Michael Scott | April 8, 2020
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
It’s Only a Motorbike Race
With no racing now other than the virtual, and with the future uncertain, at least for the next few months, we’re left instead to look back. Not in anger nor with rose-tinted “those-were-the-days” reminiscence. Just to pass the time while we’re waiting.
Speaking of which, revered wooden-faced actor Steve McQueen had a line, in his meandering self-made racing-car film Le Mans: “Racing is life. The rest is just waiting.” You might think that is very profound. Or very silly. It is both.
Quotations are the theme, and I’ve made a small collection over the decades. Remarks that made us laugh, think, maybe even weep.
The funny ones, rather unfairly, are usually innocently nonsensical, made by people using words they don’t fully understand.
Like the anonymous U.S. Superbike racer way back who said, after being one of only a handful of finishers on a grueling afternoon of crashes and breakdowns: “It was a race of nutrition.”
Or the quite famous British TT racer who broke down while well in the running for a leading finish. Wiping his brow, he told live commentators: “I’m devasted.”
It’s perhaps unfair to single out foreign press releases, battling with English. But I treasure the Spaniard who inadvertently dissed his home nation by describing it as “the hole Spain.” And the Frenchman who, after his rider hurt his hand, wrote: “he has a strong blonde on his finger.”
An enviable fate.
There are many such, one emanating from another Spaniard who left out an important “r” when she notified the press room of the time for “the media scum.” (Many a true word?)
A greater treasure in the archive, however, comes from an English writer, employed by Dorna to drum up interest in the forthcoming GP season, some years ago.
“MotoGP,” he wrote breathlessly, “is set to literally re-explode.” A sentence that is wrong on about every level. Re-exploding, even figuratively, is beyond the capacity of most explosives. They’re a one-off thing.
But let’s get serious.
I’ll never forget the aged Pops Honda, at the last race he attended. It was a face-off between Freddie Spencer on the Honda and Eddie Lawson on the Yamaha. Fatuously asked who he thought would triumph on the morrow, he met his interlocutor’s eye, and replied with great solemnity: “If we knew who was going to win, it would not be necessary to hold the race.”
And one of his successors, asked why Honda still raced two-strokes when they were dedicated to making four-strokes: “If you only ask questions you know you want to ask, you never get unexpected answers.”
The best quotes come from before riders were sanitized by PR teams and sponsor-speak. Nowadays, public utterances tend to be about “trying to get the best result possible,” and “giving my 110 percent.” As if they would be at the track for any other reason. We took these things for granted back in the old two-stroke days, and people were more prone to speak their minds.
Like when Spencer was heavily lauded for pressing on to finish a distant second after hitting his knee on a straw bale at Rijeka in Yugoslavia in 1985. Race-winner Lawson’s laconic reaction? “It was also possible to miss the bale.”
Sometimes a rider’s words might come back to bite his ankle. Barry Sheene was always witty and quotable, but not always long-sighted. When Pat Hennen signed as his Suzuki teammate, snatching (in Barry’s view) an opportunity only created because Barry’s good friend Gary Nixon had been badly hurt in a testing crash, Sheene said: “Pay peanuts and you get a monkey.” Another Sheene associate Steve Parrish commented wryly, after Hennen became the first U.S. premier-class GP winner: “Some monkey! This one had horns.”
Barry also stumbled when commenting on rival Kenny Roberts’s bike-development skills, saying: “He’d have trouble developing a cold.”
“If I’m so bad,” Kenny told me soon afterwards, “and I’m beating him, then what does that make him?”
So, the best lines are often just good ways of stating the obvious, and often meant to deflate people asking silly questions.
No-one was more dedicated to this than the straight-talking Mick Doohan who had little patience with an over-enthusiastic press. As in Argentina when he turned his best death stare on a prying local, and said: “My name is Michael Doohan, and I’ve come to Buenos Aires to race my Repsol Honda.” Then zipped his lips.
Or when somebody mentioned that he seemed to find it too easy to win: “What do you want me to do—slow down?”
Best of all, delivered with most withering look at a bright-eyed super-keen questioner, trying to delve into the arcane niceties of steering geometry and tire compounds and talking too knowledgeably about 10ths of a second. A withering look and then the deflating put-down.
“It’s only a motorbike race.” CN
