by Carl Fogarty
The injury had cleared by Albacete, where I needed to maintain some consistency and pull out another couple of wins to claw back a few more points. In both races I was running comfortably in second when the tyres lost grip and I dropped quickly back through the pack to finish in fifth and seventh. Corser won both races to take the championship lead. But my challenge was all but over, as I was now 45 points behind.
That round had summed up the whole year – two good wins at Assen had been followed by inconsistency at the very next round. Yet my season’s results had been good enough for Honda to try one last attempt to wrestle me from Ducati’s grasp. Neil pleaded with Michaela to try and get me to change my mind and offered around £750,000 for 1997, almost double what they paid me in 1996. As it happened, their bike was better the following year. And I’m convinced that I would have won the championship on a Honda if I had stayed for one more year.
It was perhaps fitting that I should finish the year off feeling terrible with a throat infection in Australia, where I missed a lot of practice. I managed to finish fourth in the first race but it wasn’t enough to prevent Troy Corser from clinching the world title. I didn’t even think that he was a worthy champion. He made hard work of an easy job. If I had not left Ducati, I would have walked the championship without any doubt. At three tracks where he won both races – Donington, Brno and Albacete – he was very good. He won seven races in total but was inconsistent and made a lot of mistakes.
After that first Phillip Island race there were only 10 points between me, Kocinski and Slight, in the battle for the runner-up slot. But, if I wasn’t going to win, it didn’t matter if I was second or fourth. I gave up in the second race and couldn’t wait to get off the Honda and go round to the Ducati garage, to see if the bike still felt the same to sit on.
It was exactly the same. But a lot of things at Ducati had changed which were to affect my chances of winning back my title. And a few things were changing at Chapel’s Farm in Tockholes …
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cramping my Style
It’s unbelievable just how much fuss a simple tennis court can cause.
It was built shortly after we moved into Chapel’s Farm. As far as I was concerned, I owned five acres of land and could do what I wanted with it. Call me naïve, but it never once occurred to me that we would need planning permission.
But I did call the council planner round when I decided to convert a corrugated iron garage back into stone and, at the same time, add around three feet to its height in order to build a loft. The garage was at the bottom of the drive, which ran by the side of the house and down into the fields. There had been a shed in its place before, so there was no need to obtain permission when the garage was actually built because it wasn’t a new feature.
The planner who visited us was a bit of an idiot. It was obvious from the moment he set foot on our land that he was out to cause trouble and make a name for himself. He had a look at the garage but then pointed at the tennis court.
‘Whose is that and how long has it been there?’
‘It’s mine and we built it a couple of years ago,’ I replied. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’
‘You can’t just build a tennis court,’ he said.
‘What? It’s my land. I can do what I want. The neighbours have never complained,’ I argued.
‘Mr Fogarty, this is greenbelt land. You need permission for these things,’ he scoffed.
He then went to the stables and asked whether permission had been obtained to build them. It hadn’t, of course. Apparently, they were outside the curtilage, the area around your house for which planning permission wasn’t needed. He left, pleased to bits with his day’s work.
Then the letters started arriving. First, we had to apply for permission from the Tockholes Parish Council. I couldn’t understand why because it had to be referred to Blackburn Council eventually. It soon became clear that the stables wouldn’t be a problem, and I didn’t think the garage would be an issue. I had actually applied for permission to build a gym in the extra space, thinking they would have some sympathy with that because I was a sportsman.
But we had to find a way of making the tennis court blend in with the surroundings. We suggested planting conifers as a way of coming to a compromise. The first meeting of the Tockholes Parish Council accepted the stables, but rejected the garage alterations and the tennis court compromise. Their main objection was that, because the court was close to a cemetery, anyone in mourning might be upset by any grunts and groans from the court. I felt like telling them that we promised not to shag on it in future.
Then they said that raising the garage would affect the skyline. The bloody thing was surrounded by trees and was 30ft lower than the level of the house. How could an extra 3ft affect the skyline? What skyline? Who were these people? I had never met them and none of them had been to look at the house. If they had visited it, they would have seen that everything was nice and neat. It wasn’t as though I was building a bloody great power station in the middle of a field.
Just a mile down the road a motorway extension was being built right next to the village. Yet this group of two-faced grumpy old farts were making stupid decisions that were affecting our lives. They had seemed quite happy to have me living there when they wanted me to open their village fete. There could only be one reason for their actions – jealousy.
The whole thing dragged on and developed into a bit of a shit fight. When it was eventually referred back to Blackburn Council some six months later, they laughed at Tockholes Parish Council and passed everything.
The funny thing was that, while all this was going on, we had decided that we wanted to move. Without wanting to sound big-headed, I had become a bit too big a personality for that house. It was not a private location as a couple of properties had been renovated either side of our house, and we also found that more and more passers-by were having a good nosey over the wall. But there was no way that I was going to put it up for sale until this dispute had been settled. That would have looked like I was conceding defeat. And, even if we had found the right house, we might have even stayed in Tockholes because we had become good friends with a few people. So I wasn’t running away.
We made the most of our last few months at the house and, that summer, held our best ever party. The usual crowd of mates, mechanics, Jamie, Neil Hodgson and Slick all turned up on the hottest day of the year. We erected a marquee and brought in a chef to cook some chilli. The beer was flowing, the music blaring out.
Later in the evening, I nipped around the back of the tent for a piss and killed myself laughing when I saw two legs poking out from underneath a bush. It was, needless to say, Slick’s arse that was going up and down on top of some girl that I didn’t know, so I went to fetch Nick Goodison for a good look.
I didn’t take long for the whole party to get rapidly out of control. People were being thrown in the pool and one girl’s ankle was cut quite badly. There were around seven or eight people in the jacuzzi at one point – and let’s just say there were no hands on view! Then, when I wandered inside, another girl was being entertained on the sofa by a couple of male guests. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – it was wild.
The following morning, Blackburn Shopping Centre staged a superbike day. I had to ride into the town centre under a police escort and I remember burping pure alcohol into my helmet, with a couple of coppers within easy smelling distance. I felt like shit.
Back at Ducati, I was interested in seeing if they had become more organised in my absence. This was, after all, Virginio’s fourth year in charge and he was obviously learning all the time. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the guy and he was good to work for. But there is a thin line between being laid back and disorganised. I was also kind of hoping that a year of John Kocinski’s quirky habits might have rubbed off on the team.
There were some improvements. For instance, Virginio set up an extra testing session in December at Misano, where Slick was also re-united with h
is former colleagues. It was important for me to get back on their bike and for Ducati to get Slick back into the swing of things. But, when I rode the bike, it wasn’t how I remembered a Ducati at all. It felt awful.
‘This was how Kocinski had it set up,’ I was told.
‘Well, is there none of my old stuff left?’ I asked.
Slick changed a few parts back, but it still felt difficult to ride. And it didn’t help that I felt awful. The doctors put it down to eating too much hot pasta before riding round in the freezing cold.
On top of all this, there were a lot of changes happening at the highest level of the company, as the Castiglioni brothers were preparing to sell the Cagiva Group to current Ducati owners, the Texas Pacific Group. As a result, people like my old engine man, Ivo Bertonni, were no longer there. Still, this was an early stage in the preparations for the following year and those tests were on the old 1996 bikes and not the new 1997 model. So I thought nothing more of the bike until the next tests in Australia and America.
Neil Hodgson had remained as a factory rider and was my new team-mate. Over the previous couple of years we had become quite good friends, riding motocross near our homes and travelling to and from races together. But that is so different from working together on the same team, when you are with each other nearly every day, week in week out. There is also the professional rivalry to consider. These things put relationships under different strains and, although we didn’t fall out, we didn’t get on that well either.
We are two very different people. Neil is quite vain and just wants to look pretty, train and eat the right food. I’m completely the opposite. The long testing trips meant that we were in each other’s pockets for long periods, and I couldn’t wait to get away from him at the end. There was no hatred, I would just rather have my own space and do my own thing. And Neil was forever gassing. We shared one flight from Manchester to Heathrow with the Spice Girls. He claimed that one of them – the ugly one, Sporty Spice – smiled at him. But I didn’t notice anything. I remember one of them acknowledging me, but they had no idea who Neil was.
Corser’s championship-winning bike from 1996 seemed fine in Australia where I was the fastest rider, despite a massive crash on the first day when the throttle stuck open. At the next test at Laguna Seca, where I had struggled in the last two years, the bike also performed very well and felt much more like the 1995 bike. It didn’t stop me having another two big crashes, though. For the first, something worked loose from the engine and locked the back wheel going up one of the hills. It threw me over the bars and I landed on my head. This was the one and only time a bike has locked up on me. Later that afternoon I had a massive slide. The bike flipped over and threw me over the high side to land on my head once more. If it wasn’t bad enough having to fly home from California, dazed, with mild concussion and a stiff neck, Neil was sat there talking me to death!
When the new bike was finally put through its paces at Monza, all three factory riders – me, Neil and Chili, who was in his own team – struggled to post good times. I even resorted to cutting through the chicanes, which were not coned off, to try to convince myself that I had done a couple of fast laps. The struggle continued at Phillip Island for the first round of the championship. I was running wide and the throttle was aggressive. But swapping and changing the bike made no difference. I couldn’t work out how I had been fastest during the winter testing on the 1996 bike, but was now finding the 1997 one so difficult to ride at the same track. Everyone else who had been at the Australia test was matching their times, but I was around half a second slower. What was going on?
It threw down on race day and the circuit was as slippery as I’ve ever known. I thought, ‘Steady away, here. There’s going to be a lot of crashing. Just make sure you pick up some points.’ As expected, the other riders dropped like flies. But Kocinski, who had swapped with me and moved to Honda, was a very fast rider in the wet. He won the race and I was second. In some ways that first round summed up the whole season. If the first few races had been held in the dry, Kocinski might not have finished halfway in the final standings. He could have lost his rag and he could have fallen out with his team.
Instead, because he was winning, everything was right with his world. In the dry of the second race, he was back down in seventh while I was second, until my tyre blew out and I had to settle for fourth. Kocinski has always seemed to rely on having the bike set up perfectly, whereas I can ride round any problems. Having said that, when he was riding in GPs for Cagiva in 1994, I thought he was the best rider in the world along with Doohan. Kocinski and the temperamental Scott Russell are probably the only two riders who have ever given me a run for my money in superbikes.
The fact that I trailed Kocinski by just one point after two rounds disguised the problems with my bike. For sure, it was more powerful but I couldn’t put that power down on the track effectively enough. Rain also ruined the Misano round, where I picked up a couple of third places while Kocinski won one race and was second in the other. Donington was dry, and proved to be one track where the bike performed well. Slight overtook me with two laps remaining of the first race to steal victory, but I rode well in the second for my first win back on a Ducati. Again, Kocinski couldn’t cope in the dry and was tenth and fifth – so I was leading the championship. The next round in Germany provided proof that the year was going to be tough.
When I was at Honda, Corser and Chili’s Ducatis always appeared to have the legs on the others. But this year, in the first race at Hockenheim, the two Hondas were in a class of their own. A clutch problem early on meant that I lost their tow and there was no way back. But I managed to hang on in the second race. For some reason, Neil Hodgson was also up in the leading group. On this particular day and in this particular race, his bike was the fastest thing out there.
I clashed with Kocinski early in the race and knocked his fairing bracket off, which prompted him to cry and moan after the race that I should have been disqualified. Slight crashed out at a chicane and, when I had to run wide to avoid him, I lost the tow from Neil for a while. Coming out of the last chicane, though, I had managed to claw my way back into his slipstream and was in the perfect position to pull out alongside. I didn’t have enough speed to go past Neil, but I beat him on the brakes at the next corner without any problem. I dived inside, edged him out and won the race. Unknown to me, he’d panicked, lost the plot and ran wide into the loose stuff and finished eighth.
Although I had stretched my championship lead to 24 points, I was in no mood for celebrations. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bike hadn’t been good enough to win that race. I had stolen a victory. And, of course, I wasn’t afraid to say so. ‘I can tell you all now that I’m not going to win the world championship on this bike this year,’ I said at the press conference.
So what if it earned me a bollocking from Ducati’s top bosses? I wanted some action. I was riding on the edge, yet Neil Hodgson’s bike was 10kmph faster. Typically, Virginio did nothing to sort out the problems.
The same issues cropped up again at Monza, Ducati’s home track, where the Hondas blew me away. At the last corner, I out-braked them both but still finished third as they flew past me on the finishing straight. This was now really pissing me off. And Kocinski, who wasn’t riding all that well at this point of the season, made even more ground in the second race when it rained yet again. I was my usual cautious self, finishing fourth after a good dice with Jamie Whitham on the Suzuki.
I’m ahead of team-mates Neil Hodgson and Pierfrancesco Chili during my 40th WSB win at Donnington in 1997, my first race back on a Ducati after my year with Honda.
Aaron Slight, who has been one of my biggest rivals down the years, on and off the track.
Troy Corser and Akira Tanagawa show their dejection in the press conference after I easily won the second race at Misano in 1999.
Scott Russell was at his best during 1993 and 1994 but changed as a rider when I beat him to the world championship in 1994.
A difficult day at a difficult track Laguna Seca, during a difficult season with Honda in 1996.
This pictire sums up my season with Honda in 1996. You can see the bike yet again losing rear traction mid-corner and the rubber left on the track from the skid at Brands Hatch.
Neil Tuxworth is no doubt pestering me yet again, this time at Laguna Seca in 1995, to ride for Honda the following year.
Slick helps me make some last minute adjustments at Assen in 1995, on the day I clinched my second World Superbike title.
Deep in discussions with Virinio Ferrari during testing of the new Ducati 916 at Jerez in 1994. Giancarlo Falappa is listening in the background.
David Tardozzi joins in the celebrations for my fourth world title in Hockenheim in 1999.
This picture appeared on the back page of The Sun as I correctly predicted the 2-0 score of the first qualifying game between England and Scotland for Euro 2000.
A fan from Burnley shows his loyalty with a tattoo of me across the whole of his back. The picture was taken at an event to celebrate my third world title in Blackburn.
I was persuaded to wear this dress on the catwalk of a charity auction in 1998, but it’s not really my style!