Guy Martin Read online

  Sometimes, at the last minute, a rider realises they’ve gone in too hot, they begin to doubt themselves and, not wanting to take out the guy in front, they head straight over the chicane to avoid a collision. Of course, there are times they can’t avoid an accident and wipe each other out. I’ve done both.

  Racers must have been getting their braking wrong and running over this chicane more regularly at Rockingham, because the Clerk of the Course, the man in charge of the meeting, noticed and sent out a message to all the racers explaining that if anyone cut through the chicane and made up a place they would be docked time after the race. This kind of official stance isn’t that unusual either.

  I qualified well and finished the race in second behind Cal Crutchlow, who would go on to be probably the best British Grand Prix rider of his generation. I was well chuffed. I went up on the podium, collected my trophy and was back at the van, packing up with my dad, when one of the marshals came up and told me I was going to be given a ten-second penalty for running through the chicane. I knew I’d done it once in the race, but I had lost time and a place by making the mistake, not gained it. I’d braked too deeply, gone off line, stood the bike up, run over the dirt and grass, still braking as hard as I dared so I didn’t crash straight into the side of anyone when I rejoined the track. After my mistake I was still riding well and got back into the rhythm, trying, and managing, to make up places. I made the mistake early enough to be able to take back the place I lost.

  The racing in Junior Superstock was so close that adding ten seconds to my time would put me back to fifth place or something. I was told I could have the decision reviewed, if I paid £100 to lodge an official appeal. The racing authorities always make riders and teams pay to appeal. If you think another team or rider is cheating, you have to put your money where your mouth is. It’s done this way to make people think hard before they start slinging mud. If the accused team or rider is found to be guilty of cheating, the person who makes the complaint gets their money back. If they are not found to have broken the rules, the person who accused them loses money. Because I wanted to disagree with the officials, it was me who had to put the money up.

  Coughing it up was the obvious thing to do, because I was right (I’m always right …). So I wrote a cheque and went to see the Clerk of the Course in one of the track offices. I was annoyed, but I knew they’d see my side of things. There had been a simple mix-up, it just need ironing out. No problem.

  I waited a while until I was told I could see the official. He asked me, ‘What would you have done if there was a brick wall there?’ Obviously I wouldn’t have ridden through it, I replied. I explained I’d lost time by running off the track, but I got the feeling he wasn’t listening. He was ancient, and I was just a young nobody racer in the Support Class of the big-name British Superbike series. Right from the moment he opened his mouth it was clear I was wasting my time. I was fuming when my so-called appeal was over. When I left the Clerk’s office, one of the race officials, Stuart Higgs, who would go on to be the top man – Series Director of the British Superbike series – said, in a way I thought was very sarcastic, ‘Did you get sorted?’

  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 while shouting a few obscenities and telling him, ‘You can shove your series up your arse!’

  Pretty diplomatic, I thought. Dad was waiting for me, so he saw it all happen. He quickly put an arm around my shoulder and told me it was time to go. While I was packing up the van I knew the job was buggered. The next day I cancelled the cheque for the appeal I’d made at the track. I didn’t think I’d had a fair hearing, so I didn’t see why I should pay.

  I’m one of those people who truly believe that everything happens for a reason. Perhaps this post-rationalising just makes it easier to deal with difficult situations. Whatever it is, this time of my life is a perfect example.

  The week after Rockingham, I was entered to race in the Cock o’ the North meeting, at Oliver’s Mount, Scarborough. I’d also been sent a letter telling me I had to attend a hearing at the headquarters of the ACU, the governing body of UK motorcycle racing.

  Oliver’s Mount is mainland Britain’s last remaining real road racing circuit (I’m counting Aberdare Park as a park circuit, not a public road). It’s a road, but a road to nowhere really, on a big hill outside Scarborough. For a few weekends a year it’s a race circuit; the rest of the time it’s open to the public to drive or ride around. You don’t need special permission, a ticket or time slot to ride it, just turn off the main road into Scarborough and loop round it, obeying the speed limits and the laws of the land.

  They’ve been racing bikes there for 50 years. Once it was a track the world’s elite grand prix racers competed on – thought of in much the same way as the Isle of Man or Monza, but as the top riders became more concerned with the safety of tracks, the Isle of Man and Scarborough began to struggle to attract the international names. The main men really were dropping like flies back then, so Oliver’s Mount, the Ulster GP and Isle of Man tracks were left to British and Irish riders who were either road specialists, had grown up in the era in which being a good TT man was key to being signed by a team or, a bit later, were riders like future four-time World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty, who raced the roads on their way to World Championship racing.

  In the 1970s, Barry Sheene used to arrive at Scarborough by Rolls-Royce for a day’s British Championship racing at Oliver’s Mount. At the time, he was at a similar level to Valentino Rossi – world-famous, two-time world 500-cc champion; a guest on primetime TV shows like Parkinson; a playboy recognised by everyone in the UK; the face of Brut 33 aftershave in TV adverts when Britain only had three TV channels. He was bigger than motorcycle racing alone; yet, back then, Sheene, like fellow former world champions Phil Read and Giacomo Agostini, would turn up to one-off non-World Championship races at Mallory or Scarborough for start and prize money. Contracts in MotoGP and World Superbike are so tight now that modern racers could never do that even if they wanted the money, and I’m sure plenty would like it.

  When Sheene and real road racing are spoken about together, people often mention that he helped to ensure the Isle of Man TT lost its grand prix status. That might be true, but it was the right thing to do. Whatever people say about the dangers of road racing, at least no one is having their arm twisted to race at the TT nowadays. It’s not part of a bigger championship, like it was from the end of the war up till 1977, when the British Grand Prix moved to Silverstone. Even back in the 1970s, however, only the best six results of a ten-race season counted towards the championship total, so in theory riders could choose to miss it anyway.

  The Isle of Man was out of step with the way mainstream racing was developing, and it took the Isle of Man until the early 2000s to realise this and do something about it. In his autobiography, the former TT and World Championship racer Mick Grant put the blame on the ACU for not moving with the times, and it wasn’t until the Isle of Man authorities themselves started having a big hand in the organisation that things really changed.

  The TT is still out of step with every other kind of racing, but now that’s seen by fans and the motorcycle industry as a strength, not a weakness.

  Still, while Sheene might have hated the Isle of Man TT, he had a soft spot for Scarborough, and he clearly wasn’t short of balls when it came to racing unforgiving circuits. Sheene still holds the record for the fastest ever average speed for a motorcycle lap of a race track, at 137.15 mph at the old nine-mile Spa-Francorchamps, and that was virtually a real road race circuit for most of the lap, because the track left the Spa short circuit for the Belgian roads of the surrounding Ardennes region.

  It was my dad’s idea for me to race at Oliver’s Mount. It was one of his favourite tracks, even though he’d been badly hurt crashing there. I’d sent off my entry weeks before the Rockingham laptop incident.

  After finishing my apprenticeship, in 2000, I had
been working full-time for my dad. As long as I got the work done he was flexible with my hours, so I could go racing. We were quiet during the week on the run-up to the race, and Dad suggested we knock off work early and drive the 50-odd miles up to Scarborough in the van so he could show me round. This was my fourth season of racing, and though he’d been a great help and had come to races with me, this was the first time I remember he’d really tried to share some of his racing knowledge.

  Now I realise Oliver’s Mount isn’t the kind of track I enjoy the most, because it’s quite tight and nadgery, but I liked it from the very first lap. About 200 metres from the Oliver’s Mount start line the track funnels into the uphill, left-hand Mere Hairpin, one of the tightest on any track in the world. It is also one of the few places anywhere on the circuit with run-off – somewhere to go if you make a mistake, or someone else makes a mistake for you. Get it wrong anywhere else at Oliver’s Mount and you’re into a fence, a tree or a six-foot grass banking. Just ask my dad.

  After the Hairpin there’s the climb up Sheene Rise. It’s nearly as steep as the Mountain at Cadwell Park, and three times longer, and you go under a footbridge and through a tunnel of trees. There are blue and white kerbs on the apex of each corner.

  Then it’s through the Esses with a raised banking and hedge on the left. The left-hander leading on to the straight has loads of positive camber, which allows you to exit fast. It’s 180 mph down the not-very-straight straight. Hedges are on one side, oak and cedar trees on the other. The road is smooth by road race standards, but not wide enough for a white line.

  I’ve seen this track described as claustrophobic, because the grass banks and trees shadow the track. To me it never feels like anything but home.

  Next up is a tight left-hander in front of the café. From flat-out in sixth, it’s back four gears for this corner, then get on the throttle gently past the café and into a slight right before the first-gear left. The right is what I’d call Memorial. Dad’s race career was ended at the tight left directly after it.

  The circuit passes right in front of the hilltop café, with its great view of the track one way and Scarborough and the North Sea the other.

  Next is a third-gear straight, a right-hand hairpin and a hill down to the left-hand Mountside hairpin.

  Two bumps make the bikes wheelie viciously, then there is the new chicane. It’s more of a loop than a chicane and has a tricky off-camber section where it rejoins the straight just before the grid markings and the end of the lap.

  The race meeting I’d entered was the Cock o’ the North, a major club event and the middle meeting of the three big ones held annually at Oliver’s Mount. It’s not seen as an International meeting, like the end-of-season Gold Cup, but all the top Irish lads would come over for it. I entered the 1300 cc Open and 600 Supersport classes on the same Suzuki 600 I had been racing for the majority of two seasons, a bike I knew inside out.

  I was entered with Jason Griffiths, who was on a Kawasaki, and the massively experienced Ian Lougher was racing for TAS Suzuki. These two, both 15 years or more older than me, were the top roads men at the time. Lougher had won TTs, and Griffiths, after he retired, was regarded as the fastest rider never to win a TT. They were riding for well-known teams and were used to winning. By the end of the two-day meeting, my very first competitive visit to Oliver’s Mount, I had beaten the pair of them.

  I was on my Suzuki 600, in very basic Junior Superstock specification, even though I was competing against trick Supersport bikes built using much bigger budgets and more freedom. The only person I didn’t beat in the 600 class that day was Gary Jess, a shit-hot Northern Irish racer. Unfortunately, he was killed later that year, at Deer’s Leap on the Dundrod circuit, competing in the Ulster GP Superbike race.

  I finished the day thinking, ‘This is it! This is what racing is about.’ I’d done over a year and a half of National racing, a support class to the British Superbike – probably the most important domestic racing championship in the world at that time. I wasn’t at the pinnacle of racing by a long shot, but I was on a rung of the ladder, and believing that BSB was what motorbike racing was all about. I was even beginning to have the odd thought along the lines of right, the next step is British Supersport – on a higher spec and more expensive 600-cc bike – then after that British Superbike, then maybe into a World series.

  I didn’t know there was an alternative. I was developing a mind-set like most British racers, following, or at least trying to follow, the well-worn route of club, National support class, main National class, World Championship. Then I did this Cock o’ the North meeting, a real roads race, and realised there was more to motorbike racing than competing in the British Championship. I wasn’t at the stage where I was thinking I was going to be the next Mick Doohan, but if I’d have stayed on that British National route much longer who knows what daft stuff I’d have started believing. After all, Cal Crutchlow, the lad I finished second to in my last ever Junior Superstock race, has done all right for himself, having signed a multi-million pound deal to race Ducati’s MotoGP bike in the same year another ex-Junior Superstock racer, Tom Sykes, became World Superbike champion.

  One of the main things I liked about Scarborough was that everyone was working out of the back of a van or a seven-and-a-half tonner, not big articulated lorries. The BSB paddock was full of fancy motorhomes. There was even more money in that series back then than there is now.

  At Scarborough, half the grid will have been on the piss the night before. It was laidback, but the racing was hard. Bloody hard. The racing at the front was as committed as that in Junior Supersport, but on this very different kind of track. When I turned up at Oliver’s Mount I was dead cocky, I thought I’d smoke them all, but I didn’t.

  A few key things, those things that happen for a reason, occurred at that Cock o’ the North race meeting. The first was finding this thriving scene of professional racing away from the BSB series. Another was discovering I could cut it racing on this kind of track. The last was a being approached by an Irish journalist who pointed me towards another door I could barge through.

  After one of the races, Leslie Moore, the editor of Road Racing Ireland, came and found me in the pits and suggested I should think about going over to Ireland to race. It was an idea that had never occurred to me.

  Muir told me about a meeting called Kells that was coming up just the following weekend. Even though I’d never heard of it, I didn’t think to ask him any questions about Kells – the track, the other competitors or anything. I just assumed it would be like Oliver’s Mount. I went home, checked the ferry times and booked a crossing from Holyhead to Dun Loaghaire. Me, my brother Stu and a mate and fellow racer, James Andrews, from nearby Bardney, went over in the Transit, W173 JDO. We docked on the outskirts of Dublin and headed straight for the town of Navan, in southern Ireland.

  When we turned up it was a case of right then, where’s the track? The answer was, you’re on it. There was cowshit everywhere. The race paddock was a farmer’s field and people were getting towed into the pits because it had been raining so heavily for a few days before. You know you’re there for the duration when they’re using tractors to pull the racers’ vans into the pits before the meeting even starts.

  My mate James was the same age as me, and racing a Suzuki in Junior Superstock at the time, the same class as me, so we took his spare wheels as well as mine, meaning I had tyres ready for every eventuality – rain, shine or anything in between.

  I was 20, it was the first time I had ever been to the Republic and it was an eye-opener. Even coming from Lincolnshire the place seemed backward. Though it’s called the Kells Road Races, the race track is actually based around the village of Crossakiel, six miles away.

  On our first evening, the night before the meeting started, we went for a curry and waited a lifetime for a meal that cost a fortune. Not a good start, but then we went to the pub and the trip started looking up. Crossakiel, in County Meath, is half the size of Ki
rmington, but it had three pubs, proper dingy places with sticky floors, but dead friendly.

  The circuit itself, I would learn, was typical of a lot of the smaller Irish tracks. Many Irish road circuits are in the shape of a triangle, formed out of three country lanes that intersect with each other. The Crossakiel circuit that hosts the Kells Road Races is one of these. The sections you’d call the straights have bends and jumps on them, bloody big jumps at Kells, but the main corners are the road ends, where one road makes a T-junction with another.

  Arriving at Kells, after my success at the Cock o’ the North races the week before, I thought I’d just use my short circuit experience to brake harder than everyone else into these road-end corners and show everyone how it was done. I’d been on the podium in the British Championship and Scarborough, and I knew how hard I could push a bike.

  I sat on the grid, bike revving to 6,000 rpm, ready to launch at the first corner. I had it all planned in my head and was determined to brake later than everyone into the first corner of the first lap, but hadn’t accounted for just how bumpy the road was. I was braking hard on these rough country lanes, not much wider than a suburban semi’s driveway, and my back wheel was off the floor. We were approaching Magee’s Crossroads, and I felt if I braked any harder I’d flip the bike and fly over the handlebars, so I released a bit of pressure on the front brake lever and ran on, taking out Richard ‘Milky’ Quayle. We both hit a wall that lined the corner. Milky (so nicknamed because his blond hair and glasses made him look like the Milky Bar Kid) was screaming in his helmet. I genuinely thought, ‘Shit, I’ve killed him!’ It turned out he’d only twisted his ankle, the girl!