My very first holiday, at the age of three months, was going with Mum to see Dad in that North West 200, where we had a caravan in the paddock. Our summer half-term holiday was often a week on the Isle of Man where Dad was racing at the TT. Mum tells me that from a very young age I would just stand at the fence and not move for hours. I could recite the race numbers of all the riders as well, and it’s kind of spooky that my son Jake did exactly the same with World Superbike riders from about the same age.
When I was a bit older, I just used to love getting in the way in the paddock and was always really happy to feel part of the team when Dad gave me little jobs like cleaning wheels or polishing the bikes.
Mum tells this story about one weekend when I was about three-and-a-half and we all went down south to a place called Loughshinny near Dublin to watch Dad race. He had quite a bad crash and as he lay in the road another bike had come along and whacked him properly in the nuts. I can’t imagine the pain he must have been in, and although we can laugh about it now, he would have been in agony. He spent a couple of weeks in hospital and by the time he’d recovered his sense of humour he was telling anyone who’d listen that he was the only white man in the world with a black dick and took great pleasure showing his battle scars to his mates who went to visit.
Despite Mum’s bad memories of that episode, and the North West and the Brands Hatch crashes, she supported Dad’s career on top of being mum to four of us kids: me the eldest, Richard, Kristofer (who we jokingly call the Mistake!) and Chloe.
Richard turned out to be a pretty good kid brother, by which I mean his arrival in November 1989 was probably one of the best things to happen in my early life. He and I spent a lot of years having fun and riding bikes together and he has turned out to be one of the nicest, most genuine blokes I’ve ever known. He’s a real gentle giant and has become a very important influence in my life. The arrival of Kristofer and Chloe made us a much bigger family unit and those years of expansion must have been a pretty chaotic time for my parents.
Mum was never any kind of pushover, but if Dad came home and she told him that we’d not done something or we’d been naughty, he would shout a bit and whatever it was that we hadn’t done got sorted pretty quickly. You could say I had a fairly strict upbringing, and although I don’t remember actually being hit with anything, the threat of getting a bit of a whack if we were naughty was never far away.
I totally respected my parents while I was growing up and I still do. They really helped my growing love of motorcycles too. Dad’s TT win in 1989 came, of course, with a bit of prize money and he bought me the best Christmas present I could imagine: an Italjet 50, a tiny little motocross-style bike. I was just short of my third birthday.
Unfortunately, Santa’s amazing generosity hadn’t stretched to a helmet, or any gloves or boots; but that wasn’t going to stop me riding on that cold Christmas Day. Dad probably instantly regretted it. He must have frozen his nuts off watching me ride up and down all day outside in the cold. I knew how to twist the throttle, because Dad had shown me when he used to sit me on his race bikes from the minute I could hold myself up. But he had to explain what the brakes were all about. The problem was I still couldn’t get the bike stopped because my hands were too small for my fingers to reach the brake lever, so Dad had to run alongside to make sure I didn’t ride into a fence or the side of the house. I just rode and rode all day until the bike ran out of fuel. Not surprisingly, I had my first crash that day, but it didn’t put me off – I was straight back on it, because I loved it and never wanted to get off.
Looking back at my early life, you can see a lot of me as a professional racer coming together. I used to throw a complete fit if we were ever late for Ballynure Primary and Mum had to be waiting outside as soon as I came out in the afternoon. An early love of routine and following a schedule, I guess, which helps for busy race weekends today. I also got an early taste of hospitals, now an occupational hazard, when I had suspected meningitis and was kept isolated on a drip for about five days.
I got in plenty of training, too. The house in Kilwaughter was, for me, the ultimate kid’s playground. We had a reasonably sized garden and the land backed onto the Kilwaughter House Hotel, which, in the mid-1990s, was one of the biggest rave venues in Northern Ireland. We had a pretty good relationship with the hotel management and, while we were OK about the ravers trampling all over the place every weekend, they were quite relaxed about me using the hotel grounds to practise riding whenever I could. The house also backed onto a limestone quarry and chemical works, which was just like an extension of the playground for me and Richard and my schoolfriend Philip McCammond on our BMX bikes.
Philip is an absolute legend, a lifelong friend, and he introduced me to this other playground down the road, which happened to be his parents’ farm. Our two families were inseparable. Lorraine, Philip’s mother, was like my second mum and Richard also became best friends with Michael, Philip’s younger brother. With them living on a farm, it made riding motorcycles on private property much easier as well.
One night, when Dad and Philip’s dad Gary were working on the bikes at our house in Kilwaughter, me, Philip and his bigger brother Christopher ventured out of the garage and wandered up among the trees of the hotel where we saw a couple basically dry humping the life out of each other. We started laughing, but it got less funny when the two of them suddenly broke off, especially when we saw the expression on the fella’s face. They chased us down through the woods and Christopher and I managed to get back to the garage, but Philip wasn’t so quick and they caught him by the scruff of the neck.
It was the first time I’d seen Dad properly rear up and he charged out of the garage with this big lump hammer, shouting, ‘If you don’t let him go, I’m going to hammer you!’ The fella let go pretty quickly and started running very fast in the opposite direction.
There were some stables at the hotel, which belonged to my dad’s Uncle Noel, and I remember Richard got a horse once when he was drifting in and out of bikes. He was a funny old nag with a glass eye that we called Flash. Much to Mum’s horror, Richard, Philip and I used to climb aboard Flash and ride him, without any training or technique, just to see how fast we could go and how high we could get him to jump.
Once, probably after the parents had all had a few drinks, it was suggested we should build a proper motocross track on some rough ground in one of the fields on the farm. So, our dads got a local guy with a JCB to come in and we gave him a good idea of what we wanted. He put together a really cool track for us, with double jumps and tabletops and everything you’d want for a little motocross track.
When I wasn’t riding I was at home watching motocross videos. I would devour anything: Supercross re-runs, training videos, Grand Prix races, any kind of racing. I would watch them over and over on repeat, studying them in as much detail as I could, looking at race starts, the different techniques of individual riders, how they rode inside or outside corners, through ruts, how they took jumps and whoops.
Apart from motocross, I remember watching Kevin Schwantz in 1993 and 1994 doing his thing in 500cc GPs because my dad was always a fan of his. I used to make tracks out of anything that happened to be lying around to race my little model of his Pepsi Suzuki.
As soon as I climbed on that little Italjet, I knew I never really wanted to be anywhere else. But while little kids grow, motorcycles don’t, so it wasn’t too long before I was riding a Yamaha PW50, which was as iconic back then as it is today. I remember mine vividly – white plastics with a bright red seat and displaying race number 17. I spent day after day riding the bike around the garden at home and at the McCammonds’ farm.
I was desperate to start racing myself. It happened that the final round of the 1993 British Youth Motocross Championship was coming to Ireland’s famous track at Desertmartin, a tiny village in County Londonderry not far from Cookstown. The track is one of the best in the world and has hosted many world and British championship races.
We applied for a wildcard for the 50cc race – a one-off entry rather than entering for a whole championship. A low-profile junior club meeting would have been a fine first race but, no, we were jumping straight in at the deep end. To my six-year-old eyes,