The good, the bad and the very ugly

 

This post is going to be an extremely hard one to write. My racing life or in another way my racing addiction can from an early age, and it is hard to pinpoint when I first became hooked. I would say when I was young, I did not have a competitive nature until I hit the double digits, I was not the best at school but did always try at some things there. As I previously said on “why motorcycles” I had been going on the back of my dad’s bike for a while and been going to Knockhill to watch the bike racing. When I first got a shot of a minibike, I was not the fastest at Ingliston, but I manage to control the bike in a way I was passing everybody in the corner and that became a way of mine but will tell you more about that later.

After we got my first minibike, a Polini 910 6.2hp 40cc water cooled bike, we had gone to Aberdeen Kart start and quickly realised I had a challenge in-front of me. During that day we got quicker and quicker but noticed when I got out with the faster kids and adults, on a straight they were pulling away with ease and me being a beginner, they pulled away on corners as well. I quickly developed a buzz for trying to go as fast as getting a bike to the point where it was on the edge, something that for years I could never get out of the habit of to enjoy something.

If you are on your phone or tablet you might need to click on the pictures for the full picture and not a cropped corner.

A little history of the minibike, if you follow Moto GP, you will see stars like Valentino Rossi, Marc Marqez, Dani Pedrosa, and a lot of others talk about minibikes. For a motorcycle racer, the minibike or minimotos is like a go kart. It teaches you how to race from braking to acceleration, corning to crashing and most importantly to myself as an adult now, it teaches race etiquette which will help some of the young races mature into future stars. If you are ever searching for racing, it goes under a lot of different names like pocket bike racing, minibike, mini moto etc.

This next part is taken from Wiki

Pocket bikes are small, two wheeled recreational vehicles approximately one-quarter the size of a regular motorcycles and are powered by two-stroke internal combustion engines of between 40 and 50 cc. Pocket bikes maintain the look of full-sized sport bikes and are known for racing on specialty tracks designed for small Power Sport machines. These specialized models, designed for competition, produce up to seventeen hp, and have front and rear suspension akin to larger sport bikes. Most consumer models are far less powerful, usually below 3hp,[1] and do not feature suspension, relying on the tires alone for shock-absorption. Weight for most machines are approximately 50 lb (23 kg). The usual height is less than 50 cm (20 in), and up to 1 m (3 ft 3 in) length.

The Pocket bike racing, known as Minimotos, is a professional, internationally sectioned sport. It is raced by both youth and adults, on specialized, high-performance machines. Several notable MotoGP racers and champions first raced in Minimotos, including Valentino Rossi, Loris Capirossi, Nobuatsu Aoki, and Daijiro Kato.[13] The sport of Minimotos originated in Japan in the 1960s, expanding as a professional sport in the 1970s, before spreading to Italy in the 1980s and most of Europe in the 1990s.

We raced the rest of that year across Scotland at Knockhill, Raceland’s in Tranent, Kart start Kirkcaldy and Aberdeen, Crail and Larkhall. We struggled a lot that year due to our budget compared to others, my dad and I use to work in the garage most nights cleaning it and just trying to find that little extra speed for the weekend changing the gearing to dropping the forks an extra 1mm etc but we could never keep up, we put a different exhaust system on the bike which helped a lot. As that year went on the people who got the 910s for the year moved to the 911’s. These bikes were more advanced with better handling, easier power and speed and we struggled to keep up, when it came to a corner I could pass on the brakes, stay in front all corner then they would zip by again on the power, this became a bit disheartening for us.

We had two practice tracks we used, we used a place in Larbert which we would set a few cones up and do it in clockwise and anticlockwise just practice. Think this was the only time my mum came to see me on a bike, and I am sure I came off it that day. That track was not much but I loved going there at night times with my dad, Lee use to practice there as well. Back in these days no one had really seen a minibike so you would get cars stopping to watch and would never get a hassle from the police as the invasion of these cheap Chinese minibike that people flew about the streets were not invented then. We also used a track called Matthews minimotos, they ran a fleet of Polini’s as well but allowed owners to arrive and drive for £10 that day. At Matthews, there were not many owner drivers so when people went to bike rite they seem you flying about in a set of full leathers knee sliding round the corners, it attracted more people to hire the bikes, they had two riders who raced in the Scottish who worked for them, I still remember me leading a session and they two were all over me at the back, they called me a maniac to my dad as the back of my bike was all over the place bouncing about, drifting and sliding, I knew I was just pushing it and as long as my front tyre was where I wanted it I was fine. They even had an open day at bike rite and the minibikes done the same there, they had a parent’s race where all the parents jumped on the hired bikes, about 4-5 parents out there, my dad grabbed my bike. He shot off out the pits and went in to the first corner, this is a memory that I hope will always stay with me, he stopped at the corner, picked the bike up to turn in then went to the next corner and repeated with the stop, lift, turn, and go.

We continued to race in the Scottish that year and when we went to Knockhill to race all sort of things happened that meeting. I had been going well that day and managed to pass a couple people at the end of the straight into a hairpin. My uncle Watty came with us to that meeting and him and my dad were watching my next move at the same hair pin, it was four wide and I got shoved on to the grass on the inside. I never shut the throttle off and was still trying to pass. As I re-joined the track in front of the other 3 my dad and Watty had jumped on the fence with their arms waving like mad men, then disaster strikes, I say my dad and Watty go flying as the fence broke to which I lost focus on what I was doing and lost the control on the corner resulting on me going in to the tyres and finishing a few places down, I also done something similar at Raceland’s and the end of that straight, my carb played up and got stuck on full throttle, when I managed to get the power off I was just about in to the tyres, I went flying over my handle bars in to the tyres that day and crawled very badly out of there. I would wait after a Scottish round waiting for the mail with the points coming through. I still have all these copies in the house. Unfortunately, I do not have many photos from them as I gave some photos to a friend for his talk at school who raced with me and never got them back.

The end of 2003 came and we had to return the bike, I know now how much this tore up my mum and dad and when this happened it left me chasing a fix to race, I know some people who have gave up racing from mini bike to even big bikes and unfortunately know how they chase their fix, thankfully I never went down that path. This left a big whole in my life and found that I would try and ride any bike available for the next few years on any track legally or illegally down fields were we were not meant to be.

In 2012 I went back to minibike racing; I started building an open class bike and had a bike which was a power demon. Me and my dad spent many weeks building it to get it ready for the first round of the Scottish that year and spent a lot of money. My wife and daughter came to watch that race meeting were I had nothing but problems, my bike was spitting the chain off, brake failures, more spitting chains, then when starting my last race in the reverse grid, sitting in pole my bike stalled and I couldn’t get it started again until the rest had finished their first lap. Was not the weekend we wanted. We continued racing that year, even buying a production class bike to race in the heavy weight class where I finished second that year. I was five points short of winning but missed the first two rounds, so it was achievable. I went back as an adult paying for it myself and relying on just me and my dad, it was the best racing season I have ever done, this brought me and my dad closer. We went on to race in 2013 but again budget hit as people were leaving the Polini’s behind and going to another better brand and we struggled to keep up, but we still enjoyed it. James Williamson still raced this year again and we had some great battles on the old Polini’s. When the last race came, we packed up the bikes and they have sat in the garage since. We went to the dinner/price giving that year and sat with James and Stuart Anderson who won that year. Stuart was a talented racer who should be up in the BSB racing but never got a break. I did not know this would be the last time I would have seen James, he was a good friend at the racing, even though when we were on the track it was a constant battle, after the race we always shook hands and shared a pit together. He passed away due to the injuries he sustained when he was out on his big bike on the road.

I hope to one day have a shot of another minibike, maybe next year I will try and do an enduro with them, maybe a blog feature. I always hoped my kids would go into racing, but my daughter does to well at gymnastics to pull her from that to race and my son does not seem to be interested. Who knows what I will be on track with next.

Overall, would if I were to go back and know what I know about racing would I, YES definitely, in a heartbeat.