JACK VALENTINE
Lancastrian drag ace who turned a passion for speed into a title-winning career
‘Steve and I went straight in at British Championship level’
In the 1990s the sight of V&M Racing’s yellow and red flame paint scheme on a bike’s meant one thing – it was going to be fast! Set up by Jack Valentine and his business partner the late Steve Mellor, this tuning firm took on and defeated the might of HRC at not only the TT but also in British championship-level racing for the best part of 20 years. And it came about thanks to Jack’s determination to turn his hobby into a business. “It all started with me basically being a bit of a hooligan on the road,” remembers Jack. “As a kid I used to find knackered bikes in people’s gardens. I’d do them up and flog them on for £10 profit having thrashed them illegally around the block! I dabbled with trials but gave that up and concentrated on road riding on a Honda CB500 Four as well as the occasional sprint race. I was working for a local engineering firm in Rochdale called Holroyd, so I learnt a trade, and spent my weekends helping out a racer called Roger Taylor, which got me into the engine side of motorcycle racing. At Holroyd’s I also met Steve Mellor, who had graduated from the firm’s apprentice course. Steve had the noisiest and fastest NSU Quickly moped in the area so we hit it off! “In 1978 I bought a new Suzuki GS1000, which was so fast I won a few sprint championships. Things escalated and I ended up racing it all the time. Then in 1981 Steve had been made redundant, so I suggested we set up a company and in 1982 V&M Racing was born with Steve full-time and me leaving my job to join him a year later. I wanted a way to fund my hobby and the answer was setting up V&M Racing! “Steve’s genius was his ability
‘Steve had the noisiest NSU, so we hit it off…’
to set up a bike’s fuelling, he was magic with carbs. Because initially we focused on drag racing with me competing in the European Pro Stock series, we were good at working on a cylinder head to extract power. When we moved towards road racing, this meant our superbike and supersport bikes were absolute rockets as at that time people just blueprinted them and no one had really got to grips with proper head work to gain power. “We had a lot of success in the drag scene but it wasn’t until 1989 that a racer called Dave Leach approached us and asked us to tune his Yamaha FZR600. We did and Dave finished third at the TT, which led to Mick Grant asking us to work on the Durex Suzukis with Mez Mellor and James Whitham and things just
escalated. We never did club-level racing, we went straight in at the British championships. “Throughout the 1990s we took British Supersport titles and race wins with Jim Moodie, Ian Simpson, Iain Duffus to name but a few and also had success on the roads. When 400s were allowed to race at the TT, Leachy took the win with an FZR400 and Jim Moodie still holds the TT lap record for a 400, which was set on one of our bikes. Alongside this we had success with Dave Jefferies at the TT, North West and Ulster and in 1997 Michael Rutter even took a third spot in a wet WSB race at Brands on a V&M Honda RC45. But by 2002 the tuning world had changed to ‘bolt-on’ and V&M shut its doors and I opened up Valmoto, with Steve as the company’s chief engineer. “Valmoto picked up the contract to run Triumph’s Daytona 600 at the TT and in British Supersport. We took a historic TT win with Bruce Anstey and won a British Supersport round but Triumph decided to stop the project so I became a team manager with Foggy Petronas from 2005 until 2006, which is a story in itself! Since then I’ve been a team manager for Crescent Suzuki in BSB and WSB and also JG Speedfit Kawasaki, who took the BSB title in 2018 with Leon Haslam. I’m just as passionate as ever and can’t imagine not being around a race paddock.”