Guy Martin

by Guy Martin

  It was the week before the 2013 TT and I was out cycling with my girlfriend Steph for a hilly ride. Those of you who are paying attention will have noticed straight away here that my girlfriend’s name has changed from Kate to Steph. Well done. I’ll be filling you in a bit more on that later.

  Back on the hill, Steph decided that she’d had enough before me, so I went to do one more climb on my own.

  When we set off, the plan was for just a steady ride, so I wasn’t wearing a helmet, but when Steph went home I ended up riding a lot quicker. Coming back down the steep hill, near Double-Decker Lil’s, I must’ve been doing 40 mph, on the fixed wheel, single-speed, when the bike got away from me. I wasn’t in control and my legs couldn’t keep up with the speed the back wheel was making the crank spin. I had my cycling shoes clipped into the pedals and if my feet hadn’t been flung off the pedals it would have been messy. Very messy.

  CHAPTER 12

  JUMPING SHIP

  ‘I’m not even bothered about being paid to ride, but the bikes have got to be right.’

  AS I’VE EXPLAINED, I have never thought too far down the line or planned a career progression. I wasn’t like most UK National racers, who had a dream of winning the British title, being picked up by a World Superbike team – moving to a tax haven, winning the World Superbike title in their second year and then going on to compete in MotoGP. I had no master plan. Thinking about it, there still isn’t one. I would like to win a TT, but I have always been more motivated by the fun I can have racing a motorbike at tracks I love.

  I enjoyed Junior Superstock, because I was ignorant of the alternatives. When I raced at Oliver’s Mount and Kells I realised there was another way to race and I preferred everything about it. I was part of Finlay’s Team Racing till something that suited me better, namely Uel Duncan’s set-up, came along. The same with AIM Racing, and they approached me, I didn’t go out looking for a new team.

  I am keen to better myself, but enjoying racing is everything. As soon as I stop enjoying it I’ll pack in. I have always wanted to improve my results, because I am competitive and I’m not having much fun if I’m not up the front; being on the pace and having fun are tied together. I have never done a big PR job on myself, gone knocking on doors, promised to do this or that, or bent down to kiss anyone’s arse to get a ride. Teams have always had to take me for what I am and what I thought was best at the time. Fortunately for me, some very good teams have wanted me to ride for them.

  Because I never thought of motorcycles as my job, I don’t have to keep racing to maintain some kind of lifestyle or even just to have a wage coming in. After a win I have sometimes said things like the result was ‘not bad for a truck fitter’. This might sound like a throw-away comment, but it gets to the very core of everything. Fixing trucks is my trade. It’s my big picture. I can do other things, but if everything goes to shit, I’ll happily be up at dawn to cycle to work preparing Scanias and Volvos for their next MoT test and truly not worry about what could have been.

  I know there are those who think this is an act, all a story to detract from results, when I might have come second best, but after virtually every big race, I travel home the night of the race to be at work at 6.30 the next morning. No one is making me do it. I never wanted it any other way. Yes, I might have bought cars that not many truck fitters could afford, but I paid for them all. And not with inherited family money or bank loans.

  So, with this background of a steady day job, if something wasn’t working out with a team, or a good offer landed in front of me, I’d react to the situation. I’m not short of ambition, but neither was I ever driven by a dream of being Valentino Rossi’s team-mate in MotoGP.

  That all goes to explain some of the thought process going on at the end of 2009. After three years with Shaun Muir I was looking for a change. Other team managers had been in touch, and I had said I would join Rob McElnea’s Yamaha team. We had agreed everything and done all but sign on the dotted line. The physical signing for me is normally nothing but a formality. I prefer to do things on a handshake, but this time it let me back out at the last minute.

  I really like Rob Mac. He was originally from up the road in Humberside and when we were going to work together he lived even closer to me, near Coningsby in Lincolnshire. When he started racing, in the early eighties, he was a steel erector. In the racing world, where riders often spend hours every day in the gym, but are often short and slim, Rob was built like a brick shithouse. He looks like he could eat Dani Pedrosa between two slices of bread.

  As a racer he’d achieved plenty, winning in Britain and racing for a few seasons on top factory teams in GPs. He was fifth overall in the 1986 500cc World Championship on a Yamaha, and two years later was the more experienced Pepsi Suzuki team-mate to Kevin Schwantz in the Texan’s first full season in 500s. Schwantz would come eighth that year, Rob Mac was tenth overall. Rob scored a hatful of fourth places in GPs, but never a podium. He was a TT rider with an excellent record, too. He did his first TT in 1979, coming second in the Newcomers Junior. Then he raced from 1981 to 1984, winning three TTs from a total of ten starts. That’s a bloody good wins to starts ratio. Rob was the last ever Grand Prix racer to compete in an Isle of Man TT while having a current GP contract, and he won the big race that year, the 1984 Senior. He actually missed some of practice for the French GP he was entered to race for Suzuki, because he was winning on the Isle of Man. He really was the last of a breed.

  McElnea packed in racing in 1993, a leg injury forcing him to retire, and then became a team owner and manager. He always ran Yamahas in British Superbikes and also organised the Yamaha R6 Cup that helped some of Britain’s best young riders really get noticed, riders like Tommy Hill and Cal Crutchlow – who I’d raced in Junior Superstock in 2002.

  With Niall Mackenzie, another former GP rider of a similar age who’d returned to race full-time in Britain, Rob Mac’s team won three back-to-back British Superbike titles. After those Cadbury Boost-sponsored years Rob’s teams were regularly in the hunt for titles, but always missed out. Eventually the podiums dried up too and Rob retired from team management to concentrate on his other business, a courier company.

  It was in the very lean period of his history that he contacted me to race. I’m not sure if there’s a coincidence there, but it was at the time the profile of real road racing was growing. I wanted to try something different for 2010 and told him I’d race his Yamahas. It was even mentioned in the press that I was joining the team. Then a friend, someone you’d call ‘a racing insider’ told me it might not be the best move for me, and my feet went colder than a penguin’s ballbag. It was suggested the team had a champagne mouth but lemonade pockets. They always looked great, through the Boost and Virgin Mobile days, but I was given the impression they didn’t have the money to make the bikes as competitive as I expected them to be.

  I wasn’t looking to get rich, but I didn’t want corners being cut when it came to bike preparation. I don’t give a monkey’s about a fancy race transporter or staying in a nice hotel; I’ll happily sleep in my van, and regularly do. I don’t expect to fly anything other than in the cheapest seat, and I’m not even bothered about being paid to ride, but the bikes have got to be right. If not, everyone is wasting their time and I’m doing a bit more than that. The smallest errors become very costly at places like the Isle of Man and the Ulster GP. There was enough doubt to make me panic and look for an alternative in a hurry.

  Mehew had a hand in my plan B, as he had suggested me as a rider to the Irish-based Wilson Craig team, that he had been tuning engines for.

  Wilson, a short, grey-haired Irishman, in his sixties, had been running road racing teams since 2008. Before that he’d been one of Uel Duncan’s sponsors, and was when I raced for the Irish team.

  When I met Wilson to talk about the 2010 season, I liked his enthusiasm. He had approached me before, offering lots of money for me to race, but then I didn’t want to leave Shaun’s team. Wilson told me his set-up had he
lp from Honda for 2010, with Honda Racing’s top men in the UK, Neil Tuxworth and Havier Beltran, on Wilson’s side. The Irish team would obviously be playing second fiddle to the official Honda squad of McGuinness and Steve Plater, but Wilson’s connections would make sure his team got the right bits for the engine and that they were built properly, ready for racing. Wilson also explained that Simon Buckmaster’s Performance Technical Racing (PTR) would prepare the bikes. Although PTR Hondas hadn’t won a World Supersport title, they’d done everything but that. They seemed to be a well-respected, world-class outfit.

  Buckmaster was a former Grand Prix privateer, between 1989 and 1991. He had lost his leg in an endurance racing accident in the 1990s, became a team manager in British Superbike and was now managing the Parkalgar team in World Supersport.

  During the short time we were discussing whether the Wilson Craig Racing team and I were right for each other, I met Buckmaster and thought we would get on well. That would be a lesson in not trusting my first instincts.

  It wouldn’t take long for Buckmaster and me to start disagreeing about how the bikes I was going to race should be prepared. From what’s been reported you’d get the impression the bikes his company delivered for me to race in 2010 were competitive and the whole problem was my attitude. This is my side of the story.

  Wilson said he would let me have the team structure I wanted. After leaving SMR my idea was that I’d run the mechanics. It had worked up to a point in 2009, but I put the failings down to me having to organise the building of the bikes at the last minute, when we were let down.

  I would choose the team members and I’d be in charge of them – there wouldn’t be a crew chief, or whatever title the foreman wanted, between the mechanics and the team boss, like there is with most big teams. I was riding the bike, I knew how I wanted it to be, and I didn’t want to waste time and energy disagreeing with someone in the middle who didn’t see it my way. So, the bikes would come from a highly regarded race team, ready for the first session of any race meeting, and from there, me and my mechanics would tweak and try to perfect it for the track and conditions we were dealing with. Wilson said he was happy to work that way.

  My mechanics would be the same as the previous season. Danny Horne left SMR to stay with me; my mate Johnny Ellis would take time off work to be my mechanic again; and Cammy would work at the bigger races like the TT.

  I was excited. It seemed to be exactly what I was after. I thought we had been trying to reinvent the wheel at times when I was racing for Shaun. To me, keeping it simple was the way to go about the job. We wouldn’t be based in the paddock at the TT. We’d do all our spannering in my friend’s garage again and we rented a house near Bray Hill. That meant we could stay out of the way, concentrate on the job in hand and only arrive in the pits when we were due out on track. If I stayed in the pits we’d never get anything done for people asking ‘Have you got a minute?’

  It was going to be a bit like the old days. Not entirely, though. Top road racing bikes had become so complicated – some of the Superbikes were £200,000 bits of kit laden with electronic systems – and the racing itself was so competitive, that it couldn’t be like it was when Johnny and I would drive around in the old race truck and he was my only mechanic. This Wilson Craig team structure was as stripped-back as I thought it could be and still allow me to be in the hunt for international road race wins. It was the way I had wanted it to be for the last couple of years. It all sounded good. Better than good really, but it soured very quickly.

  Wilson Craig is a wealthy Irishman who has made his money from trading in potatoes and some canny buying and selling of land. He’s obviously a very good businessman, but, as far as I could see the principles he must have applied in his business life, all the rules, experience and skill, weren’t carried over to his hobby, that is, running his motorcycle racing team. To be as good as he is in business you must have to be ruthless up to a point, but when it came to his team I felt he wasn’t getting what he paid for. He didn’t seem to be aware that he needed to apply the same principles to his team.

  I was going to be running Honda CBR1000 Fireblades and CBR600s, bikes I was familiar with as I’d been on them for the last three years with SMR. So I was carrying quite a lot of specific set-up knowledge into 2010.

  So far, so good, but the organisation fell at the very first hurdle. Instead of being given bikes prepared for early season shakedown tests I didn’t get to ride the Wilson Craig bikes until the Pirelli tyre test in April. Some riders are out in Spain for pre-season testing from February. I had done that with SMR and would do the same later with the TAS Suzuki team, too. If you’re staying with the same team and the bike hasn’t been updated, it’s not crucial to test too early. I don’t think so, anyway. But if you’re going to a new team with bikes that have been built from scratch, it’s important to get on them early, to start getting them dialled in and flush any bugs out of their systems. It’s reassuring for everyone. Don’t test early and you can be chasing your tail when the season starts.

  The bikes weren’t ready for early season tests, but I still wasn’t losing sleep over it. It wasn’t until I rode the Hondas at the tyre test that I began to realise that all was not going to go smoothly.

  Castle Combe is regularly used by Dunlop and Pirelli for TT tyres tests. It’s about the only short circuit track in the UK with corners quick and bumpy enough to feel anything like a fast Manx or Ulster road corner. Obviously you can’t test on the tracks I race on, because they’re public roads for the rest of the year, so you’re looking for a compromise – somewhere you can rent, but which is fast and not as smooth as a motorway. I test at smooth, shorter, slower tracks too, but that’s to work out other issues with the bikes, to improve set-up, simple things like the position of the bars and footrests, or for setting up the electronics packages: traction control, anti-wheelie and fuelling maps. At Castle Combe it’s all about assessing the performance and characteristics of the newly formulated rubber.

  I arrived at the Wiltshire track, which is just a few miles from Bath, excited to be riding these 600s that had been built for me. In my mind they would be world-beating bikes. In reality, I found they fell far short of that. I knew that to be competitive in World Supersport, the PTR Hondas had to be mustard. The excitement soon disappeared. Never mind being at a private Castle Combe test session, as far as I’m concerned, I could’ve been riding around a supermarket car park and told you these bikes weren’t going to win anything.

  The PTR mechanic who had been sent looked to me to have no experience in top-level motorcycle racing. He’d built Transit vans or something and helped a mate who raced a bike, but he didn’t seem to have much of a clue about preparing a bike to finish a TT. Lovely lad, but some of the stuff he did made my blood run cold. If I have to explain the point of lockwiring stuff to the person who is building my race bikes, I don’t have a lot of faith in him.

  I felt basic things, like lockwiring, were simply not right. Every race bike, from that of a first-race novice in club racing right up to Rossi, Lorenzo and Marquez, has to have certain parts lockwired. The one many people know is the sump plug. You drill a tiny hole in the sump plug, thread some thin stainless steel wire through it, then twist the wire up, poke the two ends through another hole in either a fin on the engine case or another bolt and twist the ends together tightly before snipping the excess off. You arrange the lockwire in such a way that when it is all twisted up tightly, the bolt cannot move because the lockwire is in tension, effectively pulling the bolt tight. We had it wired the other way, so when the wire was twisted with the pliers it was pulling the bolt slack.

  With few other choices, and a pile of tyres to work through and give feedback on, I climbed on the Honda and started riding. It didn’t take long for the 600 to shit itself. The bike hadn’t even survived the first morning of a pre-season test before blowing up. It was my very first day riding for my new team and I was already getting wound up. I rode the Superstock Fireblade for the res
t of the day, because the Superbike still wasn’t ready. That night we loaded up the 600, drove back to Lincolnshire, swapped the engine over, then got up at three in the morning, after a couple of hours’ sleep, and drove the 230 miles back to Castle Combe, to do the second day of testing.

  I can watch the way someone wields a spanner and tell if they know what they’re doing or not. Danny Horne, who has worked with me for years, can handle a spanner. He likes his hair gel and sunglasses, but just watching him as he fettles my bikes fills me with confidence. That’s the kind of confidence you need in whoever is spannering for you – your life depends on their work. When I was swapping the engine over with PTR’s lad, any lingering doubts I had about him were confirmed. It was clear to me, when it came to top-level racing motorbikes, the fella wasn’t up to scratch, and wouldn’t be in time for the first race. I remember he numbered the plugs caps back to front. To me, this was basic first-week-in-a-bike-shop stuff. He made me nervous. What else might he have done wrong? I didn’t want him working on my bikes.

  I have been asked if I would ever work with a complete arsehole if they were the best race mechanic in the world, but I don’t think it would ever happen. Based on my 30 years of experience, the two things go hand-in-hand: if you’re a good mechanic, you’re normally a good bloke; maybe a bit of a weirdo, but still all right. You can be an all right bloke and a terrible mechanic, but it rarely, if ever, works the other way around.

  After this test I told Wilson the situation I was in. To me, it was as plain as the nose on his face that he was having his trousers pulled down. I made it clear I couldn’t ride bikes in that condition because I felt they weren’t safe to race, but nothing changed. Perhaps he thought I was making it up.