by Guy Martin
The qualifying for the Classic Endurance series is decided by both riders doing a session each and the average of their best two lap times decides where you start on the grid. You each have a 40-minute session, then you swap.
Classic Endurance racing is competitive, but it’s nothing like Le Mans. We practised wheel changes and all that, though. There are some fast teams, like the Neate Honda team, a father and son team from Britain. Phase One, another British team and World Endurance champions on modern bikes, now race classics, too.
The Spa race started late in the day, so teams had to compete in daylight and in the dark. I’d been a bit quicker than Boastie in practice, just two or three seconds a lap, but it was wet on race day and I was ten seconds a lap quicker. We were having a bit of bother with the lights after it got dark, then the race didn’t go the full distance because someone chucked a load of oil down with half an hour to go and the track conditions, oil on water, were too dangerous to continue. We finished seventh, but we might have done better if it had gone the full four hours. I don’t know for sure. Anything can happen in an endurance race.
That race was the best motorbike thing I did in 2017, but, saying that, the rest of the year didn’t take much beating. Spa was some icing on a turd cake.
After Belgium I raced a Manx Norton at Goodwood Revival in September 2017, then nothing until the middle of May 2018, when I was back racing Classic Endurance, this time at Donington.
I rode 1980s Suzukis at both the Classic Endurance races, but with two different teams. In Belgium I was with the official Classic Suzuki team, then Boastie and his mate Pete, from B&B Motorcycles in Lincoln, came up with the idea of forming a different team, Team Lincs Classic Suzuki, for Donington. They did a lot of the organising, but the bike belonged to a mate of theirs, Ken from York. It was an XR69 replica, a Harris frame with a Suzuki 1200 Bandit engine in it. It takes a lot of folk to run an endurance team, with mechanics, foremen, chefs to feed everyone. Because classic racing attracts enthusiasts, a few blokes in the team own similar race bikes, so they know it well.
The official Team Classic Suzuki lot were racing at Donington, too, on the bike me and Boastie raced in Belgium, but they were our competition this time. They had John Reynolds, Steve Parrish and Michael Neeves riding for them.
John Reynolds – what a nice bloke – is a three-time British Superbike champion and was a privateer in GPs and a factory Suzuki World Superbike rider. He’s 54 years old now, same as Boastie. Steve Parrish is always friendly when I meet him. In his day he was a very good racer, competed in grand prix, not a messer and still riding well at 65. Michael Neeves – not to be confused with my mates from Lincolnshire, the Neave twins – is one of MCN’s road testers. I don’t really know him, but he seems an all right bloke.
In the European Classic Endurance series you can have two or three riders, but riders are in categories of gold, silver and bronze, depending on their results in National and World championship series since the year 2000, and you can’t have two gold riders in the same team. A team can have a rider under 30 years of age, but he must be partnered with one of 45 or older. These handicaps are there to help the racing keep more of an amateur feel. I’m not under 30, and Boastie is over 50.
I hadn’t ridden at Donington for years; the last time was on the Smith’s Triumph in 2015. For the Classic Endurance we raced on the short National configuration of the track, not the grand prix circuit with the Melbourne Loop. Practice and qualifying was on Saturday, warm-up and four-hour race on Sunday.
I hadn’t ridden competitively for ten months, since the previous year’s Spa Classic, and I’d never sat on this bike before, but I never have much bother swapping between bikes. All I’ve ridden this year, in the way of race bikes, is right-side, road-shift gear change, because that’s what the Rob North BSA has, and I’ve hardly even ridden that. For this race I was jumping on the Suzuki that had left-side, race-shift. That means I’m changing with my right foot on the British bike and left with the Suzuki. And on the British bike I’m pressing down for first gear and up for the rest, where the Suzuki was up for first and down for the rest.
I couldn’t get any clear track in qualifying and I think mine and Boastie’s combined qualifying time put us 8th out of 55 bikes, but qualifying isn’t crucial in a four-hour endurance race. The bikes line up on one side of the track, riders on the other, for the Le Mans-style start, then run over the track, jump on, start the bike and peel onto the track. The quickest qualifier is right on the start line and all the others are lined up alongside, at something like a 45-degree angle, front wheels pointing onto the track, of course.
I was asked to do an interview by the Suzuki people in front of the crowd. It was the husband of Anji Yardley, the helpful CRMC race secretary, asking the questions. ‘So you’re riding this XR69 …’ he said, but I felt I had to put him straight and say, ‘That’s not an XR69. It’s got a Suzuki Bandit engine in it. It’s based on a GSX-R1100, that dates back to 1986, but they were making that engine right up to 2007. They’re making 160 horsepower, running on, they’re fitted with quickshifters, so it’s not really being true to the sport in my mind. To me that bike should have an eight-valve GS-based engine with a roller-bearing crank. That was what an XR69 was.’
Plenty of teams are running the same specification, so it’s not cheating, and this spec of bike is what’s racing at the Classic TT. I’m not sure if they’ll ask me for another live interview.
When we’d raced at Spa with Team Classic Suzuki, it was decided I’d do the first session, because I was the quicker of the two of us, meaning Boastie would have done the last session if the race had run its course. With the riders swapping every 40 minutes or so, Butch, the foreman of the Donington team, had a think about this and decided Boastie should start the race and me finish it. The European Classic Endurance series had gone to Aragon in Spain after Spa, but I couldn’t race because Shazza was calving, so they had Boastie and Michael Neeves racing. Boastie went out on the last stint and slid off with four minutes of the four-hour race to go while he was on for a podium, and they wanted to avoid that playing on his mind.
Butch thought that if we were battling for a finish they wanted me on the bike when other riders in the race were tired and the field was a bit thinned out from crashes or breakdowns. I was happy either way. So Boastie did the running start, though neither of us are brilliant runners. Especially not in leathers and motorbike boots.
It seemed like a theme to the race bikes I was spending time on in the first few months of 2018, because the gearbox was terrible on this Suzuki, too. We both agreed it was bad. I moved the gear lever and thought it was a bit better, but Boastie didn’t. It kept jumping out of gear when either of us shifted down the gearbox. It was just worn out, I think.
Boastie finished the first stint in eighth or ninth place, had the bike refuelled, then I jumped on and left the pit lane. Before the end of the lap I was thinking, This isn’t safe. The bike wanted to jump into neutral every time you shifted down the ’box. If it jumped out when I was in a pack of bikes I had to run real wide to avoid everyone and stay out of their way while I got it back in gear. I had to compensate for it everywhere so it didn’t make for good progress. I thought about parking it up, but kept at it, and was up to fifth or summat at the end of my forty-minute session. I’d worked out how to get around a lap only changing gear four times. I was going up one gear on the start/finish straight, back one for Redgate; up one coming out of Redgate, then I’d hold third gear, all the way to the Chicane, before the start/finish.
If the gearbox was as good as it should’ve been, because Suzuki road bike gearboxes are normally good, I’d have been changing gear 12 times. I don’t know of another race engine you could get away with two gears for a lap of Donington, but it had that much torque it was possible. Stewart Johnstone built the engine. He was the TAS engine builder when I was racing for them. The motor had done a bit of work since he built it. I can’t imagine he’d build an engine with a worn
gearbox, but the bike had done the Classic TT, what I still sometimes call by its old name, the Manx, and had six hours of work, all going well, during this weekend.
Team Classic Suzuki, Reynolds, Parrish and Neeves, were doing well, just in front of us, when their bike shit itself. I think it ran out of oil.
I’d stand and have a natter in between my sessions. Shazza and Dot came on the Sunday. Shazza had her phone out and could see the live timing so we knew how we were doing in the race. Then Butch would come into the awning to tell me when Boastie was coming in and when they wanted me in the pit lane ready to go.
Boastie was dead consistent, just plugging away. Early in the race he’d come in for the changeover in sixth or seventh, then I get on, go that little bit quicker and get us back to fifth or summat. I’d worked out a way of riding round the gearbox problem. I was still only using two gears, but I was holding my foot against the gear lever going into corners, so it would still jump out, but it would jump straight back in again. I couldn’t be rushing about, but it did the job. I tried to explain to Boastie what I was doing in the few seconds as we swapped riders, but I don’t think he got the gist.
We’d worked our way up to second, then dropped to third going into the final session. I’d told Butch that I didn’t want loads of info on the pit board, just how many minutes to go and what position we were in. I don’t want all that fist waving over the pit wall. I just want to concentrate and that’s what I did, so we ended up coming second, behind a Dutch team on another Suzuki. The top Honda team, the Neates, crashed. Phase One crashed. To finish first, first you must finish, but that’s easier said than done in endurance racing.
We had a barbecue afterwards, everyone helped pack the garage up, then I jumped in the van and headed home. It was a great day. I liked the challenge, though I didn’t enjoy the riding as much as I would have if the gearbox had been better. Still, the whole experience was great. I like the whole team effort. I did leave thinking, What a great event, how good is it to be away from the modern stuff, but I’m glad I’m not doing this every weekend like I used to. Who gives a fuck? I can still put in an all right lap, but I don’t need to do it to prove anything to myself or confirm I’m a man or anything. I do like that I can do a bit of racing, but I don’t need it. I like being offered the opportunities. A big part of me thought I should’ve been mucking about in my shed that weekend, but I’m sure if I only did that I’d get bored of it eventually and want a change. I do love being in my shed, though.
CHAPTER 19
‘I’d have lived in a ditch to attend a school like that’
WHILE I WAS making the tank programme in 2017 I spent a few days filming at JCB’s World Headquarters in Rocester, and the project wouldn’t have happened without them.
Rocester itself is a small village in Staffordshire, on the Derbyshire border, and the footprint of the JCB headquarters can’t be much different from the size of the whole village. Just driving up to the place is impressive. In front of the massive grey steel building, with the famous yellow and black logo high on its wall, is a lake that the public can walk around; the grass is all perfectly cut and everything is spotless. Rocester is the place where Joseph Cyril Bamford began his company, in 1945, just at the end of the Second World War. The company has always been headquartered there, even though it’s a household name around the world and the firm is still owned by the Bamford family.
J.C. Bamford grew up in engineering, but left the family business to start out on his own, in a shed with some basic welding equipment he bought for a few quid. Mr Bamford was what they’d call a workaholic today. He died in 2001 at the age of 84, but by then had already passed the business to his son. Mr JCB said the problem with his competitors was ‘they get out of bed too late and go home from work too early’.
During the tank project I got to know a few folk at JCB and they said if I ever needed to borrow some of their kit all I had to do was give them a call. It didn’t take me long to phone them up, because I wanted to get cracking with the small dirt track I had planned for the new house. I thought I’d better get in before they changed their mind. The land where I wanted to put it needed levelling out, so I asked for a loan of some heavy machinery and they were happy to help out.
I drive fork trucks all the time at work, so I’ve got a feel for what the knobs do, but I didn’t have the tickets to operate the machinery they dropped off. Luckily the bloke who delivered them was ready for this and was qualified to assess me in my own yard and now I have tickets to operate a fork truck, roller, excavator and backhoe. I can drive them all for work if I need to.
When JCB asked if I would hand out some awards to its engineers at their annual ceremony I was happy to do it. The first date, in March 2018, was snowed off and I couldn’t get out of Lincolnshire, but I could make it to the next date, in May. They’d always wanted to give me the grand tour, but I didn’t have time when we were filming, so I spent the day of the award ceremony with them, and it was fascinating to find out how much they do.
JCB started out making farm trailers from military surplus materials that were dead cheap to buy at the end of the war. Just four years later, J.C. Bamford designed the Major Loader hydraulic kit, that meant regular British-made Fordson tractors could be modified to take shovels, bulldozer attachments and muck forks. Mr Bamford knew he was on to something and kept developing the idea until he came up with an excavator attachment for the back of a tractor. That would be the blueprint for the backhoe loader, a piece of machinery that the company became so synonymous with that when most people see one they don’t know it’s called a backhoe loader, they just think it’s a JCB. The company’s trade name has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition of ‘A type of mechanical excavator with a shovel at the front and a digging arm at the rear’. Before that invention trenches for building, water and gas pipes and agriculture were dug by hand, with pick and shovel, but JCB properly revolutionised the job.
Plenty of other companies make their own version, but JCB has half the market share to itself. It’s not all they do; they make 300 different products in ten factories across four continents. They are a big way of going.
I was taken to one of JCB’s own quarries. It costs them £5 million a year to operate and they use it purely for prototype testing; they don’t directly earn a penny from it. They can burn 3,000 litres of diesel a day just testing prototypes and the competition. They have other manufacturers’ stuff in so they can benchmark their own products against what else is on the market. The quarry is state of the art, with a helipad so that wealthy buyers from big construction companies from around the world can fly in for demonstrations of the latest machinery.
How much did they plough into our tank job? It must have been £200,000–£300,000. I didn’t see the programme, but I’m told it didn’t come across as a JCB advert. They’re not in the business of making tanks. They have some military contracts, but that’s it. I think they did it because they’re a British company and they’re proud of what our engineers achieved and wanted to be part of celebrating that. If it gave them a bit of marketing, then all well and good, but they were doing it for the right reason and went over and above to make the tank a reality.
Because JCB are family-owned and don’t have shareholders or the stock market to answer to, they think about things differently. The quarry is one example, the JCB Academy is another. A few minutes from the headquarters, in the middle of Rocester, the academy is housed in an eighteenth-century mill and is a senior school and training centre for apprentices.
The academy opened in 2010 and takes high school-age lads and lasses from a 50-mile radius of Rocester. The aim is to get the schoolchildren used to working in industry, so they have a focus on engineering and science-related subjects, and their hours are nine to five.
Pupils can apply to go there as a regular high school from the age of 14, though they’re lowering that soon. At the moment students have to start at another high school then move to the JCB A
cademy when they’re old enough. They take 200 pupils per year and the school is hoping to expand so they can take kids for the whole of their time at high school.
There are three main groups that the incoming pupils can be put in. One group is those whose parents think it’s a good idea for them to be there. Then there’s a very small group where it’s the kids themselves who have decided it was best for them; that’s their direction in life. The final group is the pupils that other schools want rid of. They’re disruptive, or troublemakers, and the academy will sometimes take them. One of the guides who was showing me around the school’s workshops told the tale of a lad who turned up there a few years ago with a record of behavioural issues a foot thick, and now he’s one of the top apprentices at JCB. The academy knows for a fact they’ve sorted some unruly kids and put them on a better path, by teaching them in a way that appeals to them and in a way the kids can see is going to help them in the future.
If I’d have had an opportunity to do that when I went to school I’d have ripped their arms off. I’d have lived in a ditch to attend a school like that.
School leavers can apply for apprenticeships at JCB, or other big companies in the area, including Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Network Rail, who also have a stake in the academy. I was shown around the workshops by a couple of JCB apprentices. It was an eye-opener. I didn’t know there were still places like that, where they give an apprentice a drawing, and say they can use whatever machinery is in the workshop to make the part. The apprentices explained that the tutors see how different people go about the task and work out what each of them is best at, before they tell them, ‘Well, this is what we thought was the right way to go about it, but if you’ve done it that way, then that might be better.’ It was brilliant. They had a load of kit, including a load of milling machines like mine, and a welding workshop. They wanted for nothing, except more space.
