have since met Jimmie’s widow, Isabel, and his son, Jimmie Guthrie Junior. Young Jimmy’s one ambition was to win a race on the TT Mountain circuit on which his father had won six times and he actually achieved that in the late ’60s when he won the Manx Grand Prix. After that, he quit racing and moved to South Africa but he came back to Hawick in 1987 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his dad’s death. I had just won my first TT a couple of months prior to his visit and I met him at a reception. He was really friendly with me because I’d won a race and because he had known my father. Little did either of us know then that I’d go on to win even more TTs than the great man himself and at speeds that Jimmie could never even have dreamed of.
The first proper steps I took towards achieving a TT victory came in the spring of 1979 when my dad asked if I wanted to have a stab at road racing. Too bloody right I did! He bought me an old Bultaco rolling chassis and we slotted the CR125cc Honda engine from my motocross bike into it. Well, believe me when I say you have never seen such a fucking lash-up in all your life. We had bits of plywood and all sorts of other crap acting as brackets until we got the chain lined up and then we got the local blacksmith to machine some better parts out of metal. They made the bike look marginally better but it was still a hell of a mess to look at. There were no shiny new race bikes for me when I started out.
But I must make a bit of a confession here before I go any further. I have always told the press that I started racing in 1983 but my first road race was actually in 1979. I didn’t do a lot of racing between ’79 and ’83 (for reasons which will become clear), so I didn’t want the media to think I’d been racing seriously for all those years and hadn’t gotten anywhere. It’s a bit like the way many racers these days lie about their age because they think it will improve their chances of getting a decent ride. You know who you are.
But anyway, my first race was actually at Croft near Darlington in North Yorkshire in 1979 and my outstanding memory of that meeting was a moment in practice in a combined 125/250cc session. I was riding my little 125 with my orange novice bib on and going down the main straight as fast as I could, thinking nobody could get past me. There was about two feet on the outside of the circuit between the grass and myself as I lined up for the next left-hand corner. As I shut the throttle and sat up to brake for the corner the local 250cc champion came past me on the outside between me and the grass and hooked up another gear! He wasn’t even thinking about braking then and yet I was thinking, ‘Fuckin’ hell, these boys are a bit fast.’ I still enjoyed it though and ended up finishing twenty-first in a field of around 30.
In my second race of the afternoon I was lying about twelfth following a big group of riders off the starting grid and into the first corner. They were all sitting behind each other like a row of ducklings and I wondered why they were doing that. I thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to ride round them all and take the corner.’ Bad move! So in only my second race, I had my first crash. I actually got past four or five of the riders but then some bloke lost the front end, slid off, and took me out with him. Served me right for trying to be a smart arse I suppose!
When I wasn’t tinkering with my race bike back home, I’d ride my Yamaha RD125 road bike to my papa’s in Jedburgh, dump it there and meet up with my mates in town for a few under-age drinks. We weren’t old enough to buy drink then so we’d give our money to some older boys and ask them to get some beer for us. Then we’d sink it in the River Jed to cool it before drinking it straight down and heading off to the Town Hall dance. There was usually a live band on at the Town Hall in those days and I invariably pulled a girl I knew from school and tickled her tonsils for a bit or even got to have a bit of a fumble if I was really lucky. If she got unlucky, I’d puke on her good dress before stumbling back to my papa’s, quite often finding him lying in the gutter on the way home!
He drank a lot after my nana died and nine times out of 10, I’d find him lying by the side of the pavement drunk and have to pick him up and help him home, poor old sod. Then I’d jump on my bike and ride the back roads home. I had passed my test by that point but I’d have soon lost my licence if I’d been breathalysed on one of those trips though somehow I managed to avoid getting caught.
I could have had a 250cc bike if I’d wanted to but I prided myself on being able to thrash bigger bikes on my little 125. I used to smoke Suzuki X7250s and Yamaha RD250s with no problem. It was even more fun because I knew who everyone else was when I saw them on a bike and you can be sure they knew who I was. I loved kicking other riders’ arses like that.
I’m sure some of the old boys in the area tell tales nowadays about me tearing round the farm roads on bikes just like the tales I used to hear about Jimmy Guthrie. ‘Aye, that young Hislop eedjit – ah remember him hairin’ roond thay roads thinkin’ he was a TT racer whun he wuz jist a slip o’ a lad.’
But my carefree youth, playing at silly buggers came to an abrupt end on 27 September 1979 in the early hours of a Friday morning. Mum, dad, Garry and I had eaten our tea that night and dad then finished off some bookwork in his little office before we all went to bed. In the early hours of the morning I heard this terrible moaning and groaning coming from my parents’ room so I bolted through to see what the hell was going on. My mum was running out of the room in a real panic shouting, ‘It’s your dad, it’s your dad – there’s something wrong!’ I ran to the bed and turned my dad on his side thinking he might be choking on something. I put my fingers into his mouth and pulled his tongue out too so that he could breathe freely but then he just suddenly stopped groaning and went totally limp as I held him. He died right there in my arms. It was like a scene from a movie that you hope will never happen to you; holding your own father as he dies. As far as we knew, he had been in perfect health up to that point but he died of a massive heart attack right there and then at just 43 years old.
I’m still haunted by the thought that maybe I could have done more to save him and I often wish I’d known more about first aid but I suppose there was nothing else I could have done. Needless to say, we were all completely and utterly devastated by our loss. I was so close to my dad and he had done so much for me, not just with bikes but in every aspect of life. He had given up his beloved racing so he could pay for our upbringing and he had worked really hard to get us little extras. I’d probably never have gone into bike racing if it hadn’t been for my dad because he was the one who really encouraged Garry and I to ride and race.
In the end, I think dad just took on too much. He had his business to run, he played in a band, he took Garry and I racing, did his own racing and rode horses in many of the Border’s festivals. Even by a younger man’s standards that’s a busy schedule.
I was just 17, Garry was only 16 and we had lost our dad who was as much a friend to us as a father. It was a terrible thing to have to come to terms with at an age when we really needed him for guidance and it’s a blow I’ve never really recovered from. I’m sure I’d be a very different person now if my dad were still alive.
I took a few days off work and then went to the funeral a week later and that was it – all over. We were now a single parent family and knew that life was about to get a whole lot tougher. My mum said there was no way she could continue living in the house which our father had practically built from scratch as the memories were just too painful, so we sold up and moved to Denholm in early 1980. It was only while writing this book that she told me we actually needed to sell the house for money as well because there was some kind of ‘death tax’ that had to be paid.
Mum continued working at the mills in Hawick but money was tight for us all and I was forced to quit racing. There was no way I could carry on with a wage of just over £26 a week, especially as I had to help out with money round the house now that I had no father to bring money in. Garry was too old for schoolboy motocross by that point so he packed that in and it looked like the end of racing for our family. My little 125 Honda sat in the garage along with my dad’s 350cc Aermacchi and neither turned a wheel for a long time. It appeared the dream was over.
From that point on, the three of us just worked and survived in a kind of numbed quietness, and it was at this time that I started taking an interest in cars. I had to get my licence to test cars at work anyway but it proved to be easier said than done. I failed my first attempt for being far too confident and driving too fast; I was just