interview - john mcguinness
mr Photos: Impact Images
John McGuinness is one of the most famous names in International Road Racing with an unbelievable 23 Isle of Man TT race wins. The mind of a TT racer is a mystery to us mere mortals, so we spent some time with “McPint” recently to find out what makes him tick, and just how he has managed to be so successful around the mountain course.
You’ve had one of the most successful careers of any racer either on the roads or circuits – what is at the core of your need to keep racing, what are those key elements that make you want to keep competing? JM A good package, with good stable people around me and good mechanics. People who are still willing to put a bit of faith in me, it’s not rocket science. I know racing is expensive, I know it’s stressful, a lot of people take huge chunks of time out of their lives to play a part in the team, I want to do the best I can for them. When all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed, it comes down to me to ride the bike. It’s weird for me, maybe I’ve had my arse wiped for me for too long and I’ve been lucky but I’ve always just enjoyed the camaraderie and the crack with the people around me, we have fun when we go racing. Regardless of the paddock and the talent, sometimes people in the team just don’t like each other and when that happens, things never work out well. There’s no point being in the team for the wrong reasons. When I have a good team and a good bike, that’s when I want to race forever. In many ways you are cast from the same clay as Joey Dunlop – both of you took a less than conventional view of training and the publicity demands of manufacturers and sponsors. Given that you rode with Joey tell us exactly what he meant to you?
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JM I always make sure I have enough energy left to climb on the top step and lift a trophy above my head, I’m not sure how much more a racer needs? I take the PR role seriously, but there’s an opinion that race fans want to hear what racers have to say from the heart rather than from a script. I always got the feeling Joey felt the same. When you’re a kid you follow your heroes and Joey was mine. Joey was the best and that meant everything to me, he was the guy with all the wins and five world championships. He was unassuming. He was hard to get to know and I was fortunate to get to know him a little bit more than lots of people and got closer to him than most. I didn’t realise at the time that he’d accepted me into his clan more than others. It took years after he was gone for me to realise how special that was and what it meant to me. You would always assume that somebody like that is invincible. The day he was awarded the freedom of his borough, he dropped me off at the B&B I was staying in and we had a few beers in us, I didn’t know that would be the last time I would ever see him alive. His last words to me were “thanks for coming, it means a lot” These were big words for a man like Joey to say and I never expected them to be the last to me from him. I watched him as a kid, ten, 11, 12 and 13 years old. Had his posters on my bedroom wall, he was just so cool and I followed his every step. Eventually I’d go on to be his teammate and it was the icing on the cake really. It was a bit of a whirlwind for me. Joey wouldn’t ride the Fireblade, then he tested the SP1 and decided to race it and all of a sudden we were teammates. I really do think it was meant to be. When I did my first ever TT, I ended up being asked by Frank Wrathall (he tuned everyone’s engines back then) if I could stick an