I've just sold my Yamaha Fazer 1000, it was a great bike but it had to go because I never had time to ride the thing. Of late it seems to have been a gradual process of getting more sensible motorbikes and slowing down on the road for me. You suddenly reach that age whereby you realise how ridiculously fast these bikes are - before the Yamaha I had a Kawasaki ZX-10R which was insanely fast.
I've been riding bikes since I was a kid and used to fall off every week when I was 17, but you're supposed to at that age. If you got through that phase alive chances are you'd be an okay rider. So right now I've got my KTM450EXC, I love that thing and have just bought a set of Tecnosel 17" supermoto wheels for it. Haven't had a chance to fit them yet but I can't wait.
That bike is rampant, really good fun, and I can get into 3rd gear on the back wheel on the dirt. I'm a bit chicken about wheelying on the road, though. Years ago a mate and myself were mucking about two-up on his Honda XL250 when we crashed hard and the footpeg went straight through his ankle. It was disgusting, and that image stuck with me, so I prefer sticking to muddy fields where you hurt yourself less.
Air-racing is quite similar to production bike racing in that the guy that's going to do well is the bloke who can afford the best engine with the best tuning. Like all top-end motorsports air-racing is specialised and expensive, and you need good sponsors. My brother used to race proddy bikes back in the early '80s and I remember going off in his Transit van with bald tyres, no tax disc and his knackered GS1000 held together with gaffa tape. He'd work all week as a scaffolder and then spend all of that on one set of cross-ply tyres. He never did do that well.
I think people are still getting their head around air-racing in this country. Most have ridden a bike or driven a car so they can watch normal racing and get an idea what it's like to go into a corner too fast or slide the tyres. But air-racing is different, most people don't fly and it's harder for people to understand what we're up to. They're doing a pretty good job in showing viewers what we do up there, at least I hope they are because it's really hard work, you do four races in a day and you're knackered. After race day it's like "yeah you've won, let's go to the party", and all I want to do is go home and collapse.
We're not putting on a show when we're up there racing, we're going flat out in our Extra 300 aircraft and trying to win. Like a lot of bike racing you actually go faster if you do it smoothly and that's the key to winning air races. I remember watching Neil Hodgson and Chris Walker racing in BSB in 2000, and Chris Walker looked like he was about to crash at every turn while Hodgson just looked as if he was out for a Sunday stroll. They were both doing the same speed, and I think smoothness is the key. Two years ago I used to go mad during an air-race and get red mist all the time, I'd think 'right, I'll show the bastards' and go charging into a track, wipe out a couple of pylons, and half frighten myself to death. But you only have to do that a couple of times and learn the hard way and realise there must be a different way of doing this.
The last time I had a serious fright was racing at Istanbul last year. I cocked up the entrance to the last gate and hit a pylon head-on, it wrapped itself around the wing and the aileron got locked upwards, giving me full roll to the left at 30 feet. Within half-a-second I was upside down which I hadn't planned on and I had to do some pretty drastic things to get out of that. I came back in a bit shaken after that, I'll be honest.
I'd like to see Rossi get his bike working properly again this year and steal the MotoGP championship back, but I can't see it happening now. He's such a character, which is something we don't really have in our sport. We're considered a bunch of old farts compared to most sportsmen, but that's mostly down to the fact that you can't learn to fly until you're 17, and to get the relevant experience to do this sort of thing you have to be of a certain age. Which is, er, older than most athletes!
I fly for a living and some of my colleagues can't understand how I can fly on my days off, but I love it, it's my passion. If I really thought about it, there would be two aircraft that I lust after more than any others: the Spitfire and the Harrier. I've been priveleged enough to fly a Spitfire a few times and that is wonderful, but I'd do anything for an hour in a Harrier. I'd take off, go roaring around some valleys for 20 minutes, have a dogfight with someone else for 20 minutes and then find my brother's house and be a massive nuisance.
