AT LUNCH WITH...
A stellar career of engine tuning, drag racing and race team management started with a GS1000 and a crash...
Jack Valentine – drag racing star, gifted engineer, top-class road race team boss and lunchtime drinker
In 1982 Jack Valentine looked set to continue a promising career in engineering. Over 13 years he’d risen through the ranks at a company manufacturing gear-cutting machinery, eventually taking charge of the training department he’d attended when he first joined as a 16-year-old. Then an almighty crash on a Suzuki GS1000 set him on a different path.
“I was riding across the moors [near his home town of Rochdale] chasing a friend and got into a massive tank slapper that threw me off and smashed the bike to bits,” says Jack in his thick Lancashire accent, a pint of bitter in hand. “I’d been thinking of selling the GS, but that was out of the question after the crash so I thought I might as well turn it into a drag bike. Without that crash, I might never got involved competitively at all. I might have carried on working in engineering.”
Instead, he took all that precision engineering experience and embarked on a tuning career that led to three European drag racing titles, ended Honda’s run of 17 consecutive Formula One TT victories, gave Triumph their first TT
win in 28 years and even got a WSB podium with a wildcard rider. As the ‘V’ in V&M Racing and later Valmoto, Jack made bikes that won national titles by the bucketload and he worked with everyone from Carl Fogarty to John Hopkins, from David Jefferies to Sylvain Guintoli.
That GS1000 was instrumental in Jack’s early career in other ways, too. Before the Suzuki, he’d ridden trials and terrorised the neighbourhood on a Honda 500-4. “I turned into a hooligan on the Honda. I went all over Europe and rode to loads of TTS, the Dragon Rally in Wales, everything. I rode it day-in day-out, when there was snow on the ground, all that carry-on. I did local hillclimbs on it too, riding to the events.
“Then I saw a bloke arrive on the new GS1000 at Snetterton and he did a race on it and cleared off. He smoked all these race bikes, and I thought: ‘I’ll have one of them’. I ordered one from my local dealer just in time to go to the TT. I got off the ferry, did 100mph down the promenade – we always did that in those days – dropped my bag off at the hotel and was straight round the course. “I remember the motor was mint, but I was grinding everything out round Braddan Bridge so it was off with the centrestand, which was better but it was still grinding out. By the end of the week I’d chamfered everything off and it was spot on.”
Such was Jack’s enthusiasm for the GS that he did a few club races on it, and – crucially – some sprints. “I was leading the northern sprint championship and said to my buddy Steve Mellor [the ‘M’ in V&M] that I’d like to win it. We both liked playing around with bikes – we were porting cylinder heads in my dad’s garage – and we put twin 40mm Webers on the GS [the standard bike had 26mm carbs] and made it into a bit of a Wes Cooley thing with a chopped down seat. We won the sprint championship.
“After I had that crash, I put a longer swingarm on it and went drag racing. But everyone else seemed to have more time than us, and I eventually worked out they were all self-employed. By then Steve and I were already getting a few enquiries from local lads wanting their bikes tuning, and then Steve got made redundant, so we set up V&M Racing in 1982.
“Steve was a genius at carburation. He understood how carbs worked, he had a gift. We did everything we could to the GS1000 – big cams, lots of cylinder head work, the twin Webers. We were learning how to build really quick engines during those years. From 1983 onwards we started winning loads of races on the GS – all the street championships.
“Back then the ports were tiny, so you could get lots more out of them, unlike today where the gains are minimal. We invested in flow benches and we built a Prostock bike [from a GSX1100] in 1984. I won our first European Championship on it in 1986, which was a big deal because it was against all the fast Scandinavians.
The GS had taught Jack and Steve plenty – and V&M’S fame was spreading beyond the drag world. “In 1989 a local lad called Dave Leach brought us one of the first FZR600S and although we didn’t have enough time to tune it before the TT, we set it up on our dyno and he did really well [he came second] and it grew from there.
“There wasn’t a big difference tuning for drag or road racing, because back then all the engines were still highly tuneable – they needed lots of cylinder head and carburation work, so it was all the stuff we’d learned making fast drag bikes. It might sound crazy, but with the drag racing we always built our engines to have tractable, linear power – and of course that’s exactly what you need in road racing. People used to send their carburettors from all over the world for us to set up.”
The next big breakthrough came in 1991 when Dave Leach came to them with his new Yamaha FZR400RR and asked them to set it up. “He won the Supersport 400 TT with a lap record of 108mph and when you start winning those sort of races – and racers see one of your bikes fly past them down the straight – you get plenty of business. “The next year we got asked by Yamaha to do an FZR400RR for Foggy at the TT. I remember he went out for the first time in practice, and from a standing start did a 111mph lap [smashing Leach’s lap record]. He came in and I asked him how the bike was and he says: ‘It’s alright. I lost the front a couple of times, but I brought it up on my knee.’ Typical Foggy. Trouble was, in the race he’d just taken the lead when a piston broke.”
While Jack’s business partner Steve was happy to continue tuning engines and working magic with carbs, Jack had other ambitions. “I wanted to set up a professional race team – and in 1994 I managed to do it. Ian Simpson just pipped our rider Spike Edwards to the Supersport championship that year, but I didn’t mind too much because Simpson was using one of our engines, too – we had the top five engines that year.”
Given the start V&M had with the FZR600S, you’d think Yamaha would be keen to keep things running smoothly. But it didn’t work out like that. “In 1995 I wanted a YZF750 to see what we could do with a superbike, but Yamaha kept messing me about and then Honda asked if I wanted to run a team for them. I didn’t really, because there was a hell of a lot more to come from the FZR600S. So I went back to Yamaha and told them the score, but they still messed me about. Then Honda offered us all the bikes, free spares, £25,000 and an RC45 to play with. That was the start of a really good relationship with Honda. “We won the TT in 1995 for Honda with Iain Duffus and Joey was fourth – his best ever 600 result at the time. Working with Joey was great. We were in Duckhams colours then and I had a special set of leathers for him, but I didn’t want to push him to wear them in practice – you’ve got to respect people as they are, and I knew he probably wouldn’t want to. As long as he wore them for the race I’d be happy.
“He took out his 125 first, wearing his filthy green
‘FOGGY WENT OUT IN PRACTICE AND DID A 111MPH LAP FROM A STANDING START, SMASHING THE TT LAP RECORD’
and white Kushitanis and then came in, stripped off in the pitlane and put on the Duckhams leathers. I couldn’t believe it. He kept the leathers on while riding his other bikes, too. I think it was because he knew we built quality bikes, so he had some respect for us as a team and as engine builders. “He was humble, too. He came in after one practice and asked for softer springs, but I wasn’t sure about that – I said he’d be pushing harder in the race, so the current springs would probably work better. But we went with what he said – he was Joey Dunlop, after all – and he just lost out on a podium. He said afterwards: ‘You were right, I should have stuck with harder springs’. He could have kept that to himself, but he took the trouble to tell me.” In 1996 V&M helped Ian Simpson to his first TT and Honda’s trust in the team was proved the following year, when Jack was able to send Steve Mellor over to HRC to build the factory RC45 engine that Michael Rutter would use. “The frustrating thing was they had some really shit top retainers on the valve springs – they weren’t machined from aluminium or titanium, it looked like they were stamped out. And they kept breaking in WSB, bringing the mileages down [between engine rebuilds].”
For a team without V&M’S engineering and drag racing background, this might have been a continuing hassle. But not in this case. “Steve realised that GSX-R600 retainers would fit and we knew from our drag experience that though they were heavier, the engine would be fine. So we put them in, and they worked a treat – Rutter won both races in the NW200. Honda would have had a fit if they’d known there were Suzuki parts in their full factory engine, but they never knew. Michael would have won the TT too, but a piston broke on the last lap. It was so frustrating because we knew the pistons were right on their mileage limit, but Honda couldn’t give us any more.”
The relationship with Honda came to an end in 1998, when the manufacturer insisted on using the less-favoured Michelin tyres and then parachuted in a new team manager. At that point Jack decided that enough was enough, and V&M became independent once again.
So what next? Jack smiles, evidently relishing explaining the next chapter. “I knew DJ [David Jefferies] hadn’t got a ride, and that he’d ridden a stock R1 with slicks round the TT course the year before at just shy of 122mph. I looked at the R1 motor and knew we could make it go a lot quicker, so I asked DJ if he wanted to ride one with our engine. “All we did was have Maxton do the forks, put a Penske shock in the rear and adopted a drag mentality about the engine. We lightened and balanced the crank, beefed up the clutch because that looked weak, got some new conrods, fitted new cams and valve springs from the States and we were getting 180bhp. We knew that the factory Hondas were putting out 155bhp, so we were confident. “The R1 was fast as hell and completely stable. We cleaned up at the North West, cleaned up at the TT – DJ would have got the lap record as well as the win, but he was leading by so much that he sat on the back wheel from Creg ny Baa to Brandish – and we cleaned up at the Ulster GP, where DJ set pole position in a novice jacket because he’d never been before. What a year! We put a stop to 17 consecutive Honda TT F1 victories, and after that everyone was on R1s. It was very satisfying.
“DJ was fantastic to work with. He was a proper hooligan. We were at our base in Coleraine [for the NW200] and DJ was supposed to come and meet us to do some PR stuff
‘DJ WOULD HAVE GOT THE LAP RECORD AS WELL AS THE WIN BUT HE SAT ON THE BACK WHEEL FROM CREG TO BRANDISH’
for the local papers. He was late, so I rang him and he said: ‘Oh shit, I forgot – I’m on my way’. He was on a KTM supermoto and we could hear him coming from miles away. Then he appears at the end of the driveway, which was a long, straight bit of road. So we’re all standing there by the house and he does about 80mph down the drive and the press people start running. Then he hits the front brake and does a rolling stoppie for about 100 yards, dropping it down right in front of the press who are left. “Right,” he says, “what do you want me to do?” I could see the local paper people looking at each other thinking: ‘He’s mad’.
“At one point he told me he’d ordered a Clio V6 [a hot hatch with a mid-mounted V6] and I told him I’d seen some reports from top drivers saying they were lethal. Obviously he took no notice of that and he wrote it off the first day he got it. That was DJ.”
He was hard as nails, too. “I didn’t realise that in the 1999 TT he had some cruciate ligament damage and on one of the practice laps he pulled in at Ramsey; we got a message: ‘Rider OK’, so I assumed there was something wrong with the bike. But he was putting his knee back in joint. He said later: ‘Yeah, I moved it the wrong way and it came out, so I had to put it back in’. Bloody hell.”
Listening to Jack talk about DJ, it’s clear why he rarely has any trouble with his riders – he really likes and respects them. Talking to some team managers, you get the feeling they view their riders as unhinged necessities to be tolerated and manipulated. But there’s none of that from Jack. He talks about them like a fan – the fact DJ was a free-spirited hooligan makes him grin, not grimace.
Jack pauses and sups his pint, his demeanour clouding. I know what’s coming next: the downside of genuinely liking riders who race on the Isle of Man. By 2003 Jefferies was riding a GSX-R1000 for TAS Suzuki: “That was a horrible year, because we lost DJ. That was the terrible side of the TT. When the accident happened [DJ crashed on oil at Crosby] we knew it was either Jim [Moodie, who was riding for Jack], DJ or his team-mate Adrian Archibald. It was awful – they wouldn’t give me any information in the pits, so we drove to the hospital and found Jim, who’d nearly been decapitated by wire from a downed telegraph pole. He told us about DJ. Bloody sad. So bloody sad. He was a fantastic character.”
Jack’s a bluff pint-drinking Lancastrian to his toes, but he can’t mask how hard DJ’S death hit him, even now. He sighs. “I asked Jim if he wanted to pull out – I would have understood completely. But he wanted to race. So we had to regroup and carry on. It’s what you do.”
The waitress clears our plates, Jack orders another beer and points to a bag of photo albums he’s brought from home. “Want to have a look?” It’s a treasure trove of drag and road racing history, and we flick through, our moods lifting as Jack chuckles at ’70s haircuts and his increasingly hardcore GS1000. It seems totally appropriate to end our lunch talking about the bike that started Jack down this path in the first place...
“I definitely had my money’s worth out of that GS1000. When it finally blew its brains out at the end of York Raceway’s straight at 126mph it had done 28,000 miles – I’d raced it, ridden round Europe, gone to TTS, won championships on it, the lot. What a bike.”
‘WE KNEW THE HONDAS WERE ONLY PUTTING OUT 155BHP SO WE WERE CONFIDENT’