It’s one thing to know that pros are better. It’s another to watch them do the impossible on your local track, as reader Paul Smith discovered…
The first time I didn’t meet Jake Farnsworth was back in January 2025. I had started doing track days after being hit by a car coming towards me on the wrong side of the road. I thought it would improve my reaction times the next time it happened. So, in January, I was at Luddenham Raceway in Western Sydney.
Not knowing much about the track layout, I decided to watch a YouTube video the night before. It was a three-minute Go Pro clip of a guy in a blue race suit with ‘Jake’ written on the arse. He was quick.
The next day I turned up, and as the safety briefing began, I saw a man milling around wearing a blue T-shirt also with the name Jake written on it. He was older with grey hair. In my ignorance, I thought that it must be Jake.
He looked as though he had been through the gravel traps a few times and I knew from my previous track days that some of these old fellas, despite a few missing teeth and a concession card, were fast, that they had skills.
He was sitting on the benches next to the track, so I walked up and sat down next to him. I admit it wasn’t the best opening line.
“I spent last night looking at your arse.”
Slight pause. “What?”
“I spent last night looking at your arse… you know, on that YouTube video.”
His face darkened slightly and he seemed to be edging away. But I pressed on.
“I mean, you were good to watch, mate. You ride it pretty hard…”
By that point, he was on his feet and before I could fully explain myself – “Hey, mate, don’t leave. I just wanted to…” – he was gone.
I then worried about what would happen if I saw him again (maybe in the toilets?) and we made eye contact. So I avoided him.
It was three months later when I discovered the extent of my faux pas. I was flicking through AMCN when I saw a picture of the real Jake Farnsworth. Not quite so old. In fact, he was a young bloke in his mid twenties.
From the article, I learnt he was making a living as an ASBK rider. Maybe the man I had inadvertently propositioned was a member of his team, or perhaps his dad. I winced.
Late last year, I returned to Luddenham for another open track day. And this would prove to be the second time I didn’t meet Jake Farnsworth.
Jake was there. Later that afternoon, with the skies darkening, me and my friend Brendan sat on the benches and watched him on an empty track do the fastest ever lap round Luddenham – a 46.9. We were the only people who saw it. Everyone else had been packing up the trailers to get home.
I write this because there is something unusual about motorbike racing. Unlike virtually all sports, the limited number of racetracks means that normal, ordinary people can occasionally find themselves side-by-side on track with professional riders.
It wasn’t just Jake. The Christmas before last, I’d been a couple of pit garages away from Senna Agius and his team at Eastern Creek.
This is rare. You don’t for instance get Dave, the bloke who plays centre forward for the local pub team, training with the Manchester City first team. Or Terry, the dad-of-two who put on a few kilos in middle age and can’t run more than 40 metres without risking an asthma attack, mixing it with the South’s Tuesday night training sessions.
But the fact that you can find yourself on track with, say, an ASBK rider breaks the illusion harboured by many people watching sport on TV that some of the athletes they are looking at are a bit shit, chokers with limited talent, maybe not much better than they would be had they been given the same lucky breaks.
A few years ago, I watched Manly vs Roosters at Brookvale Oval. It was in the glory days of Sonny Bill Williams. And, yes, he glided around the pitch under a halo light of genuine stardom. As for most of the others, we noticed very little.
Towards the end of the game, one of the Manly interchanges came on, a man of considerable girth called George Rose. Suddenly, there was an eruption of ‘‘Who ate all the pies?’’ going round the ground. And, from that point on, every time he touched the ball, he lit our faces with frivolity.
‘‘A fat man with no skills! A fat man with no skills!’’ It occurred to none of us that, had George turned up at the local park, he would have crushed skulls.
The gap between you and virtually any professional athlete – not the superstar GOATs, just those who make a living, pay the mortgage, put food on the table without riches or fame, the so-called journeymen – is vast.
That guy who thrashes the bloke who always beats the fella who thrashes your best mate who regularly kicks your arse when it comes to your Sunday evening match at the tennis club down the road, yes, that guy probably has some claim, maybe, to getting somewhere close to being George, probably, if he’s lucky.
And so it was with Jake Farnsworth among us at Luddenham last month. Even those fast group riders who I always thought were existing in different realities from myself were rendered slightly above general mediocrity by his presence. He monstered them.
It is worth mentioning here that Luddenham is a small circuit, best suited to bikes under 60bhp and 160kg. The straights are short, the turns tight.
But when we watched Jake that afternoon on an R6, he changed its physics.
The straight at the back end with the bumps became a 150km/h corner, knee down. It then tightens and twists into a downhill spiral. To me, it’s eyeballs on stalks when taken at speed. He floated through those turns going twice the velocity.
And looking at him we couldn’t unpick the phases he went through – the braking, the tip-in, that moment as you wait for the apex before pushing the bike and cracking the throttle, because unlike even the fastest riders that afternoon, there were no hesitations, no pauses. It was seamless and unflustered.
When he came around the last corner and we were looking at him head on, for the briefest of moments it all stopped. He and the bike were held suspended in time. And then came the noise-rush of mechanical violence as he ripped past, returning the world back to life.
On the Instagram video Jake posted the following day, you can just about make out the speedo, about 180km/h before he tips into the first corner – a corner blinded by the concrete wall the Luddenham track designer included for the billboards.
To offer some perspective, if that corner was on a street, it would have a 40km/h sign with one of those convex mirrors on the outside.
I hung around after Jake left the track, thinking I would introduce myself, mumble something stupid to a kid half my age.
But the old fella was there, rummaging around in the tool kit. I was still worried he would remember me from our brief encounter, worried that there could be another unfortunate misunderstanding.
Our eyes met and I could see him working out why I looked familiar. I got on my bike for a hasty exit before the penny dropped.
