by Guy Martin
The little Kawasaki would do over 80 mph, which was crazy for what was supposed to be a road legal 50-cc bike. I’d ride it everywhere, but it kept knocking the main bearings out because the bottom end wasn’t designed for the power it was now making. Because it was so highly tuned, I had to buy top quality two-stroke oil to mix with the petrol, to have even half a chance of not blowing up every other time I rode it. The only people to sell decent two-stroke oil in my area were Regent Motocross in Goxhill, but they were in the arse-end of nowhere, so I’d ride a 30-mile round trip just to buy my two-stroke oil – always the most expensive they, or anyone else, had.
At 16, I left school and enrolled at North Lindsay College in Scunthorpe on a motor vehicle engineering course. I don’t know what I was thinking, because further education just wasn’t for me. I’d been grafting since I was old enough to be able to, but I thought I had to go to college because everyone else was doing it. It was the done thing. It only took a few days before I started thinking, ‘What am I doing here? This is a load of shit.’ They were either teaching me stuff I thought I would never need or stuff I already knew. And I wasn’t being paid to go. I lasted a month, before I left and never looked back.
I had landed an apprenticeship at John Hebb Volvo, a local truck dealer and service centre. It was here that I started working with Johnny Ellis, who would become my best friend. We already knew of each other, because we’d both gone to the Vale of Ancholme School in the same year, but I didn’t knock around with Johnny at school. He wasn’t part of the Kirmington massive. In fact, when he turned up to school on a motorbike on his 16th birthday, I thought he was a bit flash. It turned out Johnny had been doing the same at this Volvo garage that I’d been doing at my dad’s, working on trucks during weekends and holidays while he was still at school.
John Hebb was a top bloke to work for. At Christmas he’d give each of his employees, including the newest of the apprentices, a £100 hamper. I used to take it home and pass it on to my mum and she would knock the equivalent off the money I paid for my lodging. And at Hebb’s, if you worked on a Saturday afternoon, you’d get fish and chips bought for you. From the age 16 I was earning over £300 a week and spending the biggest slice of it on my Kawasaki AR50. I would regularly work 8am till 8pm five days a week, and on top of that I’d usually do overtime, 6am till 4pm, on Saturdays. During term time we would attend a local college on day release for classroom-based training.
At that time my dad was self-employed, having set up a truck maintenance business on his own. If there wasn’t overtime at Volvo I worked with him some evenings and weekends to earn a few quid extra. One of his regular contracts was a haulage company called A D Jackson, and one of their drivers was called Baz Kirk. He knew my dad had raced at the Isle of Man and got talking to him one evening when I was there. Baz was about 40, not a young lad, and he smoked like a trooper. He was telling my dad he was going to race the Manx Grand Prix that year.
The Manx Grand Prix meeting is a road race, just like the Isle of Man TT, that takes place on the same 37.73-mile Mountain Course as the TT. While the TT is held over the last week in May and the first week in June, the Manx takes place at the end of August. The Manx is run as a time trial, just like the TT, with riders setting off one at a time, or sometimes in pairs, not in a mass-start like a MotoGP or British Superbike race. The difference is that the Manx Grand Prix is aimed at amateur racers on modern bikes and keen classic racers. The Manx GP was always used as the stepping stone to the TT. For years, if you hadn’t raced the Manx, or didn’t have an FIM (Federation of International Motorcycling) international race licence, you couldn’t enter the TT, but that’s all changed now, and although I have raced the Manx on a classic, I made my Mountain Course debut at the TT before I raced the Manx. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Many racers just want to compete at the Manx and never progress to race the TT. They prefer the atmosphere and level of the Manx. It’s like a big club race, but held on the most famous motorcycle race circuit in the world. The Manx also meant that riders who were disillusioned with the commercialism of the TT could still race the Mountain Course, with less of the glitz and bullshit that had developed around the TT.
On the classic side, the Manx GP is the cream of road races. It always attracted very serious and seriously fast classic racers like Bill Swallow and Chris McGahan, but eventually some of the top current TT men were offered rides, like Ryan Farquhar, Michael Dunlop and me. But the Manx wasn’t bringing in enough cash to justify the effort needed to put the race on. It was only attracting something like 9,000 spectators, compared to the 40,000 that were visiting the TT.
For 2013, the Isle of Man Department of Tourism and Economic Development, the government department that promotes the races to bring more money and investment to the island, changed the Manx GP, incorporating a newly packaged event, the Classic TT, into the middle of it. The idea was to try to give it more of a festival feel and bring in more spectators and sponsorship by using the island’s race heritage and the TT name. For the 2013 Classic TT, the Isle of Man organisers brought in a load of a current TT top names like John McGuinness, William and Michael Dunlop, Cameron Donald, Bruce Anstey, Conor Cummins, Gary Johnson and James Hillier to compete against classic specialists like Ollie Linsdell and Chris Swallow.
But that was all in the future. Back in 1997, Baz Kirk was telling my dad he had rented a house on the island and that he was going to do this and that at the Manx. I was listening away, while doing a poor job of sweeping up, and he must’ve noticed me cocking an ear, because he turned to me and said, ‘If you want to come and get mucked in, then get yourself over.’ As soon as I heard those words, that was all I wanted to do.
I booked the days I could get off work, and a few weeks later I jumped in the van with Baz Kirk to head off to the Manx. It would be my first time back on the Isle of Man since I was seven years old. We drove to the ferry, stopping in Settle, Yorkshire to pick up another racer called Adam Knowles and his bike.
Baz Kirk’s bike was a scruffy 1993 Honda CBR600 ‘bitsa’ (made from bitsa this and bitsa that). It seemed to be held together with jubilee clips and cable ties. My role as mechanic was to make sure everything was tight after each outing, change the oil and clean the carburettors out, and give it a wipe down. Then, on the morning of each practice session, I’d queue up and take it through scrutineering for Baz. The scrutineers are set up in a garage under the grandstand, right at the top of the pit-lane and in the thick of things. The scrutineers give each and every bike a thorough check over before every practice or race, ensuring everything is tight and safe. I wasn’t trained for the job, but I was helping where I could.
I’d do most of the preparation back at the house Baz and Adam had rented, but during the time I was in the pits, either in the queue for scrutineering or while Baz was out on the track, I noticed another rider who would stick in my mind for years. Keith Townsend was a dead confident Southerner, who owned a motorcycle shop, and his race bikes were absolutely mint. I think his mechanic used to work for Rumi Honda, the Italian-based World Superbike team. I remember looking at Townsend’s race bikes and thinking, ‘When I get a race bike, that’s what mine is going to be like.’ His bikes did it for me. It was the way the cables were routed and the cable ties were trimmed. You could tell that whoever had built it had a real pride in their work. If a bike looks right, it normally is right. It sounds obvious but there are loads of racers, Baz Kirk included, who turn up with a shoddy bike and waste their money when it doesn’t perform or sometimes even finish the race. Looking at Keith Townsend’s bike was the first time I seriously thought about having my own race bike.
The Manx Grand Prix meeting lasts a fortnight, and I could only be out at the Isle of Man with Baz for the first half, practice week, so I missed his race, but it was still a hell of an experience.
During that practice week, Baz and Adam had to get their eye in for their races, but they also had another target. The plan was to get their un
der-age mechanic drinking ten pints of Guinness in one sitting. That was the goal for my last night before travelling back home. And I did it.
My mum said later that I went to that Manx GP a boy and came back a man. And it was nothing to do with the Guinness. After I’d been involved with motorcycle racing, really in the guts of it, not just as a spectator, all I wanted to do was race. From then on, I couldn’t stop thinking about racing.
I had only been back from the Manx a couple of weeks when I was in the local pub, The Marrowbone and Cleaver, for my sister’s 18th birthday. I was 16, but I ended up showing everyone I was the man, by demonstrating my new party piece, drinking ten pints of stout. It hardly needs saying, I was absolutely wankered. I can’t even imagine being able to drink that much now.
Somehow I got up the next morning in time for my day release at college. I must’ve still been trolleyed. I’m not proud of it, but this is just what happened. I was riding my Kawasaki to Scunthorpe when I went straight through a junction where I was supposed to be turning right, and smashed head-on into a car at Barnetby Top Services.
I was so loose, totally not on the ball in any way, that I flew over the top of the car, flailed down the road like a rag doll and got up without a mark on me. I was still so, how would you say it, relaxed, that I didn’t even think to tense up before hitting the ground – and, ironically, I reckon that’s what saved me from breaking anything.
The Kawasaki, my pride and joy, didn’t fare as well. It was completely smashed up. It’s never been the same since, but I never sold it. I still have it now, in the vague belief I’m going to restore it one day. The car, a Fiat Punto, was wrecked too. It was so bent out of shape the back doors couldn’t be forced open. Luckily the young lass driving didn’t have a scratch on her.
The police turned up, but I wasn’t breathalysed. I’d had a major let-off in a load of different ways and even then, though I clearly was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I started to realise that things had started to get a bit dangerous. I was riding flat-out, taking crazy chances on every journey. Lots of people have had similar thoughts when they’ve had near misses in life and changed what they’re doing. But my idea of making things a little less risky for myself was not to start saving up for a nice little car – no, I was going racing.
Everything seemed to come together: the accident; spannering in the Isle of Man with Baz and experiencing all that; being mad about bikes, but loving working on them as much as, if not more than, riding them. I wanted to make stuff go faster all the time. Previous to that month, I hadn’t dreamed of being a racer. As a kid I had my motocrosser, the 1986 Kawasaki KX125, a bike that was built for competition, yet I wasn’t that bothered about racing it. But now the switch had been flicked and I was on the hunt for a motorcycle to go racing.
CHAPTER 5
CLUB RACER
‘But it wasn’t all motorcycle racing and picking up vomit. About this time I was invited to an orgy …’
HAVING DECIDED I was about to start racing, I needed a suitable bike. Even if it hadn’t been stoved into the front of a Fiat Punto, my Kawasaki AR50 wouldn’t have cut the mustard. Because I was so fired up, it didn’t take me long to find what I reckoned was the perfect machine. And it was through yet another connection in the local haulage industry.
It was 1999, and Dave Johnson, from just up the road in Killingholme on the Humber, was being tipped as the next big thing. Dave was the same age as me, 17, and dead confident, but not in an annoying way. He was selling a 1997 Honda CBR600 F-V, a popular road bike that had been converted to race. This Honda had survived two hard years of competition, and was a bit rough, but it had all the right bits fitted to it, like Spondon front brake discs, and it came with a spare pair of wheels for wet tyres. Crucially, for a race bike, it was fast.
I did a quick test ride out of the back of his house, but it was a bit pointless. I wouldn’t know a good CBR600 from a bad one. Coming straight from a bored-out 50-cc two-stroke, I felt like I had been strapped to a rocket. And, anyway, I had already made up my mind. I paid the £3,000 asking price, with £2,000 coming from my savings and my dad loaning me the rest.
Dave was selling the bike because he had been signed for the Honda Young Guns team. He’d already made the step from paying for everything himself to having ‘a ride’. By that I mean he would turn up to race a bike he didn’t even have to buy. In other sports, he would be at semi-professional level.
Dave’s dad, Keith, had plenty of money, but he was as rough as arseholes. Keith ran a haulage company called Old Goat Trucking, serving the docks and transporting imports and exports to and from the Humber ports. Fifty per cent of the time, the guys who run these companies are rum buggers, and Keith was the definition of rum. His son Dave was rum, too, but not in the same league as Keith, but both were right blokes, a hundred per cent.
Keith’s nickname was Animal. He was skin and bone and looked like he’d have a bath once a year, whether he needed it or not. He would always call his wife the Old Crow in front of everyone.
A lot of people who run haulage firms, or, perhaps I should say – so I don’t offend too many people I still deal with – a lot of people who were running haulage firms back then, were turning over massive amounts of money, but they weren’t clever enough to handle these sums. I would see it all the time. Anyway, Keith wasn’t one of them. He was doing all right for himself and was happy to spend some of his earnings on his lad’s motorcycle racing.
We quickly did the deal, and I took the bike away that night. I kept in touch with the Johnson family, and Keith helped me out for a couple of years. He gave me bits of advice and, later in that first season, he paid the hundred-odd quid for a track day so I could have some practice away from an actual race weekend.
Even if Keith did help get his lad get into racing, it wouldn’t have made any difference if Dave didn’t know what he was doing, and he was obviously talented. Dave would progress to race for the Red Bull Ducati team in the Supersport class on the 748. If you do well at that level, the next step is usually racing in either British Superbikes or going into the World Championship in the Supersport class, where it’s all becoming a serious career.
Supersport, Superstock and Superbike are descriptions that are used a lot in the race sections of this book, so it’s worth explaining them here.
Supersport is a class for 600-cc motorcycles. It has long been thought of as a stepping stone to the bigger bikes of the Superbike class, but because 600-cc bikes became so important to the Japanese manufacturers’ sales figures, the Supersport bikes got more and more advanced, until the top teams were spending hundreds of thousands on them. Of course, a very basic bike, like my first Honda CBR600, could also race in Supersport. This class of bikes run on road legal tyres, though now they’ve developed to the point where they look like slicks with a few slash marks cut into them.
Superstock is a class where the budgets have been kept tightly under control. There are Superstock 600 and 1000 classes run in various championships around the world, but at the current Isle of Man TT races the Superstock class is for 1000-cc machines only. A Superstocker is very close to the specification of a road bike. Like all race bikes, the original brittle bodywork is swapped for a fairing that is lighter, tougher and less expensive to replace. Lights and mirrors are removed, too. Tuning is forbidden, but a relatively cheap ECU (Engine Control Unit – an electronic gizmo that helps give you optimal engine performance) is installed to change how the fuel injection works. The exhaust is swapped, and so are the rear shock absorber and the front fork internals. The Superstock 1000 has less power than a Superbike – although still over 180 bhp – less vicious power delivery, and the suspension, wheels and brakes are not as high specification and nowhere near as expensive. The Brembo brake calipers that we run on the Superbike cost over £4,000 a pair. The Superstock 1000 uses the brakes the £11,000 road bike comes out of the showroom with. The Superstock can’t have any of the electronic ‘rider aids’, like traction control, that
the Superbike has, unless it comes as standard on the showroom bike.
The modifications we make when prepping the Superstock bike are regularly made by thousands of keen road riders to the bikes they ride to the races. Superstockers run on the same kind of road legal tyres as the Supersport class.
The Superbikes are referred to as a ‘silhouette’ class. It means they must look like the road bike they’re based on, but that leaves a massive amount of room for interpretation. The Superbikes raced at the TT and other road races are currently a higher specification than those raced in the British Superbike Championship (BSB) races. Superbikes have seriously tuned engines; advanced, bespoke electronic systems; completely different suspension units, brakes and wheels; and petrol tanks are altered to hold more fuel and even position it differently to its road bike brother for improved weight distribution. Hundreds of parts differ. Superbikes also run racing slicks, in the dry, or specialist racing tyres in the wet. Some teams spend up to £200,000 building a competitive TT Superbike, where a Superstocker could be built for less than a tenth of that. Superbikes also need a team of mechanics, including suspension and electronic experts, to really squeeze the most out of them. In the road race world Superbikes are often just called the big bikes.
A while after buying my first race bike I remember going to Cadwell to one of the British Superbike meetings. I went with mates and camped there to watch a couple of days of racing. The first thing I saw was the Australian Troy Bayliss come over the Mountain on the orange INS Ducati. It blew my mind. Bayliss was obviously something special. He wouldn’t be in England long before he moved into World Superbikes and became champion, but it wasn’t just him who was impressive. They were all incredibly fast and, on top of that, I was amazed how professional everything looked. I tracked down where Dave was pitted and went to see the lad whose bike I’d bought. By then he was part of this really professional-looking team. I struggled to take it all in. I was in awe of it.
