Kitabı oku: «Dream. Believe. Achieve. My Autobiography», sayfa 3
I learned so much in those years just by racing and trying to get better: How to apply the throttle to get maximum traction out of the corners on dirt; how to use the front and rear brakes in combination – applying and releasing to create a balance and prevent the bike pitching back and forth too much. I worked out how to release the clutch lever to make gear changes as smoothly as possible. And I learned how to plan a race. Those 15-minute-plus races were incredibly physical, absorbing bumps and landings from jumps, muscling the bike into and out of corners. I found any way I could to make the races less physical, by taking different, smoother lines or adjusting my body position to make riding less tiring.
When you’re riding bar-to-bar with 40 other riders going down to the first corner, you develop this balance of aggression and caution, a kind of sixth sense of what the other riders are going to do. After years of those, launching off the start line of a World Superbike race with three riders on each row of the grid is honestly not that daunting.
Motocross is so raw and is still my first love. We can’t even go to a private World Superbike test now without two 40ft trucks, plus the hospitality unit to water and feed around 40 staff. But when I’m at home I can put my motocross bike in the back of my van and go and meet my friends at the track and have a great day riding, having fun. I really love that, but I think if motocross was my job the enjoyment might be different.
I always arrange a motocross camp before each World Superbike season. I put myself through race simulations of about the same time length as a World Superbike race – around 35 minutes – to switch my brain and my muscles on again after a few weeks off the bike. In track racing, the speeds are a lot faster but the environment is extremely controlled. In motocross, the track is always changing and you have to be so alert to all those variations.
My annual camps remind me of my early motocross years, which were one long fantastic adventure. Mum and Dad bought a bigger motorhome and we had what we called the ‘coffin bed’ above the workshop which I shared with Richard, and the two of us had Chloe, a wee baby at the time, in between us. We’d often get a late ferry back on the Sunday night and my parents would leave us asleep in the motorhome and wake us on the Monday morning for school.
But if the racing was going from strength to strength, school definitely wasn’t.
Mum and Dad had said that if I wanted to carry on with motocross, I’d have to pass the 11-plus. I did, but I ended up the only kid from Ballynure to go to my senior school, Larne Grammar – no Philip, no anyone. I knew from the first time I got on the bus just outside the house that I wasn’t going to be happy. I struggled from the first day and found it difficult to make friends.
I want to say now that Larne Grammar was a fantastic educational institution. My business studies teacher, Miss Herron, my Spanish teacher, Miss Beggs, and my technology teacher, Mr Lee, are amazing people. But I found it pretty tough. In my first three years there, I really felt what it’s like to be bullied. And it’s not a nice feeling at all.
You probably know about the religious divide in Northern Ireland and how dramatically it has affected people’s lives over the years, especially during the Troubles in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The Good Friday Agreement, which brought about a permanent peace in the province, was signed in 1998, just a few months before I went to Larne Grammar, a mixed school taking children from Protestant and Catholic families.
My naïve country upbringing hadn’t prepared me for life in a school where, to some kids, religion was something to hang on to. The guy who was bullying me was a Catholic, which I couldn’t have given two shits about because I had as many Catholic friends as Protestant in my motocross world. But where it gets bat-shit crazy is how it all started – with a Kevin Schwantz pencil case done out in his famous Pepsi colours. You know the Pepsi colours: red, white and blue. Yep, the same as the Union flag. And this, I kid you not, is what kicked it off in school.
My friend Martin Barr lived on a housing estate just outside Ballyclare and the kerbstones there were painted red, white and blue – not unlike the rumble strips at the Assen TT Circuit – obviously for religious and loyalist reasons. I didn’t get that at all though and asked if there was a racetrack there. Remember, they race on the roads in Ireland, so it wasn’t such a daft question! But, along with my deeply offensive Pepsi pencil case, that was great ammunition for me to be tormented with.
In those days, I’d heard stories of the youth wings of paramilitary groups, but I knew absolutely nothing about how they worked. Thankfully I never found out, but I was often threatened quite menacingly with the possibility of getting jumped or stabbed by some of these guys on my way to or from school.
The whole experience and the relentless and scary nature of it definitely affected my confidence, especially with other kids at school. I just tried to keep my head down and maintain as low a profile as possible. God love Mum, though, she was in the headmaster’s office more than enough times because of this problem.
It all came to a head at the end of Year 10 – I would have been about 14 – when we were all lined up to go into the sports hall to do a Key Stage 3 test. Something was said to me by this same bully and for some reason my fuse just blew. I’m not proud of that moment when I was punching him so hard I started crying myself. Violence should never be a way to settle any dispute. But afterwards the bullying stopped and I’m happy to report I was never stabbed on the way home. The last two years became kind of bearable and while the kid and I did not become lifelong best buddies, we got along.
For 2002, Dad put in a massive effort to get a bike good enough for what turned out to be my final 125cc schoolboy season. Right the way through the schoolboy motocross ranks I was always very competitive and won a lot of championships in Ireland, but when we competed in England I always seemed to have an issue in my final year of any particular class, when I should have been most likely to win. There would often be an injury to recover from, or simply faster rivals to deal with.
So, Dad took a Honda CR125R that was already pretty sorted with better suspension and he spent a fortune making it race-ready. Then, just two weeks before the start of the season, our garage got broken into and my bike, my tyre allocation, generators, my brother’s quad bike, everything, was stolen by some lowlife.
They had known what they were going in for. The police were getting nowhere, so we started asking around the local area about who might have been responsible. We never quite got to the bottom of it, but we got a pretty good idea. Dad’s questions led him, he said, to meet people in some of the scariest pubs he’d ever been to. We had never had any association with those organised crime groups or paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland, but eventually he got a call from someone whose voice he didn’t recognise but who said that he and Dad knew of each other. The mystery caller told Dad he was getting close to our stuff but that, if he knew what was good for him, he’d drop the trail and forget all about it.
We packed our bags pretty quickly after that and moved permanently about five miles further into the countryside, right on the edge of a forest called Ballyboley.
Along with my bike and my realistic hopes for the season, we had to say goodbye to the adventure playground that was Kilwaughter. I’m not saying Dad stopped enjoying racing there and then, but it put a dampener on the whole motocross adventure, I think, for both of us.
I had to start the season borrowing Philip’s KTM SX125. It was a horrible bike and never felt right or like it was mine, so that 2002 season was certainly lacking something, and although I was always competitive I never got to win another British schoolboy championship.
By then, I knew I didn’t want to continue with A levels or go to university after I left school the next summer, and Mum and Dad made it clear I was never going to be allowed to lie around at home trying to be a professional motocross rider. My parents had always seemed to find a way to finance the racing and Mum was always very good at putting sponsorship proposals together. But they had been funding this adventure for the best part of ten years and now I was going to have to go to work, to earn money and treat motorbikes as a hobby and nothing else.
I was also aware I had two brothers and a sister, and it wasn’t fair that my parents had spent so much time and energy allowing me to follow my dreams. Dad had taken over Granda’s transport business, which is still going strong now, and that needed more of his attention. It was getting to the point that my ambition was in one place and reality was in another.
I’d grown up and raced in the early motocross days with the Laverty brothers, who made the transition to road racing with some success and appeared to live this glamorous life as professional racers. I wanted some of that for myself and, seeing them ride, I was sure I could do the same. I was also a bit envious of some of my rivals who were starting to train in the USA during the winter, some of them even home-schooled because their parents were so loaded and committed.
I knew it was going to be tough to earn money from racing, but I had to give it a go. I began flirting with the idea of trying to scrape together enough personal sponsorship to buy a ride in 2003 with a bigger, manufacturer-supported team from the UK, a process where I would pay for a ride by covering the costs of the bike or the tyre budget or, in some cases, much more.
I met a guy called Stevie Mills, who has become a great friend, and he helped me look for a professional seat. Another friend, Gareth Crichton, picked up on more of the spannering as Dad started to roll off the throttle a bit during that 2002 season, and we had a lot of discussions about where it was all heading. I was at a crossroads. A few of my dad’s racing friends offered me bikes to go pure road racing, like at the Isle of Man TT, but that wasn’t for me. I also had an opportunity through Dad’s link with Joe Millar, a great friend of Granda and high-profile sponsor, to get hold of a 125cc Honda race bike that we could run ourselves. But that was short-circuit racing and that seemed a huge leap considering I’d never ridden on tarmac.
It was around this time that Arenacross became popular in the UK. Arenacross was the equivalent of Supercross in the USA, where a compact motocross track is built with around 5,000 tonnes of earth shipped into an indoor arena.
I rode in one event for a guy called Darren Wilson at the Odyssey Arena, Belfast. Darren got hold of an ex-factory GP bike, Stevie hooked me up with all the gear and Mum took me for a bit of practice without Dad knowing. I remember Darren pushing the bike up to the start in the dark with all the music blaring out, the flashing lights and the announcer hyping everybody up on the PA. My name was called, and 8,000 people were cheering. My heart rate was probably higher than it’s ever been, and I got awfully bad arm-pump during the races but managed to split 1–2 finishes with Shaun Simpson, who’s still a GP rider now. I threw my goggles into the crowd at the end of the race I won – it felt like proper rock star stuff!
I think it opened a few people’s eyes to what I could do and gave me a little taste of the life of a Supercross rider in the USA where, like everything else, the show, the spectacle, the size of the arena and crowds are ten times the size. I would have jumped at any opportunity to go and do it in the USA, but there was no real evidence of any motocross rider from the UK making it big in Supercross.
After the buzz died down, I could see the reality of my situation. My options about what to do the following year were kind of drying up.
CHAPTER 4
Red Bull Rookie
At the end of the 2002 season, Gareth Crichton told me about this advert he’d seen in Motor Cycle News, the weekly industry newspaper. It was for a kind of audition for a ride with a team in a short-circuit racing programme run by Red Bull and Honda. It was called the Red Bull Rookies and Gareth had already spoken to Dad about it in detail. They thought it would be a good idea to go for it, especially because opportunities in motocross were really drying up, along with Dad’s ability to finance it.
The grab headline said, ‘Deal worth £70,000’, which kind of got my attention, but none of it was going to the rider; it would cover the cost of a bike, spares, tyres, a mechanic, pretty much everything to do a season’s racing in the British 125cc Championship except travelling expenses. We thought. ‘Wow! This is our X Factor – let’s try and do this!’
The Red Bull Rookies already had two riders – Midge Smart and Guy Farbrother, who was sadly killed in a road crash just after the start of the following season. They wanted a third rider, aged 14 to 17, with bike experience, and I had to provide a CV and write 40 words on why I should be picked. I wrote mine in bullet points like ‘hard-working … willing to learn … enjoys working with others … Ulster, Irish and British Motocross champion … Arenacross race winner … wants to be world champion’.
It must have worked. Of hundreds who responded, I made the first cut of 20. I couldn’t believe it. I was still in two minds at that stage, keeping my eyes and ears open for any possible options to continue with motocross, but I couldn’t help getting a bit excited about being shortlisted. In his practical way, Dad reminded me there was a way to go yet.
We were invited to Rockingham Motor Speedway in Northamptonshire for a selection day to whittle those 20 down to five. There was only one problem: I’d never ridden a road bike in my life.
This was when Dad’s experience and contacts list came in handy. He made some calls, one to an old TT rival and former Grand Prix rider, Ron Haslam. A couple of weeks later, we were on our way to a race school Ron still runs at Donington Park, to ride a Honda CB500 naked road bike. I was wearing my dad’s old leathers about five sizes too big, boots a size too small and gloves which fitted. Thanks to Wendy Hearn, an old contact of Dad’s who worked for Arai, I also had a shiny new helmet. I’ve worn Arai ever since.
I’d never been to any kind of racing activity with a kitbag on an airplane before, it was always me and Dad out of the back of the van. But on this trip, me and Dad rocked up at East Midlands airport and stayed in the Holiday Inn Express there – it all felt quite professional. Ron and his wife Ann came to pick us up and take us to a briefing, because it was my first track session. Ron was a bit of a British racing legend and GP hero from the 1970s and 80s, so I felt very special being taken under his wing for some one-to-one coaching sessions.
Ron looked after me really well, and maybe there was a bit of special treatment through knowing my dad. After a few laps, he said, ‘You need to be a lot less rigid on the bike. Forget your upright motocross riding style. Move your inside bum cheek off the seat and lean into the corner with the bike.’ For ten years, I’d been kind of pushing the bike down into corners and almost pivoting from the middle of the seat, so I told him how alien it felt. But he was calm and reassuring and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s normal for circuit rookies to be a bit scared at first of leaning your body so much into corners.’
In the middle of the day, Ron said, ‘Come on, I’ll give you an idea of what I mean.’ He got me on the pillion seat of one of the school’s Honda Fireblades and took me around for a few laps. He showed me what he meant about moving around on the bike and did a one-handed wheelie down the start-finish straight with me on the back.
I also remember the best piece of advice Dad gave me – which was to make sure to do all your braking in a straight line because, as you release the brake and lean the bike into the corner, the contact patch of the tyre changes. Even now, I still use a fine balance of different braking techniques, trying to get it right for each corner.
When you’re riding on tarmac, pretty much all your braking is done with the front brake, whereas in motocross you don’t use the front so much and, if anything, the rear is more dominant. The thrill of the higher speeds was just amazing.
At the end of the day, Ron told me he thought I had loads of potential and to keep working at it. ‘Hang off the bike more,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be fine at the Rockingham test day.’
I was anxious all the same; I realised I was getting desperate to be picked. This was a really big deal – the kind of opportunity that wasn’t going to come my way with motocross.
When we got to Rockingham, it was the worst possible day to have to ride for your future career. It was damp and drizzly and the track surface started out patchy. Tyre choice was an absolute nightmare – at least it would have been if we’d actually had a choice! We had borrowed an old 125 from another contact of Dad’s, Alan Patterson, a GP rider back in the early 1990s. We had a set of slicks on the bike and a set of wets for extreme rainy conditions, both of which were pretty old and ropey.
I think the organisers took it all into account and knew that not everything we brought was going to be perfect even though, like in our motocross days, everything was clean and tidy and well presented. They came and had some chats during the day about my racing experience, ambitions and targets. I answered as politely as possible and tried to sound knowledgeable. We didn’t really have much of a clue about the carburation, which is vitally important on a 125, or suspension, and whether that had been set up for me or, more specifically, my weight, so we just put the tyre warmers on the bike.
Of the 20 guys at the test, I was the only complete rookie – the others had done at least a season of road racing at club or British championship level. I went out on slicks but, because it was damp, I took it quite steady in the first session.
To my great surprise, I was passing loads of other riders.
My confidence was growing as I remembered my day with Ron Haslam and all the advice he’d given me. I was realising it was working, that hanging off the bike and leaning into the corners allowed you go round the corners faster. And, as anyone who rides a bike will know, the faster you can go round a corner, the bigger the buzz.
I was probably still quite stiff on the bike, but all the levers and pedals were in the same place as on a motocross bike so it was a question of adjusting my balance on the little 125, tucking in behind the screen on the straights and sticking my knee out in the corners instead of extending a leg.
The track was beginning to dry out and I was building speed lap by lap as the dry line got bigger and wider, cutting my lap times not just by tenths of a second but by seconds and seconds. I was passing other riders, amazing myself at how natural everything felt and how quickly I was able to get into a rhythm, moving around on the bike like Ron had told me, using the brakes like my dad had told me and everything felt like it was coming together.
When I pulled in at the end of that first session, Dad was quite excited and started firing questions at me about the bike, but I was much more interested in his opinion of my performance. ‘How do you think I did?’ I kept pestering him.
He was his normal self and said, ‘Don’t worry about that, just tell me what the bike’s doing. Is it OK on the brakes? Where can we make some improvements?’ He changed the suspension a little bit to give me a slightly better feel for the damp conditions and we altered the gearing slightly as well. Then I went out for the second session and, with those changes to the bike, I was even faster.
One goal I had set myself was to get my knee down, which I hadn’t been able to do at Donington because the bikes were so big and the footpegs so low. It’s something you never do in motocross, which needs a completely different riding style, and it was why this experience was so alien to me. I’d seen heroes like Kevin Schwantz do it on TV so often and I knew it’s a way riders gauge how far over the bike is leaning in a corner. It’s a subconscious thing now, but I remember it being so important then, a little indication I could be a short-circuit racer.
It was probably like watching an elephant riding a bicycle, me at 70kg and 1.72m trying to find my way around a 125. But I got my knee down, scraping my virgin sliders as proof, and I loved it! It was satisfying to hit that little target, but it also told me how hard I was pushing and how close I was getting to the probable limits of grip.
I was beginning to think I had a real chance of making the cut and being one of the final five who the Red Bull Rookies team would take to Spain for a test.
Then I crashed.
Maybe I was getting a little too confident, but racing is all about finding the edge of performance and sometimes you have to go beyond the limit to find where the limit is. I was putting more and more lean angle into corners, but as I accelerated out of one left-hander, still banked over quite far, I went through a big damp patch. I’d seen it on previous laps but, as you carry more corner speed you run wider on corner exits and this time I couldn’t avoid it. As my front tyre touched the edge of the damp patch it lost traction, the handlebars folded to the left and I fell off the inside of the bike. It was my first tarmac crash and I remember it lasted such a long time. When you crash a motocross bike, you just stop because you’re on mud or sand and a part of your body or a part of the bike just digs in and the crash is over, often quite painfully. In this crash at Rockingham I wasn’t hurt, but I just remember sliding. And sliding. And sliding.
I’d been a bit worried about crashing on tarmac, but I hadn’t fallen very far off the bike and my dad’s old leathers had done their job. When I eventually stopped I thought, ‘Ah, that wasn’t so bad!’ But when I went to pick up the bike, I realised that the left handlebar and footpeg were broken.
First, I felt guilty about damaging Alan’s bike, then I just felt stupid for crashing it in the first place. I managed to bump start the bike and ride it back to the pits, but it wasn’t in any state for me to continue.
I was just devastated. I’d completely blown this one opportunity I had to continue racing. My heart sank at the thought of being remembered by that selection committee as the raw motocross kid who crashed in the third session of a selection day. So we sadly packed everything back into the van, saying nothing apart from our thanks and goodbyes and we set off with a shattered dream for the long drive north to catch the ferry from Cairnryan.
I felt I’d been quite fast for someone who had only ever ridden one day on a road bike. My only consolation was I still had this vague offer from Joe Millar back home in Ireland, and me and my dad started to talk about calling him as soon as we were back.
As we drove along the A75 towards Stranraer, my phone rang. I saw a number I didn’t recognise. This voice said, ‘Is that Jonathan?’
I should have recognised the team boss, Robin Appleyard, by the Yorkshire accent, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I replied, ‘Yes, who’s this?’
He told me who he was and said, ‘I just wondered what you thought of today’s test at Rockingham.’ I figured he was just after a bit of feedback on the day, so I said, ‘Yeah, I thought it was well organised and I really enjoyed it until I crashed.’ Then I thanked him for the opportunity and thought that would be it.
He said crashing was all part of the learning process. ‘But I’m really pleased you enjoyed the day, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘Do you have a passport?’ I hesitated and said, ‘Er … yeah, I’ve got one at home.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s good because you’re going to need it in a couple of months. You’re in our final five and you’re coming to Spain for the final test.’
I just went through a complete 180-degree flip – from being devastated that the dream had been shattered to being absolutely elated that I was still in the game. Viva España – the little motocross kid from Northern Ireland, who’d never ridden a road bike, was in the Grand Final!
Before the test, scheduled for March, my dad and Alan Patterson agreed it would be a good idea to go to Cartagena, where the test was to be, to learn the track and spend a bit more time on that 125cc racing machine. So in February we set off for three days at the annual winter test for a lot of UK-based teams, organised by Barry Symmons, who had previously been Honda UK’s racing manager. It turned out to be a complete eye-opener as to what happens on boys’ trips away. Of course, as the saying has it, what goes on tour stays on tour, but there was a lot of stuff happening out there that you never see in Kilwaughter. I quickly learned that old Spanish hotels with flashing lights outside are not necessarily a disco or nightclub.
I felt I’d joined this exclusive club because all I’d known was schoolboy motocross. Now I was away in Spain, staying in a hotel, eating out, not having to power-wash bikes every day – and I was loving it!
I also got going really fast on the bike and was comparing well with a few guys there who had ridden at British championship level. Alan was great for me with all his two-stroke experience and taught me about setting up a gearbox and getting the carburation right on the bike. Instead of one day on a 500cc four stroke that I’d had before the Rockingham test, I had three and a half more days’ experience and felt a lot more comfortable on the bike.
I didn’t feel quite as good a month later, however, when I was on my own and away to the final Red Bull Rookies selection day, aged 16, without my parents or anyone familiar. Former GP rider Jeremy McWilliams, who was involved in the selection, had told Dad, ‘You just need to let him go and don’t be the schoolboy dad.’
I knew of the other four finalists – Ashley Beech, Daniel Cooper, Michael Robertson and Barry Burrell – who were all established riders, and of course there were team managers and mechanics who I was introduced to.
The bike I rode at the test was incredible. Not that Alan’s 125 hadn’t been good, but it was a bike he’d made for a customer. The Red Bull Hondas that Robin Appleyard had prepared were proper new high-end bikes. From what Alan had taught me, I was able to give some feedback on the first day and I was faster than all my rivals, as well as both Midge Smart and Guy Farbrother, the two existing riders in the team. In fact, they started coming to me to talk about set-up, asking me things like, ‘Do you think second gear needs to be a bit shorter for that corner?’
I was surprised that I felt pretty comfortable without Dad there. I’d spent a lot of my childhood around adults in racing paddocks so I got on very well with all the mechanics at the test. I was just being myself and I felt so at home in this new environment – tarmac instead of dirt or sand, garages instead of awnings and a crew of professional technicians instead of enthusiastic and supportive relatives and friends. But I still heard my parents’ voices in my head, telling me to be polite and respectful, so I made sure I thanked everyone for the opportunity. It felt like a big deal too; a TV crew was hovering around the track making a documentary. The whole test went incredibly well and I was thinking there was no way they couldn’t pick me, because my lap times were so much faster than the others. And that’s how it turned out – I remember phoning home and telling my dad, feeling so super-happy I could have cried. I was going to ride for the Red Bull Rookies Honda team in the British 125cc Championship.
It was a big thing. The championship provided support races for the British Superbike series, and the Red Bull Rookies Honda team was the one in the 125cc class that everyone wanted to ride for. The top Superbike riders like John Reynolds and Michael Rutter were household names. And there was me, getting ready to be a part of that giant circus.
In the first round, my first ever race on tarmac at Silverstone, I out-qualified both Midge and Guy in 12th and finished the race in the top 10.
If I ever thought Desertmartin was an impressive paddock, the number of motorhomes, 40ft trucks and hospitality units in the British Superbike paddock was incredible. I felt under a little bit of pressure, but there were never any expectations put on me by the team.
I was always going to be physically challenged on a 125. It wasn’t just my height, it was the fact that I was built like a motocrosser – quite tall, muscular and broad in the upper body – which you could say is not ideal for a tiny little race bike. In fact, I’m the same weight today as I was in that first Red Bull season, and the bike I ride now is just a tad more powerful.
After that first race my results were a bit more sporadic but, at the penultimate round in September at Brands Hatch, I woke up to a dry, sunny race day. I had only qualified 12th on the grid – the wrong end of the third row – but I was feeling confident and there was always a good crowd at Brands, which fired me up to battle through the field. It’s a really short lap on the Brands Indy circuit, around 50 seconds, but there were 24 laps and I managed to finish third, a couple of seconds down on Steven Neate and my team-mate Midge Smart, who won the race. Crossing the line for my first podium was the most amazing feeling, and I remember screaming into my helmet at the thought of spraying champagne in front of the Brands Hatch crowd, even though technically I was still too young to drink it.
