Worms to Catch Read online

  It was only a two-hour crossing, so there was next to no time to sleep, but I dropped off. The next thing: ‘Bing-bong. Can drivers please return to their vehicles.’ Fuck! We rolled off the ferry at two in the morning and a group of Irish lads I’d been talking to were there to meet us. Fair play to them, they were keen.

  The Irish group were Geoff, Dave and Mike. They’d been training like hell since before August, and I got the feeling this was going to be like their Olympics. I only really knew Geoff before this. He worked for Chain Reaction Cycles, the massive mail-order company in Northern Ireland. He was the youngest of this group, in his mid-thirties, and he was one of the people behind the Ride for Michael Trust. Dave was late-forties and fit. He did 14,000 miles of cycling in 2015, so he’s not a messer. Mike was between the other two in age, worked for Orange mountain bikes and came over from England for the ride. They were all riding mountain bikes, because that was the rule I’d made. Originally, my mate Tim was going to follow us in a van and we’d have road bikes for the road sections, then swap for mountain bikes for the trail centres, but I decided, a couple of weeks before, that it wasn’t what I needed to do to prepare for the Tour Divide. I needed to test myself by having no support – just one bike and whatever I could carry.

  Before we really got going, we biked to Geoff’s house for Weetabix and tea, then we were back on the bikes at 5 am, heading south to a trail centre in the middle of Belfast, the Barnett trails.

  We were aiming for some of the main trail centres in Northern Ireland. The next was Castlewellan, 40 miles south of Belfast, where we ate again and rode the trail. Next we headed over to Rostrevor, on the banks of Carlingford Lough, in Newry, right on the border. That was near-on 30 miles away, so after riding the trail it was time for another feed in the caff, then Jase and I had half an hour’s kip on the grass bank outside. The sun was in the right place and I might have even got a bit sunburnt. I was absolutely knackered, but it was great. It felt like no one gave a damn about what we were doing. We were just five blokes out riding and I was loving it.

  I didn’t even know what day it was. I thought it was Friday, but it was Saturday. By the time we left Rostrevor it was five or six in the evening. We had more food outside Newry, probably four hours after the last feed. The chef came out, told us about the soup of the day and it sounded good, so I had that, thinking that I should give me guts something a bit easier to digest.

  From the diner we headed to Davagh Forest trails, to the north-west of Cookstown, where the first motorcycle road race of the year is traditionally held, and a place that sometimes reminds me, after a long winter, of why I love road racing. This year was different. I wasn’t racing until at least after the Tour Divide in June. The ride from Rostrevor to Davagh took us past Armagh, Portadown, Dungannon and Cookstown. It was all of 70 miles, and into a headwind, something we didn’t need by this point.

  We met a couple of lads I’ve known for years, Richard and Darren, who were supposed to ride with us, but we were later than we intended and it knackered up their plans. Instead, they sat in their van waiting for us for hours, then made us a much-needed cup of tea, but didn’t bother riding. We got to Davagh Forest at some stupid time in the middle of the night. The ground was frozen, so we decided not to ride the trail. The Irish lads were suffering, but we kept at it, on to Desertmartin, Swatragh, Garvagh, Coleraine, Portrush. The last two towns being main points on the North West 200 course.

  Just north of Swatragh I crashed, falling asleep while I was riding. My legs felt good and were still putting power out, but my brain needed a rest. I’d only slept four and a half hours, or not much more, since I’d left home four days ago. I didn’t hurt myself. I had kept slapping myself around the face, trying to keep myself awake, but it didn’t work.

  I explained to Jason that I wasn’t weak-kneed, but I needed five minutes, so I slept in a bus shelter. I bet I was only sat on the floor for five seconds before I was asleep. I’d said I needed five minutes, and five minutes later Jason woke me up and said, ‘Alright, let’s get going.’ I could’ve slept for eight hours, I bet, but that five minutes was enough to keep me going for another few hours. It was four or five in the morning, and not long after that forty winks the sun started coming up, which tricks the brain into thinking it’s had more sleep that it has. Along the way we found a McDonald’s. It was playing the same music, and that really annoyed me, but not enough to stop me from going in and filling my face.

  We biked to Geoff’s mum and dad’s place in Portrush, right on the north coast of Northern Ireland. We were finished and still smiling. His parents weren’t there, but his wife, Margaret, was and she cooked us steak and chips. From there, David took me and Jason to the ferry terminal in Larne in his car. I’d done over 750 miles by that point, so I wasn’t wimping out by not riding to Larne. We had two hours on the ferry and it was chocka. A family in the corner had a right comfy bit and said we could sit with them, so we did and fell asleep. Sharon was waiting for us in the van at the ferry port when we docked at four in the afternoon. I climbed straight in the back of the van with the bikes and slept for four hours while she drove the 180 miles across the country to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where we dropped Jason off at his car. It was straight down the A1 for me and Sharon, and we got home at midnight. I went to work the next morning, in for eight. I didn’t bike in. I was going to but Jason told me to have a few days’ recovery, then have a big week the following week. I’d do a 50-hour week before the Tour Divide, then that would be it for serious training.

  The longest I’d sat on a bike before this was the ride up to Inverness, which was a fair way, just over 500 miles, with over 100 miles of riding on the Strathpuffer itself. The coast to coast to coast was over 750 miles, from Wednesday morning to Sunday morning, and I’d learned a lot. The Rohloff hub I’d chosen wasn’t the most precise thing, but it was reliable. My wheels needed to be lighter, because it took too long to accelerate. The bike was comfortable enough, but I needed to put more cream on my arse for saddle-sore. I needed more painkillers – nothing fancy, just ibuprofen, or vitamin I as some cyclists call it. When we were on the road, my arse and knees were getting sore and Jason was aching too, his back and arse, so he got on the painkillers and I asked, ‘What are you doing with them?’ He told me it just takes the edge off. I knew I had to take regular multivitamins to America, because you’re eating so much fatty, greasy rubbish that you need vitamins to keep you right.

  I learned that I know my pace. I know that when hills get steep I should get off and push for a bit, not kill myself every five minutes to make a climb, because if I do that I won’t last. So I was pushing up hills in Ireland that I could ride up on a normal day’s ride. You need a different mindset when you know you’re cycling for 750 miles, or 2,745 miles. You’ve got to know that if you’re only doing 3 or 4 mph and your heart rate is up to 180 or 190 bpm while you’re crawling up the hill, you’re not gaining anything. You can walk at that speed and get your heart rate down. And you have the added benefit that it stretches your legs. I only walked for five minutes or something at a time, until the gradient slackened off, then got back on. Jason would slog on, but that’s him and he was on his featherweight race bike, not that I’m making excuses.

  I also found that I couldn’t eat enough. I did 55 hours of biking, at least 750 miles and 10,500 metres of climbing, and burnt something like 50,000 calories in just over four days. On the Tour Divide you’ve got to deal with self-cannibalisation, when the body has used up all the glycogen, the body’s natural stored energy source, because you can’t get enough food, and starts to eat at the muscles for energy. Tour de France riders can lose a lot of weight, but they’re not riding long enough per day for self-cannibalisation to be a problem. The Tour de France is seen as the hardest race in the world, but the Tour Divide is more miles in less time, with no support and the riders sleeping rough, so you tell me what’s the toughest race. Yes, the pace is slower, but Tour Divide riders are on the bike for more hours every day and
it’s a mountain bike, off-road.

  This coast to coast to coast filled me with confidence, and I reckoned I could’ve done that pace for two weeks, which is what I’d have to do on the Tour Divide. It was scary thinking about it, but I was fascinated about what would be going through my mind at the end of it. Before then, though, I had a job on with a rebuilt Transit Custom.

  CHAPTER 8

  Legendary in the Transit world

  THE TV BODS at North One were looking for ideas for stuff I could do for another series of Speed. A mate had told me about a couple of races in Nevada, flat-out, 90-mile time trials, held on closed public roads. The races are called the Silver State Classic Challenge and the Nevada Open Road Challenge. North One liked the sound of them.

  When the TV lot started talking about a race in America, the idea turned to me doing the Nevada Open Road Challenge in a Transit van. Then everyone agreed it would be a lot better if it was done in a van that had some link to me, instead of one we might be able to get from Ford. They asked, ‘Have you got a Transit van?’ Well, actually, I have …

  Between me, Andy Spellman and North One, we came up with the plan to turn the black Custom I’d written off and bought back from the insurance company into Supervan 4, and I’d go and race it out in Nevada. After everything that had gone wrong with the van, it sounded like it couldn’t have worked out better.

  Ford had been building promotional vans out of Transits since 1971, calling them Supervans. The first was a Mark 1 Transit fitted with a V8 engine from the famous Ford GT40 sports car.

  Built in 1984, Supervan 2 had a version of a Cosworth DFV V8 F1 engine, rear-mounted on a Ford C100 Group C racing-car chassis with the fibreglass body of a Mark 2 Transit over the top. Really, it was a Le Mans racing-car chassis with an F1 engine in it and a fibreglass shell. It would do 174 mph, but it wasn’t really usable. The engine was so highly strung that it needed pre-heating before you could start it, and a team of mechanics to look after it whenever it ran anywhere. And Ford had used a body shape that was just about to be replaced with a new production van, so, from a marketing point of view, it was out of date not long after being built. It was only used for a year before it was retired.

  Supervan 3 appeared in 1994 and was used to promote the new Mark 5. It had a seven-eighths scale fibreglass body and was originally fitted with a Cosworth HB V8 F1 engine, the same type that powered Michael Schumacher’s Benetton when he won his first F1 title in 1994. The Supervan’s engine was eventually replaced with a Ford Cosworth 3-litre V6, so it could be more usable. Mine could be thought of as Supervan 4, making it legendary in the Transit world.

  North One decided they’d use Krazy Horse to manage the building of the van. The company’s boss, Paul Beamish, is really into his hot rods and American muscle cars. The shop is also a Morgan dealer, so they had the facilities and mechanics to do it. The TV lot trusted Krazy Horse because they’d proved how hard they worked on the wall of death, and they were on the same wavelength.

  The van would be completely modified: V6 twin-turbo engine; converted from front- to rear-wheel drive; roll cage; massive brakes; coil-over suspension.

  There are different classes to enter in the Nevada Challenge race. You tell the organisers which class you want to run in – 100 mph, 140, 150 or unlimited – and I was going to be in the 150 mph class. The idea is to cover the 90-mile course at as close to an average of 150 mph as possible, but it’s harder than it sounds. I was told that in the 2015 race, a boy who was summat like two-tenths of a second off the perfect time for averaging 150 mph over the 90-mile course wasn’t even in the top 20.

  I had no idea how I was going to drive 90 miles that accurately. I would have a local co-driver, or navigator, as they call them in this race, a man who knows where to go steady and where to give it the berries. And the race was in May, so not even two months after the wall of death attempt I would be going to America to race what might be the world’s fastest van. I just hoped there wouldn’t be any parked car transporters in the way.

  At the beginning of December 2015, my wrecked Transit Custom, FT13 AFK, was collected and taken to Krazy Horse in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. I followed it for the first day of filming on the Speed programme. Paul Beamish, his salesman Stuart, who has built hot rods all his life, and Krazy Horse’s mechanic Dan Sims were there, and some wild ideas were chucked about. Ford V8s and rear-mounted turbos were all discussed before a plan was decided while the cameras filmed it all.

  The next day the van was taken to Baker Body Craft in Mildenhall, a specialist body-repair company that Krazy Horse trust. They set about straightening the van and ended up putting an A-pillar in it. An A-pillar is the upright that runs from the sill, has the door hinges fasten to it then forms the side windscreen frame and carries on to join the roof panel. You know a car or van is near enough buggered if it needs an A-pillar in it.

  I went back to the wall of death job that was looming, while Dan got on with the Transit. He would be the foreman in charge of modifying my van. I would have loved to do it, but it was being built at the same time that I was flat out with the wall of death bike, so I didn’t lay a hand on it. Dan was the brains behind the whole job. He’s 32 and a real good lad. He had worked as a Mercedes mechanic for 13 years, starting out as an apprentice and working up to diagnostic technician on all vehicles, from smart cars up to Sprinter vans and everything in between, including AMG Mercs. He’d been at Krazy Horse just short of a year when he started on the Transit.

  He set about putting meat on the bones of the plan while Craig McAlpine, one of the subby researchers at North One, contacted Ford GB to tell them what we were doing. Craig’s in his mid-twenties and dead into his cars, so he was the ideal man for this job. Ford offered North One a special Tourneo, the minibus version of the Transit, that their motorsport department had fitted with a 400-horsepower V6 EcoBoost engine, a six-speed manual gearbox and a Ford F-150 pick-up back axle. Tourneos are only ever front-wheel drive, like Transit Customs, but Ford’s motorsport lads had wanged this eff-off engine, Mustang gearbox and a back axle in it for the fun of it. It had been chucked together by some of the mechanics – a few of them had been involved in the Supervan projects – but it was never supposed to see the light of day. It was only ever a tea-break and after-work project – an experiment – that was never meant to be anything fancy. We were told that the Tourneo project had been shelved, but they were happy to help us.

  Ford were never going to do anything with this special van, except crush it, so they told the TV lot that we could take whatever we needed off it. Dan took the ideas from the Tourneo, but not a lot more, then did it his own way.

  On 28 January, Dan took the Tourneo to Millbrook Proving Ground, the specialist automotive industry test facility, near Bedford, to see what it could do. He got 138.5 mph on the bowl before he reckoned it felt a bit loose at the rear. It clocked 125 mph at the end of a mile from a standing start and 135 mph on a flying mile. The test gave us half an idea about the gear ratios we’d need to run top speeds and proved that a Transit would do 140 mph with a bog-standard EcoBoost engine. Ours would end up being a lot neater job, though.

  Our van, FT13 AFK, was coming along slowly but steadily, though there was a problem. North One reckoned that the van couldn’t be imported into America without a logbook, and because it was a Category B, it no longer had a valid logbook. Baker’s had finished the repairs on the van and done a perfect job of it. The TV researchers found out that they could have the van rebuilt, then inspected, and pay for an engineer’s report to prove the van was as good as new. Spellman had to smooth it out with the insurance company, who’d already sent me a cheque for the written-off Transit. It would have been a lot easier to start with a different van, but then it wouldn’t have been mine and I wouldn’t have been as into it. The engineer’s report did the job and Spellman got the van reclassified from Category B to C, meaning we could use the van for the project. Another hoop had been jumped through.

  Dan and Craig from
North One had been contacting parts suppliers to see what they could get in time for the project. The timescale for something as complicated and oddball as a 175-mph Transit van was dead tight, and some of the specialist companies they got in touch with were too stacked out to help. Eventually, with only about three months before it would have to be shipped out to America, Krazy Horse could really start on the spannering.

  At first we were going to use the engine out of the Tourneo, but it was a really early prototype engine and nothing else we planned to use wanted to fit it, so Dan decided we should start from scratch with a different motor. Because he was talking to loads of different parts suppliers for the van, through this man and that man, a deal was done with Radical to supply an engine and other parts.

  Radical are a sports car company based in Peterborough. They started in 1997, making track cars powered by superbike engines. The cars were for keen track day drivers, very lightweight, dead revvy and adjustable, so they were more like proper racing cars than modified road cars. And because they had motorcycle engines and fibreglass or carbon-fibre bodywork, they had good power-to-weight ratios. From very early in their history, Radical organised their own race series for owners, and they quickly started exporting around the world.

  The company kept adding models, eventually making a road-legal car, all the time with bike engines, then, in 2005, they started using the Ford V8 engine in their SR8. That car – it looks like a modern Le Mans racer – holds the production-car lap record at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, the place I’d still like to go back to with a trick motorbike for a crack at the lap record. It’s on the list. By the time they got involved with our Transit project, Radical had built over 2,000 cars in their 19-year history.

  The engine they promised us was a twin-turbo V6 EcoBoost, and supposedly good for 700 horsepower. If you’re not familiar with horsepower figures, a 2015 Ferrari 458 only makes 562 horsepower, while a 2015 Porsche 911 Turbo is 572 horsepower.