[1] How it all started
I wanted to ride a motorbike ever since the age of two, I started liking bikes because I used to remember hearing my dad come screaming down the road on his new Honda Fireblade 900cc. This really excited me because I liked the sound and I knew dad was almost home from work because I could hear him, but it also frustrated me because I wanted to do it as well! When he had got home I used to climb onto his bike and pretend I was riding it, I would do all the sound effects and everything, I simply loved it.
As time passed on a few years later when we had got settled into our new house, my dad decided to buy me a three wheeler trike at the age of five, I found it pretty simple and I actually learnt to ride a trike before learning to ride a bicycle, I was so excited as I was able to roam around on my trike as we lived on a farm. I did this time and time again until I thought and felt comfortable with moving on to the next stage, which was learning to ride a bicycle.
And then Dad gave me a real bike which he had bought me just before he bought the trike but I felt that I wasn’t ready to jump straight onto a motorbike straight away as I hadn’t even learnt to ride a bicycle.
I began trying to ride my bicycle, my first attempt didn’t go to plan and my dad thought it would be easier to ride on tarmac than grass but I didn’t find that true as I simply just swerved to one side and crashed into a wall, I didn’t get on my bike until another week or so later when my mum suggested a better solution, “why not learn to ride on grass”? this was actualy better because if I did fall off then I wouldn’t hurt myself because I would be falling on softer grass. so I tried this and it worked perfectly, I was so happy with myself, I had finally achieved something that meant quiet a lot to me at a young age.
Some time later Dad and I decided to give the bike a go, it was an old classic called the Italjet. It was a 50cc two stroke, a bit like a yamaha “pee-wee” 50cc except a few years older. We set off to a big open field where I could not crash into anything, except I did! I hadn’t at the time learnt throttle control which meant I didn’t let go of the throttle when I pulled the brake on and so I didn’t stop! so there I was heading towards my poor innocent father at about 20mph with a forest straight behind him as there was a forest next to the open field, amazingly my Dad actually stopped me! He was like a goalie as if he was in the world cup, ready to save the goal that would win the world cup! and I guess he saved my life that day because otherwise I would have headed straight into the forest and it could have resulted in something more tragic.
A few days later I learnt how to ride a motorbike successfully! My Dad was renting out a different workshop at the time and there were acres of fields to ride down there, and I did as the landlord back at home was starting to get a bit sick of me riding on his land all the time. I did this for one-two years. Dad and I then went and bought a brand new ktm 60cc motocross bike which was a proper little motocross bike with 6 gears and was a fiestey little machine, for a young boy anyway, and perhaps I was a little too young for this bike at the time as I had to be two years older to race it competitively, so perhaps we should have bought a new 50cc twist and go motocross bike which was the same as my Italget but a lot newer, and better suspension so I could race that competitively, but we kind of rushed a bit too far ahead of our selves and bought the 60cc ktm.
We managed and my dad got the suspension lowered so I could touch the ground. I started riding my ktm around fields for one-two years until I was old enough to race it at the age of nine.
it was a big shock being on the track as it was totally different to riding on a field, as on a track there were aggressive lumps and bumps and thin long ruts and massive jumps that came up ahead of you and peering over you like some big ugly brown giant. I soon started getting the hang of things but there wasn’t any chance of winning the championship or even being up there with the top bunch of riders as I had wasted two-four years riding round a field just for fun, and we also just started going motocross racing just for fun and I fancied a change as riding around a field was starting to get very boring!
I did half a season in junior 60-65cc championship then a full season in it and then I had to move up a class to school boy small wheel 85cc championship, as when you reach a certain age you move up a class, so in small wheel 85’s the age group is 11-12 year olds.
In my first season in this class I finished a respectable 16th place in the championship and the following year I was doing very well and found myself in 3rd in the championship until disaster struck.
I was into bmx riding at the time as we had a local skate park just down the road from where I lived, on one sunny saturday during the summer holidays I had a nasty accident on my bmx in which I broke my arm, the first thing that came into my mind was “oh no! what am i going to do? ive just broken my arm and I lay 3rd in the championship at motocross”! I never forgave myself after that day at how foolish I had been in thinking that I would have been perfectly safe down the skatepark whilst zooming up and down ramps like an idiot when bmx’ing wasn’t what I was good at anyway.
In the end I ended up finishing 11th in the championship which was an improvement but not where I deserved to be, but none the less I shouldn’t have been that stupid, in thinking that nothing would happen to me down that pathetic skate park. I would rather have injured myself actually racing at motocross than doing it whilst doing something else which I had no career ahead of me in.
The next season I moved up to school boy big wheel 85’s for 13-14 year olds.
In the first season of the school boy big wheel 85’s championship I was really confident in my riding ability and was scoring top ten finishes regularly and I was in a decent position in the championship, things started to click into place and I improved on a lot of techniques, including my starts. That was what improved the most as I was starting to get in the top five out of forty riders whilst coming out of the gates. Dad and I also had a view to go road racing eventually, and do as much motocross as possible, but that was if Dad could afford to keep going motocross and be able to go road racing as well. We started getting serious at motocross when I got my small wheel 85 and thats when we started thinking about road racing that lay just a few years ahead of me, we decided to carry on doing motocross as a grounding to go road racing and we thought that there was no point suddenly going mini moto racing as I had come pretty far from when I first started motocross racing.
Half way through my 2005 season in motocross we eventually did start road racing.
We were at a track called Milldenhall one cold wintery Sunday morning at the beginning of the 2005 season, we decided that we had had quite enough of being soaked in mud that sometimes rose to just below your knee-caps and we had had quite enough of freezing to death in cold wintery blizzards! So we decided to start road racing as we had been planning to go there for quite some time now, we thought that motocross was the perfect grass roots for a view to going road racing!
