The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
On Your Bike!
Tralee’s Emmet O’Grady on life in the fastest lane
THE rush must be something else. Coming out of Copse corner and haring down towards the iconic Maggots, Becketts and Chapel. Picking up speed all the time before the left kink into the first right. Body and soul on the line. Man and machine in tandem.
On the turn in going low, leaning over, practically horizontal, knee and elbow basically touching off the tarmac. It’s a feat of bravery as well as endurance. It’s not about being brave, though. It’s about being quick, and that’s simply the quickest way around the corner.
That it looks spectacular is merely a welcome by-product.
The lower you get to the ground, though, the greater the sensation of speed must be. That’s the thing that thrills and hooks on a most basic level.
When you get to the level of competing in the British Supersports Championship at the world-famous Silverstone circuit in Northamptonshire, as Tralee man Emmet O’Grady did between 2010 and 2012, the satisfaction comes from a job well done.
The speed, the g-forces and all that good stuff won’t count for much unless you nail it. That means carrying the speed with you through a complex of corners. As O’Grady explains it, for an accomplished rider it’s not that difficult to go quickly around a bend. Where the skill comes in is in maintaining that momentum.
When you get it right it’s the greatest feeling in the world. When you don’t the frustration is palpable. On the backfoot all the way around the circuit until you end up back where you started, hoping this time to get it spot on.
“That’s what you work on every weekend you’re out there,” he says.
“Looking at the data to see how you can exit that bit quicker, how you could go in quicker and carry more cornering speed. You spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen looking at the data, to see where you can improve in this area or that area. Looking at gearing.
“When it works out it’s brilliant because you’re after putting the work in sitting in front of a computer screen looking at squiggly lines for two hours, but when it doesn’t and you go slower... some weekends you can go nuts from the whole thing.”
MOTORCYCLE racing is a technical sport, albeit one built on passion and heart. It’s also something that O’Grady was pretty much born into. Bikes were an ever-present part of his childhood. His father, John, is a noted motorcycle mechanic and was an accomplished racer in his own right.
“From the age of five or six I would have been travelling all over Ireland with him,” Emmet explains.
“It’s been bred into me basically. I would have been at Mondello from the age of about one or two onwards, as a family thing with my dad. He did road racing along with short circuit, but it was mainly road racing towards the end of his career.”
Life on two wheels came naturally to O’Grady then. At about five or six he got his first bike, a motocross for use off-road. His competitive career started quite late, however, although not, we must stress, by choice.
“On my sixteenth birthday I was supposed to go do a track day at Mondello, but I ended up trying a race go-kart at a go-kart track and the brakes broke and I ended up breaking my two ankles, my two legs, in a crash,” he recounts.
“I was about six months in a wheelchair and it took me a year to learn how to walk again. I actually didn’t hop on a bike until the age of about 21 in Mondello.”
By then – after a pause for the Leaving Cert – the urge was strong to give it a proper go. His dad sourced a bike on loan and off they went, Kildare and Mondello bound. Turns out O’Grady was something of a natural. His dad could see it straight away. Not that he was ever a pushy father.
“I said I wanted to do it. He said ‘let’s make it happen’ and that’s what happened,” Emmet explains.
“The way it started for me was that I got a license and a bike and then the first year I ended up winning the Southern Championship on a 400cc bike. Then I went on to the next year and my father would have been tuning engines for a race team. He got me a spin out on one of their race bikes.
“The owner of that team ended up seeing something in me and asked me to go to England the year after and go racing. So I was kind of fast-tracked through short circuit on to full tracks. What happens with short circuit riders is that if you’re riding short circuit you’re not really going anywhere so you turn to the roads to get your adrenaline fix after that.
“The difference between the circuit and the road is the differ
ence between Formula 1 and rallying sort of thing.”
It was a rapid rise for the young Tralee man. Racing in the British Supersports Championship is a pretty big deal. It’s the feeder series of the famed British Superbikes Championship, with its races taking place on the same tracks on the same race weekends.
It means big crowds, famous venues and heavy media interest. The races are carried live on TV on British Eurosport. This is sport at a professional level and right there in the middle of it was a young man in his early twenties from Tralee. Eyes wide open, taking it all in.
“I liked Silverstone a lot,” he says.
“It would have been one of my favourite tracks because it was such a fast track – a flowing track. Donnington Park was another one. I would have had two podiums there. Oulton Park and Cadwell Park as well. They would have been closer to road racing – the barriers were right up next to you. I’ve been to all of them. Thruxton is another one. I won on it – it’s very fast.”
Competing in England was a hell of a buzz, no doubt, but it carried pressures with it too. Pressure to perform, to make a mark, and to justify the faith being shown by your sponsors and manufacturer.
“Honestly it was hard going over there,” says the 33-year-old, who was competing for Triumph in Supersport.
“If you had a good weekend, you’d a good week and if you’d a bad weekend, you’d a bad weekend. It was fiercely competitive.”
Possibly one of the biggest pressures was financial and that was the main reason O’Grady’s career in England stalled when it did.
“A fella coming from Kerry has never been able to get any sort of funding really. You have to go further afield,” he says.
“That’s kind of wrong me saying that as well because obviously there have been plenty of people around who have put their hands in their pockets for me. But when you’re in British Supersport, making the step up to British Superbikes – to the highest level – you need an apprenticeship that’s going to cost you a lot beforehand.
“We were going over to England for three years and the bike would have been supplied every weekend, but the tyre bill would have been €3,000 when you came home afterwards. For a full season you’re talking about €30,000 all of a sudden on tyres alone.
“Then when you’re going over from Ireland you’ll compete here as well... so all in all a year could end up costing you €60,000 all in including travel over and back and everything. Your parents end up going through very hard times financially, end up re-mortgaging stuff to get you to the places you want to be.
“At the end of the day then if you don’t get the breaks, you don’t get the breaks and you end up then kind of coming back to what you’re able to do. If you race in Ireland you’re still able to win and still become a champion here. It’s still gives you that buzz.”
There’s no bitterness about how things played out for the Kerry man in the UK. He lived what many can only dream of.
“I’ve never been one to dwell,” he says.
“I see a lot of riders going
‘if I had this chance this would have happened and that would have happened.’ I see it that I’m delighted to still be racing at the level that I’m at. I’m still able to be at the top of my game even to this day.
“I live in the moment. I don’t look back and I don’t look forward. I enjoy what I’m doing at the minute, because any day could be the last day you’re racing a bike through injury or anything like that.”
THE move back to Ireland has, nevertheless, been a most satisfying one. There are three main circuits in the country: Kirkistown and Bishopscourt in the north, and Mondello in the south, which has two different track layouts. The scene is vibrant.
“The level here is strong,” O’Grady explains.
“A lot riders that I would have raced, the likes of Glenn Irwin, race here when they’re not racing in British Superbikes. The same as Jack Kennedy from Dublin. The level here is strong because people come back here and compete once or twice a year.
“It’s still very competitive and you can gauge where you are, what level you’re riding to, whether it be a fella who’s come back from the UK the year before or another fella who’s coming up. One thing is they set lap records and if you’re close to the lap records here in Ireland you know that you’re still riding very competitively.”
In 2018, aboard a Yamaha he purchased himself, O’Grady claimed the Masters title in the 600cc category. A well-deserved success, but one that left him in a bind as to whether or not he ought to give the British scene another go at the age of 31. It would be on a bigger bike this time – a 1,000cc – and it was a dilemma that resolved itself.
“We were looking at the idea and we got a phone call from TAG Racing, Thomas Fitzsimons, up in Dublin. A gentleman’s agreement as done really to say that there was a Superbike sitting there and he’d take care of most of it and we’d run together for 2019. That’s how that kicked off and we took it from there,” he says.
O’Grady’s new Honda proved a handful at first. Indeed on his first test last year he ended up crashing – “the bike was ready just for the bin afterwards” – meaning his 2019 campaign was largely a year of development.
It ended with him getting back on the pace late in season and ready to challenge in 2020. After testing pre-season in Spain, he was ready to rock and roll again before the Covid-19 emergency halted racing. It’s been quite the readjustment for a man used to living life in the fast lane.
“For me, Monday to Sunday, what you do is you train twice a day and eat well and try stay as light as you possibly can,” he explains.
“It’s like being a jockey in a way, but you have to do a lot of strength and endurance work as well, because the races are 2025 minutes long. You need your food right at a certain time. If you want to be competitive, you have to do all the scientific training bits and nutrition.
“If you go up to a race in Mondello, you leave in the caravan on Thursday evening and you don’t pull out of there until Sunday evening. Whether it’s a good weekend of a bad weekend, you have to do a team debrief at the end of it.
“You have to go through all the bits and pieces of what you could have improved on over the weekend and then come Monday it’s back to the same grind again of eating right and training in the morning and training in the evening again.
“I think that’s the biggest misconception of it [that you just race]. It’s not like – and don’t get me wrong – Junior B football, where you turn up and just play. To get to the top level you have to be 100% dedicated and committed to it.
“Sometimes that’s being awake at 1am in the morning tossing and turning, wondering what can you do to improve. That’s what makes podiums and wins and not getting there.”
One ambition that remains for the champion racer is to follow in his father’s footsteps by dipping his toes in the road racing circuit. O’Grady was set to race at the North West 200 in Northern Ireland this year. Incidentally he was also due to race it in 2013 but for a hand injury to rule him out. Compared to the track, road racing is quite dangerous – something O’Grady is more than aware of.
“It’s the fastest and easiest of the international road races in Ireland,” he says.
“Would I be afraid of it? Of course I would be. I could go out and do two rounds and come back in again and say that’s not for me. On the other hand, I think I could get a good result there as well against riders I’d be competing with on track.”
It’s an interesting world, and one that’s increasingly popular here in the Kingdom. A plethora of riders – such as young Kevin Coyne from Killarney – compete at a national and international level, so there’s a nice little community growing all the time.
“It’s a good bit of craic,” O’Grady says.
“I help them as much as I possibly can as well, because think about it. A North Kerry fella going up to Mondello on a 600cc bike, they wouldn’t know what to do and you just steer them in the right direction. That’s enjoyable as well.
“When you see fellas going out on track you can tell instantly whether they’re going to make it, if they have it naturally... they’re always going to enjoy it no matter what, but whether they’re going to be very fast and competitive or just being out there for the fun is the thing. You can see it straightaway, who has an affinity for it. There’s no easy way to learn it.”
You either have it or you don’t. O’Grady clearly does.
When you’re making the step up to British Superbikes – to the highest level – you need an apprenticeship that’s going to cost you a lot beforehand