into the first TT feeling all right. I finished the race in second place behind Ian Hutchinson on the Padgett’s Fireblade, but was given a 30-second penalty for breaking the new pit-lane speed limit. I wasn’t happy.
I started asking where the calibration certificates were, and when the equipment had been calibrated last, but no one came up with any answers. It seemed like they hadn’t operated with a tolerance. We’d set our bike to run at 60 kph, calculating it to the gearing and the tyre size, and had it checked by Brains, Mark Woodage, who had the formula, but their speed gun was reading 60.112 or something. They repeated that the limit was 60 mph, and I wasn’t doing 61, so surely I was doing 60. There was no tolerance. It was the first year of using that system and I don’t think they’d thought it through. There was no way we could check our speed against their radar gun, and their gun could have been slightly out. A penalty of 30 seconds was added to my race time, for being 0.18 of a per cent faster than the limit. When it’s that close, surely it makes sense to do what even the police do and run a tolerance. Yes, we could’ve have set the speed limit below 60, to be on the safe side, but we’re trying to win a race, and when TTs have been won and lost by three seconds you don’t want to give the opposition any breaks, so we set it correctly.
We’d worked our bollocks off and second would have been a good start to the week. I wasn’t going to beat Hutchie that day, but a podium would have been some return on the effort the lads had put in.
Kate kept me calm. She didn’t try to reason with me, she just called them rude names like I had been doing.
I thought, I’ll win a race and show them. I didn’t, but I came close. In the next race, the first of two Supersport 600 races, I came second by three seconds, again to Hutchie, and didn’t go to the podium. I rode up the slip road, past the parc fermé where the podium placed riders are supposed to stop, and went and had a cup of tea in the awning instead. I wouldn’t have gone to the podium at all, but Wilson’s wife Esther told me I should go for Wilson, so I did. I still think I’d made my point. I was being awkward. Perhaps people thought I was being childish, but I didn’t care and still don’t. I had my reason for thinking what I thought. I’d have done the same if I had won.
On the plus side, after a disastrous start to the season our bikes were holding up well. We should’ve had two second places if it wasn’t for the 30-second penalty that dropped me to fourth. I came fifth in the Superstock on Thursday and fourth in the same day’s second Supersport race. Meanwhile, Hutchie had won all four solo races so far.
Then came the Senior, the biggest race of the week, the one I and every other racer really wants to win. A six-lapper, not four laps like the Superstock and Supersport 600 races. The fateful Senior, as it turned out.
Going into the race I was still feeling annoyed about the penalty. It wasn’t the best frame of mind to be in at the start of a TT. The anger would give me a push going into it, but would it give me the focus needed for two hours of tough racing?
The Senior was, as it traditionally is, the last race of the TT festival, meaning it would be another year before we all got the chance to try to win a TT again. It’s not like a MotoGP or World Superbike race, where if you have a bad one you only have to wait a fortnight or even less to make up for it. I had to make it count. I wanted to do it for Wilson and the boys.
There’s always one extra lap of practice for those doing the Senior, just after the second Supersport race, this year on the Thursday, and we’d made a couple of minor changes to the bike, a slight alteration to the rear ride height. The bike now felt spot-on and I was full of confidence. I felt I could go and do the business.
Two racers had died during the second Supersport race on Thursday, the New Zealander Paul Dobbs and an Austrian racer, Martin Loicht. I didn’t know either well. It might be hard for people outside the world of road racing to understand, grasp or even believe, but a death can happen in a race meeting and it barely sends one ripple through my part of the paddock. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me. Someone may mention it to me if I was stood next to them in a queue. They might be taking it to heart but I wouldn’t.
I’m not trying to delude myself by not recognising it. Some people could regard it as heartless, but I’m that focused on what I’m doing I don’t think about anyone else. I knew it was Dobbs’s own fault, by which I mean no one else had made him crash by dropping oil or petrol. And no one twists anyone’s arm to race the TT. From all I’ve heard Paul Dobbs loved racing the TT and did everything he could to make sure he could afford to go back there to race. He went doing what he loved. A lot of people would say that was a good way to go.
I knew he’d crashed at Ballagarey. It’s the kind of corner where, if you come off, it’s game over. Everyone who raced at the TT believed the same.
Friday 11 June, Senior day, and I didn’t do anything differently to any other TT race day. I was still staying in the camper van while the team, Kate and her cousin Fay, who is Johnny’s missus, were all in the rented house I was paying for. Perhaps they were wondering what they’d done wrong, but most likely not. No one mentioned it. They hadn’t done anything wrong; they all knew my strange ways and realised I was under some kind of pressure.
All that TT I would run number eight on my bike. In 2008 I had tried number one. At most races, wearing number one on your bike means you’re the champion, or you won the last running of that annual event, but not at the TT. Because the TT is run like a time trial, with riders leaving at ten-second intervals, there is no need for a traditional grid. Times from practice don’t affect the start order, it’s all decided in advance. The fastest riders get to choose what position they want to set off in. I think I had the third or fourth choice that year. You consider who is around you and pick your spot. John McGuinness never liked me going directly behind him, so there was a gentleman’s agreement to avoid that.
Though I liked starting at number one, out at the front, running my own race, I hadn’t had too much luck with that number at the TT, so I thought I’d try a different approach. I thought perhaps I needed a carrot to chase, so I went for number eight, with plenty of carrots in front of me.
Michael Dunlop was in front of me. When I’d caught him during races earlier in the week he’d played silly buggers, trying to pass me back.
In the first Superbike race, I’d passed Dunlop, who then did everything he could to pass me on the straight, but I was already ten seconds ahead of him on corrected time. He was holding me up and it wasn’t safe. Before the Senior I walked up to him and said, ‘When I catch you, play the white man.’ Perhaps that was a bit cocky, already assuming I was going to catch him, and he said something cocky back, so I thought, ‘Bloody hell …’ Anyway, I caught him on the first lap up the Mountain Mile, he heard me coming and put his foot out to show he knew I was there and I could pass. If you’re catching someone on the first lap they’re better off tucking in behind you and seeing where they can make up time for their next race.
I caught Bruce Anstey and Cameron Donald too. It was obvious I was doing something right without needing them to pull me along. When I’m in that position I have to keep my focus on what I’m doing, not focus on them. As soon as I get to them I have to pass them, by any possible means, because if I pause for a second I’m travelling at their pace, not mine; I’ve lost the rhythm and that takes some getting back. The race has gone. So, go over the hedge, up the kerb, whatever you have to do to get past. Multiple TT winner Phillip McCallen told me that.
When you’re going off in position one, you’re only passing backmarkers in the fifth and sixth laps, and a race-winner is so much faster he should always be able to find a way past. So it’s easy to see that going off number one suits some racers, who can get in a rhythm and set a high pace without needing a carrot to pull them along.
I had friends and family holding up pit boards around the track to give me information letting me know how the race was going. In a grand prix, the riders are passing the pit once every two minutes, and they are mass start races so they can see who is ahead of them. In a TT, you don’t pass the pits for over 17 minutes, and you can be racing neck and neck with someone who is two miles up the road from you, so having pit boards out on the track is even more important.
I was seeing P1 and P2, telling me I was leading or in second place. I was in a fight, but holding my own. The first board was held by Uncle Rob, who, like Uncle Rodders, wasn’t my uncle. Anyway, he was doing the signalling at Ballacreg. He does it in the driveway of a house. The next board is Rhencullen 2, which is where Andy Kershaw, the radio DJ, held the board for me.
You come out of the village of Kirkmichael, go through Rhencullen 1, over a jump, then right, right again and there’s another jump with a wall on your right-hand side. Next to it is a bit of a walkway up the side of a house and I have a pit board there. In 2005 I saw that Richard Britton had a pit board at that position. Before that I’d never heard about anyone having a board there. I must have been near Richard on the track just going through that section and spotted it as it was held out for him. I thought it was a mega idea, and decided to have one there myself.
The people who are doing the pit boards are listening to the commentary on Manx Radio. The commentators have screens that tell them who is leading and by what time through different timing points. My mates are positioned far enough away from the timing section to have a few seconds in which to put the numbers on the board and hold it out as I come by. The board is like those used at MotoGP or Formula One, but it’ll only give the minimum information because you can’t read it otherwise. So it’ll say P and a number, and that’s my position in the race. Then it’ll show a plus sign and a number, and that’s how many seconds I am in front of the rider behind me. It’ll also show a minus sign and a number, and that’s how far I am behind the rider in front of me. This is all on corrected time, not on the road. At the TT, the winner could be in eighth or, theoretically, thirtieth place on the road. The pit board doesn’t tell me who is in front or behind, like a GP one would. That’s too much information to try and take in. You’re pretty busy going through a section like Rhencullen 2, but it’s just good to get a glimpse of where I am in the race.
Some people are a bit confused about the usefulness of a pit board, because you’re surely trying the hardest you possibly can. But sometimes, if you get the set-up of the bike just right and all the stars are lined up, you can be riding at lap record speed, yet it feels slow because everything’s working so well. At times like this, the bike isn’t getting out of shape, so you’re not trying hard to keep it under control and you’re not tensing up and tiring yourself out, so it feels slow. The other side of the coin is, you can be trying so hard, that the bike is shaking its head, you’re up on the kerbs and two-wheel drifting into corners and you think you must be riding faster than ever, but you’re not. The pit board takes the guessing out of your performance, at least in terms of position in relation to the other riders.
If you’re seeing a pit board that’s saying P1 and the numbers keep growing, then you know whatever you’re doing is right, so you don’t have to change anything. If the board says -2, +1, then I’d think, I might be able to get him in front, but to be honest I don’t have a lot to spare in a TT. Unless there’s a problem with the bike, I’m racing to win from the time the starter waves me off. I can’t go faster than I’m going at any point, but it might keep my mind on the job a little bit more. It can sometimes be hard to stay completely focused for 100 per cent of a two-hour race.
A mate called Tom does another board at Sulby Bridge, on the right-hand side, just before Ginger Hall. The pit boards at Rhencullen and Sulby are close together, but the timing points they’re referring to are far apart. The first board is for the timing point at Glen Helen, nine miles into the lap, and the Sulby Bridge board is telling me the times at Ballaugh, 17 miles in.
My little sister used to do my board coming out of the Gooseneck, but since she became a mother, Steve, a mate of mine, does it. And that’s the last one I have. In later years, if the TAS lads have any mechanics coming over that aren’t working, ones who are just over for the craic, they’ll do a board at the Nook, about half a mile from the pits. That one is used to tell me to come in for a pit-stop. A local lady, Yvonne Murphy, who visited me when I broke my ankle at the Southern 100 in 2003, did that board for me for years. Sometimes I can forget if I’m on the third or the fourth lap of a six-lap race, so I start wondering about it. Not coming in to the pits on the right lap is a disaster, because these bikes won’t do three 38-mile laps on one tank of fuel. So, in a four-lap race, the Supersport 600 races and the Superstock TT, you do four laps with a pit-stop at the end of the second. For the six-lap Superbike and Senior TTs you have to pit twice for fuel and a rear tyre. A pit board at the Nook means me not having to think about it.
I was pushing like hell in the first two laps of the Senior, seeing either P1 or P2 and time of plus or minus 0.5 seconds. The board wasn’t telling me who I was trading the lead with, but I had a feeling it was McGuinness. I was thinking, ‘I’m in with a shout, I can do this.’ I was riding the TT like a short circuit. I wasn’t bouncing off the kerbs, but I was using every inch of the road. I was pushing the front into Governor’s Bridge; braking so hard the back end was off the ground; turning it in with the front brake on; sliding the rear. I was really trying hard. The rule was always slow on the slow, fast on the fast: keep it smooth on the slower stuff and really make the difference on the ballsy corners, but we’re talking about losing races by a second or two, so I was trying like hell everywhere.
I came into the pits at the end of the second lap of six. In previous years Johnny had always done my back wheel, but we changed it for this TT. He didn’t like the pressure and I don’t blame him. I didn’t enjoy it when I’d done it for Finnegan in 2003. Johnny held his hands up and said he didn’t really want to do it, so Danny did it. It wasn’t a problem, because Danny had done the job for the Australian Cameron Donald in the past.
Johnny filled the tank. Cammy handed me a drink bottle with a long straw to stick up the inside of my helmet, changed my visor and gave me information while he did it. I loved that, because he was always so calm and precise, it was like listening to the shipping forecast. This was the one and only time I could hear a bit of urgency in his delivery. He didn’t think we had one hand on the trophy, but he knew we could win it. He told me I was leading, but by fuck-all. The pit-stop was spot-on.
The bikes obviously burn their first tank of fuel gradually over two laps, so you don’t even feel the change, but then 24 litres are dumped into the tank and the bike immediately gains over 20 kg in the space of a 30-second pit-stop. You don’t notice the weight difference in the fast sections, but you do in the slower parts of the track. It’s harder to pull the bike up on the brakes and when you lean it over, after the initial turn-in, the bike wants to bank over further, to fall on its side. You can hear the forks bottom out when you’re on the brakes, and you have to ease off so you don’t lose the front end.
I was up and running on the third lap, flat knacker out of Union Mills thinking, ‘I’ve got to make this count.’ I was pushing as hard as I could go. I was at my limit, but the gap to McGuinness was nothing.
I knew where the line was. The line of performance, of skill and of grip, that I can feel and push up to and be right on the edge, but I was pushing past it – and had been even on laps one and two. But there’s a time and a place for riding in this way, and the 2010 Senior was it. The bike was skating about a lot more than either I or the Honda was comfortable with. Through the faster corners I was getting two-wheel slides. My arse was nipping.
You can push past the line on certain corners and I was getting comfortable with it, like I never had in the past. Perhaps I was getting too confident pushing past the line. The line has moved all through my racing life as I’ve improved and got faster, but at any one time I’ve known that if I push past the line I might crash. Still, I hadn’t had any major moments in the race. I’d had a little one near where Andy Kershaw was pit boarding, Rhencullen. We carry a lot of speed through there, a good 160–170 mph, and the bike landed with the wheels slightly out of line so it tankslapped when it touched down, but nothing too bad because I was carrying loads of forward momentum and in a situation like that, speed is your friend. The bike wants to keep going in a straight line, so the gyroscopic force of the front wheel straightens it out. You just have to be sure it can straighten out before the next bend.
Three miles into the third lap I came up to Ballagarey. It’s one of my favourite corners. Another big balls one. An extremely fast right-hander. By fast, I mean 170 mph, with the bike leant hard over. It goes over a slight crest and there’s a wall on your left-hand side. You don’t brake, you just flick it back a gear, into fifth, and get straight back on the throttle to drive through the corner. You’re on zero throttle for tenths of a second and then straight back on the power. With everything being as tight as it was in this race, I clicked it back a gear and I was back on the gas even quicker than normal. That slight crest in the road just took enough weight off the front of the bike to cause the front wheel to tuck. When this happens, the front tyre is no longer tracking round the bend, it’s sliding to the outside of the corner.
If I hadn’t had the experience of dozens of front-wheel slides at that kind of speed, in those conditions, surrounded by walls and telegraph poles, I’m pretty sure I would be dead. The fractions of a second where I was trying, but failing, to save the front-end slide meant I travelled further around the corner. If I’d bailed out at the time I lost the front end I’d have gone straight into a wall at 90 degrees at 160 mph plus, but I hung on for grim death, got it a bit further around the corner and glanced off the wall. I hit the wall on one side of the road, then ricocheted over to the other side. Then the bike exploded. Back in the pits, my mechanics didn’t have a clue what was happening.
Danny, Cammy and Johnny remember the travelling marshal going out on his bike. Danny thought that some poor bugger had come off somewhere. He never thought it might be me. Then a red flag came out. Another mechanic, Denver, who is now part of my TAS team, walked over to Danny and said, ‘It’s Guy.’ Danny’s heart sank and his thoughts went straight back to his brother being killed racing at Mallory Park in 2006.
TT mechanics, like the racers they work with, are a bit of a different breed. Making a mistake on any racing bike is bad, but the TT turns little mistakes into bad situations. Everything went through Danny’s head. Had he done the back wheel up? But it was nothing he or anyone else in my pit had done.
Kate was in tears. They asked Danny to go in the office, but he didn’t want to. Cammy and Johnny had disappeared. They all said it felt like a lifetime before the word came through that I was all right, but Danny still wasn’t confident. He remembered when Martin Finnegan was killed. Martin’s wife had been told by someone he was up and talking.
I tried to get up and walk, but my back didn’t feel right and hurt like hell. I tried moving all my fingers and toes and it seemed as if everything was still working, but I knew I’d badly hurt something. A marshal started talking to me, dead calmly, just chatting about normal stuff. A Welsh fella – I’ve seen him since. No one was getting flustered.
I was complaining about my back hurting, I could sense people panicking and I was strapped to a stretcher. I could feel everything, so I wasn’t shitting myself. And I’d had some morphine by then, too. That keeps a fella calm. I was dazed, but I knew I was only a stone’s throw from the hospital, so I didn’t know why they’d sent a helicopter for me. It was concerning me a bit more that they were putting me in a helicopter to take me over the road to the hospital.
As far as I know it was the first time the Senior had been red-flagged, which is something considering what must’ve occurred in that race in the previous hundred-odd years of its history.
When I arrived at the hospital the staff were pricking me to make sure I could feel everything. They had cut the leathers off me by this point. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t put clean pants on. I like a three-day cycle of underwear, four at a push.
I was put in an MRI scan and it showed I’d broken four vertebrae and four ribs. They thought I’d broken my leg too, but they were looking at the mess from the old 2003 Southern 100 injury. I also broke some ribs, punctured my lung and singed my eyebrows and fringe, but worse things happen at sea.
When people hear you’ve broken your back they think you’re going to be crippled, but a large percentage of people who break their backs aren’t paralysed. I was one of the lucky ones. The Dainese kit I was wearing did its job.
Johnny, Cammy, Danny and my girlfriend, Kate, all got to the hospital quickly. Cammy was in a bit of a state. Even though I had been a bit distant during that TT, not staying in the house with them, we were very close. Perhaps they were still thinking, ‘Did I tighten that?’ They all have the ability to work in the stressful situation of a TT pit-stop and I trust them with my life, literally, but they must’ve been doubting themselves a bit too. It was natural for the mechanics to wonder, because it was so soon after the pit-stop. When they saw me talking and smiling, they were straight back to normal.
My mum had been watching up at the Keppelgate, just before the run down to Creg-Ny-Baa. She knew something bad had happened. Andy Spellman arranged for the pace car to take to her straight to the hospital. He was thinking I was on my last legs. My mum’s seen it all, though. My dad’s broken his back, so it wasn’t new to her. I’m sure Big Rita wouldn’t have been panicking.
Maybe I’m selfish, but it never even enters my head the worry that I’m putting those around me through by racing where and how I do. The only reason I’ll stop racing motorbikes is when the bullshit outweighs the buzz I get out of it, not the amount of pain I’m going to put my family through. The crash didn’t change a single thing about my attitude to racing. Not one thing. All I wanted to do was get fit and race again.
When I was in hospital I couldn’t work out why my eyebrows were singed. Then I was shown a photo of an explosion, with orange flames as high as the top of a lamp-post, and thought, ‘That was nothing to do with me, was it?’ A full tank of fuel is going to make a mess, given half a chance.
I was put on the ward and later in the day they brought in the local Manx rider, and TT front runner, Conor Cummins. He had a massive crash at the Verandah, on the Mountain, in the afternoon re-run of the race I’d crashed out of and caused to be stopped. He’d been pushing for the lead too when he went off the side of the Mountain, literally. Because he and his bike left the road, the race carried on.
McGuinness, who I’d been racing nip and tuck for the lead when I crashed, broke down in the re-run and Ian Hutchinson won the race. Hutchie told me, a while later when I interviewed him for Performance Bikes, that he was about to retire with a mechanical problem when the race was red-flagged. If I hadn’t crashed when I did he’d have been out and not taken his fifth win of the week, a clean sweep which I don’t think will be repeated.
Simon Buckmaster, the PTR boss, sent out a press release while I was lying in hospital with a broken back, telling anyone who’d listen that the bikes were more than competitive and that I had been unprofessional. The statement accused me of courting publicity. It seemed like he was telling me how to win a TT, but I don’t remember him winning one. From what I’ve heard, he started three TTs, finished two of them with a best finish of thirty-first, according the Isle of Man TT’s own database.
It didn’t annoy me, because, as I said to the lads and as I’ve repeated many times since, those that know know, and those that don’t know don’t matter. I knew what the people who really mattered to any of us knew would think, and if some people wanted to believe something else, then we wouldn’t want to work with their kind anyway. I don’t think any of the shit that people might throw in my direction makes any difference to my career chances. If they have anything about them they know the truth, or they’ll make an effort to find it out. I’ve never given a damn about what’s written in MCN or on internet forums or what other racers thought about me. In a way I like all the bollocks and bullshit that’s spouted about me. It gees me on a bit.
At the end of 2010 I was still considering riding for Wilson the following season. I told him it was dead simple – I would ride for him if he gave me the bikes from the off and we’d do it ourselves with more time and less panic. Wilson said that wouldn’t work, Buckmaster must have the bikes, so I left Wilson Craig to join Hector and Philip Neill’s TAS Suzuki team.
Wilson stayed with Buckmaster and PTR, and signed the Australian Cameron Donald and William Dunlop, Michael’s older brother, to race for them for the 2011 season. William doesn’t get the same attention as his younger brother, but he’s quick, and a race winner on the roads. A few years later we’d be TAS Suzuki team-mates. Cameron is spot-on, he’s a TT winner, he understands how bikes work and he’s fast. He went one way, leaving the TAS team to join Wilson Craig, and I went the other.
It took a year, from my crash at Ballagarey, for the shit to hit the fan but it eventually did.
At the 2011 TT Cameron was on it, out to prove a point, and Wilson’s bikes were fast, but they kept breaking down, when the camshafts would fail. The cam they were using had a radical closing profile that was putting a lot of stress on the camshaft. The rules limited the amount of lift, so tuners look at ways of lengthening the duration the valve is open. Legendary tuning guru Phil Irving came up with the theory, or at least explained it in his famous book, Tuning for Speed, back in the 1950s. A cam is normally roughly egg-shaped, but Irving had the idea of putting a flat top on the cam. This way the valve would ‘jump’ after being flicked off the flat edge of the cam, giving more lift than the cam actually measured. But doing this puts a lot of strain on the cam, and if any race is going to find an engine’s weak spot, it’s likely to be the Isle of Man TT.
Cameron should’ve won two races that year. Some websites and reporters called it cruel luck, but, to me, there was no luck about it. In any event, Wilson Craig and PTR fell out too. Before the end of the 2011 TT all the fairings of Wilson Craig’s bikes had the PTR logo covered up with pieces of black tape. Wilson didn’t want to give them any more publicity.
I felt the bikes weren’t right, and any team manager looking to sign me will have seen enough to feel the same as me. It all came back to the saying, those that know know, those that don’t don’t matter.