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Transcript

Steve Parrish · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:13
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:30
  I'm in New Zealand for this episode, south of Auckland, near Hamilton, at a racetrack called Hampton Downs.
• 0:37
  I'm here for their annual Motorfest, a celebration of motorcycle racing, with some priceless classic bikes, legendary riders, and some engineers from this part of the world who rose to the top because of their never-give-up, innovative, can-do approach.
• 0:53
  Among the international riders is Steve Parrish.
• 0:57
  Whenever I catch up with Steve, it reminds me of my old colleague, two-time 500cc world champion Barry Sheen.
• 1:04
  They were teammates for a time and became the best of friends.
• 1:08
  Stavros, as Baz called him, lives life to the full.
• 1:12
  He's not PC and makes no apologies for it.
• 1:15
  And there'll be some stories here that might raise an eyebrow or two.
• 1:19
  Don't email me complaining.
• 1:21
  Just enjoy it for what it is and keep it in the context of the era he raced in.
• 1:26
  He's one of the most genuine blokes I know who just likes taking it to the edge, especially for a laugh.
• 1:32
  The path to bikes and racing wasn't that of a single-minded young man growing up in England.
• 1:41
  I am rusty, probably truthfully keeping out of the UK for as long as possible during the winter months.
• 1:48
  But I also love the classic scene.
• 1:50
  I've recently been in South Africa where I was out there.
• 1:53
  I took my wife, actually.
• 1:54
  That was, we got married a year ago and I may have told her that was her honeymoon because we hadn't had one before.
• 1:59
  But we've been in South Africa riding our G500 classic bikes down there and had a wonderful time.
• 2:04
  And then I get the invitation to come back here to Hampton Downs in New Zealand, which is really strange because generally the only invitation to come back a second time is to apologise.
• 2:13
  But they actually wanted me back.
• 2:15
  Let's start with just the classic scene for a moment.
• 2:18
  I mean, it's gone through this sort of resurgence.
• 2:22
  Tell us about the bike you're riding for this weekend, for example, and the memories that that evokes for you.
• 2:28
  Well, some of the memories, of course, are laying in hospitals wondering who I am.
• 2:33
  Because that, of course, was part and parcel of what went on.
• 2:36
  And it is going through a resurgence.
• 2:37
  And I mean, possibly it's not good for the motorcycle industry because a lot of people that go and watch motorcycle racing are of the age of 50, 55.
• 2:46
  That's kind of the average age.
• 2:47
  And so, of course, their great memories are the smell of the two-stroke oil from the back of Barry Sheen and Kenny Roberts' and Mick Grant's and Stuart Vaughn's and people like that.
• 2:57
  That's...
• 2:57
  etched in their minds and it was a halcyon period i think of grand prix racing and so that's i think is why people want to come along and see them and i have actually this weekend been riding a bike that's owned by tom dermity a lovely irishman that lives up in brisbane and stewart vont has a lot to do with it and they bring the bike out for me and it's prepared beautifully mike sinclair is there working at paul treesey and all these great engineers from the past legends they're legends too behind the scenes but they are
• 3:24
  Yeah, very much so.
• 3:25
  I remember last year at Eastern Creek, I had Jeremy Burgess there.
• 3:27
  Wow, if I'd have had those engineers when I was racing, I could have been good, I think.
• 3:31
  They're just such nice people, and a bit like riders of that era.
• 3:35
  They're not just engineers, they're characters, they're people.
• 3:37
  They've got stories and world championships behind them.
• 3:41
  That's the thing, and they still love what they're doing.
• 3:44
  If I say we need to change the jetting on this, they kind of jump at it.
• 3:48
  which is unbelievable, bearing in mind that some of them are 50, 60 years old.
• 3:52
  And so that's also really nice about it.
• 3:54
  And I guess also we've got time to stop and talk to the people that come in that are also from that era.
• 4:01
  And the garage we've been in here at Hampton Downs has a footprint that goes through the middle of it, asking and inviting spectators to come along and talk and look and see these bikes, touch them.
• 4:12
  You know, we've got Graham Crosby, Christopher Mullen, Simon Craefar,
• 4:16
  legends that are here to talk to people and have their picture taken everything else so surely that's why you've got to love classic racing because i love motor gp but boy oh boy i can tell you when you go to qatar next weekend or you go to jerez or something like that if you can get within 200 meters of the paddock you're doing really well and to chance of seeing valentine it might be in the distance by a quarter of a mile away so that's the difference with with classic
• 4:39
  Where did the love of bikes come from for Steve Parrish?
• 4:43
  And I want to hark back to your childhood, where you grew up.
• 4:46
  And were you a kid that was obsessed by a particular bike?
• 4:50
  Maybe you had a poster on the wall.
• 4:52
  Or was it a particular racer?
• 4:54
  I think back for Barry, it was Bill Ivey, I think, wasn't it?
• 4:58
  Yeah, it was.
• 4:58
  No, to start with, not at all.
• 5:00
  I mean, I didn't even know motorcycle racing existed.
• 5:02
  I guess I was...
• 5:04
  I was 10 years old I'm assuming and I got invited around to a friend's house and his dad had built him an old motorbike and he let me have a go on it and within 10 minutes I was hooked on this thing.
• 5:15
  I always like going fast on my bicycle and then finally I get something with an engine underneath me and I mucked around with that and then I got myself a bike and luckily I lived out in the countryside not far from Cambridge in the UK.
• 5:26
  And there was an old disused airfield.
• 5:28
  But for me, you know, Rusty, it wasn't just a motorbike.
• 5:31
  It was something with an engine.
• 5:32
  It was something that could propel me along.
• 5:33
  And sometimes it could be a pickup truck.
• 5:35
  It could be a car.
• 5:36
  It could be a motorbike.
• 5:38
  It could be a scooter.
• 5:39
  Anything that I could get on and start it up, make a noise and go fast was all I was interested in.
• 5:44
  And then I never, ever imagined I'd become a motorcycle racer.
• 5:47
  I really didn't.
• 5:48
  I got expelled from school.
• 5:50
  What for?
• 5:51
  What for?
• 5:52
  Well, I actually got expelled from primary school.
• 5:54
  I don't know what you call it over here, but it was like up to 11 years old.
• 5:57
  Same thing.
• 5:58
  Right, primary school.
• 5:58
  I got expelled from that because Mrs. Wilson, who was a head teacher, she didn't like me and I didn't like her.
• 6:04
  And I can understand why she didn't like me.
• 6:06
  And a lot of people say I'm hard to dislike, but worth the effort.
• 6:10
  And I wrote on the school wall, Mrs. Wilson is a fat old cow or something, but I spelt it all correctly and everything else, but anyway, they still expelled me.
• 6:18
  And then I went to a senior school, and then that went wrong when I was 15 because Mr. Carruthers, my geography teacher, had a Triumph Herald, and he didn't like me and I didn't like him, so one day I decided at lunch break it'd be really cool to take his hubcaps off and take his wheel nuts off and put his hubcaps back on.
• 6:34
  And you can imagine I gathered everyone up at five o'clock when he was about to go home because I was usually in detention anyway.
• 6:39
  So I was still there.
• 6:40
  And it was the funniest thing I've ever seen because all these wheels fell off immediately and they grasped me up.
• 6:45
  And that was the end of my schooling.
• 6:46
  So at this point, I'm now having to go and do an apprenticeship because what else can a 15 year old kid do?
• 6:52
  In what?
• 6:53
  In agricultural engineering.
• 6:55
  I went to work for a local company that mended massive Ferguson tractors and things like that.
• 7:00
  But then when I got 16, 16 years old I got myself a bike and off I went on the road, loved it, a YDS3 Yamaha.
• 7:09
  About a week later, I passed my test, and I get a 650 BSA and things like that.
• 7:13
  And how I stayed alive, I've no idea.
• 7:15
  You know, back then, it shows how old I am.
• 7:16
  You didn't even have to wear a crash helmet.
• 7:18
  And I'd be hurtling around the lanes near Cambridge at these bikes and skidding around.
• 7:23
  And it was part of me.
• 7:24
  It was in, I don't know why, it was just inbuilt in me.
• 7:27
  Motorcycles were a love because, I guess, it was independence.
• 7:30
  They went fast, and they made a nice noise.
• 7:33
  And then I went about a year without a motorbike.
• 7:36
  I had a car, and that was better for the girls, of course.
• 7:39
  What was that first car?
• 7:40
  The first car was Morris 1000.
• 7:43
  Yeah, I mean, can you believe it?
• 7:44
  Stylish.
• 7:45
  Yes, very, very stylish.
• 7:47
  And I rolled it in the ditch a few times.
• 7:49
  I remember one of the first accidents I had, I had five in a Morris 1000.
• 7:52
  We ended up upside down in a ditch.
• 7:54
  No one was hurt until someone said, I smell petrol.
• 7:57
  And there was such a screaming and shouting to get out.
• 8:00
  We all got stung to bits by all the nettles that were in the ditch.
• 8:03
  So that was the worst injury.
• 8:04
  So that kind of went on.
• 8:05
  But then all of a sudden, on my way to work,
• 8:09
  and often the Morris Sousen had broken down I had no wheels or my motorbike had broken down I used to walk to work from the bus station and there was a guy that raced motorbikes and his name was David Brown and he raced a Triton Triumph engine in a Norton frame and I used to poke my head in there and look around and he invited me in and then he asked me if I wanted to go to a race meeting and I went along to Snetton and I cleaned his wheels and fetched his petrol and did things like that I thought this is for me I was all of a sudden surrounded by all these lovely old motorbikes and people that...
• 8:38
  sort of thought like I did, weren't real bright like I wasn't.
• 8:41
  And that was it, I thought I'd have a go racing.
• 8:43
  So I built a bike with a group of mates from a local pub and we built this again, a Triton, went off to Brands Hatch, finished completely last, and Brands Hatch is still slippery to this day because of my Triton.
• 8:57
  So much oil came out of it, it's ground into the track now, I think, and I remember pulling in last and the cylinders were going up and down and oil was coming out everywhere.
• 9:06
  And we called our team, we had on the side of this old comma van that was a green grocery van, called Porous Racing.
• 9:14
  Because there was so much oil coming out, it was porous and porous piss, because we had no money.
• 9:18
  So that was Porous Racing.
• 9:20
  And that was the name of the team.
• 9:21
  But it was really like a pub team.
• 9:22
  Instead of having a darts team, they had a motorbike team, and I was the rider.
• 9:26
  A minute progressed from there, and I got a better bike, and a friend bought me a better bike.
• 9:30
  He had more money than I did.
• 9:31
  Yeah.
• 9:33
  And I started winning amateur racing.
• 9:34
  Still had no idea I was ever going to do it because I was still winning.
• 9:37
  How did it click then?
• 9:37
  What clicked for you to get from that guy who was struggling to being a racer that was proper and winning?
• 9:45
  One of my mates suggested that I bought a better bike because these old British bikes were finished, really, but I could only afford that.
• 9:53
  I saved up, someone helped me, my mum lent me 200 pounds, and I went out and I bought a 250 Yamaha, TD2B Yamaha, and all of a sudden I was winning, I couldn't believe it, because I didn't know I was any good, because you're battling around with an old bike leaking oil, I had no idea whether I was good or bad, and all of a sudden I jumped on this bike, which had got a reasonable pedigree, and I went out for the first race, and instead of battling around in 28th position, I was in second position, third position.
• 10:18
  Really good.
• 10:19
  Wow, this is impressive.
• 10:20
  Did that for a couple of years with my mates living in the back of transit vans and sleeping rough and things like that.
• 10:26
  And a lovely gentleman called Harold Coppott, who was a retired chicken farmer from Oxfordshire, sold his chicken farm for land to build houses on.
• 10:35
  Saw me in the paddock with this old bike, and it was still quite old, but I was winning on it.
• 10:39
  He said, I reckon you could do better on a better bike.
• 10:41
  Lent me a 250 350 TZ 250 TZ 350 Yamaha.
• 10:47
  which was unbelievable.
• 10:48
  Lend me a van as well.
• 10:50
  And all of a sudden I had this big van, well, say a fairly big van, with Harold Coppock written on the side.
• 10:55
  And I was part of a three-man team, Mick Patrick and Wayne Dinham and myself.
• 11:01
  And that really broke me into the national scene.
• 11:04
  Started winning national races, meeting people.
• 11:07
  By then I'm starting to look at motorcycle racing.
• 11:09
  And I was exactly as you said, I had a poster of Barry Sheen on the wall.
• 11:13
  I had Giacomo Agostini on the wall and all these famous, famous people.
• 11:17
  So I'm now buying Motorcycle News, but I still didn't think I could ever make a living out of it.
• 11:21
  I really had no idea.
• 11:23
  Anyway, after a year or so with Harold Coppock, I then get a gentleman come up to me called Dave Moore, who was a builder from Guildford, and he said, look, 250s, 350s are great, but no one really noticed them.
• 11:35
  Then you need to be on a bigger bike.
• 11:36
  You need to be on a 750 or a 500, because that's the class that all the factory teams are going to look at and things like that.
• 11:42
  So he went out and spent all his money, and it really did break him buying a 500...
• 11:47
  RG500, hence I have such a love for these bikes.
• 11:49
  A legendary bike in that period.
• 11:51
  Yeah, and they were hard to come by.
• 11:53
  But he managed to secure one through, no, it would have been Suzuki Great Britain, and a TZ750 Yamaha.
• 12:01
  So all of a sudden I've got these bikes.
• 12:02
  So I went out and I won the British Championship, straight off, off the bat, on these two bikes.
• 12:07
  And it was all of a sudden then, that was when it clicked that maybe I could give up work, which was, you know, and in fact, I am now, to this day, celebrating 43 years without a proper job.
• 12:19
  And I'm hoping to never get one, really.
• 12:20
  But, I mean, you turned effectively, the way you're talking, pro at about what, age?
• 12:26
  19.
• 12:27
  Yeah, 1920, I guess, something like that.
• 12:30
  It would have been, let me think, 76 years.
• 12:32
  Yeah, about 2021, maybe something like that, yeah.
• 12:35
  And a year later, help me with the timeline here, about a year later, you are teammate in the 500cc World Championship to Barry Sheen, who you talked about a moment ago.
• 12:45
  I mean, that's surreal stuff.
• 12:47
  Very short, and in fact I failed to mention that during the time riding my 250 and 350, so that's going to be I guess 74, 75, I met Barry Sheen, who's obviously a hero, and he'd got everything, and a bit like Barry, his hero was Bill Ivey, sadly Bill Ivey got killed, because he liked Bill Ivey because he had fast cars and smart women and everything else like this.
• 13:07
  So I'd sort of at that period worked out that if I raced a motorbike and kept my helmet on, I could probably get better girlfriends, and in the end I did.
• 13:14
  But I met Barry at an event called Stars of Tomorrow, and that would have helped me up the ladder, I guess.
• 13:19
  And I went to this event, I won about three races, and Barry came over to me, and I didn't win it.
• 13:23
  I finished second.
• 13:24
  He said, I don't know who the other guys were looking at.
• 13:26
  I had you down to win this flat out.
• 13:28
  And I'm really sort of puffing my chest out and thinking it's good, but I'm not too sure whether he actually meant that or he wanted to get off of my girlfriend.
• 13:36
  So to this day, I've never worked that one out.
• 13:39
  But anyway, we hit it off straight away.
• 13:40
  I realised that he lived quite close to where I was living.
• 13:43
  And so we then kept in contact at this point.
• 13:46
  And for sure, then when Dave Moore, and I jumped back again, bought the RG 500, I started racing with him in 500cc races in the UK.
• 13:54
  And this was starting to get surreal.
• 13:56
  You're absolutely right.
• 13:57
  And at the time, 1976, when I had my RG private bike,
• 14:02
  He had a team, it was Barry Sheen, head team, John Newbold and John Williams, three riders in the team.
• 14:08
  And I started getting second to Barry in front of his teammates on the factory bikes.
• 14:13
  So Barry goes straight to the boss of Suzuki Great Britain and says, you want to have a look at this guy, Steve Parrish?
• 14:18
  And I'd won the British Championship.
• 14:20
  And then I get this ridiculous phone call.
• 14:22
  You know when someone gets a phone call and you think someone's winding you up?
• 14:24
  I get a phone call from Maurice Knight from Suzuki Great Britain.
• 14:28
  are you interested in being Barry Sheen's teammate to do Grand Prix's in 77?
• 14:31
  Go on, who is this?
• 14:32
  Yeah, come on, stop mucking around, who is this going to be?
• 14:35
  No, seriously, and I think he sent me a fax, which were around in those days, and I get this fax coming through, and I'm showing my girlfriend and stuff like that, and sure enough, that was it.
• 14:45
  And I didn't even ask how much money I was going to get paid.
• 14:47
  I'd have paid them, actually, but I think I got £5,000 or something, and Barry would have been on 60, 70, I don't know, whatever.
• 14:53
  I didn't really care.
• 14:54
  And that was it.
• 14:54
  That...
• 14:55
  Or that was when, boy, oh boy, you know, I am going to go racing a motorcycle around the Grand Prix.
• 15:01
  And I'd never been abroad, really.
• 15:02
  I'd been to France on the ferry.
• 15:04
  I swear to you, I'd never been on an aeroplane at this point.
• 15:07
  And my first round in 77 was the Venezuelan Grand Prix.
• 15:11
  And there I am.
• 15:11
  I don't know what's going on.
• 15:12
  I'm just wet behind the ears and just sapping it up and absorbing it.
• 15:17
  My education started in 1977, so I forget all the years previously.
• 15:22
  And I'm still, you know, I'm not...
• 15:23
  I'm a bit dyslexic, I guess you say.
• 15:25
  I can kind of get by, but I do regret not probably spending a bit more time at school.
• 15:30
  And I'm only saying this for the kids out there, but truthfully, my life would have been easier had I probably educated myself a little bit better.
• 15:37
  It's my own fault, but I made up for it with other things.
• 15:39
  So then, yeah, bam, I'm doing Grand Prix's with Barry Sheen.
• 15:43
  And one of the things that in 77...
• 15:46
  that came home to me.
• 15:47
  It was the Belgium Grand Prix.
• 15:49
  And I still giggle to myself.
• 15:50
  I'm at Spa, never been there before, and we didn't get a lot of practice sessions.
• 15:53
  So I never qualified that high up, but I always got faster and faster as the race went on.
• 15:58
  And we're on the long track at Spa.
• 16:00
  And I'm battling for the front three or four places.
• 16:02
  There was Barry and Michel Rougere.
• 16:04
  And that was the very famous race, which is still to this day, the fastest ever Grand Prix
• 16:09
  lap, average lap, and it was like 133 miles an hour average or something like that.
• 16:14
  But I'm battling now with Giacomo Agostini, Pat Hennon, who was my sort of team mate as well, and Johnny Cicotto and all these names of people.
• 16:23
  And there was so much slipstreaming went on back then on the long track, and you would pass someone and they would pass you and you would pass them, and it was all slipstreaming and stuff like that.
• 16:31
  And I would go...
• 16:32
  creeping past Giacomo Agostini on the Yamaha he was, and I'm looking and I'm thinking, that's the guy I've got on the wall.
• 16:38
  He's my poster man and 15 times world champion.
• 16:41
  And he'd be looking back at me thinking, who the bloody hell is that?
• 16:44
  Because I never heard of me.
• 16:46
  I could see him looking, who the hell is it?
• 16:49
  And that, yeah, it was just dreams, you know, just absolutely living the dream.
• 16:53
  I probably still am, but it was wonderful.
• 16:55
  Unbelievable.
• 16:56
  I mean, you were there...
• 16:58
  You know, with Barry, his winning world championships, he was helping to transform in several ways motorcycle racing as it emerged really into this kind of professional sport.
• 17:12
  People south of the equator, I mean, he was loved in Australia when he moved there, became integral to Channel 9 and Channel 10's motorsport coverage.
• 17:20
  But we maybe don't fully appreciate, he was in Europe and in England, he was a rock star.
• 17:26
  Yeah, he was.
• 17:28
  I think probably when I first got my professional job with Suzuki in 77, still a very small sport in the UK, and you turn up somewhere, what do you do for a living?
• 17:37
  Well, I race motorcycles, they couldn't really comprehend, scrambling I think it was called then, what do you mean motorcycling?
• 17:45
  I just say Barry Sheen, ah right, got it, and I think now...
• 17:48
  you'd probably find certain people that race nowadays, what do you do for a living?
• 17:52
  I'm a MotoGP.
• 17:53
  They've got no idea what it is.
• 17:54
  You say Valentino Rossi.
• 17:55
  So that was where he was.
• 17:56
  He was the guy that was the link, the key.
• 17:59
  And once you've said that, all of a sudden they want to know you because it might be a way of getting to know Barry Sheen.
• 18:04
  And I think back then, all the guys wanted to be Barry Sheen and all the girls wanted to be with Barry Sheen.
• 18:09
  That was kind of how it was.
• 18:10
  And he was the guy that took...
• 18:12
  motorcycle racing in the northern hemisphere and certainly in the uk from the back pages to the front pages he went out of the sports pages into the front page because he had a television show he was hooked up with stephanie sheen a top model he was big mates with people like george best from football you needed anything he was the man he was he preceded google you know like you needed to know it sorted couldn't it
• 18:37
  He could fix it, you know, and you kind of, you didn't go into Google and find out who to get to anywhere.
• 18:41
  You just phone up Barry and he had a book, a little black book, and you needed tickets for this or needed to meet someone.
• 18:47
  Hence, he opened up my life.
• 18:50
  And a lot of people said, Steve Parrish, all he's ever done is been in Barry Sheen's slipstream.
• 18:54
  Well, trust me, it was a heck of a slipstream, not just on the track, all over the place.
• 18:58
  It was like...
• 18:59
  It was just whatever, you know, I just followed him through and I was happy to be in his slipstream.
• 19:04
  It was like it just opened up so many doors for me.
• 19:07
  And sadly, at the end of 77, I get fired.
• 19:11
  But I was used to it, chucked out of primary school, senior school and everything else.
• 19:14
  So I'm now being fired again.
• 19:16
  It was a bit my own fault.
• 19:18
  Suzuki Great Britain cut back.
• 19:20
  And I crashed whilst leading the British Grand Prix, and so I finished fifth in the World Championship, which I thought was pretty good going, my first ever year doing Grand Prix.
• 19:28
  But my team, there was three of us, Barry, Pat Hennon and I, and Pat Hennon finished in third place in the Championship.
• 19:33
  Barry won it.
• 19:34
  Suzuki cut back, so there was no position for me.
• 19:37
  But Barry, pretty much on the phone, gets George Harrison from the Beatles to put some money up, and then Makaha skateboards, because that was all the rage at the time.
• 19:47
  George had an interest in, I think, didn't he?
• 19:48
  Is it right?
• 19:49
  sorry george had an interest in that didn't he in the skateboard companies i think he probably did george had an interest in all sorts of things i got to meet all the monty python people because i don't know if many people know but george funded life of brian that the monty python people did and if you i'm jumping off piste here but if you ever watch life of brown if you like all that george harrison is actually in it because he funded it all anyway um so 78 i actually had a bigger budget had more money than i had with the factory suzuki team because
• 20:14
  because George said, come on down to the offices, and don't worry, Astavros, I'll sort you out with a mud guard and a petrol tank and some tyres.
• 20:21
  They gave me a cheque for £55,000 in 1978.
• 20:24
  I could have gone and bought three houses, I think.
• 20:27
  So I bought myself a couple of RG500s, one of the bikes Suzuki's let me have from the year before, a 750cc Yamaha, because Suzuki's didn't make a big bike, and off I went racing, and did OK again.
• 20:38
  I won the 500 British Shell Sport Championship,
• 20:44
  on so 78 comes 79 comes around and they re-employed me so i'm now back in the fold but i have to say 79 was a horrible year not just for me but our three teammates uh pat hen and sadly had a huge accident in the isle of man in 78 so that was finished his racing career
• 21:01
  79 starts off, Barry Sheen, Steve Parrish and Tom Heron.
• 21:05
  In May, Tom Heron of that year was killed at the Northwest 200.
• 21:09
  I broke my wrist at the first round.
• 21:10
  Barry ended up with some virus and he wasn't fit and healthy.
• 21:14
  So 79 was kind of a year to forget.
• 21:18
  History tells it, Barry left Yamaha, Suzuki and went to Yamaha in 1980.
• 21:22
  I got fired again, but I didn't care because I was used to all that.
• 21:25
  And got some more sponsorship.
• 21:27
  So I had a kind of a...
• 21:30
  three those three years 78 79 77 78 79 were kind of I crammed an awful lot into that with triumphs and tragedy and we look back at that period being the halcyon period and all the fun times but it was like a war zone um that's why we lived it lived it to its fullest you know every day was precious and you got up thinking well I'm still here today let's make the most of it because people were getting killed left right and center it was on average five or six a year and I could when I wrote the book on Barry and my experience
• 21:58
  But just recently, I could name 23 mates I lost over that period, and that is kind of crazy, really.
• 22:04
  Yeah, crazy, and thankfully safety's improved a lot in racing.
• 22:08
  I want to come back on a couple of things here.
• 22:10
  Firstly, to George Harrison.
• 22:13
  What the heck was it like hanging out with a beetle?
• 22:15
  And he was...
• 22:17
  He was instrumental in helping Barry move to Australia, and he was a proper race fan, mate.
• 22:22
  Yeah, he loved Formula One, big mates with James Hunt and people like that, travelled around a great deal.
• 22:26
  And like anyone, if you like Formula One, you've got to like motorcycle racing.
• 22:30
  He's got to have trans-trended through that.
• 22:31
  I think Barry got to meet him at Long Beach.
• 22:33
  They did a demonstration race at Long Beach, and that's where Barry hooked up with him.
• 22:37
  And yeah, it was.
• 22:38
  Eric Idle would come along at the races and all these famous people.
• 22:41
  And yeah, I mean, I'm walking around like dribbling, really, and seeing all these famous people.
• 22:47
  And wherever you went, you bumped into famous people and went to nightclubs in London.
• 22:51
  And it was absurd, really.
• 22:54
  I look back on it thinking, I wish, you know...
• 22:57
  Nowadays we walk around with a phone with a camera and things like that, and I've hardly got any memories of all that because you didn't kind of take it all in.
• 23:04
  So yeah, it was rather special.
• 23:06
  And one story that always made me laugh, I said to George Harrison one day, was Ringo the best drummer in the UK?
• 23:12
  He said he wanted him the best drummer in the Beatles.
• 23:16
  Let's talk a couple of 500cc stories.
• 23:19
  Firstly, and I've had a discussion with Mark Scaife about this at Bathurst once, he once cheekily subbed for another driver to ensure they could qualify for the race.
• 23:33
  And you kind of dressed up as Barry Sheen at one point and helped him qualify while he was injured.
• 23:38
  Share that yarn with us.
• 23:39
  Yeah, it was absolutely true.
• 23:41
  That was in 77 at the post-TT and it was a one-day event.
• 23:43
  And Barry had had all sorts of problems with his legs and you'll know that because he had all sorts of accidents with his legs.
• 23:48
  And he'd broken his legs quite badly in Daytona in 75 and had them pinned and screwed and everything else.
• 23:53
  We get to Mallory Park and I don't know what he'd been up to the night before.
• 23:56
  Hadn't been drinking or anything, but all of a sudden he went to get off the bike after the free practice in the morning.
• 24:01
  And in one of his legs, his right leg locked up and he couldn't get off the bike, so I had to lift him off the bike.
• 24:05
  And if he didn't do the qualifying at 12 o'clock, he wouldn't have been able to do the race.
• 24:10
  And he felt that it could be unlocked if he went to see a chiropractor or an osteopath or something.
• 24:15
  So they whizzed him off out the track under a blanket because they didn't want everyone to see Barry Sheen leaving the circuit and everything else.
• 24:20
  So Franco, in the old Rolls Royce shadow, smoked off out the paddock, taking him to find a chiropractor in the local town of Leicester.
• 24:28
  and Rex White, the team manager, sheepishly came up to me and said, look Steve, we need a big favour from you.
• 24:33
  And it was like he was going to try and coax me to do it.
• 24:36
  Would you mind putting Barry's leathers on, helmet, gloves, boots, getting on his number seven bike that was already fixed up for him with Franco having it all ready and it would have been his mechanic Don there and Martin Ogborn from Suzuki's.
• 24:48
  Just doing three laps to qualify him.
• 24:50
  Doesn't matter what time, just want him on the grid.
• 24:52
  Would I?
• 24:52
  Boy, I'd love to.
• 24:53
  I jumped at the chance.
• 24:55
  My mechanics and my guys were not so sure because they thought it would take away time for my practice.
• 25:00
  No, no, no.
• 25:00
  I said, no problem.
• 25:01
  Do that.
• 25:02
  Bike's probably the same as mine, and off I went.
• 25:04
  So exactly that's what happened.
• 25:06
  It was 12 o'clock, and the track opened up, and off I went out there, wearing the dark visor, of course, the number seven helmet and everything else.
• 25:12
  And away I went.
• 25:13
  But what I couldn't believe is every time I got around the hairpin where the big crowds were, there was all these girls screaming at me and waving their underwear at me and everything else like that.
• 25:21
  Little did they know, underneath the helmet was this bloke with a big nose and big ears was bombing around there pretending to be very sheen.
• 25:27
  So I did something like three or four laps, came in straight into the awning, parked the bike up, and at that point, a lot of the journalists had come running up, what's up, what's up, what's up, can we interview Barry?
• 25:37
  And the mechanic said, I wouldn't go anywhere near him, he's furious, so the disc valve's broken, so I'd leave him alone.
• 25:42
  I'm creeping out the back into my tent, putting my helmet and leathers on, my bike's all running and everyone's wondering, why is Parrish late out for practice?
• 25:50
  Why?
• 25:50
  Off I went, and I did probably 20 laps, sorted out the jetting and the gearing, and we got the bike tuned up really well, and I felt pretty comfortable with the bike.
• 25:59
  Went off, had a cup of tea, Barry comes back and gets out, and luckily his legs all fixed up.
• 26:03
  Stavros, well done, thanks for that.
• 26:05
  How did we go?
• 26:05
  I said, I don't know, I haven't even been to look at the times, because back then you had to go and look on the toilet wall where the old lady would have written out all the times, and we wandered over there.
• 26:14
  And there it was in black and white, front row, number seven, Barry Sheen, third row, number six, Steve Parrish.
• 26:20
  You out-qualified yourself.
• 26:21
  I out-qualified myself.
• 26:23
  And to this day, I don't know whether his bike was better, the underwear being waved at me, or just me wearing the number seven, did it?
• 26:29
  So, yeah, I out-qualified.
• 26:31
  And he said, well, I can't even say on here what he called me, but he called me, you know, he couldn't believe what had gone on.
• 26:36
  So, anyway, he did win the race, and I think I finished up second or third or anything else, something like that.
• 26:41
  You touched on a story before about finishing or an incident at the British Grand Prix, I think it was.
• 26:48
  Share with our audience.
• 26:50
  It involves a pit board.
• 26:52
  There would have been chalkboards back then where you wrote messages and things.
• 26:55
  Baz had a mechanical.
• 26:56
  He's out of the race.
• 26:58
  You're leading.
• 26:59
  Tell us where you were and what happened.
• 27:02
  Well, that was at Silverstone, actually, at the British Grand Prix.
• 27:04
  And this is the end of 77.
• 27:05
  And I was...
• 27:08
  really looking forward to Silverstone, because it would have been the only track that I knew of that year.
• 27:12
  And Barry was desperate to win.
• 27:13
  He'd won the championship already, but desperate to win the British Grand Prix.
• 27:16
  And, you know, no Briton has won the British Grand Prix to this day, apart from when it was at the TT, of course, but when it had moved back to the mainland, which was 77.
• 27:24
  And I'm really looking forward to this.
• 27:25
  My bike was running like a dream.
• 27:27
  I had a great mechanic and everything else.
• 27:28
  But Barry had the next, the later model bike than me, which...
• 27:31
  It was arguably a little bit better, I guess you'd say.
• 27:34
  But it was slightly less reliable.
• 27:36
  And he'd had all sorts of problems during practice, and he'd actually borrowed my old bike to go out and qualify.
• 27:41
  And I can't remember if he was first, but we were all on the front row.
• 27:44
  There would have been back then at Silverstone maybe eight on the front row, and it was myself, Barry, Chocotto, Kenny Roberts, I think.
• 27:50
  No, it would have been Kenny that year, Will Hartog, John Williams, British rider.
• 27:55
  Race starts, push starts, I get a reasonably good start, and I'm having a bit of a go with Barry, and we're having a bit of a giggle and stuff like that.
• 28:02
  Will Hart, Tochicotto, Pat Hennon was also in the mix and everything else.
• 28:06
  And about lap 11, half race distance, 22 lap race.
• 28:10
  And this is on the real fast Silverstone circuit before they slowed it all down.
• 28:14
  I saw his hand go up, he was in front of me, and he goes straight down pit lane, that was his race out.
• 28:19
  I carry on, and by about lap 18, I'm in front, and I've got past Chocotto, and I've got past Pat Hennon, I've got past John Williams and Hartog, and this, that, and the other, and I'm leading the British Grand Prix, and I'm starting to smirk a little bit, and all the crowd are waving, because they've got no Barry Sheen to wave for, so I was the next guy along.
• 28:37
  Anyway, my pit board comes out, and it was a chalk board back then, there was none of these big fancy boards, and I had a mechanic, a big tall fellow called Martin Brookman,
• 28:45
  Lap three plus one, meaning three laps to go, one second in front.
• 28:49
  And back then, you darely looked behind in case you slowed your bike down, but I had a quick peek, and yes, I'd got the lead, and I'd got a second.
• 28:56
  Lap two, plus two, so I'm now two seconds.
• 29:00
  So I'm gaining a second a lap and everything.
• 29:02
  else really kind of this is going good the bike was running so sweet and i'm talking to it come on you old girl you can do it two laps to go and i came around and i came around to start the last lap expecting to see obviously p1 plus four or something like that and i had a quick glance and sure enough i'd got a reasonable lead woodcut corner at silverstone was fifth gear on a suzuki rg 500 maybe 140 mile an hour scary corner so you had to
• 29:26
  Once you got round the corner, you had a quick glance up to see what was going on.
• 29:29
  I glanced up, looking towards two and a half miles to finish and win the British Grand Prix, and there was my pit board hanging out, sheeny holding it out, and it said, nothing else but gas it, wanker.
• 29:42
  Sorry about the swearing, but that is exactly what it said.
• 29:45
  And I had to, you know, stupidly, I clearly wasn't focusing, I'm starting to giggle now.
• 29:50
  And it had started drizzling with rain.
• 29:53
  There was a few spots of rain, but I'm not sure if they made much difference.
• 29:56
  But anyway, a few spots of rain.
• 29:58
  knew I'd got a lead and I brake fairly early, touched the front brake on the old RG500 that I was praising.
• 30:04
  And I just, the front just folded and I slid straight down the track underneath a straw bale.
• 30:10
  And that was it.
• 30:10
  And I thought I was in a dream, you know, when you, because it had gone all dark, I thought I'd perhaps died, but I got a bale on my head.
• 30:16
  And then I just could.
• 30:18
  not believe it i was sliding down the track thinking no no i'm gonna wake up any minute now but unfortunately it wasn't john williams um inherited the lead and went to the next corner and he crashed out so i think the rain had affected a little bit pat hennon the worst person in the world to win it because he's kind of our teammate goes on to win the flipping race and ends up third in the championship and i'm bumped down to fifth and so i can only assume barry sheen was telepathic because he knew i was what he put out on the pit board if i crashed it
• 30:43
  So I was so near to win the British Grand Prix.
• 30:46
  I could have been famous, Rusty.
• 30:47
  It never happened.
• 30:49
  You two were cheeky.
• 30:51
  We mentioned before that I was during a great period of change for the sport.
• 30:56
  And Baz was big on making sure facilities and things were right for riders, right for team people.
• 31:03
  What happened at Imatra?
• 31:04
  You went to Imatra, I think, didn't you?
• 31:06
  And Baz was a bit miffed about the state of the facilities.
• 31:09
  And he had asked before for things to be improved, right?
• 31:11
  Yeah, we were going through this period, I think, where Barry, because he had so much horsepower, honestly, not in his bike, but him himself, he was respected by everyone.
• 31:19
  Just clear up where Imatra is.
• 31:21
  Imatra is right on the border of Russia, actually, top of Finland.
• 31:25
  And again, you've got to remember, which is so uncommon back then,
• 31:29
  We would all travel around.
• 31:30
  It was called the Continental Circus, that's what it was.
• 31:33
  It would be a bunch of guys with caravans and transit vans, and you'd travel up, and we would have gone from the Swedish Grand Prix and the Storp to get the ferry over to Finland, and it would be an overnight ferry, and everyone would get drunk, and it would be in a disco.
• 31:47
  I must just tell you a very quick story about this, because...
• 31:50
  riding for Suzuki's, we had a bit more money and we could have cabins and they had this kind of corridor with all these cabins and I remember Rex White had one, I had one, Barry and Steph had one and Pat Hannon would have had one and the Kawasaki team and stuff like that and I got up early in the morning and I roped everyone's doors together so they couldn't get out of their cabins.
• 32:08
  So this tannoy comes up.
• 32:09
  Everyone, please go to your vehicles.
• 32:11
  Please go to your vehicles.
• 32:11
  No one could get out there.
• 32:12
  So no one could get off the ferry, which I thought was hilarious.
• 32:15
  Anyway, so we'll move on.
• 32:17
  So we get to Finland.
• 32:18
  And again, I didn't have a clue that the facilities weren't that bad.
• 32:21
  It had a really scabby toilet block with probably four cubicles in it in the running track area because there was no paddocks there because it was a road circuit.
• 32:30
  A lot of the circuits we were racing at were road circuits.
• 32:32
  So you didn't have a paddock or...
• 32:34
  Toilet blocks and everything else.
• 32:36
  The toilets we had were designed for the athletics track, is where we'd park all our vans and caravans.
• 32:42
  And right beside the athletics track was a great big lake, as Finland has got lots of trees and lots of lakes.
• 32:47
  And so we would get up there on the Monday night after getting off the ferry and go swimming and mucking around, as you would, and looking at all the pretty Swedish, Finnish girls that are around and things like that.
• 32:58
  But there wasn't a lot to do.
• 32:59
  But when you went in the lake there...
• 33:01
  It was one of these conservation lakes where they made you wear caps.
• 33:04
  And if you weren't wearing a cap, they'd come round and give you one and tell you off.
• 33:07
  There was no motorboats or outboards.
• 33:09
  You had to use rowing boats or canoes and things like that.
• 33:12
  But the water was crystal clear.
• 33:14
  You could see the bottom at three metres and things like that.
• 33:17
  And the girls loved it.
• 33:18
  They got their bikinis on and we were having fun and we'd get all our washing done because you've got four or five days.
• 33:23
  We're living like gypsies, I guess you could say, but having a lot of fun.
• 33:26
  Anyway, race took place, scary race, tree-lined over railway crossings and everything else and Barry still had a problem with his bike and he ended up dropping back from leading it to finish fifth.
• 33:37
  I finished fourth.
• 33:38
  So room for celebration because his fifth position gave him the 1977 World Championship.
• 33:44
  Locked out with three rounds to go.
• 33:46
  Two rounds
• 33:46
  to go so it's going to be a big party that night and i finished fourth so i was pretty happy with that moved me up in the championship so we're getting everything packed up and there was so many people in the paddocks back then not like it is now because we had 250 125 cc class 250 cc 350 500 side cars and the grids back then would probably be 50 people 45 50 people so it's 500
• 34:10
  Living in a little kind of campsite with a toilet block with three cubicles and maybe two for the girls or something like that.
• 34:16
  All made of wood because everything in Finland's made of wood.
• 34:18
  Five o'clock, everyone's packing up and we're all getting ready to go to the Valtian Hotel, which was the place to be at, where they would have a presentation.
• 34:26
  Barry comes wandering over to me and I'm sat there helping the guys pack up my tent.
• 34:30
  And everyone was folding tents and awnings and things like that.
• 34:33
  And he said, Stavros, I've been coming here for about four years now.
• 34:35
  It's disgusting.
• 34:37
  We love the place, but the toilet block needs getting rid of it.
• 34:40
  He said, if you come and help me, I'm going to set fire to it.
• 34:43
  You know what?
• 34:43
  He said, we'll set fire to it.
• 34:45
  I look around.
• 34:46
  There's no one around.
• 34:46
  Everyone's packing up and stuff like that.
• 34:49
  I said, Barry Sheen said, we're going to set fire the toilet block.
• 34:51
  That's what we're going to do.
• 34:52
  He said, Savros, bring that 20 litres of av gas that you've got left.
• 34:55
  He says, this one's got probably 18 litres.
• 34:57
  Bring that.
• 34:57
  He says, we'll go and tip it in there and get rid of it.
• 35:00
  All right, then.
• 35:00
  So I said, we wander across, and about 25 metres from where we get there, he stops.
• 35:06
  looks around, he said, there's no one watching, he said, I'll keep guard, you go and tip the Avgas, oh thanks mate, so anyway, if Barry Sheen wants me to go and tip pets around there, so that's what I did, I went in there and I'm shouting, anyone in, anyone in, no, it was empty, got this 18 litres of fuel, which was high octane Avgas, tipped it all around there, left a trail, he said, leave a trail back to where I am now, and he's now stood behind a tree, he said, if there's no one looking, I'll just set fire, it'll be gone, it'll be as easy as you can believe.
• 35:34
  Right, so I did exactly that, get back there.
• 35:36
  He's got his fag on, his galwals on, with a tip broken off that he used to smoke.
• 35:40
  Jatan with a tip broken off.
• 35:42
  With his lighter, his gold lighter in his pocket.
• 35:44
  We look around, no one there.
• 35:45
  Lights to touch paper as such, which was a stream of petrol.
• 35:49
  And at this point, I wish I'd gone to the science lessons I should have gone to before I got expelled.
• 35:55
  None of us knew what methane gas was.
• 35:57
  I have never seen anything like it.
• 35:58
  The whole shithouse blew to bits.
• 36:01
  The walls come off and the roof flies over the top of the paddock and lands upside down in this lake that you had to wear a cap to go swimming in.
• 36:08
  It was crystal clear.
• 36:09
  The shithouse roof, it was like a movie.
• 36:11
  It was burning upside down.
• 36:13
  In the conservation lake.
• 36:14
  Yeah, in the lake that you had to wear a cap to go swimming.
• 36:17
  At this point, there is security running.
• 36:20
  I think they actually thought that the toilet itself combusted with all the stink and smell from the toilet.
• 36:26
  But they had a bit of help with 18 litres of gas.
• 36:28
  So we've crept off.
• 36:29
  No one really had any idea.
• 36:31
  Security is standing around looking and stuff like that.
• 36:34
  Where it went horribly wrong was the fact that as the shithouse roof proceeded to go over the top of the paddock, all the guys, and I remember Jan Eckereld, Alan North, Corky Ballanton, were in the process of folding their tents up.
• 36:46
  It was covered in shit.
• 36:48
  It was all sprayed on tunnels.
• 36:50
  So that went down like a fart.
• 36:51
  This was on cars and on everything.
• 36:53
  Oh, everything was covered in poo.
• 36:56
  Anyway, so we kind of got in a bit of a bollocking for that from the riders and everything else.
• 37:00
  And to top the story off, just last year, 2018, I am at the British, the TT, classic TT, working for Greenlight Television covering the race.
• 37:12
  I'm at Jerby Airfield.
• 37:13
  which is a little airfield in the middle of the Isle of Man, which they use for testing, and they have a kind of a day where a lot of the classic bikes come along, waiting to do some filming.
• 37:22
  Stood at the cafe, and this little lady comes up and taps me on the shoulder in a Swedish accent.
• 37:26
  She said, Mr Parrish?
• 37:28
  I said, yes, thinking it was like, I don't know, it could have been my daughter or whatever, or mother of my daughter, who knows?
• 37:36
  I said, yes.
• 37:37
  She said, I was in Finland with my husband, Esso, and we were at Finland, and we were parking, and this was her exact words, we are parking next to the old shithouse.
• 37:49
  And she said, and when it caught fire and blew up, we saw everything that was going on and the police were coming to us and they said, who did this?
• 37:57
  And my husband, Esso, he said, we didn't see.
• 38:01
  And we did, of course.
• 38:01
  We saw everything that was going to be.
• 38:03
  He wouldn't tell the police, so they took him away and he went to prison.
• 38:06
  Oh!
• 38:08
  Poor old Esso, whoever he was, refused to grass us up and spent a night in prison.
• 38:13
  So anyway, just top the story off because I'd never had anyone else that witnessed it apart from the people that got sprayed in it.
• 38:19
  It was lovely.
• 38:20
  I love it.
• 38:21
  Anyway, just to say, we did get a new toilet block.
• 38:23
  The next year, a brand new toilet block.
• 38:24
  So I feel part of history changing the world of toilet blocks around the world.
• 38:33
  Because you were gypsies and you had, you know, transit vans and camper vans and things like that, I would imagine there's some good stories.
• 38:41
  And one that's in the back of my mind, it may not have been you or Baz, I reckon there's a story of legend of someone taking their old transit, which had a huge amount of Ks on it, and maybe, quote-unquote, borrowing one from a rental car company,
• 38:56
  and parking it in a garage and doing the late night where the body of one ended up with the brand new engine is this are they true those sort of old yeah yeah but i think almost certainly well i did it with rear axles transit vans yeah transit vans were renowned for rear axles whining and making horrible noise they had like this horrible v4 engine in them but the rear axles only lasted probably half a season something like that so yeah exactly that go and rent one for the weekend for 50...
• 39:20
  45 50 quid or something like that bring it back up on the jacks take the axle out stick the other one back on probably Take the better tires and everything else you could and then fire it all back That was pretty common and then so there was so many stories The traveling part was probably as much fun as anything that you could ever imagine because we were this convoy of people but it was
• 39:38
  So many scams went on because you had to have carnage to go through from France to Belgium and Belgium to Germany and Germany to Switzerland.
• 39:46
  And it was just hard work.
• 39:48
  So you always had to have a load of bribes to give people caps and hats and stuff like that.
• 39:52
  And the Italians in particular were horrible because they wouldn't let you through unless you gave them a T-shirt.
• 39:56
  Because I always used to put all my T-shirts ready to give them, but I used to put itching powder in them all.
• 40:01
  sod them if they were nicking t-shirts off me I used to make sure they were as uncomfortable as they possibly could and then the ferries because obviously living in England we had to get a ferry every time we went anywhere but you couldn't afford it because you had a transit van with a caravan on the back and you'd have your mechanic and girlfriend and
• 40:17
  There could be four or five of you, and the cost of the ticket would be £200, which was probably as much as you'd get start money to go to the Grand Prix.
• 40:24
  So I had, and I think a lot of people learned from me, I had this scam, because back in those days you had this carbon paper that you'd go to a travel agent and they'd write in...
• 40:32
  what you got and it would be transit van carrying this so I just turn up then I'd put minivan down or something like that and it'd be I don't know three meters for instance and that was it and one person so straight away you get your own car and I had all these different colored carbon papers blue carbon paper red carbon paper and I'd look at the pen she was using when you went to the travel agent and usually when they turn around I'd nick the pens I've got everything I've got the equipment
• 40:54
  Go home, and the minivan, instead of being three metres, you could make a three into an eight by putting another three beside it.
• 41:00
  Then you'd put plus four at the end for people instead of one, so you could make the one into a four.
• 41:05
  And then you'd just write plus caravan on the back of that, and it used to kind of work, and you'd get there, and you'd give it to this guy.
• 41:09
  who didn't really give a shit at the ferry, and you'd get on there ice and early.
• 41:13
  And then we'd go upstairs and watch all these people trying to get on, and invariably, me and two or three others had done exactly the same.
• 41:19
  And half the... Well, there would be three or four people left on the dock because they couldn't get on, and the bloke would be walking around trying to work out what's gone wrong because they used to work out the meterage, and, of course, we'd added three meters and a caravan, and these poor people trying to go on holiday never got on the ferries.
• 41:32
  And then, on top of that, there was a lounge.
• 41:35
  If you were a lorry driver, you could get in for free food.
• 41:38
  Part of your ticket was...
• 41:39
  So I'd always have a Scania or an ERF or a Foden jacket, which were trucks in the UK that they'd wear, and look a bit greasy and just say, oh, I left my ticket and hang on, the lorry driver, and we'd get a free meal as well.
• 41:49
  That was the way it was done.
• 41:51
  Macau has always been two and four wheel, a place of a legendary race meeting.
• 41:58
  Are you allowed back into Macau?
• 42:01
  And if not, why not?
• 42:02
  Well, you are right.
• 42:04
  I wasn't allowed in.
• 42:06
  But back when I got banned from Macau, which was very, very embarrassing, it was owned by the Portuguese, but it was a lease that they had.
• 42:13
  And it went like Hong Kong, back to the Chinese.
• 42:15
  So I have now been back since.
• 42:17
  But I had a 10-year ban, actually, which is, you know, I felt quite proud.
• 42:20
  Not many people
• 42:21
  banned from a country are they you might be banned from hire car companies like we all are but not a country and that was just i was a victim of circumstances i guess you would say because we decided in 84 um that it would be really good fun at the end of the race meeting
• 42:37
  to let off a firework.
• 42:39
  Because that's in Macau, it's where they make all the fireworks for Chinese New Year.
• 42:43
  And you can have a factory around the back of Macau and buy a firework which is the size of a 45-gallon drum round and half as deep for two pounds or something like that.
• 42:53
  Yeah, and so we got these things and we're having a bit of fun letting them off around on the beach and this, that and the other.
• 42:58
  So on the Sunday night after the race, we'd all survived it, so there was a reason to celebrate.
• 43:03
  We knew that one or two of these lower class people might be going to have a massage.
• 43:09
  Apparently that's what goes on in these places with a red light over the door, where they've got all these girls lined up with numbers on.
• 43:15
  Allegedly that's what goes on.
• 43:16
  So it was all decided, a little splinter group, and myself and a guy called Paul Butler,
• 43:21
  who was the commercial manager for kenny roberts's team was out in macau to try and negotiate a deal with lucky strike cigarettes when it was all cigarette sponsorship and we were locked in a team together because lucky strike had sponsored my bikes and my bikes painted up in that and it was a kind of toe in the water for them before they spent lots of money on kenny roberts's team so paul and i were hanging around together a guy called howard lee's who was quite a good endurance endurance racer sadly he got killed in a plane crash
• 43:46
  And an Irish fella.
• 43:47
  And anyway, we hatched this plan that at nine o'clock we were going to go down to the brothel and let one of these fireworks off and see what sort of commotion it made.
• 43:55
  And I think we got a heavy duty one, one that went off bigger and better than I thought.
• 44:00
  And no question about it, the blue touch paper was shorter than it had been on the one we'd experimented with.
• 44:06
  I'm driving a Mini Moak, which was our kind of getaway vehicle, and it was all worked out, military operation.
• 44:11
  I'd be driving a getaway vehicle, Paul Butler would like it, Howard Lees would roll it through the door, and the Irish fella would be kind of guard to watch what was going on.
• 44:20
  So that was the deal.
• 44:20
  I left it running outside, ready to go and stuff like that.
• 44:24
  We went, or Howard Leeds, Paul lit it with his cigar, we went to roll it through and the thing went off before it even got through the door and it was flying around everywhere like a massive rip-rap thing that was bouncing around everywhere and blue paper was flying here and there was smoke going on and screaming from every direction.
• 44:39
  The poor girls behind the glass thing were screaming thinking that they had been under attack.
• 44:43
  Can you imagine doing it these days?
• 44:45
  You'd definitely get handcuffed and locked up.
• 44:48
  Anyway, it goes off, but the funny part was, as it went off, we were all starting to laugh so much.
• 44:52
  Instead of getting away, we were standing watching what was going on, and the smoke slowly cleared as it all died down.
• 44:57
  All these naked people coming running out the back, and it was just like a carry-on film.
• 45:02
  You could see them thinking, you know, it's never happened to me like this before, because all these people are doing all this banging and crashing and stuff like that.
• 45:08
  But where it went very, very wrong was sat at the bar watching everything that went on.
• 45:14
  The chief of Macau's police was waiting for him with a car outside because the chief of police was round the back, probably getting a backhander or a fronthander or something like that.
• 45:24
  I don't know what he was up to, but he shouldn't have been there.
• 45:26
  So the driver who was waiting for him decides he'd better find out what's been going on.
• 45:31
  So he then comes out, sees us getting in a mini-mote, gets in the car, follows us back.
• 45:35
  finds out where we're staying, which was the Hilton Hotel, I think, in Cowluck, no, somewhere in Macau, over a bridge.
• 45:45
  So then we've been there and we're having a drink and we're celebrating our successful, successful mission of shutting down the brothel that night.
• 45:51
  And all the police turn up because they knew where we were and came straight in and it was all sorts of commotion.
• 45:56
  They wanted our passports from us, details and everything else.
• 45:59
  And they made us pass out, give us our passports.
• 46:03
  Luckily in those days, I carried a second passport around that had my American visa on it.
• 46:08
  And so I gave them that one, keeping my good one.
• 46:10
  But the other idiots gave their proper passports.
• 46:13
  And they said, we'll be back in the morning to sort this out, there's some paperwork to be done and everything else.
• 46:17
  They turned up at 9 o'clock in the morning.
• 46:19
  And the whole kind of crew of people from the UK and around that a guy called Mike Trimby was organising were due to leave at 10 o'clock.
• 46:27
  We're in the foyer, police will turn up with handcuffs.
• 46:31
  And they're looking for me, Paul Butler, Howard Lees, everything else.
• 46:34
  And we couldn't leave because they had our passports, or they couldn't leave, but I actually had given my false passport.
• 46:40
  As soon as I saw them come in the door, I have gone up to floor one in the lift, borrowing a newspaper and a cap off my mechanic.
• 46:47
  At floor one, there was a set of ladders that you could jump out and go down to get out.
• 46:51
  And I did that, I pulled the ladder, shot down, ran around the hotel, jumped in a cab, went straight to the hydrofoil, got on the first hydrofoil, go back to Hong Kong.
• 46:59
  Get out of here.
• 46:59
  out of it.
• 47:00
  I was clean out of it, thinking I'm not getting involved with this.
• 47:02
  I'd just got married, so I didn't want to get trapped in Macau.
• 47:07
  And off I go.
• 47:08
  Anyway, there was no mobiles or phones there.
• 47:10
  So I'm sat in Hong Kong where the jet foil lands, knowing that the others are due back, with my gin and tonic thinking I'm pretty flash because I've escaped as such.
• 47:21
  When I get the other lot arrive, and Mike Trimby was absolutely furious at what had gone on and told me unless I went back to Macau, they were impounding all the motorbikes, and there was probably 50 of them, all the Formula 3 cars.
• 47:35
  And we're talking of...
• 47:36
  you know this formula three was a top end event they'd got damon hill race in there and michael schumacher and they'd locked everything in until i returned so i had no choice i have to get on the bloody hydrofoil go back to macau and when i get back there they'd use the picture out of my passport and there's this big sign up like a cowboy thing wanted yeah wanted do not let this bloke out little did they know i'd already gone so i go back there and i'm arrested and the flipping soon as i get off the ferry the hydrofoil i'm arrested taken down there and i'm in prison and there's all this paperwork and
• 48:06
  It was horrendous.
• 48:07
  We had to get the British consul involved and everything else because we're, yeah, it was messy, very messy.
• 48:12
  Paul Butler was crapping himself because he was due to have a meeting with Lucky Strike in Macau on Monday morning.
• 48:17
  Couldn't tell him he was in prison for blowing a brothel up, could he?
• 48:20
  Anyway, finally, four and a half days, five days, we're let out.
• 48:23
  But it wasn't good for my marriage.
• 48:26
  It wasn't a good start to my marriage, I can tell you.
• 48:29
  Let's wrap up the motorcycle chapter for a second here before we go on to your truck racing, which is phenomenal.
• 48:36
  Has there been over time a bike that you've got a really soft spot for, a racing bike, and why?
• 48:41
  Which one and why?
• 48:42
  It has to be the RG500 Suzuki.
• 48:45
  Right the way through, as soon as I got on the thing, I fell in love with it, and it's been good to me.
• 48:50
  And that's why I'm loving the classic stuff.
• 48:52
  because Stuart Von Ton Dermot, he'd bring a bike along for me to race.
• 48:55
  There's a guy called Steve Wheatman that has a bike that's very similar to what I used to race, and he kindly lets me use it.
• 49:00
  I've been in, as I said at the beginning, in South Africa riding that.
• 49:03
  And I've got three of them of my own, and I've got two that I used to race, and they sit in my gym at home, and it gets me going in the gym just to look at them.
• 49:12
  So it's good for my fitness.
• 49:13
  So they are the bike that I have an affinity with, and I love them to bits.
• 49:19
  They're just rather special.
• 49:22
  in the days so yeah the rg5 and it is unquestionably my motorcycle so you go at i may not have the timeline right here in your career but you go off and you would do truck racing and british champion european champion i mean multi-time world champion of truck racing that is the polar opposite of 500cc grand prix racing how did that opportunity come about and and what was it like going from two-wheel to to four-wheel like that
• 49:49
  Well, we come back to my old mate, Mr. Sheen.
• 49:51
  He was pretty much everything.
• 49:53
  He triggered everything that I did.
• 49:54
  And, yeah, you're right.
• 49:57
  It's polar opposite in weight.
• 50:00
  And I'll come to it in a minute.
• 50:00
  But, yeah, what happened was Barry Sheen, a lot of his fans will know that on his bike in 84, he had daft.
• 50:06
  DAF Trucks were a sponsor of his.
• 50:08
  So in 1985, truck racing ended up coming to the UK, the Multipart Truck Grand Prix.
• 50:14
  And it was actually put together and organized and promoted by our agents, a company called CSS.
• 50:23
  And they were Barry's agents for any jobs and work he did.
• 50:27
  So immediately it all worked really well.
• 50:29
  They wanted Barry Sheen driving in it.
• 50:31
  Daft wanted Barry Sheen to drive a Daft truck.
• 50:34
  And I wanted to drive in it.
• 50:35
  And during the years of us racing together on bikes, Barry and I am talking about, a number of times you'd get invited into a celebrity car race.
• 50:44
  And they'd have at Brandsat Ford Fiestas or something, at Donington Park.
• 50:47
  They'd have Vauxhall, whatever, I don't know.
• 50:49
  And we'd get the chance to have a race in these cars.
• 50:52
  And if Barry was sat here beside me now, he'd agree with me.
• 50:55
  I was faster than him in a car, but he was faster than me on a motorbike.
• 50:59
  So with him driving a truck, I thought, shit, I need to go at this.
• 51:02
  So I literally drove around to Mercedes-Benz UK, got to see the PR guy, and I said, look, Barry Sheen is driving a daft truck at the British Multipark, whatever they called it, at Donington Park in a daft truck.
• 51:14
  And these were all road trucks at this point.
• 51:17
  Have you got a Mercedes that I could drive?
• 51:19
  Are you interested in doing it?
• 51:19
  And they were, well, we're not that bothered, but we actually have a dealer that maybe does trucks that would let you have a truck.
• 51:26
  So they put me in touch.
• 51:29
  The dealer said, yeah, we are interested.
• 51:30
  We'll bring one along and get you to have a right drive in it and see if you think it's any good and stuff like that.
• 51:36
  And I've lied and said I've got an HEV, like a heavy good vehicle licence.
• 51:39
  I'd never been bigger than a Transit in my life.
• 51:42
  So they'd bring this truck along and I'd get in it and I'm up there, you know, like they were big high seat and stuff like that.
• 51:47
  And it's about 18 gears and double clutches and I'm grinding all the gears.
• 51:52
  And I said, oh, I'm actually more used to a Foden or something like that.
• 51:56
  Ken, just bullshitting.
• 51:58
  Anyway, they let me drive this truck.
• 52:00
  We get to Donington and they say it was ridiculously dangerous because these trucks had no roll cages.
• 52:05
  The brakes lasted about two laps.
• 52:08
  They had a lap strap, no four-point harnesses and everything else.
• 52:12
  And my very first lap at Donington in practice was driving out the pits.
• 52:17
  down through Craner Curves at Donington Park, and as I went to break for the old hairpin, they had these, like, seats that flew up and down, and it hair bumped, the seat went up in the air, and I couldn't reach the break to leave, and went straight off the track.
• 52:32
  I had to drive back on the track.
• 52:33
  We'd come round the pits, and they'd get a load of tie downs and tie the seat down so I could at least get my foot on the brake.
• 52:38
  Anyway, it went on like that, and sure enough, my poor old truck had no brakes.
• 52:42
  I finished second in the race.
• 52:43
  Barry finished about fifth, I think.
• 52:45
  And bam, wham, bam, I'm a truck racer all of a sudden.
• 52:49
  Going back to what you were saying about being polar opposite, funnily enough, there is unquestionably some connection between bikes and trucks because you ride a motorcycle on the road, on a track, you don't go to the corner and go bam into the corner.
• 53:06
  It's not erratic.
• 53:07
  Like a car, you drive a car with a lot of grip and you kind of late apex, turn it in sharp using kind of G-forces and side forces.
• 53:14
  With a motorcycle, you...
• 53:16
  You peel in, you coax it, you go in early because it hasn't got a lot of grip and you have to do everything really smoothly.
• 53:22
  And that's exactly what it was like in a four and a half ton truck.
• 53:25
  You could not be erratic.
• 53:26
  And I think my background of bike racing stood me in good stead.
• 53:30
  And all the way through, a lot of people had come from car racing.
• 53:33
  In the race at Donington, that first race, Martin Brundle was driving a Renault truck.
• 53:40
  I believe Stig Blonkus was there.
• 53:42
  A number of people from the car world, rally world and stuff like that, were there.
• 53:47
  And they didn't really kind of get it.
• 53:49
  They really were too erratic and stuff like that.
• 53:51
  So all of a sudden, there I am, starting to do really well in truck racing.
• 53:55
  And what my real love was, not only the speed and the smoke and the smell and the camaraderie, was the fact that I didn't keep waking up in hospital.
• 54:03
  LAUGHTER
• 54:05
  The machines are amazing, mate.
• 54:06
  I mean, I think I can recall when I first started in commentary and things like that, the 0 to 60 kilometre an hour, I mean, it's phenomenal, isn't it?
• 54:16
  Oh, wow.
• 54:17
  To put it in perspective on what...
• 54:20
  I knew they were fast and we did some TV stuff, like filming them and stuff like that.
• 54:25
  One of the issues was that they didn't have a lot of grip, but we'd test a lot at Hockenheim, which was owned by Mercedes-Benz at the time, and I'd go along there and we'd have the track to use, and it'd be the DTM cars were the regular people that would go and test there, the German touring cars, and you know those things, they were the hottest saloon car.
• 54:46
  They were space frame things with,
• 54:48
  500 horsepower, big V8s, and they'd have Audi would be involved and Mercedes-Benz and all those guys would be involved.
• 54:57
  And they would clearly lap faster than us in the truck, but we'd come out of the final corner on the start and finish at Hockenheim.
• 55:03
  Together, you're on the truck.
• 55:04
  Yeah, together.
• 55:04
  And I would just leave them for dead.
• 55:06
  I'd blast away and there'd be Bernd Schneider looking up, thinking, what the hell is going on here?
• 55:11
  It was absurd, really, that they had so much torque.
• 55:15
  Anybody that knows anything about torque, if you go and buy a Porsche or whatever you might buy, a big thing, they might have 600 newton metres of torque.
• 55:22
  We had 6,000 newton metres of torque in these trucks.
• 55:25
  They would blast away like you couldn't believe.
• 55:28
  And it was just fun to drive because it was like driving
• 55:31
  I guess an old-time car, because they didn't have a great deal of grip or suspension, but they had so much power.
• 55:37
  So you'd be just powering out of corners, sliding them and burning smoke and things like that.
• 55:43
  And they were fun, fun things to drive.
• 55:44
  And eventually, Alan Jones had a go at doing it.
• 55:48
  Steeke Blomquist, a famous rally driver.
• 55:51
  And there was all these famous people.
• 55:52
  coming in to drive trucks.
• 55:53
  And even David Coulthard had a go in them and Bernd Schneider and people like that would have a go in them and come out just with the biggest smile on their face you could imagine.
• 56:03
  There's an amazing chapter for you because, I mean, some races in Europe, the crowds then you would dream of now for Formula One, more than 100,000 people...
• 56:13
  And you would be invited every year to the end-of-season Mercedes Gala, with their Formula 1 drivers or DTM drivers, as one of the big things, mate.
• 56:23
  Yeah, it's called Stars and Cars was the big event at the end of the season, and they would have a test track around the Mercedes-Benz factory in Stuttgart, and we'd have to go along and drive around there, and the Formula 1 cars and bits and pieces, stuff like that.
• 56:35
  So truck racing for Mercedes for a number of years, about...
• 56:38
  91 to 2001 was the 10-year period.
• 56:41
  The budget was similar to DTMs.
• 56:44
  What sort of number?
• 56:45
  Oh, millions.
• 56:46
  Yeah, yeah.
• 56:47
  A truck I drove probably in value to get on to a million quid.
• 56:49
  It was so trick.
• 56:50
  It really was.
• 56:51
  And the engine, the development in diesel engines was very integral to that time.
• 56:57
  Going back, if you think anybody listening to this, if you are old enough...
• 57:01
  Back then, why would you drive a diesel car back in the sort of early, late 80s?
• 57:06
  Because they stunk and they smelt and they didn't go very fast.
• 57:08
  They made a lot of noise.
• 57:10
  But if you think about the transition from that era to now modern day diesels, I think it was a period when you had to have a diesel to win Le Mans.
• 57:17
  You know, they got faster than the petrols.
• 57:19
  So that period was a great part of the development for Mercedes-Benz to develop the engine and the brakes and all the things that went on with that truck racing.
• 57:29
  It was kind of weird because you would think that trucks shouldn't have that kind of development, but it was very important.
• 57:35
  If you want to pull a big load, you need a lot of torque.
• 57:37
  So anyway, it was all part of it.
• 57:38
  So we'd go to the stars and cars at the end of the year.
• 57:41
  Crowds had come along to watch, and they'd like the DTM cars, they'd like the Formula 1 cars, but they had never seen anything like a big truck doing 100 miles an hour sideways with smoke off the back and everything else.
• 57:51
  And if you go to the museum at Stuttgart now, my truck is sat in there with the Formula 1 cars, with me, like my overalls and helmet and things like that.
• 58:00
  So I'm very proud of that period.
• 58:14
  In the time I say this sentence, a superbike has gone from 0 to 100km per hour and come to a complete stop again.
• 58:21
  What have you been doing in that time?
• 58:25
  Let's talk about a couple of the things that were in and are in the parish garage.
• 58:31
  You talked about having some of your bikes before.
• 58:33
  How many of you have you kept over time?
• 58:35
  You said three there, I think, at one point in the conversation.
• 58:38
  Yeah, I did have an awful lot of them.
• 58:40
  When I say an awful lot, I probably had about a dozen, 12 of them from 250cc Yamahas, 350s and 500s and things like that.
• 58:49
  750 yamahas but um unfortunately uh divorce turned up probably through macau actually i split up with my wife and i felt it appropriate to uh kind of not give half of them to her i wish i had actually to this day because they're now worth four times as much as i sold them for and i'm now buying them back so i used to have quite a collection of bikes but i've ended up
• 59:11
  getting a few of them back and as I say I'm paying a lot more for them when I sold them I've got two of my old rg500s one that used to be raced by a mate of mine um I have an fz 750 yamaha which was my last ever race bike in 86 um and I have an old honda that uh was raced but I never raced it but I wanted it for a collection so I'm gradually building my collection back up I have um uh an old panther sidecar outfit just so I can scare the hell out of my wife when when I take her out
• 59:41
  And all sorts of stupid kind of vehicles, a fire engine and a hearse and an armoured car and weird things like that.
• 59:49
  Let's break out on a couple of those.
• 59:51
  The hearse has, correct me if I'm wrong, you have a coffin in the back and a prosthetic car.
• 1:00:00
  What hearse is it?
• 1:00:02
  Tell us a bit more about it.
• 1:00:03
  Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous.
• 1:00:04
  This is my second hearse, actually.
• 1:00:06
  I wanted a faster one than the first one.
• 1:00:08
  So I bought one with the Jag engine in it and everything else and all the bits and pieces.
• 1:00:12
  In fact, I had a pair, believe it or not, where I was sponsored by an undertaker because he had lots of money and he sponsored me.
• 1:00:17
  So he's my hearse dealer.
• 1:00:20
  Because it's quite awkward to go and buy a hearse.
• 1:00:22
  The first one I bought, I went to this undertaker's and they said, you are in the business, aren't you?
• 1:00:26
  And I'm wearing a black suit.
• 1:00:28
  Yes, of course I am.
• 1:00:29
  Took it out there and got it down the road and was doing 100 miles an hour.
• 1:00:32
  Anyway, so the one I've got now is, it's just a bit of a giggle, really.
• 1:00:35
  If you go somewhere in a hearse, for a start, Christmas time in Cambridge, near where I live, you can't get parking anywhere.
• 1:00:41
  I take this down the pedestrian area and leave the back door open and just...
• 1:00:45
  Leave it there and never get a parking ticket.
• 1:00:46
  So it's really good for that.
• 1:00:48
  And it just causes a bit of a scene.
• 1:00:50
  I used it.
• 1:00:51
  Bless her.
• 1:00:52
  My daughter, her 21st birthday party was at this kind of smart joint in Cambridge.
• 1:00:57
  And I took the hearse, much to her, discussed everything else.
• 1:01:00
  And all her mates turned up and thought it was a funeral and went home.
• 1:01:03
  So...
• 1:01:03
  It saved me a bit of money on drink, I think.
• 1:01:05
  Anyway, sometimes if I'm a bit down, I get the hearse out and give it a run down the road.
• 1:01:10
  Most people respect the hearse, and I back the traffic down, particularly about 8 o'clock on a Monday morning.
• 1:01:15
  Everyone late for work, and back them down to about 25 miles an hour, and I can get 10 or 15 cars behind me.
• 1:01:20
  And you can see them all going, oh, for Christ's sake, I'm late for work already, and should I overtake it?
• 1:01:24
  No, I better not.
• 1:01:25
  And then I'll give them about three or four miles, and then I just floor it and just skid it sideways through all these S-bends.
• 1:01:31
  I've got a set of S-bends that I know how fast I can get through them, having had the diff locked up on the hearse, and the old Jag engine flat out through there, and I get it sliding through the corners, and I leave the pin out where the box should be, and the old box slides from right to left with the arm hanging out, and I've put quite a nice watch on the arm as well, so...
• 1:01:47
  And you go around and round about sideways and skid around there, and there's all these people with their eyes wide open, their mouth open.
• 1:01:53
  They can't believe what's going on.
• 1:01:54
  They must get to work and go, you're not going to believe what I've seen today.
• 1:01:57
  And I've actually put, shouldn't have it, but I've got a police siren on it as well.
• 1:02:01
  So you don't often see a hearse going...
• 1:02:04
  You have, our good friend is Lee Diffie.
• 1:02:08
  He tells me you have a police cap that you keep on the parcel shelf of, is it a merc that you've got?
• 1:02:14
  What is it?
• 1:02:15
  And that sometimes if anyone's a bit out of line when you're on the highway or whatever, that gets them back into line pretty prompt, doesn't it?
• 1:02:21
  Yeah, it does really.
• 1:02:22
  I don't know if I could get done for, I don't know if I should get done for impersonating a police officer because I actually bought the policeman's hat from a stripper.
• 1:02:29
  That was all she was wearing.
• 1:02:32
  So I ended up buying it off her.
• 1:02:33
  But yeah, I do.
• 1:02:34
  I keep it in most of the cars.
• 1:02:36
  Because what makes me giggle, and I shouldn't say it's just women, but women are good at sitting at the lights on the phone, aren't they?
• 1:02:41
  You know, they're always trying to sneak it in and this, that, and the other.
• 1:02:43
  So I just pull up beside them, slip my hat on and stare across at them.
• 1:02:46
  And they throw the phone on the floor.
• 1:02:48
  And I can see them going, can't talk, can't talk.
• 1:02:50
  There's a policeman looking at me and stuff like that.
• 1:02:52
  But yeah, if someone starts cutting me up or anything, I just go past them, put my cap on them, point to them.
• 1:02:57
  And I've had people pull over, actually.
• 1:02:58
  That's quite funny.
• 1:02:59
  And they're actually pulling a label.
• 1:03:02
  so the police just one of them flat checkered caps and things like that and we have a lot of fun with that just winding people up they are your good deeds let's just bounce through the cars in the parish garage you mentioned the hearse what's your daily drive
• 1:03:17
  Range Rover now, yeah, I have a Range Rover Sport, one of them big engine ones I use because I need something to tow a trailer and I live on a farm, so weather in England, it gets a bit, stuff like that.
• 1:03:27
  A C63 Mercedes that, you know, makes a nice noise.
• 1:03:32
  And my wife drives a little Mercedes.
• 1:03:36
  And what else have I got?
• 1:03:38
  That's it, a few road motorbikes.
• 1:03:39
  I have a big Indian Roadmaster.
• 1:03:42
  which has got heated seats and heated grips, stereo, sat-nav and things like that.
• 1:03:46
  And you would never expect me to ride something like that, but I love it because it's comfortable.
• 1:03:52
  I have a lovely Triumph, Triumph Bonneville, one of the new Triumph Bonnevilles.
• 1:03:55
  I use that and I keep that actually in Mallorca where we have a holiday house.
• 1:04:00
  and that's probably it now.
• 1:04:01
  If I want a track day bike, people lend me one wherever I go, and the FZ750 I use on the track a little bit, and I guess I did an aeroplane parked outside.
• 1:04:12
  That was my next thing, because you're based in the British Midlands, and you can land and pretty much taxi up to the house, can't you?
• 1:04:18
  Is that right?
• 1:04:19
  Yeah, I do.
• 1:04:20
  I live about 10 miles west of Cambridge, and I have a good mate that had a farm that has a landing strip there, and a house came up for sale, which was part of one of his relations, and this would have been when I was living in the Isle of Man.
• 1:04:33
  When I got divorced, I moved to the Isle of Man, and then I thought, I did about 10 years, and I thought, I'm going to come back to the UK, had an aeroplane that I used to fly backwards and forwards to the Isle of Man, and I thought, how perfect would it be to get a house where you can park it outside the door?
• 1:04:46
  And this house came up for sale,
• 1:04:48
  I bought it.
• 1:04:48
  It's known as Top Farm.
• 1:04:51
  Hook's Corner, but people call it Hooker's Corner.
• 1:04:53
  That's the name of the house.
• 1:04:56
  And I seriously can park it within 15 metres of my back door, and it's lovely because I can't afford to run a helicopter.
• 1:05:04
  Well, I could, but I think they're way too expensive.
• 1:05:06
  But having your plane parked at your house is kind of half a helicopter.
• 1:05:10
  And I have an IMC licence, so I'm flying bad weather and instrument rated and stuff like that.
• 1:05:16
  So I use it an awful lot.
• 1:05:18
  You call it, tell us what you call it, it's Plummet Airways.
• 1:05:21
  Yeah, it's known as Plummet Airways.
• 1:05:22
  And that deters too many people wanting lifts, really, because they don't want to get in it.
• 1:05:26
  But on occasions, actually, for a number of years whilst working with BBC...
• 1:05:31
  Susie Perry, Lee Diffie, Charlie Cox, Matt Roberts, they would all hitch a lift in Plummet Aeros and we'd hurtle off to Aston in Holland or Le Mans in France or something like that.
• 1:05:42
  And it was so nice, they'd just turn up at mine, we'd have a cup of tea and then off we'd go with Plummet Aeros and, you know, Le Mans for instance.
• 1:05:50
  The Grand Prix would generally be held at two o'clock in the afternoon, probably finished around three o'clock.
• 1:05:54
  We'd do some interviews.
• 1:05:56
  We'd nip across the airfield, which was 15 minute walk across the airfield, jump in, plummet back home.
• 1:06:02
  We'd be lit up the barbecue five o'clock in the afternoon because we gain an hour.
• 1:06:06
  We'd be having a barbecue and a beer back at my house.
• 1:06:08
  I mean, how perfect was that?
• 1:06:09
  Fantastic.
• 1:06:10
  Diff says that there would be a point in the trip, you're very professional with the way that you fly, but there's a point in the trip where you get on the intercom and you say that the lunch cart's coming through now.
• 1:06:22
  Yeah, my wife would, or my girlfriend at the time, she'd prepare little meal packs and stuff like that, and in the pack would be a can of gin, gin and tonic and stuff like that.
• 1:06:31
  For the guests.
• 1:06:32
  And sometimes we'd just celebrate that we'd actually made it home.
• 1:06:35
  But yeah, the food trolley had come out, which would be passed out over the top and things like that.
• 1:06:39
  Actually, with Diff, I think he only ever got to eat normal food, but I remember after he'd left to gone to better things, I can distinctly remember Matt Roberts and I think it was Charlie Cox
• 1:06:50
  We decided to have a bit of a laugh with them, and my wife at the time, or my girlfriend actually it would have been before I got married, we'd set up this little thing.
• 1:06:58
  We spent days trying to do this little food pack and everything else, and we'd got these mealworms and we dipped them in chocolate.
• 1:07:04
  Like you'd normally feed insects with them or something like that, and we'd put them in little packets and nice stuff like that.
• 1:07:09
  We'd have little chocolates like Frere Ross chocolates, and in the middle of them they would have liver dog biscuits and things like that.
• 1:07:17
  Incredibly, they loved them.
• 1:07:19
  They all arrived in Le Mans one year and they'd eaten all this stuff.
• 1:07:22
  And when I showed them what they'd been eating, they were all sick that day and went to bed early.
• 1:07:26
  What is the plane?
• 1:07:27
  I don't know if in this conversation we've established what type of plane it is, have we?
• 1:07:30
  It's a Cessna 182, which is sort of the Land Rover of the Sky, four-seater, single-engine, quite powerful plane.
• 1:07:36
  It'd go in and out of any of that.
• 1:07:37
  And that's what we'd use.
• 1:07:39
  And another little story that was quite funny, when I was racing trucks, I'd often give another driver a lift home and some of the mechanics...
• 1:07:48
  PI who were our data logging people were based in Cambridge so their head engineer would often scab a lift with me and he was always getting drunk this guy, his nickname was Virgil because when he got drunk he'd walk around like Virgil from Thunderbirds and he was sat in the back of the plane coming back from Dijon in France one Monday morning, it was quite a sunny morning and he was in the back of the plane and I'm next to a guy called Slim Borgard who was my team mate who was a bit of a Formula One driver in the day and he was racing trucks and Mercedes as well
• 1:08:14
  and Virgil was in the back farting and snoring and dribbling and everything else like that, really annoying me actually.
• 1:08:20
  So we're halfway across the English Channel, and there was a sea-linked ferry, and we're at 5,000 feet, I guess something like that.
• 1:08:26
  And I put this 182 into a steep, steep dive, and we're down to about 1,000 foot when we leant over the back and shouted to him, Get out!
• 1:08:33
  Get out!
• 1:08:35
  Can you imagine what it must be like waking up, hung over, and you're looking at a sea-linked ferry a thousand foot above it, heading straight at it?
• 1:08:42
  And this poor guy, if I hadn't have stopped him, I think he would have got out.
• 1:08:44
  He was struggling in his seatbelts and everything else.
• 1:08:46
  And I can assure you, he never slept one second the rest of that trip.
• 1:08:50
  I'll bet.
• 1:08:50
  I'll bet.
• 1:08:51
  The Isle of Man is something you brought up before, and it's something that intrigues me because...
• 1:08:56
  It's held in the highest regard by some people.
• 1:09:00
  I mean, you talk to Mark Webber, and he thinks they are the riders, and what they do are enormously brave, enormously special.
• 1:09:07
  Other people are against it with a passion.
• 1:09:10
  You've covered it for television many, many times.
• 1:09:12
  How do you feel about the race?
• 1:09:14
  Yeah, you're right.
• 1:09:15
  Mark's a big fan and he comes across and I take him around place and he brings all his mates.
• 1:09:19
  He's like the tourist board, really, because he brings all these high profile people over there.
• 1:09:22
  And we've had Ross Braun come over and lots of people from Formula One because I think they appreciate the dangers.
• 1:09:30
  I really do have a love-hate relationship for the place.
• 1:09:32
  I love it for the biggest challenge in motorcycle racing.
• 1:09:36
  I don't care what you say.
• 1:09:37
  And I have so much admiration for Valentino Rossi and Mark Marcus and people like that.
• 1:09:41
  But...
• 1:09:42
  When you go out there and you get the lap record like Peter Hickman did last year, 135 miles an hour in the TT, you are laying it on the line like you cannot believe.
• 1:09:51
  The penalty is way, way bigger than the crime, and sadly, often the penalty is your life.
• 1:09:55
  People who are listening that may not know it intricately, describe the lap.
• 1:09:59
  I mean, you're talking about through narrow lanes by houses and all sorts of things, aren't you?
• 1:10:05
  Yeah, the Isle of Man is a small island, 37, well the circuit of the track is, they actually call it a course for some reason, I don't know why, but it's 37 and three quarter miles around one lap.
• 1:10:17
  And the island sits off Liverpool, it's between Liverpool and Belfast I guess you say in the UK, so you're sort of north west side of it and that's where it sits.
• 1:10:27
  Anyway, the island has a population of about 80,000 people, something like that.
• 1:10:32
  But when the TT arrives, it doubles to 160,000 people, something like that.
• 1:10:36
  Anyway, yeah, 37 and three quarter miles around.
• 1:10:38
  And you set off in the capital of Douglas and you ride from there around through lots of places down to a place called Balacrane where you turn right and then you go through a valley and then you go up to a place called Kirk Michael and then you go across to Ramsey, the second biggest town.
• 1:10:54
  Then you go up and over a mountain.
• 1:10:57
  267 corners.
• 1:10:59
  Can you imagine trying to learn that?
• 1:11:01
  Not only do you have to learn the corners, you have to learn where the manhole covers are, because this is a street.
• 1:11:06
  It's used every day for people to go to work, take the kids to school, walk the dogs, anything you can imagine.
• 1:11:11
  There's manhole covers, there's gaps in the hedges where the wind blows, there's trees, there's through Kirk Michael, it's literally, there is one pavement where people walk, which would be half a metre wide, and then there's houses.
• 1:11:23
  So...
• 1:11:24
  Yeah, it's absurd, really, when you talk about it and think about it.
• 1:11:27
  And then you go out of Ramsey over the mountain.
• 1:11:29
  You climb, actually not that high, a thousand metres up over the top of a mountain where sometimes it's misty and it's wet and you're wondering what's going on.
• 1:11:38
  Then you drop back down into Douglas.
• 1:11:40
  So very hard to describe, but wherever you live in the countryside, you imagine going 37 miles round through a few villages and towns and stuff like that, and that's a lap.
• 1:11:48
  And they do that lap now in, like, 16 minutes.
• 1:11:51
  Crazy.
• 1:11:52
  I know.
• 1:11:53
  You can't imagine how.
• 1:11:56
  Why Mark Webber and a lot of high-profile people want to go and see it is because you stand on the side of the road and you think, I'm not seeing this.
• 1:12:05
  It's something that you would never imagine you could see.
• 1:12:07
  We've all stood on the pit wall here at racetracks, and the guys go, whoom, past you.
• 1:12:12
  But you stand at the bottom of Bray Hill, where they come past you at 160 miles an hour, and you can touch them.
• 1:12:18
  And they wriggle and buck and weave, and then they go up and they miss the hedge on the left-hand side by, I don't know, a couple of foot, and then they fly over the top of the hill, and their bikes are in the air, and they land, and then they break, and they go down to Quarter Bridge, and then they go through Braddon Bridge, where there's walls and trees and things like that.
• 1:12:34
  Yeah, it's madness.
• 1:12:36
  Truthfully, it's madness.
• 1:12:37
  And why I have a love-hate relationship, I have so much admiration for it.
• 1:12:41
  I did it.
• 1:12:42
  I never won it.
• 1:12:42
  I finished third.
• 1:12:44
  But I hate it because it takes so many lives as well.
• 1:12:46
  And I've lost a lot of good close friends through the TT.
• 1:12:50
  But you can't stop those people doing it.
• 1:12:51
  They want to do it.
• 1:12:52
  No one forces them to do it.
• 1:12:54
  They want to take on the biggest challenge.
• 1:12:55
  And the exhilaration and the satisfaction you get from it when you've done it, there is nothing else quite like it.
• 1:13:02
  You can go to any racetrack in the world, what I call a man-made track, and it's great to win, you get all the adulation, but you don't get the satisfaction you do at the TT because of that craziness of it all.
• 1:13:15
  And it's something very, very special.
• 1:13:17
  How are people from our part of the world, Aussies and Kiwis, regarded, I think, to Cam Donald in more recent time and people like that, for example?
• 1:13:25
  Very much so, because the people from here, from Australia, from New Zealand and wherever, they go on that pilgrimage and they have to want to do it.
• 1:13:34
  And I think a lot of them have... Hughie Anderson that's here this weekend, he talks about it with high esteem.
• 1:13:41
  And a lot of great Aussies and Kiwis have gone over there and they've won races around there.
• 1:13:45
  And it's...
• 1:13:46
  It's part of heritage, I guess you can say.
• 1:13:48
  Some want to do it, some don't.
• 1:13:49
  I mean, I know a lot of British riders that their parents will never let them do it.
• 1:13:53
  And that's part of the deal.
• 1:13:54
  You're going to go motorcycle racing, you're not going to do the TT.
• 1:13:57
  And I fully understand that.
• 1:13:58
  Yet most Irish riders, for instance, in the Dunlop dynasty, the Joey Dunlop dynasty and the Michael Dunlop and everything else,
• 1:14:05
  they wouldn't consider not ever doing it's the biggest event of the year for them john mcginnis 23 times tt winner that is the highlight of his year and that's why he's been doing it so many years i would go there with a mixed feelings i'd go there kind of wanting to do it but i had a set a pace and i reckon that pace was 80 of my capabilities and i kept 20 in my pocket
• 1:14:25
  because I felt I wanted to leave an extra metre on every corner as opposed to using the last little bit and all the gravel.
• 1:14:30
  And I'm still here to tell the story, but a lot aren't.
• 1:14:32
  So you want to go and see it, I think I'd say to anyone, if you've never been to it, try and do it, because maybe one day someone will stop it.
• 1:14:40
  You know, they're stopping, they're sucking the fun out of most things these days.
• 1:14:42
  Yeah, they are.
• 1:14:43
  I mean, it's Last Bastion stuff, but it does so much for the place, doesn't it?
• 1:14:47
  I mean, it is a huge, huge thing for them.
• 1:14:50
  Yeah, sure.
• 1:14:51
  When I was living on the Isle of Man, you might be somewhere, you could be in the middle of Lake Taupo.
• 1:14:55
  Where do you live?
• 1:14:56
  Isle of Man.
• 1:14:56
  They've got TT.
• 1:14:57
  It's linked, intrinsically linked.
• 1:15:00
  And it's a great, fun place.
• 1:15:02
  It's got its own government.
• 1:15:03
  It's a weird place to go.
• 1:15:04
  You need to go there even if you don't see the racing.
• 1:15:05
  The government's older than the UK government.
• 1:15:08
  It only gave up giving people the birch about 15 years ago, so I kind of liked it.
• 1:15:13
  But it's a funny little place, but I'd recommend you go and see it.
• 1:15:17
  I'd love to see it.
• 1:15:18
  I haven't done that.
• 1:15:19
  And people tell me it's bucket list stuff.
• 1:15:20
  You've got to do it.
• 1:15:21
  You do some stage shows.
• 1:15:22
  Your daughter coined the phrase mad.
• 1:15:26
  Just tell us about that.
• 1:15:27
  And a little of what we've discussed here in the podcast is shared through that.
• 1:15:31
  They're great, aren't they?
• 1:15:32
  And it's your life and time on track and off it.
• 1:15:36
  Yeah, it is.
• 1:15:37
  We kind of sat down with my lovely daughter Frankie Francesca Parrish, who is now, I'd better not say her age, but she's due to get married, I think, next year.
• 1:15:46
  And she's got my spark, and I wanted to do a theatre show travelling around.
• 1:15:51
  The reason I wanted to do a theatre show, because Carl Fockety and James Whittam kind of started before me, and they'd go around doing a kind of chat show between them, and they'd run out, and I used to get this from James, oh, he said we'd run out with half an hour to go, so we have to use all your stories up.
• 1:16:05
  I'm going, yeah, come on it mate, that's not fair.
• 1:16:07
  Not only did they use my stories, they used to get them wrong, and I had people come up to me going, oh, you remember that time when you dressed up as Barry Sheen because he was drunk?
• 1:16:13
  I was saying he wasn't drunk, his leg locked up.
• 1:16:16
  So, yeah, that was kind of, so I thought, sod this, I'll go and do my own.
• 1:16:19
  So I spoke to my daughter and I said, look, this is the plan, I've got an agent called Mike Rowland who does some stuff with me, and we hatched a plan that we'd do a tour.
• 1:16:26
  what are we going to call it?
• 1:16:28
  And so it's all about mad things.
• 1:16:29
  So Frankie said, well, how about call it the MAD Tour, which stands for my adolescent dad.
• 1:16:34
  And that's exactly what she thinks I am.
• 1:16:36
  So that's exactly what happened five years, six years ago now.
• 1:16:40
  We start off doing it, and it was lovely.
• 1:16:42
  It was the best thing I've ever done in my life, apart from racing motorcycles, because I was working with my daughter, and we grew kind of much, much closer.
• 1:16:49
  We laughed, we giggled, and we cried, because it's...
• 1:16:53
  The tour is about, yeah, the life and times, but I've had a lot of sad times as well.
• 1:16:56
  So I laugh a lot, but I also cry a lot because I've lost so many good mates, including, you know, that horrible time when we lost the great Barry Sheen.
• 1:17:04
  And so there's some sad times in it as well.
• 1:17:05
  And it's really about the way my life and peaks and troughs, the way things have gone and everything else like that.
• 1:17:11
  But I have to tell you, on occasions, my daughter Frankie now lives in Geneva, so she can't always get back.
• 1:17:18
  So my wife now does it.
• 1:17:19
  So we kept the MAD, because instead of standing for my adolescent dad, it's now my arsehole darling.
• 1:17:28
  So we kept the same initials for it.
• 1:17:30
  So my wife does it on occasion.
• 1:17:31
  So it's just as embarrassing.
• 1:17:33
  telling all your stories to your wife as it was to your daughter so it's and and every show changes because it evolves different things and i talk about certainly different subjects but the easiest way to describe the mad tour it's when pc stood for pulling crumpet now you might not know what crumpet is but barry sheen you always used to call pretty girls let's go and get the crumpet
• 1:17:54
  So that's where that comes from.
• 1:17:56
  I've been treated to a little slice of the show, which I love.
• 1:18:01
  One of the yarns that you've sprinkled over time is that you have a business card that says, Steve Parrish, what is it, N-L-A-M...
• 1:18:14
  That's the normal business card, but I always have on the bottom of it N-L-A-M-N, which stands for no letters after my name, because when you get chucked out of school at the age of 15, you're not likely to get any letters after your name.
• 1:18:25
  But it does also have PhD on it, which is actually real, because I did some Pizza Hut delivery when I was about 16 years old.
• 1:18:31
  But you know, funnily enough, we go back to Mercedes-Benz.
• 1:18:34
  When they used to pay you back in the days, there was no backs and things like that.
• 1:18:37
  I'd get cheques through.
• 1:18:39
  Steve Parrish, NLAMN, PhD.
• 1:18:41
  And I used to tell them it was some engineering degree, and they never did know.
• 1:18:45
  So, yeah, it's...
• 1:18:48
  And people often do think I've got some sort of title.
• 1:18:50
  Can you imagine me getting a title?
• 1:18:52
  There's not a chance in the world.
• 1:18:53
  To the point where you helped John Hopkins, the motorcycle racer, at one point.
• 1:18:59
  He's injured with some broken ribs or something.
• 1:19:02
  Tell us that.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah, that was on a flight coming back from Mattei in Japan.
• 1:19:07
  The Japanese Grand Prix had been held there.
• 1:19:09
  Poor old John Hopkins had got broken ribs.
• 1:19:11
  Gets on the flight to go home, the same flight I was on.
• 1:19:13
  And I had to get back.
• 1:19:14
  I had a meeting.
• 1:19:15
  My co-commentator at the time, Charlie Cox, was desperate to get back.
• 1:19:19
  And the British Airways flight that goes back in takes...
• 1:19:22
  Most of the Europeans, they go via London to Madrid or Barcelona.
• 1:19:27
  So we're sat on the plane at about...
• 1:19:29
  quarter to 12, 20 to 12, and Hopkins comes charging on there, but very carefully, because he's broken three ribs, and I think he's got a cracked collarbone, so he's a bit second-hand.
• 1:19:39
  As he gets on the plane, he announces he's got broken ribs, and the cabin director was listening in to what was going on, and one of the stewardesses mentions that she's been told that Hopkins can't put his bag up on the locker because he's got broken ribs.
• 1:19:53
  She grasses him up, cabin director comes up and said, I'm very sorry, Mr Hopkins, but we cannot take you on this plane.
• 1:19:59
  British Airways' policy is to not fly anyone that's got broken ribs because the pressure changes and perhaps punctured lungs and things like that.
• 1:20:07
  And I'm thinking, oh, Jesus, this is going to be a bloody nightmare.
• 1:20:10
  They're going to have to chuck him off, chuck his luggage off.
• 1:20:12
  We'll be an hour delayed.
• 1:20:13
  We'll lose our slot.
• 1:20:14
  And I'm talking to Charlie.
• 1:20:15
  What are we going to do?
• 1:20:16
  What are we going to do?
• 1:20:17
  And I said, well, leave it to me.
• 1:20:18
  I've been listening.
• 1:20:19
  So I trotted over, and he was in a different aisle, just over the aisle to me.
• 1:20:22
  I said, excuse me.
• 1:20:23
  I said, I've been listening, putting on my best voice, of course.
• 1:20:27
  I've been listening to this conversation, and I said, I can't believe you're not flying Mr Hopkins, because I've already examined him, and he's perfectly OK to fly in my best doctor's accent.
• 1:20:35
  And they said, oh, right, well, this is what's going on.
• 1:20:39
  I said, yes, I examined him at the circuit.
• 1:20:41
  He's perfectly OK to fly.
• 1:20:42
  So they then call the captain.
• 1:20:44
  The captain comes down.
• 1:20:45
  He said, I understand from my cabin director that you're a doctor.
• 1:20:47
  He said, have you any proof of that?
• 1:20:48
  I said, well, I'm a consultant.
• 1:20:50
  I said, here's my business card, which he looks at.
• 1:20:52
  It's Steve Parrish, N-L-A-M-N, PhD.
• 1:20:55
  So they all rung him.
• 1:20:56
  Hoey said, well, if you're willing to sign under what I'm going to write here now, and he wrote on the back of a menu...
• 1:21:02
  BA007, Tokyo, London, John Hopkins in 6B's, got broken ribs, but Dr S Parrish, NLAMN, PhD, and he says if you'll sign this to say he's cleared of thumb, we can take off.
• 1:21:15
  Well, I'm getting an ear-bashing from my producer from BBC, Belinda Rogersham.
• 1:21:18
  I would have been freaking out.
• 1:21:19
  Yeah, she was completely freaking out.
• 1:21:21
  And Charlie Cox even thinks I've gone a bit far.
• 1:21:24
  Susie Perry wasn't sure what the hell was going on.
• 1:21:26
  So anyway, sure enough, doors closed.
• 1:21:28
  We push back.
• 1:21:29
  Hop is putting his thumb up.
• 1:21:31
  Are you a drink?
• 1:21:31
  And he's, I don't think I've ever got the drink off him.
• 1:21:34
  So, and I'm thinking I've probably gone a bit too far, but I'll keep my head down.
• 1:21:37
  So I'm having something to eat, 11 hour flight.
• 1:21:40
  So with nine hours to go, I've got my bed down, get my blanket out, having to sleep.
• 1:21:44
  Bit nervous, as you can imagine, a little bit of trepidation going on, thinking I've lied about being a doctor.
• 1:21:48
  And I don't know if there's any penalty for that.
• 1:21:51
  And now I get a tap on the shoulder.
• 1:21:52
  Cabin director comes back.
• 1:21:54
  Dr. Parrish, I said, yes.
• 1:21:55
  I said, I'm, he said, we've got a problem at the back of the plane.
• 1:21:56
  Well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm
• 1:22:00
  I all but shat myself there and there.
• 1:22:01
  You can imagine my producer who sat behind me going, I told you so, I told you so.
• 1:22:05
  Charlie Cox is weeing himself, as is Susie.
• 1:22:08
  Stavros, you've done it this time.
• 1:22:10
  And I'm telling the cabin director, I said, well, I'm sorry, I can't help you, I'm off duty.
• 1:22:14
  He said, no, no, no, we need you.
• 1:22:15
  We checked around, you're the only doctor on the plane.
• 1:22:17
  Would you mind coming back to my cabin, my little office, and we can sort this out?
• 1:22:22
  And I'm thinking, oh, Jesus, I've got three options.
• 1:22:24
  Lock myself in the toilet for nine hours.
• 1:22:27
  lie, sorry, say I'm not really a doctor and I was just kidding, because we're already two hours into the flight, surely they're not going to turn back.
• 1:22:33
  Or I have a go at seeing what the problem is.
• 1:22:36
  And I'm thinking it's going to be a baby, heart attack, kidney infection.
• 1:22:42
  I think, geez, well, why not?
• 1:22:43
  I might as well have a go, you never know.
• 1:22:45
  So I go back into there, and I am really, really very nervous.
• 1:22:51
  And I go in there, and I have done, I've watched TV, and they have a thing called Casualty on TV, so I know a little bit about medical issues.
• 1:22:59
  As it turns out, and this is the luck of Parrish, Maschini always said if I fell in a cesspit, I'd come up with a salmon on my head.
• 1:23:05
  He was absolutely right.
• 1:23:07
  All it happens to be is there's a bloke, a drunk Spanish bloke down the back of the plane that's causing havoc with all the passengers and the staff and everything else, and he wants more vodka and everything else.
• 1:23:17
  Would you mind going back and certifying he's drunk because he's on a connecting flight going, when he gets to London, he's going to transfer to a flight to Barcelona.
• 1:23:25
  And we've had enough of him, so we want him arrested at London.
• 1:23:28
  And the only way he can have that done, he said, if we get a certification from a doctor that he's properly inebriated and drunk.
• 1:23:35
  I said, well, look, under the circumstances, I'm going to help you out.
• 1:23:37
  I said, orthopaedics are more my thing anyway, but...
• 1:23:41
  But I'm going to help you out on this one occasion.
• 1:23:44
  You don't pester me anymore.
• 1:23:46
  I don't care what goes on.
• 1:23:47
  I've got operations to do when I get back to London, and I need to get some sleep.
• 1:23:51
  So I said, I'm going to help you out.
• 1:23:52
  So I go down the back, and sure enough, there's this bloke, waving his arms, ordering more vodka and everything else.
• 1:23:57
  When I get down there, it only turns out to be one of the Dorner cameramen, and Dorner are the people that own MotoGP, that I'd worked with, and you probably would have worked with some of them yourself.
• 1:24:05
  Here's flipping Manuel, who's the cameraman.
• 1:24:07
  He's going, hey, Steve...
• 1:24:10
  I'm thinking shit he's going to blow my cover here so I had to make it I'd never met him before and I had to poor old man well I had no choice but to certify he was completely drunk and he did get arrested when we landed at London but I've never been more keen in my whole life and to this day to get off an aeroplane because I'm thinking I'm going to get into serious trouble when we land I've got my coat on I've got my back
• 1:24:34
  pack on, I'm pushing and shoving, I'm already still getting an ear bashing from Belinda Rogerson who's telling me I shouldn't be doing this whilst working for BBC and British Broadcasting This gets out into the media I'm saying to her, I work for BBC Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it's Monday it's the sod off
• 1:24:50
  So I'm queuing up, and sure enough, I can see, as you're getting off, there's a policeman stood there, and I wasn't sure if it was for him or me, if it was for Manuel or for me.
• 1:24:58
  So I'm pushing and shoving, they let, it's 747, they let first-class passengers off first.
• 1:25:03
  Captain Steve Waring has come down to say, goodbye, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for flying British Airways, we hope to see you again, and I'm there, first of the business class.
• 1:25:11
  As I come past, Captain Steve Waring puts his hand out, he says, love your commentary, the bastard knew all along that I wasn't a proper doctor.
• 1:25:20
  Oh, mate, fantastic, fantastic.
• 1:25:23
  We're getting towards the end here.
• 1:25:24
  I want to do a couple of fun yarns before we wrap up.
• 1:25:27
  I think I'd like to finish with Baz because it's been such a significant part of your life and a little bit for mine, and people listening treasure him in so many ways.
• 1:25:37
  Firstly...
• 1:25:38
  A quick story about the time you were going to dinner with Lee Diffie.
• 1:25:44
  I can't remember the country that you were in.
• 1:25:46
  You were a little bit lost, but you decided to make the big grand entrance in the car.
• 1:25:51
  Did you drive down some stairs?
• 1:25:53
  Please do not try this at home, but apparently you did.
• 1:25:55
  Is this right?
• 1:25:56
  Yeah, we did.
• 1:25:57
  I think we were a bit late and something like that, and we were going to this press function, and there was...
• 1:26:02
  Most of the journalists are pretty boring, aren't they?
• 1:26:05
  So we decided that... Well, I didn't actually mean to.
• 1:26:07
  I think I arrived a bit too fast, and there was a set of stairs in front, and as soon as I saw them, I thought, I reckon we can make this.
• 1:26:13
  And hire cars are built for that, aren't they?
• 1:26:15
  Every one of them comes with a certificate so you can go rallying or down the set of stairs.
• 1:26:19
  Yeah, we did.
• 1:26:20
  And then the car managed it.
• 1:26:21
  It did okay.
• 1:26:22
  The exhaust went real good afterwards, but it made it better on the journey home.
• 1:26:25
  So, yeah, Diff had a few kind of scary drives, I guess you could say.
• 1:26:30
  We had a few scary trips on occasion.
• 1:26:32
  Life with you is mad, appropriately the name for your shows.
• 1:26:36
  He, I've seen some funny stuff with you sticking fart machines like a teenager into cornflakes in hotel restaurants and scaring some poor...
• 1:26:47
  patron who's going up for morning breakfast.
• 1:26:50
  He tells a good yarn about you writing notes in a restaurant, giving them to the waiter and trying to get it delivered to someone else.
• 1:26:58
  And it's stuff like see you out back later for a bit of a kiss or whatever.
• 1:27:02
  He says it backfired one time and a guy pulled a knife on you.
• 1:27:06
  Is that what happened there?
• 1:27:07
  Well, actually, that's two stories in one.
• 1:27:10
  A guy did pull a knife on me in a restaurant in Valencia because I'd got a fake mouse that I have...
• 1:27:20
  So you put this thing on and you pull the... Yeah, there it is.
• 1:27:22
  Oh, no.
• 1:27:23
  There's the fake mouse that come flying across.
• 1:27:25
  So you pull...
• 1:27:25
  It's got like a bit of fishing line.
• 1:27:26
  It's quite like a note snatcher.
• 1:27:28
  It's quite like a note snatcher.
• 1:27:29
  Anyway, there's this guy in a restaurant who was clearly, I think, trying to propose to his pretty girlfriend.
• 1:27:34
  She was quite pretty and she was like on a table next to me or he was.
• 1:27:38
  And I thought we'll have a bit of fun here.
• 1:27:39
  And I said to Diff, watch this.
• 1:27:41
  Susie Perry sat there with me and a whole bunch.
• 1:27:43
  There was probably 15 of us.
• 1:27:44
  It was Sunday night after the Grand Prix, having some dinner and having a few glasses of wine and stuff like that.
• 1:27:49
  And it got a bit quiet and I thought I'll liven it up a bit.
• 1:27:52
  So I leaned around the corner.
• 1:27:53
  Chuck this fake mouse on a piece of retractable string across and it lands on this fella's plate.
• 1:27:59
  At which point he screams and jumps up on his chair.
• 1:28:02
  I think much to the delight of the sort of girl that was staring into his eyes.
• 1:28:07
  And probably slightly embarrassing for him because she still sat there and this bloke was stood up on the chair screaming.
• 1:28:12
  And I could see him.
• 1:28:13
  He sort of realised that it was me.
• 1:28:15
  Gives me a right nasty stare and everything else.
• 1:28:18
  I'd probably ruin the moment.
• 1:28:19
  He's probably got away from getting married, actually.
• 1:28:21
  He owes me one.
• 1:28:22
  So I decided the best thing to do is to clear off out because he was giving me some dirty looks.
• 1:28:27
  So I go up the stairs to the toilets and hung around there for about five minutes and came back down wearing my Billy Bob teeth so he didn't recognise me.
• 1:28:34
  Or I hope he didn't.
• 1:28:36
  As I come down the stairs, he clearly has still clocked me.
• 1:28:39
  He must have seen the BBC shirt or something like that.
• 1:28:41
  And comes at me with a steak knife, I swear to you.
• 1:28:44
  He's going to stab me because clearly I think the girl had left in disgust or whatever.
• 1:28:47
  I don't know what had gone on.
• 1:28:48
  And I have now got a chair and I'm fending a bloke off.
• 1:28:52
  Like a lion tamer?
• 1:28:53
  Yeah, it was like the lion tamer.
• 1:28:55
  And in fact, I have to give it to Susie Perry because she was smart as you like.
• 1:28:59
  She comes over and she's now calling me Chairman Mouse as it was...
• 1:29:06
  Anyway, yeah, that was exactly right.
• 1:29:09
  But the fart machine did get me in some troubles and bits and pieces and stuff like that as well.
• 1:29:13
  So, yeah, I've spent my life getting into trouble, I guess you'd say.
• 1:29:16
  You have.
• 1:29:16
  There are some great fun yarns.
• 1:29:18
  And people can read about those too, mate, because in addition to the Barry book, which we'll talk about in a second, you have a book out right now, Parish Times, Life as a Racer.
• 1:29:27
  And it's about all this kind of stuff, isn't it?
• 1:29:30
  About the on track, but also about your character, and clearly you are one.
• 1:29:34
  Yeah, and I'm very, very proud, and we go back to Bowser again.
• 1:29:37
  I knew I was going to write a book from many, many years ago.
• 1:29:40
  I just knew, because I wrote bits and pieces down.
• 1:29:42
  I kept kind of a bit of a diary of my life, and it's been a fun life, and I thought that people might like to enjoy it.
• 1:29:47
  So way, way back, and in fact, terribly tragically, Barry wrote the foreword to this in 2003 when he was ill. And I kind of...
• 1:29:56
  He died, wasn't he?
• 1:29:56
  Yeah, the year he died.
• 1:29:57
  And the time I was out there, probably three or four months before he died, and I said I was going to write a book.
• 1:30:01
  And, you know, great on you, good on you, Stavros.
• 1:30:03
  It'll be fun.
• 1:30:04
  And so the forward is by my lovely mate that I sadly missed.
• 1:30:08
  And I knew I was going to write something just because...
• 1:30:10
  But my book's nothing like any other motorcycle racers book, simply because it's not about... And I read a lot of books, and I enjoy them, and, you know, the world champions that write them.
• 1:30:18
  And so I was at Hock and Ironman.
• 1:30:20
  I got a third.
• 1:30:21
  I would have got a second, but the clutch was slipping.
• 1:30:23
  And then I went on to so-and-so, and I won this, and I did that.
• 1:30:25
  I think all that's told because if you follow it, you know it.
• 1:30:29
  Mine is more about the trips going to, the tracks, and the things that go on in between, the fun and the daft things that went on.
• 1:30:36
  So it's not just for motor racing people because I have people come up to me, and it's particularly wives that have read the book, and the same thing happens when they come to the shows.
• 1:30:45
  They thought, oh, I won't enjoy this, but they do.
• 1:30:46
  So it's more about fun and the times of what went on.
• 1:30:51
  So I'm very pleased with the way the book has gone, and...
• 1:30:56
  I think I've never yet had anyone come up and say they haven't enjoyed it.
• 1:30:59
  And I get so many emails and tweets saying, funniest thing I've ever read.
• 1:31:03
  It's in audio as well.
• 1:31:05
  Which you would love.
• 1:31:05
  You know, the fact that it gives someone a giggle.
• 1:31:08
  With Baz, two world titles, obviously, there in the 70s.
• 1:31:12
  We've talked about it earlier in the podcast, a proper rock star.
• 1:31:15
  But, I mean, other things too, Stavros, having sponsorships the caliber of Brutal Fabergé and, you know, Rolls-Royce.
• 1:31:25
  He was a Rolls-Royce ambassador and he gave them a real kind of youthful feel.
• 1:31:29
  Yeah, he did.
• 1:31:29
  And, like I say, people wanted to use him.
• 1:31:32
  He was such an ambassador for what we were doing.
• 1:31:34
  He was the Cockney kid that made good and I think everyone loves someone that comes up from very little and does that job.
• 1:31:39
  Yeah, you're right.
• 1:31:40
  He had Fabergé and he had Marlborough and he had jeans companies.
• 1:31:44
  And he took pretty much before him all we ever had was Feroldo, Reynolds Chains and Shell.
• 1:31:49
  You know, that was kind of what it was.
• 1:31:50
  And he was the guy that brought out all these other sponsors because we mixed with people that wanted to...
• 1:31:56
  be part of that, be part of the success that went on with it.
• 1:31:59
  So he, again, he's somebody that actually opened up the doors to motorcycling.
• 1:32:03
  And whether you loved him or hate him, he did a lot of good for motorcycling.
• 1:32:07
  He lifted it out of the doldrums of black leathered people going around the racetrack to being on the front covers of newspapers.
• 1:32:13
  And he had a TV show called Just Amazing that went on.
• 1:32:18
  This Is Your Life, that was it.
• 1:32:20
  Yeah, he was on that, Eamon Andrews and things like that.
• 1:32:22
  He had got an MBE.
• 1:32:24
  just so annoying that he's not here I mean that sounds ridiculous thing to say but we would have had so much more fun I guess we'd have stretched it out even more we might have been in prison again though I mean it's crazy to think how much time has elapsed since it seems like yesterday tragically he was in his early 50s and I often think now what he would be like would he embrace social media for example would he have been a character in that sort of space we're at a classic meeting recording this he would love being here for this style of thing wouldn't he?
• 1:32:53
  Yeah, I think he probably would.
• 1:32:54
  But then, I'm like you, I often think how he'd like it.
• 1:32:58
  But he wouldn't like being old, would he?
• 1:32:59
  Not at all.
• 1:33:00
  He wouldn't have been a good old pensioner like I would be, I don't think.
• 1:33:03
  I'm sure he would have coped with it most admirably, but he wouldn't have much liked it.
• 1:33:07
  But I'm sure he would have...
• 1:33:09
  He'd have everyone running around after him, wouldn't he?
• 1:33:11
  What would we be doing now?
• 1:33:12
  Oh, Rusty, go and get that for us, will he?
• 1:33:15
  Go and just go do that for us, mate, would you?
• 1:33:17
  Or something like that.
• 1:33:17
  He'd still be ticking along just fine financially too.
• 1:33:20
  He did super well for himself.
• 1:33:21
  He one time, we were all out, the Network 10 crew, and we're in Brisbane, and he bought us all dinner.
• 1:33:29
  He made coffee.
• 1:33:30
  He quite often, he was very particular about his coffee.
• 1:33:32
  He would quite often go behind the bar and he would make the coffee himself or whatever.
• 1:33:36
  And anyway, the end of the night came.
• 1:33:37
  He goes, fellas, no, leave it, leave it.
• 1:33:40
  I've got it.
• 1:33:40
  And he pulled out the credit card and he paid for it.
• 1:33:42
  And I remember ringing my mum and I went, Mum, Barry Sheen bought me dinner.
• 1:33:46
  I was chuffed.
• 1:33:48
  And the next day our boss from Network 10, David White, arrived.
• 1:33:50
  And I said, Chief, I said, Baz paid for dinner.
• 1:33:54
  And he said, oh, I know, I know.
• 1:33:55
  I said, what do you mean you know?
• 1:33:57
  He goes, he faxed through the receipt this morning for reimbursement.
• 1:34:03
  Let's finish on one final yarn.
• 1:34:04
  We've had a ripping chat here.
• 1:34:06
  And a lot of what I talk about is about the cars and the bikes that are significant in life and things like that.
• 1:34:10
  You love a stitch up.
• 1:34:11
  That is clear.
• 1:34:13
  But you have also been stitched up by a television program in the UK.
• 1:34:18
  You mentioned you had an armoured car before and things like that.
• 1:34:21
  So you get home to wherever it was at one point in time.
• 1:34:25
  Tell the audience about the show and what you were confronted with.
• 1:34:29
  Yeah, we had back in the 80s a program called Beedle's About, and it was Jeremy Beedle.
• 1:34:35
  He was this guy that'd go around catching people out, and he'd do lots of things like put your car, set your car on fire, or take the engine out of your car, and do daft things and things like that.
• 1:34:46
  So a consortium of bastards, I guess you'd say, they got in touch with London Weekend Television, it was, and said, we've got this idiot in the village that...
• 1:34:54
  One of them was the landlord of the village pub, who was not well impressed when we went flying around the corner with a fire engine, pulled the hoses out and hosed the place out.
• 1:35:01
  He had to shut the pub for two days, so he was not at all impressed.
• 1:35:05
  And another buddy called John Brown, who we were always playing pranks with and bits and pieces and stuff like that.
• 1:35:12
  So they rang up or they emailed London Weekend Television and said, we've got this bloke in the village that we want to get.
• 1:35:16
  Would you help us out?
• 1:35:18
  And they came back and said, yeah, we would.
• 1:35:20
  And they went to so much trouble.
• 1:35:22
  I got a phone call from Yamaha, Mitsui Yamaha, who I was riding for, need a meeting.
• 1:35:26
  Can you come down if you could be here for 11 o'clock on Tuesday morning?
• 1:35:30
  And we've got something to discuss with him.
• 1:35:32
  So I get in my van at 6 o'clock in the morning, drive all the way through London down to the other side.
• 1:35:36
  Just before this had happened, about two weeks before, Loctite called me up, who were my sponsors, and said, we've got a guy from the trade press that wants to come and do a story on the team.
• 1:35:45
  Unbeknownst to me, it's a research guy from London Weekend Television walking around all my workshops and house, just checking out what they're going to do.
• 1:35:53
  So, yeah, what they did is they turned up about half an hour after I'd left, knocks on the door, sees my wife, who was pregnant with my daughter at the time, and says, they're going to play this practical joke on me, and would she mind, you know, getting involved and so on and so on.
• 1:36:07
  They went around and knocked on people's doors to say, could you lock your animals away, because we're going to be setting off explosions and things like that.
• 1:36:12
  It's a massive operation.
• 1:36:14
  Off I go to Yamaha's.
• 1:36:15
  have a meeting about nothing.
• 1:36:17
  I thought, that's a waste of bloody time.
• 1:36:18
  Normally they'd buy me lunch and tight bastards didn't.
• 1:36:20
  So I get in the van and I drive home and I get back, having stopped at the bakery and got some doughnuts and bits and pieces, and I drive into my driveway as a policeman.
• 1:36:28
  Yeah, area's sealed off, you can't come down here.
• 1:36:32
  I said, don't be stupid, I live down here, this is my work, so you can't come out now.
• 1:36:35
  I just drove past him.
• 1:36:37
  and get down the bottom and there is a flipping war going on, a NATO exercise, armoured cars, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, people in Armageddon, machine guns, helicopters flying around.
• 1:36:49
  I'm driven into a war zone and this bloke, another policeman down there, I get out of the van eating my donut or something.
• 1:36:55
  What are you doing down there?
• 1:36:56
  I said, I own the flipping place.
• 1:36:57
  What the hell are you doing down there?
• 1:36:58
  And I was going to shout and scream until I saw they'd all got guns.
• 1:37:02
  Anyway, he wants my identification.
• 1:37:04
  I gave him a credit card.
• 1:37:05
  just as I'm doing that, that fricking great big explosion goes off behind me, blowing up all the dirt and everything else.
• 1:37:11
  And I'm now cringing, thinking this is, to start with, I thought it was a joke.
• 1:37:16
  And then I looked at the scale of it and I said, nobody I know can afford a joke like this.
• 1:37:20
  I don't want to do this.
• 1:37:21
  And then there's another explosion.
• 1:37:23
  They're like an idiot.
• 1:37:24
  I've got a tin hat on and I'm creeping around and they blew another bit up that looked like my workshop had gone off.
• 1:37:29
  And I'm freaking out.
• 1:37:31
  I am absolutely freaking out what's going on.
• 1:37:33
  And to cut it fairly short, they're going, oh yeah, we're at Gatley Inn Farm.
• 1:37:38
  I said, you're not a frigging Gatley Inn Farm.
• 1:37:39
  You're at Church Farm.
• 1:37:41
  This guy's going...
• 1:37:43
  Oh, my God, ceasefire, ceasefire, we're at the wrong location.
• 1:37:46
  And another explosion goes on.
• 1:37:49
  And they've properly got me hook, line and sinker.
• 1:37:51
  The next thing, Jeremy Bloody Beadle drums down in a motorbike and sidecar with my mate John Brown all with pats on and goggles on and everything else like that.
• 1:37:58
  And it's a full-on set-up.
• 1:38:00
  They got me, absolutely nailed me properly.
• 1:38:03
  And I'm never going to get anyone back like that.
• 1:38:05
  And sure enough, it was a wonderful set-up.
• 1:38:08
  It was amazing, actually.
• 1:38:09
  I'm really proud of it.
• 1:38:10
  But I got Brownie back on a few occasions.
• 1:38:12
  So it's still going on, actually.
• 1:38:14
  Just recently, Rusty, I went to his house for dinner, supper.
• 1:38:17
  Six of us, my wife and another couple.
• 1:38:20
  And I'm sat round a dinner table in the kitchen, like a kitchen supper.
• 1:38:23
  He spent all day long wiring up Goodridge wire hosing under the table, screwed it underneath the table, pointing at my bollocks, my nuts.
• 1:38:32
  connected to a fire extinguisher, a high-powered fire extinguisher.
• 1:38:36
  As I went to drink my coffee, he blew me clean off the chair with about 3,000 PSI.
• 1:38:41
  It looked like something out of the Exocet.
• 1:38:42
  I just flew across the flipping room.
• 1:38:44
  This is the sort of thing that goes on in my life.
• 1:38:47
  Spending time with you, mate, is like spending time with Baz.
• 1:38:49
  With a child.
• 1:38:50
  With a child.
• 1:38:52
  It reminds me so much of that.
• 1:38:53
  It's a life lived full, but there's still so much more that you're going to do and many more laughs that you'll create.
• 1:38:59
  I love the fact that you're doing some classic racing like that.
• 1:39:02
  Keep doing that stuff, and thank you for spending time with us.
• 1:39:04
  Just awesome.
• 1:39:05
  And I just want to say, Rusty, you are a true professional.
• 1:39:07
  You do your research so well.
• 1:39:09
  You smile and you laugh and you're part of it.
• 1:39:11
  And it's a pleasure talking about it.
• 1:39:14
  Even I, having spoken about things like this, I still giggle and laugh about it, and I hope I never grow up, and don't you?
• 1:39:19
  No, that's how it should be.
• 1:39:20
  Cheers.
• 1:39:25
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 1:39:29
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 1:39:33
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 1:39:42
  Listener.