by Carl Fogarty
‘What took you lot so long?’ I asked.
‘It’s been a nightmare,’ Reg explained. ‘That dickhead put us on the wrong boat … to Sardinia!’
It turned out they had had to drive across the whole of Sardinia in order to catch another ferry to Sicily.
The weather was steaming hot and most of us slept outside, under an awning that we attached to the van. Joey had parked next to us and was sharing a tent, which seems strange now as there is no way you would share anything with a rival in today’s cut-throat world of racing. There was time to acclimatise to the heat, though, as we had a couple of days to kill before the race. My main problem was that I was still a steak and chips man and had not discovered Italian food. But I found a bar that served thin slices of beef, chips or patate fritte and gravy, so I was happy.
The Blackburn lads were also enjoying the trip until one of them, Paul Russell, took my scooter out around the circuit in the evening as the light was fading. He was not that used to riding bikes, so the rest of us sat on the pit wall to see how he was getting on. When he came round the corner, I realised that the circuit officials had put up some temporary railings across the track to stop people riding round at night. They were a grey-silvery colour and were hard to make out against the track.
I started to panic. ‘He hasn’t seen the fucking railings,’ I shouted. Everyone screamed at Paul to try and alert him. But he only spotted the railings when he was a foot away from crashing into them, travelling flat out at 30mph. He slammed on the brakes and the bike almost stood up, vertically. Paul was thrown over the bars, through the railings and landed on his face on the other side.
The first thing he did, for some reason, was take his false teeth out and put them in his pocket. I have never seen blood like it. He had shaved all the skin off his cheek and around his eye. It was a right mess. When we reached him, because he was concussed, he was fumbling around saying ‘I’ve lost my false teeth’, so we wasted time looking for those. We rushed him to hospital, where he was cleaned and bandaged up. When it finally scabbed over, he looked as though he had a horrible birthmark across one half of his face. But, because he didn’t pick at the scab for the next few months, it healed perfectly.
It cheered everyone up when I took pole position from the local hotshot, Gianluca Galasso, riding a factory Bimota – the same bike that my future team boss, Davide Tardozzi, was leading the World Superbike championship on. Joey crashed in practice but, after our lads looked after him in hospital, he was fit to ride in the race. He suffered more bad luck when his bike would not start for the race but, by this time, I was locked in a real battle for the lead with Galasso, unaware of Joey’s problems.
Although the track was bumpy and patchy, I had adapted to it and we also worked out that this was one of the few Formula One races where you could risk making it to the finish without a refuelling stop. We were wrong. With a lap and half remaining, and having built up a fair lead, the engine started to cut out, so I pulled into the pits. The crowd was whistling and I was screaming, ‘I need more fuel.’
My uncle Brian sprinted over and shouted, ‘You’re winning with one lap to go. You can make it.’
‘Well, bloody well push me back out then.’
I dropped the clutch as they pushed like mad and the engine fired. I completed the lap to take the chequered flag and the Blackburn crew went mad. This was Mafia country, though, and I couldn’t help worrying that someone was going to take a pot shot at me on the podium for beating the local favourite!
With just Donington to go, I had a lead of 15 points. From starting the season with serious doubts about my career, I was one race away from a world championship at the age of 23. Yet my attitude was ‘The least I can get is second place,’ while everyone else was insisting ‘Don’t be so stupid. All you have to do is follow Joey round to win it.’ I was due to race in Scarborough before Donington, but pulled out to be on the safe side. So everything was in place. There was quite a lot of media attention and I featured on the front of the programme for the meeting.
None of the British championship riders said anything to my face, but I could tell that their attitude was ‘I cannot believe he is going to be a world champion. I can beat him easily.’ The facts of the matter were, though, that they had not taken part and could only guess at what might have been. I felt that I proved my point, finishing fifth in the race, with Joey out of harm’s way in 11th, and ahead of most of the British guys. The only British riders in front were Grand Prix rider Niall Mackenzie, Roger Burnett from World Superbikes and the top British rider that year, Brian Morrison. I actually thought I was going to finish fourth, until Andersson came past when I pulled in for fuel.
When I pulled into the pits, the T-shirts were ready with ‘Carl Fogarty: World F1 Champion’ already printed up. But, even after winning the world title, I couldn’t escape a bollocking. My Metzeler tyres had been poor in practice so, at the last minute before the race, I switched them to some that Michelin had given me and blacked the Michelin logo out with a marker pen, because I had an agreement with Metzeler. Both companies were pissed off, but I couldn’t have cared less. It was straight back to Blackburn, with Joey and his Irish mates, for a party at a pub called The Barge – and a lot of beer. I featured on the front page of my local paper the next day and even regional TV caught up. It was only then that I was starting to become a bit more relaxed and confident in front of the microphone and TV cameras.
There was still one race remaining, the Neil Robinson Memorial Trophy at Kirkistown, and I was desperate not to spend the winter on crutches again. Even so, in horrible conditions, I beat the British F1 riders to finally earn their respect. Joey, who was one of the three big names in Northern Irish sport along with George Best and Alex Higgins, owned his own pub, The Railway. And he was keen to show us some typical Irish hospitality to repay us for the party in Blackburn. I couldn’t believe that the two huge Isle of Man TT trophies, the Senior and F1, were on the piano in his pub. I was dreaming of getting my hands on these things, while other people were banging into them and spilling beer. Then he brought out some poteen – Irish potato wine. It was about 90 per cent proof and I had one sip and was knocked out. I fell asleep and came round at five in the morning when Joey and his mate carried me into the van. I could smell the stuff on my breath for three days.
That win in Kirkistown really meant a lot to me because, deep down, I knew that I hadn’t really pushed myself all year. Having suffered so much bad luck in the previous two years, this season had been a big leap forward. So, with proper organisation and a proper team behind me for 1989, I didn’t expect any contest. I was confident of winning everything in sight.
A couple of months later, the title also earned a trip for dad and me to the Federation of International Motorcycling Awards in Rio de Janeiro for a glittering presentation night for all the world champions – although the 500cc Grand Prix champion, Eddie Lawson, didn’t turn up. It was a new experience for me to have exotic dancers shaking their stuff all around as I went up to collect my trophy. Even though the TT Formula One World championship didn’t have the highest of profiles within the sport, my own profile was growing. That meant that my bargaining position had improved for the following season.
Honda wanted me to retain the championship and their Chiswick-based importers, Honda Britain, gave me two RC30s for 1989. But it was a year too early for them to run a proper team. Dave Orton continued to help, for his final year, by providing a converted horsebox, which served as a big motorhome with a living area and storage space for the bikes. Metzeler, despite the incident with the marker pen, and Shell also upped their sponsorship. Having briefly returned to work at the warehouse, I packed that up to concentrate full time on racing and turned professional in February, gambling on picking up enough prize money to make a living. We were all set up; it was just a pity that the race organisation wasn’t as good.
At one stage, it looked as though the series was going to lose world championship status, as Ass
en almost opted to stage a Superbike round instead. That would have meant the number of races dipping below the minimum six rounds. In the long run, it was obvious there was not enough room for two Superbike championships, but I decided to stay with Formula One and defend my title. To go to World Superbikes, which was only in its second year, would have cost way too much.
On the face of it, there was not much difference between the two classes, Formula One and Superbikes. But, while you started off with the same production bikes for both, they were very different. In F1 you could do whatever you wanted to the bike, even changing the frame. With Superbikes, the rules were a lot tighter. Four-cylinder bikes up to 750cc, three-cylinder bikes up to 900cc and twin-cylinder bikes up to 1000cc were all allowed, but there was very little that could be done by way of modification. The aim of Superbikes was to produce a competition that the biking public could identify with, because the bikes that were being raced were similar to production models on open sale.
The size of the crowds turning up for the World Superbike championship events these days proves that the idea was a success. But the rules meant that, whenever I rode in a British superbike race that year, I had to take off the £20,000 carburettors that Honda had provided for F1 races and replace them with standard road bike carburettors. It was all very messy and confusing.
The ACU were way behind the rest of the world, partly because Norton had made a comeback, which brought in crowds keen to see a bit of nostalgia. So the ACU did not want to invent rules that would stop the Nortons racing. But that bike was like nothing else, so was not allowed in superbike races. It had a rotary Wankel engine, which some argued was 580cc, while others insisted it was 1300cc. Whatever the capacity, these machines were incredibly fast in a straight line, even though their riders, Trevor Nation and Steve Spray, were fairly average.
Before starting the defence of my world crown, I was involved in the Eurochallenge series between European riders and Brits, staged at Brands Hatch and Donington. I was fifth in that series, ahead of the lads who had been beating me in England the previous year, but behind a new rider, Terry Rymer, who had burst onto the scene. He was a mouthy Londoner and not someone I ever got on with too well. But he was a bit too tall to get into a fight with, and probably too big to be a great rider. His Yamaha was not as fast as my bike, but handled better in the corners. And my motto has always been, ‘Give me a bike that works and not one that is fast.’ Rymer went on to have a good season and won a World Superbike race. I also rode in my first ever World Superbike race, at Donington, finishing seventh before brake problems in the second race left me in 13th place. It was not as daunting an experience as it might have been, because I had raced all the other riders in the Eurolantic series at that same meeting.
Back in England, I was pushing that bit harder because the doctors had given my leg the all-clear. So I was pretty confident for the first round of the TT Formula One World championship in Sugo, Japan – the first time I had raced so far away from home. And I had the shock of my life. The Japs were on very good machinery and, to make matters worse, I missed the only dry part of practice. Having qualified 30th, I pulled it round in the race to finish 13th and collect a couple of points.
Next stop was Mallory and then on to the Isle of Man – and a completely new and disturbing experience in racing …
CHAPTER SIX
Fearless
Some of the lads who had made the trip from Blackburn to help out and support me stayed at a small guest house run by the parents of an Isle of Man rider, Phil Hogg. He was one of the favourites to win the production class and had previously won the Manx Grand Prix. I had got to know him quite well that year and had a few beers with him at the hotel on the Wednesday evening, the night before final practice for the Supersport 600. On the Friday morning, at the age of 23, he crashed and died.
Even at such an early stage in my career, I had been around a fair amount of tragedy. Gary Dickinson’s dad had died on the Isle of Man and there had been the Gene McDonnell incident with the horse. I had seen my dad fracture his skull, and read and heard about any number of other deaths. Yet none of this had affected me.
That attitude might appear cold and cynical to some people, but it’s just a fact of biking life. Death can be around every corner. And there are only two ways to react – to let it eat at you and allow the images to haunt you, or to get back on the bike and concentrate on racing. I have never had a problem with the dangers of my sport, and I’m typical of all the other riders. Racers are a different breed, they can block things out of their mind very quickly – they have to.
For some reason, Phil’s death was totally different. Maybe it was because we had such a good laugh on the Wednesday night. Maybe it was because I was due to ride in the 600cc race later that Friday. I genuinely don’t know the answer. But, for the first time, a death had really got to me. I freaked out and pulled out of the race, and wanted to go straight home. That night, I kept myself to myself in my room. First, my dad came up to me and said, ‘You’ve got to race. You’ve got to just get on with it and forget what has happened.’ Then Michaela tried to reason with me. Initially, I dug my heels in and insisted I wouldn’t race.
It wasn’t until someone passed on a message from Phil’s dad that I began to see that my actions wouldn’t change what had happened. He said, ‘It’s what Phil would have wanted. Go out and do your thing.’ So I raced on the Saturday morning in the TT Formula One World championship race and came fourth. It was pretty much as though nothing had happened. In fact, I had reportedly collided with a slower rider in Parliament Square. To this day I cannot remember hitting anyone. I think I just went past him very close and he panicked and fell over. The next day, though, I was called before an ACU meeting and told to calm it down. So it was clear that my riding style had not been affected.
And my attitude to the danger of the sport hasn’t changed much to this day. I have never been worried or obsessed about death in any way. I have never once thought, ‘God, that could happen to me.’ The way I tend to think is, ‘So and so has been injured – he’ll ride again. Or he’s been injured, but he won’t ride again.’ I can brush it aside that easily. People who know me realise that it is just my way of dealing with things.
Where I differed from many other riders was in the amount of life insurance that I paid. A lot of them pay up to £20,000 or £30,000 a year, whereas I paid about £4,000. I know that Michaela and the kids would live comfortably off the money we have already put away in investment plans and pensions. It seemed stupid taking out such a hideous amount of money to cover something that I would see no benefit from while, for a much smaller figure, there would still be more than enough paid out from the insurance.
Phil’s death probably rammed it home that it’s inevitable that riders are going to die at the Isle of Man TT. Over the years, the event has given motorbike racing a bad name. It’s an understatement to say the meeting is dangerous. If you fall off at the TT once, it could be the last time you do anything. Having said that, nobody has to do the TT, as it’s no longer part of any world championship. It’s like the Grand National in horse racing, it’s something different – a challenge with obvious dangers and risks. But riding a 37-mile circuit over mountains and through tiny villages, at touching distance from the spectators and occasionally actually touching the kerbs, is a fantastic feeling – especially if you win. And, ever since I was a kid, I had wanted to win the TT. It has a tremendous history and was the event that my dad raced in more than any other. At that age I didn’t even understand the dangers; they only sunk in as the years went by.
But nothing can be done to make it safer, except to knock down everyone’s back gardens and all the stone walls on the Isle of Man. And there are similar dangers at just about every road racing circuit in the world. Even the man who had mastered the island circuit up until the age of 48, TT legend Joey Dunlop, eventually became a victim of road racing. Joey was killed in July 2000, just two months after my accident in Australia, when
he came off the road at an obscure race in Estonia and smashed into a tree at the side of the circuit. His record speaks for itself, he was the greatest road racer of all time. He won a record 26 TT titles at the Isle of Man and the amazing thing is that he did it with hardly any training.
‘Yer Maun’ – as everyone called him – was just your average guy from down the road who ran a pub. He would do anything for anyone and received the OBE for all the charity work he did in places like Romania, and an MBE for his achievements on a bike. That summed him up. He was just one of those people you couldn’t help but get on with and it has been a privilege to have known him. To have been still winning titles on the most dangerous circuit in the world at that age deserves about as much respect as you can give a person. He was one of my biggest heroes and I had hoped he was going to quit before something like that happened – maybe 10 years ago when he had a bad crash at Brands Hatch. The one thing you can say is that he died doing something he really loved. On those types of circuits, though, there is just no room for error.
Road racing is dangerous, though, it’s another harsh fact of life on two wheels. Riding a bike for pleasure on the roads is also dangerous. Personally, I don’t see the point in it. Ever since I was 17 and first sat behind the wheel of a car, I have never liked riding bikes on the road. When I am travelling somewhere, I want to wear a T-shirt and have a few mates in the back of a car with the music blaring out. On a bike you get pissed wet through, covered in oil and shit, and you have to wear leathers and a helmet.
If I had my way, I wouldn’t want my daughters Danielle and Claudia anywhere near the roads on a motorbike. They have a little quad bike, which they love riding in the fields, and that’s fine. But girls don’t seem to have any sense on a bike, even when they get older. So the chances are that they would fall off and injure themselves at some point, and I really don’t want that to happen.