WHIT’S WISDOM #2
naughty picture!) WARNING – ADULT LANGUAGE USED OR INFERRED! (and one
There are more funny stories in James Whitham than there are tea plants in China.. and India, and all the tea-producing countries of the world combined. Get a brew or a beer and come and have a laugh…
We all recall that James Whitham is a multiple British champion, World Superbike race winner,tt racer, commentator and that he also has a hilarious story or two. Here’s his second instalment...
My dad David had a self-sufficiency thing going on for a while and boy was he was tight! We had a boiler for heating but logs were too expensive for him, so he did some deals. We had an MOT station for a while and some other guy had a place getting chipboard wastage, so they had free Mots and we had chipboard to fuel the boiler. Then he realised he could use horse manure as fuel… He came up with a device that if you squashed it that much and dried it out – you could burn horse shit as fuel… The device had a ram off of a JCB attached to a cylinder, with drilled holes in it. The ram/piston would squeeze it all and make bricks out of horse shit… He burned it on the fire al lright – but it stunk – and so did we. It wasn’t worth the effort really!
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Earning a crust…
Another money-saving idea from my dad was collecting crusts of bread. Dad had his garage in Halifax and one of his mates was a Greek/cypriot (this was the mid-1970s) and he ran a cafe. Anyway, Costa was asked by my dad that when he was in the cafe, the customers got slices of bread and butter but never any crusts. Costa said something along the lines of the fact that his was a quality establishment and that crusts were never served, instead they went to the pig man, who picked up edible waste. Course, dad started collecting all of Costa’s left-over crusts and he put them together to make a loaf of crusts which he passed off to us kids as some sort of delicacy…
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Helicopter funerals…
So, my mum and dad got divorced and my dad David took up with a lovely lady called Pam. They were all settled down and sadly she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and passed away. This hit dad badly and he was devastated, but we got him through the funeral and he got Pam’s ashes. She always maintained she wanted scattering on a piece of moor above Halifax, it was very touching. We could have gone in the car with her ashes in the boot of the car like anyone else, but my dad – overthinking as usual – got his mate with a helicopter. One Sunday, his mate Ron lands at our airfield and him and my dad were taking the door off of this helicopter, as you can fly them with no doors. I’m holding Pam in the back in her pot. It’s all very sombre and my dad’s in tears. We find ourselves over some moorland, Ron’s flying and we’re only 50ft up. ‘Pass me Pam will you James’: says my dad. He takes the lid off and croaks: ‘Bye Pam!’ The lid comes off but the ashes don’t go straight down, the helicopter’s rotors mean we’re caught in this grey cloud of ashes going up and through the rotors – with a lot of it coming back into the helicopter! Ron’s going: ‘Bloody hell David!’ I ended up vacuuming most of Pam up after we landed…
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Having a ‘proper’ job…
I only ever had one proper job: I was an engineer – until I went to the Manx Grand Prix! I was an apprentice toolmaker/general engineer and had a day release to tech once a week and one evening. I’d been doing it about 18 months and it was a good job, but basically I could only take holidays when they were shut. Mr Roebuck was the boss and he was lovely – right up until
I wanted two weeks off to do the Manx. He didn’t even know what that was. So, of course, I just went off and did it. When I got home there was my P45 waiting for me… mum wasn’t best pleased.
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Getting on a ‘big bike’
Mick Grant wanted me on a big bike pretty quick, even if on the continent, Italy, Spain and Holland produced cracking little bike riders. They were valued over there because that’s where these bikes were often produced: Morbidellis, MBAS, Garellis etc, but here in Britain – it was big bikes, hence we love big-bike racing. I was on an MBA 125 twin in 1985-86 and Mick came and sat me down and he was brutal: “You’re not going to make a living on a small bike – but I think you can make a living on this, so go Superstock go with either FZ750 or GSX-R750… I think you can make a living.” That winter, I was thinking ‘what do I do?’ He’s all the time telling me to go with the big bikes, so I sold the MBA in January, got a slab-side GSX-R and never looked back. I did enjoy it really and I think I rode them all right. Little ones handle, they stop well, they’re precise but the GSX-R was like a big jelly in comparison. Sure, I fell off a bit but got some good results.
Loads of people have commented on my riding style – or lack of! I think you ride a bike however it feels natural to you and as long as its not uncomfortable. I still train with people who ride on track and I’m always at meetings and you see several different styles. Shane ‘Shakey’ Byrne is more upright while Scott Redding is head down and elbow next to his knee and often scraping both. You need to do what makes you feel comfy so you can worry about braking points etc. My style just happened…
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Winning a World Superbike race…
Yes I won the World Superbike race at Sentul in 1994 and I don’t think I ever got to see the trophy after the podium celebrations: I think the team boss Hoss Elm, then of Ducati UK may have it! Carl Fogarty was leading the race and I was in a battle with Aaron Slight, Scott Russell and Simon Crafar and we were having a real set-to… I had a better rear tyre, I had more grip than anyone. Slighty and me caught Simon and then Foggy broke down, so we were all like: ‘Ooooh this is for the win!’ I’m following Aaron and I knew he had no grip compared to me, so I knew I was going to beat him. It was a fact that Carl led the race until his crank went, something Foggy is always reminding me of.
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Nicknames…
It’s 1992 and we had this supposedly brilliant new water-cooled Suzuki GSX-R750. But, the team spending most money at the time was Team Green with John Reynolds and Brian Morrisson. JR would take the title and he rode the bike well, clearly. Now, Mick Grant would make the best of what we have but the GSX-R that year, well, I called it the ironing board! That’s what it handled like, long, like an ironing board. Racers come up with nicknames: Steve Parrish talks about ‘The Slug’ his TZ500 I think it was… then he got a better bike so he called it ‘Son of Slug’. Blokes will make up nicknames for bikes – especially if a bit shit… Course I was nicknamed ‘DH’ by Granty, which stood for ‘Dick Head’. Problem was, he’d make up stuff about it being my middle initials, so he would say it stood for ‘David Herbert’ or some-such. Thing was, while he was a great engineer, he was nowhere near as good at taking the piss as I was, so he was on rocky ground and I often made him look silly as a result.”
WHIT’S WISDOM ON…
The lack of characters in today’s WSB
Yes, we had characters back in the day: Scott Russell, Foggy, Giancarlo Falappa and Pier-francesco Chili, but there are still characters in there now. Michael van der Mark, Alex Lowes, and Leon Haslam: listen, there’s no bigger character than Lowes! And as for Leon, well, what the lovely (but clearly mad) Ron Haslam put him through has clearly made him the man he is today! Crazy, the lot of them – in a lovely way, mind. Thing is that – these days – the sport won’t let them be seen as characters anymore. It’s the same with people saying Jonathan Rea is boring – he’s not, he’s another real character and he’s intelligent and funny – I’ve never met a ‘not-funny’ Northern Irishman, have you? The WSB paddock is full of nutty characters, it’s just that they’re not allowed to say owt anymore…
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… The genius of Anthony Gobert…
Oh yes, Gobert. He was incredible and he didn’t know how good he was. When things were going right he didn’t know why, but he enjoyed it, but then as he didn’t know why things were going right, he couldn’t fix things when they went wrong. But, he could do things with a motorcycle that most couldn’t.
I rode at a good level, so you could see how good he was, but when I followed him when he was on his game I couldn’t follow him for more than two corners before throwing it into the trees. He was a very special talent on a bike but did everything else wrong.
He liked a drink, he didn’t train, he fell out with everyone, was too aggressive off the bike and pissed his money away. But what a character too… My favourite story is that he was racing over in the USA in AMA, against the likes of Mat Mladin and Ben Bostrom, and he’d put a lot of weight on but was still winning. The Americans – well, you know what they’re like – they hated him. So a journo says: ‘You’ve put a lot of weight on Anthony,’ to which Gobert answers: ‘Yeah, I’ve got a bet with myself on how fat I can get and still beat everyone.’
He’s the one with more talent than I’ve ever seen on track and I’ve shared a track with Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Rainey and Mick Doohan. I only say I shared a track with those legends – I didn’t really race them as such!
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… King Kenny…
I’ve been dead lucky with some of the team managers I’ve had over the years. Granty was great – and a brilliant rider back in his day and a better road racer than I was. Mick – I could talk to him on a level and it was the same later with Rob Mcelnea, but in 1999 when me and Mike Hale rode for Modenas and Kenny Roberts, well, he was the King, wasn’t he? A better rider than I ever would be, so any criticisms you had to take on the chin. He was so unbelievably good and funny – but brutally honest at the same time. Off duty he was fun-loving bloke, I got on well with him and he got English humour when most Americans didn’t do. Oh and he loved sarcasm. He did have a bit of an edge to him sometimes, but I was in the team just short of a year and loved it. They say: ‘Don’t meet your heroes’, but with Kenny, Mick and Rob Mac, it was brilliant and I wouldn’t change a thing…
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Christian Sarron….
If you could boil up Frenchness and make a fella out of it – that’s Christian. He’s nice, funny, quirky and he has so much passion. Riding for him he’d get so emotional, he’d cry lots of the time. And then there was his team-building. We’d have team building weekends, cycling, doing stuff together and Yamaha rented this chateau. It was in the middle of France, complete with suits of armour, hunting dogs and must have cost a fortune. So at dinner in this big hall he gets up and gives this speech and we’re all there, riders, wives, girlfriends and the food is this sausage cassoulet stuff. He was emotional and trying to inspire us to win the 24-hour race for Yamaha. Little did he know that some great big hairy Great Dane wolfhound thing was sticking its nose into his bowl and was licking it and nicking the sausages. He then finished his speech and we said nowt to him… What a lovely bloke!
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Broken bone denial…
Christian Sarron was laying into the other two endurance riders who were handy: Adrien Morillas and Jean-marc Deletang. It was raining and we were leading – I was quicker than them in the poor conditions. In endurance racing, if you had a better man suited to the conditions you sent him out. So I was doing two stints on and one off in the pissing rain – I couldn’t do all three! Course, eventually down I went and I was pretty sure I’d broken my wrist – it wasn’t the first time, after all. But the deal was try and get the bike back – which I did. I asked to go to the hospital, but Christian was saying: ‘We send you out again!’ I was trying to tell him, making my wrist go click, click, click but he would just say: ‘Yes, hospital after the race!’ Eventually he relented, but he gave the other two riders a bollocking which I thought I was going to get. He told them both off saying they were rubbish and too slow…
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Collarbones…
When you race for years you expect a collarbone breaking, but both at the same time? Well, it happened to me and the only thing you can’t do with two broken collarbones is wipe your bum. Between my mum and a girl called Nicola I’d met three months before, they managed it, bless them. But you could see the look in her eyes was saying: ‘I didn’t sign up for this shit.’ My collarbone mended quickly but kept her doing that for six months anyway… Sorry, only joking!
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… That 1996 title showdown…
It was a great year, with not the best start… At Donington, round one I had my first bike crash since the cancer treatment. It was at the Foggy Esses and I’d gone under Niall Mackenzie and it was a proper high-side. It hurt a bit but that achy, bashed-up feeling felt lovely as it wasn’t an illness, sicky feeling I had been used to! I didn’t score in that first round thanks also to a gear-lever coming off.
I think he’d won five races and I had won 10 but we went into the last round equal on points: I had money on myself as could beat him on countback. I wasn’t bothered about it being Donington (a place Niall loves) as I had to think that. Long and short of it was that Niall rode well, Sean Emmett was a wild card and rode very well too. I got a win and a third and Niall got a win and a second, so there was just four points in it…
It was a great year with a great team and we are still great mates. Some have to win and some have to lose… That night after a skin-full, we tried to steal a van from a security guard who then proceeded to beat us up, single-handed. Me and Niall ran away then Jim Moodie went and laid the bloke out – which seemed fair enough to us!
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… World Superbike Suzuki
We had our moments – 3rd Hockenheim, 3rds at Brands Hatch with the lap record. By the end of 1998 it was doing okay as it was a new project and the bike had a fast top-end. We were flipping between carbs and fuelinjection. The handling was okay but it never steered quick enough. Some of the results weren’t too good but we had an enjoyable year. Sadly for 1999 the Harris Performance team were out of it and Francis Batta’s Alstare Suzuki team was in with Katsuaki Fujiwara and Pier-francesco Chili.
WHIT’S WISDOM ON… Supersport…
It breaks my heart that Supersport has gone the way it has… The litre-class superbikes aren’t really selling and supersport bikes are selling fewer still. I had that one-off ride in Donington 1999 and then rode from 2000-2002 and it was the most enjoyable racing I ever did. The bikes are pretty much the same, so if you’ve got chatter, you can know that everyone else has it.
All bikes were basically the same, you can’t alter swingarm pivot, you’ve got standard fork externals, standard head angle, standard brake calipers, wheels… If your bike has handling issues you can’t alter that much to fix it, but, most people on the grid will have the same issues… By Saturday dinner time you’d think ‘this is as good as it gets’ go ride it. That’s your only option. It was proper racing and it just worked for me.
On a Superbike grid you always felt someone else had a better bike, a better set-up or a better team behind them – not in a jealous way. It was one of those classes that if you didn’t get stuck-in, someone else would! By the end of 2002 I’d had enough really, I felt I was taking more risks to do what I would normally have to, to be competitive. Chemo affected my eyesight, causing glaucoma and I knew I needed two operations that year and would have to tell them that I would miss four races. I went testing in Spain as if nowt had happened and by the time I was back home I had made the decision – and that was that! I’d done 20 years of racing and won titles.