As a journalist type working in motorsport it’s quite handy to have access to the events that you are employed to report upon. Said access requires the much coveted media pass, which is allocated to individual journalists at the discretion of the event organisers or promoters.

In the dim and distant past the threat of having your pass revoked was ever present, and often threatened, especially if you were in the habit of publishing articles that were even slightly critical of an event organiser or promoter.

This was a particular problem when I was the editor of Motorcycle Racer magazine, as I was not overly impressed with the way a new promoter was running things in a series we had to report on, but was warned off a number of times about writing anything negative about the situation.

And so Black Flag was born. 

Basically Black Flag was the ‘pseudonym’ we used at Racer magazine to pen articles that were less than complimentary about certain aspects of motorcycle racing. Black Flag’s identity was a closely guarded secret, which we never revealed, despite a lot of pressure from a certain series promoter at the time.

In reality, Black Flag was a number of people. Everyone in the office used to fight over who got to write the monthly Black Flag column. It was good fun while it lasted!

It seemed like a good name for a blog…