Читать книгу Niall Mackenzie: The Autobiography - Stuart Barker - Страница 8

As usual, the off-season during the winter of 1982-83 had thrown up a few surprises and challenges and as usual, they mostly concerned money.

My mate Craig Feeney who had supplied my Yamaha TZ250 in 1982 had got married in the summer of ‘81 and needed to sell the bike to raise some funds which was fair enough. I had done all right on the bike in Scottish races but never really had a decent result in England so I wasn’t too bothered about losing it. I used to be so embarrassed about getting blown away on the long straights of the English circuits because the bike was so down on power. I should have realised it was the bike but I honestly thought it was me and that was really demoralising. My only lifeline was that I was beating the same guys in the Pro-Am races who were beating me in the 250 races so that was at least some sort of encouragement.

By the start of 1983, my mum was beginning to think that I might actually be able to make a career out of racing and she was really supportive. She asked me what I wanted to do in the coming season and I told her that I needed a new bike. She said she would borrow what she could and I did the same and we put it all together. It was a real family effort and we raised about £4000 between us. Wullie Feeney who had loaned me his van during the previous season needed it back to take Harpo, his son, motocross racing so 1 was then faced with the additional expense of buying a new van as well as a new bike. But Jock McGuire from Dean Plant Hire in Bathgate stepped in to help and sorted me out with the cash for a new van for the season and Alan Pirie from Clydesdale Electrical eventually helped out too which was great.

With the £4000 raised by my mum and myself, I decided on buying a 250cc Armstrong racing bike. Armstrong was a British company which was run by the same people who make CCM bikes today. Initially, the bikes were all-British although the firm later used Austrian-built Rotax engines in an all-British chassis. Armstrongs had been getting some great results on the short circuits with people like Alan Carter on board and Steve Tonkin had even won the Junior TT on one. And anyway, I liked the look of the bikes and that’s just as important!

I spoke to Carter and he highly recommended the Armstrongs, so as soon as I sat on one at the Alexandra Palace bike show in London my mind was made up. It cost just short of £4000 which was quite a lot back then and that was most of my money gone but Jock McGuire again helped me out with some more cash so we were still looking pretty good for the season. The plan was to do the full Pro-Am Championship again on the Yamaha RD350LC and the full British 250 Championship on the new Armstrong.

The Yamaha Pro-Am challenge was the maddest race series ever held. Twenty years on, bike racing fans still talk about it with glee and the riders themselves wonder how they managed to survive it all.

The concept was simple. British Yamaha importers Mitsui took twenty-five identical RD350LC bikes to various tracks throughout the year, riders drew lots for ignition keys before practice and then raced whichever bike the keys happened to fit. The idea was to put the emphasis on rider skill rather than machine superiority and it worked brilliantly.

The series was introduced in 1981 and pitted young amateur riders under the age of twenty-four against seasoned professionals. It was a perfect stage for me to prove my abilities at national level and the timing of the series couldn’t have been better as far as my career was concerned.

Having learned my trade in club meetings over the previous two years, I was ready to take another step forward or risk riding round in Scottish championship meetings for the rest of my career. That’s not knocking Scottish racing, in fact there’s a healthy little scene up there, but if you want to get to world level you have to keep moving on. By the start of 1983, I felt I needed a bigger stage to play on and the televised Pro-Am series even ran the same make of bike which I’d been racing since I started in 1981, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The bikes used in the series were almost bog standard Yamaha RD350LCs. They had a few mods to make them more suited to a racetrack but these were not exactly performance enhancing. Naturally lights and indicators were removed, the sumps were wired up and racing number plates were fitted. To reduce front-end patter, 20mm spacers were inserted into the forks and the air filter elements were junked to allow the engines to breathe more easily. The gear change system was changed to one up and five down like a proper race bike (as opposed to one down and five up like a road bike) and the footrests were moved higher up to allow more ground clearance. But that was pretty much it and riders were not allowed to make further modifications themselves, even if we had the time, which we didn’t.

The Pro-Am series was mental and we got up to stuff that you’d never get away with in any other racing class. We used to dab each other’s’ front brakes going along the straights, pull on the pillion grab rail of the rider in front to get a tow, and even hold our own front forks to make a more aerodynamic shape on the bike. In fact, anything to gain another one mile an hour on our rivals. It was brilliant fun and helped by the fact that no one took it too seriously.

If you put your arm down on the fork it meant you could tuck your head in tighter against the clocks and you would notice the speedometer going up by about one or two miles per hour. It was German Grand Prix rider Martin Wimmer who started it. He raced in a one-off Pro-Am World Cup race at Donington (which I won, incidentally) and all the other British riders and myself copied him after that. But sometimes he would also put his right leg up flat over the pillion seat to make himself even more aerodynamic! I thought that must have been some weird German trick and it didn’t take off in quite the same way as the old fork leg trick, but each to their own.

Because the bikes were relatively slow compared to proper racing bikes there was so much time on the straights to mess around. So when you already had your arm outstretched on the fork, it made sense to stretch it a little bit further and pull the guy in front back a bit. Sometimes we even hit each other’s kill switches in practice, which would cut the other rider’s engine completely dead! Pro-Am was definitely a full contact sport.

I’ve still got a Yamaha RD in my garage and I still love to ride it because it handles so well. It’s not my original bike although I know who’s got that and he keeps promising to give it to me but he still hasn’t. So Graeme, if you’re reading this…I want it!

The RDs were so light that you could change your line mid-corner and they were pretty good on the brakes too, so they made for great racing and I think that’s why the series was such a success where other one-make championships haven’t done so well. Big heavy bikes like Triumph Triples just aren’t suited to close racing.

But the best thing about the series was the TV coverage because it was helping to get my name known and that wouldn’t have happened if I’d stayed in Scotland where there was practically no television coverage of the races. I had a Freddie Spencer replica helmet at that time which was quite distinctive so I could stand out on television. Despite the fact that the brilliant American would be my team-mate a few years later (although if you’d told me that at the time I would have laughed at you), it wasn’t hero worship that persuaded me to buy it. It was just my shrewd Scottish head for a good deal. Alan Carter was wearing AGV helmets at the time but Arai, who made the Spencer rep, wanted to send him a lid to try. But Alan was happy with AGV so he sold me the Arai at half price, which is the only reason I bought it!

I got on well with Carter and I really thought he was going to be a multiple world champ after he won the 250cc French Grand Prix in 1983 when he was just eighteen. At the time, he was the youngest rider ever to win a GP. He had come up to Knockhill at the end of 1981 and crashed his brains out all over the place but he was extremely fast when he managed to stay upright. We became good friends during 1982 and I stayed with him in his home town of Halifax sometimes to go out for a few beers. Alan was completely mad – very talented but completely mad. He was a really intelligent bloke but then sometimes he’d just whip his lop-sided privates out in public (he had one testicle much bigger than the other) and cause a scene for no apparent reason. Still, he made me laugh and I respected him because he was so fast and I think it’s good to surround yourself with people you can learn from just by constantly talking about racing techniques and stuff. I think Alan’s biggest downfall was that he really believed, along with everyone else, that he’d just walk into GPs and take over and when that didn’t happen he couldn’t understand why and went off the rails a bit. Top bloke though.

We had some great races together in the Pro-Am series and he cleared off a few times making the rest of us a bit suspicious about his bike. After all, he was riding for Yamaha in the 250cc class so some of us suspected favouritism but now I realise it was just because he was so good.

All the riders in that series got on really well and there was never any ‘handbags at dawn’ or falling out over crashes or on-track incidents. As long as no one got hurt then everyone was happy and we had a great laugh. Things turned sour for me in the last round though and it was nothing to do with the other riders. I was going to the final round at Brands Hatch with a chance of winning the championship. I’d had three wins in the series and needed to win the last race to take the title but my main title challenger, Graham Cannell only needed to finish ninth to win.

Every race that season had been a clutch start so we didn’t have to kill our engines on the start line; we just engaged first gear and went. But at the final round at Brands, the marshal held up a board telling us to kill our engines. All the other riders ignored this board and kept their engines running except for Kenny Irons and myself. We obeyed the start line marshal and killed our engines and when the lights turned green, everyone else got away while we were sitting there with dead engines and no hope of catching the rest of the field even if we had fired up the bikes and chased after them.

The rules clearly stated that it should have been a clutch start so I lost any chance of winning the series because that marshal hadn’t read them properly. I wasn’t happy. Especially since my main rival Graham Cannell crashed during the race so I would only have needed a decent finish to win the series and I desperately wanted to win a national championship at that point.

Kenny Irons and I went straight to the officials to complain but we were basically told not to cause a fuss and given £500 each to shut up and back down. There was a lot of money changing hands and a lot of promotional deals hinging on that championship so the organisers didn’t want any trouble or bad feeling. I was still hopping mad but realised there was no way they were going to re-run the race even though Kenny and I had sat on the grid for half a lap in protest until we were dragged off kicking and screaming. I suppose we could have got lawyers on the case and got all heavy but we eventually calmed down and accepted the cash. It was £500 after all.

That was the low point of the season for me and coming right at the end of the year made it worse. But there were high points and the best of all was finally being able to quit my job! In May 1983, I finally became a professional racer but it happened in the most bizarre circumstances.

Early in the season I had gone to my first race on the new Armstrong at Oulton Park and knew straight away that I had made a good choice of machinery. It just felt perfect for me and I was on the pace immediately in the British championship, which was a far cry from the year before when I was nowhere on the Yamaha TZ250.1 was running fourth amongst top riders like Alan Carter, Phil Mellor and Paul Tinker and then the bloody bike just exploded. My new £4000 bike! I had a good guy called Rab Hardy who had prepared it for months making sure everything was perfect yet it still blew up first time out. I couldn’t believe it. So I packed the bike up in the van, drove straight to the Armstrong factory in Bolton and threw the engine on the table. I shouted at them that I had spent all this money on their bike and it had let me down in its first race. I even gave them the sob story about it being my mum’s money and everything but they said there was no warranty on race bikes and that I must have done something wrong to make it blow up. In the end I came away with a credit note for spares but I wasnearly in tears because my mum and I had wasted so much money and didn’t have any more to buy another bike with.

But going to the factory turned out to be one of the best things I had ever done and that’s what eventually led to me turning professional in the middle of the season.

I had the bike rebuilt for the next race at Donington where Armstrong’s official rider, Tony Head, had a huge crash in practice and was put out of action for a while leaving the team with no rider. As it happened, Alan Carter’s former mechanic Doug Holtom was working at Armstrong and he suggested they try me out on their factory bike. As soon as he mentioned my name the Armstrong guys remembered this mad, raving Scotsman who had burst into their factory complaining and I suppose they agreed to give me a chance on their official bike in the hope that it would shut me up!

In this business, getting your face known can mean the difference between getting a factory ride and not getting one. In my case, it meant that I got one.

This happened midway through practice. It was a big international meeting but I immediately put the bike on the front row of the grid for the race. Then, when the race started, I was running at the front again when the bike blew up! I couldn’t believe it. My private Armstrong had blown up in its first proper outing and then the official factory bike did the same the first time I rode it! What was going on?

Still, Armstrong were happy with the way I had ridden over the weekend despite the disappointment and I received a letter from them soon afterwards asking if I would be interested in working for them full time as a development rider/racer. They were planning to develop the bike as it raced though I was a bit dubious about that because it could have been unreliable and kept on blowing up. After all, my experience showed they weren’t the most reliable bikes on the planet.

The first thing I thought about when I got that letter was packing my job in but when I went in and told some of the guys at work they all said ‘Don’t do it. You’ve got a job for life here.’ I’m glad they said that because it made me even more determined to make it as a racer. There was no way I wanted to be still working for the electricity board in Falkirk when I was sixty. I know my colleagues had my best interests at heart but that job just wasn’t for me. My mind was made up. I was young and still living at home with my mum at that stage too so I didn’t even have a mortgage to worry about and I didn’t have a serious girlfriend either. Mum was fine about it too, because she knew I could always go back to my old job if I had to.

I asked Armstrong if I could continue doing Pro-Am if I accepted their offer and they said yes so that was it; I finally quit my job at the electricity board and became a professional racer. I was over the moon. I knew I could survive on the Pro-Am prize money and I would get the chance to go racing properly for free, even if I did break down a lot. Armstrong also paid me £3500 for my services as a development rider so it couldn’t have worked out any better.

Once I had left my job and started working with Armstrong however, I went to Blackburn and moved in with the family of a fellow racer called Geoff Fowler, so that I didn’t have to travel up and down from Scotland so much.

We had some top laughs on Friday nights at a pub just outside Blackburn called The New Inns. The usual protocol was to get drunk in there and then go skinny-dipping in the nearby reservoir. A bit dangerous looking back on it but we all survived somehow.

Then on Saturday nights it was off for a boogie at The Peppermint Place where I was thrown out of more times than I can remember. I was once thrown backwards through a set of double doors and down a whole flight of stairs just for being Scottish and obnoxious!

At the same time, I must have been getting a bit more professional because I started running to get fit. There were still no special diets or anything, in fact we lived off whatever we could find in the local Spar shop and a regular diet of Lancashire corned beef hash which Geoff’s dad seemed to make for us every night.

But at least I was running which I hadn’t done when I was working, because I didn’t really have the time or the energy. It goes to show how much the media informs us these days about diets and fitness because most people are quite clued up about it now but at that time I did some pretty strange things to try and get fit. One of the daftest was my ‘sauna theory.’ I thought sweating buckets in a sauna was an easy way to get fit but unfortunately, I didn’t have a sauna so I had to improvise. I sat in my van with as many layers of clothing on as possible, all topped off with a big duffel coat then turned the heater on full blast for hours on end! I used to drive all the way to race meetings in England like that thinking I was a regular little Rocky Balboa! Six hundred-mile round trips in the mobile Mackenzie sauna. Man, that van must have smelt bad and unsurprisingly enough, it didn’t do me much good in the fitness stakes either.

My diet of curries and lager almost got me into trouble as well that year and I was lucky not to lose my Armstrong ride soon after getting it. When I competed in my first race for the team at Knockhill, I missed morning practice because I was locked up in the police station! I had gone out on Friday night and got a bit carried away in the local Indian restaurant. I was dancing on the tables, and generally being a bit messy and noisy and the next thing I knew, the police arrived to take me away. I had become an Indian takeaway! They locked me up overnight and didn’t let me out until lunchtime on Saturday hence I missed Saturday morning practice and that obviously didn’t impress the team too much. It was a very dodgy start to my Armstrong career and I was lucky, and grateful, not to get sacked.

The Armstrong deal aside, another big bonus for me in 1983 was winning the Pro-Am World Cup race at Donington which was shown on TV. It was weird because I was racing with Alan Carter again and he waved me through as a joke because he must have thought he would just come straight past me at the next corner. He didn’t and I won the race, so it was a bit daft of him but that was Alan all over. I suppose he was just messing about but I was pretty serious and I certainly wasn’t going to pass up the chance of winning a World Cup race on live TV.

I also rode in my first race abroad in 1983 in another Pro-Am World Cup meeting at Hockenheim in Germany and came fourth which I was quite happy with. All in all, it had been a pretty good year as I ended up with second place in the Pro-Am Championship and I had enjoyed occasional success on the Armstrong in the 250cc class although the bike broke down too often to allow me to have any consistent results. I won some races in Scotland on the Armstrong and had a win at Knockhill and a fourth at Donington on a 350cc Armstrong that the factory had built for me. But the most important development of the year for me was that I had become a professional racer and for the first time I could spend all week concentrating on the race ahead instead of having to go to work. Having said that, I actually went back to work at a plant hire company called Dundaff Draining along with my mate Wullie McKay during the winter because it was some extra cash in my pocket and I had too much spare time on my hands. I’ve always liked working anyway, just because it’s a good laugh if you’ve got the right sort of mates around you and I don’t like being idle.

Armstrong had committed to backing me for a full season’s racing in 1984 rather than having me just as a development rider-come-racer. I knew they were serious about winning the British championship so things were looking better than they had ever done for me at the end of a season. For me, Armstrong was the team to ride for at that point because they had their own factory right here in Britain, they built their own bikes, and they could respond quickly to any changes I wanted made. I didn’t even look anywhere else for the 1984 season, not least because I suspected Armstrong would provide my route into Grand Prix racing which was where I really wanted to be.

Also, I was going to be the sole UK-based factory rider for Armstrong in ‘84. Tony Head, who had recovered from his Donington crash which gave me my big break, was given bikes to run in his own private team rather than being the factory’s official rider.

The other exciting thing about Armstrong at that time was that they had built a carbon-fibre-framed bike that I had tested in the second half of 1983 and would race in 1984. It was going to be the first bike of its kind to be raced and I was very much looking forward to it. In fact, that bike was largely the reason why Armstrong landed government funding to go racing in the first place. The British government had provided a grant to develop carbon-fibre-framed bikes and the big carrot for them was that Armstrong said they were going to build an all-British 500cc Grand Prix racer. With Barry Sheene still making headline news in those days, there was a lot of support for the idea of a unique British bike that could take on the world so it was a shame it never really happened. I’ll explain why a little later.

My salary for 1984 was increased to £6000 and on top of that I got prize money and bonuses for winning as well as any personal sponsorship which I could sort out but there wasn’t much of that about back then, just a few quid here and there for wearing helmets and leathers.

Still, the new season was going to be another big step forward and as it turned out, my fourth year of racing would see me ride in my first ever Grand Prix. My dreams were coming true at last.