by Carl Fogarty
Falappa retained that lead in Austria but, in the Czech Republic, my season went up a gear. I won the first race comfortably and that got to Falappa, who crashed out in the second, leaving Scott Russell leading the championship with me tucked nicely in behind.
But the World Superbike battle was put on ice when I was handed another wild card ride at the British Grand Prix, on the same Cagiva that Doug Chandler and Matt Mladin were riding in the world championship. It was obviously my first time on the bike and, in general, 500cc bikes needed much more time to set up properly. 500s are a lot lighter and therefore more powerful than superbikes. I was not confident with tyre choice or gearing, but finished the first day having set the second fastest time. ‘I can go a lot faster tomorrow,’ I thought, as the British press started to whip up a feeling that I was going to win a home Grand Prix.
I crashed in the Saturday morning session, which knocked my confidence and affected the bike. It meant that I had to use the second bike, which wasn’t as good, for final qualifying and I was edged off the front row right at the death. More importantly, I had missed valuable track time when I could get to know the bike. Still, fifth fastest for the British Grand Prix was good going. And, when Mick Doohan took out Alexandre Barros and Kevin Schwantz on the second lap, I dived inside Luca Cadalora and into second place. The 23,000 fans inside Donington went absolutely mental. For a couple of laps I made ground on leader Wayne Rainey, before the problems set in. The rear tyre was too soft, I always seemed to be in the wrong gear in the corners and, when Cadalora inevitably came back past me, I was seen on TV to be adjusting the front brake.
By then, Niall Mackenzie was closing in and threatening my first GP podium finish. With two laps to go, it started to cut out but I felt I had done enough to hold him off when, coming out of the hairpin with two corners remaining, it died on me. With the line in sight, Mackenzie came screaming past. I had run out of fuel. It was probably my style, whipping up the throttle as I changed down gears, which had used up more fuel than normal. And I am convinced that, if things hadn’t gone against me during the whole weekend, I would have won the British Grand Prix on that day. It took me some time to come to terms with that.
Superbikes welcomed me back with open arms. My performance at Donington had proved that their top riders could mix it with the GP boys. And I carried on where I left off in Brno. I had a double win in Sweden and Russell’s face on the podium was a picture. He didn’t take too kindly to me saying it looked like a ‘slapped arse’ and, from then on, we were locked in a war of words. Russell thought the twin-cylinder Ducati had an advantage, as these bikes could accelerate out of corners better than four-cylinder machines like his Kawasaki, which were marginally quicker down the straights.
Two more wins in Malaysia at Shah Alam and the points difference was down to five. And that was wiped out after the first race in Sugo in Japan, where I completed five wins in succession. The championship lead only lasted for two hours when, after being annoyed by a Japanese back-marker while I was leading the second race, I tried too hard to push past him and a high side threw me right over the bars and onto my coccyx, the bone at the base of the spine. Now that was painful! Russell won the race to regain the lead, while Roche tried to kill the guilty Japanese rider.
Raymond almost killed me in Japan as well – with laughter. A lot of Japanese hotels have shallow communal hot and cold pools, segregated for men and women. We went down to try the men’s pools, but Raymond stopped me before we left the changing room. ‘Watch this, I will have a laugh,’ he said. He took off his towel and walked straight into the women’s section, pretending it was a simple mistake. He is not a man lacking in confidence – or inches – and it only took a couple of seconds before the roomful of Japanese women were screaming the house down.
Any man who had made a genuine mistake would have covered his dick up and crept out. But Raymond flung his arms out shouting ‘Sorry! I am very sorry. So sorry, ladies,’ while he backed out of the room, still on full display. I was almost wetting myself on the other side of the door with Slick. The women complained to the hotel management, but Raymond was an expert at talking his way out of trouble.
I was sharing a room with Falappa in Japan. His season was turning into a disaster and he was crashing more often than not. He was a rider who didn’t seem to know his own limits and would try to pass in places you don’t normally try to pass. He was probably one of the hardest riders I’ve ever raced – but dangerously hard. He was a crashing machine and the crashes were often big, breaking lots of bones.
Falappa had fallen twice in the previous round in Malaysia and was murder to share a room with, as he was still in a lot of pain. The night before the Sugo races, he was up every hour for a hot water bottle, an ice pack or some painkillers. That’s typical of Italians. To make matters worse, he crashed again in the first race in Japan. It left him black and blue and in a bad way.
Yet he still managed to get friendly with a fit local interpreter, and invited her back to our room. ‘Carl, do you mind leaving us alone for an hour,’ he whispered. I was also in agony after my fall, but did the decent thing. While killing time in the hotel foyer, I bumped into Roche.
‘What are you doing down here?’ he asked.
‘Giancarlo’s trying to shag that interpreter up there,’ I told him.
‘Ah, come with me then,’ said Roche. ‘We will have some fun.’
He led me out into the grounds of the hotel and we climbed up onto the roof of a shed, from where we could clamber onto the row of balconies. We scrambled along until we reached our room.
There was only a fine mesh covering over the window, and a gap between the two curtains. It was enough for us to see Falappa and the Japanese girl sat on the bed. He was whispering something close up and then moved in for the kill. While they were kissing, we were pissing ourselves outside, but trying to keep quiet. His hand slipped up her skirt, but it was obvious she wasn’t all that keen and she pushed it back down. So he tried for her tits, but got the same reaction. Then he unzipped his flies and got his cock out, and tried to guide her hand onto it. Again, she was having none of it. By now, we were in hysterics outside. These fumblings seemed to go on for ages until she made her escape.
Falappa pulled himself together and was about to leave the room. We needed to get back to the foyer, and quickly. ‘Don’t tell him what we’ve seen,’ whispered Raymond, ‘he’ll be very mad.’ We clambered off the balcony and back onto the shed roof. And, as if my aching coccyx wasn’t enough to contend with, I slipped off the roof and into a bunch of nettles, or their Japanese equivalents.
We wandered casually back into the hotel, Raymond acting as if nothing had happened, me rubbing my sting. Giancarlo was waiting and I asked, ‘Well, did you get anywhere?’
‘Oh yes, Carl. I shag her,’ he boasted.
We knew different!
Back in Europe, I struggled to make any ground on Russell in the championship, despite a double win in Assen. But, whenever I won a race, Russell seemed to be behind me in second place. At that stage, he had just three race wins to my 10 and yet he led the championship by seven points. That lead was stretched to nine in the appalling weather of Monza, where I took a pair of fourth places compared to his second and fifth.
This meeting again proved that I was no longer fast in the wet. I was totally demoralised but had Donington to look forward to, where I was expected to blitz the opposition. Perhaps I was over-confident. On a freezing cold day, when Russell’s Dunlops seemed to be working better than our Michelin tyres, I was closing in on his lead when a crash deposited oil all over the track at the Melbourne Loop. The race was stopped with Russell leading by around a second, which meant that I had to beat him by more than that margin in the restart. Coming out of the Esses, on the last lap, I was one second in the lead. But I was too cautious round the final corners and, as I crossed the line, I turned round to see him right behind me. The crowd, not realising that I needed to win by more than that first race margin
, thought I was the winner. But I had my doubts. And when Slick held up two fingers to signify second, I was devastated. ‘Not on my home track,’ I thought.
There was still a chance to make up for it in the second race, though. And I was pulling away from the rest when I had a massive crash, pushing too hard through Craner Curves. Russell won, to stretch his lead to 32 points and the championship was all but over. I threw in the towel. There was no way I could pull back that points difference with just two rounds (four races) remaining. In those days, there were only 20 points for a win and, more importantly, there were not enough talented riders, with the exception of Aaron Slight on occasions and Falappa when he felt like it, to stop Russell from finishing second.
Strange as it seems, in view of our recent history, Slight and his wife Megan came to stay at our house in the gap between the next round in Portugal, as I had arranged to keep his motorhome in winter storage in a nearby village, called Hoghton. We got on well during that year, as he was in the same team as Russell but didn’t like him too much, either. I spent a lot of time in Aaron’s motorhome during the season, taking the piss out of the American over a brew. Maybe Slight was being a bit two-faced, as I think he actually got on with Russell quite well.
For me, there was no doubt. I found Russell arrogant and mouthy. But I probably needed to hate him as well, because he wanted to win as badly as I did. It was the same with Terry Rymer in 1989. The rivalry intensified my aggression and made me a better and more focused rider. There were never any clashes, as such, because most of the bad feeling was conducted through the press. But you only have to look at pictures of us on the same podium to realise there wasn’t a lot of love lost between us.
I crashed yet again in Portugal, which I didn’t think mattered too much at the time – until Russell broke down for the first time in the year. If I had won the race, the gap would have been down to 12 points with three races remaining. Still, there was nothing that could be done about it, and I was already resigned to finishing second in the championship.
Normal service was resumed for race two when I won, beating Russell into second. My hand gestures made it quite clear that I was the number one and that he was a wanker. A couple of viewers later complained to Ducati about such obscenities on live television, and I was given a bit of a bollocking. But Roche was equally pumped up. ‘You are unbelievable,’ he said. ‘You crash in the first race and win the second. Unbelievable!’
Pumped up from my win he was in a typically naughty mood. He had just bought some golf clubs while in Estoril. So, as we were packing up, he took out his Big Bertha driver and smashed an apple into the garage. It splattered everywhere, into the engine, my ear, even inside my leathers. Not content with that, he then teed a golf ball up outside the garage and smashed it one, over the track and the facing grandstand. It landed where hundreds of spectators were still filtering out of the stand. It must have nearly killed someone.
Trailing by 29 points going into the final round in Mexico, it’s perhaps a good job that my title challenge was effectively over because the race organisation was appalling. During practice, there were people playing football at the side of the track and dogs wandering all round the circuit. To cap it all, when Russell was at full pelt down the fastest straight, a truck pulled out right in front of him. He managed to miss it, but that was the last straw.
We had been saying all during practice that the officials had to sort it out, or we wouldn’t ride. Russell and I drove round the circuit in a car to see if there had been any improvement on the Saturday before final qualifying. I remember thinking, ‘This is a joke. I really don’t want to race here. I’m too far behind in the championship and I hate the place, anyway.’
Scott, who had nothing much to gain by riding, was pointing every small detail out in a bid to get the race cancelled. But he was right. I couldn’t just think about myself – I had to think about all the other riders. If anything had happened it would have been down to me, so we decided to pull out of the race. To fill in the time, we arranged a football match – The Rest of the World versus Italy on a pitch at the circuit. How they staged the World Cup out there, I’ll never know. The air is so thin and the smog so thick that I was out of breath after five minutes. Still, I scored a hat-trick and we were leading 4–1 until Slick gave away two penalties when the proper ref turned up. The final score was 5–5 and I sulked for ages!
We bumped into Russell and his team later that night, celebrating their world championship at the Hard Rock Cafe in Mexico City. I had a quiet meal with Slick on a separate table and, when we went to pay, the waiter told us that Russell had already settled up. That pissed me off as well. I did not want his charity just because he had beaten me to the title.
It was a strange way to end a strange championship. I had won 11 races to Scott Russell’s five – and he won the championship quite easily. Perhaps the most important statistic was that he had been second 12 times to my two. It was clear that my inability to finish high in the points when I hadn’t won races had cost me dear.
That was perhaps the only time in my career when some people regarded me as a crasher, maybe because I was pushing too hard in order to impress the new team or even because I lacked a bit of experience. And it came on the back of the couple of high-profile falls in 1992, before my first WSB win at Donington, and in the British Grand Prix. So it was perhaps not the frequency of falls, but the profile of the races, which made people think I was a crasher.
I actually think that my record for crashing is very good. It’s a fact that some riders fall off more than others. Some get away with it, some don’t. Look at Mick Doohan, for instance. He hardly ever fell off but, when he did, he suffered terrible injuries. There was the crash at Assen in 1992, which cost him the world title. And I saw him in America, after the massive fall in the Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez in 1999, when I was sure he’d never race again. That was a guy who’d had too many bad injuries. In a way, I was relieved to hear that he’d retired at the end of that year.
In contrast to Doohan, Jamie Whitham had always been a frequent crasher. But, until Brno in 1999, when he broke his pelvis in three or four places, and another fall in 1989 when his ankle was badly broken, he didn’t suffer many serious injuries. Steve Hislop is another guy who has never hurt himself badly. So I suppose I should count myself lucky as, although my injuries will no doubt continue to give me problems later on in life, I’m still in one piece.
During that summer I decided it was about time to try and obtain a road licence for riding a bike. It had never really been a problem, until I needed to run in the new Honda in 1988. But I had to turn down one personal appearance in Newcastle, where the organisers wanted me to ride through the city centre, because it would have been illegal, as I had never taken my test. You don’t need a normal licence to take part in road races. The local press found out that I had applied for my test and, suddenly, the pressure was on for my big day. I would look a right idiot if I failed.
I had actually taken the first part three years earlier, and that was a piece of cake. But, during training for the second part, I had a few problems adjusting to the brakes, as I wasn’t used to riding so slowly. The instructor insisted that I should brake with four fingers, whereas I only use two in races. He also told me to cover my back brakes with my foot, but my toes always rested on the edge of the footrest when racing. It was pouring down on the day of the test and the examiner had to follow in his car, because his bike would not start, which made me even more nervous. He pretended he didn’t know me, which was good, although he did ask me how my racing was going – after informing me that I had passed.
Towards the end of the year, we sold Verecroft and bought a near-derelict Grade II listed farmhouse called Chapel’s Farm, in a village outside Blackburn called Tockholes. We made around £35,000 on the £100,000 that I had paid dad just over a year before for Verecroft. He was a bit annoyed about that, but we had done a lot of work on the house.
We had seen the Tockholes h
ouse just before travelling to Mexico and the price had dropped from £200,000 to £160,000. No one had lived there for five years and, though the structure was sound, the inside was a shell. But we fell in love with it. It was ideal. The stone walls gave it character, it was out of the way and had five acres of land, in which we could keep a horse for Michaela and buy some other animals.
I was on the phone all the time I was out in Mexico and made a final offer of £140,000. We also had our eye on another house in Langho, which footballer Kevin Gallacher eventually bought. When I mentioned this, the owners finally accepted our offer. To celebrate, I went out into Mexico City and bought a saddle for the horse, having borrowed $100 from Kawasaki manager Peter Doyle, as I had forgotten to take any cash. He keeps reminding me that I haven’t paid him back.
For once, I thought there would be no doubt where I would be racing the following year. The figures were soon agreed with Raymond and I was left to concentrate on the house move. But Honda had decided to make a comeback, sponsored by Castrol, and Neil Tuxworth had tentatively approached me a couple of times before the end of the season. I didn’t think much more of it until he rang again and made their plans seem very professional.
I heard enough to persuade me to set up a meeting, at an M62 service station, with Neil and the boss of Honda Britain, Bob McMillan. With a Ducati deal already agreed but not signed, Honda were going to have to almost double Ducati’s offer to have any chance of prising me away. These were not figures that Neil was used to dealing with and he knocked me back. But I wasn’t bothered. I wasn’t keen to leave Ducati at that stage of my career anyway. Honda eventually signed Aaron Slight, for one year, and Doug Polen, on a two-year deal.
When our house was sold, we stayed at dad’s new house for a few months until Chapel’s Farm was ready. That was hard work, but I spent nearly every day of the winter up at Tockholes and absolutely loved every minute. It kept me busy and fit, plus we had financial security with the Ducati contract in the bag. There was also the small matter that Michaela was pregnant again with Claudia. My life seemed all in order – until the animals started to arrive …