by Guy Martin
CHAPTER 9
MAC-OW
‘When I woke up in hospital I thought I’d be like a dog trying to explain to a vet that it needed its appendix out.’
THE MACAU RACE calls itself a Grand Prix, but it’s never had Formula One or FIM motorcycle world title status. It’s a big deal for some of the Formula classes that feed into F1 – like Formula Three – and some of the great F1 drivers have won at Macau on their way up. It is a World Championship round for World Touring Cars as well.
From the motorcycle side of things, Macau is regularly referred to as a ‘holiday race’. And the motorcycles definitely play second fiddle to the cars. They are there to pad out the race programme and give the few spectators who do go something to watch.
Teams are given a budget to take out bikes, mechanics and riders, and there is the opportunity for a cheap holiday in Thailand at the end of it. The majority of the teams are those involved with British real road racing, but there are also competitors from Germany, Portugal and the USA, and locals from China, Macau and Hong Kong. I’d first read about the place when Gus Scott and Ronnie Smith, two racers who were also test riders and writers for Performance Bikes magazine, used to go out and get up to all sorts.
Macau is to Portugal what Hong Kong is to the UK. They’re both islands off the coast of China and were colonies before being handed over at the end of the last millennium. Macau is also the Las Vegas of Asia. The Chinese are well known for their love of gambling, and casinos on Macau take much more than those in the USA’s gambling capital.
Macau was my first race outside the UK, but my trips there tend to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.
The Macau Grand Prix always takes place in November, and my first visit was at the end of 2005. I raced Billy Baron’s Superstock 1000, a bike I’d been using in the Robinson’s Concrete colours. Billy was a lovely older fella who was in the haulage business in Northern Ireland and one of Uel’s sponsors.
I soon discovered the timetable at Macau is very relaxed. There’s lots of time to kill and not a lot to do, so that first year I decided to have a massage. I chose the spa on the second floor of the hotel where the race organisers were putting me up. I’d seen lots of racers and mechanics going into the spa. It must have been popular, because the button in the lift for that floor was worn out, the number two completely rubbed off.
The receptionist pointed at a menu of what the spa offered, but the English translations were terrible, so I didn’t bother reading it and just went for one that wasn’t the cheapest or the most expensive. Then I was given a gold dressing gown to change into. I went and did that, then came back and sat down, with my pile of clothes and trainers on my lap, until a lady masseuse appeared and took me to a room.
When I race now, there is often an independent sports physio in the paddock, who goes around with a fold-out table, giving riders massages between practice and the race. At an endurance race, like the Le Mans 24-Hour, teams employ their own masseurs to give mega rubdowns between the 50-minute sessions of racing. I like these massages. They make a difference, but back then I was just killing time. It was going to be the first massage I’d ever had.
I did what I was told, in pidgin English. I put a towel around myself, hung up the bath robe and lay, face down, on the table. Even though this was my first massage it was all going as I imagined. I then rolled over onto my back, careful not to lose my towel, when – Woah, woah, woah, Nelly!
It seems I had chosen a rub-down with extras. Looking back now, and thinking about the worn-out button in the lift, perhaps everything on the menu had extras. I was so naïve, it hadn’t occurred to me. I might have been the only westerner on the island who genuinely thought he was going for just a massage.
Macau is a track of two halves. One half of the lap, after Lisboa, is mainly first to third gear stuff, tight and twisty. The rest is as wide as the M1.
The first corner, Reservoir, is not far off flat-out. It’s a shallow left-hander and a big balls corner. You go from sixth gear to fifth for the next corner, Mandarin, another man’s corner, the fastest bend on the track. Then it’s back up to sixth and wringing the bike’s neck all the way to the bottom gear, 90-degree right at Lisboa. That’s the corner you do a lot of your passing going into, out-braking the rider in front. Shift up into third gear, before going into a right and climbing San Francisco Hill. There are a few little kinks, while you’re accelerating and shifting up to fourth gear before the Hospital Bridge and Maternity Bend. You shift back to third and hold it. I just roll the throttle on and off, not really braking hard, and remaining in third all through this back section, including the Solitude Esses.
Next, the track goes down Faraway Hill, then climbs again up Moorish Hill. The famous photos by Irish photographer Stephen Davison of riders scuffing their shoulders were taken through this back section. I’ve rubbed my shoulder on the concrete and steel Armco barriers a couple of times, but never purposely. All it would take is a little screw sticking out of the wall or the Armco to catch you and pull you off the bike.
It’s back to second gear for the right at the top of Moorish, then it’s into Donna Maria Bend, a really steeply cambered left-hander, that comes back on itself. A quick blip of the throttle and then round the Melco Hairpin. The hairpins are tight at Oliver’s Mount, Scarborough, but not as tight as this. If you don’t get the line right you can’t get around, because the handlebars of a race bike don’t turn enough, there just isn’t enough steering lock to make it around. If you try to dive up the inside of someone here, you can’t make it around the corner.
From the Melco Hairpin you’re driving really hard downhill to sea level. There’s a little right kink and the bike is unsettled as it’s accelerating down the slope, the back wheel fighting for grip.
This is where the track turns from tight and twisty in among the buildings to very wide and flat-out by the harbour. You take the second gear Fisherman’s Bend, and then you’re onto a straight that’s as wide as a motorway. You don’t get a good impression of speed here, because the fences and walls at the side are so far away. Up to fifth for the straight run before clicking back to second for the R bends, then you’re back to the start–finish line.
After the massage with the unexpected ending, the 2005 race that followed a day later was also memorable for a strange reason. I couldn’t get on with the bike. I thought it was me, struggling to read the track, but that was odd, because I had become good at learning tracks quickly. I can go to a new circuit, get to grips with it and often be competitive in the races on my very first visit, but I just couldn’t get on the pace at Macau.
The lad who rode the Billy Baron bike the following season was Les Shand, a Scottish road racer who knows what he’s doing. He struggled with the Suzuki and decided to investigate what was up with it. It turned out that the bike’s frame was bent, and it had been bent when I raced it at Macau. When I was told that, I remembered that before the bike had been shipped out to the Far East I had come off it at the end of Park Straight at Cadwell in a British Superstock race. This was the site of the bomb scene crash in my first race, back in 1999, and like then, the bike I’d just lost control of went end over end. Johnny and I patched it up and I raced later in the same day at Cadwell, but came nowhere. After the race we had to quickly mend it, then delivered it to be shipped out to Macau. In the rush to have it ready we can’t have had a very close look at the bike.
The next year I raced at Macau for AIM in 2006, but I wasn’t in the best physical shape. And this time it was due to a self-inflicted wound suffered before I arrived.
My mate Jonty Moore would always have a Guy Fawkes Night bonfire on his farm not far from Kirmington. Towards the end of the night, when the kids had gone home, more boxes of fireworks would appear and people would start playing with them. It was at the time when Jackass was really popular, and we’d come up with daft stuff to do.
Jonty also had these huge tyres, called flotation tyres, for the digger he’d been using for his family�
��s building business. These tyres are three feet wide to spread the load, so they don’t damage farmer’s fields when they’re out putting fence poles up. One of these tyres had split, so when it was replaced Jonty ended up with a tyre. He reckoned a person could climb in, like a human inner tube, and roll down the big hill near his house. Because of the weight distribution of one body, the tyre would speed up and slow down on each rotation, as the main weight of the body went over the top. My thinking was, if you got two bodies in there, it would even out the weight distribution, so me and our mate Mathieu would climb in it together. It went well. Then Jonty built a ramp for us to jump … It didn’t go so well. But that was earlier in the summer. We had another plan for Bonfire Night.
In the farmyard was a corn drier. It’s like a large hopper, 40 ft in diameter and 60 ft tall. It’s enclosed, with a welded-on lid. To get in it, you climb through an oval hole in the side; it’s a tight squeeze until you’re in.
I crawled into it, wearing Jonty’s BMX helmet, and someone would fire a rocket in through the hatch. The rocket would fly round and round the perimeter of the corn drier before exploding.
After that, Jonty was trying to talk me into gripping a rocket between arse cheeks, instead of using the more normal launch pad consisting of a tube of cardboard stuck in the lawn or, the old school method, a milk bottle. I wasn’t having any of it, so he grabbed a rocket from the Black Cat box, but as he tried it the rocket’s stick snapped and he backed out. For reasons that I still can’t put my finger on to this day, I said, ‘Give it here,’ having decided to show everyone how it was done. With the same broken-stick rocket.
I dropped my jeans and gripped the, by now, very short stick between my bum crack. I reached round and lit the fuse and could feel the intense heat when the rocket started shooting explosive sparks out as it tried to launch into the sky. The mixture of pain, heat, nerves, fear and whatever was going through my head meant the signal from my backside that was screaming, ‘Release your arse muscles!’ wasn’t getting to my brain – or else the orders weren’t getting back. I was still bent over, trousers and undies round my ankles, hands on my knees, when the bloody thing exploded.
I’ve never seen so many grown men in tears of laughter. One person who wasn’t laughing was my girlfriend at the time, Kate. I’d never seen her so revved up and angry before. She was on the rev limiter.
My backside looked like it had a six-inch diameter red circle burned onto it. The next morning it was dripping pus and plasma. Two days later I was sat on a plane to Macau – a 14-hour flight with my undies stuck to my wounded bum.
Looking back at the list these experiences, it’s clear that something about being around Jonty made me do the stupidest stuff without thinking of what might come next. We’d go to Rossington in South Yorkshire where there was a foam pit, a huge open container full of off-cuts of thick upholstery foam. The foam pit gives a soft landing for BMX and motorcycle riders wanting to learn and practise dangerous new tricks, like backflips. I couldn’t do a backflip on a BMX, so – and I realise this is becoming some kind of theme – I have no clue why I thought it would be a good idea to attempt a two-person back flip, again with my equally daft mate Mathieu.
We set off, Mathieu pedalling like hell, and me sat on the handlebars. It wasn’t until our front wheel was hitting the ramp that I thought, ‘This is going to hurt.’ It hadn’t occurred to me all the time we were planning and preparing. I nearly broke my nose with my own knee, there was blood pouring everywhere, while Mathieu had a massive graze on his arm.
I didn’t always need encouragement to do things that were plain daft. During a slack few minutes at work, I was riding round Dad’s truck yard on my Whyte 46 mountain bike. I got it into my head that I could, and should, jump into the pit that the trucks straddle and we, the mechanics, climb into to work on the underneath of them. This is very different to a foam pit. It’s concrete, soaked in decades of old oil and 8 ft deep and about 15 ft long with a steel ladder, fixed to the wall, at the end. Add together all the time I’d spent in the pit under a lorry and it would come to solid months at least, but, again, there was a lack of planning and consideration when it came to potential consequences, and I just went for it.
At no point, until I was lying on the floor of the pit, having properly spannered myself – tearing my AC joint in my shoulder, the acromiclavicular joint that allows you to move you arm above your head – had it occurred to me that the handlebars of the mountain bike could possibly be wider than the pit … What a wanker.
But back in Macau, in spite of a badly burnt backside, at least I finished the race, in fifth place.
The next year, my first visit with Shaun Muir, I crashed in qualifying. It was while entering the downhill right-hander, where you have to work the front hard, before the climb up Moorish Hill.
The crash was down to me not being aware how much difference a qualifying tyre would make to the lap. All my previous laps had been on regular race tyres. Qualifiers offer more grip but aren’t designed to last race distance, just help riders set a good time to put them closer to pole position. But I wasn’t used to them, and it caught me out. For this particular downhill right, rather than use a braking marker on the track, I was braking just as the shift lights came on. Because of the increased grip of the qualifier, though, I’d got much better drive out of the previous corner, was travelling faster and, when I got the signal to brake, I was closer to the corner. I grabbed too much brake, hit the ground hard and smashed into the side of the bridge.
I was out cold, and apparently shaking at the side of the track – looking like I was having some kind of fit, one of the other riders said, though I remember nothing of it. I was told some of the marshals thought it was just my final nerve movements and I was dead. I was out for an hour. When I woke up in hospital I thought I’d be like a dog trying to explain to a vet that it needed its appendix taking out, but the local medics were spot-on.
I’d actually only broken my thumb on one hand and wrist on the other, but both hands were in plaster. I couldn’t even wipe my own arse, so I had one of SMR’s mechanics cut off one of the casts with a steak knife.
There are different emotions for every crash. When I return to the pits after a big crash, broken and bruised, I never think other racers are judging me, and when it happens to other people I don’t judge them. I sometimes wonder why they were pushing so hard in particular conditions, but this is motorcycle racing and shit happens. It was much worse that I was trapped out there in Macau, that I couldn’t just get a lift home and try to forget about it.
When I finally got back to Kirmington I was contacted by a faith-healer nicknamed Johnny Hot-Hands. He told me he thought he could speed up the healing process of my broken bones. He also said I had nothing to lose, except a bit of time, because he wasn’t going to charge me.
I was lined up to present some trophies at the Aintree Racing Club’s end-of-year presentation. I’d just taken delivery of a new car, too, FV57 NBA, a brand-new BMW M3 V8. I couldn’t wait to get out in it, but my wrists hurt so much I couldn’t even drive, so Kate drove and I decided we’d call in at Johnny Hot-Hands on the way home. He was right, what did I have to lose? I was clinging on to anything that offered hope of getting better. Even though there wasn’t any racing or even testing for another three months at least, I’m not someone who is happy just sitting and waiting, or seeing it as a time to take things easy.
The faith-healer was based just south of the M62, in Yorkshire, so it wasn’t even out of my way. Before we knocked on his door – not that I was in a fit state to do any knocking – I was aware that Johnny had worked with the late Steve Hislop. A brilliant racer, from Hawick in the Scottish borders, Hislop had won one of the most memorable TTs ever, the 1992 battle with Carl Fogarty. He’d also been the British Superbike champion, but died in a helicopter crash in July 2003.
Walking into the house I could see that magazine articles mentioning Johnny and Hislop together had been framed and put up on the walls
.
We sat in his front room and Johnny put his hot hands on my wrist. I felt a slightly unusual sensation, like more heat than I expected, and at the time I thought it had done something, but now I reckon it was just wishful thinking. I don’t think any magic happened and I don’t believe in miracle cures. I was so desperate for it to work, but now I’m more cynical.
Johnny wanted to meet me at a few race meetings the following year, 2008, and because he was a nice bloke I had no problem with it, but I wasn’t asking him for any treatment and instead Johnny started doing stuff with my team-mate of the time, James Ellison. James must have been more impressed than I was, because they saw each other for ages.
My last visit to Macau, in November 2008, was the biggest disaster of the lot, because I crashed at the top of Moorish Hill on the very first lap of practice. I don’t even know what happened. I genuinely don’t know what went wrong. I must have had a bad earth or something. I was so beaten up I couldn’t race. It was a long way to go for bugger-all.
Macau never really flicked my switch. I was never chomping at the bit to get back there, but most teams would want to go, because it didn’t cost them anything and for the mechanics going out it was an opportunity to tack on a free holiday.
There was plenty of talk about Macau being a holiday race, even from some of the riders, because there are no championship points and very little prize money, but the lads pushing to win aren’t having a holiday. They’re hanging their balls out like they would at any race back in Britain or Ireland. And racers still get killed at Macau. Does that sound like a holiday?
I’m not bothered about going back to the place unless I can line up something special to race, like a turbo bike. I love racing my bike, but I was happier concentrating on the British and Irish races.
