‘When he got off he was destroyed’
23-time winner recalls the day he took naive car journo on a TT lap
It was a while ago now but I got asked to take a journalist round the TT on a pillion lap. It ended up being a guy from a car magazine. It was a closed circuit and I went for it and did an 100mph★ lap. When I look back at it now I realise that when we were on the start line he had absolutely no idea what he was about to go through. I told him to hold on to me and trying to look cool he said he’d be fine just holding on to the seat. So I said to him again: “Look we’re all big boys here, hold on properly…”
When we got to the end of the lap and he got off the bike he was destroyed and I mean destroyed. He couldn’t use his hands and he had to keep asking me to undo his helmet chinstrap, because his fingers had stopped working and he couldn’t do it himself. No-one ever gets to do pillion laps around the Mountain Course like that and I was the main man at the time. I’m not saying I’m the best but he got something not many people would never get the opportunity to do.
It was then that I told him that the lap was only about 40% how hard we go when we’re racing and we have to do five more of them too. I hoped that would put what racing the Senior TT is like into context. But the most frustrating thing was that when he got off it he tried to play it down. I don’t know if it was because he was a car journalist, but he just couldn’t say it was better on two wheels.
Why couldn’t he just take it for what it was – an incredible, maybe terrifying experience? Instead of saying it was amazing, he didn’t give us any credit, he didn’t regard us as sportsmen – nothing. I don’t really understand that attitude!
‘HE COULDN’T EVEN UNDO HIS HELMET STRAP AFTERWARDS’