either; he’s not the kind to spray the champagne.
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
