Prior to my first TT in 1985, my employer, Jim Oliver, asked me what bikes I had to ride. I told him I only had the Yamaha TZ350 and to race that in the Senior class against 500cc machines was going to be an uphill struggle. When you make the effort to go over to the Isle of Man it makes sense to enter as many races as possible to make it worthwhile and increase your chances of winning some prize money; if you’ve only got one bike and it breaks down, it’s all over. Jim knew this so he pointed to a Yamaha RD500 in his showroom and said, ‘Take that for the Production race and enter the Formula One on it as well while you’re at it.’ Result. It was only a standard road bike but at least it would be good enough for the Production race. I ran that bike in on the roads of the Scottish Borders with Wendy Oliver on the back most of the time and no matter how fast I went, she prodded me to go faster. She was totally mad. As usual, I had my one meeting before the Island trip to make sure my 350 Yamaha was going okay. It was a miserable, sleety, wet day at East Fortune in East Lothian and I bagged a couple of second places, but my heart’s never been in racing when conditions are like that and it still isn’t. Despite what a lot of people think, I can actually ride in the wet but I just don’t like it. After all, I did keep up with Mick Doohan for a whole session in the pissing rain at Suzuka in 1991 and there’s no one faster than him.
Apart from my rides in the F1, Production and Senior races, Ray Cowles also gave me a bike for the Lightweight race so that gave me a ride in almost every race but the sidecars!
At least my crossing to the Isle of Man went smoothly again, which couldn’t be said for Joey and Robert Dunlop that year. They took their customary means of travel, which was a fishing boat and the bloody thing sank! Joey’s Hondas were being transported on a ‘proper’ boat, but Brian Reid and some of the other Irish boys watched helplessly as their bikes sank to the bottom of the Irish Sea. Everyone escaped unhurt and the bikes were all recovered but had to be stripped and soaked in diesel to stop the salt water corroding them.
Many people would be psychologically scarred after an event like that but Joey just jumped on a plane, headed for the Isle of Man and became only the second man in history to win three TTs in a week. The next man to achieve that honour would be me, but that was still a few years off. Just for the record, the late, great Mike Hailwood was the first to win a treble back in 1967.
Considering that 1985 was my first attempt at the TT and I didn’t have the best of machinery it wasn’t a bad week for me. I finished twenty-first in the Formula One race and tenth in the Production 750 (I was the first 500 home and managed a lap at about 108mph). I pulled out of the Lightweight class when Ray Cowles’s bike broke down and then I finished eighteenth in the Senior class on my little 350 Yamaha.
Most people agree that you’ve got to go to the TT for three years to learn it properly before you can start thinking about winning races and that’s exactly the way it worked out for me. So although those finishes may not look fantastic on paper, they represented a steady learning curve and, anyway, simply finishing a TT race is an achievement in itself. Jim Oliver was especially pleased because the Yamaha RD500 he loaned me got sold straight after the TT – it had been sitting in his showroom for months beforehand because he just couldn’t get rid of it!
I came back from the Island quite full of myself because I felt I had done really well. I hadn’t gone that much faster than I did at the Manx, but I had a lot more experience under my belt and knew I was going in the right direction. I was used to coming back from the Island in September when the Manx was finished and that was always pretty much the end of the racing season. But this time it was still only June when I got back home to Scotland and I really wanted to go racing again. That was the first time it had ever dawned on me that there was more to bike racing than just two weeks on the Isle of Man each year. It sounds stupid but I had never really considered going short-circuit racing properly – it just never entered my mind.
There was a meeting at East Fortune a few weeks later so I entered that and got a third place in one of the races. That’s when a guy called Frank Kerr came up to me and asked what I was doing in September. I said I had no plans so he asked if I wanted to ride for Scotland in the annual Celtic Match Races, as he was the Scottish team’s manager. It wasn’t a big thing really but there were teams from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Isle of Man and I thought it sounded like a bit of fun so I agreed to take part. When I asked him where it was he told me it was at Pembrey. I thought, ‘Where the fuck’s that then?’ Pembrey? I had never heard of it. It turned out to be in Wales.
There were races on the Saturday and the Sunday, and in both the 250 and 350 events I finished second to Irish rider Mark Farmer with whom I immediately became friends but who, like too many bike racers, was to lose his life at a young age. Mark’s death at the 1994 TT was extra sad for me because I was the last man to see him alive. I passed him in practice between Doran’s Bend and Laurel Bank when I was on the Honda RC45 and he was on the experimental New Zealand-built Britten machine. Because we were good mates, I looked back at him as I passed and gave him the fingers but then a couple of corners later at the Black Dubhe crashed and was killed. Mark had been a great friend of mine since I met him back in 1985 and his death was a great loss to bike racing.
I also got a second, third and fourth in the open class at the Match races to make me the highest points scorer in the Scottish team and we won the competition overall, too. It was a brilliant weekend both in terms of racing and in meeting new people and getting pissed up. That’s when I realized what I had been missing all that time, so I decided there and then that somehow, I was going to get the money together to race a full season in 1986.
I finally realized too, that all those years of getting drunk and crashing cars had been totally wasted. I had been a good-for-nothing waste of space but now that I had decided to go racing full time I was determined to make up for it. Now I had a purpose in life – a reason for not going out boozing, a reason for working late, a reason to live, and that actually made me feel extremely good.
So from that point on, the piss-artist bum was gone and he was replaced with a focused and dedicated motorcycle racer. Bike racing may be a dangerous sport but, ironically, the sport which took my brother’s life actually gave me a life and plucked me out of obscurity.
Obscurity doesn’t pay much, as I was finding to my cost. My job as a mechanic never paid well and even when I left Jim Oliver’s in 1988 to become a professional racer with Honda I was only on about £90 a week which is shite really. It wasn’t Jim’s fault; it was just the going rate.
Fortunately, as I said before, my mate Brian Reid really came good for me in the winter of 1985 by finding me some sponsorship through a guy called Leon Marshall of Marshall Lauder Knitwear. It wasn’t the most obvious company to be associated with bike racing but I wasn’t complaining. Leon asked me what my plans were for the coming season and I told him I wanted to do the British championships. He wondered why I didn’t just do the Scottish championship but I never saw the point in that. I was living on the border anyway so I figured I might as well travel down to the big English races than waste my time riding in Scotland getting no recognition. I’m not knocking Scottish racing but I’d been there done that and was ready for a new challenge.
I had helped work on bikes for another racing mate, called Jimmy Shanks, at some of the Marlboro Clubman events in England in 1985 and thought I could run with that level of competition, so that’s another reason why I was keen to race in England.
I wanted to ride in the (now defunct) Formula Two class, both at British and world level, so Leon offered to pay for the engine and exhaust system which I needed to make my bike competitive. It cost £2600 and my first reaction was, ‘What? Say that again.’ I couldn’t believe anyone would do that for me and thought, ‘Whoopee!’ Leon also gave me £100 in cash for every race meeting, which was more than I was earning in a week so it was invaluable help and I couldn’t have done it without him. So my bike was painted up with ‘Marshall Lauder Knitwear’ on