Big Break
I really wanted to make the move up to Supersport, but it wasn’t going to be easy. I’d made good friends in my first year in the British championship paddock, among them Superstock rider Stephen Thompson and his partner Charlotte Pullen, who often took me to the races in their truck. They knew I wanted to make the move up and they put us in touch with a guy called Nick Morgan at MSS Kawasaki. But there was a problem: he wanted £35,000 for the season. Back then we couldn’t even think about coming up with that kind of money without help.
Talking things over with Red Bull’s Linda Pelham, I stressed that even though I was only 16, I needed to make the move to a 600cc bike because of my size.
‘I’m still working on some plans,’ she told me. ‘Don’t commit to anything without speaking to me first.’
Another avenue we explored was with the Northern Ireland-based TAS Suzuki squad, run by Hector Neill and his son, Philip, who I knew a little from motocross. But they weren’t remotely interested in me for the 2004 season; they were planning to hire Tom Sykes and Adrian Coates.
Then Linda came back to me. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I can’t promise anything, but I really want to take this Red Bull Rookie thing to the next level and I’ve had a good meeting with Honda Racing.’
Linda had convinced Neil Tuxworth, the Honda Racing manager, to give me a try-out for a potential new junior team to be run out of Honda’s HQ in Louth, Lincolnshire. It was to be a stepping stone from 125 racing to the Supersport class, with Honda providing the bikes, the team and the whole infrastructure. It was exactly what I needed.
Linda is tall and imposing and she probably intimidated Neil a bit – he was old-fashioned and not accustomed to women in the workplace. She has a light grasp of technical matters but knows what she wants, can be direct in conversations and she doesn’t suffer fools.
She had pleaded with him to at least give me a go, telling him he had nothing to lose. It was going to be another selection day and I was going to have to learn to ride another new bike and prove myself all over again. Only later did I find out Neil had virtually ruled me out before I even got there. He thought I wasn’t going to be fast enough, because I didn’t have enough experience after just a single season racing 125s.
The try-out was at Cadwell Park, five miles south of Louth, on another cold and damp end-of-season November day, just like the Red Bull selection the year before.
There were four of us competing for a Supersport ride on the expanded Red Bull Rookies Honda team: me, Kieran Clarke, Daniel Coutts and Cal Crutchlow. These guys had all been short-circuit racing for years. I had raced against Daniel before, as he’d been a regular podium finisher with the Padgetts team in the British 125 series. Kieran and Cal were a bit older and had both won 600cc races in the Yamaha R6 Cup, a one-make British Supersport feeder series.
At the track, Linda and her Red Bull colleague Ariane Frank may have been rooting for me to win the spot, but they were having to be very discreet about it. Although Red Bull were joining forces with Honda, the whole set-up was very much on Honda’s terms. And what a set-up it was. I’d thought our Red Bull Rookies’ 17-ton truck had been impressive, but this was another level. The amazing Honda Racing truck was crawling with technicians, and media interest in the day was being managed by a slick PR firm. There were interviews to see how marketable you were, which I think I handled pretty well. Those make-believe post-race interviews were starting to pay off.
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