Jake Dixon: confessionsof confessions of a Moto2 racer
Last year Jake Dixon went from BSB hero to Moto2 zero, but with a new bike and team for 2020 he believes this season will be very different…
Put yourself in the racing boots of Jake Dixon. It’s 2018, you’re 22-years-old and you’re riding the crest of a wave in BSB: race wins, up on the podium pretty much every weekend and fighting for the title. You end up second overall to the vastly more experienced Leon Haslam. You’re on your way to the top.
Now it’s 2019, you’ve got yourself a full-time ride in the Moto2 world championship and you’re finishing 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 23rd.
You’ve gone from being a big fish in a pond to a minnow in an ocean of piranhas. And instead of driving home with a trophy and a grin you’re squeezing onto an early morning Ryanair flight to East Midlands airport, wondering why you’ve made life so hard for yourself.
Maybe you should get back to your comfort zone – give up your hopes of a world-class career and return to BSB.
These are the moments that make or break motorcycle racers. Bike racing isn’t all riding technique, chassis settings, software maps,
recovering from injuries and chasing sponsorship, grid girls and champagne. It’s also cold moments of psychological crisis, during which you look deep into yourself and find the will to go on. Or not.
Dixon is soon to embark on his second Moto2 campaign, riding a better bike for a stronger team, even though there were times last year when he really doubted himself.
‘Coming from nearly winning the BSB championship to finishing right at the back and feeling like you’re an absolute licker isn’t easy. It’s mentally dicult,’ says Dixon. ‘I struggled a lot last year, especially with being depressed. It was super, super dicult. The biggest difference between BSB and GPS is that in GPS they don’t give a fuck – every lap is 100 percent.’
Dixon didn’t only struggle on track, he also took a while to adapt to the very different lifestyle.
‘At the start of last year I was like, fuck, I don’t feel comfortable here, everything just feels alien. In BSB you have your own motorhome, so you can chill-out, but you can’t have a motorhome in GPS, so you’re floating around all the time. Plus you’re away a lot more, so you almost get homesick. It’s so different. Lucky I travel with Sarah [Mrs Dixon – they got married in 2018], which is a massive help. If I couldn’t do that it’d be really dicult.’
Bit by bit, Dixon adapted, made friends and started thinking more deeply about his riding.
‘By halfway through the season I began to feel at home. Now I’ve got good relationships with a lot of riders, especially Alex Marquez and Brad Binder. I suppose it depends on what sort of person you are – I feel like I’m quite open and there’s no bullshit, whereas if I was arrogant they’d be like, “who’s this tosser?!”.
‘I text Alex quite a lot. He says you’ve obviously got talent, so when the opportunity arises, like in the wet, show it, because everyone can see it, and just keep chipping away. When I was walking onto the grid at Sepang I was speaking with Marc and he was saying the same: you’ve got a good ride for next season, just keep doing what you’re doing and it’ll come good. Both the Marquez brothers have been really nice.
‘It’s good making friends because when they see me on track they know I don’t know the tracks, so they get me to hop on the back of them and follow them. Alex did that a lot last season, Brad too.’
Last season Binder rode a factory KTM, similar to the bike Dixon rode, so he was able to learn a lot chasing the South African during practice sessions. Indeed Dixon had something of an epiphany following Binder during morning warm-up at Sepang, the penultimate race of 2019.
‘Something clicked then – I went from two seconds off to half a second off. I was already up to speed when he came past. I got behind him and told myself, now I can try to stay with him. I was, like, fuck it, if I crash I crash, it doesn’t matter, so I tried going with him and I was like, oh my god, this is easier than the laps I was doing that were slower.
‘It was down to the way I brake. I don’t usually grab the front brake, I apply it and then squeeze it to keep the bike more settled. Behind Brad I just grabbed the brake and as soon as I did that it was much easier, because then the bike is sideways on the brakes, so it turns itself into the corner. Also, applying more brake pressure initially, then starting to release it means you don’t put full load on the front tyre when you’re entering the corner, so the bike turns better and it doesn’t chatter so much. That made me believe and gave me the drive: yeah, you can do it, it’s just a matter of time.’
It was no coincidence that Dixon scored world championship points in the next race, his second score from the 19 rounds.
His rookie season wasn’t helped by the fact that he rode a KTM. The Austrian factory got their Moto2 bike so wrong last year that Binder used seven different-spec chassis as engineers searched for the right way forward. Chatter and poor turning were the big problems, which haunted Dixon everywhere. Binder’s on-track tuition was a huge help and so was a change of mental approach.
‘Once I accepted what the bike is – the chattering, the bike not turning and not doing this, that and the other – as soon as I accepted that I started to go better. You can change the bike left, right and centre, but more can come from you than from the bike. It’s hard – you’ve got to face it straight in the face and tell yourself that you’ve got to improve. Since I did that I went a lot better. I just opened up to the fact that I needed to stop changing the bike, because when you keep changing the set-up it’s a massive pain in the arse because the bike feels different every time you ride it, so you can’t understand what it’s doing. So I just left it the same and worked on my riding.
‘I’ve come on so much in my riding since then. Now I use the rear brake a lot more, to help the bike stop and to help the bike turn and everything I do now seems to help. I got to see Brad’s data at the end of
‘You’ve got to face it straight in the face and tell yourself that you’ve got to improve’