Ian Simpson double
Twenty-six years ago, Scotland’s Ian Simpson became the first man to win a British Superbike title on a Norton and the last man to win both the Superbike and Supersport titles in the same year. This is the inside story of his incredible achievement.
Not to be outdone is our own Ian Simpson. Back in 1994 he accidentally took on the demands of the double when he joined Duckhams Norton, but then had to take on the supersport 600 title to help pay the bills. How and why did he manage to take both titles? Read on...
Scotland produced a wealth of motorcycle racing talent in the 1980s and 90s, from Donnie Mcleod and Niall Mackenzie to Steve Hislop, Jim Moodie, Brian Morrison, Iain Macpherson, and Iain Duffus. But one of the greatest was Ian Simpson, the Dalbeattie rider who, 26 years ago this year, pulled off an astonishing feat: not only did he become the first man to win the British Superbike Championship on a Norton, he also won the Supersport 600 Championship in the same year on a Yamaha FZR600.
And yet it wasn't for show or for glory that ‘Simmo’ took on the epic challenge – it was merely to earn a wage: “I only did it because I wasn’t getting paid a penny by Norton and I knew I could make some money in the 600 championship with Avon Tyres and Yamaha,” says Simpson, now 50.
As well as being a five-time British champion, Simpson has also won three TT races, including a Formula 1/Senior double for the Honda Britain team in 1998. But at the dawn of the 1994 season, when he signed for the Duckhams Norton team, the then 24-year-old Scot had only won the British Supersport 600 Championship (1991) and the Supersport 400 Championship (1993) and had never won a Superbike race, never mind a title.
“In 1993 I had a Francis Neil-sponsored Kawasaki ZXR750 (as well as Supersport 400 and 600 bikes) but I didn’t race it so much. I did a few World Superbike rounds as a wild card but I couldn’t afford to do many British Championship rounds because there was hardly any prize money available. I had never won a British Superbike race before 1994. I’d led a few but never won. I’d only ever had standard bikes with standard forks and brakes so just couldn’t get near the likes of Terry Rymer, Rob Mcelnea and Jamie Whitham on their factory-supported bikes.”
But on a shoestring budget and with inferior machinery, Simpson ran close enough to the front of the field on a Superbike to persuade Norton team boss Colin Seeley to take a punt on him and when Simmo’s personal sponsor, Norrie Lymburn, put his name forward to the British team,
they agreed to take him on. Seeley soon discovered that his new signing came with baggage though. “Colin didn’t want me to do the 600 championship but I had already signed a deal with Avon tyres and Yamaha so I had to do it,” Simmo says. And with that, a crack at both titles was on.
As odd as it seems now, it was actually quite standard procedure to race in different classes in the 1990s before each class became so specialised, as Simpson explains: “I had raced in the Supersport 400 Championship, the Supersport 600 Championship and the Superbike Championship in 1992 so it wasn’t unusual to race in different classes back then – in fact it was normal. Jim Moodie did both championships in 1993. He won the 600 championship and came second in Superbikes. Carl Fogarty rode a 400 in 1991 and a 125 at the TT as well as Superbikes so it was just what people did back then.”
While the Superbike class (then called the HEAT Supercup but essentially the same as BSB) was the more important, Simpson couldn't afford to slack off in the 600cc class because that’s where his wages were coming from – he had to perform.
“I concentrated more on the Superbike because it’s so much harder to get the best out of a Superbike – there’s so much more stuff to adjust. With the 600, I just jumped on it and rode it. My dad (former racer, TT winner, and hugely respected engineer, Bill Simpson) was my 600 mechanic so he always had that prepped and ready and it was always good. It was fast too – V&M had built the engines for it. But basically, I just rode both bikes as hard as I could every time I went out. I certainly didn’t hold back on the 600 to save myself for the Superbike.”
Even though he had raced in different classes before, the extra strain of setting up and competing at the front on a Superbike took its toll in 1994. “Oh, it was horrendous at times,” Simpson admits. “My brain was just flat-out. The thing about racing in two championships is that every time you switch bikes it feels really awkward because you’ve just got used to the other one. That’s what impressed me so much about Joey Dunlop – how he could ride so many different bikes and win on them all.
“Some riders ride the same bike every year and focus on the same tracks and that’s a very different game because, if you keep practising something you’ll eventually get good at it. When you’ve got loads of different bikes it isn’t like that because every time you jump from one to another there are huge differences. One might have slicks, another might have road-legal tyres, some have crap brakes, or quick-shifters – there are so many differences so every bike feels awkward.
“I remember riding three bikes in 1997. I won the Superstock Championship on a Ducati 998, was second in the Supersport 600 Championship on a V&M Honda, and then I was given Hizzy’s Red Bull Ducati 998 Superbike to ride. That was a horrendous year so after that I said ‘Never again.’ My brain went into complete meltdown, trying to cope with so many different bikes. Superstock bikes then were horrible things to ride – big, slow, heavy, wallowy, horrible things with no brakes and horrible clutches. It wasn’t like today where Superstockers are so similar to Superbikes. At least the 600 worked properly – it was a proper race bike that had good brakes and turned well so it was actually closer to a Superbike than a Stocker was. They were absolute pieces of shit!”
The 1994 season was held over 11 rounds and 22 races and, while success came straight away on the 600 with three wins from the first three rounds, things took a bit longer on the Norton. “I was winning straight away in the 600cc class so that went pretty smoothly and ended up being a straight battle between me and Mike Edwards. The Superbike obviously took a bit more learning and it was a far harder championship to be part of. The bikes are harder to set-up, they’re harder to ride, and the quality of riders
“THE NORTON RCW588 SUPERBIKE WAS HARDER TO SET UP AND RIDE. WITH LESS ENGINE BRAKING THAN A TWO-STROKE, IT WOULD ‘RUN-ON’ INTO CORNERS. YOU WERE ON A KNIFE-EDGE WITH THAT BIKE ALL THE TIME.”
in the field is higher. I was up against Jim Moodie, Steve Hislop, Phil Borley, James Haydon, Robert Dunlop, Ray Stringer – even Carl Fogarty and Jamie Whitham at the first round.”
It wasn't until the fifth round at Oulton Park that Simpson finally broke his Superbike duck and took a debut win in the class, delighting not only himself and his team but the legions of British fans who loved nothing better than seeing a home-built bike beating a whole field of Japanese machines.
Simmo attributes his sudden improvement in pace down to a trip over the Irish Sea. “I used to go to the TT and come back to the short circuits and go faster, for some reason, and I think that kind of happened a bit in 1994: weird, but true. I can't really explain how that was!”
Once he had gotten the monkey off his back, the wins kept coming. He won both races at Oulton, both races at home in Knockhill, took a first and second at Pembrey (where his team-mate Phil Borley took his first win on the Norton in race two) and, from there on, the two Norton riders cleaned up, taking every win between them apart from the final race of the season at Brands Hatch which went to Simpson’s best mate and former Norton rider (by then with Yamaha), Jim Moodie. Of the 22 races in 1994, the Nortons won 14 of them and finished on the podium 31 times. Better still, Simpson and Borley finished first and second on no less than 11 occasions.
But that doesn't mean the Norton was an easy bike to ride: far from it. “It was a hard thing to ride and required a different technique,” Simmo explains. “It ‘run on’ all the time so you had to lift the back wheel off the ground when you were turning it into corners so it went light and would spin and not push the front. There was no engine-braking – even less than on a two-stroke. I knew, just from feel, what I had to do with the bike to get it to work but doing it was a different matter! I was riding on a knife-edge most of the time and was lucky that there weren’t many wet rounds in 1994 or I would have crashed a lot more. The Norton was so difficult to ride in the rain.”
Simpson insists that, by 1994 at least, the rotary-engined Norton did not have the advantage over the four-cylinder bikes that it had enjoyed in previous years with the JPS team. “It was lighter but it wasn’t any faster. When they first came out they were missiles – much faster than bikes like Yamaha’s FZ750 and Suzuki’s GSX-R750 – but they handled like shit. By the time I rode it, all the other bikes had caught up in terms of speed – bikes like Honda’s RC45 and Ducati’s 916 were out by then – but the Norton was still lighter.
“The rotary engine was brilliant for a race bike because it was so small and powerful but the downside was they wore out really quickly, they were unreliable, and they smoked a lot so they weren’t very environmentally friendly! They sounded great though.”
Jumping between bikes meant very swift visits to the podium in 1994 as Simmo often had to get straight back out on another bike. But that's where a good team boss can help. “I had to cut them short sometimes but I did always try and do the podium for both championships. I don’t think I missed any. Colin Seeley was really good with the organisers – he’d phone up and make sure there was a race run in between the Supersport bikes and the Superbikes so I at least had a bit of time to switch between the two and change leathers.”
Simpson wrapped up the 600 title with a round to spare, beating Mike ‘Spike’ Edwards to the championship by 15 points (Simmo took six wins to Edwards’ five). The Superbike championship went down to the final round at Brands Hatch but a win in the opening leg ahead of Borley and Moodie sealed the title to make it a double. “I just felt massive relief as I crossed the line,” Simmo recalls. “It was more relief than joy, although obviously I was very happy too. But we'd done what we'd set out to do and it was a huge relief to have that weight lifted off my shoulders.”
The reason Simpson isn’t a household name isn’t because of his lack of success
– it’s because of the limited TV coverage of bike racing in 1994. Only four rounds of the 11-round British Championship were shown on live TV so many of his wins went largely unnoticed – or at least unseen by a wider audience. That all changed in 1996 when the championship was revamped and every round was shown on television. “Aye, TV coverage changes everything,” Simmo admits “but it really doesn’t bother me. I know what I did and that’s all that matters. I suppose with TV I could have made more money though!”
His efforts were enough to impress team bosses though and for 1995, Simpson’s signature was highly sought-after. “I got a chance to ride for Padgetts in 500cc Grands Prix – on the Harris Yamaha YZR500 V4 that John Reynolds ended up riding – but they couldn’t pay me. I sound like a bloody mercenary but I needed a wage! I couldn’t have afforded to trail round the world with no wages. Sean Emmett had done well in Grands Prix in 1993 and 1994 and I always considered myself to be on a par with him, riding wise.”
With the Norton team folding at the end of 1994 due to lack of cash, many of the staff switched straight over to the Castrol Honda team in BSB and Simpson went with them. But the RC45 wasn’t as competitive as it should have been and a badly-broken leg cut Simpson’s season short. By 1997 he had switched to the Superstock 1000 class and won the championship that year as well as the Junior TT – his first TT win. He backed that up with a Formula 1/Senior double in 1998 on the Honda Britain RC45.
By 2001, after breaking both legs four times and almost having to have his right leg amputated, Simpson called it a day and retired from racing. He would later run the ETI Racing team in BSB but now spends his time with track day instruction, a bit of classic racing on a Yamaha TZ350, and running a new touring company called Adventure Moto Scotland, based in his native Galloway.
There’s still no hesitation when asked which feat he’s most proud of – winning the British Superbike Championship or winning the Senior TT. “Oh, the British title, any day,” he says. “That's far more difficult to win. BSB and the TT are incomparable, in my opinion. It’s much harder to win a BSB title than it is to win a TT race: much, much, much harder. Anybody who’s won both will tell you that.”