Jeremy McWilliams Irish 250cc, MotoGP and Classic racer ... and movie star
Jeremy McWilliams is a racer and tester for hire, ready to take on the ‘the kids’ on a TTF1-style racer or evaluate the latest KTM road bike.
“You don’t want to let these kids walk all over the top of you,” he said. “If you have a name in racing, you can’t just doddle around to make up the numbers. I love Phillip Island and Eastern Creek, and it’s very difficult to go out and not put a hundred per cent into it. I don’t know any other way to ride a motorbike. If I find myself not really trying, I’d be better to stop. And we love coming over and beating the Aussies in their own backyard.”
McWilliams was racing a Yamaha 250 in Northern Ireland, essentially for fun, when he was offered a private Yamaha 500 ride.
“There were only about four short circuits at home and I had decided not to go road racing, even though it was more lucrative. I wanted to get out of the Irish Championship and into the British Championship as quickly as possible and maybe even try to get into some Euros. It really just started as a hobby sport and quite quickly got a little bit more serious. I happened to be winning races around about the time when Joe Miller was running a 500 Grand Prix team. He approached me one day. I nearly fell off my chair. At the time, I had a good full-time job in electronics with Chubb. We did lot of security work in Northern Ireland. I had to give that up when I agreed to go riding for Joe.
“Come ’96, we realised we weren’t really going to go any further with the 500, as there was no real help for privateers. I decided to jump to the 250s and that was the best move in my career. We had a couple of great results on a privateer Honda 250 with a TSR chassis in ’97. In 1998, I finished second at Sachsenring, beating Valentino Rossi and Loris Capirossi. So we were performing above our level on what they called a ‘kit motor’. In 1999 I moved to Aprilia. We had a couple of Italian mechanics and that really got things going; we started getting results, again on a kit engine. That led to a factory ride in 2000 with Aprilia on the V twin 500. So the 250 kind of saw the progression of my career. If I’d stayed with 500s, I’d been out of GPs around about ’97 or ’98, but I had a couple of factory bikes with Aprilia for 2000 and also with Kenny Roberts on the KR3, and 2004 back with Aprilia again.”
McWilliams won the 250 GP at Assen on an Aprilia in 2001.
“We had a bit of a funny story this year, because I met one of my mechanics in Qatar, where I was helping John McPhee in Moto3. He reminded me of the story. I was on the front row with I think it was Tetsuya Harada, Daijiro Kato and Marco Melandri. We had quite a heavy shower and it soaked the circuit before the race. Everybody put wet tyres on. But I kind of stuck my ground with the team and said I wanted immediates. I had a bit of back and forth with the boss at the time, Peter Stafford, but I stuck to my guns. Luckily it worked in my favour or I wouldn’t have been able to come back to the garage. But it started to dry out about lap three or four onwards.
We got a dry line and yeah, the rest is history.”
McWilliams has also appeared in a movie called Under The Skin.
“Sometimes you find yourself in funny situations in this life. I had a call from Jonathan Glazer, the director of a number of movies, asking if I’d like to star alongside Scarlett Johansson. I thought it was one of my mates on the phone winding me up. Then he asked me to parade up and down in front of Skype in my leathers, so he could see what I looked like when I was walking in leathers. I still thought it was a wind up. But my role was Bad Man and it was basically riding the motorbikes very fast through the Scottish highlands, and following Scarlett Johansson about.
“I wouldn’t suggest you go and watch – it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. The Guardian for some reason gave it a five-star review, but they must have been watching something else!”
By Don Cox