Dream. Believe. Achieve. My Autobiography

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.