OXLEY INTERVIEW: CAL CRUTCHLOW
Britain’s best racer for years talks about pain.
We conduct this interview in Crutchlow’s o ce inside the LCR Honda garage, pit lane, Sepang. It sounds glamorous but it’s really nothing of the sort. The tiny space feels more like a police interrogation cell than a Motogp star’s paddock sanctuary. Paint peels from the walls and apart from a rickety table and chair the only furniture is a manky old sofa, like you might find in a crack den, or that 1980s student house. The weather is typically tropical – 34 degrees outside – so Crutchlow is sprawled across the sofa wearing nothing more than underpants and some recently acquired tattoos.
This is Crutchlow’s tenth season in the premier-class of motorcycle racing. The man from Coventry hasn’t won a Motogp world championship but he is the only Briton to have won a premier-class grand prix in the past 40 years. And the only Britons who have won more GPS than the 34-year-old are Mike Hailwood, Geoff Duke, Barry Sheene and Phil Read. That’s some seriously exalted company. Crutchlow has made it this far through grim determination, a fearsome ability to shrug off pain and a blind refusal to admit defeat. He’s not the kind of guy with whom you’d want to have a fight.
‘I like to suffer,’ he says. ‘I have a hardness about me that if it hurts I want it to hurt more, which is the worst possible mentality you can have as a motorcycle racer, but it works for me.’
Crutchlow won the World Supersport title in 2009, riding a Yamaha R6, which got him a ride in the factory’s World Superbike team the following year, aboard an R1. That season he won three races and had several teams chasing his signature for 2011: both BMW and Honda offered £800,000. No doubt he could’ve enjoyed a very lucrative career in WSB for as long as he wanted.
But no, that was the easy road and Crutchlow was more interested in taking the rocky road. Tech 3 owner Herve Poncharal offered him £300,000 to ride a Yamaha YZR-M1 in the 2011 Motogp championship and he signed on the dotted line.
‘I wanted to get to the top, not just get to the top championship and cruise around, I wanted to be the best in the world. I’m not the best in the world, but you have to have the belief and the desire to be the best or it’s pointless doing it.’
Crutchlow has tried hard to be the best, probably too hard. Since 2011 he has won three Motogp races, climbed the podium a further 15 times and had close to 200 crashes.
‘I sit there and think I could’ve finished on the podium another ten times if I hadn’t crashed out of half of them. I give it my all, no matter what happens, which means more to me than anything. But that’s also been my downfall. Even if I don’t feel good with the bike in the race I’ll keep pushing and pushing and pushing. That’s just me and that’s why I haven’t finished half the races I should’ve finished.’ Crutchlow has always had a cockiness about him, but it’s race-face cockiness, not normal-life cockiness. Even when he decided to take the hard road into Motogp he thought he had what it took to make it. Soon he wasn’t so sure.
‘I went to watch the Valencia race at the end of 2010, before I started testing with Tech 3 a few days later. I was looking at the guys riding around at the back – at the time it was people like [Hiroshi] Aoyama
‘I could’ve done five or six years in WSB at a million a year… But back then I wasn’t looking at Motogp in money terms. I wanted to be at the top’
– and I thought, these guys are rubbish! Me being me and having that killer instinct I said, “I can’t wait to get out there with them”. Then on the first day of testing I didn’t even see which way Aoyama went. I thought, this is a lot harder than racing a production bike on Pirellis.’ The first half of his rookie Motogp season was such a disaster – slow and crashing – that he wanted to get out and return to the relative safety of WSB. Finally, things came to a head at the U.S. GP in July. ‘Honestly it was a really dicult time and I had a massive fight with Herve at Laguna. I wanted to go back to Superbikes. As a racer you have doubts in your head and I said to myself, “I just can’t do this”. Herve came into my motorhome and said something like, “you’re being beaten by [Karel] Abraham!” So I said, “well, fucking go and sign Abraham!” And then we had the argument. I remember him half leaving the motorhome and me half pushing him out. We didn’t speak for a while after that, but ever since me and Herve have been great, great friends.’ The turning point for Crutchlow was Motogp’s change in technical regulations, from 800cc engines to 1000s in 2012. ‘When the 1000s came they were fantastic for me, because I could play with the bike a lot more. The 800s were so robotic, completely different to what I’d ridden before. The superbike moved around a lot, I used the throttle a lot more, I played with the brakes and although the electronics were good they weren’t the be all and end all. The 800s were like twist-and-go bikes and I couldn’t get my head around them. ‘I immediately went a lot better with the 1000s. I went well in preseason tests, got fourth at the first race in Qatar, fourth at the second race at Jerez and my first podiums at Brno and Phillip Island.’ Next the factories came knocking. Crutchlow signed with Ducati in 2014 – his first multi-million pound payday – but soon realised he had no long-term future there. ‘I knew the following year I wouldn’t be in the factory team, because Ducati told me they’d already signed [Andrea] Dovizioso and [Andrea Iannone].’ So he got out of there (with a big, fat payo) and joined LCR Honda, where he’s been ever since.
That gamble he took in 2011 has paid off handsomely, with a year at Ducati and then multiple contracts with LCR and HRC.
‘I could’ve done five or six years in WSB at a million a year, but I make that and more in one year in Motogp. But back then I wasn’t looking at Motogp in money terms at all. I just wanted to be at the top, I didn’t care about anything else. At that point in my career I wasn’t bothered about taking a salary cut because me and Lucy [now Mrs Crutchlow] lived day by day, happy as anything. If we could pay the bills, have food and be comfortable we were happy, so I took the chance and jumped across because I wanted to be at the top, I wanted a chance to be there. As things have gone on I’ve got bigger and better stuff, but I don’t blow my money. I’m not a Ferrari or Lamborghini guy.’
I ask Crutchlow to list the reasons for his success, splitting them four ways between skill, grit, bravery and bloody mindedness.
‘My talent is probably 10 percent, the rest is dogged determination. Trying to get it done, trying to prove a point to myself that I can do it.’ Crutchlow has had the fortune and the misfortune to have spent the last six seasons riding the same motorcycle as Motogp king Marc Marquez, arguably the greatest rider of all time. That’s why he is the best man in the world to assess the skills of the eight-times world champion. ‘People have no idea how special Marc is – he’s a freak of nature. He can get results, week in week out, while riding a bike that’s notoriously the hardest thing to ride. Marc is 100% talent. But he’s a bit like me – he’s got that dogged determination to grit his teeth and get on with it.’ Marquez is another who tastes a lot of asphalt. Last year the Spaniard fell off his RC213V 14 times, against Crutchlow’s 12. Both men understand that pain is part of bike racing. But everyone has their limit. Last year Crutchlow thought he had reached his, due to ongoing problems with the ankle he mangled at Phillip Island in October 2018. At the end of last season he admitted he would probably retire once his current contract expires at the end of 2020.
‘I’m still fast… But at some point everyone has to stop, even Valentino’
‘I crashed out of the final race of last year at Valencia and I said to Lucy in the motorhome: “I’m done with this, I cannot bear this pain anymore. I’m going to have an op and get the metalwork out of the ankle.” Then we spoke to the surgeons – the problem is this nerve that runs over one of the plates, but they can’t take out that plate on its own, they have to take all the metal out. Even then they can’t guarantee that the nerve will be good for at least a year. It will be better because there’ll be less pressure on the nerve, but it may not settle down for a year or more, so I’d end up in the same boat. So I started winter testing and the pain was horrendous.
‘Now the ankle is okay, because I didn’t ride motorcycles in the winter, so I wasn’t getting any inflammation. I rode my bicycle a lot, but it’s not the same, because you’re not bending your leg and your foot all over the place.’
Which brings us to a little exclusive: Crutchlow has cancelled his plans to retire at the end of this season and may change teams for 2021. ‘Where I’m at I still think I’ve got a lot to give – I’m still fast and still competitive and I’ve still got the desire. But at some point everyone has to stop, even Valentino [Rossi].