AARON SLIGHT
Super-cool and committed as a racer, Aaron Slight was one of the greats during the golden era of World Superbikes and as hard as they come…
He deserved the World Superbike title but – for some reason – never managed it. This Kiwi was one teak-tough racer who battled the best on-track, with (some would say) a technological disadvantage over the booming Ducati V-twins. Here’s his story.
We think it would be unfair to come up with the age-old statement ‘the best rider never to have won a World Superbike title’, for Aaron Slight – it’s the sort of thing that gets trotted out for Randy Mamola when it comes to 500cc GP racing. There was so much more to Aaron. He took seven pole positions on his way to 13 World Superbike race wins (along with 42 seconds and 32 thirds) and this gave him the two runner-up spots in the WSB championships.
There are other remarkable achievements to note: how about three back-to-back Suzuka 8-Hour race wins in 1993, 1994 and 1995? Then there’s the 1991 Aussie Superbike Championship, a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit award and various sports personality of the year awards back home. He even had a song made for him by his local radio station in Masterton… We think the most impressive of all was coming back to race just 12 weeks after major brain surgery, when – at the start of 2000 – a two centimetre bleed was found on Aaron’s brain. This condition had clearly not only affected his run-up to the 2000 WSB campaign, but also his 1999 campaign, where he finished ‘only’ third overall.
Looking back, how does he feel about his stellar career? “I came from a small town in New Zealand so when I look back at glimpses of it, it’s been an amazing ride. And for me it was perfect timing too. At the time lots of great Kiwi racers came on the scene and I think if I was around just five years later it wouldn’t have happened that way. It’s a tough road for a Kiwi to make it on the international scene so you have to take any opportunities with both hands.”
And take them he did, but the road out of Masterton was a long and winding one. The young Aaron first showed an interest in rugby but soon bikes took hold, following a family holiday to the Wanganui circuit to watch some bike racing. Persuading his future uncle to lend him a go on his Yamaha GT80MX started it all and there was no looking back. More dirt bikes (including a DT175 MX to go to school on) and then dirt racing courtesy of local sponsorship from Gregory Motorcycles, all helped and were backed by Slighty’s own knowledge working for Gregory’s as a mechanic.
The move to road-racing happened aged 16, when he followed pal Peter Blackwood onto the tarmac, but tragedy struck soon after when the pair decided to enter a flat-track race for fun, a race in which Peter was to lose his life.
Back in the 1980s, most of the racing occurring down under was production based. Aaron rode TZRS, RZ350S (RDS to us) and an RZ/RD500, but his first big four-stroke stuck in his mind. “My Yamaha FZ750 was an awesome bike,” recalls Aaron. “It was my first
big four-stroke. All the hype was about the five-valve head and that this was gonna be the big thing coming through.
“At the time I was racing with Robert Holden (legendary Kiwi racer and later TT star) and he was the man to beat alongside Bob Toomey, but our rules were open production so they had GSX-R1100S and I had a 750! They were sure I had something like an 860cc motor in there, as I would leave them for dead and it was ages before they could catch up with me. I know the FZ wasn’t a full-on race bike for the road like the GSXR750F which came out the same year, but it did things as good or better.
“I recall winning an F1 race because – when we rolled up onto the grid – it was sprinkling with rain and all the F1 bikes had slicks on, but our production tyres were perfect for the wet conditions! I beat Rob Holden and Roger Freeth that day on their trick F1 bikes, so it was pretty special.”
During the late 1980s/early 1990s, Aaron was crossing swords with the very best of the down under talent. Not just Kiwis like
Holden, Simon Crafar and Andrew Stroud, but Aussies like Michael Dowson, Pete Goddard, up-and-coming riders like Mick Doohan and later Daryl Beattie, as well as veterans like Rob Phillis – a rider who would become Aaron’s team-mate in the Team Kawasaki Australia squad.
Winning the 1991 Australian Superbike championship would lead to Aaron making the step to World Superbikes, where he won his first race at Albacete in 1992. “No one had ridden there before, and some didn’t like the start-stop nature of the track, but I sure liked it. It was a bit of an opportunist win, won via my skill of quickly dialling in a bike and to quickly find the limit in wet conditions.”
More wins could have been forthcoming, but he was often asked to play back-up to Scott Russell, especially during the
American’s championship year of 1993.
Aaron says: “After riding for Peter Doyle and the Aussie Kawasaki WSB team, it was a bit of a transition to move to Muzzy Kawasaki. Scott was fast because he was Scott and used to riding on their stuff, but Rob Muzzy made exhausts and always tuned the bikes for top-end, but I kept asking for more mid-range to get the bike off the corners.”
For 1994 came the call from Honda to ride the new RC45 V4, the replacement to the legendary RC30. He would be paired with previously dominant Texan (well, on a Ducati, at least) Doug Polen. “That V4 eventually became an amazing piece of kit,” recalls Aaron, although initially it clearly wasn’t.
In his autobiography he recalls how slow it was and that Polen (1991/92 champion on a Ducati) called it a: ‘slow piece of shit…’ Things would change: “For the years we raced it, we were doing everything to beat a bigger capacity V-twin. If we wanted something to make the bike better, Honda would make it.
“One year we tried five different swingarms to get the tyres to last longer. When I rode it for the final time at Sugo in 1999 it was a masterpiece. At that final session they put a new crank in it, which gave 1.5bhp more… I asked what that was for and was told it was a development part for the future four-stroke Honda Motogp V5 engine. Lots of the RCV211V’S tech came from the RC45 race bike – including some cylinder head and crank tech. Our 750cc V4 was by then pumping out close to 190bhp, so think about it: if you’re adding another 25% power to that with another cylinder.”
It’s a shame that Slighty’s time on the V4 was one of ‘what ifs’. 1994 was a pure development year, but he still managed to be in the fight for the title and handily beat his team-mate. 1995 saw improvements, but with Doug’s early departure Aaron shouldered most of the development and raced for most of the year alone in the team.
1996 saw him beat Foggy on identical bikes (while Carl would win more races, Slighty would beat him 15 times in the 24 races) but the V4 was still suffering in comparison to the Ducatis, and Carl’s turn-around came at the expense of using Aaron’s settings, when the Englishman turned back to winning ways at Hockenheim.
1997 saw the mercurial talents of John Kocinski take the title, but only after the whole Castrol Honda set-up was shamefully spun
around and focused on the little American: where Slighty would drive to PR events, Kocinski was flown there. With Kocinski taking the title in Sugo, Aaron expected some teamwork to help him secure second at the final race at Sentul – instead the Kiwi claims he was pushed off the track by the American in the first race, leaving the fuming Slight to refuse to attend the podium celebration…
1998 really should have been Slighty’s year, but a mechanical blow-up at Monza, electrical issues at Donington, year-long brake issues with the Brembo master cylinder and a duff Michelin tyre at the season-ender at Sugo saw him the bridesmaid once again by 4.5 points to Foggy.
So, what of the Honda V-twin that was developed into the all-conquering Honda VTR1000/RC51? Slight was the man doing the developing but fate decreed that he wouldn’t get a fair crack at the title on it… He says: “I was at a test just after I’d missed out on the 1998 title and I was following Itoh and found I was 23kph slower on the Firestorm-powered test bike down the straights, but just 0.9 seconds behind on lap times. I knew that if we got some power in this thing, we’d be laughing. It was the same old story with fours versus twins: you’d have 30% more torque on the big V-twin which you could use more than any top-end.”
1999 was tough for Aaron as he was... “... often pulling double testing duty on the VTR and the RC45. I’d had the best year ever in 1998 but started 1999 feeling pretty shit. I knew I was fitter than ever and a better rider than ever, but I spent 1999 feeling constantly fatigued. Little did I know that a malformed vein was bleeding and putting pressure on my brain: thankfully an MRI scan in early 2000 found it.”
Aaron’s real battle was coming back from that as just 12 weeks after his operation he was back for the fifth round of the 2000 World Superbike championship. He’d never win a WSB race again, but he’d won the hearts of race-watchers the world over and – in an emotional finale – he threw his Castrol Honda leathers into the Brands Hatch crowd at the final race of the season at the ‘European’ round of the series.
He may never have won the title, but it’s fair to say that Slighty made some serious coin over the years: in his excellent autobiography entitled: ‘You Don’t Know the Half of It’, he confirms that he was on a similar salary to our own Carl Fogarty at the height of their respective powers (cross referencing Foggy’s autobiography shows that figures like $800,000 in 1996 have been bandied about…)
After a number of years touring car racing and Porsche Cup racing, Aaron invested wisely, including in his dad Rex’s business: Mitre 10 hardware stores, which have 900 shops located across Australia and New Zealand. He adds: “In my small town racing career I didn’t make the dollars that Carl Fogarty did: he opens his mouth and makes dollars! Here, back home in Masterton I’m just Aaron Slight and I’m grounded. I’m making things happen with my money and investing here and there. The pond is so small here. I did look a bit green-eyed at people after racing and the opportunities they have around the world, but there wasn’t anything else to do here. No commentary work or anything like that.”
Just as an aside, did you know that back in 2002 Slighty was in the top 10 earners of sports personalities in New Zealand with around $6.5 million in the bank…? We didn’t have the balls to ask him what he’s worth today…
Carl Fogarty: if one rivalry needs to be brought up it’s this one. Famously, Carl would remark that ‘no one put pressure on you like Aaron did.’ Today perhaps the pair have both mellowed. Slight says: “We saw Carl a few years back at Monza as we still talk to Michaela and she explained how he’s changed – and he has.”
With Slight’s vocal challenges over the years in World Superbike about the rules between the four-cylinder machines and the twins, it was strange that he never made the swop to Ducati. He says: “The reason I wouldn’t, was that I wanted a signed contract in front of me, whereas the Ducati way was more ‘turn up for the first test and we will see you there!’ I was a kid from New Zealand who managed his own affairs and I really only had year-on-year deals and I wanted a signed contract. I really needed to know what was happening and got that from Honda.”
Talking of contracts, back then the 8-Hour was vital to any Japanese factory’s agenda: “The 8-Hour was at the top of my contract then it talked about World Supers. It was the same for Mick in 500s. The 8-Hour was great back then, as you had all the Grand Prix riders and the Superbike riders racing together. I think my three wins there came from mechanical sympathy. I’d even roll off if it meant I didn’t have to do another lap at the end of the race. The racing there hasn’t moved on as much. I worked out that they did 216 laps at the 2017 8-Hour race on a 1000cc bike with rider aids, but in 1995 we did 212 laps in 8-Hours on 750s with no electronics…”
And what about 500cc GPS: many felt Slighty would be well-suited to a 500cc two-stroke. His first chance came when he abortively flew to Europe to negotiate with Giacomo Agostini to join the Marlboro Yamaha team. That fell through as it was dependent on Ago stealing the services of Kevin Schwantz, where Aaron would be the team number two. He also had talks with Garry Taylor of Lucky Strike Suzuki, but these too led to nought.
His loyalty to Honda almost gave him a way in. Aaron recalls: “In some ways I stayed with Honda so I could possibly get a ticket into 500cc GPS. I did some testing. I recall at Phillip Island, the GP team had a three-day test there. I did the last afternoon only and was 1.9 seconds slower than Mick Doohan, but faster than Loris Capirossi and Shinichi Itoh. I was like ‘where do I sign?’ Then they said I had a choice: ride for nothing in 500cc GPS or ride in World Superbikes and get paid. Itoh was Japanese so he was there for a reason and Loris was bringing money into his team. The NSR500 was a lovely motorcycle, built to do the job, but if GPS would have gone to four-strokes earlier, perhaps things would have gone better for me?”
Looking back, Slighty knows he served in the golden era of WSB. Looking at the series now he laments the fact that the same company controls both Motogp and WSB. “You can’t do that,” says Aaron, as you need to try different things. It’s also a shame the factories don’t support it like they used to and we also had a tyre war going on. I’m also not such a fan of all the rider aids like traction control and anti-wheelie in racing. I sometimes wish you had all the modern slomo cameras and ultra-high-definition cameras at a 1990s WSB race: you’d see more action than now. You’d see the sheer throttle control, the chattering rear-end (no slipper clutches) and then watch as the tyres got smoked. Today the rider opens the throttle to the stop and the bike hardly moves. They’re tuning it to a standstill.”
Aaron’s life is good. He and wife Megan returned back to Masterton in 2004 after living in Monaco during his bike and car race years. In recent years, Slighty has fitted in some driver training with Aston Martin and Lamborghini while helping coach sports teams at his daughter’s school. He even designed the family home and was hoping recently to restore his old TZR250 proddie race bike…