Crash: The restart of the second race in 1997. I hit the gas too early exiting Druids and robbed myself of a double win. Best Moment: When I won both races on a red-hot day in 1995, virtually clinching the world championship. Closest Finish: In 1998, Troy Corser opened a three-second gap but I had to hold off Jamie Whitham and the two Hondas for second place. Best Other Rider: Giancarlo Falappa won both races in 1993 by a mile in the worst rain I’ve ever seen. Worst Moment: I’ve been either hit or mis at Brands but the tyre problems I had in 1999, in front of 120,000 fans, was the lowest point.
‘Carl Fogarty the person and Carl Fogarty the rider are two different people, but his personality has a lot of influence on his riding. Sometimes, he had to be aggressive off the track because it was the only way he knew how to transmit his personality. When he is with other people he sometimes looks uncomfortable if he doesn’t know them. Carl is still a bit shy, even after all his success.
‘In the beginning he was a bit hard to manage because I had first to try to understand him. Then I was lucky because we found a very good feeling together. It’s not so difficult to read him. It means looking him in the eyes and already knowing what he needs and what he wants, or what he wants to say. Also, he understood that I was often already doing what he was going to ask for.
‘Carl was very aggressive on the throttle, so we needed to set the bike up hard on the rear. Especially when he thought the grip was poor, he would turn the throttle so quickly that it was difficult to set the rear suspension. But, at the end of the day, you could always say that Carl would ride round any problems with the bike. He would try hard during qualifying but we always knew that he would put in 110 per cent on race day.
‘His body used to move a lot on the bike and he would use his weight to adapt to different corners. And if there were problems with the bike, he would use his own body to solve them by hanging off at different angles. He would not hang off as much as someone like James Whitham, but just use his bodyweight to hold the corners. In that way he could carry high corner speed, a big part of his technique.’
Davide Tardozzi
Ducati factory team manager
Hideous. That’s the only word for my style when I first started out on the race track. It was probably something I had picked up from watching my dad so often during his racing career. I had a horrible tucked-in style, a bit like Mike Hailwood. That’s not to take anything away from the achievements of Mike. In his day there was no one better. It was just that racing was starting to enter a new era. I guess Kenny Roberts, who grew up on the dirt tracks of America, is the one man credited with introducing the style where riders were hanging off their bikes and sliding the rear end round corners. But Roberts himself will tell you that he picked the style up from Finnish rider Jarno Saarinen.
At the start of my road racing career, around 1984, I used to listen to a friend of my dad called Bill Ingram, who tuned engines. He told me to alter the bars on my bike so that they were pointing in, almost as far as possible, which meant that my riding style was totally tucked in – but as I later discovered, that did not suit my riding style at all.
It was a year later when I finally said, ‘I don’t like the bars like this. It’s really uncomfortable.’
‘Well, why do you have them like that, then?’ my dad asked.
‘Because I was told to have them there,’ I replied. That was typical of me at that time. I was not confident enough to stand up for myself, even if I thought there was something wrong. ‘So I can put these bars where I want, dad?’
‘Yeah, course you can!’
As soon as the bars were moved so that they were a lot further out, I realized immediately I could ride a lot better. Until that point, probably towards the end of 1985, I had been a very slow learner. And I didn’t realize how much more room there was for improvement until I started studying videos and pictures. It wasn’t just the top international racers I learned from. Even the good national racers, people like Niall Mackenzie, were hanging off the bike a lot more than I was doing at the time.
It was clear that I had to start getting my knee down and to throw the bike around more at the corners. Nowadays, there is just no way a rider can stay upright through a corner without falling off. The sheer size and speed of the machine means that the bike has to be tossed from side to side. And it stands to reason that the more a bike tilts over in a corner, the less grip you are going to have as there is less of the tyre in contact with the track. So the more you lean off the bike and put your knee down on the surface, the more upright you can keep the bike.
I found the Honda CBR600 hard to handle when riding in the British Supersport championship in 1991. For one thing, the footrests were too low.
There was another position I’d also become more aware of: the financial position in terms of my dad’s support of my career. Dad had sounded a few warning bells at the start of the 1986 season.
‘Look Carl, we can’t keep putting money into this unless you start winning. This is going to have to be the last year our company can fund you unless something happens,’ he said.
It was obvious that I was going to have to shape up or spend my life working on a factory shop floor.
By April, I had gone from winning club races to winning internationals against 250cc Grand Prix riders like Donny McLeod and Alan Carter. It was as though I’d missed out a step on the ladder – winning national races. You often see a similar leap of form in athletes; someone who has finished third throughout one season suddenly starts winning at the start of the next. Footballers are the same. A season off through injury can make them stronger and wiser. Neil Hodgson suddenly came back a better rider in the 1999 season after time off. It appeared the previous winter had had the same effect on me.
But a bad crash later that year set me back a bit. I came off at Oulton Park during practice and smashed my femur pretty badly. Still, I used that winter, laid up at home and feeling sorry for myself, to study other people’s techniques even more. I was determined to put what I had learned into practice on my return to racing in 1987. But my leg was still causing problems and, during that 1987 season, my tibia snapped because of an infection around the pin that had been inserted to help mend the femur fracture. At the start of 1988 the discomfort of my leg being cramped up on smaller bikes made me switch to the bigger superbikes. I could then really put my theories into effect, and I was soon well on the way to winning my first world championship: the Formula One TT world title.
This is the case with all riders, though. Nobody jumps on a bike and keeps the same style from the start of their career to the finish, although most will probably have a smoother learning curve than I had. Mine was very steep during that period from 1984 to 1988, only flattening off around 1990. And it was not the only thing that flattened off.
I was always altering things to try and squeeze that little bit extra out of my bike. For instance, it was around that time that I noticed that the bars of American
