Flat out in the tuck position at Brands in 1999.
This experience taught me never to stop questioning even the smallest things. At the start of my final season, before the crash in Australia, I was convinced that something had changed with the gear lever.
‘Are you sure the rubber isn’t thicker this year?’ I asked. ‘Are my boots any different, then? Because something doesn’t feel quite right.’
When I went to the first test in Valencia, I changed the position of that gear lever so many times. The riders have this lever in roughly the same area on their bikes, because you never get the chance to ride other racers’ bikes, I’m not sure whether my preference was much different – it is not as noticeable as the position of the bars or the footrest – but for some reason I just couldn’t get comfortable during this test. I seemed to be hanging over the front of the bike and didn’t seem able to get my foot under the gear lever to go down through the box and change from third or fourth back to first. You cannot alter the position on the splines, because there would be too big a gap. On a factory racing bike, the gear lever bar is egg-shaped and swivels around so that it can either be under your foot or away from it. At this track, though, as I said, I could not make myself comfortable, for no real reason because the lever had not been altered. It was either too high when I was changing up through the box or too low when I was coming back down and had to put my foot underneath it. Perhaps it was because that circuit is hard on the brakes, with almost every corner taken in first gear. And you had to change so quickly down from fourth to second that the position had to be spot on.
Whatever the reason, it just goes to show how many things are going through a rider’s mind, especially that of a perfectionist like me, when he is racing and testing.
The credit goes to the Honda RC30. When Jamie Whitham and I rode for Honda in 1990, we both had a lot of problems with the front end of the bike. Jamie hated the bike more than I did. He hung off the bike a lot, but not in the same way as me. His style seemed to be led more by his neck, and his knee did not touch the floor as much as mine did. When I felt the front end going, I could actually try to catch it with my knee and try to push the bike back upright, and I have never worn out my knee-sliders as much as when I rode the RC30. Jamie was not able to do that and spent a lot of the year on his backside.
In some ways, though, I had those problems to thank for a lot of what happened in the future. Because I struggled for so long with that front end, it prompted me to take a tighter line so that I didn’t feel as though I was going to make things worse by sweeping in from the outside after braking late.
In the last few years of my racing career, I was always tighter going into corners than any other guy. It felt so much better for me. For someone who carried a lot of corner speed, you would expect the opposite to be true, that I would prefer to take a wider line, but I always thought that if I had been peeling in from way out while carrying so much corner speed I would have felt as though I was going to crash the front end all the time. It was almost as though I did not have the confidence to be out as wide as the other guys. So, at the point when all the riders were starting to brake, I would probably be a couple of feet nearer the inside kerb.
This was obviously more exaggerated on the slower corners. For the very fast corners, such as from Redgate down to Craner Curves at Donington, the line is pretty much the same for everybody; for the slower corners, though, the other guys would try to maintain maximum speed for as long as possible before hitting the brakes really hard and very late. But by that time, I was probably starting to run through faster. Even for the faster corners, I tended to brake that little bit earlier and then let go of the brakes to run in with as much speed as possible. The other riders would leave the braking until the last minute and then start to slide the back end round a little bit while scrubbing off speed. If I was behind any other riders, they would hold me up in the middle of the corner because by then I would definitely be carrying more speed.
I’m slightly tighter than COlin Edwards and Troy Corser going into this turn.
The result of that extra speed was that I had to hang off the bike that much more than anyone else to hold the line. If anyone were to compare pictures of me with almost any other rider at the same point on the same corner, the other rider might have his knee on the ground and his arse hanging off the bike. With me, my head and shoulder were also nearly touching the ground. For a right-hand corner, my left arm would basically be totally locked out so that I could reach over as far as possible.
At somewhere like Assen, one of the faster tracks, my line would be pretty much the same as anyone else’s. I might just have turned a little bit earlier into corners, but other riders, like Jamie, turned in a lot later than the rest. He was always a hard opponent to get past because he would brake so late and so wide. You would think you were about to get past him when he’d come whoaaaa! right across you. I was always glad to get past Jamie whenever he got away in front of me at the start of the race. But it was no surprise that he lost his front end so often by braking so late on such wide lines.
The rider who probably had a similar line to me was Pier-Francesco Chili, who also enjoyed Assen. Colin Edwards is also similar in a lot of respects. But riders like Garry McCoy, Noriyuki Haga and Chris Walker are in some ways all about a lot of action going into corners and being a big handful coming out. That’s fine if it suits their style of riding, but that was never my style.
Thre’s probably only a foot difference in it but I am holding a tighter line into the corner in 1999.
So, once I had turned early into a corner, I wanted to get all my body weight hanging off the bike as early as possible. That way I could hold the tightest line and open the throttle mid-corner. At a track like Assen, where there are more fast corners than average, no one could live with me because the other riders did not open the throttle until they were coming out of the corners. It’s no coincidence that Chili was one of the few exceptions.
Turn one at Assen is a perfect example. You approach very fast in fifth gear and then, suddenly, it’s brmm-brmm and you’re down to third gear while going hard on the brakes. While the other riders were still on the brakes, scrubbing off that speed, I had swooped in, picked up on gas, taken the weight off the front end and accelerated out. When I was injured in 2000, I had to smile to myself when I was watching the race. You had riders like Haga and Bayliss going hard on the brakes with their back ends kicking out all over the place. I thought to myself, Guys, that’s not the way to go round Assen. The secret is to keep it smooth. Because Assen used to be part of a road circuit, the camber of the track banks right for the right-hand corners and also helps you to keep the bike tight into the corner.
On the slowest corners however, like a chicane or a hairpin, I could be as hard on the brakes as the best of them. There is no way you can carry corner speed through these anyway. Albacete, for instance, has a lot of first-gear corners, so there was no way I could rely on the style that suited me at places like Assen.
One track I never liked, and which did not suit me at all, was Laguna Seca in the States. The camber of the track almost falls away from you at the first corner, and the rest of the circuit is flat, so there were certain parts where I found it impossible to carry any corner speed. The front end always seemed to be pushing and I tried to hang even further off to try to keep the line. I even found myself trying to turn the bars to try to keep the bike in. Before I knew it, the front end was tucking in and I was in trouble. That