I’ve spent most of the month out on the Isle of Man, working flat out doing TV stuff. I’ve been having a whale of a time with Steve Parrish. He’s always good for a laugh. I could never get tired
of watching people picking up his electric-shock pens in the press office in Douglas. But the biggest shock for me this year was the Superstock race.
This is blokes racing on bikes that you can near as dammit buy in the shops. No engine work, standard wheels, swingarm, wheels, brakes: the lot. They only look like race bikes on the line ‘cos
the teams put aftermarket bodywork on them. Fook me, Ian Hutchinson and a gang of others went out and minced it. Hutchy put in one lap at 129.7mph on road-legal tyres on his Fireblade; there
are full-spec British Superbike machines over here, £80,000 race bikes, only going 1.5mph quicker. It seems nuts. This just proves how good road bikes are now. Un-be-lievable.
When I raced here, the proddie bikes were shit. Suzuki’s GSX-R1100 was lethal. They didn’t go where you pointed them and they weaved down the straights. They were just big dumb horrible things. When you chucked one into a corner the bike could be on a line up to two feet either side of the one you had in mind. You had to just guess. Therefore you either had to stay two feet away from everything or risk hitting it. Proddie bikes in 1989 were to be treated with a great deal of caution, for completely different reasons to 2009 bikes. But they went well, when you got them going fast on the quick sections.
I remember getting a speed weave along the Crosby section on a proddie bike at about 140mph. It came every half a second, a slow rhythmic pulse through the whole bike. I shut off thinking that would sort it, but it got worse, so I just wound it open again. Mine wasn’t any different to anyone else’s, we just got on and rode them.
Standard road bikes with a strong engine prove that there’s no point having 220bhp if you can’t hold the thing flat out. We looked at McGuiness’ data and he was managing to hold his Superbike on the stop for 17% of a lap. Some were spending less time on full throttle, but not going much slower. Steve Plater for instance is a little less aggressive, but just as quick.
For the first time this year we’ve had slow-motion cameras. We’ve got two of them over here. They cost £250,000 a pop before you put a lense on them, which makes even the most expensive, top-spec superbikes over here look a bit cheap really. We’ve been spotting squirrels in trees and bees flying about in the background when we play the footage back, it’s amazing. Some of the teams have been asking to see their bikes in slow motion so they can study what they’re doing. They’re then using this as data to help make changes. And then Rossi came in, which caused a massive media frenzy.
I got hold of a Rossi-rep AGV, and when the time was right I asked him and Agostini to sign the thing, which will be raffled off for the Chris Jones memorial fund. Rossi was a little bit strange. He didn’t come across as overly excited about the whole thing. He said a few of the riders were crazy then just seemed to enjoy having the day off.
The atmosphere has been great. The crowds have been dropping off but the interest is still high, especially in the TTXGP. Everybody was waiting for it to be a complete failure, but I’ve just seen
Rob Barber manage an 84mph lap with juice left in reserve. I thought it was going to be a joke but I’ll be honest, it’s been alright. The bad thing is there’s no noise, obviously – a race bike should be
loud so I’ve come up with a plan for the race organisers. I think next year all the bikes should put lollipop sticks in the spokes of the wheels so you can hear the things coming up the road.
