Of Speed and Spanner – Jenny Tinmouth Hot

Many women compete in the various series of motorcycle road and off-road racing, and there is not an excessive amount of focus on them. Instead of being a bias, it can also be seen as an indication that women racing motorcycles is not unusual. Women have indeed been riding and racing them for as long as there have been motorcycles. What's the relevance? This is not a story about a woman racer; it is a story about a motorcycle racer who is a woman. It is to be treated like a political designation or a name, nothing more. Unfortunately for that argument, she is often called “Britain’s Fastest Woman”. Well, what fun is there in consistency, right?

Jenny Tinmouth is a very fast rider. She currently competes in the British Supersport Championship - a very competitive series - alongside some of the best racers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. She rides a Honda CBR600RR for the sorrymate.com / Jenny Tinmouth Racing team, which does have several big sponsors, and she likely works on her own race bike as well (along with Steve Bradley, her trusty mechanic and pit crew). See, she also owns and works at Two Wheels Workshop in Ellesmere Port (outside of Liverpool), which is a rather sharp looking motorcycle service and repair shop – they even do M.O.T. No one can accuse her of sloth.

Tinmouth got her start at the age of 17 by taking her Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) and putting rubber on the road. She did fail that first test, but she passed the second time and really let nothing get in her way to go racing. Her father was a rider and her cousin a racer in a Classic TVR auto race series, plus, the motorcycle races were always on the television. It took some time for her to get into it, but that was mostly due to finances. In fact, those are about the lowest times for her personally – when she is strapped for money and cannot race due to that sad fact. It does not seem she has that problem now. In 2009 alone, she raced in 9 rounds of the British Supersport Championship Cup and pulled in a 6th place overall in her class. Tinmouth also took a trip to the Isle of Man and raced in the TT. Well, that is a bit of an understatement; she set the fastest lap ever for a woman in the Senior TT class on her sorrymate.com Racing Honda CBR1000RR. Though, that was not the only event she rode in at the TT – she owns more than one race bike. And, in addition to all of that activity, she put in some serious time in Hottrax Endurance and a few rounds in Thudersport GB. She doesn’t sit still very often.

You could not say she had a ton of encouragement to get where she is, but it does not seem that anyone really held her back either. Her own determination seems enough to keep her racing, if not her love for it. It is likely she will have a long and storied career in the sport, especially given her attitude towards it. She is quite well-adjusted for her young age and this is very obvious in her continuing improvement in the sport.

She will eventually have to stop spinning the wrenches, drop the mallet, and focus on training for the race if she keeps up her solid results. Just imagine this sort of speed on a factory-supported race squad! Tinmouth has the demeanor, talent and heart to be a real challenge for a championship in any motorcycle race series. As was said above, she is a racer who just happens to be a woman. When you watch her race, her gender is immaterial. It is what she does on the track that matters and she does it well.