Five-times 500cc World Champion
Ever since I was a small boy, I hated losing. At school, I could not stand losing at football. Nobody else seemed to be all that bothered. I did not take part in athletics because I knew I wasn’t good enough to win. Looking back, that was the wrong attitude to have because I missed out on a lot of fun – but then again, the boy who thought coming second was pathetic turned into one hell of a winner.
Bike racing was the only thing I knew I would be good at. But even when I started racing, I had a fear of what people might say if I did not win a race. I imagined them laughing or pointing at me behind my back. So, as a boy, I was always more comfortable flying around the fields on my own or racing against a few mates who had hardly ever ridden before, situations where I knew I would come out on top. Some of my mates were able to do tricks, like pulling wheelies, better than me. I did not seem to have that natural feel for a bike. But I hated it if they didn’t tell me I was faster, and I would really get off on it when they did.
We even tried to do wheelies on a step-through Honda 50 – a ‘plastic chicken’ as they were called, because of their shape. I never really knew who owned that bike because it was just left at our house, and it soon became a total wreck. One day, when me and a friend were bored, we decided to trash the thing by throwing it in the stream at the bottom of my house, then setting fire to it. A couple of weeks later, a lad who lived up the road called round to ask if anyone had seen his bike. ‘Nope, I’ve no idea where it is,’ I said, knowing it was a heap of molten metal.
Riding a Honda 250, not the fastest Honda in the world, to fourth place in the 1987 Junior TT on the Isle of Man.
All this time, I had an ambition to be the next Kenny Roberts. But, looking back, I wasn’t exactly doing a lot to make that dream come true. I wasn’t training every night or riding my bike around the fields when I came home from school. The kids of today who want to make it in racing are out riding mini-motos from around five or six years old. My nine-year-old daughter Danielle is already pretty confident on a bike, whereas I didn’t even get my first bike until my ninth birthday, so I was a pretty late starter.
By the time I did start racing motocross at the age of 15, I had already missed out on a lot of development. When you look at the successful riders today, they all started around the age of 10. I really wished my dad had pushed me into proper racing at an earlier age, though I would only have gone kicking and screaming. Had I started earlier, I can’t help thinking that I would have been an even better racer than I turned out to be.
To me, there are only two reasons for riding bikes: to win or to have fun. Right from the start I was always desperate to win, but in the early days, when I travelled around England with my cousins, I guess we also had a lot of fun. The higher I climbed up the racing ladder though, the less fun it became and the more anxious I was to learn and improve. It was probably only at the age of 20 that I thought Shit, I can be really good at this and make a good living. It was around that time that I really put my mind to it and improved as a rider more quickly than at any other period in my career. By the age of 23, I was a world champion.
In some ways I suppose I was lucky because alongside the determination to be the best I also had natural talent. There were those who had as much, if not more, talent, but there were never many with the same hunger. The Australian Anthony Gobert was a case in point. He could do things on a bike I could never do. Gobert had the ability to slide a bike going into or coming out of a corner like nobody else. But I’m mainly talking about playing around on a bike outside races. For instance, he could stand up and pull a wheelie with one hand and one leg off the bike. In my mind, there’s no doubt that he had the talent to become one of the best riders there has been, but talent alone is never enough. Gobert did not put in the hard work that is necessary to make it to the top. Instead, he went off the rails a bit.
It’s also one thing to have the determination and motivation, and another to stay at that same level year after year. The American Scott Russell was another rider blessed with a lot of talent, and for a couple of years he wanted to win races and the World Superbike Championship just as much as I did. But he lost the will to win – just like that. When I beat him at Phillip Island in 1994 he made a gesture to me as I passed him which said that he was throwing in the towel, and from that day on it seemed as though he was out there just to get paid and pick up the odd result. In fact, I think the only major races he has won since then have been at Daytona. There was no way I could have gone through the motions like that. Had injury not ended my career, I would have known when to call it a day: the minute I stopped having the motivation to win every race.
Not every rider wears his heart on his sleeve, though, like I do. Troy Corser, my team-mate in 1998 and 1999, always reminded me a lot of the Irish riders, who seemed very laid back about it all. He’s another who can do all the tricks, but when it came to riding round a track for 25 laps, he wasn’t as good as me. And the bottom line is that I would always rather be great at racing than good at tricks.
I was wearing a borrowed helmet in this club race at Darley Moor in 1985 because there had been a fire in our caravan.
Track 1Assen
NetherlandsRating: 10“All circuits should be like this! I won 12 out of 14 races here!”
There is no doubt that Assen was my favourite track. More than anywhere else, this circuit suited my riding style of being able to keep good speed through the corners. It’s a real rider’s track, with a lot of camber on the corners. And my record there is second to none. Towards the end of my career I was virtually unbeatable. From 1993 onwards I won 12 out of 14 races there, which is pretty amazing, including five double wins.
The Van Drenthe circuit dates back to 1925, so it has a rich history. I started racing there back in 1988 in the F1 TT World Championship – my first race experience abroad. Right from those early days, the omens were good. At that time, the rest of the more established Formula One teams were using quick fillers to force the fuel into their tanks and make pit-stops as quick as possible. Our lot was not that sophisticated; my main mechanic, Tony Holmes, hadn’t even travelled with us. Towards the end of the race, my mate Gary Dickinson, who wasn’t really a race mechanic at that time and was only there for a laugh, had worked out that we needed only another four litres to finish the race. While the others were filling their tanks with these contraptions, we used a jug and funnel, saved loads of time and I ended up finishing ninth, which I was pretty chuffed with. The others must have finished with half a tank full of fuel. It also meant I won £600, so for once I was able to pay our way home instead of relying on the money my dad had given us. Needless to say, we spent most of it by the time we got back to Blackburn!
Things hadn’t really run as smoothly as that, though. For a start we were placed over in the lepers’ paddock, way over on the other side to the Grand Prix teams, who were at the same meeting. There were only three of us, so whenever the weather changed we had to load different tyres onto a pole and I had to cart them over to the pit-lane myself. It was real low-budget racing.
Earlier at the same meeting, we had been warned that we wouldn’t be able to race until we controlled the noise of the bike, which was way over the protected limit. Another racer, Roger Burnett, told us about a way of getting
