Foggy

by Carl Fogarty

  But I don’t rate any of the others before that time. People like John Surtees weren’t the legends they were cracked up to be. In those days racing just consisted of a bunch of gentlemen travelling around Europe, racing on a few road circuits and claiming the world title. Then they thought to themselves, ‘Oh, we’ll have a go at driving cars now and win the world title at that as well.’ It was so easy to do, then, but there is no way that it could be repeated now. These guys weren’t athletes, their bikes were not fast and they could even use the same tyres all year. They weren’t great riders. There is no such thing as a great rider before 1975. If people like Surtees were around today at the age of 28, they would be just another rider on the grid.

  Getting back to Sheene, I think one of the main reasons he had the success he did was because his bikes were better than the rest. If you didn’t have a factory Suzuki, you could forget it until Yamaha produced a quicker bike for Roberts, although that bike seemed harder to ride. Having said all that, I do like the guy. Barry lives out in Australia now and we regularly bump into each other as part of his work for television. He is a lot like me in many ways; he doesn’t really care what he says and is not afraid of upsetting people. We always have a laugh and a joke and some good-natured rivalry. He is quite protective of his status in the sport and believes that, if the two of us were to walk down Oxford Street tomorrow, he would be the one who would be pestered for autographs. I think he would be very surprised!

  Our records just do not bear comparison. I’ve won more world titles than Sheene, and on more bikes. I have won on road circuits, which Barry didn’t do, and I have won the Motor Cycle News ‘Man of the Year’ award six times, compared to his five. He might have been famous in his time but, unless you are over 30, you are not going to remember Barry Sheene too well. I think our achievements will stand the test of time, but I would put myself in the top two or three British riders of all time, whereas Barry would be in the top five or six.

  And 1984 proved to me that I could make it to the top.

  Preparation for my first full season was poor as I spent the winter going out with my mates. There was no fitness regime and we couldn’t even work on the bike, as it didn’t even arrive in time for the first race at Oulton Park, one of a series of club meetings up and down the country. We were concentrating on the 250cc class and bought a one-year-old Yamaha, which had been used for Grand Prix races, off Tony Rutter, a former team-mate of dad’s. It probably cost around £3,500, which was a decent price, and was as good as the new 1984 models.

  There was a baptism of fire in store for me when the bike turned up for my first actual race, down at Snetterton in Norfolk, in the middle of a rainstorm. Dad, who was officially acting as my mechanic, my mate John Jefferson and me were all trying to sleep in the back of the van, while the bike was outside, covered by a tent that spent more time being blown around the fields than keeping the rain off. We were up all night trying to keep the bloody bike dry. But all that hard work was for nothing because on race day, at the first corner of the third lap, the throttle stuck wide open and I ploughed straight on and through a potato field. I expected another bollocking, but dad was quite impressed. ‘You were going really well. It was my fault, really. Someone has just told me that we should have put oil on the slides,’ he panted, after dashing over to the bike, which was stuck in three feet of mud.

  In truth, neither of us really knew what we were doing. I was new to riding and dad was new to being a mechanic. So there were some tense times. At another meeting at Carnaby, we couldn’t even get the bike to start so I hurled my helmet into the van, nearly smashing the front windscreen.

  That was typical of the flashpoints, which were triggered when I wanted something for the bike and dad either didn’t agree or couldn’t deliver. If I wanted fresh tyres, dad would argue that there was enough tread left. The other riders were all using ‘trick’ parts, the expensive after-sales bits that made so much difference to the bike’s performance. So other bikes had magnesium wheels while I was still on spokes. Racing technology was starting to change, but I felt as if I was being left behind. It wasn’t until later on in the year that we decided to buy some Hans Hummel-tuned barrels for the engine, which were a lot better than our Yamaha powervalve system’s barrels and had improved performance for other riders. If you didn’t have HH barrels, you weren’t cool.

  But I wasn’t really in a very good position to complain about dad not buying me stuff because I hadn’t been earning myself. In February of that year I had started working at my dad’s warehouse after realising my apprenticeship at Holden’s had been a waste of three years. It just dawned on me one day that I was going nowhere so, out of the blue, I decided to clear off. When it came to the lunch break, I stopped steam-cleaning a truck, packed my toolbox into the back of my van, drove down to the local park and sat on my own all afternoon. Most of the time I was wondering, and rehearsing, what I was going to say to dad. When I finally confronted him his reaction was much as I had expected. ‘That’s bloody clever,’ he said but, when he realised how much I hated it there, he offered me a job at his warehouse on about £50 a week.

  Dad didn’t really have anybody to look after his trailers and, while I didn’t really know what I was doing, I could at least get them ready for their MOTs in the workshop. My cousin Chris came to work as a mechanic with me later that year, as well as a lad called Graham Wilson, known as Taste for some reason, who was as daft as arseholes. I had worked with him at Holden’s and persuaded my dad to hire him. He didn’t last long because he was used to an ordered way of doing things at Holden’s where, if there was a fault on a wagon, the storeman would provide a new part. At my dad’s works, you had to try and repair it first, with welding or tie-wraps. In some ways it was similar to the racing, but dad’s company was putting nearly all the money in, so mostly I just had to put up with it.

  P&G Fogarty was a true family concern and, at some point or another, all three of dad’s brothers were involved in the business. Uncle Jimmy worked there for 20 years and Brian, who I was to grow to despise for his attempt to cash in on my success years later, was also there, on and off. Three cousins, Mark, Chris and Andy, were also employed during my time and my sister worked in the office. She was probably thicker than me and tried to do a bit of typing in the office, but she was pretty useless and only lasted a few years. Even my gran, Vera, did her bit. My grandad, Richard, was the warden of Witton Park and died when I was about eight, so I don’t remember too much about him. But I was very close to my gran. She lived a short drive from the warehouse, on Cartmel Road, and cooked dinner every day for me, my dad, Chris, Mark and, more often than not, a couple of dad’s brothers. This wasn’t soup and a couple of butties. It was a proper lamb or steak slap-up, served in old-fashioned dishes with a flat rim, with chips, peas and beans.

  Working for dad meant that I could sneak in a few hours’ work on the bike during the day, and disappear on a Friday afternoon when I had a meeting to travel to. I guess that caused a bit of jealousy among the workforce, and there were a lot of two-faced blokes who wished me all the best only to slag me off behind my back. That wasn’t the type of rivalry that was worrying me, though, as the 250s proved to be a very tough class.

  There were a lot of new lads starting out, not to mention the older experienced riders who were still knocking around. I can’t really remember many of my opponents, although one lad called Steve Patrickson did go on to be British champion at 250s and 125s. Another rider, Darren Dixon, went on to be TT Formula One British champion in 1988. A few of the others made their mark on the national scene, but nobody else made it on the world stage.

  At that point, I had no career path mapped out to the top, although the 250ccs seemed like a good class for serving my apprenticeship in. If I wanted to be good, I knew that I would have to make a consistent impression at this level. It was a steep learning curve as I tried to get to grips with some fairly major changes to my technique, such as moving the handlebars further and furthe
r in from a sort of motocross position, to the more orthodox cramped racing style. It was also a huge jump from riding the bikes of the previous year, which were effectively road bikes in a racing bike’s frame, to these out-and-out two-stroke racers. Suddenly, racing was all about carrying a lot of corner speed, and the experience I gained at that time has stood me in good stead right up to the present day. Something must have clicked, because I got better and better as the year went on and, by the end of the year, I was winning consistently at a lot of different tracks and breaking club lap records.

  I was just getting into my stride when I suffered my first major injury, on my 19th birthday of all days. It started a weird sequence of events featuring the number 19, but more of that later. I had won the first race at Cadwell Park but, in the second, came out of the hairpin first corner and high sided the bike. High sides seem to happen to a rider more nowadays, and I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s because, in those days, the tyres were a different shape. The modern tyres are thicker and, when the wheel slides underneath, it suddenly seems to find grip and flips the bike the other way, sending the rider flying. It usually results in the worst injuries.

  This time, I landed on my collar-bone, but it wasn’t a bad break and I raced two weeks later at Aintree, when I was strapped up in a figure of eight bandage and wore my dad’s baggier leathers for extra comfort. I finished second, which was not a bad result with a broken bone. The next meeting at the track was my best of the year – I won both races and smashed a race record that had stood for three years. Then I capped off the year with another win in the final meeting of the year at Aintree, but I didn’t win their championship because I hadn’t been consistent enough early on.

  The biggest series for the best young riders at that time was the ACU Marlboro Clubman championship, staged all over the country. A lot of the tracks were new to me, such as Donington, where I crashed out at Redgate, a second gear right-hander where a variety of possible lines can confuse riders on their first visit. The final race of the series was at Silverstone and was live on television, another new experience. I was in the lead for about two seconds, eventually finishing fourth as four bikes crossed the finishing line virtually side by side.

  By 1985 the goalposts had changed. I’d had enough of a taster to know that I could win the Marlboro series. And there was another target, the Manx Grand Prix, which was a major step towards entering the TT. To do all this I would need the right equipment, and that meant a Yamaha or Rotax engine, in either a Harris or Spondon frame. It was also the first year that Honda were back competing in the 250cc class, and they went on to win the 250cc world championship with Freddie Spencer. But those bikes were not for sale on the open market and were therefore not an option for me. So, at the start of the year, we sold the 1984 bike and bought a new Yamaha. We also got hold of a 350cc Yamaha, which was starting to become obsolete, so that I could ride in a wider variety of classes. There was no point having such good bikes, though, without a top mechanic and someone pointed us in the direction of John Gibbons. He had previously worked for Yamaha and had also been involved with Charlie Williams, who won the TT several times. I had also attracted a bit of backing from sponsors including Shell, who provided a few products, and had started to receive discounts on tyres from Michelin.

  Everything gelled from the word go as I won at Oulton Park and Snetterton, when another sponsor, Dave Orton from Appleby Glade, a fruit machine company, first noticed me in their club races. He had seen me win the 250cc race and ride rings around the 500cc riders on my 350cc, only to be passed every time in the straight because of their bigger engines. Appleby Glade had been involved in the sport for a long time and it was a good sign that people like Dave Orton wanted to help out. It was only a few hundred quid, but his name carried a lot of clout. I don’t know what Dave made of my first race in the Marlboro Clubman series at that same Snetterton meeting, as I was leading the race when I crashed at the end of the back straight after dropping down too many gears and locking the back wheel. My mechanic, John, was not one to moan, but I could tell how disappointed he was. ‘The guy behind you had already settled for second,’ he grumbled.

  It was the first in a series of crashes because, by now, I was pushing that bit harder to win races in order to live up to the growing expectations. In my first national race, at Oulton Park, I was pressing the leaders on the 350cc when I crashed out. This time John found it harder to disguise his disgust. I overheard him saying, ‘I get the bike set up perfectly for him and then he goes and throws it away like that.’ It upset me to hear this, but he had a point and I was still too shy and insecure to fight my corner. I just wanted to ride the races, pack up and then go home.

  There wasn’t much of a social life through biking, although, by then, I had started going out with Christine on a serious basis and she came to a few meetings. I was no longer quite as shy as I had been with girls. Racing had started to bring the best out of me and I had more freedom. The start of my racing career had coincided with the time when I was becoming more and more interested in what they had to offer. So I probably missed out on the peak chasing years around 17 and 18 years old, as I was away racing a lot at the weekends – often with my dad for company! And, if I did go to a nightclub with my mates, I hated asking girls to dance. I was always too scared that they would tell me to get lost. My sister was probably responsible for pushing me and Christine together, and the rest of my family approved as she only lived a couple of houses away and was almost part of the family anyway.

  After most of the meetings we faced a long trip back to Blackburn, where we would meet up in a small nightclub that had started to sponsor me, called Harvey’s Disco Bar, where I was quite well-known. It was my idea of showing Christine a good time, though I’m not sure she appreciated it. If we had raced at Aintree, though, we got back earlier and headed for a Chinese restaurant in Blackburn town centre with a few of the other lads that had come to watch. They were a lot older than I was – and a bit rough. But I thought they were cool, especially when they started a fight and got us chucked out of the restaurant, which happened quite often. There was one giant guy called Dave Tate, a real hard bastard with a heart of gold, who loved coming to the races when he wasn’t in some kind of bother. He was so big he could carry the bike back to the van on his own. Funnily enough, he was the one who usually stopped any fights, because people took one look at him and decided it wasn’t worth it.

  At the Aintree club dinner that year, some guy was trying to move in on Christine on the dance floor while I was nodding off at the table. Chris, my cousin, didn’t like this and walked over to the lad and said, ‘That’s my cousin’s bird, leave her alone.’ Before the lad had a chance to walk off, Chris butted him. All hell broke loose and everyone piled in. Then Dave coolly wandered over and, with one in each hand, picked up two of the main troublemakers and marched them out.

  In general, I didn’t mix with the other riders or seek attention. If anyone ever tried to interview me over the tannoy at the track, I would run off and hide. My first real press coverage followed the first race at Aintree that year. Motor Cycle News was covering the meeting, at which I had won the 250cc and qualified for the 500cc final on my 350cc. But during the 350cc final, it seized up and I was left without a bike for the 500 final. The rules stated that the engine capacity had to be between 251 and 500cc, so 250cc bikes were ruled out. In my eyes, riding a 250cc in a 500 race was not cheating, so I went out for the final regardless.

  It was one hell of a race and everyone went mad when I won. But, incredibly, one of the blokes that I had beaten made an official protest. I was livid and couldn’t believe that anyone would embarrass himself so much as to complain after being beaten by someone on a smaller bike. ‘Where is he? I’m going to rip his bloody head off,’ I shouted. The headline in MCN read something like ‘Mighty Mouse Fogarty disqualified’.

  The second Marlboro race was at Thruxton and I thought it was about time that I started to pay back the faith that had been
shown in me. I won that race, but was then only seventh in my first race at Brands Hatch the following week. I was still too inconsistent and proved that point spectacularly in the next meeting at Mallory on 19 May (that dreaded number again!). I was riding that 350cc bike during practice and lost control of the rear coming out of a corner. As I was coming off the side, I made the mistake of trying to hang onto the bike and found myself being dragged towards the tyre wall, with my hand still full on the throttle. I just shut my eyes …

  … The next thing I knew I had won the Spanish Grand Prix. The crowd was going mental as I stood on the podium, spraying champagne everywhere. I was actually lying in the middle of a patch of nettles and the hallucination had been caused by concussion. I was numb everywhere but knew that my arm was broken. I had also cut the inside of my thigh as, when I hit the tyres, I had been thrown over a fence and into a bush. My leg must have caught the top of the fence on the way over.

  I was very dazed and confused and, when I started to come round in the hospital, the doctors were asking me the standard questions like, ‘What’s your name?’ and ‘What town do you live in?’ Even with those questions I was doing a Homer Simpson, pleading with my brain not to let me down. Then they asked, ‘Who is the Prime Minister?’ I couldn’t think of the answer for the life of me, because I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in politics. It wasn’t due to the blow to my head, I simply didn’t know. It took a couple of attempts before I remembered Mrs Thatcher and the doctors let me out the following day. That was my first serious injury and the last time I rode the 350cc bike, as it was smashed to pieces in the crash.