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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

This updated edition published 2019

SECOND EDITION

© Jonathan Rea 2018, 2019

Cover layout design Sim Greenaway © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photography © Graeme Brown/GeeBee Images

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Source ISBN: 9780008305109

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008305116

Version: 2019-04-02

Dedication

For Tatia, Jake and Tyler

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Carl Fogarty

Prologue: I’m Not Crazy

Chapter 1: Sixty

Chapter 2: In the Blood

Chapter 3: Motocross

Chapter 4: Red Bull Rookie

Chapter 5: The Big Break

Chapter 6: Second Chance

Chapter 7: Living the Dream

Chapter 8: My Racer’s Brain

Chapter 9: The Learning Curve

Chapter 10: Honda Grind

Chapter 11: Little Feet, Itchy Feet

Chapter 12: End of the Line

Chapter 13: The Grass is Greener

Chapter 14: Back to Back

Chapter 15: Making a Point

Chapter 16: Homecoming

Chapter 17: Four of a Kind

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Career Statistics

List of Searchable Terms

About the Publisher

Foreword
By Carl Fogarty

My first connection with the Rea family was more than four decades ago in 1977 when my dad, George, finished second behind Joey Dunlop in his first TT victory on the Rea Racing Yamaha sponsored by Jonathan’s grandad, John.

John Rea was a jovial Irishman who loved his racing, and I was a bit in awe of him when I first met him for my debut at the 1987 North West 200 and he gave me some words of encouragement. The family connections continued when I raced on the roads against Jonathan’s dad, Johnny. I was fourth on the bike I borrowed for the Junior race in 1989, when Johnny claimed his only TT win.

Many years later, Jonathan was one of a number of up-and-coming British lads, along with the likes of Leon Camier, Cal Crutchlow and Tom Sykes, who my Foggy Petronas Racing team considered for our final year in World Superbikes in 2006, before we finally opted for the late Craig Jones.

I don’t remember speaking to Jonathan until I answered a call from an unknown number when staggering out of a beach club in Marbella, after a couple too many shandies. He was racing for HM Plant in the British Superbike Championship in 2007 and had just received an offer from Ducati to compete in the World Superbike Championship the following year. You had to respect the lad’s confidence for calling me up out of the blue. I told him that the Ducati team manager, Davide Tardozzi, would look after him and that he should take the offer. He obviously didn’t listen to a word I said, because he signed for Ten Kate Honda!

Within a couple of years, I was convinced that he was the fastest, most talented guy in the World Superbike Championship. But, relatively new to the class, he was a bit inconsistent, which was to be expected. His career mirrored mine in a lot of ways – I had to prove myself in a team and on a bike that were not the best out there. A few people started to doubt what I was saying about him, but I told them to be patient. The best rider nearly always ends up with the best package, and that happened to Jonathan, too, when he signed for Kawasaki.

The rest is history – including my record number of 59 wins! I’m often asked how that feels and the honest answer is that, if I had to lose the record to anyone, I couldn’t be happier that it was Jonathan who beat it. Family connections aside, there is nobody more talented, more determined or more deserving, and there isn’t a box that he doesn’t tick for me. He’s also a genuinely good guy, a proud family man who doesn’t have an arrogant bone in his body. And, not content with beating my records, he even had the cheek to try to sell more books than me by asking me to write this Foreword.

Dream on, mate! :) #1

PROLOGUE
I’m Not Crazy

I’ve been knocked out more times than I can remember … I have a separated acromioclavicular joint in my shoulder … I’ve had a broken left collarbone, two broken ribs, two scapholunate wrist reconstructions (left and right) … a broken right radius, two bad breaks of my left femur (one compound, one very complicated) … a complete reconstruction of the medial collateral ligament and anterior cruciate ligaments in my left knee and an ACL reconstruction in the right … a broken right tibia and fibula, a broken left ankle and a few broken metatarsals. Worst by far are my knees: they’re in really bad shape, especially the right one.

I’ve had the end of my finger worn down to the bone. And I’ve been told I’d never ride a motorbike again, let alone race one.

I didn’t listen, though.

This list is nothing unusual and I’m not complaining, it’s just the price I pay to do the sport I love. From head to toe, my body has paid its dues.

‘You must be mad.’ … ‘Racers are crazy.’ … ‘You must take your brains out before you put your helmet on.’

Listen. I am not crazy.

Focused? Yes.

Selfish? Of course.

Driven? For sure.

But a crazy thrill-seeker? You don’t understand me or my sport.

I’ve been riding since I was two, racing since I was six. At the time of writing, I’ve been crowned World Superbike Champion three times, scored the most points ever in a single SBK season and won the Suzuka 8 Hours endurance race. I’ve ridden in one British Supersport season, three British Superbike, one World Supersport and ten SBK championships so far. And I’m pretty far from being done.

This is an elite sport. You have to be very, very clever and very, very fit. You win by working margins in the thousandths of a second. You throw a 165kg motorcycle from side to side, guide it as fast as possible around tight turns, brake hard and late while fighting G-forces and intense winds. It can and does go wrong, with devastating physical and emotional consequences. But I don’t see anything reckless or crazy in risking that. Do you?

I see it as a true sport and sometimes even an art form in trying to get it right, to keep aiming for perfection.

They say racing is like a drug, but I’ve lived quite a clean life, so I can’t really say. I know racing is a bug that bit me young and has not let go.

And I know that winning is what drives me.

That means, yes, I am selfish. Every elite sport demands levels of sacrifice and commitment that are hard to imagine from the outside. Endless training and preparation and thinking and rethinking. Countless days and weeks in hospitals and months in rehab.

Any rider who has reached the top has travelled a long and bumpy road, marred by serious injury and, in some cases, worse. Having a family now, it has become harder. I’m responsible for my wife Tatia and our boys Jake and Tyler. And while this is my lifelong dream and my overriding passion, I do understand it’s not theirs.

I get nervous on the grid, but not about getting hurt. I focus on the perfect start, nothing else. I never think ‘What if I crash?’, ‘What if my brakes don’t work?’ or ‘What if I get hit by another rider?’ You never think it’s going to be you.

Yes, I’m very selfish and self-driven. No, I never think about the dark side or the dangers. That’s my racer’s brain. I park an emotion and I move on.

Shall we move on?

CHAPTER 1
Sixty
Saturday, 9 June 2018, Automotodrom Brno, Czech Republic

The stress levels are at maximum now.

At the very last moment, just as I roll to a stop, I find neutral. I give Uri a gentle nod, because he’s always as stressed as I am about me finding it. I turn back to the start lights and do a couple of nervous twitches with my head, something that’s developed over the last few years. All the other riders are in position. The start marshal walks off, pointing his red flag towards the lights. We wait. Those lights will come on for anything between two and five seconds. As soon as they go out, it’s a start. I engage first gear and activate launch control.

The lights come on, I twist the throttle. The decibel level soars as the other riders do the same. One … two … three … four …

It’s race day.

This morning I qualified second fastest in the Superpole session – the middle of the front row of the grid. The whole post-Superpole parc fermé thing, photographs and interviews, is dragging on. It’s less than two hours from the lights going out for the 1pm race. I’m thinking I need some food and quiet time.

What I am definitely not thinking is this: I’m not thinking I could be breaking a record today. Sixty doesn’t enter my mind.

I run back to my race truck office where my personal assistant Kevin Havenhand has picked up some grilled chicken and broccoli. I’ve not eaten since breakfast and I need to get this down now so I’m not bloated for the race. I scoff it while getting changed and watching the qualifying sessions for one of the support classes, Supersport 300, but I don’t eat much – just enough so I don’t feel hungry later. I stay in the truck while the physio checks my ankle, which has been hurting the last couple of days. My riding coach, Fabien Foret, is running through final details about the race and my plan of attack. He leaves and switches off the lights and I roll out a mat on the floor and rest my head on a team jacket. I’m out like a light.

The alarm goes off a quarter of an hour later, around ten past twelve, which gives me another 15 minutes to get ready. Kev has got a fresh, clean inner suit ready and all my riding gear is lined up in neat rows, just how I like it. I hop on the scales – a normal 71.3kg. Albert’s back in to log my weight and apply some Kinesio therapeutic tape to my arms. I had some arm-pump problems at the previous round – ‘carpal tunnel syndrome’ caused by heavy braking and the constant pressure and vibration. It can cause numbness and tingling, and it’s bloody painful; but that was mostly down to the nature of the Donington Park circuit and I’ve had no problems here at Brno, so this is just a precaution. As soon as that’s done, I finish climbing into my leathers and me, Kev and Fab are marching out of the office like the Three Musketeers.

We know that we have the pace to win here – I’ve been fastest in all the longer runs we’ve done in practice – so strangely this is one of the tougher weekends mentally. I’m starting from the front row and I know I’m faster than everyone else, so the only person who can mess it up is me.

Fab reminds me of that and talks about the initial plan for the race: relax, get into a rhythm and see how the first few laps pan out. If I’m in front, I’ll do a five-lap attack, put my head down, try to build a lead and manage the race from there.

What is it they say about battle plans? None of them survives first contact with the enemy …

I’ve been nervous since I started changing. I’ve got that familiar feeling of knotted tension in my stomach as adrenalin begins to flow around my body and it subconsciously prepares for fight or flight (or maybe both).

One minute, I’m focusing on my getaway, needing it to be clean and fast. The next, I’m wondering who is going to be challenging me this afternoon. It could be Marco Melandri, lining up to my right on the front row. He’s shown some pace. Or it could be my team-mate Tom Sykes, on the other side in pole position.

Mostly, I’m starting to focus on winning. Only winning. It’s the reason I’m here, it’s the thing I’m paid to do.

It’s 12.25pm and I’m on my chair in the garage, waiting for the pit-lane to open at 12.40, running through a few last-minute details with my crew chief, Pere Riba, who is confirming which tyres we’re using and whether he’s made any final changes to the bike. We’re rolling into the race with the exact same bike we had in Superpole. I give my mechanics a tiny nod and they whip off the tyre warmers – little electric blankets that keep the tyres ready at around 90°C.

The Kawasaki ZX-10R is fired up and we’re out on the sighting lap, once around the circuit and back to form up on the grid. I take in the crowd, especially in the stadium section – a series of four corners with a massive grassy bank off to the right, a great place to watch. There was quite a crowd during this morning’s sessions, already on the beer and enjoying the Czech hospitality, so they’re pretty noisy by now. I see quite a few Northern Ireland flags as well – hello, boys.

I roll up to the front row of the grid where the crew take off my gloves and helmet. I point out to Pere that the brakes are binding a little but everything else is OK. The brakes thing is nothing major, and the guys are on it straight away, but I’m particularly sensitive to it today. Must be the adrenalin.

The nerves are really kicking in. They’ve been building since I was changing, and they make my breathing a little shorter and my mouth quite dry. I’m hydrating often, without thinking; it’s instinctive now.

I’m aware of a Monster Energy grid girl on my left and a Pirelli ‘Best Lap’ girl on the right. I’ve got the highest number of fastest laps this season and she’s there for a PR opportunity with the official tyre supplier in front of the TV cameras on the grid. But my nerves are playing hell with my bladder and I’m busting for a piss, so I ruin the TV moment by running off the grid towards a toilet at the bottom of the race control tower.

In previous years, if I was caught short I’d have a piss at the side of the grid. The organisers didn’t like it though – too close to sponsor banners – and if I do it again I’ll be fined €5,000.

When I get back, everyone’s quiet and focused – very few words from the mechanics or me. Two TV crews come over for an interview. The first is from Austria, simple questions about the race; the second is British Eurosport and their reporter Charlie Hiscott, who starts asking when I’m going to decide who I’ll ride for next season.

He asks if I have a plan, so I tell him the only plan I’m thinking about right now is getting on with this race.

The five-minute board goes up and, because I always like to have my helmet and gloves on before the three-minute board, I take off my cap and sunglasses and hand them to Kev, who’s standing just to my right. The air temperature is around 26°C, so I rub my face and hands with a cool damp towel. I pull on my Arai, tighten the D-ring strap and bring down the visor about halfway, then push my hands into my Alpinestars gloves. As the three-minute board goes up, most of the team give me a pat, or a thumbs-up, and head off the grid, leaving just me and my two mechanics – Uri, who looks after the tyre warmer and bike stand at the front, and Arturo, who takes care of the rear. Uri stands there beside me and gently rubs his hand up and down the outside of my thigh.

He and I are quite connected, almost subconsciously. Maybe that’s why we never talk about the fact that he stands there and rubs my leg during those last few minutes on the grid. But because I’m so nervous it’s strangely comforting, knowing someone’s there with me as I’m just staring at the dashboard, trying to visualise the perfect start. With about one minute and thirty seconds to go, Uri flicks the ignition on and starts the bike and, as the final one-minute board goes up, the tyre warmers come off, the bike is taken off its stands and I get a homie-style hand shake from Uri.

‘Vamos,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’ Arturo does the same, but with no words, and off they both go. It’s me and the bike, and 18 laps of Brno.

Then we get a green flag to start the warm-up lap.

I put my left foot under the gear-shift lever and click it up to select first gear (the gearbox has a race shift pattern, the opposite to a road bike).

I accelerate away from the start line and push down on the lever to select second, again for third.

Then we’re braking for the first corner and I’m nudging the lever up to go back down a gear.

I always do a fast warm-up lap and get back to the grid quickly to give myself a few extra seconds. As I come out of Brno’s final corner, I accelerate hard in second gear and then start giving the lever the gentlest nudge upwards as I roll towards my grid position, struggling to find neutral.

I’ve suffered from false neutrals in the past – when the gearbox finds neutral instead of engaging the gear you want – so my team has deliberately made it difficult to find.

I need to find it for the start of a race because, when I click into first gear immediately after neutral, the bike’s electronic launch control system is automatically engaged.

I hold the throttle wide-open, and it sets the rpm at the right level in the torque range to maximise acceleration. I feed out the clutch to launch the bike, then I have to adjust the throttle slightly to try to keep the engine in the same rpm range. It’s a fine art, but at the end of virtually every session I do a practice start and it’s something I’ve mastered over the years.

At the same time, there’s another part of the launch control that prevents the front wheel going up in the air as I pull away from the line. But the possibility of not finding neutral before the start always makes me even more anxious.

Then I find it, and I give Uri that nod and the starting lights go on.

One … two … three … four …

The lights take four seconds to go out and we’re away, eyes focused on the turn-in point for the first corner, about 450m down the track.

My start is perfect, and, with a power-to-weight ratio not far off that of an F1 car, the acceleration is amazing.

I see nothing but the track ahead, no other bikes in my peripheral vision, although I know they’re there.

I hit my braking marker and sit up from behind the bubble of the screen as my right index finger squeezes the brake lever.

My head and chest are slammed by the force of the wind that’s trying to blow me off the back of the bike, which is itself pitching forward under the brakes.

I don’t know how much force is going through my arms and wrists – in both directions as I’m hanging on to the handlebars – but it feels like a lot.

I move my right butt cheek off the seat and prepare to tip into the right-hander, leaning the bike over to counter the centrifugal forces that want to send both it and me in the opposite direction.

I lead into the long 180° first corner and extend my right knee outwards until the plastic knee-slider is skimming the kerb, telling me how far the bike is leant over.

This is when the tyres do their thing, the sticky, treadless rubber preventing the bike from sliding out from underneath me through a contact patch on the tarmac about the size of a credit card.

Coming out of the corner, I pick the bike up, shift myself back into a central position and put my head back down behind the screen. I’m accelerating hard towards the little left kink that is turn two and then off to turns three and four, a tight left followed quickly by a slightly more open right, like a big, fast chicane.

The nerves have disappeared and I’m focusing on braking markers, turn-in points, apexes. My head’s down, I take no risks and make no mistakes and, before I know it, I’m out of the last corner and looking for my pit-board – a summary of key information held out for me by my team, which I can glance at as I go back down the start-finish straight. I want to see the gap, in seconds, over the rider immediately behind me.

I catch a glimpse as I scream past. It’s +0.0.

No way. That can’t be! I’ve made a perfect start and done a great first lap. I’ve been so quick all weekend – I must have some kind of small margin at least.

One lap later, the gap is reading +1.5. That’s more like it. I’m away, determined to start building a lead and control the race from the front.

Then I see red flags – the race has been stopped.

A bike has crashed into a strip of air fencing, puncturing the inflatable barrier. I see it as I ride past turn five and I know we’re going to have to wait for a replacement unit, which is going to take a few minutes. I roll back up the pit-lane and into the garage where Pere is saying everything’s great, we’re in control. I asked him why the gap was +0.0 on the first lap and he says it wasn’t, it was +0.9. I must have been looking at my team-mate’s pit-board and not my own. It’s the first time in the whole weekend all the pit-boards have been held out at the same time, so I need to concentrate on finding mine. I ask Kev for another visor with three tear-offs because there are a lot of bugs out there. I hate having bugs on my visor – I’d be useless at the TT.

Now we have to go out and do a quick-start procedure – a sighting lap, one mechanic on the grid to show me my start position, no tyre warmers. Another quick warm-up lap and more stress trying to find neutral, rolling up for the second start. Another routine nod to Uri and we’re waiting for the lights again. I’ve got the bike held in launch control mode, but now there’s another problem – the lights just kind of flicker and then go off again. Yellow flags everywhere. A board is held out of the starter’s position above the track: Start Delayed. It’s the right call from a safety point-of-view, but this race is fucked up.

I switch off the engine straight away because it’s over-heating, and I wait for the mechanics to swarm back out to the grid and put the tyre warmers back on. I take another visor from Kev, because I always use a tear-off on the warm-up lap. Race control puts out a sign saying the race has been reduced to 16 laps. Off we go again – another warm-up lap, another fumble for neutral, but this time I’m worried I might have fried the clutch on the aborted start. Normally, my crew changes the clutch after one practice start. We’re about to do our third in this race.

I’m back in my grid position, the start marshal is walking off and the lights come on again, without any problem, and they go out after a similar wait. I get another good start, focus again on my braking marker and turn in for the first corner, only this time I go in pretty equal with my team-mate Tom, who’s starting from pole position. He is virtually on top of me as he tips in, causing me to sit up a bit.

So, this is first contact with the enemy – and that battle plan agreed with Fab duly goes out the window.

Fuck this. Instead of waiting for five laps for the race to settle down, I’m taking control.

I take a slightly wider line than Tom through turn one, pulling the bike back to a really late apex so I can square off the end of the corner and get on the gas hard. I cut across the kerb on the inside of turn two and rocket past Tom so fast on the drag down to turn three.

Don’t out-brake yourself. Just hit the apex, pick the bike up quickly for turn four and block him in case he tries to get back round. I’m still in front as I charge down to turn five. Now I can manage the race.

I complete a great first lap, check the pit-board – the right one this time – and it reads +0.4 and the next time around it’s +1.1, after a 1m 59.535s lap. It turns out to be the fastest lap of the race and perhaps promises another Pirelli Best Lap moment of TV gold (as long as I don’t need another piss).

The gap continues to grow, but on lap four a bug splats right in the middle of my visor, directly in my field of vision. I’m in a dilemma: if I use a tear-off now, I’ll only have one left to last the rest of the race. I decide to push on, squinting around what’s left of the bug.

Arturo’s on my pit-board and he’s almost telepathic in knowing what information I need to see. The gap has continued to build, but now it’s Marco Melandri directly behind me – he must have passed Tom, unless Tom’s had a problem. I start to wonder if Melandri’s found some extra speed for the race, but Arturo is instinctively putting the Italian’s lap times below his name on my board as well – it’s reading +3.5, Melandri, 00.5 (his lap time of 2m 00.5s) and I can see from my dash that I’ve just done a 2m 00.3s. If I can keep doing that, two- or three-tenths each lap faster than the guy behind me, I can keep pulling away. He’s not going to catch me.

This is my mindset – every corner, every sector, every lap – for the rest of the race: check the pit-board and keep going that little bit quicker than Melandri.

I’ve done so many laps of Brno over the weekend, plus a test here a few weeks ago. I know exactly where to brake, where to turn in, how each corner should feel – it’s metronomic, instinctive. But it’s the hottest part of the weekend and the front tyre is starting to degrade. As I roll gently off the gas and go into corners with some lean angle, the bars start to rock a little in my hands because the tyre is moving underneath me.

The rubber is so hot that the molecules in the tyre’s construction are moving around inside the compound. I’m aware of it as I go through the stadium section, turns five and six especially.

The front tyre is tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Hey, this is the limit for today.’

If Melandri doesn’t have this problem, if his bike is set up a little differently and putting less stress on the tyre, he’s going to catch me. But I see the pit-board again, and the gap is still increasing: +3.8, +4.1, +4.5, +4.7. Just keep doing what you’re doing, don’t make any mistakes. Suddenly, my pit-board is reading L1, the final lap, I’m +5.1, and only now do I start thinking about actually winning the race.

I’m powering up the hill towards the end of the lap for the last time and the bike wheelies a little before the final chicane, turns 13 and 14.

As I exit the last corner, I catch another wheelie perfectly and cross the line on the back wheel, standing up, nodding to my crew who are crawling all over the pit-wall fence.

They’re holding a board that displays a specially-designed logo – 60 victories, Recordman – and that mantra.

Dream. Believe. Achieve.

I hardly take any of it in, because I’m still pulling this insane wheelie that feels so good I carry it the entire length of the straight, almost down to turn one. Then, as I land the front wheel, the pit-board message hits me.

It’s my 60th World Superbike victory.

Not bad for a country lad built for motocross.

I roll round turn one, taking it in.

Oh my God! I’ve got the most Superbike race wins in history. More victories than any other rider since the championship began; one more than the Superbike legend that is Carl Fogarty, whose record stood for almost 20 years. The team’s marketing manager, Biel Roda, spoke to me about this moment earlier this morning but I barely took it in. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘if something happens today, we’ll be at turn 11, OK?’ I knew what he meant and I just replied ‘Cool, OK.’

I do the slow-down lap pretty much on my own, because I had such a big lead at the end of the race. I get to turn 11 quite quickly where Biel is waiting with Ruben Coca, one of the technical guys, and Silvia Sanchez, the team co-ordinator and life and soul of the entire organisation.

It’s so cool to see them all there, and they’ve got a special T-shirt and flag prepared for me. As I pull on the T-shirt, I start to realise I’ve made some history.

How did I get here? It’s been one hell of a ride …

CHAPTER 2
In the Blood

Motorcycle racing is in my blood: my grandad sponsored a lot of great Northern Irish riders like Joey Dunlop, and my dad Johnny was an Irish Road Racing Champion.

I very nearly didn’t come along at all though. Dad and my mum Claire hadn’t been going out long when, during a race at Brands Hatch, Dad collided with another rider. It was at Paddock Hill Bend in the days before there was any run-off and he smashed into the barrier. He was on life support at Queen Mary’s Hospital, London, for over a week after puncturing a lung and fracturing six ribs. In an operation to stop internal bleeding he lost a kidney. Mum didn’t know if he was going to make it. Almost as soon as he woke up, he proposed.

They were married a year later and soon enough I was on the way. Even in the womb I was listening to the roar of engines and the vibes and talk of paddock life. When I first drew breath at 4.20pm on Monday, 2 February 1987 at the Waveney Hospital, Ballymena, the midwife was crazy about bikes and spent most of the labour gabbing away about them to Dad. I was taken home to our rented house in Starbog Road, Kilwaughter – a little village near Larne in County Antrim – and I was christened at the First Lane Presbyterian Church by Rev. Lambert McAdoo, who happened to be another massive bike fan.

When I got colic the only thing that would keep me quiet was being strapped into a bouncy chair in the back of the car and being driven around for hours on end. This lasted until they fitted a proper car seat, which I hated so much I’d climb out as soon as Mum started driving. One day, I spotted a motorcyclist wearing a familiar-looking white Arai helmet and I was screaming ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ at him. The police wore Arai helmets in those days; that particular copper gave me a gentle talking to about staying in my seat.

My favourite TV shows were Fireman Sam, Thomas the Tank Engine and the motorcycle racing. I’d sit on the arm of the sofa wearing Dad’s helmet, leaning into the corners with the guys on the screen. Later, I organised my own bicycle races around the house, with Mum recording my lap times. I would commentate, then do my own post-race interviews, asking the questions and answering in an American accent like my early heroes, Kevin Schwantz and Jeremy McGrath. When I started nursery school in Ballyclare, there was a sponsored cycle ride that, of course, wasn’t supposed to be a race. But I made sure I finished first and took my first chequered flag.

Dad had started racing motocross when he was about 14, but ‘Granda’ John said it was ‘dirty and mucky’ so he switched to short circuit and road racing later and did pretty well. He won Irish and Ulster championships and the famous Ulster Grand Prix, always his favourite event. He never finished higher than second at the North West 200, but he did win the 1989 Lightweight TT on the Isle of Man on a 250cc Yamaha. To even compete in a TT race is something – to win one is something else.

Now, you may have noticed a little name pattern emerging: although my dad is called Johnny, he was christened John Rea, as was Granda, and there were three generations of John Rea before that. I was the first grandson in the line, so I was destined to become the sixth consecutive John Rea. My parents called me Jonathan, but that doesn’t stop me being called John and Johnny.

It was Granda who started the whole racing thing in the family. He had the nickname ‘Stormy’ because when he lost his temper you could hear him from miles away. He and his three brothers got into racing because they lived near the old Ulster Grand Prix course at Clady. Granda never raced himself but loved going down to watch and before long the brothers started backing road racers. Then someone told him about this young kid from Ballymoney, Joey Dunlop, who was fast but didn’t have any bikes. Granda sponsored Joey in his early road racing days with that famous understated ‘Rea Racing’ logo on the side of his fairings. Joey went on to become one of Northern Ireland’s greatest racing heroes, winning a record 26 races at the Isle of Man TT and five Formula TT World Championships. A few years ago, he was voted Northern Ireland’s greatest ever sports star by Belfast Telegraph readers.

I have nothing but happy memories of Granda. Mostly involving apples. I remember going up to his place and chatting about bikes, crunching on apples. He used to say, ‘You know, you’re just like your dad.’ I was still young and wasn’t sure what he meant. But he said it a lot: ‘You’re just like your dad and you’ll be a fine wee racer. You’ll be a world champion, so you will.’

Mum’s mother, ‘Nanna’, was a nurse and her father a contractor. Nanna is an amazingly strong and traditional Northern Irish lady and lived just off the North West 200 course when I was young. Being very religious, Sundays have always been a day of rest for her. So, my chosen career, which involved going to work on a Sunday, was a huge ‘tut-tut’ back in the day and I felt quite guilty about upsetting her.

Nanna eventually got used to the idea of me racing and I’ve watched her go full circle and become my number one fan. She’s much more relaxed about watching me go to work on a Sunday now.

I’ve had some of the most sincere but funniest post-race telephone calls with Nanna, especially during my days riding with Honda. She texts before and after every race and tells me she’s been asking God to keep me safe. I love getting her messages, but it would be impossible to reply to them all, so, once in a while, I’ll call her to make up for the radio silence. One time, I rang after a race in 2012 when I had a bit of time at the airport. It was a period when we were really struggling with the Honda and she’d been listening to the Eurosport race commentary of Jack Burnicle and James Whitham. She’s normally totally calm, but she sounded pretty mad and said they’d been talking about how the Honda was at the end of the line and how I was having to override it. She took it all as gospel and said, ‘Jonathan, it’s terrible they’re making you ride that bike. They’re saying that you’re always close to making a mistake and that it’s difficult for you to realise your potential.’

I said, ‘Nanna, it is what it is – the team are doing the best they can. It’s not their fault but the base level of the Honda is just not competitive enough.’

‘Well, it’s not fair,’ she said, ‘they say you’re always riding on a knife edge.’

I told her that the bike was mass produced at the factory in Japan and that there wasn’t much we could do about it. She said, ‘So give me the number of the people over there, I want to call them and tell them it’s not fair they’re making you ride that bike.’

I couldn’t help laughing down the phone with her, but she was deadly serious. I promised that I would have a word with the Japanese engineers and get them to try to make a better bike.

Mum was very good at sport when she was young and really competitive. She played hockey for Randalstown Ladies, one of Northern Ireland’s top women’s teams, and did athletics to county level, but she hurt her back in a long-jump competition, aged 16, and had to give it all up.

Living close to the North West 200 course meant she saw her first race there when she was about 13. Unfortunately, she witnessed the crash in which Tom Herron was killed. He was one of Ireland’s highest-profile racers and had just started his Grand Prix career as a team-mate to Barry Sheene. Understandably, she never really enjoyed our time at the North West 200 after that but was apparently more relaxed watching my dad race at the Isle of Man TT where she could monitor his progress around the course from a massive board at the main grandstand.

My very first holiday, at the age of three months, was going with Mum to see Dad in that North West 200, where we had a caravan in the paddock. Our summer half-term holiday was often a week on the Isle of Man where Dad was racing at the TT. Mum tells me that from a very young age I would just stand at the fence and not move for hours. I could recite the race numbers of all the riders as well, and it’s kind of spooky that my son Jake did exactly the same with World Superbike riders from about the same age.

When I was a bit older, I just used to love getting in the way in the paddock and was always really happy to feel part of the team when Dad gave me little jobs like cleaning wheels or polishing the bikes.

Mum tells this story about one weekend when I was about three-and-a-half and we all went down south to a place called Loughshinny near Dublin to watch Dad race. He had quite a bad crash and as he lay in the road another bike had come along and whacked him properly in the nuts. I can’t imagine the pain he must have been in, and although we can laugh about it now, he would have been in agony. He spent a couple of weeks in hospital and by the time he’d recovered his sense of humour he was telling anyone who’d listen that he was the only white man in the world with a black dick and took great pleasure showing his battle scars to his mates who went to visit.

Despite Mum’s bad memories of that episode, and the North West and the Brands Hatch crashes, she supported Dad’s career on top of being mum to four of us kids: me the eldest, Richard, Kristofer (who we jokingly call the Mistake!) and Chloe.

Richard turned out to be a pretty good kid brother, by which I mean his arrival in November 1989 was probably one of the best things to happen in my early life. He and I spent a lot of years having fun and riding bikes together and he has turned out to be one of the nicest, most genuine blokes I’ve ever known. He’s a real gentle giant and has become a very important influence in my life. The arrival of Kristofer and Chloe made us a much bigger family unit and those years of expansion must have been a pretty chaotic time for my parents.

Mum was never any kind of pushover, but if Dad came home and she told him that we’d not done something or we’d been naughty, he would shout a bit and whatever it was that we hadn’t done got sorted pretty quickly. You could say I had a fairly strict upbringing, and although I don’t remember actually being hit with anything, the threat of getting a bit of a whack if we were naughty was never far away.

I totally respected my parents while I was growing up and I still do. They really helped my growing love of motorcycles too. Dad’s TT win in 1989 came, of course, with a bit of prize money and he bought me the best Christmas present I could imagine: an Italjet 50, a tiny little motocross-style bike. I was just short of my third birthday.

Unfortunately, Santa’s amazing generosity hadn’t stretched to a helmet, or any gloves or boots; but that wasn’t going to stop me riding on that cold Christmas Day. Dad probably instantly regretted it. He must have frozen his nuts off watching me ride up and down all day outside in the cold. I knew how to twist the throttle, because Dad had shown me when he used to sit me on his race bikes from the minute I could hold myself up. But he had to explain what the brakes were all about. The problem was I still couldn’t get the bike stopped because my hands were too small for my fingers to reach the brake lever, so Dad had to run alongside to make sure I didn’t ride into a fence or the side of the house. I just rode and rode all day until the bike ran out of fuel. Not surprisingly, I had my first crash that day, but it didn’t put me off – I was straight back on it, because I loved it and never wanted to get off.

Looking back at my early life, you can see a lot of me as a professional racer coming together. I used to throw a complete fit if we were ever late for Ballynure Primary and Mum had to be waiting outside as soon as I came out in the afternoon. An early love of routine and following a schedule, I guess, which helps for busy race weekends today. I also got an early taste of hospitals, now an occupational hazard, when I had suspected meningitis and was kept isolated on a drip for about five days.

I got in plenty of training, too. The house in Kilwaughter was, for me, the ultimate kid’s playground. We had a reasonably sized garden and the land backed onto the Kilwaughter House Hotel, which, in the mid-1990s, was one of the biggest rave venues in Northern Ireland. We had a pretty good relationship with the hotel management and, while we were OK about the ravers trampling all over the place every weekend, they were quite relaxed about me using the hotel grounds to practise riding whenever I could. The house also backed onto a limestone quarry and chemical works, which was just like an extension of the playground for me and Richard and my schoolfriend Philip McCammond on our BMX bikes.

Philip is an absolute legend, a lifelong friend, and he introduced me to this other playground down the road, which happened to be his parents’ farm. Our two families were inseparable. Lorraine, Philip’s mother, was like my second mum and Richard also became best friends with Michael, Philip’s younger brother. With them living on a farm, it made riding motorcycles on private property much easier as well.

One night, when Dad and Philip’s dad Gary were working on the bikes at our house in Kilwaughter, me, Philip and his bigger brother Christopher ventured out of the garage and wandered up among the trees of the hotel where we saw a couple basically dry humping the life out of each other. We started laughing, but it got less funny when the two of them suddenly broke off, especially when we saw the expression on the fella’s face. They chased us down through the woods and Christopher and I managed to get back to the garage, but Philip wasn’t so quick and they caught him by the scruff of the neck.

It was the first time I’d seen Dad properly rear up and he charged out of the garage with this big lump hammer, shouting, ‘If you don’t let him go, I’m going to hammer you!’ The fella let go pretty quickly and started running very fast in the opposite direction.

There were some stables at the hotel, which belonged to my dad’s Uncle Noel, and I remember Richard got a horse once when he was drifting in and out of bikes. He was a funny old nag with a glass eye that we called Flash. Much to Mum’s horror, Richard, Philip and I used to climb aboard Flash and ride him, without any training or technique, just to see how fast we could go and how high we could get him to jump.

Once, probably after the parents had all had a few drinks, it was suggested we should build a proper motocross track on some rough ground in one of the fields on the farm. So, our dads got a local guy with a JCB to come in and we gave him a good idea of what we wanted. He put together a really cool track for us, with double jumps and tabletops and everything you’d want for a little motocross track.

When I wasn’t riding I was at home watching motocross videos. I would devour anything: Supercross re-runs, training videos, Grand Prix races, any kind of racing. I would watch them over and over on repeat, studying them in as much detail as I could, looking at race starts, the different techniques of individual riders, how they rode inside or outside corners, through ruts, how they took jumps and whoops.

Apart from motocross, I remember watching Kevin Schwantz in 1993 and 1994 doing his thing in 500cc GPs because my dad was always a fan of his. I used to make tracks out of anything that happened to be lying around to race my little model of his Pepsi Suzuki.

As soon as I climbed on that little Italjet, I knew I never really wanted to be anywhere else. But while little kids grow, motorcycles don’t, so it wasn’t too long before I was riding a Yamaha PW50, which was as iconic back then as it is today. I remember mine vividly – white plastics with a bright red seat and displaying race number 17. I spent day after day riding the bike around the garden at home and at the McCammonds’ farm.

I was desperate to start racing myself. It happened that the final round of the 1993 British Youth Motocross Championship was coming to Ireland’s famous track at Desertmartin, a tiny village in County Londonderry not far from Cookstown. The track is one of the best in the world and has hosted many world and British championship races.

We applied for a wildcard for the 50cc race – a one-off entry rather than entering for a whole championship. A low-profile junior club meeting would have been a fine first race but, no, we were jumping straight in at the deep end. To my six-year-old eyes, everything in this paddock was huge. It was full of swanky 30ft motorhomes and big sponsored teams from the national series. And there was us in our little white van and a PW50.

The 50cc class at that time featured a mix of standard bikes like my PW50 and tuned machines that were more like a real race bike with a proper motocross chassis – bikes like LEMs and Malagutis, which were much better and faster. I lined up at the start on my little standard bike with what felt like the pressure of the world on my shoulders because I wanted to do so well.

I’d been riding for two or three years by then, with coaching and encouragement from Dad, so I was comfortable on the bike. I’d been watching Dad racing and often winning for as long as I could remember. I was always aware of his nerves in the build-up to a race; he’d smoke a bit more and go into himself. Suddenly, this was me racing – my dad was watching me, and I could sense he was nervous as well. I knew it was a really important moment: there was Granda’s prediction to fulfil. I wasn’t scared though; I just knew I had to do a good job.

I memorised all the names and race numbers I was lining up against, even though I’d never met them. I was surrounded by about 30 noisy little two-stroke bikes with riders blipping throttles and creating this huge noise of anticipation and clouds of blue smoke that just seemed to hang in the air. Lining up at the gate, I was sure I was going to get smoked by all these bigger kids on their impressive bikes, but Dad was telling me not to worry: they could only score points in their modified class, while I would be competing in the separate class for standard bikes like my PW50. It was like the independent class we have today in World Superbikes and MotoGP, a race within a race.

In some ways, there’s not much difference between me lining up then and now. Nervous, but focused and a little detached – like the lights are on but no-one’s in. I was trying just to concentrate on doing my best, like my dad had told me. I sat and waited quietly.

Motocross racers start in one straight line held by metal gates which all drop together when the starter is ready. I just stared at this gate, waiting for it to fall so we could get going.

Suddenly, there was this howl of 30 throttles being snapped open to maximum revs and we all took off. This was it, I was racing and heading for the first turn, trying not to hit any of the other riders but it was all pretty chaotic. I got through the first few turns and slotted into some kind of rhythm.

On the third lap, I rode through a puddle and got water in the electrics. The little temperamental PW just stopped. I sat in the middle of that big puddle in floods of tears. Someone had to come and get me off the track before the other riders came round again. Afterwards, Mum and Dad told me everything was OK but, for a long time, it wasn’t.

When the tears had dried and I’d calmed down a bit, I couldn’t wait to have another go.

CHAPTER 3
Motocross

I was still only six when Granda died, aged just 67. The night before the funeral, his open coffin was in the house and, even though the kids weren’t encouraged to go in, I wanted to see him. He didn’t look any different to me; he just looked peaceful. The next day there were a lot of tears flowing from my dad and his family; it was the first time I saw adults cry, but maybe it was because my grandfather had looked so normal the night before that I just carried on playing with my friends.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but Granda had a high profile in Irish racing and made a big impact with his sponsorship. Even now, Irish racing fans from the 1980s or 90s are always happy to tell me what a grand fella my grandfather was. He’s certainly a massive part of what made me a racer, which really started to get going that year.

After that first wildcard ride at Desertmartin, we managed a few more open track sessions so I could study puddle-avoidance techniques. The bug had bitten, I was desperate to race again, so it was decided that in 1994 we would give it a proper go and we prepared to head off on the most incredible adventure.

I was lucky enough to get one of those trick modified 50cc bikes I’d seen – a Malaguti Grizzly, a genuinely fast little bike. We raced all over Ireland, in the north on Saturdays and the south on Sundays. I loved every minute of the next few years on the Malaguti and later on a 60cc Kawasaki. I was living this exciting sporting life with my family every weekend, playing with my brother, Richard, and my best friend Philip, who were also racing – just like we did on the farm and in Kilwaughter. I got a massive thrill out of the racing, running through things with Dad, checking out the track and the lines other racers used. Riding the bike itself was just an enormous buzz, especially if I did well in the races. Back then, after a race, win or lose, I was able to muck about with my mates and spend time in the little close-knit family unit that we had.

Once, Richard was supposed to be lining up for a race but was nowhere to be seen. We found him sitting under the awning about to get stuck into a big cheeseburger. Dad said, ‘What do you think you’re doing? They’re all lined up ready to go!’ Richard replied through a mouthful of burger, ‘Could you ask them to hang on, Dad?’ Dad’s face said that he wasn’t about to do that, but he always understood Richard’s attitude to racing was a little different to mine. He said, ‘Well, you’ll just have to miss the race then.’ He finished his burger.

Richard was never that fast on a motocross bike, God love him. He was riding ahead of me at an open practice day at a new track in southern Ireland when I launched this huge double jump and saw him riding up the other side where I was planning to land. I hit the end of his handlebar and broke his wrist then came down and broke my collarbone. Mum came running over and put her foot in a rabbit hole and twisted her ankle.

So, all three of us were sitting in an ambulance on our way to A&E and the whole way Richard is asking the paramedics, ‘Do you know if the hospital food’s any good?’ – not seeming to care that his wrist was in bits. Mum said, ‘Shut up, Richard! This is not the time to be worrying about food!’ I was more concerned about missing any races because of my collarbone, but that’s where we differ, Richard and me – we’re cut from slightly different cloth! He was happy enough with a takeaway Chinese we had when we finally got home, but we were all in a hell of a state sitting round the family table eating that meal.

Normal injuries could get complicated, too. One time I was in hospital and one of the nurses noticed I was covered in roost marks across my upper arms and chest, which often happens when riders in front of you kick up clumps of mud and stones with their rear tyres. The medical staff wouldn’t let my parents into the ward to see me – they were more concerned with whether they should be calling social services.

At the end of the first season, Mum took me and Richard to a meeting where I won four races. I was so excited but as soon as I’d finished, Mum packed us all into the van and drove like crazy to get us to Bishopscourt where Dad was racing in a popular end-of-season meeting. We watched from a grass bank, me still in my bright pink motocross gear and super-excited to tell Dad about my wins. He listened then said, ‘I only managed a seventh. It’s probably time I hung up my leathers.’ So that was it, 1994 was his final year of racing. I wasn’t complaining too much though; it meant I got to go motocrossing a lot more.

Over those years, I did better and better and ended up with another wildcard in the final round of the British championship at Desertmartin in 1996. I had a much better race than in my first puddle-bound outing so we decided that for 1997, when I was 10, we’d tackle the full British championship. Dad saw that there was this strong family atmosphere and social thing going on and eventually he sold the idea to Mum.

It was a massively big deal for us – me, my dad and his mate Sandy travelling the length and breadth of the UK for me to race bikes. I particularly remember the first round, at a circuit in Cheshire called Cheddleton, which had a railway track running through it at the bottom of a hill. I was feeling quite confident on my Kawasaki KX60 – the engine was strong and the suspension was great after we’d done lots of testing with my dad. But it looked completely standard, right down to the manufacturer’s stickers, and we were running a standard exhaust. I could see all these trick bikes with exotic aftermarket parts and sponsor stickers and began to feel very intimidated again. But Dad would always tell me, ‘Don’t worry about how the bike looks, it’s how it goes that matters.’ He was right: maybe the competition back in Ireland had been tougher than I thought because I won those first races. And on day two, most of my rivals rocked up with standard exhausts back on their bikes.

I could fill a separate book with every race of my motocross career and every feeling I had in the build-up, on the start line and at the end – I can remember every single one.

There were few better than the end of the 1997 British championship. At a week-long festival before the final weekend at Desertmartin, I had a couple of huge crashes landing on a double jump that followed a big tabletop. Twice I picked my rut too late and ended up cross rutting – when your front wheel goes into one rut and your rear is in another – and twice I crashed. I became really anxious and scared to do the double jump again over the weekend.

Dad could see my confidence was completely gone and gave a senior rider called Adam Lyons a few quid to do a track walk with me. He helped me cope by talking me through exactly how to deal with the jumps with those deep ruts. When the first race came I had a great start, leading through the first few corners to the big tabletop. The 60cc bikes couldn’t quite clear the flat part like bigger, more powerful bikes, so I landed on it and bounced down the other side towards the jump where I’d had those huge crashes a couple of days before. When you’re ahead with a clear track in front of you, it’s the best opportunity to make time on your rivals, so I picked the rut I was aiming for as soon I found the down slope of the tabletop and nailed it first time. From that point my confidence was back, I built a massive lead and ended up winning all four races that weekend to become British champion.

There were so many special moments that year. In the build-up, I was interviewed by Stephen Watson, the BBC’s sports presenter and a big motorcycling fan. He had asked me then about my future plans and I told him to watch out for the Rea name.

I also won the Irish and Ulster Motocross Championships back home. British Prime Minister Tony Blair even wrote to congratulate me!

Dad did a great job of keeping my feet on the ground though. I wanted the world and couldn’t wait for it to come to me. I remember later being desperate for some white Tech 7 Alpinestar boots and eventually Mum went against Dad’s wishes and bought me a pair, but he wasn’t happy. He believed you had to strive and wait for the good things in life. Mum was the same, but I could manipulate her a bit better.

Mum is a very loving, nurturing character. She can get a bit stressed sometimes and have very strong opinions but will often back them up if she’s challenged on them. She was the glue that held the whole family together both at home and while we were on the schoolboy motocross adventure.

While Dad was sympathetic as I sat in that puddle at Desertmartin, he never showed much emotion. He is a quiet, humble man who likes to just watch from a distance, often puffing away on a cigarette.

In the final race of my second year in the modified 50cc class, I got pipped to the championship by my good friend Martin Barr and bawled my head off. He was very calm and said, ‘Look, you’re going to get beaten sometimes and you’ll just have to accept it.’

At the time that just pissed me off even more! But now I feel I’m a really well-rounded rider and I have my dad to thank for that. I’m always trying to make my sons see that a pair of white Tech 7 Alpinestars is something you have to long for. But Alpinestars are one of my biggest and most loyal sponsors, so my four-year-old son Jake’s already got a pair. I had to wait until I was 14.

I was always aware I had a responsibility to do my bit and, because I was a terrible mechanic, I was happy to wash the bikes down and polish everything until it shone. Dad often said to me, ‘While things might not look perfect and you might not be wearing the latest gear, your bikes will always be good.’ As usual he was right – thanks to him my bikes never missed a beat and never broke down.

He must have spent thousands of hours fettling the bikes and driving thousands of miles for me to go racing. He would never put me down, but I knew if we were travelling in silence I hadn’t done a great job. He never went over the top when I won either; he’s not the kind to spray the champagne.

I learned so much in those years just by racing and trying to get better: How to apply the throttle to get maximum traction out of the corners on dirt; how to use the front and rear brakes in combination – applying and releasing to create a balance and prevent the bike pitching back and forth too much. I worked out how to release the clutch lever to make gear changes as smoothly as possible. And I learned how to plan a race. Those 15-minute-plus races were incredibly physical, absorbing bumps and landings from jumps, muscling the bike into and out of corners. I found any way I could to make the races less physical, by taking different, smoother lines or adjusting my body position to make riding less tiring.

When you’re riding bar-to-bar with 40 other riders going down to the first corner, you develop this balance of aggression and caution, a kind of sixth sense of what the other riders are going to do. After years of those, launching off the start line of a World Superbike race with three riders on each row of the grid is honestly not that daunting.

Motocross is so raw and is still my first love. We can’t even go to a private World Superbike test now without two 40ft trucks, plus the hospitality unit to water and feed around 40 staff. But when I’m at home I can put my motocross bike in the back of my van and go and meet my friends at the track and have a great day riding, having fun. I really love that, but I think if motocross was my job the enjoyment might be different.

I always arrange a motocross camp before each World Superbike season. I put myself through race simulations of about the same time length as a World Superbike race – around 35 minutes – to switch my brain and my muscles on again after a few weeks off the bike. In track racing, the speeds are a lot faster but the environment is extremely controlled. In motocross, the track is always changing and you have to be so alert to all those variations.

My annual camps remind me of my early motocross years, which were one long fantastic adventure. Mum and Dad bought a bigger motorhome and we had what we called the ‘coffin bed’ above the workshop which I shared with Richard, and the two of us had Chloe, a wee baby at the time, in between us. We’d often get a late ferry back on the Sunday night and my parents would leave us asleep in the motorhome and wake us on the Monday morning for school.

But if the racing was going from strength to strength, school definitely wasn’t.

Mum and Dad had said that if I wanted to carry on with motocross, I’d have to pass the 11-plus. I did, but I ended up the only kid from Ballynure to go to my senior school, Larne Grammar – no Philip, no anyone. I knew from the first time I got on the bus just outside the house that I wasn’t going to be happy. I struggled from the first day and found it difficult to make friends.

I want to say now that Larne Grammar was a fantastic educational institution. My business studies teacher, Miss Herron, my Spanish teacher, Miss Beggs, and my technology teacher, Mr Lee, are amazing people. But I found it pretty tough. In my first three years there, I really felt what it’s like to be bullied. And it’s not a nice feeling at all.

You probably know about the religious divide in Northern Ireland and how dramatically it has affected people’s lives over the years, especially during the Troubles in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The Good Friday Agreement, which brought about a permanent peace in the province, was signed in 1998, just a few months before I went to Larne Grammar, a mixed school taking children from Protestant and Catholic families.

My naïve country upbringing hadn’t prepared me for life in a school where, to some kids, religion was something to hang on to. The guy who was bullying me was a Catholic, which I couldn’t have given two shits about because I had as many Catholic friends as Protestant in my motocross world. But where it gets bat-shit crazy is how it all started – with a Kevin Schwantz pencil case done out in his famous Pepsi colours. You know the Pepsi colours: red, white and blue. Yep, the same as the Union flag. And this, I kid you not, is what kicked it off in school.

My friend Martin Barr lived on a housing estate just outside Ballyclare and the kerbstones there were painted red, white and blue – not unlike the rumble strips at the Assen TT Circuit – obviously for religious and loyalist reasons. I didn’t get that at all though and asked if there was a racetrack there. Remember, they race on the roads in Ireland, so it wasn’t such a daft question! But, along with my deeply offensive Pepsi pencil case, that was great ammunition for me to be tormented with.

In those days, I’d heard stories of the youth wings of paramilitary groups, but I knew absolutely nothing about how they worked. Thankfully I never found out, but I was often threatened quite menacingly with the possibility of getting jumped or stabbed by some of these guys on my way to or from school.

The whole experience and the relentless and scary nature of it definitely affected my confidence, especially with other kids at school. I just tried to keep my head down and maintain as low a profile as possible. God love Mum, though, she was in the headmaster’s office more than enough times because of this problem.

It all came to a head at the end of Year 10 – I would have been about 14 – when we were all lined up to go into the sports hall to do a Key Stage 3 test. Something was said to me by this same bully and for some reason my fuse just blew. I’m not proud of that moment when I was punching him so hard I started crying myself. Violence should never be a way to settle any dispute. But afterwards the bullying stopped and I’m happy to report I was never stabbed on the way home. The last two years became kind of bearable and while the kid and I did not become lifelong best buddies, we got along.

For 2002, Dad put in a massive effort to get a bike good enough for what turned out to be my final 125cc schoolboy season. Right the way through the schoolboy motocross ranks I was always very competitive and won a lot of championships in Ireland, but when we competed in England I always seemed to have an issue in my final year of any particular class, when I should have been most likely to win. There would often be an injury to recover from, or simply faster rivals to deal with.

So, Dad took a Honda CR125R that was already pretty sorted with better suspension and he spent a fortune making it race-ready. Then, just two weeks before the start of the season, our garage got broken into and my bike, my tyre allocation, generators, my brother’s quad bike, everything, was stolen by some lowlife.

They had known what they were going in for. The police were getting nowhere, so we started asking around the local area about who might have been responsible. We never quite got to the bottom of it, but we got a pretty good idea. Dad’s questions led him, he said, to meet people in some of the scariest pubs he’d ever been to. We had never had any association with those organised crime groups or paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland, but eventually he got a call from someone whose voice he didn’t recognise but who said that he and Dad knew of each other. The mystery caller told Dad he was getting close to our stuff but that, if he knew what was good for him, he’d drop the trail and forget all about it.

We packed our bags pretty quickly after that and moved permanently about five miles further into the countryside, right on the edge of a forest called Ballyboley.

Along with my bike and my realistic hopes for the season, we had to say goodbye to the adventure playground that was Kilwaughter. I’m not saying Dad stopped enjoying racing there and then, but it put a dampener on the whole motocross adventure, I think, for both of us.

I had to start the season borrowing Philip’s KTM SX125. It was a horrible bike and never felt right or like it was mine, so that 2002 season was certainly lacking something, and although I was always competitive I never got to win another British schoolboy championship.

By then, I knew I didn’t want to continue with A levels or go to university after I left school the next summer, and Mum and Dad made it clear I was never going to be allowed to lie around at home trying to be a professional motocross rider. My parents had always seemed to find a way to finance the racing and Mum was always very good at putting sponsorship proposals together. But they had been funding this adventure for the best part of ten years and now I was going to have to go to work, to earn money and treat motorbikes as a hobby and nothing else.

I was also aware I had two brothers and a sister, and it wasn’t fair that my parents had spent so much time and energy allowing me to follow my dreams. Dad had taken over Granda’s transport business, which is still going strong now, and that needed more of his attention. It was getting to the point that my ambition was in one place and reality was in another.

I’d grown up and raced in the early motocross days with the Laverty brothers, who made the transition to road racing with some success and appeared to live this glamorous life as professional racers. I wanted some of that for myself and, seeing them ride, I was sure I could do the same. I was also a bit envious of some of my rivals who were starting to train in the USA during the winter, some of them even home-schooled because their parents were so loaded and committed.

I knew it was going to be tough to earn money from racing, but I had to give it a go. I began flirting with the idea of trying to scrape together enough personal sponsorship to buy a ride in 2003 with a bigger, manufacturer-supported team from the UK, a process where I would pay for a ride by covering the costs of the bike or the tyre budget or, in some cases, much more.

I met a guy called Stevie Mills, who has become a great friend, and he helped me look for a professional seat. Another friend, Gareth Crichton, picked up on more of the spannering as Dad started to roll off the throttle a bit during that 2002 season, and we had a lot of discussions about where it was all heading. I was at a crossroads. A few of my dad’s racing friends offered me bikes to go pure road racing, like at the Isle of Man TT, but that wasn’t for me. I also had an opportunity through Dad’s link with Joe Millar, a great friend of Granda and high-profile sponsor, to get hold of a 125cc Honda race bike that we could run ourselves. But that was short-circuit racing and that seemed a huge leap considering I’d never ridden on tarmac.

It was around this time that Arenacross became popular in the UK. Arenacross was the equivalent of Supercross in the USA, where a compact motocross track is built with around 5,000 tonnes of earth shipped into an indoor arena.

I rode in one event for a guy called Darren Wilson at the Odyssey Arena, Belfast. Darren got hold of an ex-factory GP bike, Stevie hooked me up with all the gear and Mum took me for a bit of practice without Dad knowing. I remember Darren pushing the bike up to the start in the dark with all the music blaring out, the flashing lights and the announcer hyping everybody up on the PA. My name was called, and 8,000 people were cheering. My heart rate was probably higher than it’s ever been, and I got awfully bad arm-pump during the races but managed to split 1–2 finishes with Shaun Simpson, who’s still a GP rider now. I threw my goggles into the crowd at the end of the race I won – it felt like proper rock star stuff!

I think it opened a few people’s eyes to what I could do and gave me a little taste of the life of a Supercross rider in the USA where, like everything else, the show, the spectacle, the size of the arena and crowds are ten times the size. I would have jumped at any opportunity to go and do it in the USA, but there was no real evidence of any motocross rider from the UK making it big in Supercross.

After the buzz died down, I could see the reality of my situation. My options about what to do the following year were kind of drying up.

CHAPTER 4
Red Bull Rookie

At the end of the 2002 season, Gareth Crichton told me about this advert he’d seen in Motor Cycle News, the weekly industry newspaper. It was for a kind of audition for a ride with a team in a short-circuit racing programme run by Red Bull and Honda. It was called the Red Bull Rookies and Gareth had already spoken to Dad about it in detail. They thought it would be a good idea to go for it, especially because opportunities in motocross were really drying up, along with Dad’s ability to finance it.

The grab headline said, ‘Deal worth £70,000’, which kind of got my attention, but none of it was going to the rider; it would cover the cost of a bike, spares, tyres, a mechanic, pretty much everything to do a season’s racing in the British 125cc Championship except travelling expenses. We thought. ‘Wow! This is our X Factor – let’s try and do this!’

The Red Bull Rookies already had two riders – Midge Smart and Guy Farbrother, who was sadly killed in a road crash just after the start of the following season. They wanted a third rider, aged 14 to 17, with bike experience, and I had to provide a CV and write 40 words on why I should be picked. I wrote mine in bullet points like ‘hard-working … willing to learn … enjoys working with others … Ulster, Irish and British Motocross champion … Arenacross race winner … wants to be world champion’.

It must have worked. Of hundreds who responded, I made the first cut of 20. I couldn’t believe it. I was still in two minds at that stage, keeping my eyes and ears open for any possible options to continue with motocross, but I couldn’t help getting a bit excited about being shortlisted. In his practical way, Dad reminded me there was a way to go yet.

We were invited to Rockingham Motor Speedway in Northamptonshire for a selection day to whittle those 20 down to five. There was only one problem: I’d never ridden a road bike in my life.

This was when Dad’s experience and contacts list came in handy. He made some calls, one to an old TT rival and former Grand Prix rider, Ron Haslam. A couple of weeks later, we were on our way to a race school Ron still runs at Donington Park, to ride a Honda CB500 naked road bike. I was wearing my dad’s old leathers about five sizes too big, boots a size too small and gloves which fitted. Thanks to Wendy Hearn, an old contact of Dad’s who worked for Arai, I also had a shiny new helmet. I’ve worn Arai ever since.

I’d never been to any kind of racing activity with a kitbag on an airplane before, it was always me and Dad out of the back of the van. But on this trip, me and Dad rocked up at East Midlands airport and stayed in the Holiday Inn Express there – it all felt quite professional. Ron and his wife Ann came to pick us up and take us to a briefing, because it was my first track session. Ron was a bit of a British racing legend and GP hero from the 1970s and 80s, so I felt very special being taken under his wing for some one-to-one coaching sessions.

Ron looked after me really well, and maybe there was a bit of special treatment through knowing my dad. After a few laps, he said, ‘You need to be a lot less rigid on the bike. Forget your upright motocross riding style. Move your inside bum cheek off the seat and lean into the corner with the bike.’ For ten years, I’d been kind of pushing the bike down into corners and almost pivoting from the middle of the seat, so I told him how alien it felt. But he was calm and reassuring and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s normal for circuit rookies to be a bit scared at first of leaning your body so much into corners.’

In the middle of the day, Ron said, ‘Come on, I’ll give you an idea of what I mean.’ He got me on the pillion seat of one of the school’s Honda Fireblades and took me around for a few laps. He showed me what he meant about moving around on the bike and did a one-handed wheelie down the start-finish straight with me on the back.

I also remember the best piece of advice Dad gave me – which was to make sure to do all your braking in a straight line because, as you release the brake and lean the bike into the corner, the contact patch of the tyre changes. Even now, I still use a fine balance of different braking techniques, trying to get it right for each corner.

When you’re riding on tarmac, pretty much all your braking is done with the front brake, whereas in motocross you don’t use the front so much and, if anything, the rear is more dominant. The thrill of the higher speeds was just amazing.

At the end of the day, Ron told me he thought I had loads of potential and to keep working at it. ‘Hang off the bike more,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be fine at the Rockingham test day.’

I was anxious all the same; I realised I was getting desperate to be picked. This was a really big deal – the kind of opportunity that wasn’t going to come my way with motocross.

When we got to Rockingham, it was the worst possible day to have to ride for your future career. It was damp and drizzly and the track surface started out patchy. Tyre choice was an absolute nightmare – at least it would have been if we’d actually had a choice! We had borrowed an old 125 from another contact of Dad’s, Alan Patterson, a GP rider back in the early 1990s. We had a set of slicks on the bike and a set of wets for extreme rainy conditions, both of which were pretty old and ropey.

I think the organisers took it all into account and knew that not everything we brought was going to be perfect even though, like in our motocross days, everything was clean and tidy and well presented. They came and had some chats during the day about my racing experience, ambitions and targets. I answered as politely as possible and tried to sound knowledgeable. We didn’t really have much of a clue about the carburation, which is vitally important on a 125, or suspension, and whether that had been set up for me or, more specifically, my weight, so we just put the tyre warmers on the bike.

Of the 20 guys at the test, I was the only complete rookie – the others had done at least a season of road racing at club or British championship level. I went out on slicks but, because it was damp, I took it quite steady in the first session.

To my great surprise, I was passing loads of other riders.

My confidence was growing as I remembered my day with Ron Haslam and all the advice he’d given me. I was realising it was working, that hanging off the bike and leaning into the corners allowed you go round the corners faster. And, as anyone who rides a bike will know, the faster you can go round a corner, the bigger the buzz.

I was probably still quite stiff on the bike, but all the levers and pedals were in the same place as on a motocross bike so it was a question of adjusting my balance on the little 125, tucking in behind the screen on the straights and sticking my knee out in the corners instead of extending a leg.

The track was beginning to dry out and I was building speed lap by lap as the dry line got bigger and wider, cutting my lap times not just by tenths of a second but by seconds and seconds. I was passing other riders, amazing myself at how natural everything felt and how quickly I was able to get into a rhythm, moving around on the bike like Ron had told me, using the brakes like my dad had told me and everything felt like it was coming together.

When I pulled in at the end of that first session, Dad was quite excited and started firing questions at me about the bike, but I was much more interested in his opinion of my performance. ‘How do you think I did?’ I kept pestering him.

He was his normal self and said, ‘Don’t worry about that, just tell me what the bike’s doing. Is it OK on the brakes? Where can we make some improvements?’ He changed the suspension a little bit to give me a slightly better feel for the damp conditions and we altered the gearing slightly as well. Then I went out for the second session and, with those changes to the bike, I was even faster.

One goal I had set myself was to get my knee down, which I hadn’t been able to do at Donington because the bikes were so big and the footpegs so low. It’s something you never do in motocross, which needs a completely different riding style, and it was why this experience was so alien to me. I’d seen heroes like Kevin Schwantz do it on TV so often and I knew it’s a way riders gauge how far over the bike is leaning in a corner. It’s a subconscious thing now, but I remember it being so important then, a little indication I could be a short-circuit racer.

It was probably like watching an elephant riding a bicycle, me at 70kg and 1.72m trying to find my way around a 125. But I got my knee down, scraping my virgin sliders as proof, and I loved it! It was satisfying to hit that little target, but it also told me how hard I was pushing and how close I was getting to the probable limits of grip.

I was beginning to think I had a real chance of making the cut and being one of the final five who the Red Bull Rookies team would take to Spain for a test.

Then I crashed.

Maybe I was getting a little too confident, but racing is all about finding the edge of performance and sometimes you have to go beyond the limit to find where the limit is. I was putting more and more lean angle into corners, but as I accelerated out of one left-hander, still banked over quite far, I went through a big damp patch. I’d seen it on previous laps but, as you carry more corner speed you run wider on corner exits and this time I couldn’t avoid it. As my front tyre touched the edge of the damp patch it lost traction, the handlebars folded to the left and I fell off the inside of the bike. It was my first tarmac crash and I remember it lasted such a long time. When you crash a motocross bike, you just stop because you’re on mud or sand and a part of your body or a part of the bike just digs in and the crash is over, often quite painfully. In this crash at Rockingham I wasn’t hurt, but I just remember sliding. And sliding. And sliding.

I’d been a bit worried about crashing on tarmac, but I hadn’t fallen very far off the bike and my dad’s old leathers had done their job. When I eventually stopped I thought, ‘Ah, that wasn’t so bad!’ But when I went to pick up the bike, I realised that the left handlebar and footpeg were broken.

First, I felt guilty about damaging Alan’s bike, then I just felt stupid for crashing it in the first place. I managed to bump start the bike and ride it back to the pits, but it wasn’t in any state for me to continue.

I was just devastated. I’d completely blown this one opportunity I had to continue racing. My heart sank at the thought of being remembered by that selection committee as the raw motocross kid who crashed in the third session of a selection day. So we sadly packed everything back into the van, saying nothing apart from our thanks and goodbyes and we set off with a shattered dream for the long drive north to catch the ferry from Cairnryan.

I felt I’d been quite fast for someone who had only ever ridden one day on a road bike. My only consolation was I still had this vague offer from Joe Millar back home in Ireland, and me and my dad started to talk about calling him as soon as we were back.

As we drove along the A75 towards Stranraer, my phone rang. I saw a number I didn’t recognise. This voice said, ‘Is that Jonathan?’

I should have recognised the team boss, Robin Appleyard, by the Yorkshire accent, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I replied, ‘Yes, who’s this?’

He told me who he was and said, ‘I just wondered what you thought of today’s test at Rockingham.’ I figured he was just after a bit of feedback on the day, so I said, ‘Yeah, I thought it was well organised and I really enjoyed it until I crashed.’ Then I thanked him for the opportunity and thought that would be it.

He said crashing was all part of the learning process. ‘But I’m really pleased you enjoyed the day, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘Do you have a passport?’ I hesitated and said, ‘Er … yeah, I’ve got one at home.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s good because you’re going to need it in a couple of months. You’re in our final five and you’re coming to Spain for the final test.’

I just went through a complete 180-degree flip – from being devastated that the dream had been shattered to being absolutely elated that I was still in the game. Viva España – the little motocross kid from Northern Ireland, who’d never ridden a road bike, was in the Grand Final!

Before the test, scheduled for March, my dad and Alan Patterson agreed it would be a good idea to go to Cartagena, where the test was to be, to learn the track and spend a bit more time on that 125cc racing machine. So in February we set off for three days at the annual winter test for a lot of UK-based teams, organised by Barry Symmons, who had previously been Honda UK’s racing manager. It turned out to be a complete eye-opener as to what happens on boys’ trips away. Of course, as the saying has it, what goes on tour stays on tour, but there was a lot of stuff happening out there that you never see in Kilwaughter. I quickly learned that old Spanish hotels with flashing lights outside are not necessarily a disco or nightclub.

I felt I’d joined this exclusive club because all I’d known was schoolboy motocross. Now I was away in Spain, staying in a hotel, eating out, not having to power-wash bikes every day – and I was loving it!

I also got going really fast on the bike and was comparing well with a few guys there who had ridden at British championship level. Alan was great for me with all his two-stroke experience and taught me about setting up a gearbox and getting the carburation right on the bike. Instead of one day on a 500cc four stroke that I’d had before the Rockingham test, I had three and a half more days’ experience and felt a lot more comfortable on the bike.

I didn’t feel quite as good a month later, however, when I was on my own and away to the final Red Bull Rookies selection day, aged 16, without my parents or anyone familiar. Former GP rider Jeremy McWilliams, who was involved in the selection, had told Dad, ‘You just need to let him go and don’t be the schoolboy dad.’

I knew of the other four finalists – Ashley Beech, Daniel Cooper, Michael Robertson and Barry Burrell – who were all established riders, and of course there were team managers and mechanics who I was introduced to.

The bike I rode at the test was incredible. Not that Alan’s 125 hadn’t been good, but it was a bike he’d made for a customer. The Red Bull Hondas that Robin Appleyard had prepared were proper new high-end bikes. From what Alan had taught me, I was able to give some feedback on the first day and I was faster than all my rivals, as well as both Midge Smart and Guy Farbrother, the two existing riders in the team. In fact, they started coming to me to talk about set-up, asking me things like, ‘Do you think second gear needs to be a bit shorter for that corner?’

I was surprised that I felt pretty comfortable without Dad there. I’d spent a lot of my childhood around adults in racing paddocks so I got on very well with all the mechanics at the test. I was just being myself and I felt so at home in this new environment – tarmac instead of dirt or sand, garages instead of awnings and a crew of professional technicians instead of enthusiastic and supportive relatives and friends. But I still heard my parents’ voices in my head, telling me to be polite and respectful, so I made sure I thanked everyone for the opportunity. It felt like a big deal too; a TV crew was hovering around the track making a documentary. The whole test went incredibly well and I was thinking there was no way they couldn’t pick me, because my lap times were so much faster than the others. And that’s how it turned out – I remember phoning home and telling my dad, feeling so super-happy I could have cried. I was going to ride for the Red Bull Rookies Honda team in the British 125cc Championship.

It was a big thing. The championship provided support races for the British Superbike series, and the Red Bull Rookies Honda team was the one in the 125cc class that everyone wanted to ride for. The top Superbike riders like John Reynolds and Michael Rutter were household names. And there was me, getting ready to be a part of that giant circus.

In the first round, my first ever race on tarmac at Silverstone, I out-qualified both Midge and Guy in 12th and finished the race in the top 10.

If I ever thought Desertmartin was an impressive paddock, the number of motorhomes, 40ft trucks and hospitality units in the British Superbike paddock was incredible. I felt under a little bit of pressure, but there were never any expectations put on me by the team.

I was always going to be physically challenged on a 125. It wasn’t just my height, it was the fact that I was built like a motocrosser – quite tall, muscular and broad in the upper body – which you could say is not ideal for a tiny little race bike. In fact, I’m the same weight today as I was in that first Red Bull season, and the bike I ride now is just a tad more powerful.

After that first race my results were a bit more sporadic but, at the penultimate round in September at Brands Hatch, I woke up to a dry, sunny race day. I had only qualified 12th on the grid – the wrong end of the third row – but I was feeling confident and there was always a good crowd at Brands, which fired me up to battle through the field. It’s a really short lap on the Brands Indy circuit, around 50 seconds, but there were 24 laps and I managed to finish third, a couple of seconds down on Steven Neate and my team-mate Midge Smart, who won the race. Crossing the line for my first podium was the most amazing feeling, and I remember screaming into my helmet at the thought of spraying champagne in front of the Brands Hatch crowd, even though technically I was still too young to drink it.

I was still in my final year at Larne Grammar and had to find time for my GCSEs. When we were able, we travelled as a family and often used to get the Fleetwood-to-Larne boat back from a British championship round on a Sunday night; I remember one time early in the season my mum sitting me down in the boat cabin to get my coursework done before I went back to school the following morning.

Sometimes to save money on flights I stayed at Midge’s house in Peterborough between races. He turned out to be extremely helpful during that season. He was from New Zealand, only a year older, but seemed a bit more worldly-wise. I was a raw 16-year-old kid, staying away from home on my own for the first time, so everything felt new and fresh and exciting. We’d stay up late talking about bikes and girls and he became a good friend.

I got a great schooling in racing that year – the technical features of a racing motorcycle and the more subtle aspects of racecraft – learning things that have stood me in good stead throughout my career. Robin Appleyard taught me more in that one year of 125 GP British Championship racing than I’d have learned in five doing it on my own. Things like setting up gearboxes and changing gear ratios for different corners on a track. Because I was a bigger rider he taught me ways to improve my corner exits – the positioning of the bike on the track and the positioning of my body on the bike – to carry more speed on to the next straight. I also learned that the British championship paddock took racing very seriously, I guess because everything cost more and there was basically more money at stake.

Robin was super-good but I realised, because of my size, I didn’t have a realistic future in his team. I was desperate to carry on road racing, but some of the guys I was racing against were tiny – guys like Tommy Bridewell, who was so small he was like a baby. He certainly wasn’t the fastest round corners, but he would drill us on straights and put 20m on me because of his weight. So on a 125, I was pissing upstream a lot of the time.

Towards the end of that season I started speaking with Linda Pelham, the marketing manager of Red Bull who was running the Rookies programmes, about what options I had. She said, ‘Listen, don’t worry. I’m trying to work on something,’ but I had no idea what she had in mind. I started thinking about going back to motocross because, although I’d had a few decent results on the 125, they hadn’t been enough for any other team to offer me a ride. We couldn’t afford to buy a ride either, an option that had started to creep in at the time and which has become a reality of present-day opportunities. My dad had been right on his financial limit to do motocross, so that was going to be way out of reach. Tyres alone were so expensive.

The ideal next step was a ride in the Supersport class, which featured much bigger and more powerful 600cc four-stroke bikes. These were slightly tuned versions of models you could ride on the road, and formed a very important sales category for all the Japanese manufacturers. But I had absolutely no idea how I was going to convince any team to take on a motocross kid who had done a less-than-spectacular year on 125s.

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