The High Sider
When the racing stops, some very unexpected names suddenly become social media stars...
The key to telling a story is having one in the first place.
Using nostalgia as a coping mechanism is usually best avoided; the longing to return to a halcyon vision of the past can become a regressive, unhelpful and potential damaging obsession that makes people take strange decisions.
Painful as it may be as we get older, but the future is best served by thinking forwards, not backwards.
But looking back can be a comfort in small doses - and nowhere has this been brought home more during the current pandemic than on social media, and by some unlikely old timer racing stars. Take, for example, the Burly Humbersider himself, former 500cc factory rider, British champ and ex-BSB team owner Rob McElnea. Long a legend of British racing, Rob Mac was winning TTs in the early 1980s, spent six years racing in 500 Grand Prix at the start of the American invasion (riding as teammate to Kevin Schwantz and Eddie Lawson), then raced in World and British Superbike, winning the pre-British Superbike title in 1991 on a Loctite Yamaha OWOl. He went on to manage one of the longest running and most successful BSBteams, taking Niall Mackenzie to three titles from 1996 to 1998 on the Cadbury's Boost Yamaha YZF750.
McElnea, a huge figure in racing (literally - Eddie Lawson famously described following Rob Mac as like drafting a truck), packed it in in 2011, retired to trials riding and golf, and pretty much stayed away from the racing limelight.
Until now. With the racing world on lockdown, the pundits and media who normally make their living commenting on racing (er, that's me) have been forced to scrape around wondering what to do next. Dorna, the owners of MotoGP, laid on an e-race - is that the right noun? - in which various MotoGP stars raced each other at e-Mugello on one of those computer game things they have now. Initially sniffy,it was actually a mildly entertaining e-vent - especially watching Marc Marquez' expression of extreme concentration as he wrestled his pixels around a screen . Allegedly,he had almost no experience of playing the game, but even so learned quickly enough to be in the top three for most of the race. His brother, Alex, won - always good to win on your MotoGP debut, but I bet that 's as close as he gets for a while - while Fabio Quartararo set the fastest lap and should've won, had he not e-crashed three times, uninjured.
Interestingly, the oldest MotoGP riders - Rossi, Crutchlow, Dovizioso, Petrucci, etc - were all absent from the race. But if there's a lesson about age and technology there, no one told Rob Mac. The 60-year old was the first to break the biking boredom of lockdown by posting a series of short video clips to social media, in which he relived stories from different years of his racing career - great snippets of storytelling from a bygone age which, apart from encouraging a whole slew of racing old timers to grab their smartphones and reminisce in public, also showed every major media outlet how best to connect with a captive audience. You can only tell a story if you've a story to tell.
Of course, the world will be a different place when we finally emerge from the pandemic; as speculated last month, racing will take a while to get back into its stride simply because so many of its existing structures - media, sponsors, circuits, suppliers, etcetera - will have been washed away or reconfigured to survive in a different environment. Racing at the highest levels is not a tap that can be simply turned off and on, without the whole system needing to be rebuilt afterwards.
In the midst of all the speculative doom and gloom, there is one piece of actual racing news: factory Aprilia rider Andrea Iannone, he of the failed drugs test back in November last year, finally managed to convince the FIM that the steroids found in his urine sample were ingested unknowingly - but failed to provide evidence of such (presumably he didn't hang on to the remains of the tainted beef steak). As such, a four-year ban was reduced to an 18-month suspension from the date of the offence. Even with the 2020 season looking to be severely shortened, if not written off entirely, that means Iannone won't be racing again until June 2021 - and at the end of 2020 he's out of contract. Given his patchy record with previous teams, it's unlikely Iannone's services will be retained unless it's in catering for the Russian athletics team.
As, indeed, will this column, at least in its current guise. After a good few years (who's counting?
Has it been that long?) pontificating on the racing world (okay, usually MotoGP), this is the last High Sider racing column for MSL. It's been a pleasure to dispense a little wit, maybe some small words of wisdom - no, really, thank you - but when there's no racing, what point is a racing column? Besides, while one of my passions is sitting in an armchair watching motorbikes go round in circles, another, greater, passion is actually riding them. A lot, a long way, for a long time. I think I've learned some lessons , and I'd like to share them. Starting next month. After all, who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?