Niall Mackenzie: The Autobiography. Stuart Barker

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