Guy Martin Read online

  Junior Superstock was a new class that was part of the British Superbike race weekend. It was for Superstock 600s, with the Superstock rules enforced to keep the budgets down. You could change the exhaust end can, and Micron sponsored the series so you got them dead cheap. Pirelli supplied the control tyres at a good price, and everyone had to use the same tyres, but riders could choose to buy and race the suitable bike from Suzuki, Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Triumph or anyone else who made an eligible 600-cc Supersport bike. A much cheaper race fairing replaces the standard plastic bodywork. Racers always sell ‘on the road’ bike components, like bodywork, lights and mirrors, to people who have crashed on the road, to help fund the bits the racers needed to convert their bikes to a racing spec. And to be classed as a Junior, for this new series, you had to be 16 or over and 23 or under.

  It seemed, from reports in magazines, that the Suzuki was the bike to be on that year, so I sold both the Honda CBR600, that would be out-gunned in this new series, and my Vauxhall Astravan to buy my own brand-new 2001 Suzuki GSX-R600K1for £5,700 cash. From now on I would be racing in classes where only the current bike would really cut it, so I was back to borrowing Dad’s work van for race weekends and cycling if I needed to get anywhere else.

  Even though I was making a big step up, Dad still wasn’t offering me any direction with my racing. He was helping in lots of other ways, buying me the odd set of tyres, and he helped when I needed it, often coming to races with me, but he wasn’t saying, ‘You need to do this … You need to race here to get on.’ I’m sure he would have if I’d asked, but I never wanted to. I was happy all the drive was still coming from me.

  Eventually, he’d sell his own road bike, a Honda VFR800, to help me buy a race bike, and that caused a lot of grief in our house. Mum didn’t think he should be encouraging me, so she gave him the silent treatment for weeks. It wasn’t a case of her being upset that Dad was spending money on me that should have been spent elsewhere. It wasn’t stealing food off the table. If he’d sold his Honda to buy me a car or van to get to work and back, it wouldn’t have caused the same trouble, but Mum didn’t want him encouraging me to race. Sally and I remember it as a very awkward time.

  The first race of the 2001 season, and the new Junior Superstock series, was at Donington Park – then the home of the British Grand Prix and so, arguably, the most prestigious track in the country. The pit and paddock were full of race transporters. Artics for all the British Superbike teams and some of the leading Supersport teams were parked in perfectly neat rows. Steve Hislop was on the Monstermob Ducati, John Reynolds and Sean Emmett on the Red Bull Ducatis; James Haydon and Jamie Robinson were riding for Virgin Mobile Yamahas … The riders were well-known on the British scene and most of the big names were back in the UK after racing on the world stage. These riders were on the covers of the magazines I lapped up, and now, while I wasn’t racing against them, I was in the same meeting as them. That would never happen in club racing. I was a bit starry-eyed. I’d turned up in M303 GRH with the wobble-box behind it, a caravan. When I opened a Biffa dustbin to put an empty carton of milk in it, there was a Virgin Mobile Yamaha R1 Kevlar fairing that had been dumped in it after one crash. I took it and cut up the fairing to make lightweight brackets for my bike.

  Some of the established Superbike and Supersport teams had entered young lads into the Junior Superstock class, so right from the off I was up against riders who were racing as part of the famous teams, and while the Junior Superstock riders were down the pecking order of these squads, they were being kept an eye on and had the back-up of some very knowledgeable blokes – both on the riding and set-up side. Crescent Suzuki were sponsored by Q8 and Clarion. They had John Crawford and John Crockford, and James Hutchins was on the Junior Superstock bike that looked identical to the Superbikes. They looked proper.

  If you look back at the riders who lined up in Junior Superstock that year, it was quite a group of riders: Tom Sykes, Tommy Hill, the late Craig Jones … They all turned out to be class acts, British or world champions or at least in the hunt for titles. It seemed lots of the top lads, who were still unknowns then, were riding for teams, even at that stage. It was obviously a massive leg-up to their careers. There weren’t many other lads doing it like me, without much support and out of the back of a Transit van. One who was doing it that way, out of his own van, was a bit older than me, a rider I’m still mates with called Matt Layt. Ross Conley was another.

  To register to race in Junior Superstock meant committing to the whole season. It wasn’t like club racing, where you simply entered two or three weeks before the next race and if you didn’t have any money you missed the race. The company running the British Superbike series wanted £1,800 up front from anyone running in Junior Superstock. On top of that was the expense of the bike, tyres, oil, fuel, brake pads, travel, food, leathers, helmets, boots, crash damage …

  That first Junior Superstock race was daunting. I’d never had to qualify before, but now I had to ride in a timed session to determine my place on the grid for the race. In club racing it was either a case of pulling a peg from a bag or the grid was determined by championship standings. Now I was racing against hungry young lads with one-track minds. They might have been the same age as me, but they were different. They all had a career progression in mind. They were already behaving like professional racers, some not even working for a living. A few had personal trainers and were under the wing of the biggest teams in Britain, being nurtured. They knew where they wanted to be. I didn’t even dream about progressing, I was just thinking about that weekend.

  Very rapidly, the series turned out to be a crash-fest. It was a popular class, with up to 40 riders trying to qualify and race. There were bikes everywhere and there was regular mechanical carnage. It wasn’t too long before the class was given the grim nickname, Junior Suicide.

  I was up into sixth in that first Junior Superstock race before I binned it. But riding that close to the front made me think, ‘I can do this.’

  Actually doing it was still a way off, though. For the rest of that 2001 season I never got that near the sharp end again. I was in the points at the second round, Silverstone, finishing 14th (points were given down to 15th). I only had two non-point-scoring rides (meaning either a DNF – Did Not Finish – or outside the top 15) in the 13-round season, so at least I was consistent. My best result was a seventh, at Mallory Park, and I finished 12th overall in the season-long championship. I might have only scored a couple of top ten finishes, but I never gave in. The champion that year was Ben Wilson, another Lincolnshire lad, from Boston, who would become a British Superbike and Supersport regular.

  During the season Johnny Ellis, my mate from John Hebb Volvo, started coming to every race with me to be my mechanic, something he would do on and off for my whole racing career to date. My dad would come to a lot of the races too, but not all of them.

  Racing at National level was a massive learning curve. Now I had to turn up on Thursday night, for official practice on Friday. There’d be two qualifying sessions on Saturday and the race on Sunday. Even though I’d been there from Thursday night, the Junior Superstock was always the last race on Sunday. There was so much carnage they couldn’t risk putting it on between the two Superbike races. If there was a massive Junior Superstock pileup, as there often was, there could be oil, petrol and wreckage all over the track and they didn’t want that delaying the main event, the star race most spectators had paid to watch. So, race day was always a long one.

  Many of the lads I was now having to race had already been on the National scene. They’d raced in the Superteen series, on 125s, when I was club racing. Superteen was the launching class for up-and-coming riders. Racing those fellas really made me progress. I watched what they were doing and realised I had to copy some of it. I could watch their lines, their tactics, their body position, everything. I was a sponge, taking it all in.

  I learnt so much in that first year of British championship, because everyone else
was so much faster than me. I had to learn, and fast. Sink or swim. I couldn’t believe how much of a gap there was between club racing and this. I had an idea National racing would be quicker, but not by such a massive percentage.

  I still crashed regularly enough, but less often in the races. I’d got an idea of what I could do with the bike. I realised that just because I was getting my knee down it didn’t mean I was going fast. I could be leaning less, putting less stress on the tyres and still lapping quicker.

  The level of the competition and the ambition I was beginning to develop, a fairly simple desire to run at the front, meant I was spending a fortune. I had worked all winter, between the end of one racing season and the start of the next, doing several jobs just to save up enough to be able to race through the summer.

  I was still doing my day job, which was fixing trucks obviously, but that alone wasn’t enough to pay for this level of racing, even though I was living for cheap at home. So I had to work three jobs for nearly six months, throughout the winter, before the season started.

  One of the drivers whose trucks we fixed also worked on Immingham docks driving coal lorries. Down on those docks is a two-mile private road. The ships would arrive from South Africa or Poland, full of coal. A big crane would go into the belly of the ship and fill a hopper, and trucks would drive under the hopper and be filled up. From there the articulated trucks would be driven to the grading plant, at the other end of the dock road, and tip the load. Between every load, the driver had to climb up on the back of the trailer, yank a heavy cover over the top of it, and tie it down, so the coal dust didn’t billow out and cover the hundreds of brand-new cars that had also been unloaded and parked on the dockside. It meant there was a physical side to the work too – it wasn’t just sitting in the cab listening to Zane Lowe.

  Because it was a dock road, not a public highway, drivers didn’t require the Class 1 licence they would need to drive an articulated truck on the road, so I ended up being one of the drivers there, doing a 12-hour shift for £80, two nights a week. I’d transport 35 loads on a shift. I was living on Pro Plus caffeine tablets and two or three hours’ sleep a day. But, heck, I was earning. For a time a fella who worked there would hand out tablets he said were EPO – the drug that Lance Armstrong and loads of other athletes have been banned for using – which he said he’d mixed with caffeine and aspirin. I don’t know if that’s really what the stuff was, but it would keep me going all night and there was no comedown.

  At weekends, I was also working at the Chicago Rock Café in Grimsby. My big sister Sally worked there. She had been away travelling, to Australia, Malaysia and Thailand, and got a job at the bar when she landed back in Lincolnshire. She loved the place and quickly worked her way up to deputy manager. She also got me a job glass-collecting on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Thursday was £1-a-drink night. In Grimsby. I’ll let you chew that prospect over for a minute …

  I would keep busy, wiping tables, collecting glasses, then I’d climb in the Biffa bins and crush everything down so they could pack them even more full. A memorable evening was when someone ralphed against a window where people queued up to get in and it was my job to pick up all the half digested chicken.

  It was always kicking off in the bar, too, but just among the customers. The staff didn’t get dragged into it.

  The Chicago Rock Café didn’t just rely on £1 drinks. It also had a gimmick. When certain songs came on, the staff would have to climb on the bar and start dancing. ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, ‘YMCA’, ‘Greased Lightnin’’, ‘Hand Jive’ … I was a bit reluctant to dance on the bar, so I would make sure I looked busy when the trigger songs came on. I couldn’t always escape, but I never learnt the right moves.

  All this was just so I could afford to race my bike. I needed to do it. Club racing was an expensive pastime; National level racing was something else again.

  In club racing, I’d use whatever brand name tyres I could get on the cheap. In Junior Superstock, I had started using four brand-new rear tyres and three fronts in a weekend, just to be in the hunt. That’s over £500 on tyres every race weekend, plus fuel for the bike and £100 on diesel to the track and back.

  In the second year of Junior Superstock, the control tyre changed to Dunlop and I soon noticed a massive difference in the way the bike behaved and the feedback I could feel from the tyres. I could predict if they were about to slide, and even started controlling slides, whereas before, at the first hint of a slide, I’d close the throttle. 2001 was when it really clicked what a difference tyres could make. By this stage I’d learnt a lot and the tyre suited me.

  But it wasn’t all motorcycle racing and picking up vomit. About this time I was invited to an orgy …

  A bunch of us were hanging around at a friend’s house, when another mate of ours – let’s call him Dave for reasons that will become clear – turned up with a new girlfriend. It turns out she was very open-minded and was as keen to experiment as Louis Pasteur. She wasn’t hard to look at and basically invited the five of us to get to know her better. A lot better. None of us had a house or flat of our own, so it was decided that my works van, W173 JDO, would be the ideal passion wagon. We’d meet the next day and go do the business. I thought, ‘Mint, I’ll have a go at this.’

  The next day I turned up with the van and was the only one there until ‘Dave’ arrived with a mattress under one arm and his other round his girlfriend, a tube of lube stuffed in his pocket. That there were only three of us didn’t seem to put a dampener on proceedings, so we drove off to find a suitable spot.

  As I explained earlier, I’ve never been that bothered about shagging, and being in the back of a works breakdown truck that stank of gear oil wasn’t doing it for me, so there was this weird scene of me sat in the buff, except for my socks, on the wheel arch in the back of a Transit van eating a Mars Bar, watching Dave rattle into his new girlfriend. I was never more than a spectator, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves and it all ended well because the two of them were still together years later.

  Back in the world of racing, I signed up for the 2002 Junior Superstock series. My Suzuki GSX-R600 was still the current model, so it just needed a thorough going over before the season started.

  At the first round, I was ninth, not much better than the previous year, but at the next race meeting, Brands Hatch, I was running second when I slid off. I came away with no points and a scuffed bike, but proud that I had put in the fastest lap of the race. Next up was Donington, and I was fourth when an oil spill meant the red flag came out to end the race early. Then followed a pair of ninths, another fourth and a fifth.

  The racing was so close, the bikes being very evenly matched, that you had to be aggressive to get a decent result. I don’t mean you had to ride dirty, but if you didn’t attack at every opportunity, someone would do it to you and you’d be nowhere. It wasn’t the kind of racing where you could make a break or plan a move for a lap in advance, but I was beginning to get in sight of the podium. Then, at the very next race, an incident occurred that would change the course of my life.

  CHAPTER 6

  I’M A ROAD RACER

  ‘It was enough to push me over the edge and I dived at him, slamming the laptop he was working on down onto his hands.’

  AFTER TWO SEASONS of club racing and a full year competing in National level racing, I had signed back up for another season of the very competitive Junior Superstock series for 2002.

  So far, the results had been right enough. Except for a DNF, when I was in second before sliding out, I’d been in the top ten for every round and had three top five finishes, two of them coming back to back before I went to Rockingham for round eight.

  This circuit, near Corby in Northamptonshire, is nothing like a traditional British circuit. Then it was still virtually brand-new. All the other tracks that the British Superbike series visit date back to the war or before. Rockingham has huge stands, a big block of corporate suites and offices, and a track that, l
ike some other British circuits, has a few different configurations depending on who or what was racing there.

  What Rockingham has, that other UK tracks don’t, is a banked section, like Daytona and American NASCAR tracks. I think they hoped to attract NASCAR races to Britain, but the idea never caught on. The British motorsport fan is spoilt for events and tracks. There can’t be anywhere in the world that has as many motorsport venues packed into such a small area as the UK. When I see the massive stands full of flipdown seats at Rockingham, I always wonder how many of those plastic chairs have actually had a pair of arse cheeks land on them.

  2002 was only the second year the British Superbike series had raced at Rockingham and I liked the place. I got on with it a lot better than some of the other racers did.

  The meeting was going like any other. Arrive Thursday night; unload; sign on; get my bike, leathers, boots, gloves and helmet checked by the scrutineers; then prepare to ride. As practice and qualifying got under way, through Friday and Saturday, some riders, in all classes, not just Junior Superstock, were out-braking themselves and cutting through the chicane, bouncing over the dirt, rather than sticking to the tarmac. We had to go through a left-right chicane after coming off the relatively high-speed section of banking.

  Out-braking yourself happens at lots of tracks and in every type of racing, from novices in their first club race up to the so-called aliens in MotoGP. Every racer is trying to ride at their limit, and there are times when we all think we can squeeze up the inside of the rider in front and block them through the chicane to make a pass. To do this you leave your braking a second later than you did on every previous lap so you can edge in front and take the other rider’s line, meaning they have to back off and you’ve made the pass. But it’s easier said than done. It’s a race. Pride is at stake and everyone is braking as late as they possibly can, and getting on the power as early as they dare. If you’re racing with someone who is at a very similar level – whether you’re racing for first or 15th place – you have to hang your balls out once in a while to get past.