by Guy Martin
Farquhar got a characteristically good start, but I was in second place behind him. Rather than bide my time and weigh up the options, I let my ‘inner chimp’ get the better of me. I have a handle on the chimp now, and a better understanding thanks to having read the book The Chimp Paradox by Dr Steve Peters. The inner chimp is this primal, prehistoric part of our brain, which makes rash, heat-of-the-moment decisions. I don’t make those kind of decisions during races now, but I still did then.
I was following Farquhar going into Iron Gate, a sort of downhill kink, one of the quickest bits of the course, where you are in top gear, then braking and shifting down to third for a right-left, a section lined with stone walls. Jason Griffiths, Martin Finnegan, Ian Lougher and a dozen more were nose-to-tail behind me.
But it was to be one of those moments when my enthusiasm outweighed my skill. I was looking to pass Farquhar for the lead, but I was nowhere near close enough and I braked way too late. I was trying to make up too much ground on him. I was coming from so far back I didn’t even get alongside him before I ran out of tarmac, lost the front end and slid feet first straight into the wall. I was lying on the edge of the road, with a newly broken tibia and fibula, bikes everywhere, because it was still the first lap of the race when everyone is bunched together, not having had time to spread out. It could’ve been carnage. I nearly, so nearly, took Ryan out.
I was taken to Noble’s Hospital, where I was operated on and kept in for a week. Dad drove out to pick me up and take me back to Kirmington. Breaking my leg obviously threw a spanner in the works for much of the rest of the season.
I was supposed to race at the Manx Grand Prix in late August, but although I could walk, no doctor I visited would pass me fit to race a motorcycle and I missed out. So my focus changed and my next target became being fit for the Scarborough Gold Cup meeting, the big one, in September.
Still, the two English-based doctors I visited wouldn’t pass me fit to race at that meeting either. They could see I could walk, just about – I made sure I hobbled in without the help of crutches – but because my leg had been pinned and still had the metal freshly fitted, they weren’t keen on signing me fit to race a Superbike. They had quite valid reasons and my leg was still very sore, but I was dead keen not to miss any more races. It wasn’t like I was involved in a season-long battle and needed to get back in action to try and clinch a championship. I just loved racing, and even having a broken leg wasn’t enough to put me off.
While I worked out what to do, I was rebuilding and developing my Suzuki GSX-R1000. I’d ported the cylinder head, carefully grinding away metal to change the shape of where the air and fuel mixture enters the engine and the exhaust gases leave it, so it made more power. I put different camshafts in and prepared to build it all up ready for the Scarborough Gold Cup. The bike would be ready, even if I wasn’t.
It was during these weeks that I met one of the people who had a big influence on me. I needed a cylinder head skimming and couldn’t find anyone locally who I trusted to do it. My dad remembered someone he half knew through racing and it turned out to be Chris Mehew – one of the best motorcycle engine tuners in Europe.
I rang him and arranged to visit his workshop in the nearby village of Ulceby, North Lincolnshire, riding over on my brother’s Peugeot Speedfight 2 moped. Walking through the door of Chris Mehew Engineering nearly knocked me off my feet. From the outside his workshop was a weird-looking place, like a bunch of Portakabins all bolted together. It felt like a 1970s primary school, but the machinery he had there included lathes, valve seat cutters, milling machines and all kind of grinders – some of the stuff I’d never seen before, but I was immediately fascinated by it. There was a £30,000 Reve Red Bull Ducati Superbike engine sat on a bench, from the team that won that year’s BSB title with John Reynolds, and Mehew wasn’t making anything of it. He was busy when I visited, but the politest man I have ever met. He’d turn around to do something, and as he did, he’d say, ‘Excuse my back.’
Mehew had raced when he was younger, but then become a race mechanic, before working on the wildly ambitious Elf Grand Prix project. As I got to know him better he’d tell me stories of the incredible lengths they went to for that project. He was working so hard on it, he lost stones in weight. He would work on the Elf till he fell asleep at the bench, then lie down in the corner of the workshop for a few hours, get up again and get straight back to work.
I eventually ended up doing the odd day’s work with Mehew for a couple of months, three days here, two days there – five days if he was stacked out. I was still working at my dad’s too, in a pot, or cast, with a rocker on the bottom, so I could walk about. I’d be under a truck trying to get a gearbox back in. A Scania gearbox weighs more than a ton. It’s raised up to the truck on a gearbox lift, but you have to wrestle it into position. I was on my back with my foot, encased in its plaster cast, jammed under the gearbox as I tried to get the shafts lined up, with oil running down my leg, covering the pot. Not clever.
During the six weeks I was out of action with my broken leg, I was itching to see what difference all the tweaking had made to my Superbike, but I still hadn’t been signed off to race.
I spoke to a few lads and was told there was a doctor in Northern Ireland who understood bike racers and might sign me off. Fred MacSorley worked at many of the Irish road races as a travelling doctor, riding around the circuit on a bike in his orange helmet, ready to be on the spot if a crash occurred. He would have seen some sights in that role, there’s no doubt about that. MacSorley was a normal doctor too, so I arranged an appointment and booked the ferry for Ireland. The plan was to visit the doctor, get signed off and go surfing, up on the north coast, with my mate from Lincolnshire, Jonty Moore. I was also going to race my dad’s Rob North BSA at the Killalane road races, just to get some time on a bike without too much pressure. I hadn’t raced for something like six weeks and the Scarborough Gold Cup was the following weekend.
We found Dr MacSorley’s surgery in Portadown, just near the Tandragee road race circuit. I walked into the doctor’s office and told him I was here to be signed fit to race. Dead nonchalantly, he said, ‘No problem, just climb onto the bed, and jump off landing only on your bad leg.’
The bed was the doctor’s examination table, and seemed much higher than a bed you’d sleep in at home. We both knew this was going to end in one of two ways: either the leg had mended and was strong enough to take my 11-stone weight, landing from three and a bit feet, or it would break again. If it was the latter, at least I was already in the doctor’s surgery.
I didn’t know if it was strong enough, but I hadn’t come all that way to bottle out, so I climbed on the table, bent my good leg up behind me and held it with my hand, took a breath and hopped.
It hurt. It hurt like hell, but it held in one piece and I got the all clear to compete. A few days later, I raced at Killalane on my dad’s BSA Rocket 3, only the second time I’d ever ridden it.
I’d broken my right leg and the old Brit bike had a right-side gear-shift, not left-side like a Japanese bike. Normally I prefer right-side one, but not this time – my injured leg was getting some stick. At times I was sure I could still feel things moving around, like a bag of wet gravel. I managed to win the classic race, and that was the last time that bike has ever been raced.
After my crash at the Southern 100, when I was laid up in Noble’s Hospital for a week, Sam Finlay had taken one of my bikes and all my tools back with him to Ireland. It was when I was back in England that my Suzuki GSX-R600 race bike and my Snap-On tool-chest, full of thousands of pounds’ worth of tools, were nicked from Sam’s place.
He’d bought a brand-new Suzuki GSX-R1000, and he gave me that as a replacement for the tool-box. It was worth less than the tools that went, but I didn’t have much choice. We had sold the Suzuki I’d raced at the Southern 100, so Dad had his money back. Then the 600 that had been stolen was recovered, so I had two Suzukis: the new 2003 GSX-R1000 from Sam and my faithful o
ld 600, but with no tools I felt as though my hands had been cut off. At the time they were just about everything I owned in the world.
At least now I was officially fit for the big Scarborough meeting, even if, in reality, I was still way off 100 per cent.
Like I said, I clicked with Scarborough straight away and I’ve always had a soft spot for the place. I’d already won the Cock o’ the North on the GSX-R1000 earlier that season, but this was the big one, the Gold Cup.
The Team Racing crew came over and Dad and my little sister, Kate, were there too. Every time I got off the bike, after every practice or race, someone would have to pull my boot and sock off and yank up the leg of my leathers so I could dunk my ankle in a bucket of freezing cold water, just to try and ease the pain.
In 2003, Prince Philip handed out the trophies at the Gold Cup, and he gave the biggest one to me after I beat a field including Ian Lougher, Jason Griffiths and Ryan Farquhar. The last time they’d seen me I was skidding along on my arse towards a drystone wall on the Southern 100 course. This was the biggest win of my racing career to that point, and it was also the end of the road for me and Team Racing.
I only stayed with Sam Finley for one year. We didn’t see eye to eye. His management style could be summed up like this: we either did things his way or no way. I had too many of my own ideas of how things should be done, from my time racing self-supported in England, to agree with everything. Sam also kept wanting to take me to the barbers to get my hair cut! But we get on a treat now. Both Sam and I know that if it wasn’t for him things probably would have still worked out for me, but it would have taken a lot more effort on my part to get things to move along, so I’ll always be grateful to him.
By this point I’d totally turned my back on the British National racing scene. I was racing and living in Ireland and loving it. Racers have to re-apply to their governing body for a licence every season, and I’ve had an Irish licence ever since. I won’t go back to having a British ACU licence while there’s a choice.
The atmosphere at races in the south, in the Republic, was slightly more laidback, though events in the north were hardly full-on. And in the south we’d race on a Sunday, where in the north the races were, and still are, always either mid-week evenings and Saturdays. No races are held in Northern Ireland on a Sunday for religious reasons.
I was once asked to tune an engine by Paul Cranston, a well-to-do Irishman who would always run around in a scruffy old van. He must have been 50-odd the last time I saw him, but was still racing all the Irish National meetings. When I collected the engine I was tuning for him, we discussed what he wanted doing and when he needed it finishing for. Then, just as I was strapping the motorbike engine in the back of my van, he took me by the elbow, led me to one side and just whispered, ‘Do us a favour, don’t work on that engine on a Sunday.’ He looked me in the eye till I nodded that I understood. It was almost like he was half embarrassed to say it, but he had to. Some people take their Sundays very seriously in the north. Winston McAdoo, a well-known name to Irish and TT fans, ran race teams, with riders like Ryan Farquhar, Ian Hutchinson and Conor Cummins, and supported Michael Dunlop too, but he’d never let his bikes be raced on a Sunday, so anyone who wanted to race at Scarborough, or in the Republic, would need to do deals with two teams to have any kind of meaningful season. While I’m not religious in any way, I can admire commitment to principles like that.
For the 2004 season, I joined Uel Duncan’s team. Uel was a fixture on the Irish roads scene. He had been paralysed, and was in a wheelchair, after a crash in 2000 during practice for the Ulster Grand Prix. Up until then he’d be a regular top six man on the roads, knocking on the door of the podium places, but often edged out by Archibald and the other top Irish racers of the time – Richard Britton and Darran Lindsay. I had never seen him race, but I had heard he was fast but a bit wild. He had loads of experience, which helped me. Specifics about gearing, lines on the road, how to take the jumps …
He always had a well-run team and was good at spotting talent. Cameron Donald raced for him, and so did Keith Amor and Les Shand.
The deal with Uel came about through Paul Phillips. Now Paul is one of the top men at the TT. He’s employed by the Isle of Man government and has helped make it the financial success it’s become in the last few years. He realised it wasn’t living up to its potential and knew what to do about it. He made some decisions the old hands and the hardcore didn’t always like, but no one can argue with the success he’s brought.
Under Paul’s direction the TT has also done a lot to try and make the race safer for riders and spectators. He made the organisation concentrate more on making sure riders coming to the TT are up to speed and know where they’re going before the first night of practice. He’s also worked more closely with the marshals. The TT can never be as safe as a track like Silverstone, but Paul and his team have done a lot, no doubt about it. Back, in 2003, he was a mad-keen race fan and ran a website called realroadsracing.com. I used have one of the website’s stickers on my helmets. We were good mates, and he advised me to go to Uel Duncan’s team, so I did and it was the right move.
Me and Martin Finnegan were the only racers at Paul Phillips’s wedding, but more recently my relationship with Paul has gone pear-shaped. I still think the man is spot-on, and I’ve never had a bad word for him. I’ve had success outside the racing world, since the 2009 TT, off the back of North One Television and their coverage of the TT, so I don’t know if Paul or his department think I owe the TT more than I think I do. They want me to turn up at all the press gatherings, but I don’t want to because I don’t enjoy them. I do press stuff that I think promotes the races I’m in, but I’m not a performing monkey, that’s going to every TT press event. Simple as that.
A turning point for me, regarding the TT, was in the spring of 2011 when I was over in the Isle of Man for the press launch of that year’s race. I was told to get up to the top of the Mountain for seven o’ clock in the morning for a group photo with some other riders as the sun was rising. I got up early and cycled to the meeting point, but only the photographer, Stephen Davison, was there. All the other riders had been on the piss the night before and didn’t bother getting out of bed. I waited for everyone to eventually turn up, did the photos, and then we were supposed to be at the bottom of the island to do another thing, but I thought, ‘Fuck that. You kept me hanging about here, I’ve got other things to be doing.’ That was the beginning of the end for me and the TT lot.
Then, in 2012, the TT press office said I was racing at the Classic TT, in August of the following year, when, as far as I was concerned, it hadn’t yet been agreed that I could compete on the bike I wanted to race – we were still talking about it. Once something has been announced like that, if I decide I don’t want to do it for any reason, it looks like me letting everyone down and turning my back on the TT and its fans, but this situation all came about because someone jumped the gun with a press release.
I didn’t think they’d been straight with me, so instead of doing an hour on the TT stand at the Motorcycle Live show in 2012 at the NEC, I told them I’d do half an hour, on principle. Then it all got very personal. I felt people from the Isle of Man were claiming I’d said stuff that I hadn’t. It’s a shame it’s gone like this. But they have more to worry about than me, and I have more going on than the TT.
None of that was an issue when I signed for Uel. No one knew who I was and I hadn’t raced a TT.
Uel’s team was sponsored by Robinson’s Concrete, and when I joined the team, Johnny Ellis, who I had done my apprenticeship with at John Hebb’s Volvo truck yard, moved over with me for the race season to be my mechanic. Johnny and I lived in a few different places, but for weeks, on and off, our home was the race truck, a big old Mercedes, parked at the concrete yard. Gareth Robinson’s dog, Blade the Spaniel, came to live with us.
We’d knock off at six or seven o’ clock and then we’d go out on Johnny’s motocross bike that he brought over fro
m home. I’d have a go, but I always get the sound of ambulances ringing in my ears when I ride a motocrosser. We never went to the pub, but one of the team’s sponsors enrolled us in a gym and we even went a couple of times. We’d potter about getting the bikes ready. Johnny is as anal as me when it comes to getting bikes right, so we’d spend nights just getting things as right as they could be.
From time to time we’d stay in a flat owned by one of the sponsors, if it wasn’t being rented out. We thought we’d made it. When we were living in the truck I’d sleep on the bench seat in the van’s kitchen, with the dog on top of me, and Johnny would be up on the bed in the Luton bit above the cab.
Johnny and I would maintain the fleet of concrete mixing lorries. All the money I earned I would give to Johnny to be my mechanic at the races. I raced my 1000-cc Suzuki, in Robinson’s colours, Uel’s 600 and Gareth Robinson’s Superstock 1000, basically his road bike. All painted in red and blue.
My GSX-R1000 had been updated over the close season. It had a Spondon swinging arm in it, and my Uncle Rodders, who isn’t really my uncle but is my dad’s cousin, cast me a subframe to hold the seat and move my body position more over the handlebars.
The other big change for 2004 was the fact that I was out of the Support Class and into the main feature races with the cream of the world’s road racers.
I’d obviously watched the likes of Farquhar, Lindsay, Archibald, Finnegan and Britton race. I’d even beaten a few of them the odd time at Scarborough and the Southern 100, but to be racing them on tracks they’d grown up on was another massive eye-opener. I’d been around them and racing on the roads for a year, but I didn’t realise just how hard those boys were riding. It was an education.
I hear it all the time, from people who think they know what they’re on about, but don’t have the first clue, that road racers aren’t pushing as hard as short circuit racers. They say stuff like they’re only riding at 90 per cent, but they really don’t know what they’re talking about. The lads that are winning the big races in Ireland are pressing on, riding as hard as is humanly possible without crashing. They might not be leaning over as far as a MotoGP rider, but that’s because a road covered in cowshit with a huge dip in the middle of it doesn’t have the same level of grip as a GP circuit. Those boys were, and still are, hanging their balls out to win. If they don’t, some other hungry young bastard who thinks he is invincible will cut them up and leave them in the dust. And those fellas were racing to feed their families. Especially a rider like Farquhar – this was his job. For much of his career, Ryan didn’t have a plan B or a big sponsor to cover costs if he had a few bad meetings. He was racing for prize money, as his family’s breadwinner. He wasn’t handing wins to any bugger.
