Guy Martin Read online

  I started spannering at a very early age. I had spent years watching my dad and working on the scrap he had lying around the chicken shed. He had a few old, good-for-nothing Briggs & Stratton 3.5 lawn-mower engines, but they weren’t the best to work on, not for someone still at infant school, anyway. My first proper engineering project was a Suffolk Punch engine. A neighbour, Mr Cassidy, gave it to me. It was an old knackered lawn-mower motor. I wasn’t even ten, but he must’ve known I was into engines.

  Mr Cassidy lived opposite some derelict Kirmington farm buildings we’d play in. Our gang would climb up and jump off the ramshackle roof and he would always be coming over to give us a bollocking for making a racket. Then one evening he said, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ It was a Suffolk Punch engine and it was mega. The early Suffolk Punches, like this, were cast, side-valve 200-cc engines, but basically this one was scrap.

  When word got around that people could off-load their old scrap lawn-mowers without even having to take to them to the tip, folks would give me all sorts of Suffolk Punches and Briggs & Stratton engines. I’d take these engines and literally rev them to death. I wanted to blow them up. The neighbours must have loved it. My dad eventually made me a really trick exhaust for my tenth birthday to help keep me quiet. It was a straight bit of pipe, with holes drilled all around it, then wrapped in wire wool, before another, length of pipe, of a larger diameter, was slid over the top and brazed to collars at either end. The noise of me murdering those engines, running them flat-out till they went bang, must have been horrendous, but I loved it.

  Before I was even ten I would strip engines and put them back together. I didn’t have specialist tools, like a puller to take the flywheel off, but I could take the cylinder and the piston off and the valves out. The valves didn’t have a collet, they had a pin that went through the stem. I couldn’t replace this pin. I knew what to do, but my fingers weren’t strong enough to compress the spring, so I had to wait for my dad to come home from work to do that.

  That Suffolk Punch was the first engine I tuned too. I’d seen pictures of a famous racing bike, like a Manx Norton or something similar, with drilled pistons and con-rods, in one of my dad’s classic race bike magazines, so I start drilling the pistons and con-rods of my lawn-mower engine. I’ve still got the scars from it now. I didn’t know anything about centre-punching or drilling a pilot hole. I just tried to drill big holes through the skirt of the piston to lighten it. My dad’s Black & Decker drill was bigger than me, so it used to jump off and get me on the back of the hand. Scarred hands are all part of being a mechanic, though. I always wanted hands like my dad’s, so I wasn’t bothered if I cut them or blackened my fingernails. I wanted my hands to be like shovels. Nowadays I look after them a bit more. I still don’t wear gloves to work in, I’m not into them, but I wear barrier cream. I realised my hands are what earn me my money and it’s no good for them to look like they’ve been to Afghanistan and back every minute of every day.

  As a boy I used to cut my hands and stuff, but no one died. I’m sure, now, if anyone saw a primary school pupil with a power drill, trying to bore holes through an aluminium piston on the driveway of his house, they’d report it to the social services, but no one seemed bothered in Kirmington – or at least not in our corner of it. Mum didn’t stop me. She may have thought it was strange that I would rather be in the shed on my own than out with my mates some days, but her dad was very hands-on, and her husband worked with his hands, so it can’t have seemed that unusual that her eldest son wanted to as well.

  It wasn’t all lawn-mowers. The Yamaha TY80 and my dad’s racing bikes had sparked my lifelong obsession with motorcycles.

  One day, when I was a few years older, Aaron Ash brought round a Maico 490. This was a huge German air-cooled motocrosser with what I already knew was a very fancy and exotic Öhlins shock absorber. This wasn’t the kind of bike to gently ride around the fields and lanes. It was a fire-breathing dirt bike, built to win races. They don’t make anything like it any more. What a weapon! I was 12 or 13 at the most, and Aaron was three years older. The Maico had come out of someone’s shed, but wasn’t running. Aaron knew I’d have a chance of getting it going. It had a big Bing carburettor on it, so I cleaned that out. Then I took the plug out and cleaned that. I drained the dregs of the old fuel out of it and poured some fresh petrol in the tank. We couldn’t kickstart it. I was only a pup at the time, so we ended up bumping it off down Gravel Pit Lane. Somehow, we got it going, then took it out on Kirmington playing fields, two kids on this vicious motocross bike. It revved like mad. It shouldn’t have been allowed. In fact, thinking about it, it wasn’t allowed. That bike had enough power to put some manners in you.

  Not long after that, my mum talked my dad into getting me a helmet.

  By the time I was 14, I had a paper round. After I’d done that, on Friday nights, my mum would take me to work at my dad’s truck yard. During school holidays, I’d cycle the seven miles to his work on my purple Claud Butler mountain bike. On the way I’d sometimes time it just right to be overtaken by a tractor going to the Cherry Valley Ducks factory. I would then pedal like hell to get in the slipstream, where I could stay, going faster but not pedalling so hard, all the way to the truck yard.

  At my dad’s work I’d fill windscreen washer bottles, check wheel nuts and tyre pressures, sweep up, sort out the scrap heap, clean oily and greasy components in the parts washer – all kinds of odd jobs that an apprentice would do.

  Friday nights are always busy, getting trucks ready at the end of the working week, so they were serviced and ready to go back on the road, either the next morning or the following Monday. I’d work there and get a lift home with him in the van at 10 o’clock. We’d be back there at six the next morning. Graft. It’s all I’ve known.

  One day we were out on a job. Dad used to do repairs for C & J Haughton, a local firm. We were in their yard on a breakdown and I spotted this bike around the back of the warehouse and thought, ‘Bloody hell!’ It was a Kawasaki KX125, a 1986 model, the first year the 125 had disc brakes front and rear. It was a full-on motocrosser, a real racer, not a road bike styled to look like one. The bloke we dealt with said it had been there for years, but it ran. I was desperate to have it.

  On the way back home in the van I told my dad I thought it was mega and asked him if he thought they’d sell it. He told me he would find out. It turned out they were happy to get rid of it, but it was over a month before my dad picked it up for me. Four weeks, but at that age it felt like a lifetime. Every night he came home and I would ask if he had got it, but he’d tell me he hadn’t had a chance. Eventually, my dad did buy it, but I paid for it by working weekends.

  I’d ride the KX every chance I could. I’d often go in the gravel pit at the top of the street, but I preferred to ride it through Mr Lancaster’s farm. I’d get bollocked for riding on the farmer’s field every week. It wasn’t that I didn’t respect him, I just wanted to ride my bike.

  I grew up with parents who were out at work a lot. I remember walking home from primary school and seeing Mum picking potatoes in the fields. That was her job for a while. She is a serious grafter, just like my dad. She has quite old-fashioned views. To her, men having paternity leave is a load of rubbish. The breadwinner should be back at work, earning. The Martin children were bred to work.

  After Kate, my youngest sister, started school, my mum studied to become a nurse. Now she’s a District Nurse Sister, band seven, the highest you can get. She did it without any wittering or moaning, she just got on with it. Four kids and a career as well.

  My mum and dad didn’t row. One or the other would just go deathly silent for a week and not talk to their other half. Now I do that a bit myself, but I try not to. There’s so much about my parents that I respect, but there’s also a few parts of their character and habits I don’t like. I’ve often thought, I don’t want to be like that when I’m older. So I fight against it. I worked with my dad for years. Right back to when I was 12 year
s old. I loved it, most of it anyway. The only things that really began to get on my nerves were to do with Dad being the world’s worst for routines.

  I worked with him at weekends and during school holidays until I left school. Later, when I was 19, I went back to work with him full-time, after I finished my apprenticeship at Volvo. It was then that I really started noticing he’d eat breakfast the same way, while reading his magazine the same way, always back to front. On the drive to work, me sat next to him, he’d change gear in exactly the same place. Every. Single. Day. It did my head in.

  At work every day was different. Yes, I was fixing trucks every day, but each had a different problem, and the drivers were all characters. One of these drivers would inadvertently change the course of my life.

  CHAPTER 4

  WENT A BOY, CAME BACK A MAN

  ‘The plan was to get their under-age mechanic drinking ten pints of Guinness in one sitting.’

  I AM THE son of a motorcycle racer, but I don’t see that as the main reason I started racing. My dad’s influence obviously rubbed off on me in some ways. I’d see the bikes in the shed every day; I’d sit with Dad as he worked on them; and then I’d be aware of him going away to race them. Still, I think I was too young to be really infected by it all when he was racing. The almost constant contact with bikes – my dad’s, my and Sally’s little TY80, and the Kawasaki motocrosser I’d own later – all made me want a road bike as soon as I was 16 and legal to ride on the road, but I hadn’t made the mental leap to believing I’d ever race motorcycles. It just wasn’t on my radar.

  I went to some races with my dad when I was young, but not many. We went to the Isle of Man TT a few times, including the last year he raced there, in 1988, but all I remember about that is losing the rag I used to carry round and suck on. I still had it at seven years old, I don’t know why. I lost it on one of the horse-drawn trams that run up and down Douglas seafront. I don’t remember any of the bikes or anything of the racing, just losing this bit of comfort blanket. It wouldn’t be the last time I lost my rag on the Isle of Man during TT fortnight …

  My dad smashed himself up later in 1988, and didn’t race again. The accident happened at Oliver’s Mount, Scarborough. He crashed his Yamaha at the top bend of Scarborough, coming past the Memorial, a very tight left-hander. Now I have a lot of experience with that track and I don’t see it as a specially tricky or fast corner, compared to some at Scarborough, but you don’t think you’re going fast until you’re sliding along on your arse.

  The thing about the corner is, if you get it wrong you go straight into the trees, and that’s what he must have done. I was seven at the time, and I remember being in the back of the ambulance with him, Mum and Sally. For some young kids it might have been upsetting to see their dad laid out in an ambulance, but everything was so calm and matter-of-fact that it wasn’t shocking in any way.

  He had badly smashed his hip. I asked him if he was all right, and he replied, ‘Oh yeah, no bother …’ He gave me his trademark big thumbs up. I realise now he was putting on a brave face for his family. He must have been in serious pain, but he is a double-hard bastard. Mum wasn’t flipping her lid or anything, just thinking about how she was going to cope with work, four small kids and a husband on crutches for a few weeks. She never gets excited, she just gets on with it.

  When I saw Dad in hospital, later that week, surgeons had plated up his femur, with screws and brackets. The injury caused him agony for four years, till they gave him a false hip, a prototype stainless steel thing. I think he was one of the first in the country to have a replacement like this, and he said it was better than the original.

  The bike he crashed was a Yamaha FZR750RR, quite a rare machine, and he was offered a good deal when he bought it. This, Dad’s last race bike, was Yamaha’s version of the Superbike of its day. Four-cylinder, 100-horsepower, if that; aluminium frame, full fairing and trick flatslide carbs. Good for 150 mph. It was a homologation special, built by Yamaha and sold looking like a road bike with lights, but made almost exclusively for racers to buy and convert into a track bike.

  This was the start of the era when production bikes, ‘proddie’ bikes, took over British racing. Proddie bikes have long been part of the racing landscape, but until the 1980s the most important bikes were pure race machinery – designed and built to race, not bikes that were based on converted and tuned road bikes. Machines like Yamaha TZ750s and TZ250s and 350s were made in big numbers, but they were pure race bikes. In the fifties and sixties it was machinery like the Manx Norton and AJS 7R ‘Boy Racer’, off-the-shelf race bikes. There were also bikes that would use tuned road bike engines in special chassis like Rob North and Seeley frames. That all changed in the 1980s, and except for a couple of classics I’ve only ever raced proddie bikes.

  After the Memorial Corner crash, Dad made the decision to stop racing, or maybe Mum made his mind up for him, but he still wanted an involvement with racing bikes, so he started spannering for a couple of local businessmen who raced classic bikes.

  They had a converted bus, a big old Bedford coach, that could carry four bikes in the back and also had home-made bunk beds, enough to sleep six. They were fixed to the sides of the interior, three on either side, and we called them torpedo tubes.

  We would travel to the classic race meets as a group. There would be me, my dad, Ian Clark and Rob Cadle. We did that for two or three years, starting when I was about ten. Dad had built a pair of Triumph classic racing bikes for the other two, Cadle and Clark, who were quite well-to-do. Clark ran a double-glazing company and had a Triumph Trident T150 triple (it had a three-cylinder engine) in a Rob North frame, and Cadle had another Rob North Trident, a ‘Slippery Sam’ replica. The nickname came from the 1970 Bol d’Or race in France when a racing T150 with a knackered oil pump sprayed engine oil all over the rider. Cadle owned a building company.

  When Clark bought the brand-new chassis for his racer, my dad bought one from the same company to build a Rob North BSA – the hot bike from the very early 1970s. He’d never race it, but he still owns it now.

  Dad built Clark’s engine, and as payment for that and for spannering at the race meetings, they’d buy him parts for his own bike.

  Even though Clark was minted, he had to justify the price of his bike to his other half. You could buy these race machines second-hand as complete runners, but if you wanted a new one, you ordered the whole rolling chassis without the engine. You’d then buy the rest of the parts you needed to make it a runner. When the three of them bought these Rob Norths I think you paid something like £6,000 for the chassis, bodywork, petrol tank, wheels, brakes and suspension: basically everything but the engine, carbs, exhaust and electrics. When you’d finished paying for everything, the bike would be well over £10,000, especially if you had to pay someone else to assemble it for you. It turns out that when Clark, one of this pair of wealthy businessmen, told his missus that the Rob North kit cost £300, she hit the roof: ‘Three hundred pounds! For a motorbike with no engine!’ It’s one of my dad’s favourite stories.

  Attending these classic events was quite an eye-opener for me. I would see Dad with these other blokes and how he’d behave when he wasn’t just being my dad. I’d be sat in the pub with them and I couldn’t believe he swore so much. He still swears a lot. Not in front of my mum, though.

  I went to a few of these classic meets, and eventually he started taking my little sister Kate to some. Much later, in 2008, Kate ended up being one of my mechanics. I don’t think her interest in bikes came from me in the slightest; it just happened that our paths crossed when she wanted to get into spannering.

  When Kate started to go to the races with Dad, I was older and doing my own thing. I was mucking about with mates, or else out on my motocross bike or tinkering in the shed on my own.

  Though he had bought me and Sally the Yamaha TY80 for Christmas, all those years ago, Dad had never encouraged me at all to start thinking about racing myself. His reluctance was probably d
own to the money it cost to go racing and the heartache that came with it. He knew all about that, but he’d still reminisce about his racing days. The older he gets, the faster he was … Still, in 1983, a year after I was born, Ian Martin was the first privateer home in the Senior TT on his P & M-framed Suzuki GS1000. He wasn’t shabby.

  By the time I was 15, Mick Hand, the son of my dad’s best mate, Jeff Hand, was racing schoolboy motocross, but there was never any mention or even thought of my going racing. It’s an expensive game, even at schoolboy motocross level. If I was going to race it would have to wait till I could pay for it myself. And anyway, it hardly mattered, racing wasn’t on my mind, because as soon as I turned 16, in 1997, I had my road bike, a 1991 Kawasaki AR50 – registration J121 LVL – and that was everything to me.

  My mum let me take a day off school to do my Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) motorcycle test. I bought the bike from a lad who worked in the truck spray shop opposite my dad’s work, paying the asking price, £700. I used to see him coming and going from work on it. It was trick. It had an 80-cc engine with a five-speed gearbox in it and a Micron exhaust. It was illegal to have an 80 in a 50, if you were still on L-plates, like I was, but I wasn’t bothered. Then I bored it a mil and ended up with a 93-cc kit on it, cut my own ports in the barrel, fitted a KX60 carburettor and a Nikon pipe. I was always tinkering with it.

  I used to think up the maddest stuff to make it faster. I’d experiment, like I did with the lawn-mower engines. I would do things like taking the rev counter drive off because I thought it was robbing power by driving the cable.