MICHAEL DUNLOP
“He rang me once during a football match and said ‘You don’t fancy doing me a favour do you, I need a bike for the TT.’ He’d just left
Milwaukee Yamaha, half way through the 2015 TT. So I told him to organise the boat and I said I’d be there. I loaded Kio’s superbike into the van, picked the mechanic up from his house in Mansfield at 2am and went to the ferry. We still had a shit load of work to do and they wouldn’t let us on the 6am ferry so we emptied everything out onto the docks and started working on the bikes there and then to get things ready – we had no option. It was the strangest thing because we had the
Manx radio on and they were saying about how the team are coming over with Dunlop’s BMW… but if only they could have seen us! What an interesting week that was. His first lap on that was 127.9, it was his first time on Bitubo Suspension, and we’d never tested it on Dunlop tyres. We were on for a new lap record and second place but he caught a backmarker just at the wrong place and crashed out dislocating his shoulder. If we’d have managed second place in that race it would have been unbelievable.
“The first year we went to the Southern 100, he just said pull up on the grass, we don’t need an awning or anything, so we went there as a factory BMW team in a Transit van. He chucked a sheet of plywood on the floor and said that’s where we are working from. And that was it, we sent him down the road he won his races, we went to the pub and it was great.
“We work together well, like me he is a results man. I know every time he put his leg over a bike he’ll give 100%. He is an intense character to work with that’s for sure.
“He has had a real hard time over the years and nobody would blame him if he hung his leathers up but I think he will come back – that’s what he does, he is a road racer.”