Six-time British Superbike Champion Shane Byrne has released his autobiography Unshakeable and we have got a signed copy to give away.

All you have to do is read the extract below and answer a question based on it. A bit like school.

Unshakeable is available in all good bookshops - and probably some bad ones - right now, priced at £16 for the hardback.

Whenever I hurt myself and have to ride injured, I always try to do practice and qualifying with no painkillers. My theory is that if you can take the pain on Friday and Saturday and get through Sunday morning warm-up, a painkilling injection just before the race – the only bit of the weekend that really matters – will have the most profound effect on your performance.

I was so sore I could only manage a lap or two at a time throughout practice and qualifying at Motegi, so I could only hope that the pain- killers and the adrenaline would pull me through the twenty- four-lap race.

I lined up on the back row of the grid, determined to hold on for as long as I could and learn as much about the track as possible for the following season. There was no pressure to try and score points and, even if I came last, at least I would know I had given it my best shot. As luck would have it, no sooner had the race started than Loris Capirossi went and wiped out half the field in the first corner.

Six bikes went down in front of me, including all of the Americans – John Hopkins, Colin Edwards, Nicky Hayden and Kenny Roberts Junior – meaning that if I could just make it to the end of the race, I was guaranteed a good result. The first thought that came into my head when I saw the pile-up was, ‘Bloody hell, Loris, that means I’ve got to stay on the bike now. Thanks a lot!’

The painkillers wore off far too quickly and as a result I honestly can’t remember too much about that race, other than hanging on to the bike for the longest twenty-four laps of my life. I brought the Cube home in thirteenth place, good enough for three precious points, and again the Italians went nuts in the garage. Of course, they knew I couldn’t manage more than two laps in practice, and they were all hugging me, until one of them grabbed hold of my broken wrist and ragged it up above my head in celebration. I screamed in agony. The poor guy was mortified, going: ‘Scusa, scusa!’

Even though it had only been a month since the crash at Brno, there was something that wasn’t right with my wrist and my physio wasn’t happy. He sent me for another X-ray, which showed that the scaphoid had snapped in two and the ligaments were so badly damaged that they couldn’t even hold the joint together.

I flew to the World Superbike round at Imola at the end of September for a meeting with Dr Claudio Costa, an eccentric old Italian with some notoriously alternative approaches, who was also the official MotoGP doctor, to have a look. Dr Costa confirmed the wrist had fallen apart and, on the following Wednesday, he and another old professor operated on me in San Marino, when they ensured the scaphoid would never break again by taking it out completely.

Competition

To win a signed copy of Unshakeable, tell us Dr Costa’s first name…