Nick Harris

Nick Harris, informally known as Harry, is an English motorsport commentator, journalist and author. He provided television commentary of live MotoGP coverage for the official MotoGP world feed between 1999 and 2017. He is known as 'the voice of MotoGP'.

During his 18-year run as full-time commentator, Harris became known for his uniquely enthusiastic and authoritative voice. He retired from full-time commentary after the final race of the 2017 MotoGP World Championship at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia, where he held his last post-race interview with multiple prominent riders at the time such as Valentino Rossi, Dani Pedrosa, Jorge Lorenzo and Marc Márquez. Since then, he still writes blog posts by the name of Nick Harris Blog before the start of each race, which get published on the official MotoGP website.

Early life Harris was born in 1947 at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and lived in the small village of Cumnor, near Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. Initially he declined the offer but when Rosser offered him three times the salary, he joined the journal two weeks later in January 1973. One of his personal best and interesting reports came in the same year when he was sent to Italy to report on the 1973 Anglo-Italian Cup match between Bologna and Oxford United, where he sat in a private jet next to a Scottish international footballer who had scored a goal against England at the old Wembley Stadium. For the interview in Kettering, he felt "vastly underqualified" but went anyway. He worked in both the British road racing and later, in 1976, in the motocross departments. A part of his job as a road racing reporter was finding a phone or telex machine to get results and reports through, which took up to three hours. Harris found those days as motocross reporter to be "exciting" because he could travel, stay in hotels and write various reports, but felt it was different compared to writing reports for motorcycle grand prix races. He moved up to news editor and later still he joined Motor Cycle Weekly as a sports editor in 1979.

Career as a commentator Harris' first private commentary was in 1974 when he called a North Gloucestershire club meeting over the phone from a sergeant's mess at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire. Over 1.2 million people have since seen his thank you video, which was hosted by world champions such as Rossi and Márquez. Harris revealed in his autobiography Never Say Never: The Inside Story of the Motorcycle World Championships that his club was in financial troubles in the final year of his work on the board of directors. After he retired from commenting on the MotoGP series, he stated that he would continue to commentate the football matches of Oxford United on the BBC.

Commentary style Over the course of his grand prix motorcycle racing commentary history, Harris has attracted mixed and even polarising opinions on his particular style of uniquely enthusiastic commentating. Some praise him for this as well as his overall passion, familiar expressions during the races and his decades of involvement in the sport which gave him great knowledge and understanding of grand prix motorcycle racing while others criticise him for his overusing of certain phrases, his use of cliché's, the mistakes he sometimes made and his early beginnings at Rothmans. The book was officially published on May 26, 1986, by Motor Racing Publications Ltd. The second book is called Motocourse History of the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy Races 1907 - 1989, was released in 1990 and was also translated into German. In 2007 his third book - a biography on the life of Barry Sheene - was released in collaboration with former grand prix motorcycle racer Steve Parrish with the title Barry: The Story of Motorcycling Legend, Barry Sheene. To date, this is Harris' most successful book, reaching the Bestseller List of books of The Sunday Times and being published in Australia and Germany. Harris' fourth book, Racing Together 1949-2016, was written together with prominent grand prix motorcycle racing figures Vito Ippolito, Carmelo Ezpeleta and Hervé Poncharal and commissioned by Dorna Sports. This book goes in-depth on the history of grand prix motorcycle racing up to the 2016 season. In 2018, he hinted in an interview with Fast Bikes India that he was writing a book about his life travelling the world in MotoGP and Formula One. Penguin Random House UK, though Virgin Books, published an audio book which was narrated by Nick as well as a paperback version in 2020. When Rothmans and Williams parted ways, he came back to grand prix motorcycle racing. Overall, Harris worked in Formula One from the 1994 to the 2000 season. In an interview with the Golden Triangle Rider in 2017, Harris said that he suffers from tunnel vision and therefor does not ride his motorcycle anymore. He also mentioned he was great friends with Barry Sheene, Wayne Gardner and Bradley Smith.