Riding a Honda 250, not the fastest Honda in the world, to fourth place in the 1987 Junior TT on the Isle of Man.
All this time, I had an ambition to be the next Kenny Roberts. But, looking back, I wasn’t exactly doing a lot to make that dream come true. I wasn’t training every night or riding my bike around the fields when I came home from school. The kids of today who want to make it in racing are out riding mini-motos from around five or six years old. My nine-year-old daughter Danielle is already pretty confident on a bike, whereas I didn’t even get my first bike until my ninth birthday, so I was a pretty late starter.
By the time I did start racing motocross at the age of 15, I had already missed out on a lot of development. When you look at the successful riders today, they all started around the age of 10. I really wished my dad had pushed me into proper racing at an earlier age, though I would only have gone kicking and screaming. Had I started earlier, I can’t help thinking that I would have been an even better racer than I turned out to be.
To me, there are only two reasons for riding bikes: to win or to have fun. Right from the start I was always desperate to win, but in the early days, when I travelled around England with my cousins, I guess we also had a lot of fun. The higher I climbed up the racing ladder though, the less fun it became and the more anxious I was to learn and improve. It was probably only at the age of 20 that I thought Shit, I can be really good at this and make a good living. It was around that time that I really put my mind to it and improved as a rider more quickly than at any other period in my career. By the age of 23, I was a world champion.
In some ways I suppose I was lucky because alongside the determination to be the best I also had natural talent. There were those who had as much, if not more, talent, but there were never many with the same hunger. The Australian Anthony Gobert was a case in point. He could do things on a bike I could never do. Gobert had the ability to slide a bike going into or coming out of a corner like nobody else. But I’m mainly talking about playing around on a bike outside races. For instance, he could stand up and pull a wheelie with one hand and one leg off the bike. In my mind, there’s no doubt that he had the talent to become one of the best riders there has been, but talent alone is never enough. Gobert did not put in the hard work that is necessary to make it to the top. Instead, he went off the rails a bit.
It’s also one thing to have the determination and motivation, and another to stay at that same level year after year. The American Scott Russell was another rider blessed with a lot of talent, and for a couple of years he wanted to win races and the World Superbike Championship just as much as I did. But he lost the will to win – just like that. When I beat him at Phillip Island in 1994 he made a gesture to me as I passed him which said that he was throwing in the towel, and from that day on it seemed as though he was out there just to get paid and pick up the odd result. In fact, I think the only major races he has won since then have been at Daytona. There was no way I could have gone through the motions like that. Had injury not ended my career, I would have known when to call it a day: the minute I stopped having the motivation to win every race.
Not every rider wears his heart on his sleeve, though, like I do. Troy Corser, my team-mate in 1998 and 1999, always reminded me a lot of the Irish riders, who seemed very laid back about it all. He’s another who can do all the tricks, but when it came to riding round a track for 25 laps, he wasn’t as good as me. And the bottom line is that I would always rather be great at racing than good at tricks.
I was wearing a borrowed helmet in this club race at Darley Moor in 1985 because there had been a fire in our caravan.
Track 1Assen
NetherlandsRating: 10“All circuits should be like this! I won 12 out of 14 races here!”
There is no doubt that Assen was my favourite track. More than anywhere else, this circuit suited my riding style of being able to keep good speed through the corners. It’s a real rider’s track, with a lot of camber on the corners. And my record there is second to none. Towards the end of my career I was virtually unbeatable. From 1993 onwards I won 12 out of 14 races there, which is pretty amazing, including five double wins.
The Van Drenthe circuit dates back to 1925, so it has a rich history. I started racing there back in 1988 in the F1 TT World Championship – my first race experience abroad. Right from those early days, the omens were good. At that time, the rest of the more established Formula One teams were using quick fillers to force the fuel into their tanks and make pit-stops as quick as possible. Our lot was not that sophisticated; my main mechanic, Tony Holmes, hadn’t even travelled with us. Towards the end of the race, my mate Gary Dickinson, who wasn’t really a race mechanic at that time and was only there for a laugh, had worked out that we needed only another four litres to finish the race. While the others were filling their tanks with these contraptions, we used a jug and funnel, saved loads of time and I ended up finishing ninth, which I was pretty chuffed with. The others must have finished with half a tank full of fuel. It also meant I won £600, so for once I was able to pay our way home instead of relying on the money my dad had given us. Needless to say, we spent most of it by the time we got back to Blackburn!
Things hadn’t really run as smoothly as that, though. For a start we were placed over in the lepers’ paddock, way over on the other side to the Grand Prix teams, who were at the same meeting. There were only three of us, so whenever the weather changed we had to load different tyres onto a pole and I had to cart them over to the pit-lane myself. It was real low-budget racing.
Earlier at the same meeting, we had been warned that we wouldn’t be able to race until we controlled the noise of the bike, which was way over the protected limit. Another racer, Roger Burnett, told us about a way of getting round it by taking off the silencer and inserting a washer in the exhaust. All of a sudden, my bike went from the noisiest thing on the track to the quietest, so the stewards, who are as strict at Assen as they are anywhere, knew something was up. When they found the washer and started bollocking us, I went mad. ‘What do you want us to do? We’re just starting out and can’t afford all the stuff we’d need to meet your standards.’ They eventually let us off with a warning.
Gary must have had a thing about the stewards at Assen. Nearly 10 years later, when he was working for Sean Emmett, there was a big argument on the grid. Neil Hodgson’s bike had got some air in the clutch and the officials allowed him a minute to bleed it. Gary’s team thought he was getting special treatment, so they decided that when the time came to leave the grid, they would leave it as late as possible. When they tried it on, one of the stewards, a massive bloke, picked up Emmett’s front stand and hurled it over the barrier. The red mist came down over Gary and he smashed the bloke with his torque wrench. The following year Emmett was not allowed to race until he paid a £600 fine for what Gary had done the previous year!
Here’s a description of my flying lap around Assen. I would go through start–finish in second gear and move up to fifth through Timmer Bocht at the end of the pit-lane, where you run across a white line and a hump that can sometimes upset the bike, and straight-line it through the kink. Then I drop down two gears for the proper turn one. I enjoy this third-gear corner. You go in quite hard and then just let go of the brakes while the camber of the track holds you tight into the corner and helps you turn in. The other riders seem to keep braking all the way round. As soon as possible, just after going into the corner, I’m onto the gas and using all the room on the exit before going up through the gears to fourth and moving side to side through a couple of slight kinks left and right. This section is called Witterdiep, but they cannot really be called corners.
The next turn, Madjik, is possibly my favourite corner in racing. I go down two gears to this straightforward right-hand corner, with plenty of room going in and plenty coming out. As soon as I exit, I’m straight on the gas and can feel the bike sliding at the rear, which is a really good