This wasn’t just any ordinary 250 though, this was Sea-Biscuit! My mechanic, Mark 'Big Man' Kelly’s spare bike which he resurrected from being a clapped out, corroded piece of crap basically! It was a 1993 Honda RS 250 which he bought from Japan. When he got it, it was as it if had been sitting in the bottom of the ocean for a few years. He did a good job in bringing her back to life though. If I had seen the pictures of how it looked before when I rode it, there is no way I would have thrown my leg over it! Anyway, she went like a dream, rattling a bit but not too bad all in all!
The "just doing a bit of teaching" got a bit out of hand when I started getting a feel for the thing as I was having a lot of fun. I asked if I would be able to race it later that day. They said no problem but I would have to start from the back of the grid. Game on! Things then got serious and the race face came out but I also had to do what I could to try and help Bigman out as he was racing that day and still had a chance of winning the championship. I was really excited about it!
I made an awesome start passing about five rows! Why didn’t that ever happen to me in GPs?! At the end of lap one I went from around 40th to 5th! Bigman was leading at the time so I was hoping I could pass him and we could both pull away.
Unfortunately, when I passed Bigman I took him out. Only joking, that wouldn’t have been very funny but what did happen was Bigman’s rear brake hose split and started leaking on to his rear tyre unknown to me. I kept my head down and stretched the lead to about 12 seconds. Then, on the last few laps I was trying to see where Bigman was to hopefully help him out but by this point he had dropped back to 9th. I then got the signal from Barry (my team boss) to get a move on and then took my first win in a long time. Some would call it cherry picking….but it was good fun!
