Guy Martin Read online

  Dave was team-mates with James Ellison in the Young Guns Honda squad (and James and I would be team-mates for a season, years later, when we were both racing for Shaun Muir). James subsequently had two spells racing for privateer teams in MotoGP, and for very good teams in both the British and American Superbike series and World Endurance. He was still winning races in 2013. Back in 1999, when they were starting out, James and Dave were at the same level, but sadly few people remember Dave Johnson’s name now.

  This wasn’t the be-all and end-all, but I don’t think having a dad as blunt as Keith helped Dave when he began to get involved with those bigger teams. His dad would call everyone a See You Next Tuesday, whoever they were. I liked Keith – you knew where you stood with him – but I can see why some people might not want a person who had earned the nickname Animal around their swanky Superbike pits.

  Another thing that derailed Dave’s motorcycle career was finding out there was more to life than racing bikes. It had been all he’d known, and he was mega talented, but then his eyes were opened to other things. He discovered he liked beer and women, too. Finally, a family tragedy finished him as a racer, or seemed to from the outside. Dave’s younger brother, Ally, died in an accident with a bonfire. Ally was 14 or 15 at the time and it really affected all our family too. I haven’t seen Dave for years and years, but I do know he’s a truck driver now.

  My own effort was a little different from the team set-ups I’d seen at the Cadwell Park British Superbikes round, but I was still trying to look as professional as I possibly could. Even though I’d never raced a bike in my life I still managed to get some backing. My first sponsor, besides my dad, was Bill Banks of local company BB Haulage, who gave me £1,000 to go towards my first racing season. It didn’t take long to spend that. I was earning decent money too, and my bike was mint. A mate of my dad’s had painted it. It was blue (paint code RAL 5017, if you’re interested) with lime green wheels. A truck signwriter stickered it up for me. It said Guy Martin on the tank, which was a bit much, I thought.

  I had the sense to do a track day before my first race. It was at Mallory Park, Leicestershire, on a Wednesday afternoon. There were dozens of track days going on every month, when road riders could get out on track and wring the neck of their bike without fear of the law or a car pulling out on them, but this Mallory date was the regular weekly track session exclusively for race bikes and riders with ACU competition licences. Back then, to get a race licence you just had to send off your application form with a cheque and proof of a recent eye test, but now you have to sit a test before they’ll give you one.

  I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep the night before the track day. I went out with the experienced 125s and the handful of other novices and got through the day without crashing, but I didn’t have a clue what the racing line was. Looking back, I didn’t have a clue what a racing line was. I can’t imagine how slow I must have looked. And no, I didn’t scuff my pristine kneesliders. I didn’t get my knee down for a year. Still, a few days after the track day I was set to make my racing debut.

  My very first race meeting was run by the Grantham and Pegasus Club and held at my local track, Cadwell Park, near Louth, Lincolnshire, just 20 miles from Kirmington.

  I had ridden the track just once before. I had been round it on my dad’s Rob North BSA classic race bike, his pride and joy, at an owner’s club rally the previous year. I stalled it over the Mountain, and because his hand-built British bike was bigger than me he had to run out on to the track and rescue me. That, and a few times spectating, was the sum of my experience of this very challenging track.

  Cadwell Park, as the name suggests, is what the British call a park circuit. It is in the same family of circuits as Oulton Park, Donington Park, Mallory Park and Brands Hatch. You can pretty much split Britain’s race circuits into two camps: the park circuits and the airfield tracks, which were developed from disused World War II runways. Where the airfields, like Silverstone and Snetterton, are as flat as a pancake, the park circuits have big changes of elevation, as the layout was designed to make the use of the surrounding landscape. Cadwell does this in a more extreme way than any UK circuit, with the Mountain now acting as a short runway launch pad for powerful Superbikes. If you’ve never seen it, don’t expect Mont Blanc – Cadwell’s Mountain is a short, sharp hill.

  In the run-up to my debut Dad hadn’t given me any advice at all. And I hadn’t asked. I don’t resent that. I had to work it out for myself. Perhaps he thought I’d picked up more than I had done from going to races with him. If so, he was wrong. I could not have been more green going into my first actual race. And I knew I’d be racing. There was no need to qualify. Paying your entry fee guaranteed you a place on the starting grid as long as you made it through the short practice session in one piece.

  Dad drove me to the race, but I turned up not knowing a thing. I was going from riding an AR50 – a hot one, mind – commuting to work and back, to racing a tuned Honda CBR600 – a 140 mph Supersport bike – for my very first race. I know now that I should have started off with a smaller 125, a lighter machine with not much power that I could use to get into the rhythm of racing while I was learning the precise lines needed to have half a chance of survival. But that’s only with hindsight. Instead, I was in at the deep end, racing a bike that was so fast and intimidating that it took all my concentration just to stay on the track.

  I scraped through the short untimed morning practice and then was told I had to blindly pick a peg with a number on it out of a bag. This was the way the club decided places on the starting grid. When my race was called, I pulled on my helmet and rolled down to sit in the holding area, under the trees, next to the café. The bikes all around me were being revved to warm up and I waited, in a fog of fumes, not knowing what to expect. I was buzzing with nerves and excitement as the previous race finished and the riders funnelled off the track, a marshal in orange overalls directing them up the narrow return road, through the trees and into the paddock high above the start line. My exact position on the grid hasn’t stuck in my mind, but I was somewhere in the middle, surrounded by blokes who had been racing for years. I took my place, one foot on the floor, arms bent, eyes staring at the flag. As the rules demanded, I wore an orange bib over my leathers, to show everyone I was a novice rider.

  Although I don’t remember which row of the busy grid I was on, but I won’t forget what happened as soon as the flag dropped. I got a surprisingly good start and was determined to make an impression. I truly was young, dumb and full of cum. I was in the mix through Coppice, the first corner that sweeps uphill to the looping right-hander, Charlies. Soon I was flying down Park Straight, knees and elbows tucked in to be as aerodynamic as possible, managing to pass a load of bikes, thinking, ‘Check me out!’

  What I didn’t realise was that everyone else was hard on the brakes for Park, the sharp right-hander that was approaching at 100 mph plus. It was the third corner of my very first race and I crashed, taking three other lads out. Less than 60 seconds had passed since the flag signalled the start of my racing life and I had barely covered a third of the 2.2-mile circuit. My introduction to bike racing looked like a bomb scene. It was absolute carnage. My bike, the Honda CBR600 I’d spent weeks preparing, and all my money, went end over end. The impact ripped the petrol tank off and bent the forks. Luckily I didn’t injure anyone in the crash, and they were all standing when I went round the pits apologising without making eye contact.

  Still, the thought that I might not be cut out for motorcycle racing never entered my head. I was never a natural. I realised that early, and have never kidded myself into believing anything different. I’ve had to work at it. My brother, Stuart, is the one with the racing talent. He started racing in 2003, when he was 18, after seeing the craic I was having. He raced Supermoto, then Honda Hornets and Superstock 600s. He crashed a lot, but he was fast straight away, and they say it’s easier to stop a fast racer crashing than make a steady, but safe rider into a race-winn
er. I was both slow and dangerous, but I wasn’t going to give up. What I didn’t have in talent, I made up for in knuckle-headed determination.

  I made my racing comeback a month or so later after saving up to mend my Honda. Mum took me to the race in M303 GRH, my dad’s works van, a really nicely sign-written Ford Transit. Even though I had a racing licence, I still hadn’t passed my car driving test at the time, so Big Rita drove and sat reading Woman’s Own while I raced. She supported me like this even though she didn’t even want me to start racing in the first place. This was the first of many years during which she would have the dilemma of supporting me in something she’d much rather I would just pack up. She would be on edge, biting her nails, while I was doing what I loved.

  My second competitive outing was at Mallory Park, Leicestershire. It was a circuit I knew like the back of my hand after that highly successful half-day ACU track day. Despite that, I crashed again, but this time it was just a stupid one coming out of the Hairpin and I didn’t torpedo anyone else. I did finish the day’s other race, well down the field, but anything was an improvement at that stage.

  I crashed 13 times in my first year, sometimes twice in a meeting, because I definitely didn’t do 13 different race meetings that season. It was costing me a fortune.

  For the last meeting of the 1999 season, back at Cadwell, I bought a cheap tyre from a bike shop in Grimsby. The Michelin Pilot Sport had been sat there for a while, which is never good for a high performance tyre, but I didn’t know then that tyres went off.

  Even after I’d done practice and a couple of races on the tyre, it still looked like brand-new, not a mark on it. This tyre was so old, it was obviously rock hard, but back then tyres were just black and round as far as I was concerned. I must have been half pleased that it was lasting so long, so I wasn’t having to cough up yet more money to replace it. This early in my racing life, I wasn’t listening to the messages tyres were giving me and couldn’t tell if one tyre was better than the other.

  I learnt the hard way that this wasn’t a good one. I highsided out of the Gooseneck and badly twisted my ankle. I had seen and read plenty about highsides. It was something Grand Prix riders had to deal with. For those who’ve never heard the term or seen a highside, they begin when a bike is leant over, going through a corner and the rear tyre loses grip and starts to slide sideways. If it just continued to slide, the bike would fall onto its side and the rider would suffer a comparatively gentle lowside crash. When I say, ‘I lost the front end,’ it means exactly the same but with the front tyre. I lost the front end in 2010 TT at Ballagarey, the crash that ended with the fireball …

  During cornering both tyres are being asked to grip while the bike is leant over and the weight of the bike and rider is pushing the tyres across the surface of the track, not down into it. When the front tyre loses grip, the bike slides off line. If a bicycle rider slides off going around a wet corner, as you see in the Tour de France, they always have what a motorcycle racer would call a lowside. If you’re ever going to crash a motorcycle, a lowside is usually the lesser of all the evils on the menu.

  Sometimes, though, halfway through its sideways slide, the rear tyre starts to grip again, the sliding comes to a sudden stop, and the sideways energy combines with the spinning of the rear tyre to cause a vicious and dynamic change. The pairing of bike and rider goes from leaning on its side to being stood upright and the rider is flung up into the air. A really powerful bike highsiding in a fast corner can chuck a ten-stone rider well over a couple of metres out of their seat and fling a 140 kg bike a similar distance off the floor, before they both come crashing to the deck. You’re very lucky to survive a highside without an injury. And I wasn’t lucky.

  I landed heavily and thought I’d broken my ankle. The next day I went to work as usual, but I was as white as a sheet and couldn’t do anything, so my Granddad Martin took me to the hospital. It turned out I hadn’t broken anything, so they strapped me up, gave me some crutches and sent me on my way. Those became the family crutches. Since then my brother has used them, and I had to have them back off him when, in 2011, I had a blood infection that caused my knee to swell up and I couldn’t walk, meaning I missed the Scarborough Gold Cup that year.

  Clearly, these crashes weren’t putting me off. In fact, I was determined to go even quicker. I would read any magazine I could get my hands on that covered bike racing. I had read in one of them that the highly respected Dutch team, Ten Kate Racing, changed the cam timing of their World Supersport bike from circuit to circuit. They had 600-cc Hondas, and so did I, so I thought I would try this in-depth and very high-level tuning method too, but I didn’t know a thing about it. It was only years later I learnt why they did it. In that first season I genuinely wasn’t bothered where I finished. I was racing and that was it.

  I got the odd top-ten finish that year, competing in the bottom rungs of the British motorcycle racing ladder. This was hobby racing, for fun and a plastic trophy if you were lucky. When I raced with the New Era, a bigger club than Pegasus and District, I might get in the top 15. I had not bothered the podium in the slightest, but I didn’t care one bit. The next year, 2000, I had the same attitude. I had passed my driving test by then, so I could drive myself to meetings and friends would come with me.

  One time, I took a bunch of mates to a race at Mallory Park. We were nearly at the track, having just gone through some traffic lights, when we were overtaken by a nutter in a Yugo, a Yugoslavian jalopy, one or two steps down the quality ladder from a Lada.

  He’d gone the wrong side of the traffic island through the lights – obviously a man in a hurry. A couple of miles later, we went round a corner and there’s a bloke stood in the middle of the road with a blank expression on his face, holding a car door that was no longer attached to a car. Up the road, buried in a hedge, was the Yugo. The bloke holding the door must have had his car sideswiped just as he was climbing in. His car was absolutely battered, all leant over to one side where the suspension had collapsed from the impact, but the windscreen wipers were still going. We didn’t want to hang around for the police to arrive, because I had so many lads in the back of the van, but as we drove past, my good mate Johnny Ellis wound down his window and said, to the dazed fella with the car door, ‘You want to turn your wipers off, mate. You’ll flatten your battery.’ That was it – we were in tears for the rest of the day.

  Memories like that sum up the time. I was racing for the craic. There was no pressure, just pure fun.

  I didn’t crash as much in that second season, but I still didn’t know where the line was. I’m not talking about the racing line now. I was picking that up, slowly. I mean the line you can ride up to and if you pass it you might crash. This isn’t a line on the track, it’s not something you can see or touch – it’s ‘the edge’, I suppose, and where it was depended on the conditions, the bike and my skill at the time.

  Now I know where my line is, I can sense when I’m right up to it, and if I have to go over the line to get past someone I know I’ve taken a risk. Crossing the line doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to crash, but it means I’m pushing my luck, something you’ve got to do in races from time to time.

  Back in the club racing days I just went as fast as I dared, and if I crashed it came out of the blue. I often knew why and how I crashed – I’d lost the front end by being too hard on the brakes leaning into a corner or whatever – but I didn’t really know what to do to stop crashing. People I was racing against were still riding miles faster than me on the same bikes and the same tyres. We both had two arms and two legs, so I had a lot to learn.

  I wasn’t being methodical or thinking deeply about racing. I didn’t have any mentors pointing things out to me. Racing was just something to do. I didn’t care where I finished until about two-thirds of the way through that 2000 season, when I won the Yellow Belly. This was a race at Cadwell Park exclusively for riders who live in Lincolnshire. It used to be annual and it’s a race a lot of very good riders
have won: Steve Plater, Roger Marshal, Roger Burnett … From that win onwards a switch was flicked and I was hungry to do well. At the end of the year I went to a meeting at a miserable Snetterton held on a grim October day, with the rain coming in sideways, and won a couple of races. Keeping up my impressive record of crashing, I still managed to slide off at some point that day.

  By the end of 2000, I had done two full seasons of club racing, the highlight being the Yellow Belly win, but there wasn’t much else to write home about. Club racing is different to the racing you see on TV. It’s hobby racing, purely amateur. You still get club racers who spend a squillion quid on their bikes and equipment, but their ability doesn’t allow them to move up to the National classes – the championships for the best riders in Britain. The comparatively big budget club racers are happier finishing near the front of a club race and going home with a plastic trophy than going up a league, racing a much better calibre of riders and finishing nowhere.

  After my two seasons of club racing I was thinking differently. Now I seriously wanted to improve. It had gone beyond having a bit of fun with my mates, so I decided to make the step up to National level for 2001 and enter the Junior Superstock class I’d read about in Motorcycle News. Club racers want to win, but it’s for fun; it’s regional, often lower-budget racing. It’s the equivalent of Sunday League football. National level racing is like the football league structure, with the British Superbike class being the Premier League, Superport being Championship, Superstock being League One and Junior Superstock being League Two or even the Conference League, but still a team that could hammer a Sunday pub team. In club racing, I’d usually turn up early on the morning of the race and leave for home in the evening. For National racing I was away from Thursday night or, if the race was local, Friday morning until Sunday night. I would also be racing at a lot of unfamiliar tracks in the National championship. I’d only raced at three or four different tracks during my club racing years.