Foggy on Bikes. Carl Fogarty
often see me clambering over the front of the bike to keep the weight forward.
Then it’s up into third and I just touch fourth before going over the hill and dropping down to the Melbourne Hairpin on the brakes. It’s easy to spot the rear end of the bike sliding around here when a rider is changing down to first. Obviously I always tried to keep it stable but it was very difficult, and even my rear would sometimes slide at that point. The track again slopes uphill into another first-gear hairpin, Goddards, another point where you can try to pass up the inside if you’ve got a good drive coming out of Melbourne. My line tended to differ here: I preferred to keep the bike tucked in whereas others peeled in from the outside or the middle of the road. It is without doubt my least favourite corner on the track because it’s a bit bumpy and off-camber. A lot of people have high-sided there and I often struggled to get on the gas and usually lost a bit of drive down the finishing straight.
Worst Crash: When I came out of the Craner Curves, leading the second race in 1993. It was fast but I wasn’t hurt. Best Moment: Winning both races in 1995. Closest Finish: Russel beat me by 0.6s over aggregate times in 1993 when the race was stopped. I thought I had won because I was 1.0s clear going into the second part of the race. Best Rider: Me! Apart from me, Scott Russell always seemed to go well and was very good in the wet in 1994. Corser also does well here. Worst Moment: Hitting Kocinski’s coolant in the British GP when I was up there with the best 500cc riders.
The last thing you want to do, having just stepped off the overnight ferry from Heysham to Douglas on the Isle of Man without having had a wink of sleep, is to throw a bike around one of the most dangerous circuits in the world. But that is the kind of thing you have to put your mind and body through if you want to give yourself the best possible chance of finishing the TT course in one piece.
It was 1985 and I had already been to the Isle of Man the week before the Manx Grand Prix – the first time I raced on the island – just to drive round the course in the car. Then we returned to the mainland and raced at Mallory Park, where I finished 11th in an ACU race. We probably arrived in the Isle of Man at around 4am, absolutely knackered after a three-hour drive from Leicestershire and a four-hour ferry journey. But I had to make the most of the time available by doing that extra couple of laps early on the Monday, when the roads were closed to the public.
The fact that I was the favourite to win the newcomers’ race made my preparation even more important. After an hour and a half I was dead on my feet, and at 6.30 in the morning I went back to the hotel to try and grab a few hours’ sleep before more practice, even though I always found it difficult to get to sleep after riding early in the morning.
One of the main things to learn on a new circuit are the braking points for the corners. We had of course driven round the course in a car the previous week to get a feel for the track, but it’s a lot different when you put your helmet on, jump on a bike and produce some speed. It’s also a lot different when riding a road bike because the brakes are obviously better for race bikes. And in a road race there is no margin for error. If you run on at a corner, you hit a wall – and that’s not advisable. At the North West 200 circuit in Northern Ireland, there is a first-gear corner at the bottom of one of the longest straights I have raced on, probably two miles long. You are braking at 190mph and, because it’s a road circuit, you feel as though you’re braking on manhole covers. Luckily, at that particular point the road does carry on while the riders turn off to the left. So it’s essential that a rider gives himself every chance of getting to know the circuit before the race itself to learn things just like that.
For every corner on every circuit, I picked a marker where I would brake. It might have been as I passed under a bridge, something on a board next to the track or even just a bump in the earth. Towards the end of my career, I walked, jogged or did a few laps on a scooter – depending on the length of the circuit – before tackling a new track. I learned some tracks more quickly than others; one on which I struggled was the Nurburgring. I felt lost there for a while, whereas the other guys went quickly straight away. And until then I had always thought I was a quick learner. It’s a big track with a lot of corners which all look the same, so I found it difficult to pick out which were going to be quicker than the others. When I first went to Sentul in Indonesia it was new to everyone, but within the first five minutes Doug Polen and Scott Russell had left me for dead. ‘Are you sure they haven’t been here before?’ I asked. But by the end of the first session I was quicker than they were.
Obviously, the first time you ride round any track you brake a bit earlier than you would normally have to. The next time you brake a bit later, and so on. But the faster the corner, the harder they are to learn. For instance, a chicane is pretty straightforward, whereas a third or fourth-gear corner will take a bit longer to learn. That’s because there is a bigger chance of getting hurt if you get it wrong, so you take more care. If you run wide on a slow corner you can run off and get away with it.
Another of the first decisions to make at any track is the size of discs to use, and this can be a frustrating choice during practice. The harder the track is on the brakes, such as somewhere like Donington, the bigger the discs that are needed. But bigger discs mean that the bike is harder to move around, because they are obviously heavier, and the less weight you have low down on the bike the better. In recent years there have been just two sizes, 290s and 320s, although they are testing a new 305 size for use at Daytona.
The rear axle on which the back brake disc is mounted. I have never used the back brake in all my years of racing.
The smaller the diameter of the disc, the less the gyroscopic effect. That basically means that it is easier to steer the bike with a smaller, lighter disc. But at the tracks that are harder on the brakes, like Donington, these will heat up too quickly. At Donington in 1998, one race was split into two parts because of rain, so for the second leg I tried the smaller discs. But even after just 14 laps they were knackered at the end (although I did win that second leg of the race). Had it been a full 25 laps, I would not have got away with it. Also at Donington, we used to run discs that were 6.5mm thick instead of 6mm. Again that was just to improve heat dispersion.
The brake pads are also made out of different materials. Now they are called performance friction, and are carbon-impregnated. As they wear down, they stick carbon onto the disc so that you effectively have carbon to carbon. The ones before that were sintered. They did a similar thing, but more aggressively and so didn’t wear as well. We used to be able to use carbon-fibre discs, but they were banned at the end of 1994. The view was that the privateers could not really afford to use them at £800 a disc, so it was an unfair advantage for the factory boys. I don’t see why they cannot be allowed again because the hotter the carbon-fibre discs got the better the brakes were. The opposite is the case with metal discs.
The material for the Brembo carbon-fibre discs was actually too soft for the brake pads, and we were wearing out the discs rather than the pads. I shouldn’t really admit this, but at Albacete in 1994 we only had two sets of discs and one of those was already worn out with tramlines with two sessions of practice remaining. We didn’t want to use the new set because we wanted to save them for the race, so we got the old discs and glued some emery cloth to the brake pads. Then we started the engine up so the back wheel was spinning and Slick suddenly hit the brakes. Carbon dust flew everywhere in the garage, which is not the best thing for your lungs, but at least the discs were back flat again and we could use them for practice. That’s not how the Brembo engineer saw it, though. He was freaking out.
Ideally, and particularly at tracks you know will be hard on the brakes, you want to heat them gradually. So it always made sense to go a little bit easy on them in the early stages of a race, but I have always found that difficult to do when I know there is a race to be won. My attitude