by Guy Martin
The last bit of Quarries is down two gears, into third. Getting back onto 100-per-cent throttle makes the bike squirm about a bit, but it’s not too bad.
Then there is another very long right-hander, Dawson’s Bend, that doesn’t really have an apex. I’ve watched a lot of riders through there, and I’ve tried a lot of lines myself, and keeping in the middle of the road seems to work best.
Coming out of Dawson’s I’m leant over and balancing grip and throttle position. The rear tyre hasn’t got enough of a contact patch to just wind the throttle wide open. At best, it would spin up, meaning less traction and less acceleration. At worst, it would spin, grip and highside me, slinging me off the top of the bike at 120 mph and more.
Then it’s the run down to the start–finish line, along the Flying Kilo, for another lap. The Ulster Grand Prix is a seven-lap race, covering a total of just less than 52 miles. The whole race is run at an average speed of close to 130 mph.
I’m the third or fourth winningest rider at the Ulster, but I’ve never won a TT. I like the cut and thrust of the mass-start races. I like getting stuck in.
I went to the 2013 Ulster after a poor TT and came away thinking I’d been to Michael Dunlop’s back garden and done him over. And not just a bit.
In the Superbike race, the big one, the one for the money, I led and Dunlop came past me. He qualified on pole with me in second. There was only me and him doing the times. It was going to be like 2012, only the two of us.
In the race, he came past me in the Rock Bends on the first set of corners, with a 180–190-mph entry to it. When he passed I knew he meant business. He always does. At those speeds I can feel someone benefiting from my slipstream, so I know they’re close – then he came past. I knew he was trying hard from the very off. He was 50p-ing it into the corners, meaning he was entering corners on one line, too hot, then tightening and tightening to make it around the corner, not taking one smooth line. His elbows were touching the grass, he was having to lift his knee up to miss the kerbs. Riding ragged, but bloody fast.
I decided to sit behind and see what he had and what I could do. I was happy that he wanted to show me his cards. He’s a bit like that. The thing at the Ulster is, if you’re not the quickest there, you can still get pulled around by the quickest quite easily. It’s rare for someone to really break away at the Ulster. If someone is leading and doing the speeds, it’s relatively easy to tag on.
Obviously, Michael thought he had the speed to get away, otherwise he’d have done what he did in 2012 – stayed behind and mugged me on one of the last corners with a do or die move that made our fairings bash together.
My Tyco Suzuki had better top-end speed than his Honda Legends Fireblade, but with the Superbike I’m riding, the Suzuki GSX-R1000 of 2011 to 2014, there is only a very narrow margin where it works really well. The set-up and the way the bike works with the tyres is a small window. When it’s right it’s brilliant, better than the other bikes, but getting it into that narrow operating area is much more difficult than with the Fireblade. The Honda works well over a wider range of settings. You don’t have to be so precise setting it up. That day the GSX-R1000 was more than a match for the Honda, though. I knew that straightaway.
Another big variable are tyres. Since 2008 I’ve been using Pirelli or Metzeler tyres, when virtually every other top racer has been on Dunlops. Tyres from Pirelli and its sister company Metzeler are made in the same factory, but branded differently.
‘Factory’ is a description regularly used in motorcycling that I used to hate. People would talk about bits on their race bike as factory this or factory that, but all parts on a bike come out of the factory. What they meant was they have the fancy parts. When grand prix riders talk about a factory part, they mean a special part that has been made back at Honda or Yamaha headquarters, not created by the team or a specialist small company. It gives the part and the bike a bit of glamour and shows the manufacturers are so interested and supportive of the rider they give them the cream.
A team like TAS Suzuki are the official Suzuki team on the roads, getting assistance in one form or another from Suzuki in the UK, and a few parts directly from Japan – factory parts. It means TAS have to find their own support for suspension, engine electronics and plenty of other things. In comparison, Jorge Lorenzo’s Yamaha MotoGP team are bankrolled and supplied entirely from Japan, even though the race team will be based in Europe – they are a true factory team.
There are positives and negatives with being a factory team. In the past, the official Honda British Superbike team’s Fireblade had a rear suspension issue. The shock was mounted in a certain way that made it difficult to change quickly, if I remember rightly. All the non-official teams made an easy modification to make life simpler, but the official team weren’t allowed to, because it would be admitting that the factory had got something wrong.
Anyway, after saying all that, I’m on factory Pirelli-Metzeler tyres. Anyone can buy slicks from the company, but they can’t buy the stuff I am usually supplied to race on. The tyres are made by hand in small batches. The carcass, rubber, compound and profile can all change from batch to batch, and we go with the ones that feel best during testing.
The carcass is, as the name suggests, the body of the tyre that the rubber is laid on to. It is usually steel wire, wound round and round, and a Kevlar belt. The way the carcass is constructed can change the feel of the tyre massively. Compounds are often simply described as hard or soft. The softest tyres are often the grippiest, but they might only last a lap or less before they start to slide every time I try to brake into a corner or accelerate out of one. Some road tyres, and most GP and World Superbike tyres, have different compounds sandwiched together. If you were looking at the back of a bike, and could see the width of the tyre, the centre section is often much harder than either side. When the bike is on this centre section, it’s often travelling fast, generating a lot of heat, but traction and grip aren’t usually a problem. When the bike is leant over and the side of the tyre is being punished and trying to slide, grip is crucial so the compound is softer and grippier.
For years I have regularly been the first Pirelli-Metzeler rider home in the TT. The winner would be using Dunlop. If I was behind one of the top Dunlop riders I could often see him just whacking open the throttle while I had to feed in the power more gently. It meant they would stretch a few bike lengths on me every corner, so I’d have to try even harder, go through the fast corners even faster, to get them back in.
Pirelli would say all the right things, but they wouldn’t deliver a tyre that would do what a Dunlop would do. It was beginning to get me down. I’d missed out on winning a TT by three seconds – in 2010. At the end of 2011 we went to Kirkistown to test the factory Pirellis against some Dunlops. The Dunlops weren’t anything fancy, certainly not ‘factory’, they were just slicks anyone could order and buy to run on their race bikes or even at track days.
I knew the Dunlops would be better, but I had no idea how much better. And these weren’t even the best tyres that riders at the time, like John McGuinness, Bruce Anstey and Ian Hutchinson, would have been supplied.
On one hand it made me keen to get onto Dunlops for the next season. I couldn’t see how I could win without them, but I also realised that if you’re racing for a different tyre company, and you’re all pulling in the same direction, you might have a tyre that no one else has and that makes the difference. Neither did I want to be the seagull following a tractor, doing what everyone else did. In the end we stuck with Pirelli-Metzeler.
There’s an argument that it wouldn’t make sense for Dunlop to supply me tyres. A fella called Gary Ryan took me on one side at Cookstown in 2013 and put me straight. Ryan is the man behind the Street Sweep company, one of Michael Dunlop’s loyal and long-term sponsors. He told me that if I wasn’t racing on Pirellis, choosing to race on Dunlop instead, Dunlop would have no one to beat. If everyone is on Dunlop tyres what does it prove? They’d definitely have a Dunlop
winner, whoever came home. As it is, when someone wins on Dunlop tyres they’re beating Pirelli, they’re beating TAS Suzuki and they’re beating me. I’d never looked at it that way, but as soon as Ryan said it, it made sense.
In that 2013 Ulster GP, where I was battling Michael Dunlop for the main race, we were still on the first lap, entering Lougher’s, a man’s corner if ever there was one, when Michael rolled off the throttle. I was flat-out in fifth, the engine bouncing off the rev limiter, and I passed him when I didn’t really want to. It wasn’t a calculated pass, because I’d actually wanted to stay behind him for a while, but I was back in the lead.
For the next few corners, I was taking really wide, sweeping lines. Still pressing on, but leaving enough room for him to come underneath me with some margin of safety. I gave him every opportunity to pass me. When he didn’t come past at the first gear hairpin, I thought I’d just keep on doing what I was doing, riding really big, sweeping lines, but still going as fast as I could. This was the opposite of riding a defensive line. I was hitting every apex, and while I wasn’t hanging my bollocks out, I was still getting a few slides. I was trying.
At the end of the first lap my pit board said P1 +0. That told me I was position 1 (I knew that), but with a gap of nothing to the bike behind. After the second lap it was +0.3, then it was +0.5 … +1 … +1.5 …
For the last lap I started to run a more defensive line. The thought at the back of my mind was, I’m going to get torpedoed at the Hairpin. Dunlop and me are a very similar speed at the Ulster. It you try to pass someone after the Hairpin who is running at the same speed it is very likely you’ll come off. But he never came past.
In an interview after the 2013 Ulster I was asked if I had predicted I’d win three races, but it’s a daft question. I can’t see into the future and know what someone else is going to do, or how any of the other front runners have set up their bikes. The whole of racing is unpredictable, and the characters in road racing add a further level of unpredictability. They’re not reckless or crazy. Sometimes Michael Dunlop does something that makes me think, ‘Woah, Nelly!’ But I’ve made those moves on people in the past and may well again in the future. We’re riding on the limit of what’s possible. You need to be riding like that to beat the Dunlops, Anstey and Hillier and those boys. I always ride as hard as I possibly can. Sometimes I’m not willing to push as hard as the winner in the rain. Sometimes I’m willing to push harder than everyone and it’s me that takes the chequered flag.
That race could have been so different, because during practice I had the biggest crash I never had. By that I mean I had every ingredient of the crash, the realisation it’s all going wrong, even the impact and the damaged bike, but I didn’t actually fall off.
I’ve come close to crashing a lot. I’ve crashed quite often too, but the near misses are memorable. Before this Ulster Grand Prix, the biggest crash I never had was the one on my fixed-wheel pushbike, near Big Lil’s, but the escape at the Ulster beat that.
It was coming into Deer’s Leap, a blind-entry, 180-mph corner. The track was wet in places, but I was out on slicks. I saw a rider in the distance, and knew I’d pass him after the corner, so I rolled the throttle slightly, so I could get on the gas and accelerate through the corner for a good run down the next straight and make the pass safely before Cochranstown.
As I was weighing all this up I entered the blind corner and was immediately on the rider, who turned out to be Dan Cooper. In a race I’ll take that at 180-plus. Even though this was practice and I’d rolled the throttle I would still have been doing over 160 mph in the wet on slicks. I braked and the front wheel locked up and went hard against the lockstop, the wheel turned to the right as far as it was possible to go, so I let off the brake and the bike sat back up. I had nowhere to go. I hit straight in the side of the other bike, going, I reckon, 100 mph faster than him.
I was thinking, ‘This is going to look like a plane crash. There’s two bodies here. This is it …’ The next thing I know I’m riding down the road on my motorbike, I look over my shoulder and Cooper is still on his and I’m wondering, ‘What the fuck happened there?’
The impact shoved my handlebar into the tank, buckled my front wheel, bent one of the steel front brake discs and ripped the front mudguard clean off. His exhaust was bent in half and pointing at 90 degrees out to the side.
Having got away with it, my brain immediately went back into racer mode and the very next thought was, ‘That has screwed up my fast lap.’
I got back to the pit and told the lads I’d had a near miss. They asked where I had come off. I don’t think they believed me when I told them I hadn’t. There were holes punched in the side of the fairing.
That night, in bed, it came back to me how close I came. Cooper, a good rider, who has won a 125 British Championship, explained later he was going steady because he was on slicks, but so was I. The rule at the riders’ briefing is: Do not tour. Riders have been killed at the TT and other road races when they come round a blind bend and hit a rider from behind, so we were lucky to both escape this time and it’s not something I dwell on.
What I prefer to think about are the same faces year after year at the Ulster. An old lass, Maureen, has been bringing me rhubarb jam, wheaten bread and scones for the last five years. Another lady brings me six bottles of Old Speckled Hen. It’s just mega. The whole mood in the pits is dead friendly.
The Ulster fans are hardcore, but they’re polite people. The Irish fans know their racing inside out. They’re not going because it’s the cool thing to do, and they don’t want to make small talk; they’re asking what tyre compound and gearing you’re running. They’re into the details and I like that. Even with everything else going on, I still love races like the Ulster and pushing the best of the other real roads men for a win on the fastest racetrack there is.
CHAPTER 20
SPEED
‘I wasn’t in control, I was just blind and lucky.’
I HAVE RACED, led and won road races, on circuits that grand prix racers have said make their blood run cold, but I’ve never been scared. I have had moments when I thought it was going wrong and I was just picking the wall I was going to crash into, but there was never fear. When I have crashed, in the moments where I hit the deck and time slows down giving me a split second to consider what’s going on, fear never comes into it. If I was scared I don’t think I could race the way I do.
So it might be strange to read that the most terrified I’ve ever been was riding a pushbike for a TV show.
After How Britain Worked was finished the idea was to make a series I was even more involved in. I’m not a normal TV presenter, for good or ill, but I’m not afraid of getting stuck in, and that meant North One could come up with some unusual ideas. The one everyone got behind was Speed.
The series was four different hour-long episodes, shown on Channel 4 at the beginning of 2014. The show followed me as I tried to break four separate records. It went into the science of making the attempt, showed the building of the kit I’d use, and then the action as I went for it. The show was made for the science and educational part of Channel 4’s programming.
The records were: British speed bicycle speed record; world toboggan speed record; world human-powered flight speed record; and hydro-bike distance record.
The first we got wrapped up was trying to break the British speed record for a bicycle, that had stood at 110 mph since 1986. It was set on a section of the M42 motorway, in Warwickshire, the day before it opened. The rider was David Le Grys and he reached that speed by using the slipstream of a Rover SD1 British Touring Car racer with a special spoiler enclosure on the back.
A flat section of motorway is an ideal place to do it, because you have a good length of well-surfaced road to get up to speed and then stop safely on. We didn’t have that option, so the production company approached the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, where manufacturers take their pre-production test cars to be put through the mill on different
kinds of tracks, from the roughest corrugations to a high-speed bowl. It sounded like we had permission to use the Millbrook loop, the circular high-speed track, right up until a week or so before we were due to make the attempt, then Millbrook got cold feet, thinking that it would all end in tears, so the hunt was on for somewhere else.
The next obvious place was the Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground. It’s an old airfield in Leicestershire, often used by car and motorcycle magazines for speed testing and photoshoots. It has a Cold War-era runway, now privately owned, and is 1.85 miles long. Being a runway, it wouldn’t be as good as a bowl, because the never-ending loop of a bowl allows the attempt to go on for as long as the rider, me, has power. The runway, even one of the longest in Britain, becomes a limiting factor, but it was all we had.
For the attempt, I’d ride inches behind a racing truck, using its slipstream to allow me to pedal a massive gear. The bike was custom-made for the job. Brian Rourke, the Bradley Wiggins of 40 years ago, was a consultant. Jason Rourke, his son, is a bicycle frame-builder who created the special bike for me to ride. Simon from Hope Technology made all the gearing for the bike. Getting the right gearing was crucial.
On the day of the first attempt I got dressed in a set of Dainese leathers that I raced in back in 2010, chest protector, back protector, my AGV helmet, in the blue and pink Britten colours, and cycling shoes.
To start, we gave it a go, at a steady speed, to try things out, and it all felt all right, but we reckoned the runway would only be quick enough if I came around the top corner onto the runway at over 40 mph, a fair lick round a 90-degree corner when you’re less than a foot off the back of a racing truck.
The truck that I was slipstreaming was a MAN TGA 440. From the outside it looks like the kind of trucks I work on, a tractor unit that pulls an articulated trailer, but this racing truck is nothing like a road-going, working truck. The engine position is different, the engine’s moved further into the middle of the chassis. It has a bigger turbo and a different exhaust. The standard truck makes 440 horsepower. Dave Jenkins, the owner and racer of this one, reckons his truck makes over 1,000 bhp. Dave is an experienced truck racer, a former champion, and I trusted him from the off. It would have been difficult to get anything done if I didn’t totally believe in him.
