Hizzy: The Autobiography of Steve Hislop
Steve Hislop
Steve Hislop was one of the most famous motorcycle racers in the world. He had always been a controversial and outspoken character having had many famous clashes and splits with teams and riders over the years, not always to his advantage. Season 2003 was no different. Steve’s life was incredible, funny and ultimately tragic.Hislop made his debut in 1979 on a bike paid for by his father, but when the latter died of a heart-attack, he embarked on a self-destructive quest that resulted in more crashed bikes and cars than he can remember. Three years later his brother Garry was killed racing at Silloth.It looked as if he would never race again but while on holiday at the Isle of Man TT races in 1983, he was mesmerised by the sight of Joey Dunlop and he knew he had to try it.He took to the roads immediately, amassing an amazing career record of 11 wins and was the first rider in history to lap the course at an average speed of over 120mph. Hizzy's TT victories over big name rivals like Joey Dunlop and Carl Fogarty made him a living legend beyond the confines of just the UK. He turned his back on the Isle of Man in 1994, claiming it was too fast and dangerous for modern superbikes.However, he had already proved he was just as fast on purpose-built short circuits having won the British 250cc championship in 1990 and then went on to win the British Superbike (BSB) title in 1995 and 2002.Defending a title is always difficult and made even harder when your current team doesn't give you a new contract. However, season 2003 started positively for Steve, inasmuch as he found a new team, but he was sacked half way through the season after a string of poor results on an uncompetitive bike. These events, however, paled into insignificance when Steve was killed in July 2003 when the helicopter he was flying crashed in a remote Scottish border region. His book is a fitting tribute to a motor racing legend.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
STEVE HISLOP 1962–2003
HIZZY
with STUART BARKER
Dedication (#ulink_e437f627-d8e3-564f-aebd-99a1c62bdccd)
For Aaron and Connor Hislop – sons of a very special dad
Contents
Cover (#u453df8ed-d854-50cb-8845-572b8918733a)
Title Page (#u77e936fe-f6ab-5766-88d6-60984c0b554a)
Dedication (#u0c82e84c-3e37-5341-9f5d-d3ba020db215)
1 Day Number One, Life Number Two (#u607ec2f1-2c86-51df-8fdd-4caebb274d8a)
2 Shooting Crows (#u1ac27c31-f0d8-5f24-a9d5-7bacb754e920)
3 Off the Rails (#uc494f7be-6df7-508c-bc78-58c4018be944)
4 Tales from the Riverbank (#u83e26ed0-b260-54d8-bd68-fa1402de63f6)
5 The Flying Haggis (#u3c2a49f1-2dc8-5ab7-89e0-6e4dfbb132db)
6 The Burger Van Queue (#u39bfac59-abf0-56c4-aa90-f74665d39052)
7 Money, Money, Money (#u77b80b3f-75a1-5d16-8819-90910b003980)
8 Girls, Girls, Girls (#u78ce5cdc-a4e7-5ebe-b55e-4dcb5313f31b)
9 Bored (#u90849637-d0b4-510a-b216-81dd3e3a3c17)
10 The Impossible Dream (#u5fff3d37-49c9-5103-94e4-54b1d1fd7206)
11 A Day at the Races (#ub2b2950e-fdcd-57db-83a6-4874bf2d3dea)
12 The Champ (#ue4aefc9c-b4c3-5820-818c-93760f9a6429)
13 Sacked (#u32c95d5a-3e6b-5a27-bdc4-7f9e1ae17173)
14 Sacked Again (#u7e3dc1d4-f71b-51a5-80d0-67a59c2e4d08)
15 Swearing at Fairies (#u8039e851-ff12-578e-837a-7b9493a38654)
16 2002: A Race Odyssey (#ue4b500f5-7605-5c64-97c4-ba1b46bce291)
17 The Final Lap (#ue8654896-2359-59a3-b8eb-d1231aab8bd7)
18 A Scottish Hero (#ufa586228-5bd9-530a-9c54-c8e68ed535d9)
Career Results (#u05d16aad-a1d6-515a-a6d2-1d6c207b2f97)
Index (#u8f907c24-4aa5-58cb-ac40-b76375e7bbc0)
Acknowledgements (#ubd32c27d-8912-5d43-9eba-06024fbebb8f)
Copyright (#uf5b46597-0816-56a6-8cc7-60c0f77ec55c)
About the Publisher (#u2ba9a1a1-b3cb-5a9d-88fc-defbb2b32e90)
1 Day Number One, Life Number Two (#ulink_cad97eff-feb4-5511-b345-af2562eb2bf6)
‘I’d been trying to race bikes for a month with a broken neck.’
Everyone thought I was dead – except me because I wasn’t thinking at all.
I lay unconscious in the gravel trap at Brands Hatch with my neck broken in two places, my spinal cord twisted into an ‘S’ shape and with a fragment of bone impregnated in the main nerve to my left arm. It was one of the most horrendous-looking crashes anyone had ever witnessed – and there were more than 100,000 people at the race that day. Even the national newspapers hailed it as the worst crash ever seen on TV.
World Superbike riders Neil Hodgson, Colin Edwards and Noriyuki Haga all got tangled up at about 120mph going into the fearsome Paddock Hill bend at Brands Hatch during the year 2000 WSB meeting. Neil had clipped the kerb because he couldn’t see where he was going as all the other riders were so tightly bunched. His bike bounced back onto the track and started a chain reaction and I got caught up in the mêlée as Haga rammed my back wheel and Edwards took my front wheel away. The result was total carnage: there were bikes and riders tumbling everywhere, bits and pieces flying off the machinery and scything through the air and sparks showering down the track as metal collided with tarmac.
As my bike was rammed, I was thrown 15 feet in the air and started cartwheeling towards the gravel trap. My bike was spinning end over end and it slammed into my head twice – all 350lb of it – sending me tumbling even more spectacularly. It’s a good job it did too because, ironically, that’s probably what saved my life. The first smack it gave me knocked me out so I was unconscious as I tumbled and that meant my body was limp and relaxed. Had I been conscious and tensed up, I would probably have done even more damage to myself.
After doing four full-body cartwheels, I landed square on the top of my head with my feet pointing straight up in the air, as if I’d been planted in the ground by the celebrity gardener, Alan Titchmarsh. Then finally I tumbled over, came to a halt and slumped into the gravel, knocked out cold and lifeless as the dust began to settle and the bike finally came to a stop. The race was stopped immediately and the huge crowd that had been screaming and cheering just seconds before then, fell completely silent. Joey Dunlop had been killed in a race just one month previously and no one wanted to witness more tragedy at what should have been a fun day out. I don’t know what the millions of armchair fans watching on TV around the world thought but what did annoy me afterwards was that it took such a horrific crash to get bike racing onto the main news. Usually the sport is never considered important enough to be mentioned on TV news bulletins unlike football, cricket, golf, Formula One or tennis. It was only when I had such a horrendous smash that almost every country in the world ran a story on it. What a way to get famous.
But if it weren’t for the TV coverage, I wouldn’t be able to describe the crash in detail because I can’t remember it. The last thing I remember was feeling a thump when I was banking hard into Paddock Hill bend and that must have been when Haga hit me. Because the crash looked so bad and because I had landed on my head and wasn’t moving, everyone who witnessed it presumed I was dead. My girlfriend Kelly, who was watching on TV back home, was in hysterics and couldn’t get through to anyone in my team when she tried to call to find out if I was alive or dead. The Virgin Yamaha team wasn’t taking calls because they were too busy trying to find out if they still had a rider. Kelly had to wait for about two hours before she got through to someone who told her I was OK. At first she didn’t believe it and thought I must at least be in a coma, but someone finally convinced her that I was conscious and moving.
The first thing I remember through a foggy, dizzy haze was hearing a paramedic’s voice shouting, ‘there’s a good vein, stick it in there,’ as they immediately tried to stabilize me by hooking me up to an IV drip and an oxygen mask. Apart from that, everything was completely silent as the crowd looked on numbed and fearing the worst. There were paramedics swarming all over me and thankfully they knew to remove my helmet carefully with the aid of a neck brace because there was a risk of spinal injuries.
As I was stretchered off to the nearest hospital I started coming round a little and that’s when I felt a pain in my chest and thought I might have broken my back. I was also getting a prickly feeling every time a medic touched me but it turned out that I was just covered in thousands of scratches from the gravel as I tumbled through it.
Anyone who thinks motorcycle racing is glamorous only needs to experience one big crash to realize it’s not. The frequent injuries are bad enough to deal with but the undignified hospital procedures are just as bad. On this occasion, I was still feeling groggy when a doctor wearing rubber gloves approached me and that can mean only one thing. Sure enough, I jolted as he inserted a finger straight up my backside and had a prod around but at least he was kind enough to explain the theory he was putting into practice. Apparently, men have a kind of ultra-sensitive G-spot up there and if you hit the ceiling when the doctor touches it, you’ve got a broken back. I’d have thought most blokes would hit the ceiling anyway when a doctor shoves a finger up their arse, broken back or not but apparently I didn’t flinch too violently so the prognosis was good even if the examination wasn’t.
I was then x-rayed and pushed into a little cubicle and left on my own for what seemed like an eternity as I still hadn’t a clue what was happening to me. Coming round from concussion is not a nice experience and even though I’d been knocked out several times before, it doesn’t get any easier because you’re starting from scratch every time it happens as you’ve got no memories to draw upon.
I was really scared lying in there trying to piece my world together bit by bit. Where am I? What day is it? What year is it? The answer to every question was the same – I didn’t know. I could only lie there like a newborn baby staring at the curtains round my bed, my brain completely devoid of any memory, any sense of belonging or any history; any sense of anything in fact. It really was like being born again – I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on.
Eventually, with a huge effort, I remembered I’d been at Brands Hatch but I still couldn’t remember what year it was. I became convinced it was 1999 and only realized it was the year 2000 because I remembered which front suspension system I’d been using on the bike and that I’d been swapping between 1999 and 2000-spec forks that season. It’s the most horrible, helpless feeling there is but for bike racers, it comes with the territory and you’ve just got to get on with it.
Some time later, my team boss, Rob McElnea, came in to see me and started asking me questions. As a former racer himself, he knew the routine for concussion as well as anyone and when I could tell him who I was, where I was and what year it was he reckoned I was all right and tried to get me to sign myself out.
The doctors had checked all the x-rays and said the only thing that concerned them was a cloudy area around the C5 and C6 vertebrae in my neck. I told them I’d had a prolapsed disc in 1995 at that very spot which seemed to explain the cloudy area. I hate hospitals and when I looked around and saw an old woman who had choked on a sandwich and another old girl who hadn’t been able to shit for a month I thought, ‘I hate these places – I need to get out of here.’ So I signed myself out, even though the doctors wanted to keep me in overnight for observation, and I went back to the hotel that night. The following morning I drove my hire car to the airport and was back home on the Isle of Man a couple of hours after that.
When I saw a video of the crash on ITN news I realized how close to death or paralysis I had come. It looked much worse than triple world champion Wayne Rainey’s crash at Misano in 1993 did and he’s now wheelchair-bound for life because of that incident. Being paralysed or maimed scares me more than anything else in the world so I’d readily have chosen death over being stuck in a wheelchair. But then that’s a choice we never get to make – fate decides it for us.
But I wasn’t paralysed, I was just in pain all over. My head hit the inside of my helmet so hard that the mesh lining was imprinted on my forehead, and my forehead itself was so badly swollen that I looked like a Neanderthal. I had a black eye, my face was covered in cuts from where my helmet visor had come off allowing gravel to scratch my forehead and even my eyebrows were sore, although I can’t think how that happened. I felt as if I’d been put through a full cycle in a washing machine. However everything seemed to be in working order and I figured I’d be fully fit again in a few days, so that, as far as I was concerned, was the end of my Brands Hatch crash. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Just four days later I set off for a round of the British Superbike championship at Knockhill in Scotland. Everyone in the paddock was amazed to see me on my feet and most people, I think, were glad to see me alive. I managed to qualify for the races but felt really weak and couldn’t hold myself up on the bike properly. I figured I must have come back too early and since there were two weeks to recuperate before the next round at Cadwell Park, I decided to sit out the Knockhill meeting just to be on the safe side.
During those two weeks I had some physiotherapy and tried to lift some light weights but I still felt really weak down my left hand side. Then a really peculiar thing started to happen – I started walking into doors. I would put my left hand out to push open a door but my arm just buckled under the slightest strain so I’d end up slamming my face into the door. I wasn’t in any pain (apart from the fact that I kept banging my nose), but I just had no strength or feeling in my left arm. It was weird.
Anyway, I went to Cadwell as planned but in the first few laps of practice it was apparent that something wasn’t right. When you brake for a corner on a motorcycle you lift your body up out of the racing crouch to act as a windbreak which helps slow you down. This involves locking your arms against the handlebars as you lift up but every time I tried it I almost fell off the left-hand side of the bike. My left arm was just folding under pressure and it was way too dangerous to continue. I tried taking the strain on my knees against the fuel tank or with just my right arm on the bar but nothing seemed to work, so after six laps I pulled into the pits.
Everyone asked me what was wrong and I said I had no idea. I wasn’t in pain, I just couldn’t ride the bloody bike. Rob McElnea got really mad because he thought I was cracking up. I’ve been blamed a lot over the years for being fragile or temperamental when it comes to racing a bike because my results have not always been consistent and Rob probably thought that I just couldn’t be bothered to ride or that I’d lost my bottle for some reason.
You’ve got to realize that in motorcycle sport, it’s very common for riders to compete with freshly broken bones, torn ligaments or any other number of painful injuries. A trackside doctor is always on hand to administer painkilling injections to numb the pain for the duration of the race if required and riders often have special lightweight casts made to hold broken bones in place while they race. Basically, they will try anything just to go out and score some points so for me to explain that I was not in pain but just couldn’t ride the bike must have sounded a bit odd to say the least.
Anyway, there was no way I could race but I hung around Cadwell anyway and at one point bumped into a neurosurgeon I knew called Ian Sabin. He was a bike-racing fan and came to meetings when time permitted. I explained my problem so he carried out a few tests in the mobile clinic that attends all race meetings. He asked me to push against his hands as he held them out and I nearly pushed him over with my right hand but couldn’t apply any pressure at all with my left hand. After another couple of simple tests he told me I had nerve damage and needed to get an MRI scan as soon as possible.
I went to London for a scan and had to pay the £600 fee out of my own pocket but it was the best £600 I’ve ever spent as it probably saved my life (and I eventually claimed it back through my insurance anyway). Ian looked at the results and I could immediately tell he was worried. He didn’t tell me what he saw at that point but called another department and told them I needed an ECG test immediately. It was only then that he turned to me and said, ‘Steven, you have a broken neck. What’s more, you have been walking around and trying to race bikes for the last four weeks with a broken neck.’
Fuck! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could I possibly have a broken neck and not notice? How did the hospital not diagnose it straight after the race? How do you fix a broken neck? Would I be able to ride again? All of these thoughts were rushing through my head as Ian explained that the C5 and C6 vertebra in my neck were broken and badly crushed as well. As a result of that my spinal column was twisted into an ‘S’ shape and to further complicate matters, a piece of sheared bone was chafing against the main nerve which controlled my left arm and was threatening to cut through it. No wonder I had no strength in it.
Ian said that I’d been incredibly lucky over the previous month because my head was, quite literally, hanging on by a bunch of fibres with no support from my spine. If I’d been slapped in the face or had knocked my head in any way, then that would have been the end of it – I’d have been dead, or even worse in my book, paralysed from the neck down. I thought back to all the daft things I’d done over the last month like going out on the piss when I could easily have fallen over. If I’d fallen off the bike at Knockhill or Cadwell, even if I’d slept on my neck in a funny position the results could have been catastrophic for me. The odds of not damaging the injury further in that month were incredible but somehow I’d beaten them. You could call it luck but I prefer to think of it as destiny: it simply wasn’t my time to die.
During the ECG test, they stuck needles in almost every muscle of my body and eventually found out that it was the nerve to my tricep muscle, in the rear of my left arm that had the most damage. It was deteriorating more with every passing day as the stray piece of bone gradually sawed its way through, and so I was scheduled for an operation as soon as possible.
Whilst I waited for the operation, I re-evaluated my entire life. I thought about everything I had done, pondered on everything I still wanted to do, and gradually realized how amazingly lucky I was to be getting a second chance at life when by all accounts, I should have been dead. I never once thought of quitting racing.
I’d never really believed there was a God and the crash didn’t change my mind. If there was a God, why would he have allowed my father to die in my arms when I was just 17? Why would he have allowed my kid brother to be killed racing a bike when he was only 19? Why, after my mother had lost her husband and son within three years of each other, would he then pair her off with an abusive second husband who battered her regularly? Why would he have allowed a good friend of mine to be beaten to death outside a chip shop because he refused to give his chicken and chips to a gang of thugs? No, I was pretty sure God didn’t exist or if He did, I didn’t like His way of doing things.
I also thought of how many of my friends and racing colleagues had been killed in racing accidents over the years while my own life had been spared so miraculously. The list makes for grim and depressive reading: names such as Joey Dunlop, Phil Mellor, Steve Henshaw, Ray Swann, Kenny Irons, Sam McClements, Simon Beck, Lee Pullan, Colin Gable, Gene McDonnell, Mark Farmer, Robert Holden, Klaus Klein, Donny Robinson, Neil Robinson, Steve Ward and Mick Lofthouse. I could go on but it’s not something I like to dwell on. We’re all going to die if we live long enough and I became more hardened to death than most people after losing my father and brother, so racing deaths never bothered me as much as they might have done.
But each and every one of those riders chose to dedicate his life to the sport of motorcycle racing because he loved it. It’s a sport that delivers thrills like no other but also one that punishes mistakes more harshly and more violently than any other. The risks are multiplied 10-fold when a rider also decides to race on closed public road tracks like the notorious Isle of Man TT. It is undoubtedly the most dangerous racing event in the world, but it’s also the event where I made my name and where I enjoyed so many great victories.
Since its inception in 1907, over 170 riders have been killed at the TT and the list is added to almost every year. Some years, as many as five riders are killed in the two-week event. Yet I won there 11 times at speeds which no one had ever witnessed before. Racing between walls and houses at over 190mph and averaging over 120mph for a lap was an awesome rush even if it was highly dangerous. But I cheated death on the world’s most unforgiving racetrack for 10 years and was never even hurt once while racing there. Ironically, it was a so-called ‘safe’, purpose-built short circuit that nearly claimed my life and almost left my mother with no sons at all.
I pondered on all these things as I awaited my operation and repeatedly questioned why I still wanted to race motorbikes more than anything else in my life. It certainly wasn’t for the financial rewards since I haven’t made any serious money from racing even though I’ve raced for more than 20 years. The truth is that when I retire I’ll have to get a normal job like everybody else because I have no savings worth talking about. Some racers, like my former team-mate, Carl Fogarty, have become millionaires from the sport but I’ve been financially naive throughout my career and consequently never got the rewards I feel I deserve.
Having said that, racing at least gives me some sort of wage to live on from day to day, so I suppose money was one of the reasons I had to get back on a bike again. After all, I have two small sons to support with no other obvious means of earning cash to feed and clothe them. But more than anything I wanted to get back on a bike again because I desperately wanted to win the British Superbike championship – the toughest domestic race series in the world.
Throughout my career people have always thought I could only win on dangerous street circuits and couldn’t adapt my style to the short sprint, purpose-built tracks, which require a different and more aggressive riding style. Even when I won the 250cc British championship in 1990 on short circuits people said I just got lucky, so the ‘road racer’ tag still weighed heavily round my neck.
In 1995 I won the British Superbike series but this time pundits said it was only because my arch-rival Jamie Whitham developed cancer midway through the season. It seemed as if nothing I did was enough to convince people that I was a world class short-circuit rider who could hold his own against the best in the world.
After winning that title in ’95 I had seven years of bad luck in the BSB series. Two of my teams folded mid-season through lack of funds, two other teams sacked me for ‘under performing’ and I didn’t complete three seasons because of injury. So, more than anything, I wanted to come back from my injuries this time and win the British title so convincingly that no one could ever have any more doubts about my ability on a motorcycle.
I don’t mind admitting that I was absolutely shitting myself going into that operation. Motorcycle racing may be dangerous but at least I was always the one in control: I could back off the throttle or slam on the brakes if things got too hot or I could even pull off the track and quit if I was totally unhappy about something. There was at least some sense of being in charge even if it was only a delusion. But being knocked out and having someone, however well qualified, operating on your spine? That’s really scary.
Lower spine operations are quite common and generally successful but the neck is a different matter. From the chest upwards, it’s like a bloody telephone exchange inside your body with all those nerves criss-crossing each other and that’s where things can go wrong. As I’ve said, my biggest fear is being paralysed so if the surgeons were going to mess up, I’d rather they just put me to sleep for good.
You’d think that for an operation on your neck, the surgeons would go in from the back, but in my case at least, they didn’t. Instead, they cut open my throat, pushed my windpipe aside and went to work from there. They picked out all the shattered pieces of bone and generally cleaned up the mess, then they cut open my hip and chipped a disc of bone from my pelvis to graft into my neck. I swear they must have used a bloody sledgehammer to chip that bone off because the pain in my pelvis when I woke up was like nothing on earth and I’ve had my share of serious injuries so I’m well accustomed to pain.
As you’d expect, I was also pretty groggy when I woke up and I remember wondering why the fuck there was a red Christmas tree bulb hanging out of my pelvis and one hanging out of my neck too. As I came a bit more to my senses I realized they were blood drains – little suction pumps that suck out any surplus blood so it doesn’t start congealing. My neck and throat felt OK but that bloody hip was unbelievable and when Ian wanted me on my feet the morning after the operation I was horrified. Man that hurt.
Anyway, normally that procedure would have been enough and any other patient would be told to take it easy for a while until the bone healed itself. But because my surgeon knew I wanted to go racing again as soon as possible, he strengthened my neck by screwing in a titanium plate which I still have in there – and always will have as a matter of fact.
A CT scan showed the operation had gone well and my neck was stable and I was on my way home two days later, but I’d been told there was no guarantee that I’d ever get any feeling or strength back in my left arm. Ian said it might return in six weeks, six months, one year or perhaps never at all. I had almost torn that nerve clean out of the spinal column as my body was twisted in the crash and no one could tell if my arm would ever be anything more than the relatively lifeless object that was dangling by my side. I was at nature’s mercy.
Every day for weeks – even though I don’t believe in God – I prayed for some feeling to come back, but every day for weeks it didn’t. I tried to build up strength in it but could only lift light weights and I was starting to get really depressed thinking my career was over and that I was going to be left with a useless arm. I couldn’t even try to set up a deal for the following season because I didn’t know if I’d be able to ride a bike or not.
Then one day, about two months after the crash, it started happening. I felt a slight sensation on the back of my hand and then in my index finger. It wasn’t much but it was definitely something. I thought, ‘Yes! Here we go, I’m back in business.’ I felt totally elated but not as elated as I was when, near Christmas time, I was finally able to lock my left arm out fully. That was the best Christmas present I’d had since my first son was born on Christmas Day in 1997. I was over the moon.
It was game on after that and I started training slowly and gently to rebuild some muscle in my wasted arm. That was day number one of life number two as far as I was concerned and I never stopped thinking about racing after that. There were still some months until the start of the new season so I had time to try and organize a ride for the year, even though I’d burned my bridges with most teams over the last few years. But I didn’t care – I’d been given a second chance at life and I wasn’t about to waste it. Somehow I would find a bike to race even if it meant remortgaging my house and buying one myself. The way I saw it, I had nothing to lose because I should have been dead anyway.
Steve Hislop was back – and he was going to win the British Superbike championship come hell or high water.
2 Shooting Crows (#ulink_8ee09618-0302-5b19-baf6-31ce0800de99)
‘My real name’s actually Robert Hislop but my dad made a mistake when he registered me.’
The Isle of Man TT is a totally unique event and probably attracts more controversy than any other sporting fixture on the calendar.
It’s held on the world famous ‘Mountain’ circuit that runs over 37.74 miles of everyday public roads on the Isle of Man. The roads are, naturally, closed for the races but they’re still lined with hazards such as houses, walls, lamp-posts, hedges and everything else you would expect to find on normal country roads.
Because of the dangers and the number of competitors who have been killed there, the event lost its world championship status in 1976 when top riders like Barry Sheene, Phil Read and Giacomo Agostini refused to race there any longer. When you consider that the current, fastest average lap speed is held by David Jefferies at 127.29mph and bikes have been speed-trapped at 194mph between brick walls, it’s easy to understand the dangers of the place, as there’s no run-off space when things go wrong. But the thrill of riding there is unique and that’s what keeps so many riders coming back year after year.
Riders don’t all start together at the TT – they set off singly at 10-second intervals in a bid to improve safety although mass starts have occurred in the past. That means the competitors are racing against the clock and the longest races last for six laps which equates to 226 miles and about two hours in the saddle at very high speeds and on very bumpy roads. It’s an endurance test as much as anything else and you can’t afford to lose concentration for a split second or you are quite literally taking your own life in your hands. It is an event like no other on earth.
The TT (which stands for Tourist Trophy) fortnight is traditionally held in the last week of May and the first week of June and the Manx Grand Prix is traditionally held on the same course in September. The latter event is purely amateur with no prize money and it exists as a way for riders to learn the daunting 37.74 mile course before tackling the TT proper. The name should not be confused with the world championship Moto Grand Prix series because the two have nothing in common.
Both the Manx Grand Prix and the TT races have played a huge part in my life, which is why I’m describing them in detail now. Without them I simply wouldn’t be where I am today, or even writing this book, and a basic understanding of the nature of both events is crucial to understanding my later career.
I first visited the Manx GP as a child, then later on spent 10 years racing on the Mountain course, both at the Manx and the TT. I grew to love the Isle of Man so much over the years that I moved there in 1991 and it’s where I still live to this day.
It was my father Alexander, or ‘Sandy’ as he was known, who got me interested in the TT and the Manx GP in the first place as he raced at the Manx back in the 1950s. I went on to have incredible success at the TT and that’s really where I made my name in the world of motorcycling. But believe it or not, the Steve Hislop who won 11 TT races (only two men in history have won more) isn’t actually called Steve at all thanks to one of the daftest blunders anyone’s dad ever made.
I may be known as Steve Hislop throughout the bike-racing world but on every piece of documentation that proves who I am, the name given is actually Robert. I still don’t know exactly how it happened but it was definitely my dad’s doing. Both he and my mum, Margaret, had decided on calling me Steven Robert Hislop and that’s the name I was christened under, but my dad messed up big time. For reasons known only to him, he registered me as Robert Steven Hislop and to this day even my passport carries that name.
Robert was my grandfather’s name, but he died when he was just 30 after he fell from the attic in his dad’s blacksmith’s workshop. His was the first in a series of tragic early deaths in my family.
I was born at 7.55pm on 11 January 1962 at the Haig Maternity Hospital in Hawick in the Scottish Borders. But although I was born in a Hawick hospital, I’m not actually from the town itself despite what all those race programmes, TV commentators and magazine articles have said over the years. I’m actually from the little village of Chesters in a parish called Southdean, a few miles south east of Hawick. My mum was only 16 when she had me, while my dad was a good bit older at 26 – a bit of a cradle snatcher was the old boy!
Money was tight so we all lived with my widowed granny for the first few months of my life. Mum worked in the knitwear mills; knitwear is a big trade in the Borders and my dad was a joiner who worked for a small country joinery firm in Chesters village before eventually buying the business when the owner died.
My younger brother, Garry Alexander Hislop, was born in the same hospital as me on 28 July 1963, just 17 months after I was and we were very close right from the start. I loved having a brother.
Dad loved his bikes and was very friendly with the late, great Bob McIntyre, another Scottish bike racer and the first man ever to lap the Isle of Man TT course at 100mph. Dad raced between 1956 and 1961 on a BSA Gold Star and a 350cc Manx Norton. He travelled to all the little Scottish courses that don’t exist any more, such as Charter Hall, Errol, Crimond and Beveridge Park, including some circuits in the north of England such as Silloth – a track which would later have tragic consequences for my family.
He was a pretty handy racer in the Scottish championships but never really had the money to do it properly. He used to ride to meetings on his bike with a racing exhaust strapped to his back, fit it to the bike for the race then change back to the standard one and ride home again! That was proper clubman’s racing. As I mentioned earlier, my dad also raced at the Manx Grand Prix a few times usually finishing midfield but when mum became pregnant with me he packed in the racing game to support the family.
As a kid, I went to Hobkirk primary school. I remember being absolutely shit-scared, waiting for the bus on my first day of school because I was a very shy child and hadn’t mixed much with other kids since most of the time I just played with my little brother. Shyness is something I have mostly grown out of now but it was definitely a problem for me in the early days of my career.
I can’t remember much about primary school except that I always seemed to be sticking up for Garry in fights, particularly with a kid called Magoo who was always picking on him. My other outstanding memory of primary school was of Mr Thompson, the head teacher, who had a wooden leg, though I never found out why. Instead of giving us the belt when we were bad, he pulled our hair repeatedly! I clearly remember him telling me off and yanking the tuft of hair at the front of my head in time with his rantings. No wonder I’ve got no bloody hair left!
My secondary school was Jedburgh Grammar, but I was never interested in going there because I was a real out-door type, thanks to my dad’s uncles, Jim and John Wallace, having a farm. Almost every weekend I would cycle down to that farm and have the time of my life. I fed the sheep and the cows, picked the turnips and generally mucked in with the chores, then after that it was back to the house for a big farm breakfast and in the afternoons John and I would go shooting.
At that point, all I wanted to be when I grew up was a gamekeeper. I was like a little old man with my deerstalker hat with the ‘Deputy Dawg’ flap-down ear covers and a bloody big shotgun cocked over my arm. I used to feed up all the birds and ducks and make little hideouts round the ponds then come the shooting season I blew the hell out of everything that could fly – and some things that couldn’t.
I know that sounds cruel now but that was the norm in the country, especially back then, and boys will be boys after all. Having said that, I was a bit of a nasty little fucker when it came to things like that. I shot baby crows that had left the nest with my .22 rifle and kept the shotgun for the bigger birds and the nests themselves. I’m not particularly proud of it now but as I said before, it felt normal at the time.
On Sunday evenings I would cycle home again as late as I could get away with and dreaded going back to school the next day. I had pushbikes from a very early age but they were always hand-me-downs and were far too big for me. I never had any stabilizers either so I had lots of crashes because I was too small to reach the ground. My folks would hold on to me to get me going then seconds after they let me go there would be a big crashing noise, a yelp and a puff of dust as I hit the deck again. But I loved two-wheelers from the start, even when they were too big for me.
The first time I ever got a new bike was when my nana bought Garry and I brand new Raleigh Choppers for Christmas but they were just as dangerous as the too-big hand-me-downs. Choppers may have looked cool but they certainly weren’t designed for riding – they were bloody lethal. Garry once smashed his face to hell one night when he crashed cycling down a hill and he squealed in pain all the way home – the poor little bugger. We used to get into high-speed wobbles because the front wheels were so small and the high bars provided so much leverage that they made the effect worse.
Even back then we pretended we were riding motorbikes and like most kids at the time, we gripped playing cards onto the fork legs with clothes pegs so they ran through the spokes and made a noise like a motorbike. But showing an early aptitude for setting up machinery, I eventually found that cut-up bottles of washing-up liquid lasted longer than playing cards and made a better noise too!
Before we even had pushbikes, my mum says that Garry and I would sit in the house and pretend to be bike racers. We would be at opposite ends of the sofa over the armrests in a racing crouch, our little legs dangling over the side, and cushions under our chests acting as petrol tanks.
Apparently we fought over which racer we were pretending to be too and it was always Jimmie Guthrie or Geordie Buchan. Jimmie Guthrie was Hawick’s most famous son and one of the greatest names in pre-war motorcycle racing. He was born in 1897 and went on to win six Isle of Man TTs and was European champion three times when that title was the equivalent of today’s world championships. His admirers included none other than a certain Adolf Hitler who on one occasion even presented him with a trophy!
Jimmie was killed in a 500cc race at the Sachsenring in Germany in 1937 at 40 years of age and there’s still a statue of him in Hawick, as well as the famous Guthrie’s memorial on the TT course. Like I said before, Garry and I would argue over who was going to be Jimmy Guthrie and who was going to be Geordie Buchan, who was the Scottish champion at the time and also a friend of my dad. So in a sense, my first ever race was on a sofa and I think it finished in a dead heat with Garry!
Rugby is the big sport in the Scottish Borders and although I played it at school, I was never a big fan. In fact, I never liked football or tennis either and as for cricket – what the fuck is that all about? I’ll never understand the fascination with that game. It’s just grown men playing bloody rounders if you ask me. I was more into hunting and shooting things. My old Uncle John also taught me the art of fly fishing and I loved that too. I don’t do it any more but I suppose I’ll have to relearn it now to teach my own kids, Connor and Aaron.
However, I hope they never have to go through the experience I once had when I went sea fishing with my dad and Garry. Dad owned a little boat that we used to tow to the coast for a spot of line-and-rod fishing. On one occasion we took it to the Isle of Whithorn in Galloway and were anchored over some rocks on the Solway Firth doing a spot of rod fishing. It was a lovely hot, calm day so we didn’t have any life jackets on and everything was just perfect, the sun on our backs and the water lapping gently at the hull of the boat. But all of a sudden the peace was shattered by my dad screaming, ‘Get your bloody life jackets on boys, NOW! And get your rods in. QUICKLY.’ I turned to see what the hell could be causing all this panic and was startled to spot a huge dorsal fin heading directly for the boat. Bloody hell, I shat myself; it was a huge basking shark, more than twice the size of the boat (which was 16 feet long) and it was coming straight for us!
Although I didn’t know it then, basking sharks are harmless plankton feeders but they look just like great white sharks and are much, much bigger, growing to well over 30 feet. That’s pretty damned big when you’re a scrawny little four-foot kid. This all happened just two years before the movie Jaws came out and I’m pretty glad I hadn’t seen that film beforehand because I’d probably have been even more terrified and I was scared enough as it was. The shark went under the boat and I remember seeing its head emerging on the other side before its tail had even gone under – that’s how big it was. It just continued swimming away and that’s the last we saw of it, but it was a pretty scary experience – even though it was good to brag about later.
Garry and I were very close and I suppose we had to be really because there were very few other kids to play with. Obviously, we fought a bit as all boys do but we were the best of pals most of the time. We built tree houses and hammocks, messed about in the woods and by the rivers and had a real boys’ own childhood. We did used to pal around with a guy called David Cook, or ‘Cookie’ as we called him, who went on to become a 250cc Scottish bike racing champion, but he was about the only other kid we were close to.
Way before we ever got motorbikes, Cookie, Garry and I used to hone our racing skills in 45-litre oil drums. Two of us would squeeze into a drum and the third person would push it down a massive hill. It was brilliant fun to be in the drum but just as much of a laugh watching the other two getting beaten up as they bounced and rattled their way downhill, bones clattering all the way. Eventually we came up with a new addition to the game – a tractor tyre! This thing was bigger than all three of us but we managed to wheel it up the hill then I’d spend ages trying to squeeze my way inside it as if I was an inner tube. Once I was in, the lads would give me a mighty shove and off I went, bouncing and bouncing for what seemed like ages as the heavy tyre picked up speed on its way down the hill. That bit was all right – it was the slowing down followed by the inevitable crash that caused the many injuries. I’d get thrown out at the end as the momentum died out and I was usually really dizzy and disorientated from being spun round like a hamster in a wheel, so invariably I fell on my backside as soon as I tried to stand up.
One time I actually fell out of the tyre while it was still bouncing down the hill at speed and I crashed face first into a grassy knoll and bust my nose. It was bleeding and swollen and in a hell of a mess. I don’t know if it was actually broken, but to this day I’ve still got a kink in my nose and it was all because of that bloody tractor tyre.
As kids, our other passion was for bogeys, or fun karts, as people call them now. You know the type, a wooden base with four pram wheels and a rope for steering. We got really good at building them and even made one with a cab once. There was a steep downhill corner in the field next to our house which was good for learning to slide the bogeys on but we decided a bit of mud would help make it even slippier. I don’t know why we didn’t just soak it with water but instead we had the bright idea of pissing on that corner for all we were worth to make it muddy so we could get better slides! If we didn’t need to pee, we’d simply drink bottles and bottles of juice until we did – the more piss the better as far as we were concerned. We would eventually get the corner so wet that we had out of control slides and Garry once had a huge crash and ended up lying in that huge puddle of piss with several broken fingers.
It was a happy time for Garry and I, and it may have seemed idealistic at the time but in later years I realized the more negative effects my upbringing had on me. Because I was so isolated, I was very shy with other people. I still am today, to a certain extent, so I’m trying to encourage my kids to be confident and to mix freely with people so that they’re better equipped to deal with the big bad world than I was. Even now, I hate calling travel agents and bank managers or dealing with any ‘official’ phone calls like that, so if I can, I ask someone else to do it for me! I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s just the way I am.
There was another couple of kids, called Alistair and Norman Glendinning, with whom Garry and I sometimes played. They lived on a nearby farm called Doorpool. At the time, we were renting a cottage within the farm grounds which cost seven shillings a week (35 pence in today’s money), if my mum agreed to top up the water trough for the cows every day, which she did.
Once I remember having a big argument with Alistair Glendinning and I ended up throwing a garden rake at him. It split his face open and cut his head – he was in a right mess. I got a terrible bollocking for that but a few days later we were all playing happily together again. Kids don’t hold grudges, shame adults aren’t the same.
When I was nine years old, in 1973, my dad, as a former competitor, was invited to the Golden Jubilee of the Manx Grand Prix. When he got there he met up with Jim Oliver who owned Thomas B. Oliver’s garage in Denholm, just a few miles from where we lived. Jim was partly sponsoring a rider called Wullie Simson, who also lived near our home and my dad got to know him on that trip. It turned out that Wullie was a joiner like my dad but he’d quit his job when his boss wouldn’t give him time off to go to the Manx! My dad was getting a lot of work in so he offered Wullie a job, which was gladly accepted. Garry and I helped out at my dad’s workshop for pocket money and we liked Wullie straight away when he started there and we were always asking him about the racing.
Some two weeks after Wullie started his job at the workshop, my dad asked Garry and I if we’d like to go and watch some bike racing at Silloth, an airfield circuit just south of Carlisle. Too right we did! We were so excited at the prospect that we could hardly sleep. When Garry and I had been about five or six years old, we went with our nana and papa to stay in a caravan at Silloth. I remember hearing motorbikes howling away in the background and my grandma explained it was the bike racing over on the airfield. I ranted and begged her for so long to take us to see them that the poor woman ended up trudging with us for about six miles on the round trip to the airfield just so we could watch the bikes. There was a big delay in the racing because a rider was killed and my nana wanted to take Garry and I away from the track at that point, but I was having none of it. Apparently, I refused to leave the circuit until I’d seen the last bike in the last race go past. I obviously loved bike racing even way back then. That must have been in the late 1960s.
But I was 11 and old enough to really appreciate it properly by the time dad took me back to Silloth to watch another race and my most vivid memory of that meeting is of a guy in purple leathers, because everyone else was wearing black. Every lap he came out of the hairpin and pulled a big wheelie and I thought he was amazing. He was called Steve Machin and I’m now very friendly with his brother Jack though sadly later, Steve himself was killed on a race bike.
It was great to watch my dad’s mate Wullie Simson racing and he must have enjoyed our support because soon after that race, he turned up at our house in his van and pulled out a Honda ST50. It must have been an MOT failure or something because the engine was in pieces but my dad soon put it back together, got it fired up and that was it. From that moment on, Garry and I spent every spare moment riding that bike in the field surrounding the house. My motorcycling career had begun.
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