The Cookstown 100 kicks off in April. If you’ve never watched an Irish road race, Dr Stephen Walsh explains why you really should – and why he went from spectating to racing
April COOKSTOWN 100 • APRIL 26-27 • NORTHERN IRELAND
Ihave been in awe of road racing and road racers since I was a small child. My earliest racing memories are sitting on the banks near Dukes Bends on the Skerries circuit in North County Dublin. I can’t imagine that any child – or indeed adult – who has the good fortune to watch bikes roar up a narrow country lane at breathtaking speed could be anything other than smitten. There’s nothing like it.
Pure road racing thrills all our senses – you are in amongst the smells and sounds of race bikes in a way that is impossible at the more sterile short circuits. At a road race you’re so close you can feel the air pressure change as the bikes flash by – and when the classics are running, you can taste the Castrol R on the breeze.
Many fans, me included, love the classics most of all. Yes, the modern bikes are fast and spectacular. But they won’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck in the way that classics can. If you have the good fortune to see Andy Kildea, a multiple Irish road race champion, flash past at Cookstown or Armoy on his CB750, your life might be changed forever.
I grew up in County Kildare, where my local road racing hero (and neighbour) was Eric Galbraith. As well as giving me some part-time work in Two-Wheels Honda when I was about 17, he gave me a great deal on a TZ350 that needed fixing. Dad gave me a hand to prep the bike for a pre-’81 class that was running in Mondello Park – we built the bike over the winter, I got my short circuit licence and started racing the following spring. I loved it.
Massive highs and painful lows
Getting that TZ on track was my first racing high, but a couple of months later it supplied my first racing low. About halfway through the season, mum and dad were away on holidays, so there was no adult supervision. The bike needed pistons, but all I could afford were DT175 items. I rode it to the circuit on race morning to ‘run it in’ – and of course, the inevitable happened. I did a somersault over the handlebars when the bike seized flat-out in top and I woke up in the emergency room. With no money and no more parental support, racing was finished for the foreseeable future.
Over the next few years, I was de
