AT LUNCH WITH...
The brilliant racer, TV pundit and raconteur explains his addiction to classics and why restoring Brit bikes is so damn tricky
A nibble with racer, raconteur and TV pundit James Whitham
James Whitham has won – amongst many other things – two British Superbike Championships, four World Supersport races and a World Superbike race. And as anyone who’s seen his live chat shows with Carl Fogarty knows, he’s not short of a hilarious racing anecdote. But this lunchtime he’s talking about one of his other passions – old motorcycles.
Over the last 27 years he’s restored dozens of machines, starting with an FS1-E he bought for £80 when he was still racing. And though he’s recently built a lovely Métisse, he tends to steer clear of Brit metal. “My dad was into his Nortons, and after he died I managed to buy back one of his old bikes – an ES2, a mint 1953 one.
“It sat in my garage, but one summer’s day I thought: ‘I’m going to get my pisspot helmet on and go out for a ride on my dad’s old bike’. So I’m in the garage setting
all these levers to what the bloke I bought it off wrote down – this one to richen it, that one to retard. I tickled this and pulled that. Then I swing on the kickstart and it fires me up through the bloody garage roof.
“Finally it starts and off I go to KFC to get some chicken. I leave it outside on the stand with it running – I don’t want to get thrown down the street if I have to start it again. It’s not like anyone’s going to nick it anyway. So I’m inside queueing for my chicken, watching it going bap, bap, bap outside, and then I notice it’s also going glug, glug, glug – it leaked about a gallon of oil. British bikes. I sold it after that.”
We’re chatting in James’ local, near the airfield he runs just outside Huddersfield, and I’m learning that behind each entertaining anecdote there’s usually some serious thought. The aversion to Brit classics is no exception. “There’s a definite knack to the British stuff – there’s a lot more nuance about them. With a Japanese bike, if you’ve got the handbook and the spares, you can build it and it’ll go. You put it back together exactly as it says in the book – job’s a dream.
“When I built my Triumph engine [for his Métisse], I mentioned to the bloke who builds my wheels – a genius called Paul Jackson – that I couldn’t stop it leaking oil. He says: ‘Have you lapped your casings in?’ I had. And then he asks what oil I’ve put in my primary drive, and how much. Well, I’d put what it said in the Triumph book – a pint of 80 weight or whatever. He says: ‘Too much, and it’s too heavy – that’s always going to leak. It only needs enough oil to splash the chain. Put 100ml in.’ So I did and it was perfect. With Brit bikes it isn’t just about reading a book, it’s about having run one and knowing what works. That’s why your Rick [Parkington] is good – he knows all that stuff.”
Mind you, despite his love of older Japanese bikes (he’s just bought a TZ750 race bike), James has had some troubled experiences with them, too. “I always wanted a GT750 because when I was going to race meetings with my dad as a kid, that’s what the dudes seemed to have. If you were a go’er you had these big two-strokes – KHS and GTS. So I bought one and it was horrible. Disgustingly bad.
“I had it in my garage for years, though. Then one day I took it out and I thought: ‘No, give it a chance,’ and it was running well so I came flying down this road about half a mile from where we’re sat now, tucked in, doing about 90, which is all they’d do. Now, they’ve got a massive water feed off the top of the three-cylinder head and the pipe blew – firing about a gallon of red hot steam and water over my legs. I thought: ‘You know what, I’m over the GT’.”
Besides inspiring some of James’ least successful classic forays, his dad was instrumental in sparking his enthusiasm for bikes in the first place. “There were two ways into motorcycling in the ’70s. It was a relative – usually your dad or an uncle – or you happened to be at the local rec’ when some kid who was lucky enough, or bent enough to have nicked one, turned up on a motorbike and gave you a go up and down the football field. For me, it was my dad.
“I was really lucky. In 1972 my dad bought the airfield – I was five – and suddenly we had room, lots of it. If you’re a kid living on an estate or street, you’ve no room – soon as you fire a motorbike up your neighbours would complain. My three sisters and mum were all into horses and my dad was into motorbikes and airplanes – it was the best adventure playground in the world.
“We weren’t showered with expensive stuff, mind – even as a 12-year-old I had to buy and fix my own motorbikes. By the time I was 15, me and my mates had bought, sold, bent, thrashed, fixed, welded, set on fire, wheelied over backwards, and generally mucked about with at least ten bikes each.”
Besides providing the space to play on bikes, James’ dad also took him to see plenty of racing. “My dad’s biking mate was a bloke called Clifford Leach, and his son was Dave Leach [who went on to win four TTS]. So I’d go off with my dad on the back of his bike – a 400/4 or 550 or whatever – and Dave was with his dad on the back of his. We’d go to local tracks like Scarborough and watch lads there, then we’d go to Carnaby to watch a club race and have a cup of tea and a butty.” When Dave Leach started racing a 350LC in ’81, 14-year-old James was desperate to get involved. “All I wanted to do on a weekend was go racing with Dave, who was 17, even if my dad didn’t want to go or he was working. So I went in the back of the van with Dave, his dad and his girlfriend. I did two years of that, fixing stuff, mixing fuel, nipping off to get him a brew.”
By the time James was 16 he knew what he wanted to do. “I said to my dad: ‘I’d love to go racing. I’m into it now.’ And we bought a four-year-old Honda MT125 [a two-stroke race bike] in ’83. But my dad would never take me to meetings. He said: ‘If you’re doing it, you’re doing it on your own. I’m not mucking about – I don’t like two-strokes. And Dave will take you to meetings.’ And that’s what happened.”
So, equipped with a passable race bike, it was showtime. But James was some way short of having a racer’s killer instinct. “I wasn’t a competitive kid – I was never a hard sports player. I just took the path of least resistance. In my first race they put all the novices at the back and I was a bit nervous so I went at the back of them. I didn’t want to get in somebody’s way.
“But I got off the grid and thought: ‘Well, they’re not going so fast,’ so I passed one, then another, and another and ended up coming about eighth out of 32 – by far the best novice. So gradually I started to get a bit competitive – thinking I can do better next time. And then I started getting a few club wins and I guess like any sport it all builds. I’d never been good at anything else – I was crap at football and cricket. Bike racing was the first thing I’d ever thought I was good at.”
At that stage he still didn’t realise quite how good he was, though. That changed at the end of his second season, when his dad agreed to buy him an MBA – the
‘I SWING ON THE KICKSTART AND IT FIRES ME UP THROUGH THE ROOF’
bike to have in 125s at the time. “There was only one national meeting left that year, so Pete [Moore, a mate who’d lent him bikes that year] and I went to Oulton Park for the last round of the ’84 British 125 Championship. The championship was already tied up by Robin Appleyard but there were quite a few decent riders there, and it was a big meeting with Mick Grant, Wayne Gardner and all the big names on 500s. And I won it. I started getting quite a lot of confidence then.” Unbeknownst to James, Mick Grant was keeping an eye on the youngster from down the road. The TT star knew James from when he ran his bikes on the airfield James’ dad owned and recognised talent when he saw it. So after a couple of successful years on his 125, James got a call from Mick. “He rang me at the end of ’86 and says: ‘You need to pack in the little bike. What you need is a GSX-R750 Superstock.’ So I sold my MBA and bought a 750 slabsider, having never ridden anything bigger than a 250.”
It was a big step, but not as big as you’d think according to James. “A slabside had what, 90bhp? Not much compared to these days when lads have to jump on to some flippin’ proper stuff. Also, Mick came to a few meetings and helped me out as a mentor. By the end of that year I’d won a couple of British championship rounds and at the end of ’87 Mick said: ‘I’m running a team [the Skoal Bandit Suzukis] and want you and Mez [Phil Mellor] to ride’.”
And so James became a professional road racer. Ahead lay World Supersport, World Superbike and British Superbike glory – and GP rides for Kenny Roberts on a Modenas. But there was one key race arena where he never fulfilled his potential: the TT. After doing the Manx with Carl Fogarty in 1985 – they were by far the fastest newcomers in 250s that year – James did just four years of TT racing. “I never felt I knew it like the back of my hand. I got third on a Supersport and a fourth in the 750 Production B race, but I never really felt like I knew it 100%.”
And then came 1989. Aged 22, James was racing for Mick Grant on the Skoal Bandit Suzukis as a team-mate to his friend Mez Mellor: “1989 was a bad year,” he says, the jovial grin vanishing. “Mez was killed in front of me and Steve Henshaw died in a crash I was involved in.” James clipped a kerb at Quarry Bends on his GSX-R1100 and crashed, sliding down the middle of the road. Henshaw was following and crashed trying to avoid James and the wreckage.
The accident is clearly still vivid in his mind. “I thought: ‘That’s it, I’m dead’. I was kind of waiting for a big bang, and I remember thinking: ‘I wonder if it’s gonna hurt?’ Then I opened my eyes and I’m sat on the white line with not a mark on me. If you did that same crash 100 times, in 99 of them you’re dead. I knew enough about the way I raced to know it didn’t matter what mindset I had going over there... I knew that once I went down Bray Hill there’d be no 80% or 90% for me. I couldn’t trust myself. And if I couldn’t trust myself not to fall off round there, sooner or later it’ll end really badly. So I decided it was the wrong thing for me to do.”
There’s a pause, and I wait for James to continue. “I think those big production bikes were the main cause of the issues. They were fast – you had 140bhp in a thing that wanted to go in a straight line and not round corners. I got nervous on every race grid – at Donington, Monza, Hockenheim – because I didn’t want to fail. I might break my leg, though I wasn’t scared of that. But I got nervous at the Isle of Man because I didn’t want to die. And that’s the difference. You know you’ve got six laps, the best part of two hours, and if you make one mistake, you’re dead.”
‘BIKE RACING WAS THE FIRST THING I’D EVER THOUGHT I WAS GOOD AT’