Born in                                 : 1982

Current Machine              :Suzuki GSV-R MotoGP

I started racing in ‘98 and I’ve never ridden a bike older than that until today, but I really like old cars and getting the opportunity to ride the actual bike that Barry won his first 500 GP on is a real honor. I went to Barry’s house in Queensland. He had lots of his old race bikes there; it was fantastic. It’s really interesting to see how the technology has moved on.

I met Barry in ‘99 and he really helped my career in 2000 and 2001. I’m really pleased that I got the offer to ride his bike; there was no way that I was going to refuse.

There are no brakes – I bet they were state of the art then – and there’s a lot of flex in the chassis. It goes from nothing to lots of power to nothing, I bet they were bloody hard to race. It’s my first time with a right foot shift and I usually ride with a road pattern gear shift. In one corner I changed up a gear when I wanted to brake. It got a bit interesting.

I have ridden two-strokes. I raced Suzuki RGV250s in 1998, but I didn’t expect this bike to be as fast as it is. The noise is very cool. Real two-stroke race bike noise. Our bikes are loud, but this is something else.