Niall Mackenzie: The Autobiography. Stuart Barker

some reliability problems with the Armstrong, which meant we didn’t get the results we wanted in the 250 class. I still wasn’t too hot on setting bikes up either, which didn’t help matters. But even though I was crashing, I never seemed to get hurt and I didn’t really miss any races because of injury right up until 1986.

      Looking back, the crowds were very poor at British championship meetings in 1984 but I hadn’t known any different so I didn’t particularly notice at the time. As far as I was concerned, winning a British title was another step forwards and that’s all I was thinking about. One figure that was banded about was that for every hundred people that came to see a race in 1980, only twenty-eight were coming in 1984. But there was a lot of unemployment and people didn’t have a lot of cash to spend on leisure pursuits like going to bike races. It shows how well the sport is doing in the UK now though with crowds of up to twenty thousand regularly turning out for British Superbike meetings.

      However, one of the main reasons I have to remember 1984 is because I competed in my first Grand Prix at Silverstone on 5 August. The whole weekend was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster and I went from highs to lows more times than I can remember. When I showed up at the circuit, I didn’t even have an entry to race so I sat in the organisers’ office all day and finally got an entry at the last minute when a foreign rider didn’t turn up. Back then, if riders didn’t show by 8pm on Thursday night they were disqualified so that was how I got my entry and that alone felt like winning the race for me. It meant I was actually going to be on the same grid as my heroes like Carlos Lavado, Martin Wimmer and Christian Sarron. I knew GPs were where I wanted to be, especially 500 GPs, but I wasn’t sure it would ever happen. All I could think was that if I kept telling myself enough times that it would happen, then it might just come true.

      As well as being my first Grand Prix, it was also my first time at Silverstone so I had to learn the track as well. I remember being amazed that I was on the same track as the big boys but I had to force myself to concentrate and do the best job I could. I qualified for the race which I felt was an achievement in itself but joy soon turned to despair as I finished the race twenty-eighth and dead last. It was the one and only time in my twenty-year career that I finished last and I was absolutely gutted.

      I knew the bike wasn’t nearly as fast as the others out there, and I was getting passed a lot on the straights. It didn’t help that Silverstone was such a fast track either but it was still demoralising even if being last wasn’t completely my fault.

      After the British GP, I got an entry for the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp on 12 August but I had to fund the trip myself as Armstrong would only supply the bikes but wouldn’t pay for the trip. It did my confidence a power of good though because I rode much better there than I did at the British GP. The circuit’s not so fast for one thing and I just liked the layout of the place. I qualified in twenty-fourth place and was on the pace in the race but my bike broke down after twenty-one of the twenty-five laps. Still, I had laid to rest the Silverstone demons by turning in a half decent performance and at least I didn’t finish last again.

      The last Grand Prix of the year was at Mugello in Italy so me and my mechanic decided to drive down from the Swedish GP to Italy and try to get an entry. Bad move. Every racer had turned up so I was refused an entry, which meant we’d wasted all the time, money and effort it had taken to drive there. Still, at least it was a little warmer.

      The riders’ representative at the event, Mike Trimby, just looked at me as if I was stupid (which I was) and couldn’t believe I had travelled all that way without an entry. It was a ridiculous situation and I was really upset. Then to make matters worse, I was plagued with a medical complaint below the belt that had been quietly incubating since the British GP weekend and decided to flare up while I was already at my lowest ebb. I suppose it was punishment for being a naughty boy.

      I tried to solve the problem by dousing my privates with Old Spice but it was a pretty itchy trip back to England all the same. And when I did get back and went for a consolatory pint, I saw fellow racer Kenny Irons who gave me a knowing look that told me he was suffering with the same problem. After all, we had both liaised with the same girl – though on separate occasions I hasten to add!

      When you ride in GPs, you realise just how much faster all the riders are compared to the guys back home in the UK. The plus side of that is that when you get back to racing at home you realise you can push that much harder than everyone else.

      As a result of this new-found confidence, I won my first national title – the Circuit Promoters 350cc British Championship. Although the 350cc class wasn’t as prestigious as the 250 series, it was still a national title and proved I was still getting better and moving forward which was my main aim.

      I didn’t have such good fortune in the 250cc class partly because I did a bit of crashing and partly because we were tuning the bike so much to make it competitive that it broke down too often. But strangely enough, my best result of the season, and in fact the best result of my career to date came on the 250cc machine at the Super Prestigio race at Calafat in Spain at the end of the year. Many of the top 250cc Grand Prix riders were entered including Sito Pons, Martin Wimmer, Juan Garriga and Carlos Cardus but I won the three-leg 250 event overall with a win and two seconds. The track was tight and twisty unlike Silverstone’s fast, flowing layout, which I liked and it also suited the Armstrong.

      Unknown to me at the time, my performance pretty much ensured I would get a factory Grand Prix ride with Armstrong the following year. Former GP racer and multiple TT winner Chas Mortimer was to manage the Armstrong effort in 1985 and he had a big influence over my career over the next few years, helping me to improve my riding and making me more streetwise too. He asked me before the last leg in Calafat what I was planning to do in the race. When I said ‘Finish second and take the overall win’ he realised I had finally matured from the crash-happy win or bust merchant he had seen me as and I think that persuaded him to sign me for ‘85.

      Speaking of Armstrong, I have a confession to make regarding their three-cylinder, carbon-fibre-framed 500cc project bike. As I said before, the 500 was the real reason why the firm was getting money from the government and because of that, there was a lot of pressure to debut the bike before it was ready. I wheeled it out into the pit lane at Donington in 1984 and posed before the TV cameras. I did actually ride the bike in practice but there was no way it was going to be competitive in the race so we actually stuck yellow number plates (the designated colour for the 500 class) on the 250cc machine and raced that! Even the TV commentators were fooled into thinking it was the 500.

      I did a few laps at Brands again at the end of the season on the 500 and that was the last time it was run. It’s in a shed somewhere just outside Preston these days. Shame really, because it was a fantastic looking motorcycle and technically very interesting. Incidentally, it was designed and built by Barry Hart who was the guy who’d built the bike for the 1980 movie Silver Dream Racer starring David Essex.

      Anyway, Armstrong’s money was limited after 1984 but they had won a big army contract to make bikes so they decided to rearrange their racing set-up and handed over the team to the owners of the Silverstone racing circuit. The team was then called the Silverstone Armstrong GP Team, and Armstrong supplied the bikes and spares while letting Silverstone run the team and cover costs. The circuit put up about £25,000 which was a lot back then and they also supplied premises for the team so it was a good arrangement. The idea was to contest a full season of 250cc Grands Prix and fit in whatever British championship rounds we could as well on both the 250 and 350cc Armstrongs.

      The team’s other sponsor, Dalmac, was a Scottish plant hire firm run by Ali McGregor, Willie Dalrymple and Jock Gibb – the Scottish plant hire Mafia, as we used to call them. They were the best sponsors to have because win, lose or draw, they always insisted we let our hair down on a Sunday night and went out for a few drinks. Well, with those boys it was usually more than a few and dancing on tables was normally compulsory too. Suffice to say there wasn’t much time for feeling depressed on a Sunday night if I’d had a bad result.

      My team-mate was to be Donnie McLeod who had gone well in 250 GPs on a private Yamaha. He was also a fellow Scot so I knew we’d be able to have a few laughs along the way and I couldn’t wait to do more GPs as I loved all the travelling.