‘There are times when the side of the rear tyre kisses up against the kerb and it’ll cause the bike to wheelie.’
TRUCKS, TELEVISION, MOUNTAIN biking, a lot going on, but I still take racing seriously. It’s not my career – I lasted a morning as a professional racer, remember – but all the races I enter I go out to win. If I don’t win them, it’s not for a lack of effort.
Since the 2011 season I’ve raced for the Northern Ireland-based team TAS Suzuki – first with black Relentless Suzukis in 2011, then the white and blue Tyco-sponsored bikes. They’ve all be run by the father and son outfit of Philip and Hector Neill. TAS stands for Temple Auto Salvage, the family’s original business. Hector has sponsored riders and run teams for years, and Philip was an international level motocross racer.
As a team, they’ve won TTs, but, famously, I hadn’t won a TT at the end of 2013. I have won plenty of other races and beaten every other TT racer of my generation in International mass-start races.
The North West 200, the Isle of Man TT and the Ulster Grand Prix are the races called the ‘Internationals’ in the real road racing world. Other races, like the Southern 100 and the Scarborough Gold Cup, attract the top racers and pay decent prize money, but the Internationals are the bigger and more prestigious races to win.
I’m not much of a fan of the North West course any more, but I love riding the TT and the Dundrod circuit, home of the Ulster GP.
Matt Wildee of Performance Bikes magazine summed up the Ulster GP’s circuit well after he visited in 2006. ‘The fastest racing circuit there has ever been is little more than a collection of A- and B-roads spliced together with ribbon and hay bales. For 363 days of the year these roads are used for the school run and dawdling tractors. This is about as far away from Monza or Phillip Island as you can get.’ Performance Bikes featured a lot of road racing back then, long before any three-dimensional TT films. The same article went on to compare some of the speeds with tracks readers might know from TV.
‘The fastest lap at Phillip Island [an Australian circuit famous among MotoGP and World Superbike fans for its fast corners] is 111.734 mph [now it’s 112.9, set by Marc Marquez in 2013]. Troy Bayliss has lapped Monza at 121.317 mph. But Ian Hutchinson – a little known racer outside Irish circles – averaged 130.829 mph at Dundrod, while chasing PB favourite Guy Martin.’
Matt picked the year I won four races in a day to visit. He ended his intro saying, ‘But you’d never find a telegraph pole 78 cm from the apex of the Parabolica …’
The Dundrod is fast and flowing. It hasn’t been monkeyed around with and had a load of chicanes added like the North West has. I first raced here at a meeting called the Killinchy 150 in 2003. It used to be its own meeting, but now they run it on the Thursday of the Ulster Grand Prix meeting and call it the Dundrod 150.
The Ulster GP lap record is 133.977, set by Bruce Anstey, in 2010, making it the fastest track in the world still being used. This is what a fast lap of the 7.4-mile Dundrod circuit feels like …
I call the start–finish straight the Flying Kilo, but I’ve no idea if it’s a kilometre or not. In 2013, we were timed at 199 mph along there, but it’s dead smooth for a road circuit. There’s a really fast left at the end of the straight, called Rock Bends. In fact Rock Bends is a group of corners, all with the same name, and the first is this very, very fast left before the right. You might not think it’s a corner at all, but it is at 190 mph.
I used to be able to get through the first fast left flat-out, but as the bikes have become quicker you don’t actually want to be going through the first part that fast, because it sends you off-line for the rest of the corners, knackering your line through and out the other side. You’re better off going slower to go faster, so I roll the throttle there now and make the rest of Rock Bends more flowing and less of a panic to get through.
For the right-hander, the beginning of the second section of the Rock Bends complex, I go back two gears, to fourth, and drive hard through a few downhill lefts and rights, all on the throttle, before I’m hard on the brakes for Leathemstown, a 90-degree road-end corner. These slow corners are all about the run out of them down the next very fast straight.
I use the kerb as a stop for my tyres on the way out. The ideal racing line uses all of the road, but instead of a nice sunken kerb, like at a MotoGP or BSB track, this is a kerb that would chew up a car’s alloy wheels if you weren’t careful parking. At the end of the kerb, I’m still way over on the left of the road and sometimes in the grass and dirt while I’m firing down the next straight. I’ll have the bike upright enough that it doesn’t give too much of a problem, but I’ll sometimes feel it kicking as the tyre struggles for traction. There are times when the side of the rear tyre kisses up against the kerb and it’ll cause the bike to wheelie. That unsettles the bike and means I have to roll the throttle off, or get on the back brake to calm it, and that loses time, so I don’t want to be hitting that kerb on the exit of Leathemstown too hard.
It’s a top-gear thrash to the uphill Deers Leap that has a 180 mph blind entry. The bike’s leant over and the revs rise as the contact area of the tyre goes from middle to the side, because the diameter of the tyre is different at those two points.
In the middle of Deers Leap, I’m back two gears, to fourth. At the side of the track is the Cockwell Inn, the garage in someone’s garden that turns into a pub for the house owner’s mates every Ulster Grand Prix.
The road drops away rapidly here and you can see a huge part of the west of Northern Ireland from this point, if you have time to take it in. In a race we are accelerating hard down the steep hill. I’m using every inch of the road. You really don’t want anything to go wrong here. The last part of Deers Leap is a 150 mph downhill right. I’m hard on the back brake, stood up on the pegs, weight over the front of the bike, all to try to stop it wheelie-ing over backwards.
My guts nearly drop out of me as the road changes from downhill to climbing back uphill to Cochranstown. I’m in fifth gear again and on the back brake for a lot of this section, trying to keep both wheels on the floor. I bet the rear disc is nearly glowing red hot along here.
Then it’s over a rise going into Cochranstown. I’m back from fifth to second gear. The road is dropping away so fast that it’s a job to keep the tyres in contact with the tarmac, and it’s impossible to be too hard on the brakes. I’m trying to lose 100 mph to get around the 90-degree corner, so it would be dead easy to tuck the front after asking too much of the front tyre’s grip.
Once you’re through this road-end bend the track isn’t making any steep climbs or drops, but it’s undulating. I’ll be high up in the revs in second gear, the Superbike delivering most of its 200-plus horsepower to the rear wheel while the front wheel is just wanting to rise up all the time, so, again, I’m calming it with my foot on the back brake pedal.
Up to third, then fourth, on the run into Quarterlands, then back two gears to second. It always seems to be damp here and you’ve got to be careful on the painted road markings. I’ve had the front tuck while I’ve been braking hard and gone over the white lines. When that happens I have to instantly get off the front brake, stamp the back brake to allow the front tyre to grip again, then get back hard on the front brake to slow enough to get around the corner. If you panicked you’d be off there. Directly in front of me, when this is going on, is a copse of 100-year-old trees. No run-off, just trees.
There’s no gradient here, you’re on a level road into third, only up to about 12,000 rpm for the short straight to Ireland’s Bend. Off the throttle, still in third, no brakes, just chuck it in and run up the hill. I use the hill to lose my speed while trying to understeer through the left-hander. A barbed wire fence lines the outsides of the track.
I’m accelerating hard up into fifth gear for Budore Corner, that’s been renamed Lougher’s. It’s one of my favourite corners anywhere. It’s a difficult choice whether to be in fifth or sixth. When I’m in fifth it feels right, but the bike is revving so hard that when I lean it over, right onto the very side of the tyre, the rolling diameter of the tyre changes and this affects the gearing, making the engine spin faster and hit the rev limiter.
Bikes have had rev limiters for years. They’re an electronic safety system that cuts the ignition if the engine is trying to rev past its safe limit. When the rev limiter is hit, the engine stutters slightly and loses momentum. But if I run through Budore in sixth, to avoid hitting the rev limiter, when I stand the bike up, onto the middle part of the tyre, the revs start to drop and it’s not pulling hard enough. I’ve settled on putting up with being on the rev limiter in fifth for a moment to get the best drive out for the run to Joey’s Windmill.
The road undulates through a left and right. I go back two gears and then the road goes uphill. Bruce Anstey came off in front of me there once. A very big crash.
Out of Joey’s Windmill I’m in third. The road is rising and I’m using the hill to scrub off speed again, so I’m not hard on the brakes. It’s the same as Quarterlands – big trees directly in front of you. Anything goes wrong and you’re knackered.
Up a bloody steep hill and over Jordan’s Cross. After that there’s a kink. I’m normally revving hard in fifth gear, the shift lights all lit up on the dash, telling me to change to sixth. The shift lights are little LEDs that are programmed to indicate when it’s the optimum time, for the engine, to shift up. I don’t here normally, but in 2013 I was sure Michael Dunlop was going to put a move on me, so I put it up to sixth just to keep all the momentum and not give him a sniff of an opportunity.
When I’ve got someone that close behind I’m trying to ride defensively and not do anything daft while staying as fast as possible. I’m riding differently than if I was going for one fast lap by myself. If I was just going for a flying lap with no one trying to put a move on me, I’d leave it in fifth and run it on the limiter all the way.
Into Wheelers, there’s a place called the Hole in the Wall, where there’s a wall with a hole in it. This is all fast lefts and rights. The road is level, not really climbing or dropping, and once again I’m using every inch of the road, sweeping from the verge on one side to the verge on the other.
Wheeler’s is third gear, nicely cambered and one of the only places on the Dundrod circuit with any run-off to speak off.
Then it’s up two gears for the run to Tornagrough. I’m flat-out in fifth gear, so the thick end of 170 mph, and there is a dip in the road that makes the bike bottom out at that speed, the suspension completely compressed and neck muscles straining to stop the chinbar of my helmet from banging on the top of the petrol tank.
Depending on what bike I’m on, either the 1000-cc Superbike or the 600-cc Supersport, I then shift back to either second or third for the left-hander Tornagrough. The Superbike has much taller gearing, so it’ll go through in second. The Supersport needs to be in third. There’s a little manhole cover on the right-hand side that I use as a braking marker.
There are a couple of bumps that unsettle the bike, making the front tyre squirm and protest. Even though I’d be in second gear, and that sounds slow, I’m still going through here at 90 mph or so – that’s an educated guess, like all the speeds I’ve quoted, because my race bikes don’t have speedos.
Through this long sweeper the whole bike is squirming, the rear tyre struggling to cope with the amount of power it’s being asked to deal with as I wind the throttle on, just touching 100-per-cent throttle, the twistgrip on the stop, full power, maximum revs, before getting hard on the brakes for the first gear hairpin.
The hairpin is the only point on the whole seven-and-a-bit-mile lap that we’re back to first gear. The hairpin is dead tight, downhill and off-camber. You don’t want that mix of ingredients in the wet. I’m having to brake over the white lines, that have very little grip. This section feels like walking pace after some of the 190-mph straights.
Accelerating out of there, I’m hard on the back brake, even though I’m hammering up through the gears, just to keep the front wheel down. Second, third, fourth, into Quarry Bends.
I have a lot of lean on, banked hard on the right-hand side, and I know I’ve got it right when the shift lights on the dash come on in fourth as I’m leant hard over.
Quarries is a big complex of corners. There’s a lamp-post on the right-hand side and I pull as tight as I can to that. The bike isn’t trying to wheelie here, but I’m on the back brake again to try and compress the rear suspension. I’ve gone from 100-per-cent throttle to 70-per-cent, and it’s putting a lot of weight bias on the front. When I’m then going back to 100-per-cent throttle, driving hard out of Quarry Bends, there’s a lot of front to rear transition as the front suspension rises and the rear squats under the power. That transition unsettles the bike, making it buck and shake. Keeping the back brake on through the corner keeps the rear shock compressed, pulling the rear shock into its stroke, and minimises the front to rear movement and stresses the rear tyre less.
The last bit of Quarries is down two gears, into third. Getting back onto 100-per-cent throttle makes the bike squirm about a bit, but it’s not too bad.
Then there is another very long right-hander, Dawson’s Bend, that doesn’t really have an apex. I’ve watched a lot of riders through there, and I’ve tried a lot of lines myself, and keeping in the middle of the road seems to work best.
Coming out of Dawson’s I’m leant over and balancing grip and throttle position. The rear tyre hasn’t got enough of a contact patch to just wind the throttle wide open. At best, it would spin up, meaning less traction and less acceleration. At worst, it would spin, grip and highside me, slinging me off the top of the bike at 120 mph and more.
Then it’s the run down to the start–finish line, along the Flying Kilo, for another lap. The Ulster Grand Prix is a seven-lap race, covering a total of just less than 52 miles. The whole race is run at an average speed of close to 130 mph.
I’m the third or fourth winningest rider at the Ulster, but I’ve never won a TT. I like the cut and thrust of the mass-start races. I like getting stuck in.
I went to the 2013 Ulster after a poor TT and came away thinking I’d been to Michael Dunlop’s back garden and done him over. And not just a bit.
In the Superbike race, the big one, the one for the money, I led and Dunlop came past me. He qualified on pole with me in second. There was only me and him doing the times. It was going to be like 2012, only the two of us.
In the race, he came past me in the Rock Bends on the first set of corners, with a 180–190-mph entry to it. When he passed I knew he meant business. He always does. At those speeds I can feel someone benefiting from my slipstream, so I know they’re close – then he came past. I knew he was trying hard from the very off. He was 50p-ing it into the corners, meaning he was entering corners on one line, too hot, then tightening and tightening to make it around the corner, not taking one smooth line. His elbows were touching the grass, he was having to lift his knee up to miss the kerbs. Riding ragged, but bloody fast.
I decided to sit behind and see what he had and what I could do. I was happy that he wanted to show me his cards. He’s a bit like that. The thing at the Ulster is, if you’re not the quickest there, you can still get pulled around by the quickest quite easily. It’s rare for someone to really break away at the Ulster. If someone is leading and doing the speeds, it’s relatively easy to tag on.
Obviously, Michael thought he had the speed to get away, otherwise he’d have done what he did in 2012 – stayed behind and mugged me on one of the last corners with a do or die move that made our fairings bash together.
My Tyco Suzuki had better top-end speed than his Honda Legends Fireblade, but with the Superbike I’m riding, the Suzuki GSX-R1000 of 2011 to 2014, there is only a very narrow margin where it works really well. The set-up and the way the bike works with the tyres is a small window. When it’s right it’s brilliant, better than the other bikes, but getting it into that narrow operating area is much more difficult than with the Fireblade. The Honda works well over a wider range of settings. You don’t have to be so precise setting it up. That day the GSX-R1000 was more than a match for the Honda, though. I knew that straightaway.
Another big variable are tyres. Since 2008 I’ve been using Pirelli or Metzeler tyres, when virtually every other top racer has been on Dunlops. Tyres from Pirelli and its sister company Metzeler are made in the same factory, but branded differently.
‘Factory’ is a description regularly used in motorcycling that I used to hate. People would talk about bits on their race bike as factory this or factory that, but all parts on a bike come out of the factory. What they meant was they have the fancy parts. When grand prix riders talk about a factory part, they mean a special part that has been made back at Honda or Yamaha headquarters, not created by the team or a specialist small company. It gives the part and the bike a bit of glamour and shows the manufacturers are so interested and supportive of the rider they give them the cream.
A team like TAS Suzuki are the official Suzuki team on the roads, getting assistance in one form or another from Suzuki in the UK, and a few parts directly from Japan – factory parts. It means TAS have to find their own support for suspension, engine electronics and plenty of other things. In comparison, Jorge Lorenzo’s Yamaha MotoGP team are bankrolled and supplied entirely from Japan, even though the race team will be based in Europe – they are a true factory team.
There are positives and negatives with being a factory team. In the past, the official Honda British Superbike team’s Fireblade had a rear suspension issue. The shock was mounted in a certain way that made it difficult to change quickly, if I remember rightly. All the non-official teams made an easy modification to make life simpler, but the official team weren’t allowed to, because it would be admitting that the factory had got something wrong.
Anyway, after saying all that, I’m on factory Pirelli-Metzeler tyres. Anyone can buy slicks from the company, but they can’t buy the stuff I am usually supplied to race on. The tyres are made by hand in small batches. The carcass, rubber, compound and profile can all change from batch to batch, and we go with the ones that feel best during testing.
The carcass is, as the name suggests, the body of the tyre that the rubber is laid on to. It is usually steel wire, wound round and round, and a Kevlar belt. The way the carcass is constructed can change the feel of the tyre massively. Compounds are often simply described as hard or soft. The softest tyres are often the grippiest, but they might only last a lap or less before they start to slide every time I try to brake into a corner or accelerate out of one. Some road tyres, and most GP and World Superbike tyres, have different compounds sandwiched together. If you were looking at the back of a bike, and could see the width of the tyre, the centre section is often much harder than either side. When the bike is on this centre section, it’s often travelling fast, generating a lot of heat, but traction and grip aren’t usually a problem. When the bike is leant over and the side of the tyre is being punished and trying to slide, grip is crucial so the compound is softer and grippier.
For years I have regularly been the first Pirelli-Metzeler rider home in the TT. The winner would be using Dunlop. If I was behind one of the top Dunlop riders I could often see him just whacking open the throttle while I had to feed in the power more gently. It meant they would stretch a few bike lengths on me every corner, so I’d have to try even harder, go through the fast corners even faster, to get them back in.
Pirelli would say all the right things, but they wouldn’t deliver a tyre that would do what a Dunlop would do. It was beginning to get me down. I’d missed out on winning a TT by three seconds – in 2010. At the end of 2011 we went to Kirkistown to test the factory Pirellis against some Dunlops. The Dunlops weren’t anything fancy, certainly not ‘factory’, they were just slicks anyone could order and buy to run on their race bikes or even at track days.
I knew the Dunlops would be better, but I had no idea how much better. And these weren’t even the best tyres that riders at the time, like John McGuinness, Bruce Anstey and Ian Hutchinson, would have been supplied.
On one hand it made me keen to get onto Dunlops for the next season. I couldn’t see how I could win without them, but I also realised that if you’re racing for a different tyre company, and you’re all pulling in the same direction, you might have a tyre that no one else has and that makes the difference. Neither did I want to be the seagull following a tractor, doing what everyone else did. In the end we stuck with Pirelli-Metzeler.
There’s an argument that it wouldn’t make sense for Dunlop to supply me tyres. A fella called Gary Ryan took me on one side at Cookstown in 2013 and put me straight. Ryan is the man behind the Street Sweep company, one of Michael Dunlop’s loyal and long-term sponsors. He told me that if I wasn’t racing on Pirellis, choosing to race on Dunlop instead, Dunlop would have no one to beat. If everyone is on Dunlop tyres what does it prove? They’d definitely have a Dunlop winner, whoever came home. As it is, when someone wins on Dunlop tyres they’re beating Pirelli, they’re beating TAS Suzuki and they’re beating me. I’d never looked at it that way, but as soon as Ryan said it, it made sense.
In that 2013 Ulster GP, where I was battling Michael Dunlop for the main race, we were still on the first lap, entering Lougher’s, a man’s corner if ever there was one, when Michael rolled off the throttle. I was flat-out in fifth, the engine bouncing off the rev limiter, and I passed him when I didn’t really want to. It wasn’t a calculated pass, because I’d actually wanted to stay behind him for a while, but I was back in the lead.
For the next few corners, I was taking really wide, sweeping lines. Still pressing on, but leaving enough room for him to come underneath me with some margin of safety. I gave him every opportunity to pass me. When he didn’t come past at the first gear hairpin, I thought I’d just keep on doing what I was doing, riding really big, sweeping lines, but still going as fast as I could. This was the opposite of riding a defensive line. I was hitting every apex, and while I wasn’t hanging my bollocks out, I was still getting a few slides. I was trying.
At the end of the first lap my pit board said P1 +0. That told me I was position 1 (I knew that), but with a gap of nothing to the bike behind. After the second lap it was +0.3, then it was +0.5 … +1 … +1.5 …
For the last lap I started to run a more defensive line. The thought at the back of my mind was, I’m going to get torpedoed at the Hairpin. Dunlop and me are a very similar speed at the Ulster. It you try to pass someone after the Hairpin who is running at the same speed it is very likely you’ll come off. But he never came past.
In an interview after the 2013 Ulster I was asked if I had predicted I’d win three races, but it’s a daft question. I can’t see into the future and know what someone else is going to do, or how any of the other front runners have set up their bikes. The whole of racing is unpredictable, and the characters in road racing add a further level of unpredictability. They’re not reckless or crazy. Sometimes Michael Dunlop does something that makes me think, ‘Woah, Nelly!’ But I’ve made those moves on people in the past and may well again in the future. We’re riding on the limit of what’s possible. You need to be riding like that to beat the Dunlops, Anstey and Hillier and those boys. I always ride as hard as I possibly can. Sometimes I’m not willing to push as hard as the winner in the rain. Sometimes I’m willing to push harder than everyone and it’s me that takes the chequered flag.
That race could have been so different, because during practice I had the biggest crash I never had. By that I mean I had every ingredient of the crash, the realisation it’s all going wrong, even the impact and the damaged bike, but I didn’t actually fall off.
I’ve come close to crashing a lot. I’ve crashed quite often too, but the near misses are memorable. Before this Ulster Grand Prix, the biggest crash I never had was the one on my fixed-wheel pushbike, near Big Lil’s, but the escape at the Ulster beat that.
It was coming into Deer’s Leap, a blind-entry, 180-mph corner. The track was wet in places, but I was out on slicks. I saw a rider in the distance, and knew I’d pass him after the corner, so I rolled the throttle slightly, so I could get on the gas and accelerate through the corner for a good run down the next straight and make the pass safely before Cochranstown.
As I was weighing all this up I entered the blind corner and was immediately on the rider, who turned out to be Dan Cooper. In a race I’ll take that at 180-plus. Even though this was practice and I’d rolled the throttle I would still have been doing over 160 mph in the wet on slicks. I braked and the front wheel locked up and went hard against the lockstop, the wheel turned to the right as far as it was possible to go, so I let off the brake and the bike sat back up. I had nowhere to go. I hit straight in the side of the other bike, going, I reckon, 100 mph faster than him.
I was thinking, ‘This is going to look like a plane crash. There’s two bodies here. This is it …’ The next thing I know I’m riding down the road on my motorbike, I look over my shoulder and Cooper is still on his and I’m wondering, ‘What the fuck happened there?’
The impact shoved my handlebar into the tank, buckled my front wheel, bent one of the steel front brake discs and ripped the front mudguard clean off. His exhaust was bent in half and pointing at 90 degrees out to the side.
Having got away with it, my brain immediately went back into racer mode and the very next thought was, ‘That has screwed up my fast lap.’
I got back to the pit and told the lads I’d had a near miss. They asked where I had come off. I don’t think they believed me when I told them I hadn’t. There were holes punched in the side of the fairing.
That night, in bed, it came back to me how close I came. Cooper, a good rider, who has won a 125 British Championship, explained later he was going steady because he was on slicks, but so was I. The rule at the riders’ briefing is: Do not tour. Riders have been killed at the TT and other road races when they come round a blind bend and hit a rider from behind, so we were lucky to both escape this time and it’s not something I dwell on.
What I prefer to think about are the same faces year after year at the Ulster. An old lass, Maureen, has been bringing me rhubarb jam, wheaten bread and scones for the last five years. Another lady brings me six bottles of Old Speckled Hen. It’s just mega. The whole mood in the pits is dead friendly.
The Ulster fans are hardcore, but they’re polite people. The Irish fans know their racing inside out. They’re not going because it’s the cool thing to do, and they don’t want to make small talk; they’re asking what tyre compound and gearing you’re running. They’re into the details and I like that. Even with everything else going on, I still love races like the Ulster and pushing the best of the other real roads men for a win on the fastest racetrack there is.