Dakar Trucks, Crazy Italy And a Blast From The Past…Catch up With James Toseland
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010Hi everyone, I thought it was time to update you on my year so far! After we got back from Australia I finally moved into my new home on the Isle of Man, I got my piano and all my furniture in and everything has now been decorated so it feels like home. As I’m sure you all saw I hurt my hand in my crash out there, and spent quite a lot of time working to get it back to full fitness. When I was back on the Isle of Man I spent a lot of time in a hypobaric chamber, which is something divers use when they get the bends from coming up to the surface too quickly. When you are inside you are breathing 100% pure oxygen which generates more red blood cells in your blood. These cells enable you to heal more quickly which speeds up the process of getting my hand back to 100% fitness which it is now.
My new nephew was born on the 2nd of March, he was supposed to arrive on race day in Phillip Island but he managed to hold on until I got home, and was literally born within an hour of me getting back and getting to the hospital!
I’ve been playing quite a bit with the band, I had a great gig in Glasgow before we went to Misano for our Superbike test. It was on an old ferry which had been converted into a nightclub, it was pretty cool. Unfortunately this was when the volcano in Iceland started to erupt, and I had a shop opening for Yamaha to attend in the south of England the next day along with appointments in London to keep. It turned into a proper road trip for me, travelling the full length of the country from one end to the other!
I also played my first proper solo gig which was at a university in Peterborough, they organisers had rented out a student hall for it, and there were at least 500 people there. It was my Grandmother’s birthday on the same day so she was there, my brother and the rest of our family all got on stage and we all sang happy birthday to her which was cool. I’m writing some new songs at the moment to perform, but I still need to add the words to them. I usually write the melody first on the piano then see what happens in my life to give me inspiration for the words.
We had quite a cool media event before the Assen round, we were taken to a small forest near the race track, where they had a selection of Dakar trucks and buggies waiting for us. We got to drive the buggies around, and were then taken for a ride in the Dakar trucks. It was pretty impressive, flying through the trees sideways in an eight ton lorry is an experience I can tell you!
I played a gig in Milan at the Union Yamaha dealership with Crash before Monza, it was a great gig inside the dealership itself. A really strange thing happened after the show, a guy wanted me to come 200 metres down the road to an apartment block with him. It turned out he wanted to have a picture taken with me and him and his Ducati. I thought it was replica, when he opened the garage it was my 2002 GSE Ducati racebike, from my first ever superbike podium in Assen 2002! I never would have thought I would find my old racebike in an apartment block in Milan next to a lawnmower.
When we arrive in Monza we went down to see the Yamaha workshops and offices, it’s very much the team home race as they are based literally 2km from the circuit itself. It’s always nice to say hello to the other members of the Yamaha family you don’t normally get to meet, they are very loyal fans!
The Monza race itself was crazy, we’ve been working hard as a team and are now really competitive and fast, but that track is so dangerous for us now. The first race was great and I was really looking forward to getting out for the second and getting on the podium again when I got caught up on the opening lap going into the first chicane. It was a big crash, and I took a hug bump to the head. The guys in Clinica Mobile and the local Monza hospital were amazing, I got fantastic professional treatment and was very happy to be back at the circuit later that night after a couple of scans to make sure everything was ok.
That’s about all for now, I’ll catch up with you again when I get back from America and let you know how it’s all been going.
Cheers
james
