Tai Woffinden - Raw Speed--The Autobiography of the Three-Times World Speedway Champion

Published by John Blake Publishing,

The Plaza,

535 Kings Road,

Chelsea Harbour,

London SW10 0SZ

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First published in hardback in 2019

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78606-278-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78946-158-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design by www.envydesign.co.uk

Text copyright Tai Woffinden and Peter Oakes 2019

The right of Tai Woffinden and Peter Oakes to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright-holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

John Blake Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

For Dad, my best friend, my teacher, my travelling companion, my father. Everything I have achieved came from what he taught me about life and how to live it.

T o become a world champion at any sport you need the right people alongside you, and every individual victory is because of THE TEAM.

There are so many people who have played a part in my story and I dont want to miss anyone out. They all know who they are and they will always have my grateful thanks. Those who have supported me throughout my racing life, those who have sponsored me over the years (some when I was a virtually unknown fifteen-year-old over from Australia), members of my pit crew who have worked tirelessly to ensure I went out with the best chance of winning every race, those who have driven thousands of miles to make sure both I and my machinery got to where they needed to be on time.

My thanks to each and every one of you who have, at one time or another, been such an invaluable part of TEAM WOFFINDEN.

TAI WOFFINDEN

My thanks to all those who helped jog Tais memory and recall what happened in his too-young-to-remember days, especially all his family members, including wife Faye, mum Sue, nan Cynthi, parents-in-law Sean and Tracy, Neil Machin, Pete Adams, Rob Lyon, Steve Johnston, Andrew Skeels, Len Silver, Jarek Trojanowski, the legend Andi Gordon and Josh Gudgeon.

To list everyone else who has contributed in one way or another would risk missing someone out, but they know who they are, and life would have been far more difficult without their help and assistance.

PETER OAKES

I f you asked me to describe myself in four words Id say: focused, loving, crazy and loyal.

Focused, because I have been since I decided to stop dicking about partying and concentrated on trying to be the best in the world.

Loving, because Im devoted to my wife Faye and our little girl Rylee-Cru, and longing for the day when her baby sister arrives this autumn.

Crazy, in the sense that I could never resist a challenge, however bizarre or dangerous it might seem. If someone dared me to jump off a building no matter how many storeys high, I would probably do it without even checking what was below!

And loyal, to the people around me I have had virtually the same pit team for a decade and my philosophy is, if it aint broken why change it? and to my clubs in three different countries.

That just about sums me up, and I guess one of the reasons I wanted to write my autobiography is so that people can understand me on a deeper level than just this bloke who has tattoos and a lust for racing a motorcycle that doesnt have brakes.

I want everyone to know where I have come from, what I have been through, what I have overcome along the way, how hard I have worked since I stopped partying, and what it has taken to get where I am today. I have raced, and continue to race, motorbikes for a living, and I have grasped the opportunity to do that with both hands.

I came back to Europe when I was fifteen, my dad died when I was in my late teens, I went off the rails, came to my senses, and since then have won three world speedway titles.

Not once in my career did I ask anyone like Tony Rickardsson, who won the World Championship six times, or Jason Crump, the only Australian to be a three-time World Champion, or other people at the top of the sport how I should live and what I needed to do to achieve what they had achieved in speedway.

I want to give all the kids everything I know; every bit of knowledge I have in my head I will willingly give them. Im not worried about giving away my secrets. Why should I be? By the time they have made it as far as the Grand Prix, I will probably be retired so its not going to disadvantage me in any way. I hope that by reading my story they will avoid some of the pitfalls and learn from my mistakes.

In some ways I have been fortunate to have had a career at all ... I must have been only a split second away from death when I was still at school, and even before that I could have lost two or three fingers after foolishly reaching down to see if the chain on my push bike was tight enough.

We had some BMX jumps down the front of our house in Australia and I kept snapping chains, so I bought a heavy-duty chain and fitted it. Not long afterwards, riding through the park on my way to school, I reached down to check the tension. I knew there was a steel pole in the middle of the park and while I was checking the chain I looked up to see where the pole was. As I did so I must have pushed down on the pedals, with the result that I chopped off the end of the middle finger of my right hand, the blood spraying out.

I went straight to the deputy head at school, they called my mum and we went to the nearest hospital, where we sat for six hours with my finger still bleeding.

When we did eventually see someone we were told they couldnt do anything for me and that I had to go to the city hospital for plastic surgery. But although I had cut off the top of my finger at eight oclock in the morning, it wasnt until around twenty-four hours later that they operated, attaching my finger to a flap of skin at the bottom of my thumb. It stayed like that for six weeks and then they cut my finger away from the thumb, so that the hand could function normally again. Fortunately, it has been okay ever since, but it could have ended up differently, and perhaps Id never have been able to ride a bike again.