the Isle of Man TT and five Formula TT World Championships. A few years ago, he was voted Northern Ireland’s greatest ever sports star by Belfast Telegraph readers.
I have nothing but happy memories of Granda. Mostly involving apples. I remember going up to his place and chatting about bikes, crunching on apples. He used to say, ‘You know, you’re just like your dad.’ I was still young and wasn’t sure what he meant. But he said it a lot: ‘You’re just like your dad and you’ll be a fine wee racer. You’ll be a world champion, so you will.’
Mum’s mother, ‘Nanna’, was a nurse and her father a contractor. Nanna is an amazingly strong and traditional Northern Irish lady and lived just off the North West 200 course when I was young. Being very religious, Sundays have always been a day of rest for her. So, my chosen career, which involved going to work on a Sunday, was a huge ‘tut-tut’ back in the day and I felt quite guilty about upsetting her.
Nanna eventually got used to the idea of me racing and I’ve watched her go full circle and become my number one fan. She’s much more relaxed about watching me go to work on a Sunday now.
I’ve had some of the most sincere but funniest post-race telephone calls with Nanna, especially during my days riding with Honda. She texts before and after every race and tells me she’s been asking God to keep me safe. I love getting her messages, but it would be impossible to reply to them all, so, once in a while, I’ll call her to make up for the radio silence. One time, I rang after a race in 2012 when I had a bit of time at the airport. It was a period when we were really struggling with the Honda and she’d been listening to the Eurosport race commentary of Jack Burnicle and James Whitham. She’s normally totally calm, but she sounded pretty mad and said they’d been talking about how the Honda was at the end of the line and how I was having to override it. She took it all as gospel and said, ‘Jonathan, it’s terrible they’re making you ride that bike. They’re saying that you’re always close to making a mistake and that it’s difficult for you to realise your potential.’
I said, ‘Nanna, it is what it is – the team are doing the best they can. It’s not their fault but the base level of the Honda is just not competitive enough.’
‘Well, it’s not fair,’ she said, ‘they say you’re always riding on a knife edge.’
I told her that the bike was mass produced at the factory in Japan and that there wasn’t much we could do about it. She said, ‘So give me the number of the people over there, I want to call them and tell them it’s not fair they’re making you ride that bike.’
I couldn’t help laughing down the phone with her, but she was deadly serious. I promised that I would have a word with the Japanese engineers and get them to try to make a better bike.
Mum was very good at sport when she was young and really competitive. She played hockey for Randalstown Ladies, one of Northern Ireland’s top women’s teams, and did athletics to county level, but she hurt her back in a long-jump competition, aged 16, and had to give it all up.
Living close to the North West 200 course meant she saw her first race there when she was about 13. Unfortunately, she witnessed the crash in which Tom Herron was killed. He was one of Ireland’s highest-profile racers and had just started his Grand Prix career as a team-mate to Barry Sheene. Understandably, she never really enjoyed our time at the North West 200 after that but was apparently more relaxed watching my dad race at the Isle of Man TT where she could monitor his progress around the course from a massive board at the main grandstand.
My very first holiday, at the age of three months, was going with Mum to see Dad in that North West 200, where we had a caravan in the paddock. Our summer half-term holiday was often a week on the Isle of Man where Dad was racing at the TT. Mum tells me that from a very young age I would just stand at the fence and not move for hours. I could recite the race numbers of all the riders as well, and it’s kind of spooky that my son Jake did exactly the same with World Superbike riders from about the same age.
When I was a bit older, I just used to love getting in the way in the paddock and was always really happy to feel part of the team when Dad gave me little jobs like cleaning wheels or polishing the bikes.
Mum tells this story about one weekend when I was about three-and-a-half and we all went down south to a place called Loughshinny near Dublin to watch Dad race. He had quite a bad crash and as he lay in the road another bike had come along and whacked him properly in the nuts. I can’t imagine the pain he must have been in, and although we can laugh about it now, he would have been in agony. He spent a couple of weeks in hospital and by the time he’d recovered his sense of humour he was telling anyone who’d listen that he was the only white man in the world with a black dick and took great pleasure showing his battle scars to his mates who went to visit.
Despite Mum’s bad memories of that episode, and the North West and the Brands Hatch crashes, she supported Dad’s career on top of being mum to four of us kids: me the eldest, Richard, Kristofer (who we jokingly call the Mistake!) and Chloe.
Richard turned out to be a pretty good kid brother, by which I mean his arrival in November 1989 was probably one of the best things to happen in my early life. He and I spent a lot of years having fun and riding bikes together and he has turned out to be one of the nicest, most genuine blokes I’ve ever known. He’s a real gentle giant and has become a very important influence in my life. The arrival of Kristofer and Chloe made us a much bigger family unit and those years of expansion must have been a pretty chaotic time for my parents.
Mum was never any kind of pushover, but if Dad came home and she told him that we’d not done something or we’d been naughty, he would shout a bit and whatever it was that we hadn’t done got sorted pretty quickly. You could say I had a fairly strict upbringing, and although I don’t remember actually being hit with anything, the threat of getting a bit of a whack if we were naughty was never far away.
I totally respected my parents while I was growing up and I still do. They really helped my growing love of motorcycles too. Dad’s TT win in 1989 came, of course, with a bit of prize money and he bought me the best Christmas present I could imagine: an Italjet 50, a tiny little motocross-style bike. I was just short of my third birthday.
Unfortunately, Santa’s amazing generosity hadn’t stretched to a helmet, or any gloves or boots; but that wasn’t going to stop me riding on that cold Christmas Day. Dad probably instantly regretted it. He must have frozen his nuts off watching me ride up and down all day outside in the cold. I knew how to twist the throttle, because Dad had shown me when he used to sit me on his race bikes from the minute I could hold myself up. But he had to explain what the brakes were all about. The problem was I still couldn’t get the bike stopped because my hands were too small for my fingers to reach the brake lever, so Dad had to run alongside to make sure I didn’t ride into a fence or the side of the house. I just rode and rode all day until the bike ran out of fuel. Not surprisingly, I had my first crash that day, but it didn’t put me off – I was straight back on it, because I loved it and never wanted to get off.
Looking back at my early life, you can see a lot of me as a professional racer coming together. I used to throw a complete fit if we were ever late for Ballynure Primary and Mum had to be waiting outside as soon as I came out in the afternoon. An early love of routine and following a schedule, I guess, which helps for busy race weekends today. I also got an early taste of hospitals, now an occupational hazard, when I had suspected meningitis and was kept isolated on a drip for about five days.
I got in plenty of training, too. The house in Kilwaughter was, for me, the ultimate kid’s playground. We had a reasonably sized garden and the land backed onto the Kilwaughter House Hotel, which, in the mid-1990s, was one of the biggest rave venues in Northern Ireland. We had a pretty good relationship with the hotel management
