All the riders in that series got on really well and there was never any ‘handbags at dawn’ or falling out over crashes or on-track incidents. As long as no one got hurt then everyone was happy and we had a great laugh. Things turned sour for me in the last round though and it was nothing to do with the other riders. I was going to the final round at Brands Hatch with a chance of winning the championship. I’d had three wins in the series and needed to win the last race to take the title but my main title challenger, Graham Cannell only needed to finish ninth to win.
Every race that season had been a clutch start so we didn’t have to kill our engines on the start line; we just engaged first gear and went. But at the final round at Brands, the marshal held up a board telling us to kill our engines. All the other riders ignored this board and kept their engines running except for Kenny Irons and myself. We obeyed the start line marshal and killed our engines and when the lights turned green, everyone else got away while we were sitting there with dead engines and no hope of catching the rest of the field even if we had fired up the bikes and chased after them.
The rules clearly stated that it should have been a clutch start so I lost any chance of winning the series because that marshal hadn’t read them properly. I wasn’t happy. Especially since my main rival Graham Cannell crashed during the race so I would only have needed a decent finish to win the series and I desperately wanted to win a national championship at that point.
Kenny Irons and I went straight to the officials to complain but we were basically told not to cause a fuss and given £500 each to shut up and back down. There was a lot of money changing hands and a lot of promotional deals hinging on that championship so the organisers didn’t want any trouble or bad feeling. I was still hopping mad but realised there was no way they were going to re-run the race even though Kenny and I had sat on the grid for half a lap in protest until we were dragged off kicking and screaming. I suppose we could have got lawyers on the case and got all heavy but we eventually calmed down and accepted the cash. It was £500 after all.
That was the low point of the season for me and coming right at the end of the year made it worse. But there were high points and the best of all was finally being able to quit my job! In May 1983, I finally became a professional racer but it happened in the most bizarre circumstances.
Early in the season I had gone to my first race on the new Armstrong at Oulton Park and knew straight away that I had made a good choice of machinery. It just felt perfect for me and I was on the pace immediately in the British championship, which was a far cry from the year before when I was nowhere on the Yamaha TZ250.1 was running fourth amongst top riders like Alan Carter, Phil Mellor and Paul Tinker and then the bloody bike just exploded. My new £4000 bike! I had a good guy called Rab Hardy who had prepared it for months making sure everything was perfect yet it still blew up first time out. I couldn’t believe it. So I packed the bike up in the van, drove straight to the Armstrong factory in Bolton and threw the engine on the table. I shouted at them that I had spent all this money on their bike and it had let me down in its first race. I even gave them the sob story about it being my mum’s money and everything but they said there was no warranty on race bikes and that I must have done something wrong to make it blow up. In the end I came away with a credit note for spares but I wasnearly in tears because my mum and I had wasted so much money and didn’t have any more to buy another bike with.
But going to the factory turned out to be one of the best things I had ever done and that’s what eventually led to me turning professional in the middle of the season.
I had the bike rebuilt for the next race at Donington where Armstrong’s official rider, Tony Head, had a huge crash in practice and was put out of action for a while leaving the team with no rider. As it happened, Alan Carter’s former mechanic Doug Holtom was working at Armstrong and he suggested they try me out on their factory bike. As soon as he mentioned my name the Armstrong guys remembered this mad, raving Scotsman who had burst into their factory complaining and I suppose they agreed to give me a chance on their official bike in the hope that it would shut me up!
In this business, getting your face known can mean the difference between getting a factory ride and not getting one. In my case, it meant that I got one.
This happened midway through practice. It was a big international meeting but I immediately put the bike on the front row of the grid for the race. Then, when the race started, I was running at the front again when the bike blew up! I couldn’t believe it. My private Armstrong had blown up in its first proper outing and then the official factory bike did the same the first time I rode it! What was going on?
Still, Armstrong were happy with the way I had ridden over the weekend despite the disappointment and I received a letter from them soon afterwards asking if I would be interested in working for them full time as a development rider/racer. They were planning to develop the bike as it raced though I was a bit dubious about that because it could have been unreliable and kept on blowing up. After all, my experience showed they weren’t the most reliable bikes on the planet.
The first thing I thought about when I got that letter was packing my job in but when I went in and told some of the guys at work they all said ‘Don’t do it. You’ve got a job for life here.’ I’m glad they said that because it made me even more determined to make it as a racer. There was no way I wanted to be still working for the electricity board in Falkirk when I was sixty. I know my colleagues had my best interests at heart but that job just wasn’t for me. My mind was made up. I was young and still living at home with my mum at that stage too so I didn’t even have a mortgage to worry about and I didn’t have a serious girlfriend either. Mum was fine about it too, because she knew I could always go back to my old job if I had to.
I asked Armstrong if I could continue doing Pro-Am if I accepted their offer and they said yes so that was it; I finally quit my job at the electricity board and became a professional racer. I was over the moon. I knew I could survive on the Pro-Am prize money and I would get the chance to go racing properly for free, even if I did break down a lot. Armstrong also paid me £3500 for my services as a development rider so it couldn’t have worked out any better.
Once I had left my job and started working with Armstrong however, I went to Blackburn and moved in with the family of a fellow racer called Geoff Fowler, so that I didn’t have to travel up and down from Scotland so much.
We had some top laughs on Friday nights at a pub just outside Blackburn called The New Inns. The usual protocol was to get drunk in there and then go skinny-dipping in the nearby reservoir. A bit dangerous looking back on it but we all survived somehow.
Then on Saturday nights it was off for a boogie at The Peppermint Place where I was thrown out of more times than I can remember. I was once thrown backwards through a set of double doors and down a whole flight of stairs just for being Scottish and obnoxious!
At the same time, I must have been getting a bit more professional because I started running to get fit. There were still no special diets or anything, in fact we lived off whatever we could find in the local Spar shop and a regular diet of Lancashire corned beef hash which Geoff’s dad seemed to make for us every night.
But at least I was running which I hadn’t done when I was working, because I didn’t really have the time or the energy. It goes to show how much the media informs us these days about diets and fitness because most people are quite clued up about it now but at that time I did some pretty strange things to try and get fit. One of the daftest was my ‘sauna theory.’ I thought sweating buckets in a sauna was an easy way to get fit but unfortunately, I didn’t have a sauna so I had to improvise. I sat in my van with as many layers of clothing on as possible, all topped off with a big duffel coat then turned the heater on full blast for hours on end! I used to drive all the way to race meetings in England like that thinking I was a regular little Rocky Balboa! Six hundred-mile round trips in the mobile Mackenzie sauna. Man, that van must have smelt bad and unsurprisingly enough, it didn’t do me much good in the fitness stakes either.
My diet of curries and lager almost got me into trouble as well that year and I was lucky not to lose my Armstrong ride soon after getting it. When I competed in my first race