Born in                                  : 1980

Current Machine              : Yamaha

I’m not especially into old bikes, it just love riding bikes – any bikes. I started watching racing in ‘94, so this is a bit early for me.

I was just an itch in my dad’s underpants when this was being raced. He was a bit of a Kenny Roberts fan. He’s been ringing me all weekend asking what the bikes like.

You’ve got to ride it like a 125 motocross bike. You have to be really committed and ride it near the limit the whole time or it just doesn’t want to know. Obviously, that’s quite hard when you’ve had so little time on the bike. Fortunately this is a left foot change with a race pattern, like on my bike, so I didn’t have to worry about a right foot shift.

Ii only makes power when you open it up. The brakes don’t work and it doesn’t handle in the way that our bikes do now. With what they rode then I don’t understand how they got the lap times. This has a really low center of gravity and a light front end; it’s just the total opposite of what we have now.

Kenny is a legend. I spoke to him about the bike at the GP last weekend. He said I’d enjoy it, but he told me to make sure I looked after it. He’ll be glad we kept it in one piece.