Worms to Catch

by Guy Martin

  The BUB team had a new rider too. Both of BUB’s speed records had been set by Chris Carr, the dirt-track legend and multiple champion. Now they had Valerie Thompson, a 49-year-old drag racer and Bonneville regular, from Las Vegas. Lovely woman, and, like all the BUB team, dead friendly and open. This four- or five-day test was her first time getting to grips with the streamliner, and she’d spent the time being towed behind a truck at 50 mph to get used to balancing the bike. These streamliners are heavy, and you’re strapped into a seat so you don’t have the same influence over the balance of the bike – you can’t just put your foot down to stop yourself falling over. Valerie has been 217 mph on a BMW S1000RR superbike, so she wasn’t a messer, but the streamliner was something else. She had it on its side a couple of times during her test, but no one was batting an eyelid. They seemed to expect a couple of gentle crashes.

  The BUB lot were switched-on blokes. Their streamliner looked a bit Heath Robinson, but bloody impressive to say it was only a shed effort. In the 16 years they’d been working on it, BUB and their sponsors had obviously spent some money, but now it looked a bit rough around the edges. It has done impressive speeds, having gone over 140 mph faster than the Triumph streamliner had up to that point. Talking to them while we were waiting for the Triumph to turn up put me on the back foot a bit. No one was slagging Matt Markstaller off, but the 16 years of development and one-off engine stuck in my mind.

  During that first morning on the salt flats I also met Mike Cook, who felt like the father of Bonneville. If you want to do any private testing or book the track to attempt a record, you see him. He’s a car racer whose dad was a drag racer, and his son is a drag racer and Bonneville racer, too. He’s in his sixties, and small and weathered from day after day of being out in the baking sun. He knew everyone, had driven his own Ford Thunderbird at over 300 mph, and he had recently restored a car called Goldenrod, which was the world’s fastest wheel-driven, piston-powered car, just as the era of turbine and jet cars started raising the speeds and claiming the outright land speed records. In 1965, Goldenrod took the record from Donald Campbell’s Bluebird, so to be trusted with restoring that car proves how respected he is. I talked to Mike Cook on and off all week. He put my mind at ease over a load of stuff. We had a good few yarns, both out on the salt and in a cool little bar called Carmen’s Black and White. He was dead friendly, just a brilliant bloke. His crew of helpers drive up and down in trucks, pulling heavy graders made from steel beams welded together to smooth the salt as best they can, and he put Triumph in touch with everyone from the fire and ambulance folk to the official timers that we’d need to run out there.

  The BUB lot liked to talk, and I was happy to listen. I got the feeling they’d told the stories a hundred times before, but it was all new to me. Denis Manning, who named the bike after his company, BUB – Big Ugly Bastard – told me he got the shape of his bike after watching salmon swim up a river, and it sounded like a good story. When Matt Markstaller arrived later in the day he’d also heard the same salmon yarn, but he pulled a face that gave me the impression he didn’t believe it. Where BUB were clever engineers and good old boys, Matt was different. When it came to deciding the shape for his streamliner he researched the most aerodynamic shapes American engineers had ever come up with. The shape he chose in the end was a plane fuselage designed by NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner to NASA. He wasn’t guessing or spinning a yarn about fish – he was dealing with scientifically proven hard facts.

  Markstaller brought a big team of helpers to keep the streamliner fettled, but there were a few main men. Most important was Matt himself, who designed and oversaw the building of the machine. Also there was Ed from Carpenter Racing, in New Jersey, who built the engines. This was the first time I’d met Ed, and I hit it off with him straight away. We were both into Snap-on tools, and I could tell from the way he wields a spanner that he knows what he’s on about. He has a certain way of building engines, and we spoke for hours about compression ratios, intake ports and lock-up clutches.

  James was the brilliant electronics man. You’d think he’d come out of MIT or something, and maybe he has. A very clever man who would answer my questions about the rate of acceleration and the length of track by telling me I needed to accelerate at 0.2 g to reach 400 mph in five miles, but to achieve that we had to have an aerodynamic drag coefficient of friction of 0.1 – or summat like that. He’s not playing at it.

  The other main man was Dave – Crazy Dave. He was in his seventies, the oldest man on the team, and was an experienced drag racer, expert welder and machinist with long white hair and an eye patch who had machined and welded a load of stuff for Matt. I looked at some of the stuff he’d made on old-fashioned, manual milling machines and couldn’t work out how he’d done it without the help of a modern CNC machine.

  The other team members were friends or Markstaller family members, and had jobs from checking the coolant levels in the belly tanks to filling the fuel tank, removing the panels to get to the engine, cleaning the screen, checking tyre pressures and tyre condition before every run, driving the tow truck … There were about 50 items to check before every run. Ed would only get his hands on it if something wasn’t going quite right. He’d done all his hard work back in New Jersey, when he’d tuned and built the engines.

  The Triumph lot had allowed BUB to continue using the track for an extra day after they’d lost one because of rain. It was no skin off our nose, because our bike wasn’t arriving until midday Thursday at the earliest. In the end, it didn’t arrive till gone three in the afternoon.

  I was itching to get out in it as soon as I could, and Matt said I could have my first go at getting to grips with it that day. The streamliner had been transported in a trailer and was suspended under a heavy steel cradle, which held it about 3 feet off the floor so it was easier to work on. The team checked everything over, then, late that afternoon, I got the nod to get in my kit, ready for the first ride.

  I would be towed behind a big American GMC Yukon, so the streamliner was fitted with big stabilisers, bolted on halfway down its length, to do the same job as those on a kid’s first bike. They’d be left on until I proved I had the hang of keeping it upright. The Triumph also had little retractable alloy legs, less than a foot long, that popped in and out of the bike’s belly when I pressed a button. When the stabilisers were eventually taken off, these would keep the bike from falling over when I came to a stop.

  I climbed into the bike’s cockpit, and it was snug. I’d lost weight since I first tested it, and that helped, but there was still a knack of getting in and out, because it was so bloody tight. To get in, I first had to brush all the salt off the sole of my right shoe, stand in the bike, then brush the other off. When I was standing in the gap in front of the seat, I lowered myself down and slid one leg, then the other, under the dashboard, pushed my backside into the back of the seat and tucked my head under the carbon-fibre loop that was designed to protect me if it ever started barrel-rolling. The bike was fitted with five-point harnesses. Wide, heavy-duty seat straps went over each shoulder, and two around the waist, and they all met at one buckle over my belly. I also had wrist straps that fastened to the harness, so if I crashed my arms would stay in the cockpit instead of flailing outside and getting crushed by the rolling bike, which weighs close to a ton.

  I wore my regular AGV helmet for the early practice runs, even though it wasn’t approved for record attempts. I wanted to wear something I was comfy in and wouldn’t distract me, because everything else was so unfamiliar. The team said they’d leave the canopy lid off for the first towing runs. I wasn’t going to be moving quick enough to need it, and it was a bit easier to talk and make myself understood without it. The canopy was a curved screen in a carbon-fibre frame with a trick release mechanism. It looked like it was straight off a jet fighter. It wasn’t hinged like a door or a hatch – it had to be lifted into place and clipped down. If I ever needed to get out in a hurry, I�
�d just release the catch and push it off. A long climbing rope was tied to the stabiliser legs and attached to the back of the Yukon. The car set off very gently and slowly. I had my hands on the controls and was getting the feel for how much input I had to give to steer this nearly 26-foot-long bike. Our pits were set up at the one-mile mark, with the course being seven miles of usable salt, 120 feet wide, and we headed east down the track.

  By the time we’d got a few miles under our wheels I had the thing balanced at 35 mph. Matt was in the back of the 4x4, with its hatchback open, and Nat the cameraman was set up next to him. Matt must have been surprised I’d got the hang of it so quickly, because he was saying, ‘Well, will you look at that?’

  I’d heard that Jason DiSalvo, the Triumph team’s only previous rider, took a week to get up off the stabilisers and balancing while being towed, so I didn’t know how hard it was going to be. But I was up and balancing on the very first run. I had to give constant little adjustments to the steering, but I got the hang of it, and I’m no Danny MacAskill, so I don’t know why anyone else would have so much bother.

  Even though Triumph had allowed the BUB team to keep practising on the salt for free, and were dead friendly earlier in the day, someone had squealed to Mike Cook about us doing this little 50 mph towing run without the ambulance being on the track. Perhaps they were trying to play mind games early on. It seemed a bit daft.

  The original plan was that we’d be out on the salt at 6.30am and off by midday, because the wind was usually calmest early in the morning. There are rules that don’t allow streamliners to run with side wind of more than 4 mph, so there can be a lot of sitting around waiting for the weather. Mike Cook also explained that the desert sun brings moisture to the surface of the salt as the day goes on, so it’s the opposite of what you’d expect. You’d think the track would be damp overnight and dry out during the day, but it doesn’t. It was all new to me, and I just wanted to be out there every minute we could.

  I’d get up at five and walk over the road to the petrol station to have coffee and porridge, because it was cheaper than the hotel. I’d meet the TV lot in the car park at quarter-past six and drive out to the salt in their rented Transit van. Triumph had brought three camper vans, one for Triumph and their photographers to work out of, one for the TV lot and one for me and Matt to use, but I didn’t like the idea of having one. I don’t want to be treated differently to the rest of the team. I try to explain to them that I’m only a wanker, nowt special, and I don’t want or need special treatment. There was a medical helicopter booked while we were running. It was there from seven in the morning, and the crew ended up hanging around in the motorhome that had been brought for me, so it wasn’t going to waste. I will admit it was good for having a wee in without having to drive to the Honey Buckets, the portable toilets at mile zero. We made the rule to drive down to those for a number two, and we also knew that if someone drove off in a car on their own, they were going on a Honey Bucket run.

  Day two, Friday, the first proper day, started with more tow runs. We’d leave the pit, at mile one, and head to the seven-mile marker, then turn around and come back. Everyone was dead pleased with the progress. We hadn’t been over 60 mph, but people kept saying it had taken DiSalvo more than a week to get to this stage. By early afternoon we moved on to braking practice. People reckon the braking part is the most dangerous part of a record run, but this was just slow-speed stuff. We did over 20 practices, being towed up to speed then braking down to a standstill. The brake was a carbon-carbon set-up, which means carbon-fibre brake pads on a carbon-fibre disc. It can deal with a lot more heat than a conventional steel or iron disc, and the hotter it gets the more it grips. This type is used in F1 and MotoGP, but Matt got the streamliner’s brakes from the company that made the brakes for the space shuttle. All the practices boiled the brake fluid and the brakes eventually faded, nearly making me crash into the back of the tow car. It wouldn’t be a problem if I ever had to brake from more than 400 mph, because there would be more air passing around it – and I’ll also have parachutes to do a lot of the braking.

  The waiting around meant I could spend more time looking at the bike and quizzing the people who built it. I’d seen the streamliner before, and knew how well made it was. No expense was spared. It looked just the same as when I’d seen it last time, all nice bits and bobs, any bare metal anodised, and it was well beyond anything someone would build in their shed. The front end had hub-centre steering, like a Bimota Tesi or Vyrus, not regular forks. Matt chose this design to keep the front end lower. The front wheel bearings were $8,000 each, and there were two of them. Matt ordered them from Germany. The special grease for the bearings was $200, not £10 from Cromwell’s. Even Matt said he wouldn’t normally go to these lengths, but Triumph wanted the best.

  I found out a lot more about the engines. They were modified Triumph Rocket III motors. They’re the biggest production motorcycle engine, at 2294 cc, but while land speed record bikes can have more than one engine, the maximum cylinder capacity is 3000 cc, so two standard Rocket III engines would be too big. When I wrote When You Dead, You Dead I got a couple of details about the engine wrong. I thought Carpenter Racing had reduced the size of the bore to reduce capacity, but they’d kept the stock piston size and reduced the stroke with a new crank to get each engine’s cylinder capacity down to 1480 cc. The crank had titanium conrods fitted and low compression pistons. Carpenter had designed a new cam too, but the valves were standard.

  Both engines were fitted with their own turbos, but they were nothing fancy and had internal wastegates. The engine was fed by bigger flow fuel injectors. There wasn’t room for an intercooler, but the bike would run on methanol, not petrol, and that runs cooler.

  There were still a lot of original Triumph parts left. The crank cases, gearbox and most of the clutch were all standard, but Carpenter had made a centrifugal pressure plate for the clutch that made it like an automatic. There was no clutch lever or pedal.

  At the end of day two, half-three on a Friday afternoon, the weather looked good enough for my first power run, but there was a problem with a wheel speed sensor, which was affecting the traction control. I didn’t think it would matter for this first slow run, but then Nik Ellwood from Triumph said the helicopter was only booked till four, so there was no point in rushing and running without the sensor. I wanted to get the run in and told him I’d sign anything to say I knew the risks and was happy to run without the helicopter, but contracts had been organised between Spellman and Triumph, and Nik wouldn’t let me. When people started talking about contracts I felt I had to explain to the team that I wasn’t being paid by Triumph or any of their sponsors to be there.

  Nik was the one who’d suggested I should be the man to ride the thing, so I was dead grateful for that. He had a tough job, being the middle man between the team, the factory, sponsors, journalists, photographers and me. I wouldn’t want to do it.

  The next morning, I was towed up to the seven-mile point for the first test run. Following me was Matt and his eldest son, Ian, in a rental Camaro muscle car; the film crew come in a 4x4, Mike Cook in his massive pick-up truck, Eric the Öhlins suspension man in his car, plus Ed and James the electronics man in another rental car.

  The streamliner had a massive turning circle, and we’d made the mistake on the very first towing run of going off the track to turn it around behind the 4x4, and it had got totally caked in the softer salt where it hadn’t been graded by Mike Cook’s track workers. The front wheel was now pushed on to a metal skid with a long rope attached to it, and six people pulled and pushed the bike around 180 degrees, to point back to where I’d come from, while I had my foot on the brake.

  This was it, the first run. I was told to go no more than 80 mph, and I had the stabilisers fitted. Now that I was more used to things the canopy was fastened down, like it would be for every future run, and I got ready to start the engines. The starting procedure is this: Matt holds one finger up and I start engi
ne number one, then he gives me the thumbs up before putting up two fingers, for me to start engine number two. With both engines running and everything looking and sounding good, he puts his thumb up and walks away to his car. I have to leave it ten seconds before I set off.

  The bike is already in gear when I start the engines, and it has that automatic clutch, so I just twist the throttle. I went 50 feet, if that, before the bike lost drive. The cars that were following me all stopped and people ran out to come and take the canopy off. I explained that it just lost power, and the crew set about taking off the long engine cover panels to see what had happened. They worked out that there was no drive from the engine to the back wheel. There were a lot of things that could have been causing it. The drive train of the Triumph streamliner was a trick set-up. The two Triumph Rocket III motors drive through their standard five-speed gearboxes, but the two gearboxes are linked with a shaft that drives another short shaft through a Porsche CV joint. The output from there acts like a shaft drive on a regular Triumph Rocket III leading to a rear hub. Instead of the Triumph hub, the streamliner has a bevel gear set-up from a racing speedboat. Matt didn’t know what was broken – all we knew was that there was no drive between the engines and the rear wheel. We didn’t want to risk towing the bike the six miles back to the pits in case something came loose, started flailing around and damaged another part of the bike, so we had to wait while the 4x4 drove back, bolted the towing bracket to the frame that picks the bike off the floor, brought it up to the bike, raised the bike then towed it back to mile one.