Mike Nicks: 'I didn't make it up!'

CMG is delighted to welcome Mike Nicks, who covers motorcycle racing for national newspapers including The Guardian and The Observer, to Crash.Net for the 2007 season.

Mike - who will be writing an exclusive monthly column covering MotoGP, WSBK and BSB - begins by detailing the final MotoGP test at Jerez, James Toseland's success at the opening WSBK round at Qatar and much more...

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT person at the Jerez MotoGP tests may just have been, not new world champion Nicky Hayden or even I-want-it-back Valentino Rossi, but one David Garrido. A name like that may be lighting this thought-train in your mind: Spanish.teenage.prodigy.the next Dani Pedrosa.

But Mr Garrido is nothing so exotic, although possibly as influential.

He's an English bloke, probably late twenties, and a sports reporter for BBC Radio 1's Newsbeat programme.

Radio 1 at MotoGP? Kinda doesn't make sense - and that's what Garrido thought before those two final rounds of last year, when Pedrosa bunged his Repsol Honda team-mate Hayden off-track at Estoril, Rossi fell in the final race at Valencia and Hayden grabbed an against-all-odds title.

"Those races made us ask the question, 'How much is our audience interested in this?'" Garrido told me at Jerez.

"We had such a big response - bigger than cricket or rugby," he said.

"We thought Formula 1 was big - but this was bigger. Our listeners read Motor Cycle News and Max Power. A lot of them are big, big petrolheads.

"MotoGP is a sport that's closer to them in real terms."

So Radio 1 decided to come to its first MotoGP event - blissful news for promoters Dorna, because the station brings with it ten million listeners in the 10- to 30-year-old age group, the core of them in the prized 15- to 24-year-old sector. No wonder that Dorna, which desperately wants to attract new, richer sponsors (read our exclusive news story on this), paid for flights and a hotel for David Garrido and four colleagues from BBC TV news and two regional radio stations at Jerez.

You will be reassured to know that they spent our licence fee wisely.

Garrido and co muscled in beside the rest of us and interviewed Nicky Hayden, Valentino Rossi, Kenny Roberts Senior and Junior, Jeremy McWilliams, Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta and the Brit youngsters Bradley Smith, Danny Webb and Eugene Laverty, amongst others. That's a fair work rate.

You can listen to Radio 1 Newsbeat at 12.45pm and 5.45pm weekdays.

Better still, you'll be able to hear David Garrido live from Donington Park on the weekend of June 24, when Radio 1 runs its first live outside broadcast from a MotoGP event. They're thinking of doing World Superbike rounds too, maybe the Silverstone and Brands Hatch events.

One of the things that impressed Garrido about MotoGP was the accessibility to top riders. "Can you imagine getting a one-to-one interview with the god of the sport in Formula 1?" he enthused after popping his own special questions to Valentino.

I guess the only sad part to all this is that it took an accident to unveil this cache of ten million actual or potential motorcycle racing converts, rather than MotoGP's promoters having already sniffed them out a few seasons ago. Dorna's sponsorship summit in Barcelona in April (see our news story) is sorely needed.

JAMES TOSELAND strode across the stage at the launch of his Hannspree Ten Kate World Superbike team in Milan. He sat at a piano, and belted out an astounding version of the vaulting soul-rock ballad, Walking in Memphis.

Solo, no backing, just him and the keyboard. The several hundred guests of the Asian TV manufacturer were stunned into silence, as much by the unexpectedness of the performance as by its power and sweep.

Toseland was in the process of recording his first CD last year, but shelved his music career because if he had released the album he would have had to tour to promote it - and that would have compromised his attempt to win back the World Superbike Championship.

I had never seen James play before, and until that night in Milan I had assumed that his level was a little above that of your average pub-rock band. But he's an artiste - there's no other word to describe his quality of delivery and the power of his voice. Rock stardom awaits when he packs in two wheels.

In a way, his stroll through Memphis inspired me even more than his bounce up to the top of the World Superbike points table with a stunning 1-2 performance in the opening round at Qatar. Troy Bayliss, who inexplicably slumped to fifth and eighth places in the desert, will get stronger during the season. And Max Biaggi, who won on his Superbike debut, will win further races on the Alstare Corona Suzuki.

But it's rare for a rider new to a series, on a new bike, to mount a season-long championship challenge. And how will Biaggi adapt to some of the tracks he has not yet ridden, including Brands Hatch's 2.6-mile long circuit, with those earth banks way closer than anything he's been used to in grand prix racing? Meanwhile, Bayliss' V-twin Ducati is going to get out-dragged by the Japanese fours from many corners. This may be as good a chance as Toseland will ever get to regain the Superbike crown.

CASEY STONER is my kind of racer - fast, fearless, and loaded-up with self-belief. Some preferred to call the latter quality gobbiness last year.

But then, racing fans and media can be unbelievably bitchy towards people who don't fit into a conventional box. They also slammed Stoner for lobbing Lucio Cecchinello's Team LCR Honda down the road too many times. This, despite him taking a pole and a podium, and scoring points in ten out of 17 races on his way to eighth place in the MotoGP championship in his debut year. If only Britain produced soaring 21-year-olds like this.

In fact he never said anything that he didn't back up on the track, and there were contributing factors to the crashes.

"All through practice last year we were confident, but in the race the bike felt nothing like it did in practice," he told me at the Jerez tests. Why, exactly, I asked.

"I can't discuss that - it's classified!" he rapped with that trademark Stoner sparkiness across the metal table in Ducati's hospitality unit.

The boy fears nobody and no situation.

Stoner finished sixth fastest at Jerez - and then satisfied his critics by falling off the Desmosedici. Happily, Marlboro Ducati's project manager Livio Suppo is one of those who knows that it's easier to mould a hot, feisty talent into a consistent winner than it is to drag aggression from a calmer, more cautious soul who keeps the carbon-fibre pristine. Casey Stoner is one of the greatest characters in the MotoGP paddock. And that's me being gobby, not him.

DOES NICKY HAYDEN do too many laps? He just stays out there lobbing them in during testing, when other riders figure they've learnt all they're going to learn and are back in the pitbox.

"That's just Nicky's style. He can't sit down for more than five minutes without riding his bike," his crew chief Pete Benson said at Jerez. "I'm not sure whether it's good or not, but that's what he likes."

And it's not only on a motorcycle that MotoGP's new world champion takes it to the limit. "His training schedule is incredible," his manager Phil Baker said. "It's six hours a day, every day. His listens to his personal trainer, Aldon Baker (same surname, coincidentally) and follows his guidance on everything. His eating habits are so regimented - what to eat, when to eat."

In winter Nicky likes to go for long bicycle rides with his motorcycle-racing brothers Roger and Tommy in Southern California, and they download heart rate data and email it to Aldon Baker if he's not with them.

"It's taken very seriously," Phil Baker said. "Nicky wears a watch that monitors the information - the speed they're doing and their heartrate going uphill compared to downhill. It's a completely focussed attitude to winning races."

It all seems very un-Valentino-like, but it's what makes racers feel confident that counts. Those who might dismiss Hayden's obsessions as nerdy will be even more enraged to know that Nicky doesn't have to fret about such downhome details as paying his monthly credit card bill on the right day to avoid incurring rip-off interest charges.

International Racers, Inc, the sports management company for which Phil Baker works, takes care of that - as well as Hayden's mortgage payments and an investment programme that ensures he will have enough money to last him the rest of his life by the time he's 35.

"Motorcycle racers have shorter working careers than you or I," Phil Baker reminded me.

It all sounds a bit MP3-era, but I was surprised to learn that International Racers has been looking after American bike racers for more than 25 years, and has handled the affairs of the Kenny Robertses Senior and Junior, and Wayne Rainey and Eddie Lawson as well as Nicky Hayden.

"We've managed five out of the seven American MotoGP champions, and we have

13 world championships under our belts," Phil Baker said.

Before you start carping at all this, remember that Hayden covers up to three grand prix race distances in a day when he's on a serious testing mission. If you did that AND spent Saturday mornings faffing over chequebooks, you'd be the nerdy one.