Niall Mackenzie: The Autobiography

He also told me to invest everything I had in property in London back then. I thought he was a bit off the mark with that one but it shows how wrong you can be.

It may not sound terrific, but I had another result in 1981 that I was particularly proud of; a fifth place in the national Yamaha Pro-Am Championship when it came to Knockhill. This was the series that would later help me to make a name for myself and it showed me that even in my first year, I had what it took to mix it with some very good national riders. As I said, I finished fifth but I started from the back of the grid and I know I could have won that race if I hadn’t run out of laps. There were some good riders in that championship like Kenny Irons and Kevin Mitchell so I knew I was doing something right. I must have been because I broke the record for losing my orange novice jacket (having competed in nine national races) quicker than anyone else in Scotland, and as far as I’m aware, I still hold that record.

For me, the high points of my first year of racing were the third place at Carnaby and then winning my first race the following week at Knockhill. It could have been bad for me, winning so early on, because I might have very easily gone downhill after that. But it just gave me the kind of jumpstart that I needed to know that I wanted to race and although I enjoyed the whole experience of racing because it was so much fun, for me the climax was winning. If that hadn’t been the case, I might have given it ten years or so but winning is what makes it more special, and I knew inside that I wanted it more than those types of guys who just show up and race as a hobby. I realised I was getting serious when I started pretending to the other riders that I was just there to enjoy it but deep down I wasn’t – I wanted to go further than that. I wanted to win. I also realised that I might be onto something financially because in one weekend I could make more money than I did all week working for the electricity board. I was beginning to envisage a career in racing.

With my first racing season over, I was still working my normal job labouring with the South of Scotland Electricity Board and trying to make plans for racing in 1982. But then something happened which I didn’t expect and which upset me massively but with hindsight, it was actually good for me.

I thought I would be able to go racing with the Rae brothers again in 1982, using their van to get to meetings. But in November we were all sitting in their garage chatting and one of them asked me what my plans were for the next season. I told him I was going to race the RD again and maybe try and get a race bike. I presumed they would let me chuck my bike in the back of their van again but they flatly refused. They said their dad didn’t want to take my bike again. They had helped me as a favour initially and I suppose I shouldn’t have just presumed they would take me but I was absolutely devastated and nearly in tears when they told me. I knew I wasn’t family or anything but at the same time, I had their garage logos on my leathers and stuff all that season so I felt I was giving something back, even if it wasn’t that much. Who knows?

Anyway, it’s probably fair to say that my relationship with the Rae family cooled for a while after they refused to take my bike to meetings, but I certainly didn’t hold any grudges once I had gotten over the initial disappointment and we never actually fell out or anything daft. I walked home from their house that night with my tail between my legs and was very close to crying. But it all worked out for the best, as these things often do, because at some point I needed to get myself a van anyway and that was the incentive I needed to do something about it. There was no prospect of getting one at that point though, because I just didn’t have the money.

At about the same time, my mate Craig Feeney had received compensation for his bike accident and we had already discussed the possibility of him buying me a race bike. But when his big brother Wullie heard about my transport problems he said he’d get me a van (a Bedford CF to be precise). Wullie, his mum, and his wife Marian were great supporters throughout my Career. Another brother Alan organised a sweep at work every week to raise some cash and he started bringing me back between £30 and £50 a week which was fantastic. I opened an account and paid everything in there and showed Alan the books so he knew I wasn’t spending it on anything else.

His dad had a haulage business and he said I could use his premises to work on my bike and he also gave me some work with the firm to help make ends meet. They were all brilliant and in just a few weeks I had gone from an apparently no-hope situation to being pretty much sorted out for the coming season.

At this point, I was also learning a lot more about how a bike works, which would later stand me in good stead. I have always had a good understanding of how mechanical things work and although I’m no engine tuner and I don’t claim to be able to set a bike up perfectly, I was learning all the time at that point. My dad was always interested in mechanical things, which helped, but I must admit I’m better with two-strokes than four-strokes. I only found out recently that the piston in a four-stroke bike goes up and down twice before it fires! Shame on me.

For the 1982 season, I also enlisted the help of a mechanic called Graeme Bell. I met him at Knockhill and we became friends and he did a lot of work for me in ‘82 with no financial reward so I owe him a big thanks for all his help.

I was all set to contest the Scottish 500 Production Championship again and I also had a ‘proper’ race bike as well; a Yamaha TZ250 loaned to me by Craig Feeney, complete with a spares kit, spare wheels, the lot. I also realised that I had to break out of the Scottish scene that year if my career was to progress any further. Too many talented Scottish riders get stuck in the routine of just racing at Knockhill and East Fortune. If they’re happy with that then fine, but if you want to progress, you have to take on stiffer competition in a national championship so that’s what I set out to do in 1982. Only problem was, I was diabolical whenever I raced in England. I knew I needed to be out of my depth in order to raise my game but I didn’t realise I’d have to bloody drown before I could learn to swim!

The English circuits were so much bigger and more professional than the ones we had in Scotland but that never really overwhelmed me. However I was positively underwhelmed with my results. To begin with I was finishing anywhere between twelfth and twenty-fifth though at the time I didn’t realise that the TZ250 was crap. It was quite well prepared but it was an older model and it just didn’t run very well. It handled awfully too because I had no idea how to set it up properly so some of the blame has to rest on my shoulders.

Back home though, I was doing pretty well and winning most of the races I entered on the RD350 and eventually I won the 500cc Scottish Production Championship. On the TZ250, I started off quite lowly but towards the end of the season I was winning races on it too. Those results reminded me that I could still actually ride after the hard lessons I had learnt while racing in England.

So many people had told me that going to England was the wrong thing to do but you have to race with superior riders to learn how to go faster. The proof is easy to see as most British riders who have competed at world level come back home to the UK and win races and titles. Jamie Whitham, Neil Hodgson, John Reynolds and James Haydon are just a few examples.

One of the highlights of 1982 for me was to be during another Pro-Am round at Donington Park. It was a televised race and I finished second in front of the TV cameras which was great exposure for me. That was the first time I ever saw myself on television but my mum wasn’t pleased about it, as I was actually off work for eight weeks at the time because I had crashed at Donington earlier in the year and torn my knee and couldn’t walk. When my mum turned on the TV and saw me – racing she was cringing because she thought everyone else back home would see me and not be too impressed that I was racing motorbikes when I should have been at work. And because we both worked at the electricity board she was beside herself about what our boss might say if he found out!

Anyway, I was so excited about getting second place in a national race that I ran to the phone box at Donington’s Redgate Lodge to call my mum but someone was on the phone so I went to the lavatory while I waited. It wasn’t until I’d got my leathers off that I discovered I was sitting in the ladies’ loo. I heard women speaking and then realised there were no urinals so finally put two and two together. Very embarrassing, but I was so excited I didn’t know what I was doing.

Throughout my career I always looked forward to seeing the TV coverage if I’d had a good race somewhere but that first time was a bit special. All the way home to Scotland in the van it was all I could think about.

I thought that the next round of the Yamaha Pro-Am Championship could work out even better for me. It was at Knockhill and I had been waiting for a whole year to take on the Pro-Am boys on my home turf again after finishing fifth from the back of the grid in 1981. This time I won the race and it was my first national win even though the TV cameras weren’t there to record it. I suppose Knockhill must have been too far away for them. But it was enough to convince me that I could maybe challenge for the title in 1983 so I lined myself up for another full season of Pro-Am. By the end of that season, I wanted to prove I was a pro and not just another amateur.

CHAPTER THREE No Van, Man (#ulink_7ec28332-3187-5978-ad0d-9049ee22b58d)

As usual, the off-season during the winter of 1982-83 had thrown up a few surprises and challenges and as usual, they mostly concerned money.

My mate Craig Feeney who had supplied my Yamaha TZ250 in 1982 had got married in the summer of ‘81 and needed to sell the bike to raise some funds which was fair enough. I had done all right on the bike in Scottish races but never really had a decent result in England so I wasn’t too bothered about losing it. I used to be so embarrassed about getting blown away on the long straights of the English circuits because the bike was so down on power. I should have realised it was the bike but I honestly thought it was me and that was really demoralising. My only lifeline was that I was beating the same guys in the Pro-Am races who were beating me in the 250 races so that was at least some sort of encouragement.

By the start of 1983, my mum was beginning to think that I might actually be able to make a career out of racing and she was really supportive. She asked me what I wanted to do in the coming season and I told her that I needed a new bike. She said she would borrow what she could and I did the same and we put it all together. It was a real family effort and we raised about £4000 between us. Wullie Feeney who had loaned me his van during the previous season needed it back to take Harpo, his son, motocross racing so 1 was then faced with the additional expense of buying a new van as well as a new bike. But Jock McGuire from Dean Plant Hire in Bathgate stepped in to help and sorted me out with the cash for a new van for the season and Alan Pirie from Clydesdale Electrical eventually helped out too which was great.

With the £4000 raised by my mum and myself, I decided on buying a 250cc Armstrong racing bike. Armstrong was a British company which was run by the same people who make CCM bikes today. Initially, the bikes were all-British although the firm later used Austrian-built Rotax engines in an all-British chassis. Armstrongs had been getting some great results on the short circuits with people like Alan Carter on board and Steve Tonkin had even won the Junior TT on one. And anyway, I liked the look of the bikes and that’s just as important!

I spoke to Carter and he highly recommended the Armstrongs, so as soon as I sat on one at the Alexandra Palace bike show in London my mind was made up. It cost just short of £4000 which was quite a lot back then and that was most of my money gone but Jock McGuire again helped me out with some more cash so we were still looking pretty good for the season. The plan was to do the full Pro-Am Championship again on the Yamaha RD350LC and the full British 250 Championship on the new Armstrong.

The Yamaha Pro-Am challenge was the maddest race series ever held. Twenty years on, bike racing fans still talk about it with glee and the riders themselves wonder how they managed to survive it all.

The concept was simple. British Yamaha importers Mitsui took twenty-five identical RD350LC bikes to various tracks throughout the year, riders drew lots for ignition keys before practice and then raced whichever bike the keys happened to fit. The idea was to put the emphasis on rider skill rather than machine superiority and it worked brilliantly.

The series was introduced in 1981 and pitted young amateur riders under the age of twenty-four against seasoned professionals. It was a perfect stage for me to prove my abilities at national level and the timing of the series couldn’t have been better as far as my career was concerned.

Having learned my trade in club meetings over the previous two years, I was ready to take another step forward or risk riding round in Scottish championship meetings for the rest of my career. That’s not knocking Scottish racing, in fact there’s a healthy little scene up there, but if you want to get to world level you have to keep moving on. By the start of 1983, I felt I needed a bigger stage to play on and the televised Pro-Am series even ran the same make of bike which I’d been racing since I started in 1981, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The bikes used in the series were almost bog standard Yamaha RD350LCs. They had a few mods to make them more suited to a racetrack but these were not exactly performance enhancing. Naturally lights and indicators were removed, the sumps were wired up and racing number plates were fitted. To reduce front-end patter, 20mm spacers were inserted into the forks and the air filter elements were junked to allow the engines to breathe more easily. The gear change system was changed to one up and five down like a proper race bike (as opposed to one down and five up like a road bike) and the footrests were moved higher up to allow more ground clearance. But that was pretty much it and riders were not allowed to make further modifications themselves, even if we had the time, which we didn’t.

The Pro-Am series was mental and we got up to stuff that you’d never get away with in any other racing class. We used to dab each other’s’ front brakes going along the straights, pull on the pillion grab rail of the rider in front to get a tow, and even hold our own front forks to make a more aerodynamic shape on the bike. In fact, anything to gain another one mile an hour on our rivals. It was brilliant fun and helped by the fact that no one took it too seriously.

If you put your arm down on the fork it meant you could tuck your head in tighter against the clocks and you would notice the speedometer going up by about one or two miles per hour. It was German Grand Prix rider Martin Wimmer who started it. He raced in a one-off Pro-Am World Cup race at Donington (which I won, incidentally) and all the other British riders and myself copied him after that. But sometimes he would also put his right leg up flat over the pillion seat to make himself even more aerodynamic! I thought that must have been some weird German trick and it didn’t take off in quite the same way as the old fork leg trick, but each to their own.

Because the bikes were relatively slow compared to proper racing bikes there was so much time on the straights to mess around. So when you already had your arm outstretched on the fork, it made sense to stretch it a little bit further and pull the guy in front back a bit. Sometimes we even hit each other’s kill switches in practice, which would cut the other rider’s engine completely dead! Pro-Am was definitely a full contact sport.

I’ve still got a Yamaha RD in my garage and I still love to ride it because it handles so well. It’s not my original bike although I know who’s got that and he keeps promising to give it to me but he still hasn’t. So Graeme, if you’re reading this…I want it!

The RDs were so light that you could change your line mid-corner and they were pretty good on the brakes too, so they made for great racing and I think that’s why the series was such a success where other one-make championships haven’t done so well. Big heavy bikes like Triumph Triples just aren’t suited to close racing.

But the best thing about the series was the TV coverage because it was helping to get my name known and that wouldn’t have happened if I’d stayed in Scotland where there was practically no television coverage of the races. I had a Freddie Spencer replica helmet at that time which was quite distinctive so I could stand out on television. Despite the fact that the brilliant American would be my team-mate a few years later (although if you’d told me that at the time I would have laughed at you), it wasn’t hero worship that persuaded me to buy it. It was just my shrewd Scottish head for a good deal. Alan Carter was wearing AGV helmets at the time but Arai, who made the Spencer rep, wanted to send him a lid to try. But Alan was happy with AGV so he sold me the Arai at half price, which is the only reason I bought it!

I got on well with Carter and I really thought he was going to be a multiple world champ after he won the 250cc French Grand Prix in 1983 when he was just eighteen. At the time, he was the youngest rider ever to win a GP. He had come up to Knockhill at the end of 1981 and crashed his brains out all over the place but he was extremely fast when he managed to stay upright. We became good friends during 1982 and I stayed with him in his home town of Halifax sometimes to go out for a few beers. Alan was completely mad – very talented but completely mad. He was a really intelligent bloke but then sometimes he’d just whip his lop-sided privates out in public (he had one testicle much bigger than the other) and cause a scene for no apparent reason. Still, he made me laugh and I respected him because he was so fast and I think it’s good to surround yourself with people you can learn from just by constantly talking about racing techniques and stuff. I think Alan’s biggest downfall was that he really believed, along with everyone else, that he’d just walk into GPs and take over and when that didn’t happen he couldn’t understand why and went off the rails a bit. Top bloke though.

We had some great races together in the Pro-Am series and he cleared off a few times making the rest of us a bit suspicious about his bike. After all, he was riding for Yamaha in the 250cc class so some of us suspected favouritism but now I realise it was just because he was so good.

All the riders in that series got on really well and there was never any ‘handbags at dawn’ or falling out over crashes or on-track incidents. As long as no one got hurt then everyone was happy and we had a great laugh. Things turned sour for me in the last round though and it was nothing to do with the other riders. I was going to the final round at Brands Hatch with a chance of winning the championship. I’d had three wins in the series and needed to win the last race to take the title but my main title challenger, Graham Cannell only needed to finish ninth to win.

Every race that season had been a clutch start so we didn’t have to kill our engines on the start line; we just engaged first gear and went. But at the final round at Brands, the marshal held up a board telling us to kill our engines. All the other riders ignored this board and kept their engines running except for Kenny Irons and myself. We obeyed the start line marshal and killed our engines and when the lights turned green, everyone else got away while we were sitting there with dead engines and no hope of catching the rest of the field even if we had fired up the bikes and chased after them.

The rules clearly stated that it should have been a clutch start so I lost any chance of winning the series because that marshal hadn’t read them properly. I wasn’t happy. Especially since my main rival Graham Cannell crashed during the race so I would only have needed a decent finish to win the series and I desperately wanted to win a national championship at that point.

Kenny Irons and I went straight to the officials to complain but we were basically told not to cause a fuss and given £500 each to shut up and back down. There was a lot of money changing hands and a lot of promotional deals hinging on that championship so the organisers didn’t want any trouble or bad feeling. I was still hopping mad but realised there was no way they were going to re-run the race even though Kenny and I had sat on the grid for half a lap in protest until we were dragged off kicking and screaming. I suppose we could have got lawyers on the case and got all heavy but we eventually calmed down and accepted the cash. It was £500 after all.

That was the low point of the season for me and coming right at the end of the year made it worse. But there were high points and the best of all was finally being able to quit my job! In May 1983, I finally became a professional racer but it happened in the most bizarre circumstances.

Early in the season I had gone to my first race on the new Armstrong at Oulton Park and knew straight away that I had made a good choice of machinery. It just felt perfect for me and I was on the pace immediately in the British championship, which was a far cry from the year before when I was nowhere on the Yamaha TZ250.1 was running fourth amongst top riders like Alan Carter, Phil Mellor and Paul Tinker and then the bloody bike just exploded. My new £4000 bike! I had a good guy called Rab Hardy who had prepared it for months making sure everything was perfect yet it still blew up first time out. I couldn’t believe it. So I packed the bike up in the van, drove straight to the Armstrong factory in Bolton and threw the engine on the table. I shouted at them that I had spent all this money on their bike and it had let me down in its first race. I even gave them the sob story about it being my mum’s money and everything but they said there was no warranty on race bikes and that I must have done something wrong to make it blow up. In the end I came away with a credit note for spares but I wasnearly in tears because my mum and I had wasted so much money and didn’t have any more to buy another bike with.

But going to the factory turned out to be one of the best things I had ever done and that’s what eventually led to me turning professional in the middle of the season.

I had the bike rebuilt for the next race at Donington where Armstrong’s official rider, Tony Head, had a huge crash in practice and was put out of action for a while leaving the team with no rider. As it happened, Alan Carter’s former mechanic Doug Holtom was working at Armstrong and he suggested they try me out on their factory bike. As soon as he mentioned my name the Armstrong guys remembered this mad, raving Scotsman who had burst into their factory complaining and I suppose they agreed to give me a chance on their official bike in the hope that it would shut me up!

In this business, getting your face known can mean the difference between getting a factory ride and not getting one. In my case, it meant that I got one.

This happened midway through practice. It was a big international meeting but I immediately put the bike on the front row of the grid for the race. Then, when the race started, I was running at the front again when the bike blew up! I couldn’t believe it. My private Armstrong had blown up in its first proper outing and then the official factory bike did the same the first time I rode it! What was going on?

Still, Armstrong were happy with the way I had ridden over the weekend despite the disappointment and I received a letter from them soon afterwards asking if I would be interested in working for them full time as a development rider/racer. They were planning to develop the bike as it raced though I was a bit dubious about that because it could have been unreliable and kept on blowing up. After all, my experience showed they weren’t the most reliable bikes on the planet.

The first thing I thought about when I got that letter was packing my job in but when I went in and told some of the guys at work they all said ‘Don’t do it. You’ve got a job for life here.’ I’m glad they said that because it made me even more determined to make it as a racer. There was no way I wanted to be still working for the electricity board in Falkirk when I was sixty. I know my colleagues had my best interests at heart but that job just wasn’t for me. My mind was made up. I was young and still living at home with my mum at that stage too so I didn’t even have a mortgage to worry about and I didn’t have a serious girlfriend either. Mum was fine about it too, because she knew I could always go back to my old job if I had to.

I asked Armstrong if I could continue doing Pro-Am if I accepted their offer and they said yes so that was it; I finally quit my job at the electricity board and became a professional racer. I was over the moon. I knew I could survive on the Pro-Am prize money and I would get the chance to go racing properly for free, even if I did break down a lot. Armstrong also paid me £3500 for my services as a development rider so it couldn’t have worked out any better.