by Guy Martin
We didn’t test again until Castle Combe, near Bath, on 4 and 5 April for the annual Dunlop two-day tyre test. The weather was cracking, and it was my first time on the newly completed Superbike, but I was underwhelmed again. I was thinking it was going to be something special – it was an HRC Honda Fireblade – but it felt like just another Japanese Superbike.
I made some notes in my diary: First run on the Superbike. Blipper not working. Not quick. 93 laps. McGuinness crashed on second day, dislocated thumb.
I was in the pits when he crashed, changing something on the bike, when someone told us not to go back out; something had happened. McGuinness had hurt his hand. I didn’t get the chance to talk to him on the day of the crash, because he was taken off to hospital and he was still there when I set off home.
So this is two tests, two different specifications of the same bike, one Superstock, one Superbike, and all the bikes had electrical issues. Not only that, we’d had two tests and John McGuinness had crashed at both of them. I nearly crashed at Castle Combe, but didn’t. It was close enough for the airbag to go off in my Dainese D-Air leathers. The gyros and processors in the leathers were so sure I was about to hit the deck that they triggered the airbag, which is around the shoulders and neck, to protect me from the imminent impact. You need a big moment to set it off. I’ve never done it before, or since. I was in the fast right-hander, coming on the start/finish straight, when it bucked me out of the seat.
The whole point of these tests is to push the limits and then step back from them, but the McGuinness crashes were more of a concern, because the cause of them was still a mystery.
I was back at Moody’s for a couple of days at work, before McGuinness and I flew out to Japan to test the Mugen Shinden electric TT bike. Honda’s official TT racers also race the Mugen in the TT Zero, the one-lap TT race for electric bikes. I’d been to Japan twice before, both times sent by Performance Bikes for launches of new bikes. I really like the place, partly because it feels so alien, and this visit was just the same, with the bogs that wash your arse and the people are so polite.
As soon as we landed we were taken to the Honda museum at Motegi. I was dead impressed to see that the Honda NR500 was in pride of place, because it was one of Honda’s biggest failures. Honda had always been committed to four-stroke engines, but two-strokes were dominating motorcycle grand prix racing. All things being equal, and in very basic terms, a two-stroke engine can make more power because it is firing every second stroke, while a four-stroke is only firing every fourth stroke. By this era bikes were limited to a maximum of four cylinders and an upper cylinder capacity of 500cc, so Honda came up with the idea of making odd-shaped pistons, what all the British magazines described as being the shape of a Spam tin. The idea was to increase the valve area of a 500cc engine. Bigger valves can pass more air and fuel into the combustion chamber and can make more power. Combine that with higher revs and they might make a four-stroke engine that can compete with a two-stroke.
The bike was a disaster, its results were terrible, it was unreliable. It was too ambitious, but it was brave. And here it was, right in the middle of the corporate museum. I took that to mean that Honda had learned loads by failing and were proud of trying. And I liked that.
This wasn’t a big part of me joining Honda, but getting to race the Mugen Shinden was definitely a bonus. It has been developed by Mugen, but it’s closely related to Honda. I tested the bike on track. It’s a beautiful piece of kit, and fast, but it is heavy, weighing 248kg, where the minimum weight limit of a Superbike is 168kg. It weighs so much because of all of the lithium-ion batteries it needs to shift as fast as it does.
McGuinness was still suffering with his dislocated thumb, so he hardly rode the Mugen in Japan, but he knew the bike inside out because he’d raced it a few times at the TT already. All that had changed from the bike he’d raced the previous year was a new front mudguard and how quickly the battery could charge. They hoped the mudguard would make some aerodynamic improvements, but it was hard to tell because we were testing it at a go-kart track.
Back home there were plenty of tests arranged for me on the Superbike, so there was no lack of time on the bike or lack of effort from Honda Racing. The next test was at the Oulton Park race track, Cheshire, where I stopped off on my way to the Tandragee 100 road races near Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, being held on 21–2 April. I tested the Superbike at Oulton, but I would race the Superstocker at Tandragee.
One of the reasons I went back to Tandragee was because I didn’t race the TT in 2016. I was cycling through America on the Tour Divide instead. If it’s either your first year at the TT, or you missed a year, you have to get signatures on your race licence to be given a start permission for the TT. This is what everyone is supposed to do to prove they’ve got enough experience to race there. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee safety, and the TT and the ACU (the Auto-Cycle Union) know I knew my way around the place. Also, because I was racing for the official Honda team it would only need a phone call to get me permission, but I didn’t want to owe any favours or be open to anyone coming back and saying, ‘Well, we broke the rules to get you your start permission, so can you just …?’ I wanted to tick all the boxes and get all my signatures, six of them, to show six national level finishes, between the end of one TT and the start of the next. I already had one from New Zealand, where I’d raced in November 2016 on my Martek, so the races I chose were Tandragee, Cookstown, Scarborough, and two races from the North West, because there are two different race days.
At this stage, six weeks before the TT, the team still weren’t 100 per cent sure they had fixed what had caused McGuinness’s Castle Combe crash. Nothing had been mentioned publicly, and never would be – until now – but the team told me they wanted to check a few things before I competed at Tandragee, which would be the first real road race the 2017 Fireblade SP2 would take part in. I knew what they were really doing: checking it wasn’t likely to spit me off into a field.
It’s worth explaining that the 2017 Honda Fireblade, like lots of modern bikes, has what they call a ride-by-wire throttle. What that means is there is no mechanical link between the twistgrip throttle, that the rider twists back and forward to increase or decrease the revs of the bike, and the fuel injection system. For most of the previous hundred and whatever years of the history of motorcycles, there’s been a cable, or two, between the throttle and the carb or fuel-injection throttle bodies. It’s a mechanical connection between the rider’s hand and the fuel system.
With ride-by-wire systems, the twistgrip looks the same, and feels the same, but instead of cable there’s a potentiometer that measures the movement of the grip and sends an electrical signal, via the ECU, to a stepper motor that opens and closes the throttle bodies. The reason for this extra complication, compared to a cable, is that modern fuel-injection systems can work more closely with all the new, more sophisticated traction control and wheelie control systems.
Modern fuel systems can overrule what the rider is asking for to deliver a smoother and safer ride for road riders and racers. But there is also the possibility of the motorcycle overthinking or misinterpreting what the rider wants. This meant there was a question mark over what the ride-by-wire throttle was doing.
The throttle takes a lot into account. When the bike feels the rider’s foot changing down a gear, the ECU automatically ‘blips’ the throttle; it acts like the rider giving the twistgrip a short, sharp turn. It does this to load and unload the gearbox’s dogs, the meshing gear teeth, momentarily for a smoother gear change. Some sportscars do it automatically. Before these electronic blippers, riders would do it themselves, while on the brakes into a corner. The engine knows, in the time of that blip, the gear selector barrel should move from third to second, or whatever gear, but it doesn’t just see third gear and second gear, it knows every increment in between. It sounded to me that when McGuinness had crashed and dislocated his thumb he was going down the gears to enter a corner, and the
gear hadn’t fully engaged, so it had kept blipping. He’d closed the throttle, but the ECU had kept it open while he had the bike leant over, and he’d lost the front end. Like anyone would. It was a really clever system, but the program needed rewriting so it couldn’t happen again.
I was given the all-clear to race, so I set off for Ireland. Someone told me I hadn’t raced at Tandragee since 2005 and when I got there I couldn’t work out why it had been so long. It’s the most hardcore road race of the lot. It’s amazing and the kind of track I love racing on.
Practice was Friday 21 April, the race the next day. The races in Northern Ireland are different to most of those elsewhere in the world, because they don’t race on Sundays out of respect to the religious.
Even though I loved the whole event, and being back on the Irish roads, I struggled. I can’t even tell you where I finished, but I was off the pace. I bet people thought it was because I’d had a year off from racing, but it wasn’t.
After Tandragee I got a ferry out of Belfast at eleven that Saturday evening, drove through the night and got to Scarborough at six in the morning for the Scarborough Spring National Cup as well. I was doing loads of riding. No one could accuse me of not putting in the hours in the saddle.
My results at the two Irish races and Scarborough were terrible. Bloody terrible. McGuinness hadn’t competed at those races – he very rarely did – and it never usually affected his performance; he’d been the man to beat for years. Everyone who wanted to do well at the TT always raced the North West 200 in Northern Ireland, a couple of weeks before the start of the TT. It’s never been a favourite of mine, but I’ve done all right there over the years. I’d talked myself into feeling optimistic about the 2017 race, but that didn’t last long.
CHAPTER 5
‘Killing myself, that would be a failure’
BY NOW IT was the middle of May, meaning the TT’s practice week started in less than three weeks and it was time for the North West 200. On my way through Lancashire I picked up Cammy – Cameron Whitworth – who has been my mechanic in loads of teams going right back to AIM Yamaha in 2006, and had been involved with a couple of telly shows, including Pikes Peak. He was now working for William Dunlop for the season, and we got the ferry over to Northern Ireland. I was staying at my mate Paul’s in Ballymoney, so I was just in the paddock when I needed to be. I had a Triumph Tiger road bike in the back of my van, so I could get from Paul’s house to the pits, but Honda weren’t keen on me turning up on a Triumph, so I ended up parking it at the other end of the pits and putting a bit of gaffer tape on the tank that I wrote ‘Africa Triple’ on, because Honda build an Africa Twin.
When I first visited the team’s awning, McGuinness and I were talking to the team about the issues we were both having with the bikes: the quickshifter and the more worryingly blipper problem that had caused John to crash at the Castle Combe test. We weren’t hiding anything from them. Why would we? I did get the feeling that the team thought I was rusty and that was the root of the problem. Plenty of people were saying that, but I was happy to keep my mouth shut and let them think whatever they wanted.
We were both struggling with a throttle connection problem, too, but McGuinness thought the new bike was fast in some situations, where I was pretty sure it wasn’t. All you had to do was look at the speed trap times at the North West to see we were miles off, summat like 15mph down. Agreed, you’re not on full throttle for long, but that deficit takes some making up, and if the bike’s not doing what you want on corner entry you haven’t got a chance.
On Thursday night, 11 May, we went out for qualifying on the Superbikes. On a flying lap, McGuinness crossed the finish line to start another timed lap, went through the first fast right, called Millbank, and into the fast left, Primrose Hill, and crashed.
He slid up the road and hit the railings between the path at the side of the road and the golf course that’s right on the coast there. It was a big one. He broke his right leg, four vertebrae and some ribs.
He must have broken his leg fairly early on in the accident, because he lost 50mm of bone on the road as it ground away. Later in the year they gave him a bone graft and put on an external fixator frame, like Ian Hutchinson had for so long after his bad accident at Silverstone in 2010. They’ve got some length back in McGuinness’s leg, but it was properly buggered. I went to see him in hospital and he was talking sense, but he was fucked.
He told me he’d shut the throttle to go down a gear and the bike behaved like he’d opened it. Looking back, I do wonder if it didn’t happen to me because I’m more aggressive with the gear lever than McGuinness. Perhaps I really stamp on it, relatively speaking, so the bike’s gear position sensor is in no doubt that I’m changing gear. Perhaps that’s why he had the problem twice and I never had it.
McGuinness was still very Honda, the company man, even to me. I didn’t need anyone to give me advice at that point. I knew what I was doing and what I was thinking. I will often ask, ‘What do you think?’, but I know what I’m doing, so what am I asking you for?
Honda decided to withdraw from the North West 200, with the new team manager, Jonny Twelvetrees, saying, ‘We now need to determine what happened and will sit out the Superstock and Superbike races, get back to Louth to analyse John’s bike and regroup ahead of our next test at Castle Combe in a couple of weeks before we head to the Isle of Man.’
Honda Racing were just competing with the 1000cc bikes, so I’d agreed to race Wilson Craig’s Honda 600s in the Supersport class at the North West and the TT. I still ended up racing his 600s, so I got enough signatures on my licence to race at the TT. I’d raced with Wilson in 2010, the year TT3D: Closer to the Edge had been filmed, and I liked the bloke, and the bikes were good, but because the focus was on trying to sort the big bikes I wasn’t giving the 600s as much time as I would have liked to and I wasn’t doing them, or myself, justice in the 600 races. If things are going according to plan you can put in good times in different classes, but if you’re trying to sort out big problems with one bike and that’s where you’ve decided your focus should be, the other class is compromised.
There’s two weeks between the end of the North West and the start of the TT’s practice week and things weren’t looking great. If anything, though, I felt the pressure was off me – the bike’s tried to kill my teammate. I’m shrugging and thinking, you can’t blame me, but that’s not my attitude normally.
Even before John’s crash, and Honda pulling out of the North West, it was obvious to me that the bike was just so slow and it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to. A perfect example of this was on corner entry: it wasn’t decelerating into corners like I wanted it to. It didn’t have the aggressive engine braking a big Superbike should have when I shut the throttle. I wanted it to close the throttle hard to transfer the weight onto the front tyre so I could throw it into the corner how I wanted it to. There was a fraction of a second delay every time I asked it to do anything because the bike’s ECU was taking so many things into account (or that’s what I put it down to), and, because of that, it wasn’t giving me the outright control I wanted and needed. I wanted it to react to everything my hand did. I wasn’t asking for the impossible. I’d been racing bikes on the roads for ten years and they’d all given me the response I wanted and expected, so it wasn’t some unobtainable goal. Hour-long races are regularly won and lost by a couple of seconds, so if you’re just 1 per cent off the pace you’re nowhere.
I got back from the North West at three in the morning on 14 May and I’d been thinking about the bike all the way home. I suggested an extra test to the team. I was willing to race the bike, even though no one was sure if the problem had been solved, or even what the cause was, but the lack of top speed was more of an issue when we’d sorted all the other problems out. I never wanted to just make up the numbers, but if the bike wasn’t quick enough, it didn’t matter what I did, that’s all I was ever going to be doing.
After a week working at Moody’s I went to Elv
ington on Saturday to meet the team. Elvington is an airfield, to the south-east of York, that holds motorcycle top-speed and sprint events, and has done for years. The idea was to get out on the runway, that’s nearly two miles long, and just see what the 2017 Fireblade SP2 would do flat out, in a straight line in ideal conditions. I’d decided that if it couldn’t do 200mph on an airfield there was no point in even going to the TT.
We turned up in a couple of vans, no fuss, and lined up for some top-speed runs on the official Honda Racing Superbike. Tucked in, flat out, I was clocked at 187mph, then 192mph on my next run. BMW S1000RR road bikes were doing 202mph. I was on a 230-horsepower Superbike, but it wouldn’t do 200. Roger, from the Honda team, said, ‘It’s very rare that you do 200mph at the TT,’ which is true, but you’ve got to have the ability to do it. The 200mph target was just a line in the sand. I believed if it didn’t do it, it couldn’t possibly be competitive.
And this wasn’t me looking for excuses; it came off the back of the poor speed trap readings we’d already had in races. Testing it on the airfield took any doubt out of the job. No one could say, ‘Well, it was the rider not twisting the throttle, or not getting out of the previous corner as quick as the boys he’s racing.’ No, this was as close to laboratory conditions as we could get and it was being beaten by older Fireblades with nothing but new exhausts and a remaps.
I told Roger, ‘You can see the data, you can see I’m flat on the throttle, you can see I’m tucked in, you can see the bike’s flat out, if it can’t do 200mph what’s the point?’
