Dream. Believe. Achieve. My Autobiography. Jonathan Rea

      I got a great schooling in racing that year – the technical features of a racing motorcycle and the more subtle aspects of racecraft – learning things that have stood me in good stead throughout my career. Robin Appleyard taught me more in that one year of 125 GP British Championship racing than I’d have learned in five doing it on my own. Things like setting up gearboxes and changing gear ratios for different corners on a track. Because I was a bigger rider he taught me ways to improve my corner exits – the positioning of the bike on the track and the positioning of my body on the bike – to carry more speed on to the next straight. I also learned that the British championship paddock took racing very seriously, I guess because everything cost more and there was basically more money at stake.

      Robin was super-good but I realised, because of my size, I didn’t have a realistic future in his team. I was desperate to carry on road racing, but some of the guys I was racing against were tiny – guys like Tommy Bridewell, who was so small he was like a baby. He certainly wasn’t the fastest round corners, but he would drill us on straights and put 20m on me because of his weight. So on a 125, I was pissing upstream a lot of the time.

      Towards the end of that season I started speaking with Linda Pelham, the marketing manager of Red Bull who was running the Rookies programmes, about what options I had. She said, ‘Listen, don’t worry. I’m trying to work on something,’ but I had no idea what she had in mind. I started thinking about going back to motocross because, although I’d had a few decent results on the 125, they hadn’t been enough for any other team to offer me a ride. We couldn’t afford to buy a ride either, an option that had started to creep in at the time and which has become a reality of present-day opportunities. My dad had been right on his financial limit to do motocross, so that was going to be way out of reach. Tyres alone were so expensive.

      The ideal next step was a ride in the Supersport class, which featured much bigger and more powerful 600cc four-stroke bikes. These were slightly tuned versions of models you could ride on the road, and formed a very important sales category for all the Japanese manufacturers. But I had absolutely no idea how I was going to convince any team to take on a motocross kid who had done a less-than-spectacular year on 125s.