Guy Martin Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Prologue: Game Over

  1. No Middle Name

  2. The Kirmington Bubble

  3. The Boy on the Bench

  4. Went a Boy, Came Back a Man

  5. Club Racer

  6. I’m a Road Racer

  7. It’ll Catch Up With You

  8. Getting Noticed

  9. Mac-ow

  10. Two Steps Forwards, One Step Backwards

  11. Pushbikes

  12. Jumping Ship

  13. The Fateful Senior

  14. Down with a Bang

  15. The TV Job

  16. In Trouble

  17. That Fella off the Telly

  18. The £20-per-mile Car and Other Ways to Spend Money

  19. The Ulster

  20. Speed

  21. Where Next?

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Career Results

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Guy Martin takes you on the ride of his life.

  Knee down, wrestling with a 210-horsepower superbike and tearing up the tarmac at 180 mph. For international road-racing hero, maverick star of the Isle of Man TT, petrol-head and truck mechanic Guy Martin, nothing feels as good as the adrenaline rush at killer speeds.

  In this explosive and revealing autobiography, Guy tells it straight. He takes us behind the scenes of modern road racing and into the pits with his mechanics, his bosses, his machines and his fellow racers.

  Meet his family, his friends, his rivals and find out where it all began; from the small-town boy growing up watching his Dad build superbikes, to the headstrong young racer and his first taste of success at Cadwell Park and Rockingham, to the underground Irish scene and riding the greatest road race of them all, the Isle of Man TT. Discover what it feels like to stare death in the face and risk it all for the craic, to survive a horrific 170 mph fireball at the 2010 TT, and come back to do it all again.

  This is the thrilling story of how a working-class lad with a passion for speed, a determination to succeed, and an endless capacity for endurance and hard graft, became an icon of world sport.

  About the Author

  Except for one summer spent sleeping inside a truck in a concrete yard in Northern Ireland, Guy Martin has lived within 20 miles of the Grimsby hospital he was born in, on the 4th November 1981. But that hasn’t stopped the professional truck mechanic from winning multiple international road races, including eleven Ulster GPs and eight Scarborough Gold Cups, plus scoring thirteen Isle of Man TT podiums. Neither has it prevented him from presenting three critically acclaimed prime-time TV series, being the subject of a BAFTA-nominated film or breaking British and World land speed records along the way. Not bad for a truck fitter. Guy still lives in North Lincolnshire.

  PROLOGUE:

  GAME OVER

  I’D JUST LEFT the pits after the fuel stop. Head down, wrestling the 210-horsepower Honda Fireblade through the outskirts of Douglas, the Manx capital, and out onto another 38-mile lap of the island. One of my mechanics, Cammy, had told me I was in the lead, but only by a second. I could hear a difference in his voice. He’s normally as calm as if he was reading a shopping list, but there was an edge this time. He knew we could win.

  It was the start of the third lap of the 2010 Isle of Man Senior TT, the last race of the fortnight, the race I have been desperate to win since 2004, and the last chance to get a TT win for another year. I was pushing hard.

  I had already missed out on a win by three seconds that week. Three seconds in a race held over 150 miles. A race that lasts one hour and 12 minutes, or 4,300 seconds. That means the winning margin was 0.21 per cent. It’s obvious that every second counts in modern real road racing.

  Down Bray Hill, with a full tank of fuel and a new rear tyre. The bike goes from nearly bone dry to brim full, and the extra 24 litres of unleaded always makes a difference to the handling, but I know how to deal with it.

  Then, three miles from the pits, comes Ballagarey. This is the kind of corner that keeps me racing on the roads. It’s a proper man’s corner. You go through the right-hander at 170 mph or more, leant right over, eyes fixed as far down the road as it’s possible to see, which isn’t very far. Like so many corners at the Isle of Man, and most of the other circuits I specialise at, it’s blind. I can’t see the exit of the corner when I fully commit to the entry.

  I’d been through Ballagarey 100 times flat-out, but this time something happened. This time the front end tucked, lost grip and started sliding. It’s the beginning of a crash. That’s not unusual. I’m saving slides regularly when I’m pushing for wins. Through the fastest corners the bike is always on the edge of crashing, just gripping enough to keep on going in the right direction. Go slightly too fast and the tyre shouts, ‘Enough!’ Go slightly too slow and you’re no longer in the hunt for wins.

  As the front tyre carried on skidding across the top of the road, I tried to save the slide. I thought, ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it …’ I can sometimes get away with front-end tucks, when the bike is leant so far over that the front tyre eventually loses grip and begins to slide. You can save them on your knee, or give it a bit of throttle and it’ll come back to you. One thing’s for sure, you don’t do anything major, like grabbing a handful of brake, and you don’t panic because that’s when you come off.

  I went through all that thought process, as the bike was steadily skating, increasingly out of control towards the Manx stone wall that lines the outside of this corner. Then the thought ‘Game over’ entered my head. At those speeds, on a corner like that, you’re not jumping off the bike, just letting it go. I was leant over as far as a Honda CBR1000RR will lean, and a little bit more. I released my grip on the bars of the bike and slid down the road. I didn’t think, ‘This is going to hurt,’ – just, ‘Whatever will be, will be.’

  CHAPTER 1

  NO MIDDLE NAME

  ‘The spaghetti measurer would be out and the chase would begin.’

  I REGULARLY USED to say I was born and bred in Kirmington, because up until recently I always thought of the real town of my birth as a shithole. The truth is I actually arrived in the world in Grimsby, in 1981. I was born in the maternity hospital in Nunsthorpe, the roughest estate in the town. I was, and still am, Guy Martin – no middle name.

  My dad missed my arrival. He was in the hospital for the birth of Sally, my older sister, but he had to stand outside because she was in breech and the father wasn’t allowed in when things were getting complicated back in those days. When it was my turn to pop out, Dad was there with my mum waiting for me to appear, but at eight at night the midwife told them nothing would happen until midnight, so Dad went out to get some bits from Scanlink, the local truck part specialist, for a job he was working and missed me being born at just gone ten. He was there for Stuart’s birth and Kate’s, though. My little sister’s was so quick she wrecked the interior of his Ford Granada on the way to Grimsby Maternity Hospital.

  My mum, Rita, is nine years younger than Dad. She was only 16 when they met. I think the age difference caused some friction between Dad and his mates of the time, but when I see old photos of them together, even with the nearly ten-year age gap, they don’t look wrong together. They always look dead happy.

  Ian Martin and Rita Kidals married six years later when my mum was 22, and their first child, Sally, was born a couple of years later. Sally was only four months old when I was conceived. Mum says it all happened at the end of her first night out after Sally’s birth.

  On 4 November 1981, the Martin family, now with a 13-month-old girl and a da
y-old baby boy, left hospital, jumped in the car and drove the 12 miles to my very first home, a flat above the old Co-Op in Caistor. It was a second-floor flat with a nice, big garden that had a sandpit in it. Our entrance was around the back of the shop, off Bank Lane.

  I don’t have strong memories of the place because we moved, when I was still only three, to the house on Gravel Pit Lane, Kirmington, where my parents still live. Now the house is surrounded by conifers, but in those days it had a barbed wire fence.

  My dad was a part-time motorcycle racer, a privateer, which meant he paid for his own way, and won a bit of prize money here and there. Though he was racing for fun, never a career, he lined up with some of the biggest names of the time, competing in the Shell Oils series, the British Superbikes of its time. He raced at 15 Isle of Man TTs. He was a top privateer. He didn’t start racing until he was in his mid-twenties.

  The window frames of Gravel Pit Lane had begun to rot and to have them repaired Dad eventually had to sell his P&M-framed Suzuki 1000, the race bike he finished twelfth on in the 1983 Isle of Man TT. He was the first privateer home that year. The bike had all the right bits on it and he still raves about it now, but double-glazing was more important. They must have been on the bones of their arse.

  We didn’t get a telephone until one of my granddads went into hospital, when I was ten, which makes it 1991. Up until then the family would use the traditional red phone box over the road if they needed to make, or take, calls. I remember when my dad was away racing he’d have a timetable for ringing home to tell everyone he was all right. Mum would go out, cross the road and wait by the phone box for it to ring.

  Dad would often work seven days a week. Especially when he was saving up for a bike. He would fix trucks six days a week, well, five and a half really, then on Sundays he would sometimes drive trucks for another company, and me and Sally would jump in the cab with him, sitting on the bunk-bed in the back. The money earned on Sunday would go towards his racing or bike projects.

  Dad has worked for himself since 1995. When I was born he was employed by R K Hirst, the hauliers, in the same yard in Caistor he works from now. After he met my mum, but before they were married, he was in Nigeria, working as a fitter for a crew of road builders. At the same time Mum was in Germany working in a hotel. They had a break from the relationship for a bit, and it was when they were thousands of miles apart that they realised how much they missed each other and that’s when they decided to get married. One time Sally and I were in the garage and came across the love letters Dad sent from Nigeria. They both arranged to come back to England and were married three weeks later. That was over 35 years ago and they’re still together now.

  Even in his mid-sixties, and still not retired, Dad looks the same as he does in photos from when we were kids well over 20 years ago. I think this fact has gone a long way to shaping much of my view of work and life. Hard work never hurt him. The opposite, in fact. My dad has grafted on trucks for over four decades and he’s as strong as a bull. He works in the pit, under Scania 4210s, with the 20-foot doors of the garage wide open whatever the weather and with nothing to protect him but his blue overalls, a few pints of stiff tea and cod liver oil. And he’s fitter than a lot of men half his age.

  If you met Ian Martin 30 years ago, you’d definitely recognise him now. He has always gone from having a full beard, to a goatee and then on to a porno-style handlebar ’tache. It’s a three-yearly cycle, and I’ve never worked out what sets off the changes in the style of his facial hair. He has also worn spectacles as long as I’ve been alive, always the same size and style: big, rectangular ones, as thick as the bottom of a pint glass.

  These specs were legendary in the Lincolnshire market town of Caistor. If Ian Martin’s glasses came off there was going to be trouble, because my dad was a scrapper. I never have been, but he was a renowned fighter in Grimsby, Market Rasen and Caistor. If the glasses came off, stand back. I’ve heard the stories, but, I’m happy to say, I’ve never seen him in a fight. I think it was all part of a good night out for him: go out, get drunk, have a fight.

  The famous Elton John song of 1973, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)’, was written about the rivalry between Caistor and Market Rasen, because Elton’s co-writer, Bernie Taupin, came from Normanby-by-Spital, 15 miles from Caistor. At the time there was a feud between lads of these towns just eight miles apart. It was the time of mods and rockers and anything went. One night the songwriter, then still unknown, was in the Aston Arms in Market Rasen when the Caistor mob came to town for a punch-up. Dad knows for a fact he was one of the Caistor lads causing bother that Taupin would write about.

  It was good being Ian Martin’s son, because it meant I rarely got in any bother. I’ve inherited a lot of Dad’s traits, more than perhaps I’d like, but I’ve never been handy in a scrap. I’ve thrown the odd punch in self-defence, when I’ve had to, but I’ve never gone out looking for trouble. But those who did enjoy throwing fists around perhaps thought twice before picking on me. Another thing that helped me avoid the kind of trouble that kicks off every Friday and Saturday night in towns and cities all over Britain was that I’ve never been much of a boozer either, so I didn’t go to pubs much. Still, I haven’t escaped unscathed. I have no sense of smell after getting lamped on a night out in Lincoln when I was a teenager.

  While he was lovey-dovey with my mum, buying her big Valentine’s cards and all that, he wasn’t a very cuddly dad when I was growing up. If everything was all right he’d give us a big thumbs up. He wouldn’t say much and, as I’ve said, he seemed to be always working. Until I started working with him, part-time, we’d see him odd nights of the week, Saturday afternoon and some Sundays.

  My mum, Rita, is a cracking lass, but awkward. Not socially awkward, more headstrong and stubborn. It must be where I get it from.

  When I was young, I thought Rita Martin was the worst mum in the world, but I’m sure loads of people think that of their parents and only realise later how wrong they were!

  Big Rita wouldn’t take any nonsense, that’s why I reckoned I was hard done by, but I look back now and think she did exactly the right thing. We learnt right from wrong. We weren’t cheeky very often and we didn’t have too much chelp. There definitely wasn’t any naughty step in our house. She’d smack us to keep us in line if we weren’t behaving. She would clip us with the spaghetti measurer, a flat piece of wood with rounded edges, basically a thin paddle about six inches long. It’s the kitchen implement that has different-sized holes in it to help you judge how much spaghetti to put in the pan. She moved on to the spaghetti measurer, as a tool of child discipline, after she realised wooden spoons weren’t working. She was handy with it as well. It was thick enough not to snap, but not too thick, so it had a bit of whip to it.

  The lead-up to a whack on the backside would follow a familiar pattern and develop like this: first we’d be cheeky or not pipe down after being told to, so Mum would put a hand on the cutlery drawer and look at us. That was the first warning. If we carried on, the next thing she’d do was close the kitchen window, so the neighbours couldn’t hear us. Once the window was closed you knew you were getting it, and the spaghetti measurer would be out and the chase would begin. Until I learnt, my mum would spank my arse at least once a week, usually a quick whack while I was running away. It would come sharp, with a flick of the wrist.

  Still, I got away lightly. My older sister Sally got it worse than me, and Stu got it worst of all. He was mischievous – a cheeky little bugger. He was suspended from school too, for mooning out of the bus window, throwing snowballs in class, breaking windows … Kate is the youngest and never got a spanking as far as I can remember. She nearly died, from whooping cough, when she was still very young. She turned blue, was well on her way to going, according to my dad, and was rushed to Grimsby Hospital. She survived and, I reckon, played up to it too, even until she was 11 or 12, so she never got her spaghetti measured.

  We’d often hear the threat, ‘Wai
t till your dad gets home,’ but he never did anything. Big Rita was the enforcer in Gravel Pit Lane. Of course, we weren’t abused, I had a fantastic childhood. She was a great mum. She still is.

  Rita had quite a tough upbringing herself. Once, when she was little, her school friends were all talking about Father Christmas. She raced home, all excited, to tell her mother, Double-Decker Lil, who then asked who had been filling her head with such rubbish! But Mum didn’t pass that on to her own kids. Sally was 12 before she had any real doubts about the existence of Santa Claus, and Christmas time was mega at our house. On Christmas Eve my dad would have a few drinks and tell us to bring the pet rabbits into the house. It was the only day out of the whole year he’d do it, but it happened every year. He’d be as pissed as handcarts from the pub at lunchtime. It’s the only time I remember seeing him drunk, but he’d be as daft as a brush, crawling around on the floor with our rabbits.

  Rita laid down some weird rules. She wouldn’t allow us to watch Grange Hill in case it led us down the wrong path. When we were playing out in the street with kids she regarded as a bad influence, Mum would shout, ‘Your tea’s ready,’ even though we’d already had it. She wanted us to come in, but she wouldn’t just say, ‘Come in.’ Perhaps she didn’t want anyone thinking that she was looking down on anyone else in the village, even though that might have happened to us.

  When Sally and I were very little, Mum had a trike, a pedal one, that she’d bought from a copper in Riby. She would pedal up to the Humber Bridge, with me and Sally sat in a basket behind her looking backwards at the traffic coming to overtake us. It was a good 20-mile round trip, with us two in the back. We had an old rusty length of chain across our laps to keep us in, but that was it! Helmets? You’re kidding, aren’t you?

  It almost goes without saying Rita was the no-nonsense type. Once I fell off the monkey bars in the local playground and hurt my arm. I told her I thought it was broken, but she inspected the injury and said there was nothing wrong with it. I showed my dad when he got home and he agreed with me. So did the hospital he took me to. It was broken. By weird coincidence, on the day I broke my arm two other pupils from the 18-strong Kirmington Church of England Primary School, where I was a pupil, also broke their arms. It was so unusual, 17 per cent of the whole school breaking their arms in one 12-hour period, the local paper sent out a photographer.