Publication date: 13th October
RRP: GBP17.99
ISBN: 1 85227 239 2
Published by VirginTalent and tragedy...
Let's be honest, few 25-year-olds could fill a book about their lives. Autobiographies are for older people - with years of experiences and adventures to relate. James Toseland is different. Very different.
World Superbike Champion in 2004, Toseland has packed a lifetime into his 25 years and suffered more disappointments and emotional turmoil than anybody should ever have to endure. Like a real-life Billy Elliot, Toseland was a kid from a North-East working class family, who was raised in a caravan then a council house by a single parent. He began to play the piano when he was just six and had professional tuition from age eight to 16. At junior school, the kids considered him camp. He was a tiny, skinny boy with braces on his teeth and he wore glasses. They called him 'the pianist', as if the words were a disease. Toseland achieved grade 6 - not quite enough to guarantee a place at the College of Music in London - and then stopped.
His father had walked out of the home when he was just three years old and a few years later, his mother's fiance, Ken, became Toseland's father figure. Ken was a superb pianist and a motorcycle fanatic. He took James under his wing as his own son, helped mould his personality and bought him his first motorbike. However, while James was burning up this bike on old slag piles his mother was struggling to make ends meet. And although James and Ken got on well, his mother and Ken began to argue. As Toseland says in the book: "The shouting was violent, I used to put a pillow over my head to shut out the yelling and the hurt the rows caused me to suffer."
As Toseland's interest in motorbikes grew, Ken continued to provide support - taking him to races all across the country.
Early competition in trials and motocross brought an impressive haul of trophies and awards before James set his sights on a career in road racing. Meanwhile, his mother had become frail and depressed - because of her relationship with Ken. At the age of 13, James took the difficult decision to drop his ties with the only father he had known and to support his mother. Tragedy struck when shortly afterwards Ken committed suicide. Using racing as an escape from his difficult home life, Toseland quickly worked his way up through the ranks of 125cc racing and into Supersport, winning the CB500 Cup on the way. His first season in British Supersport, at the age of 16, resulted in a third place overall.
In 1998, James was chosen by Castrol Honda to ride the CBR600 in the World Supersport Championship. Never one to turn down a challenge, in the next two seasons James finished 18th and 11th overall before returning to Britain to ride in the 2000 British Superbike Championship. Despite missing almost half the season through injury, James finished 12th overall and was snapped up by GSE Racing for their World Superbike campaign. An impressive thirteenth place in the 2001 championship, including sixth at Brands Hatch, was enough to confirm the rider as a permanent fixture on the WSBK grid.
In just his second year in WSBK in 2002, he became a regular top six finisher and scored his first-ever podium finish at Assen, while in 2003 he ended Hodgson's winning streak with an impressive win at Oschersleben and then earned his first pole position in the final round at Magny-Cours.
James Toseland caused a few eyebrows to be raised in 2004 when he became the youngest-ever winner of the World Superbike championship. Following in the footsteps of Carl 'The King' Fogarty and fellow Brit, Neil Hodgson, the 24 year-old from Sheffield put together an extraordinary final part of the season, with two wins and three seconds in the last six races, to lift the title in the final round at Magny-Cours.
As with his personal life, Toseland's racing career has been full of incidents too. He has undergone nine operations as a result of spectacular crashes and a collision in Monza, Italy, left James seriously injured and his Honda team-mate dead.
Toseland still plays the piano - to wind down after races. He plays about 20 gigs a year, can frequently be seen supporting a Robbie Williams tribute band, and more recently performed with the legendary Jools Holland.
Helping Toseland to write his life story, Ted Macauley, was the Daily Mirror's Sports Feature Writer for 35 years specialising in Formula One and Grand Prix Motorbike Racing. He was Mike Hailwood's manager and has written Bobby Charlton's international Football Books and, more recently, Grand Prix Men by Andre Deutsch.
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