LOVING LAYCOCK!

Dear CR

Great to see you expanding upon the normal ‘superstars’ to include Eddie Laycock in your pages in the last issue: as a fan of bike racing since the early 1980s, through to the 1990s, Eddie often flew under the radar, sometimes unfairly so, when you think of some of his Grand Prix results.

So, while I’m a Brit, of course I would support Rocket Ron Haslam, Big Rob Mcelnea, Niall Mackenzie, Neil Hodgson and the like, but my love of Guinness, road-racing, Ireland and the whole ‘craic’ meant that any rider from the Emerald Isle or Ulster would also get my full support! The teams too…

I remember after Eddie had left the Team Millar squad, Jeremy Mcwilliams did really well on the YZR500 and even impressed a certain Mick Doohan – that must have been around 1993-1994 I think. I used to love that era of grand prix 500 racing: while we never had the Brits/irish etc in the factory slots (although I recall Sean Emmett getting a few goes on the Lucky Strike Suzuki and didn’t Hodgson get a factory YZR in his team colours?), I kind of liked the fact that we were the underdogs, chipping away at the factories.

I was at Donington Park in 1993 when I cheered on Carl Fogarty to a superb result in the 500cc race – he took 4th – and I was still cheering when Mackenzie pipped him to 3rd. Top times…

Martin Casswell

The Editor says: “We hope you like Mark’s part two to the Eddie Laycock story Martin.”