At the start of my road racing career, around 1984, I used to listen to a friend of my dad called Bill Ingram, who tuned engines. He told me to alter the bars on my bike so that they were pointing in, almost as far as possible, which meant that my riding style was totally tucked in – but as I later discovered, that did not suit my riding style at all.
It was a year later when I finally said, ‘I don’t like the bars like this. It’s really uncomfortable.’
‘Well, why do you have them like that, then?’ my dad asked.
‘Because I was told to have them there,’ I replied. That was typical of me at that time. I was not confident enough to stand up for myself, even if I thought there was something wrong. ‘So I can put these bars where I want, dad?’
‘Yeah, course you can!’
As soon as the bars were moved so that they were a lot further out, I realized immediately I could ride a lot better. Until that point, probably towards the end of 1985, I had been a very slow learner. And I didn’t realize how much more room there was for improvement until I started studying videos and pictures. It wasn’t just the top international racers I learned from. Even the good national racers, people like Niall Mackenzie, were hanging off the bike a lot more than I was doing at the time.
It was clear that I had to start getting my knee down and to throw the bike around more at the corners. Nowadays, there is just no way a rider can stay upright through a corner without falling off. The sheer size and speed of the machine means that the bike has to be tossed from side to side. And it stands to reason that the more a bike tilts over in a corner, the less grip you are going to have as there is less of the tyre in contact with the track. So the more you lean off the bike and put your knee down on the surface, the more upright you can keep the bike.
I found the Honda CBR600 hard to handle when riding in the British Supersport championship in 1991. For one thing, the footrests were too low.
There was another position I’d also become more aware of: the financial position in terms of my dad’s support of my career. Dad had sounded a few warning bells at the start of the 1986 season.
‘Look Carl, we can’t keep putting money into this unless you start winning. This is going to have to be the last year our company can fund you unless something happens,’ he said.
It was obvious that I was going to have to shape up or spend my life working on a factory shop floor.
By April, I had gone from winning club races to winning internationals against 250cc Grand Prix riders like Donny McLeod and Alan Carter. It was as though I’d missed out a step on the ladder – winning national races. You often see a similar leap of form in athletes; someone who has finished third throughout one season suddenly starts winning at the start of the next. Footballers are the same. A season off through injury can make them stronger and wiser. Neil Hodgson suddenly came back a better rider in the 1999 season after time off. It appeared the previous winter had had the same effect on me.
But a bad crash later that year set me back a bit. I came off at Oulton Park during practice and smashed my femur pretty badly. Still, I used that winter, laid up at home and feeling sorry for myself, to study other people’s techniques even more. I was determined to put what I had learned into practice on my return to racing in 1987. But my leg was still causing problems and, during that 1987 season, my tibia snapped because of an infection around the pin that had been inserted to help mend the femur fracture. At the start of 1988 the discomfort of my leg being cramped up on smaller bikes made me switch to the bigger superbikes. I could then really put my theories into effect, and I was soon well on the way to winning my first world championship: the Formula One TT world title.
This is the case with all riders, though. Nobody jumps on a bike and keeps the same style from the start of their career to the finish, although most will probably have a smoother learning curve than I had. Mine was very steep during that period from 1984 to 1988, only flattening off around 1990. And it was not the only thing that flattened off.
I was always altering things to try and squeeze that little bit extra out of my bike. For instance, it was around that time that I noticed that the bars of American rider Fred Merkel were almost totally flat. The superbikes in those days were more like ‘sit up and beg’ street bikes, not like the superbikes of today, which are more like the Grand Prix bikes of those days. So it was more natural to have flatter bars. Merkel looked really cool and comfortable on his bike and I wanted to give it a go.
I tried it first in wet weather conditions at Kouvola in Finland in 1990. If you are going to fall in the wet, you usually lose the front end of the bike, and in those days I was a lot harder on the brakes coming into a corner. I wanted to be as upright as possible so that I was not pushing on the bars as well as putting pressure on them through braking. And with the RC30, which I was riding that year, you could slide the bars off, turn them upside down and slide them back on so that they were pointing slightly upwards. My mechanic, Dennis Willey, thought I was mad, but I felt as though I had loads of control in the wet, even though it looked an unnatural position. It had been dry during the practice sessions in Finland but it pissed down for the race itself – my last ever TT F1 race – so I decided to give it a try. I won the race easily and lapped everyone up to second place, although it has to be said the competition was probably not the strongest I have ever raced against. I never repeated this feat, because that style was probably more suited to street racing than the track, where you have to hang off even more.
My friend Geoff Hopkins owns a Foggy replica which he rides on the road. A couple of years ago he was complaining that his back was hurting. I suggested that he tried turning the bars upside down so that he was sitting more upright in the saddle and not hunching his back as much. My old mechanic, Slick, was staying with us, and after he had turned them over Geoff agreed that it was much more comfortable. I bet there are thousands of riders out there who would benefit from this advice.
When I signed for Honda in 1991, I told Dennis Willey that I wanted the angle of dip to be changed from 15 degrees to around 5 degrees because I felt too cramped. I could not make up my mind whether or not I liked the new position – and my results were not very good that year. I assumed it was the bars and went back to the 15 degree position for the rest of the year and for the next couple of years, but I still had this nagging feeling that the lower the bars were, the more hunched forward I was. So in 1994 I asked Slick to move them back up to a 10 degree dip on my Ducati 916 – a kind of happy medium. I felt that it made mid-corners more comfy, because the riding position is not a natural one for your body to be forced into for 25 laps. I was also that bit more upright when I was braking, and it seemed to be less painful on my knees.
At the end of my career, the angle of dip had probably crept back up to around 5 degrees, probably less than for any of the other riders, who preferred it at around 8.5 degrees. There are those who like their handlebars at around 15 degrees, and a lot of the Grand Prix riders had an even bigger angle of dip. One year in Japan, for some reason, we were using the older style bars with a bigger angle of dip. I simply came in and said, ‘I can’t ride this. I want to go back to the 5 degrees.’
The more I hung off the bike, the more it stayed upright. Somebody like Michael Doohan might have put the bike down more, perhaps losing a bit of corner speed but picking up an advantage exiting the corner.
I always wanted to be on top of the bike as much as possible so that I could throw it through chicanes, where I was always very fast. I did not feel able to do this if I was crouched down. Body strength was never one of my strong points, so that was