The Oxley interview
Davey Todd is as happy racing around Brands Hatch as he is racing at the TT. But he has no doubt whatsoever which gives him the biggest kick
By Mat Oxley - Mat is a TT winner, endurance racer, author and MotoGP paddock insider
Racing motorcycles around short circuits and racing motorcycles around the Isle of Man are different games with a similar genesis, like football and rugby, cricket and baseball. That’s why it’s very rare for a rider to succeed at both. During the past halfcentury or so only a handful of riders have won a British championship and a TT in the same year.
Reigning British Superstock champion and 2024 Senior TT winner Davey Todd is one of them.
The 29-year-old Yorkshireman is therefore the perfect person to answer the big question: how do you compare the thrill of riding at the TT with riding around Brands Hatch or Thruxton?
‘The buzz is a million times more riding around the TT than riding around a short circuit – if I was to estimate it, on average, about a million times more,’ says Todd, wearing the mischievous grin that rarely leaves his face. ‘I genuinely love riding around short circuits, but once you’ve ridden the TT, nothing else is the same, nothing else gives you the same buzz.
‘In a sense, riding the TT sort of ruins everything else in your life, because once you’ve had that level of buzz and thrill, that level of adrenaline, you can’t get it from anything else. I do all kinds of extreme sports – skydiving, bungee jumping, snowboarding – striving to get that buzz from something else, but I don’t think it’s possible.’
Todd made his Isle of Man debut in 2018. He scored his first TT wins last June – beating established Island stars Peter Hickman and Michael Dunlop into second and third in the Superstock race, then two days later winning the main event, the Senior. Todd and Hickman both combine the TT with British Superbikes, so no one knows better how the two disciplines demand different riding techniques.
‘Gone are the days when people rode the TT at 90 per cent with a soft bike set-up,’ Todd says. ‘We’re pushing. Up on the mountain you’re riding as hard as you do on short circuits; you’re sliding, you’re getting your elbows down in a lot of places.
‘For me, a 132mph lap is comfortable. A 135mph lap is something else. You’re pushing as hard as you do at BSB but you ride the bike totally differently. You’re not rushing into corners on the front, because that’s not how you gain time. You have to weight the rear of the bike, take the weight off the front, otherwise the bike ties itself in knots.
‘You can soften the overall set-up for the bumpy parts, but then you can’t ride fast in the smooth parts, like the mountain, so you’ve got to learn to ride and adapt to a bike that isn’t perfect in many sections of the course.
‘There’s fast, slow, bumpy, smooth, old surfaces, new surfaces… everything. That’s what I love about it. If someone said we can make it all smooth like Donington Park, it would ruin it, because that’s part of the charm and challenge of the TT – you have to adapt to the different sections and ride differently. That’s why not every BSB rider who goes to the TT wins races.’
Todd – a bright and engaging conversationalist – started out racing motocross when he was a kid. He didn’t know it back then, but he was preparing himself for the TT, which nowadays is basically 200mph motocross with slick tyres on asphalt.
‘I’m a motocross rider, so I’m used to jumps and bumps. Some TT sections are bumpy as hell, like Ginger Hall to Ramsey. There’s nothing on earth like that section. You have to ride it like you’re riding a motocross bike; specifically, like you ride in sand – keep the weight back and keep on the gas – because as soon as you chop the gas, the weight goes to the front and you have a huge tank-slapper. You have to ride the bumps by wheelieing over them.
‘In motocross you stand up all the time – you get told not to sit down – so I’m used to standing in a squatting position like a motocross rider. That’s what you have to do around the TT – you barely sit down. People don’t understand how little pressure you put into the seat. Even when you sit down you’re taking all the weight through your legs and the footpegs.
‘Going from the TT to BSB and back again, you’ve got to be able to switch your mindset and notice every detail about your riding, about what makes you fast, then completely change your riding style from one week to the next.
‘At short circuits you gain loads of time by rushing into corners. I gain a lot of time by being extremely strong on the brakes and corner entry, but if I do that at the TT, I’ll lose time. On a short circuit it doesn’t usually matter if you sacrifice your exit speed because you’re straight into another corner, but at the TT there’s long straights after most corners, so you can’t sacrifice your exits, you need to make sure your exits are very strong every time.
‘And you’re not necessarily riding on the racing line, because there’s a manhole, or there’s a really bad bit of road, or the camber really drops away at the side of the road, so you can’t run all the way to the left side of the track before a right-hander, so you have to go into the corner in the middle of the track, which is something you’d never do on a short circuit. You have to be aware of all these things.’
After this year’s TT, Todd will have to reprogramme his brain once again for July’s BSB rounds at Snetterton and Brands. But changing his riding style won’t be the only issue.
‘At the first couple of BSB rounds after the TT I’m genuinely sat on the grid with absolutely zero feeling inside me,’ he says. ‘I could fall asleep. I’m trying to get myself psyched for the race, but there’s nothing. You feel dead inside. The last two weeks have used up your next six months of adrenaline, so you’re sat on the grid and you feel like you’re sat on the sofa watching Netflix. It’s weird. Weird.’
Todd’s father was a motorcycle nut whose obsession grew even bigger in his son. ‘My dad has been obsessed with bikes since he was a kid,’ he says. ‘He never raced but he had road bikes and dirt bikes. From when I was born all I remember is watching racing on TV – that’s all that was on in our house. Motocross, supercross, the TT, MotoGP… I used to beg dad to let me watch the supercross from the US at two in the morning, so he’d record it on a VHS.
‘Racing was the only thing I wanted to do. I don’t remember a time I didn’t want to race motorbikes.’
When Todd was three his mum and dad bought him a Honda QR50 mini-motocross bike. He started motocross three years later, winning club championships, national junior enduro titles and graduating to national events.
‘My heroes were Jeremy McGrath, Ricky Carmichael and Stefan Everts, so I wanted to be a motocross or supercross racer,’ he says. ‘But I had a lot of injuries and broke a lot of bones, which is normal in motocross. When I was 15 I broke my tibia and fibula; messed up the leg pretty bad. The doctors talked about amputating the leg and said I should never ride bikes again. My family were pretty worried about me losing a leg, but I was just, like, “can I race next week?”. Honestly, stopping racing didn’t cross my mind for a second.’
Todd didn’t stop racing but he did switch from dirt to asphalt. ‘When people ask me why, I say I needed to do something a bit safer, so I went to the TT – which leaves them a bit confused! Some friends had moved across to tarmac and did pretty well straight away, so I sold my dirt bikes and bought a 600, thinking how hard can it be?
‘Motocross is a lot simpler – you get your bike, set it up and away you go. I thought riding a sportsbike would be the same. Definitely not – we were met with a lot of challenges.’
Todd started the process of switching disciplines by doing a few trackdays before his first road race meet, the 2015 season-opening Thundersport Stock 600 round at Brands Hatch.
‘It was a weird transition, extremely alien. You have to get your head around the body position thing – in motocross you sit upright and lean the bike over; in road racing you lean off the bike with your knee down. I had these little goals set in my head: my first trackday, at Anglesey, I got my knee down; my third trackday, I got my elbow down.’
Todd won the 2015 Thundersport Stock 600 title, failing to stand on the podium only once – his road race weekend debut at Brands. No wonder several teams were chasing his signature for a ride in the 2016 BSB 600 championship. But all that glitters is not gold. ‘All these teams were asking me to ride but they wanted, like, £80,000. Those numbers were insane to me and my family, absolutely no way was it possible. Then one of them offered me a ride for £20,000, which I raised through sponsorship and working. But they took my money and shafted me. That was me done. I’d gone from thinking I’d made it to thinking I’ll never race again.’
The TT wasn’t in Todd’s plans, but his world changed forever in May 2017 when he got a call from World Supersport rider Tom Booth-Amos.
‘Tom and I are good friends – we’d raced supermoto together a bit,’ says Todd. ‘He was at the TT with his dad, who was working as a mechanic for Sam West. He said: “You’ve got to get out to the TT – it’s awesome. You’ll be blown away.” But I couldn’t even afford a flight. He said: “Just get out here.”
‘I blagged a plane ticket and ended up sleeping on the floor of someone’s race truck for two weeks – no blankets, under a jacket, backpack for a pillow. Tom took me to the top of Bray Hill. We climbed over a fence and as soon as the first bikes came through, I thought, whatever it takes, I need to have a go at this. I got the buzz for it immediately.’
Word got out that Todd was up for racing between the hedges, so an Irish team got in touch. ‘They paid for the ferry over in my little VW Caddy van, which I slept in for four months. We did the Skerries, Armoy and the Ulster GP. I was just hooked and couldn’t wait to do the TT but knew I had to learn the course, so every day I watched onboards and borrowed my little brother’s PlayStation to play the TT game, to the point where I was second in the game’s world leader board.’
His first TT in 2018 started with a 16th place in the Superbike race and ended with ninth in the Senior. Impressive. The following June he was sixth in the Senior. When the event returned following Covid he achieved his first podium, behind Hickman and Conor Cummins in the Superstock race. But his big breakthrough came last year: Supersport and Superbike podiums, and Superstock and Senior victories.
A new TT force had arrived. All talent, obviously…
‘I get a bit offended when people say “you’re so talented!”,’ he says. ‘I’m, like: “I work really hard, that’s why I won!”
‘Maybe I do have some talent, but I haven’t just turned up at the race and won because I’m talented. I’ve spent every waking moment for the past 12 months working towards this, or even the previous 29 years of my life. I’ve always been obsessed with motorbikes and racing – that’s where it comes from.
‘I’m living the dream. I used to say when I was younger that if someone offered me the minimum wage and said “we’ll pay for your racing for the rest of your life”, I’d have ripped their hand off. That’s all I want, to be able to ride motorbikes all the time.’ Todd has one target for TT 2025, when he will ride BMW S1000RRs for 8TEN Racing (Todd and Hickman are part owners of the team) in the Superbike, Senior and Superstock races; and a Honda CBR600RR and a Paton for Padgetts in the Supersport and Supertwins races (he won the 2022 British Superstock title aboard a Padgetts Honda Fireblade).
‘Obviously you always strive for more – I want to win every race. That’s what I’m going there to do – otherwise what’s the point?’
Davey Todd CV
Born: 14 September 1995 Lives: Saltburn-on-Sea, North Yorkshire
» 2015 Thundersport Stock 600 champion
» 2016 6th British Superstock 600 championship
» 2017 3rd Armoy Superbike race
» 2018 9th Senior TT
» 2019 North West 200 Supersport race winner
» 2022 British Superstock champion, 3rd Superstock TT
» 2023 4th Supersport TT, Superstock TT
» 2024 British Superstock champion, Senior TT winner
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