Dream. Believe. Achieve. My Autobiography

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.