Here he is, Brit Neil Hodgson. Heeeey! What the ... Do they even make British people with beautiful teeth? Guess so.

Editor's note: I had an opportunity to spend a few hours with Neil Hodgson during the rain delay at the recent Dunlop test at Daytona.
I’d heard stories about him for years—stories about his unusual rise to fame and wanted to ask him about it.

If you knew Neil Hodgson ten or fifteen years ago, it would seem nearly incomprehensible that he’s now a professional motorcycle racer; he appeared such an unlikely candidate for the cut-and-thrust, winner-take-all world of motorbike racing.

Those who knew him then tend to describe Hodgson using a word you don’t hear too often regarding professional racers: normal. Hodgson, they say, was just a normal bloke, living a normal life. To all intents and purposes, he still is and still does, having somehow managed to display the fearlessness, speed and focus of the professional racer, while simultaneously keeping his ego in check—hardly the norm in the world of professional motorsports.

A nice story illustrating Hodgson's normalcy, friendliness is told every so often by Soup's Webmaster Tim Huntington. I've heard it a time or two and have asked him to re-tell it here. Read on:

Dean Adams: Where'd you grow up in England?

Neil Hodgson: I was born in Burnley, and that's where I grew up. It's a town in the northwest of England. The region is called Lancashire. It's a real sort of - Lancashire and Yorkshire, which is the next big region, they're real biking areas. It's sort of famous for producing good bike racers.

Q. What's the region like?

A. It's industrial. Real working-class. It's the opposite to London. If you're brought up in or around London, you usually come from money. Where I come from, it's just real working-class people, villages, small towns, and a lot of greenery.

Q. Do you have brothers and sisters?

A. I've got an older brother who's two and a half years older than me. My mum and dad are still together. They both still work. I come from a real normal family.

Q. What was the house you grew up in like?

A. From being born to being 16, we lived in three different houses. We always slowly improved. We used to live in this little semi-detached house in a really rough area, up to being about six years old. Then we lived in a new estate in a little detached house 'til I was about 12. Then we moved to a farmhouse. We went really up in the world and moved to this sort of derelict farmhouse that my dad was "remodeling", heh, should we say. Fifteen years later, he's still remodeling it. My dad's, unfortunately, a real perfectionist who has to do everything his own way. So it's just one of those nightmare jobs that's still going on.

Q. Do you remember the first time you saw a motorcycle?

A. I've always been around them. So I can't remember the first day, but I remember - my first memories of my dad being in the garage working on motorbikes. My dad smelling of petrol.

Q. In the home garage?

"I started riding when I was about five or six. But genuinely didn't really like it, and was always petrified and didn't really want to ride."

A. Yes. He raced, just local club events. He couldn't really afford to race. It was the original shoestring. My mum and dad were really young when they got married and they had my brother. They were only 16 and 17. They'd got no money at all, so my dad worked three different jobs. That sort of style. He managed to scrape together just enough money to go and do a few club race meetings. Because he was passionate about bikes.

Q. What kind of bikes did he own?

A. He used to race little single-cylinders. He was always building a bike. It was always like that. I can remember always being in the garage and welding a frame, or.... It was just bodge racing, you know what I mean. It's like the original old-school, grassroots, build your own bike and go racing.

Q. Then you started racing really early, right?

A. I started riding quite early. I started riding when I was about five or six. But genuinely didn't really like it, and was always petrified and didn't really want to ride. And my brother was - because he was two and a half years older, he was quite good, and he used to do all the riding. And I remember always being scared and not really wanting to ride, and sort of turning up in that horrible feeling when my dad used to start the bike. "Oh no, I've got to ride the thing around this field." (Laughs) I was really pushed into it to start with.

Q. How old were you then?

A. I'd be about five. And I hated it, really, to be honest. I crashed a few times early on and scared myself. I remember I burnt my leg on the exhaust. Little things like that, when you're a kid, are big things. "Why do I want to ride these things?"

So I was sort of pushed into it, for probably a good couple of years, and then I started to enjoy it. Then when I was nine - actually, when I was probably eight, I went to watch a motocross meeting (race), and I saw all the kids riding around, and instantly I enjoyed watching it, and I said to my dad, "Oh, I'd like to do that." Because I was quite a competitive young kid. I didn't see a point in riding round on a bike. I actually didn't realize you could race them. It's a bit like that.

A strange thing happened then. My dad said, "Okay, we can go racing," so we went racing, and my brother didn't want to race—which was dead weird. He was the good rider out of the two of us. But later on, two or three years later, after I'd started racing, then my brother decided he'd have a go as well.

Q. How was it between you two when you were both racing?

A. We never raced against each other, really. Because I started racing, I instantly improved leaps and bounds from being a crap rider who's riding around a field. I was always better than him, really.

Q. Did you push it in his face? You're the younger kid. Roost him?

A. No, not really.

Q. Come on.

A. No, it was really no competition to me. I was quite a bit better than him.

Q. That set off your motocross career in England?

A. I did these sort of typical club race motocross meetings, and then I did some national stuff when I'd be about 12 or 13. When I was younger, when I was about 11, I wasn't really ready for it, and it put me off. I saw events, just club events, and I actually should have stepped it up. I actually became a half-decent motocross rider. But when I was in my prime at motocross, I just did local stuff, and I could have been a top 10 national winner quite easily—not easily, but I could have been a top 10 winner, but I never really did that.

Q. Was it finances that held you back?

A. Big style, yeah. Because we were just doing it out of a van with one bike, and everything was paid for. In those days, pretty much like now, the thought of having to drive to London to race, which was like five hours, you'd never do that. We drove 25 minutes to the local track and did races there. We couldn't really afford to do it. And we just enjoyed what we were doing. We weren't really trying to be World Champion, weren't trying to make a career out of it. We enjoyed what we were doing, and we rode round in the clubs that we did, and that was the world to us.

Q. That's cool, that you had that period that you genuinely loved racing.

A. It's sad, because I look back at those days, genuinely, now, and they were the best racing days of my life. By miles. Because that was so what the sport is about. Unfortunately, when you do professionally what we do, it becomes a job, and it becomes very, very serious.

Q. Through that period, were you watching roadracing?

A. No, no interest at all. I used to watch my dad. He retired in about '83, he stopped racing, and that's when I started motocross. And I hated it. No interest at all.

Q. He roadraced?

A. Yes, and he did motocross.

Q. Where did he race?

A. He raced at really crappy little tracks that you won't even have heard of, like a track called Three Sisters, or Aintree where they do the horse race. That's near Liverpool. I don't know if he ever raced Oulton Park. That was near where we lived. It was only about an hour away. But that was a proper big national track, and he did all the crappy little stuff.

Q. So you went to club races with him and watched him race?

"It was just really weird, but I genuinely did. You'd see me walking around, in and out of cars, looking around. It was a weird sight. I wasn't interested in bikes. I was looking for pound notes on the floor. And that's a true story."

A. And hated it. My brother usually quite liked it. What my mum always used to say was - I was travel-sick as a child. Severely. So if we had to drive a half an hour to a racetrack, I'd always be sick three times on the way there. And then I'd be ill in the car. I was like a pathetic, pale child.

Q. Head against the window, sweat on your face, blowing chow?

A. Yeah, just horrible times. I can smell it now, that horrible feeling when you're going to be sick. Like it happened about a year ago.

Then, at the track one day, I found a one-pound note—at the time, that was like I'd found £2 million, and I was so excited I found it in the paddock, on the floor. My mum said, "The day you found that, you never watched a race again. You used to walk round the paddock looking for money." She always laughs about it. It was just really weird, but I genuinely did. You'd see me walking around, in and out of cars, looking around. It was a weird sight. I wasn't interested in bikes. I was looking for pound notes on the floor. And that's a true story.

Q. Freud would have a field day with that, but we won't go there. So how did you go 125 racing, if you had no interest in that?

A. No interest at all. I was 15 years old, doing motocross, and in England when you turn 14, you ride 125 motocross bikes. I was a really small child, and really skinny, and I weighed nothing. So I went from being the top man on a 100cc Kawasaki - I was top 10 in the country, definitely, for my age - to being I couldn't even win a local club race on a 125, because I was just too small. And I was all of a sudden racing against guys that had developed into men, and I was this really skinny little child. Anyway, I tried and tried, and we tried to do a National - I don't know why we did that - and I broke my leg quite badly. I was small, we had the bike lowered, and had really soft suspension for it to work, and I hit this big tabletop, and I didn't land on the downside, I cleared it. And as I landed, I didn't crash the bike, but I smashed my tibia and fibula.

It was like leaping off a building. I landed, and I knew instantly I broke my leg, because I'd never broken a bone before. I just knew. It was a horrendous feeling. I just knew. Anyway, I rode round into the pits, and rode up to my dad and fell off the bike and was crying on the floor. And he was going absolutely crazy. "Get back up! What are you doing?" And I was like, "I broke my leg." So that was the end of it, really. I stopped enjoying motocross, because I couldn't win. I was this small little kid, and it was just all the fun had completely gone out of it.

So that was me. We retired. That was that. I didn't want to race bikes. I wanted to be a normal 15, 16-year-old, with my friends, really.

And then my dad pestered me and pestered me. When I turned 16, he said, "You're 16 years old. You can start roadracing now." And I'm like, "I honestly have no interest and do not want to do it." And he went on and on and on, because my dad's the biker, it was all he wanted to do. So he said, "Look, there's a TZR125 road bike for sale. It's supposed to be a good one. It's won some championships. It seems quite cheap." So my dad bought it, and he said "We'll just do a track day at Three Sisters." Because I was always really fast on stubble fields, on flat fields. When I went to big Supercross tracks, I was shit. So he said, "You've always been good on the flat. You'll be good at it, I know it'll suit you." And as soon as I rode, I did one day, and that was me completely hooked. I said, "That is for me." I absolutely loved it.

Q. You were smiling in your helmet?

A. All the way round. Sheer pleasure. Just loved it. And I went from being really steady, the first few laps, to by the end I was pretty much near the track record. Which it's not a really twisty track, but on a TZR125. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't scraping my knees or anything. But it just felt very natural, very easy. And then that was it. We went from "I'm definitely not racing" to "Right, when is the next race? When is the race weekend? Let's do it!" And that was it. That's how it started.

Q. Were your initial race results promising?

A. The first race that I did was - I had like 12 races in the day, like you do at club race meetings. I improved every race. And then the next race meeting I went to, I won, which was actually back at that Three Sisters track. It just came really natural.

Q. Effortless?

A. Yeah. Yeah. Really easy. I couldn't understand - my mum said, in my second ever race I'd achieved more than my dad ever did in his three years' racing career. Which my dad didn't like being reminded of. Because my dad had won a couple of races, but I just went in and dominated this meeting. The way it works out, you get entered into the final in the end, and it was like a 1300cc final. I'm racing against guys on RC30s and stuff like that. I beat them on this TZR125. Scraping the pegs - like I said, you don't know what you're doing. I still wasn't scraping my knee yet at this stage, or anything. Just riding round.

Q. So that must've garnered some attention.

A. Yeah, it sort of did. Because at that time - now, in England, there's a lot of young, up-and-coming kids. At that time, there wasn't. There wasn't many fast kids - you can only start at 16, so I was 16. It didn't take long before I started to get a bit of attention.

Q. When did you start racing nationally on the 125?

"I just wanted to finish the race as soon as I could so I could get on my scooter and pull some wheelies in the paddock. Honestly."

A. The following year. I did the whole club race meetings that year. My dad has always been the driving force. Sometimes a little bit too much. But it was like, "Right. We'll get a proper racing 125." So we bought one. I started 1990, so at the start of 1991 I went to my first National at Donington Park. I sat at the grid with people like - I don't know if you've heard at them - Rob Ulm, Ian McConaghey, who's won a Grand Prix, I think, on an 80cc - they were the men at the time.

And in the race, I got lapped, which was absolutely incredible, and it was just like a massive eye-opener, to think, "Shit. I was the man at these little club pissy little tracks," and then you come to Donington Park, a national track, I had no experience, and I got lapped. But it was a great lesson. And I just improved throughout the year. The last race of that year was at Brands Hatch, and I finished fourth, and set the fastest lap. And that was how I'd improved throughout the year. And then the following year, which was '92, I won the British 125 Championship.

Q. How was your riding developing at that time? Were you thinking it about it off the bike, conferring with your dad?

A. Yes. I was working. I was a builder. I'd left school, and I was a builder. It was still completely fun. It was still not a job, it was a hobby. Even winning British Championship races - it didn't feel easy, it was really difficult, but it just was a laugh. I just wanted to finish the race as soon as I could so I could get on my scooter and pull some wheelies in the paddock. Honestly. That's what it seemed like.

There wasn't too much to put on the computer. Even when I won the championship, it was only me and my dad, so we didn't change much. My dad was like, "What's the gearing like?" And I'd say, "I think it's all right. It's revving out down there," and that would be it. So, easy racing, really - even though it was tough on the track, it seemed easy.

Q. Did the relationship between you two change at some time? Eddie Lawson basically fired his dad at one stage, as have other big name riders.

A. Not at all. To this day it's never changed, really. I've always had a great relationship with my dad. Probably now more, actually. Only just recently we've definitely become more like brothers rather than a father-son relationship. Right up until the last couple of years. Not that I was scared of my dad, but I totally respected him. And now, he's more of a friend. I can go out and have a beer with him. He came to the last race at Road Atlanta. We'd go out at the end, on Sunday night, and one of us wants to go to a strip club, and my dad's there, and I don't feel - with my dad it feels normal, it doesn't feel weird. Because my dad's young. He's only 52. Twenty years older than me.

do not fret soup army-type person, this is continued right here