#flashbackfriday takes us back to 2007, for a trip to Spain with Brendan Fairclough. He was a talented young rider on the rise, with UK National titles and a few World Cup podiums under his belt. He had just been signed by Martin Whiteley to join Greg Minnaar and Matti Lehikoinen on Team G-Cross Honda. With the high-tech factory Honda RN-01 bikes, top secret gearbox technology and Showa suspension, they had the best riders and certainly the most exclusive equipment.
The Honda RN-01 was never available to the public, it had a motorcycle style polished aluminium frame and most importantly an internal gearbox which allowed the rider to shift gears without pedalling. For years people speculated as to what was inside, until it was revealed to be just a fairly standard cassette and derailleur. See video from 2007 Worlds in Fort William:
The team won 5 World Cup races on the Honda and Greg Minnaar had already won the 2005 World Cup Overall using it. At the end of 2007, Honda announced they would not be continuing, even though they were happy with how the project went. So the bikes have mostly disappeared, except for a few souvenirs that the team riders kept. And a few that were stolen from the team truck, but have never been seen since.
Here is the original story about Brendan, first published in Dirt Magazine, May 2007
From Zero to Hero
By Victor Lucas.
Everybody starts somewhere, and if you dig around in the old race results you’ll find interesting stuff sometimes. Here’s one from October 2000. At the Pedalhounds Short Course DH Series in Cranleigh, there were 60 kids in the 12–16 Youth category. Lots of names you’ve never heard of, but a few that you’d recognise. One of them was a 12 year old kid from Hampshire called Brendan Fairclough. It was his first year racing downhill and he finished 15th that day. Not bad for starters.
It’s obvious that Brendan just loves to ride his bike, and while he’d be the first to admit it, he has never really trained hard enough; he kept racing, having fun and his results got better. Good enough to get him noticed by people with a keen eye for talent. Like Steve Peat, who (from near obscurity) brought him onto the 2003 Royal Racing/Orange team and started giving the kid some expert advice. By 2004 Brendan was dominating the UK Junior category in both DH and 4X.
2005 saw his big break. He somehow managed to get himself into third spot at the downhill World Cup in Pila, Italy. Then he took silver at his first Junior World Championships in Livigno. Things were beginning to move at a pace, but a string of bad luck caused a few problems in 2006…bikes going missing, mechanicals and a crash in the New Zealand Worlds in his last year as a junior. But he picked himself up from that disappointment and still managed a near amazing fifth place at the ’06 World Cup finals in Schladming, and then took the first ever overall World Cup title for Junior Downhill.
At this point it was obvious that Brendan had talent and ability, if maybe not the discipline and preparation that’s needed to compete at the highest level. So in steps Martin Whiteley (HRC Team Director), and makes him an offer that no racer could refuse, ‘How would you like to ride for Honda?’ To find yourself being offered a ride on the biggest factory team in the world, in your first year as an elite racer, must be pretty amazing.
Martin Whiteley has been around this sport for quite a while, and he knows when the time is right for changes to a rider’s career. And this will mean big changes. Riding the most highly advanced bike, with the most thorough factory support there is. Everything is planned ahead and all the arrangements taken care of, for a full seasons racing. The only things the rider needs to worry about are training, racing and winning. Simple, but serious pressure all the same.
As a new team rider, time on the bike is all important. Especially when there’s a team of highly skilled Honda Racing Corporation technicians waiting to analyse every setting, corner, jump and bump to the finest degree. It’s never too early to start this stuff, so in March, Brendan travelled to the Team G–Cross Honda base near Granada, in Spain for some ‘time on the bike’. Aside from some testing, Brendan also had a mountain of new race gear to collect. When he finally opened all the boxes and got himself kitted out, he said he felt like he had ‘borrowed somebody else’s gear’. He could hardly recognise himself in the photos. The bike and race gear may be new, but the familiar Fairclough style is certainly there too. Ragging through loose corners, foot out and bars dragging in the dirt. It’s the kind of riding that makes the crowd go ‘whoaghh’.
Martin describes Brendan’s riding: ‘There’s a sense of effortless fluidity in the way in which Brendan traverses the most difficult of technical sections, but when he needs to, he can carve like a hybrid skier/moto-crosser, with stability where gravity dictates otherwise.’
After just a day of checking bikes and shooting photos, Brendan left with the team for his first real race of the season. The Maxxis Cup race in Portugal, with a full line up of pro racers, it was like a mini World Cup. Turns out that his new team mate Matti Lehikoinen finished 4th and Brendan finished 8th after a puncture in his second run.
It’s a good start to a season full of opportunity, and Martin describes one of the big goals for Brendan ‘This is a rider who has tasted top level podiums early in his career, so we need to build on that and work towards consistency on all types of race tracks, not just those that feel right for him. He’s coming to a team that has two of the easiest going guys on the circuit, but who happen to be very disciplined and highly trained professionals, and he can learn from them.’
So the big question is – can the young dog learn new tricks, roll with the changes and kick ass at the next level? It’s too early to say, the full story will be told on the race course and it will certainly be exciting to watch. >> END
And here we are 12 years later. The Honda was ahead of its time, there hasn’t been much like it since. But Brendan is as competitive as ever, racing World Cups for Scott, as well as Dark Fest and the Red Bull Rampage
