One Slick operator
Them an behind Foggy’ st it les
Tony ‘Slick’ Bass is best known for helping Carl Fogarty to four World Superbike titles, but he has also worked as a race engineer for other world huge names, including Joey and Robert Dunlop, Ron Haslam, Niall Mackenzie, Steve Hislop, Fred Merkel and Scott Russell. He was also mentor to road racer Dan Kneen before the popular Manxman was sadly killed at the TT in 2018. Since setting up his workshop in the Isle of Man in 2002, Bass has built and tuned engines for countless TT racers and worked on more road bikes than he can remember. In fact, he can’t even remember a time when he wasn’t involved with motorcycles. “I’ve been around bikes all my life, since I was a baby,” he says. “My dad raced Bantams and I used to sit in his drip tray in my nappies at race meetings! My mum would have to drag me to a water pump to wash me clean. My mum rented out our garage to bike racing sponsor Colin Aldridge and that’s how I got involved in being a race mechanic. I was studying engineering at college but was also helping Colin’s team and gaining useful experience.”
After working with racers like Mark Salle, Jim Wells, and Kevin Wrettom, Slick was signed up by Rothmans Honda to mechanic for Joey Dunlop in 1987. “I was a teetotaller until I worked for Joey,” he remembers. “I was 18 and the most I’d ever had was a shandy. Joey said, ‘I can’t teach you how to fix a motorbike, but I can teach you how to drink’ and he lined up three vodka and cokes on the bar!” In 1989 Slick worked for Steve Hislop (who took a TT treble that year) and became great friends with his fellow Manx resident. It was while he was sharing a house with Hizzy that Bass got a call from Honda chief mechanic Jerry Burgess asking if he would work with Mick Doohan in the 500cc Grand Prix world championship. Slick readily accepted the job but,
‘Joey said he’d teach me to drink and lined up the vodkas’
when Eddie Lawson quit Honda, the team found themselves with an excess of mechanics and the dream job came to nothing. Instead, Bass agreed to work with Carl Fogarty in the factory Ducati WSB squad and soon became his right-hand man, helping him to the 1994 and ’95 World Superbike titles. But when Foggy moved to Castrol Honda in 1996, Slick’s hard-partying lifestyle met with disapproval, and he was sacked by Honda bosses.
It looked like the good times were over. Having worked for some of the greatest riders of modern times,
‘My dad raced and I’d sit in his drip tray in my nappies’
Bass found himself back servicing street bikes. “I was gutted when I got the sack. Within a week I’d gone from being Carl Fogarty’s chief mechanic in the Castrol Honda World Superbike team to fixing up a bike for a courier in a London bike shop,” he says. “But it taught me to grow up a bit. The team expected me to be very professional and I suppose I wasn’t very professional at that time.”
Fogarty failed to win the title on the Honda. How much of that was down to Slick’s absence is anyone’s guess, but when Foggy moved back to Ducati and the duo teamed up again, two more titles followed. It seemed more than a coincidence.
When Foggy’s career was cut short due to injury, Slick went Stateside to work with Scott Russell but, when he too was forced out through injury, Bass found himself without a job. In 2002 he moved to the Isle of Man (where his mum was living) and started the Slick Performance! tuning business that he runs to this day. He also became mentor and close friends with local racer Dan Kneen. The two were inseparable and Kneen’s tragic death at the 2018 TT affected Bass deeply but his lifelong love of bikes remains intact, and he can still be found deep in an engine at his workshop practically every day of the year, just like he did as a baby!