We Need to Weaken the Mixture

by Guy Martin

  I didn’t work with Stu for that long, perhaps a couple of years, before my dad sacked me after I was pulled for having bald tyres on the works van I was driving. Stu’s still a retained fireman now, but he has realised he can’t run the truck business and be a firefighter, so he’ll have to pack it in.

  Stu asked our dad to ask me if I’d give him a hand in the yard, but I’m too busy and he’d have a job beating the place I’m working. I enjoy it too much and have a good craic. I probably have a better time at work than I would if I was working on my own stuff full-time at home in the shed.

  I didn’t give Stu a straight answer, but knew I didn’t want to do it. It’s nothing to do with not wanting to take orders from my younger brother. I take orders where I am now. Perhaps I’ve learned not to mix family and work. It’s different with Sal and the pub, because, as I’ve said, I have absolutely nothing to do with the running of the place. She does what she wants and makes all the decisions, never asking me for my opinion. That’s how I wanted it. I wouldn’t know where to start and that’s why I say the Marrowbone and Cleaver is her pub. I don’t want Stu going out of business and he won’t do, because he’s not shy of work. He doesn’t need me.

  When my dad retired part of me thought he’d be waiting to die, because he’d had so many years of graft, but it’s the opposite. He’s that busy he can’t believe he had time to work. As well as helping with the maintenance side of the pub, he’s tidying the church up, tidying the war memorial, making sure the bushes are cut. He wants Kirmo to be the best kept village in the area. Mum’s still working three days a week as a nurse. She grew up in the same Caistor area, too, not ten minutes’ drive from where me, Sharon and Dot live now.

  Kate, who is the only one of my immediate family who doesn’t live in North Lincolnshire, is definitely a Martin. She used to be a race mechanic, now she’s trained up to be a paramedic and she’s a retained firefighter, too. She was called out to work on the fires on the Lancashire moors that made the news during the summer of 2018 when I was writing this book. She’s got three young uns; she just gets on and does it. It shows it isn’t just me who works.

  I have written about my mum’s mum, Granny Kidals, also known as Double-Decker Lil, and her late husband, my granddad Walter, in previous books. I used one of Walter’s sayings for the title of the second book, When You Dead, You Dead.

  Walter has been dead for a good few years and in January 2018 Lil passed away, too. She was 93 when she died. That is a bloody good innings and she had all her marbles right until the end. She fell over, at home, didn’t even break anything, but she went into hospital, caught something while she was there, then got pneumonia and next thing she was dead. Pneumonia, the granny fucker, that’s what they call it. It fucked my granny. She should have gone into hospital to get better, but shit happens.

  Ninety-three years old! And she had a stroke when she was 40. She was probably the least fit of all my grandparents and she lasted the longest. I went to see her in hospital and she couldn’t get about or owt, but she was on great form mentally. She still loved her gossip. Have you seen this? Hurmmmm, what’s your mother doing? That noise, Hurmmmm. It could be the start of a telling off or the beginning of her sharing some gossip. My mum makes that noise, too. She obviously got it from Lil.

  My granny’s house was a nice place, a bit tired, but nice, with about three acres behind it. I said I’d buy it, to keep it in the family, but one of her sons, my mum’s brother, thought he could get more than it was valued for and put it on the market, but sales kept falling through at the eleventh hour. I wanted to buy it for the right reasons, but I’ll leave them to it.

  It was the house Lil and Walter had bought in the 1940s, when Walter had got the ferry over the Humber, from Hull, then cycled the 18 miles to see it.

  The service for Lil was at Nettleton church, in the same village she’d lived in all her married life, and she was cremated at Grimsby Crematorium. It was a pretty small do and more of a celebration of life than a sad affair. If I can make it to anything like the same age I’ll be over the moon.

  It’s good going the way Lil went, I reckon. Everyone’s got to go, but I wouldn’t want it dragging on for months or years. She was struggling to live by herself and she didn’t want to go and live in a care home. She liked her independence. There was nothing sad about it, other than my mum has lost her mum. Lil had had a hell of an interesting life. She lived through the Second World War; married a Latvian former Nazi conscript; brought up five children, saw all those grandkids being born …

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘Hang on, boys. Who am I listening to?’

  A WHILE AGO, Williams Grand Prix Engineering, that’s the full name of the Oxfordshire-based Formula One team and constructor, got in touch with me through the TV lot. They wanted to know, ‘Do you fancy helping restore a classic Formula One car, then racing it?’

  When they first started talking about the job, I was going to race it in one round of the FIA Masters Historic Formula One series that allows drivers to race cars from 1966 to 1985. It’s an enthusiasts’ series for what I’d describe as wealthy gentlemen drivers who want to keep driving the cars from what they reckon to be the golden age of F1. The website is proud to say the series ‘takes us back to an era in which Cosworth DFV power and a creative car designer could win races, long before wind tunnels and energy drinks were created!’ I don’t know about the wind tunnel reference, because, in the motorbike world, Moto Guzzi were using wind tunnels to develop bikes in the 1950s and 1960s, so I’m sure Formula One designers were experimenting, too.

  The Masters series doesn’t allow drivers to race ‘ground-effect’ cars, the ones with massive side pods and little skirts between the side pods and the tarmac. They’re designed to make the car pull itself to the floor, giving it massive downforce and grip, all to increase corner speed. F1 cars have had front and rear wings to create downforce, before and since the ground-effect era, but wings and spoilers are not the same. Ground effect is when negative pressure is created under the car, by using the track surface itself as part of the car’s aerodynamics. By reducing the air pressure below the car it increases the grip without the drag of big wings and spoilers. Designers used all different methods to create ground effect, including great big fans that sucked the air from beneath the car to lower the pressure.

  Formula One banned ground effect for the 1983 season, and the car I was going to drive was from the first season of the post-ground-effect era, but other series still experimented with the theory. Developing racing car aerodynamics can be a dangerous game. Le Mans prototypes, that look like road-going supercars, not open-wheel F1 cars, want to improve their corner speed too, but when they’ve got their aerodynamics wrong, like Mercedes did in 1999, it goes pear-shaped in a dramatic way. That year’s 5.7-litre V8 Mercedes Le Mans prototypes, that were raced by Mark Webber and Peter Dumbreck, took off at 190mph and flew 15 or 20 feet in the air, before flipping and landing back on the track. Porsche have had the same problems in Le Mans series races, too.

  The car at the middle of the TV programme was the Williams FW08C. It’s powered by a Cosworth DFV, 3.0-litre V8, the most successful F1 engine ever. It won everything from 1969 up to 1982. Before 1969 you could race all sorts, but it was linked to weight limits, so the bigger the engine, the heavier the car had to be. At different points in F1’s history you could have supercharged engines, 18 cylinders, V12s, all sorts of rare stuff, all out together.

  F1 rules have changed over the years, sometimes to reduce costs, other times to increase speeds, especially when sportscar racing classes were getting more attention than Formula One cars. In 1966, when the FIA increased the engine size from 1500cc, they decided on 3.0-litre naturally aspirated (that means it has carbs or fuel injection) or engines with half the cylinder capacity but with forced induction – so turbos or superchargers. There were weight limits, too.

  The Cosworth DFV didn’t win overall in its first year of the new rules. It suffered from cam drive
gear failures, but as soon as the teething problems were solved it went on to win over 150 F1 races in different constructors’ chassis.

  The founder of Williams, Frank Williams, became a team owner in 1969, three years after he started Frank Williams Racing Cars. The current company, Williams Grand Prix Engineering, started out as a team in 1977, using someone else’s chassis. They only did that for a year, swapping the March chassis they’d bought for one of their own. Their first chassis was designed by Patrick Head, one of the most famous names in F1 technology, and co-founder of the company with Williams.

  When it came to the TV programme, the goalposts had moved and it turned out I wouldn’t be racing in the Historic Formula One series, because I didn’t have the right level of car racing licence; it would have taken a load of races to get it, and Williams weren’t keen on the FW08C being in that kind of race. So now they were trying to have me do some driving challenge against Jenson Button, who, everyone hoped, would be in another 1980s Williams F1 car. I’d got to try beat him, but it would be a handicap race, because Jenson was a former F1 world champion. I was a bit disappointed it wasn’t a proper race, but I still had the chance to drive a Formula One car, which was something special – even if it wasn’t the first time.

  When I went to Monteblanco in March 2017 to do my first test with the official Honda team, I got there early and saw there was a classic Formula One team testing. I had a look in the garage where the classic race car was parked and one of the blokes, who turned out to be the team owner and driver, said, ‘What are you going here?’ I told him I was going to ride the Honda. He knew about my Pikes Peak bike and I told him I had it in the van. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘does it go?’ ‘Course it does,’ I replied. He said, ‘Let me have a go on that and I’ll let you have a go in my Formula One car.’ I said, ‘You’ll do for me.’ I couldn’t believe it.

  It was a proper Formula One car, and I had five laps in it. It was brilliant. The owner didn’t give me any special instructions. He just said, ‘You might need first gear, but I don’t think so. Be a bit careful around the hairpin.’ I’d never seen the track before and I was going out in a full 1980s Formula One car. Big back wing, full aero, Cosworth DFV, trick as …

  He rode my Martek in his race overalls and he wasn’t hanging around. Brave man. Wearing those he’d be all right if he set on fire, but not if he ended up sliding down the track. So if the TV lot say it’s the first time I’ve driven an F1 car, you know the truth …

  One of the reasons the car we’re restoring is so valuable is because Ayrton Senna took his first ever F1 test, at Donington Park, in 1983. If you look at the statistics and count the wins, Senna doesn’t stand out. He had three world titles, in 1988, 1990 and 1991, compared to Michael Schumacher’s seven, and he didn’t have a personality like Valentino Rossi, but he’s seen as one of the all-time greats by F1 fans, and was even when he was driving, because his skill level was a league above anyone else he was driving against. He held the record for pole positions, but he wasn’t always in the best car, especially when the Renault Williams was dominating.

  Senna had a real good test in the FW08C we were making the programme about. He was fast – faster than Williams’s regular driver, Keke Rosberg, who was the reigning F1 world champion – but the Williams team didn’t have any openings for the young Brazilian, so Senna joined Toleman for the 1984 season.

  It doesn’t only have the Senna history: Keke Rosberg won the 1983 Monte Carlo Grand Prix in it, too.

  The FW08C has a tubular, semi-monocoque chassis. The DFV engine – that stands for double four-valve, because it was based on an existing four-cylinder Cosworth engine, with four valves per cylinder – was the first to be used as a stressed member in F1 racing. The gearbox is bolted to the back of the engine, and the tub, the part of the car the driver sits in, is mounted to the front of the engine. An engine that acts as a stressed member forms part of the chassis of the car and the suspension is mounted off the back of the gearbox. It predates the use of carbon fibre, so the bodywork is alloy sheet. The wishbones are TiG-welded steel: beautiful things. It’s been sat in the Williams museum for years and if I was going to drive it, hopefully hard, everything needed a proper going through.

  Every original component had to go through a process of NDT, non-destructive testing, whether it’s dye-penetrant or magnetic particle inspection. With the first of those processes you dye the part and if it has any cracks that aren’t normally visible, the dye shows them up. There are other methods that use magnetic particle powder that highlights the cracks in a part that can take a magnetic field, so not aluminium or its alloys.

  The first day of filming was in January 2018, at Williams in Wantage, Oxfordshire. I was shown around the car by Jonathan Williams, Frank’s son. He runs the heritage side of the company and knows the history of every car, including the FW08C we were involved with. Williams Heritage has the largest collection of F1 cars in the world, with more than 120 cars.

  Two days later I was at Bruntingthorpe, the test track in Leicestershire, to meet a test driver, a bloke called Rob Wilson. Eleven of 2017’s Formula One drivers had all been trained by him.

  While we were waiting for Rob I was getting to know Karun Chandhok, who was going to be one of the experts involved in the TV show. He’s Indian, about the same age as me, with loads of racing experience and a bit in Formula One, but only a bit. He’s one of F1’s TV pundits, too. He told me that Rob Wilson wouldn’t be what I was expecting and that he’d teach me to get my eye in on the test track. I think Karun has missed his chance to be a full-time F1 driver, but he does drive the current cars as one of Williams’s test drivers. Williams Heritage had just rebuilt the FW14B, the car Nigel Mansell won in, and he tested that.

  Rob Wilson rocked up in the car he was going to teach me in, some Vauxhall diesel rental. He’s 65, smokes 60 a day, from New Zealand originally, but has lived over here for 50 years, plays bass guitar in a country band called Grand Prairie. A right normal bloke, a good shit wouldn’t hurt him, but he’s faster than all the F1 drivers, if they were all driving his dead normal hire car. He explained that there’s nothing better than a bog stock car for understanding the benefits of the methods he teaches.

  I don’t profess to be any kind of driver, so Williams wanted Rob Wilson to tell them if he thought I was up to driving the historic F1 car. They wanted to be sure I’ve got a feel for it. I got 100,000 miles out of the brake pads in my Transit, so course I’ve got a feel for it, but they wanted their man to tell them. Some drivers are with him half a day, others are with him 20 days a year. Williams are sending drivers to him and they wouldn’t trust me unless he gave me the all-clear.

  First of all I got in with him while he drove for a few laps. ‘It’s all about getting the car in a steady state,’ he said. He kept saying you want a flat car, you want it going in a straight line, because every time you’re putting any steering input in, it’s sapping power from the car. You should always make everything as straight as possible so, don’t drag out the turns. Make them short and sharp, to get it going in a straight line again. This was the opposite to how I thought it would be. I’d try to be smooth and flowing, but that’s not the key. Instead, brake really late, really hard, then turn sharp, instead of making a nice sweeping curve through the corner. Do this and you make a hairpin into a diamond.

  There are marks on the runway that he puts cones on to mark out a course. It’s a course he’s used for years and some of the corners simulate corners on famous racetracks. There’s a mixture of tight stuff and fast stuff.

  Every now and then he’d say, ‘The brakes need to cool down’, but what that meant was he needed a fag. He was a good professional racer. He raced in America, in Indy cars, but he stopped racing professionally when they put a smoking ban on flights.

  When it’s my turn we put our seatbelts on, but we’re not wearing helmets. I have Rob in the passenger seat and Karun in the back.

  We get going and they were both shouting at me,
so I ended up spinning the car a couple of times. I was getting all this information, and ended up having to say, ‘Hang on, boys. Who am I listening to? Tell me what you want me to do and let me get on with it. Stop barking at me while I’m trying to do it.’

  After a couple of sessions I got my eye in, then it started raining. We had another couple of sessions, then it really started pissing it down, so we couldn’t do any more. I was definitely quicker at the end of the day, and Rob told Williams I’d be all right.

  Two weeks later, in early February, I was at Pembrey, in South Wales, having my first proper drive in a single-seater, because Monteblanco was just messing about. This time I was in a Formula Three car. You have Formula One, the GP2, then Formula Three. Both Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton came through Formula Three.

  The car I was driving was powered by a 2.0-litre, normally aspirated, four-cylinder Mercedes engine and had an Italian Dallara chassis. I was with Karun again. First he showed me round in a hire car. It was pissing it down again, and this time it didn’t stop all day. After that, Karun was in another F3 car and if it had been dry I would have tucked in closely behind him to follow his lines and learn where he was braking, but because of the wet track I wouldn’t be able to see anything for the spray, so I had to go out and drive the single-seater on my own. When I came back in the pits, we’d look at the telemetry and he’d say, ‘You can do that here and you can do this there.’

  I couldn’t believe the downforce and grip from this car. It was really impressive. Pembrey isn’t a long track, but I was 1.1 seconds a lap off Karun’s time. The car he was in had a paddle-shift, little levers attached behind the steering wheel that you pull with two fingers without taking your hands off the wheel, but mine had a regular gear lever, because the old Williams would have a gear lever and they wanted me to get used to that.