We Need to Weaken the Mixture

by Guy Martin

  We did the patrol on motorbikes, Chinese things, based on Honda CG125s. The guard was checking the fence where looters had entered in the past. Everything was very routine: we do this at this time and we check these things. It made me think that it wouldn’t be very difficult to get in, if you were determined, but would it be worth a Kalashnikov bullet in the ear if they thought you were a Chechen terrorist?

  That was it. We were finished and everyone was ready for home. Brian had been unreasonable, but I still think he was right. I’m not doing the TV stuff to educate the world, I’m doing it for selfish reasons. I get these fantastic opportunities to do these amazing things, but if you ate your mum’s Sunday dinner every day of the week, it wouldn’t be the same. I’m doing the best things in the world, money-can’t-buy stuff, and being paid to do it, too, but after three weeks I’ve still had enough of it.

  I know if we’d come home straight after Russia it would have been all right. If there had been a month’s gap, then back to Chernobyl, there wouldn’t have been a problem. All right, I was being unreasonable for the sake of being unreasonable, I know I’m a performing monkey, but don’t treat me like a dickhead.

  As ungrateful as that sounds – and I do remind myself about all the stories I already have to tell Dot in the future – there are still times I’d rather be at work.

  I also remind myself that I’ve earned a bob or two out of the TV job, but I’ve stuck to my rules. I’ve never once believed the hype, I’ve never thought I’m anything special, I’ve always stuck to what I was before this all started. I’ve always gone to work. I’ve always had daft hobbies. Those things have been the constants all the way through my life. As soon as I start thinking things like, I’m going to teach the nation – check me out … That will be the beginning of the end. Start thinking like that and the thin end of the wedge is in.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘Honesty Tourette’s’

  THE WAY BRIAN, the inner chimp, flared up at Chernobyl, how I reacted and thought about it later, made me realise that one of my problems is I’ve got honesty Tourette’s. If I think something needs saying, I’ll often say it honestly and bluntly, not try to sugarcoat it.

  I was talking to a mate about the whole shooting the dog thing and that I thought some people I’ve been dealing with are only polite when they want something. He asked if I thought I was being rude to the TV lot when I ran out of patience in Ukraine, but I explained that I didn’t think I was, because I was telling the truth. They were all doing their jobs, but I felt I wasn’t doing anything constructive. I don’t mean in the time between filming. I include filming, too. My mate pointed out that someone can be truthful and rude at the same time, and that’s when I realised it’s one of my problems.

  The TV stuff has been great in many ways. It’s opened up a lot of doors, made me a lot of money, but it could all stop tomorrow and it wouldn’t bother me. I don’t have a rock-star life, and I don’t need it. I’ve never needed it. People say to me, ‘Oh yeah, but you wouldn’t have this or you wouldn’t have that.’ What they don’t understand is I don’t need those things, I just bought them because I had money coming in and I could. I wasn’t going to get all the money in a pile and start swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck. I’m not like that. If the money’s there I’ll spend it, don’t you worry, but if it isn’t I’ll live within my means.

  If the TV lot want to do a five-year deal and build me a dyno room, they can, that’s spot on, thanks, get cracking. If they don’t, that’s all right, I’ve got a mate in Grimsby with a dyno and I’ll get by. I don’t need it, and the thing is I don’t crave any of these things, either. I’ve never wanted to be famous or wealthy.

  I’ve got a nice house, but I was quite happy in the house before that, and I was happy renting my mate’s little house next to the chippy in Caistor, before that. Yes, I have got a lot of stuff, I’m not denying it. I’ve got some stuff that I’m hoping is going to earn me a quid or two over the years, like the tractor and the pub.

  When I put a full week and overtime in I’m earning £1,000 from the haulage firm. Sharon calls me a greedy bastard. Another mate told me it was my equivalent of the hair shirt. The hair shirt is what religious fundamentalists would wear to make sure their life was miserable, to remind themselves that Jesus died for their sins. It was popular for a while, but didn’t catch on. Now, a hair shirt is used to describe self-sacrifice, making things unnecessarily hard for yourself for some personal belief. I don’t need to work long hours on filthy truck engines, but I want to.

  A big part of it is the sustainability. If everything stopped tomorrow, I mean the TV and all that stuff, I could carry on working on trucks and survive. That’s why I’ve kept a 1999 VW Polo that my mate Mad Adrian gave me after he blew the engine up. When it all goes to shit, I’ve got that to fall back on and to get around in.

  But that’s not all of it. I keep saying it, but I’m not sure if anyone really listens: the trucks are still the only thing that give me job satisfaction. Building bikes gives me satisfaction, but that’s my hobby, not my job. I’m having to pay to do that stuff.

  For a long time I’ve thought that the TV lot would find me out, realise I am no good at it and it’ll all stop, but I’ve been doing it for nearly ten years now and they’ve signed me up for another five, so I must be doing summat right, so why change what I’m doing? I could be doing more in my shed, but so what if it takes me a year longer to finish the pickup than if I wasn’t working on the trucks?

  The TV company has never said to me, ‘Look what you’ve got because of us,’ and they never would. They know, I hope, that I can’t be held to ransom. It’s not about the money, it’s about the opportunity and I’m grateful, even though I don’t always show it.

  I’ve written in an earlier book that I went to see a psychologist (or maybe a psychiatrist, but I think a psychologist) in Ireland, because my girlfriend at the time felt she was pissing in the wind. All the whinging that she was doing to try and change me and I didn’t give a fuck. She told me it wasn’t human to react the way I did, so there must be a reason I was reacting like that. It was more for her benefit that I went and was diagnosed with something.

  My lack of empathy was doing her head in. If she could put that down to something wrong with the way I was wired up, then she could deal with that, because it was me, not something she was doing. So I was diagnosed, with Asperger syndrome, and it made not one atom of difference to how I went about things.

  It gave it a name, and that’s the way things have got to be nowadays. If you’re a bit different or you deal with things differently; if you deal with situations in a way that’s not seen as normal, whatever the normal way is, then you have to be labelled. You’ve got Asperger’s or some other form of autism. I think it’s a load of shite.

  I came away thinking, I appreciate everything you’re saying and that’s great, but what a lot of bullshit.

  I don’t give a fuck. It’s not like I’m strutting around, saying ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ I just don’t give a fuck. It sounds right dismissive, and I’m not like that, but I don’t give a fuck.

  If there’s one person who has honesty Tourette’s worse than me, it’s Sharon. She says some things and I think, You’re not seeing the whole picture there because you don’t have the full facts to hand. But she’s saying it as she sees it. I realise I’ll be in the same position, saying stuff that other people don’t agree with, because we’re seeing it from different perspectives. I wish everyone had honesty Tourette’s.

  The disagreement in Ukraine won’t change how the TV lot and I work with each other. No one’s going to plan a trip that long again, but for everything else we’ll just get on with it. I put my Tour Divide head on. Just deal with it.

  Ten years ago I was a mechanic who raced motorbikes and loved working in my shed. I still am.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘It’s going light over the crest, scratting for grip at 175mph’

  THE TV LOT are often scratting around tr
ying to think of ideas for shows for me to make. Before leaving for Russia, Ewan, one of the two directors I usually work with, asked, ‘What are you up to? What are you doing with that Trannie?’ I said, ‘Nowt, really, I just got it back out of the Grampian Transport Museum, in Aberdeenshire, that was borrowing it and I’m going to race it while I get my pickup done.’

  The pickup I’m building, that’s based on a Ford Escort Cosworth that I bought off my mate Mark Walker, is going to take a lot of thinking about. The plan is to race it at Pikes Peak in 2020 and I want to use as much cutting-edge technology in it as I can, torque vectoring, the whole lot, and I want to do as much of it as I can myself, so that’s going to be at least a year or two’s job.

  In the meantime, I had made my mind up to race the Trannie, FT13 AFK. Before I could race it, I planned to fit a better gearbox; the one that’s in it is not good for racing. I want to make it look a bit smarter and finish some bits off more to my liking, because it was finished in such a hurry to ship it out to America to race in the 2016 Silver State Classic, the top speed-time trial on the public roads of Nevada.

  Krazy Horse, the motorcycle and car dealership in Suffolk, who did the lion’s share of the original modifications, were brilliant, and all the credit is theirs. The lads at Ford Dagenham had already been messing around with a Ford Tourneo, a Transit minibus with a V6, and when they found out about the TV show and our plan they gave their project van to us to get the gist of the job. The working out they’d already done saved a load of time and head scratching, then Krazy Horse fitted a souped-up V6, from Radical, the Peterborough-based sportscar company. Krazy Horse were working to a tight deadline and brief, and what they made did the job. It raced at the Silver State Classic, no bother, but there was a lot that I wanted to re-engineer and make a neater job of.

  All my thoughts about modifying and racing the Transit came good after it arrived back from America. At first I didn’t want anything to do with it. I nearly sold it, because I didn’t have room to keep it in the shed at my previous house, then it went to the museum in Scotland. I had no interest in it, because I had bugger all to do with the building of it. It was the first Transit I’d owned myself, so it still meant a bit to me, but not a lot, until I came up with the idea of sorting it for the 2018 Time Attack Championship and putting a bit of myself back into it.

  Time Attack began in Japan in 1994, as a challenge between the Skyline and Supra tuning businesses, at the Tsukuba Circuit. The Japanese had a whole tuning industry making mental horsepower road cars. All these tuners were saying my car does this, my car does that, so someone had the idea of getting them all together at one track to see who could do the fastest lap on that day, and that’s where it started.

  The Time Attack idea came over here and started as a recognised series in 2006. It’s a time-trial race series held on regular short circuits, like Donington, Brands Hatch or Cadwell Park, and is growing in popularity. Each driver is on track on their own, competing against the clock, not starting from a grid like a regular race. The big appeal for me is the format of the rules: there aren’t many. You can do pretty much what you like, as long as you tick the safety boxes. There are different classes to suit different folks’ budgets, but you don’t have to fit into narrow boundaries that make all the cars look the same. In the Pro and Pro Extreme classes you can go as daft as you like, fit the biggest turbos, use whatever car you want, fit slicks, spend as much as you like, go mental. I love the idea of that.

  It appeals to me more than regular starting-on-a-grid-and-racing-to-the-flag short-circuit racing, because Time Attack is more about the building than the racing. Getting the Martek ready to race at Pikes Peak in 2014 made me realise that I enjoyed all the preparing, refining and problem-solving involved in getting the Martek to the start line more than the riding. I like the riding, or the driving, but it’s only part of it. And Time Attack will let virtually anything race.

  I was properly introduced to Time Attack by Phil Reed, someone I’ve known through racing for a few years. He ran East Coast Racing, the road racing team that the Irish racer Lee Johnston rode for. I’ve known him for a lot longer than that because I rode one of his Honda RC45s for Performance Bikes magazine about ten years ago. He’s in his early forties, so he must have only been in his early thirties when he was letting me ride his RC30 and RC45. He ran a construction business and liked spending his money on bikes.

  Phil competes in Time Attack’s Extreme Class, the anything-goes class, and has done for a couple of years. I’d say his Mitsubishi Evo VIII is the best car competing in the UK series. I went to watch him race at Cadwell and he told me there was one meeting, at Croft race circuit in North Yorkshire, during the 2017 season he couldn’t do, but his sponsors wanted the car out there, and he asked if I wanted to race it. Too right I did. I just needed to sort out my racing licence, an MSA National B licence.

  To get the licence I had to do an ARDS (Association of Racing Drivers Schools) test. I did one ages ago, but I needed a refresher course, a total of three hours driving a sportscar around a track with an examiner beside me. Phil said he was hiring Croft with some other racers, so he could test his Evo, and told me I could borrow his road car, a Porsche GT3 RS, a £140,000 race car for the road, to do the ARDS course in. What an honour that was. He’s a trusting man.

  The Porsche had all the electronics that would save me from a bomb scene if it all went wrong and the car’s trick traction control system did save me a couple of times. I was licking on and did enough to convince them to give me a licence.

  I’d done a load of laps in the Porsche, and that’s a car I reckon would be quicker than a Bugatti Veyron around a track, in the same league as a Porsche GT2 RS or a McLaren. The Porsche is as fast a production car as you could ever buy.

  Then, at the end of the day, I had a few laps in Phil’s Time Attack Evo to have a feel for what I would be driving in the race. It’s a souped-up version of a £30,000 road car, and I went six seconds a lap quicker straight away than I did in the Porsche. So I’m obviously not shit; I’ve got half an idea of what I’m doing behind the wheel, but that’s how good that Evo is. Six seconds is a massive difference.

  The motorcycle lap record around Cadwell Park is 1:26 or summat. Driving his Evo, Phil Reed did a 1:25 around the same circuit, so he’s faster than the fastest ever British Superbike. At Croft I was lapping faster than British Touring Cars, that’s how good this car is, even though it’s still a Mitsubishi Evo and I’m no professional driver.

  I did a few laps around Cadwell at a track day in March 2017, six months before I would race it, too. When you’re going up Cadwell’s back straight there’s a bit of a crest, but you don’t notice it on a motorcycle, because you’re already on the anchors. The braking points are all different in a car and, because you can brake so late in this car, it’s going light over the crest, scratting for grip at 175mph. That’s what impressed me the most. You compare it to one of Porsche’s finest road cars, the GT3 RS, on slicks, and the Evo is seconds a lap faster.

  It’s a Mitsubishi Evo VIII, with all the weight possible taken out. It has the original cylinder head, but the bottom end is out of a Mitsubishi people carrier, so it has a longer stroke and is increased in size from 2.0 to 2.2 litre. It has a big eff-off turbo and nitrous, to mask the turbo lag. It runs on 120-octane fuel, has fancy suspension, a Bosch Motorsport ABS and a sequential gearbox. There is no interior except a driver’s seat and roll cage. All the ECUs are mounted where the passenger seat would be. It races on slick tyres, makes 800 horsepower, when it was about 300 out of the showroom, and is a hell of a thing.

  The Evo is so good you don’t need any finesse with it. Just press the brake as hard as you can, as late as you dare, and the Motorsport ABS sorts it all out for you.

  At the start of September 2017, I went back to Croft to compete in the race Phil couldn’t make it to. Like a few British tracks, it is a former Second World War air base made into a race circuit. It’s flat, but it’s fairly fast and flowi
ng and, for some corners, you have to be fully committed in fifth gear, 150–160mph in a car like Phil Reed’s.

  I was racing against similar stuff, souped-up Subaru Imprezas and Mitsubishi Evos, with about a hundred entries spread among the five classes, from hot hatches upwards. And I loved it.

  You don’t really get a sessions or grid start. You get four 20-minute sessions, and you’re on track with cars from the same class as you.

  You go out and do a steady lap to warm up, then one flying lap, then one lap to cool down. You need to find a clear bit of track, because you don’t want to be held up by slower cars. Then you put your headlights on, so the other drivers know you’re on a flying lap. That way, if you catch up to someone they should let you past. It’s very gentlemanly: you’re not out there rubbing door handles, like you sometimes are in a regular circuit race. Then you come back into the pits to watch the timing screens to see how your lap is comparing to those of the other drivers, while keeping an eye on the clock to make sure you don’t sit out the rest of the whole 20-minute session. I had the best car and was quick enough in it to win the class by a good bit. What does that prove? If you can ride a bike, you can drive a car. It’s not rocket science, is it?

  I was keen to do some more of Time Attack, and realised I had this Transit with a mad engine in it doing nothing. It isn’t the most sensible idea and definitely not the obvious choice. It’s a van with six times more power than when it left the Ford factory, but it would be a good laugh. Making it work is all part of the challenge. And, as you know, I love Transits.

  But all that was before the chat with Ewan, the TV director, about the plans for the van. I wasn’t fishing for help or hoping the TV lot would be interested in what I was doing. The opposite, in fact; I was just making conversation. A few days later Craig, one of the North One lot and a proper car nut, came back to me and asked, ‘What about trying to break the lap record for commercial vehicles around the Nürburgring?’ Breaking a record around there has been on my to-do list for a while. I even wrote about it in When You Dead, You Dead so I said, ‘Why not?’ With hindsight I might have said it a bit too quickly, without really thinking hard about what it involved and what difference it would make having the TV lot involved in the job. Getting the Transit ready to compete in the Time Attack series was all about me doing it at my own pace, with my own money and ideas, with no one else involved. Now that had changed.