by Guy Martin
The weather was cold but mint on that first day. I was probably 100 miles into the ride and thought, Something isn’t right here. But I kept quiet. I just thought I had to man up.
Dobby and John ran out of steam after about 150 miles, near Newcastle, got picked up and given a lift home. I got to Alnwick, and I was on schedule. Shazza was following in the Transit, doing the support truck side of things. So I kipped in the van. Everything was still on schedule at the end of the first day, but my Achilles was giving me bother.
I slept for four or five hours, woke up at four in the morning, got on my bike and, after struggling to find anywhere else to eat, headed to Berwick-upon-Tweed for breakfast. I had a massive fry-up in there, with Shazza and the TV lot. I realised I wasn’t 100 per cent, but thought I’d be all right. I didn’t like being the centre of everyone’s attention, though. I’m used to having the camera pointed at me when I’m doing the TV job, I’ve been doing it enough year’s now, but for some reason I hadn’t even considered it was going to be like that on this record ride. The TV lot weren’t holding me up, and, as usual, they couldn’t do enough for me, but it was another area of my life that TV had come into. Pushbiking had always been just for me, the escape from everything. Now it wasn’t.
I set off again, up to Edinburgh, then over the Forth Road Bridge. I was seeing the film crew during the day, and I knew they were only doing their job, and it was all part of it, but I kept thinking, Bugger off! They’d be following me, or right in front of me. And that’s what made me realise that the loneliness was one of the reasons I loved the Tour Divide so much.
I carried on towards Dundee, and I didn’t quite make the overnight stop that was on the plan. I realised if I was behind schedule by the end of day two I was going to struggle. I wasn’t on song. Really, I was fucked. Because of that, and because there was always someone around that I knew, I was stopping for too long. I couldn’t just get my head down.
I knew I was on the back foot before I even set off, but I wasn’t selecting reverse at that point. Everything was in place. Too many people were relying on me.
A couple of days into the ride it had dawned on me that this wasn’t just a case of needing to man up. The problem was I’d half finished myself at the Tour Divide, without knowing or admitting it. I thought I was the strongest I’d ever been, but I’d pushed myself preparing for the Tour Divide, doing the ride itself, and I hadn’t given myself time to recover. I’d done that ride in 18 days, when the guidebook I was referring to was recommending over 70 days to do it in. Then I’d been flat out since I got home.
Another big thing was the bike. I’d been so used to pedalling my single-speed, the Rourke-framed bike I ride to work and back on, or my Tour Divide bike, but I got on this new bike and it was different. The main thing being that the cranks and pedals were slightly wider apart than I was used to and my legs just didn’t like it.
I had another few hours’ kip in the van, then set off again to St Andrews. On a ride like this you have to grit your teeth for the first five miles, while everything remembers what it is supposed to be doing, and, if you’re fit, that’s it: you’re into it for the rest of the day. Because you’re covering big distances, day after day, you never feel on top of the world, but before you know it you’ve done 50 miles. Slogging up through Scotland was different, because I couldn’t escape the unforgiving pain. As I tried to compensate for the pain in my Achilles, I’d adjust my riding position and that put my knees out, which put my hips out, which put my lower back out.
At Inverness I had to stop in a bus shelter and have half an hour to myself. I’d only covered 20 miles. I wasn’t right.
The weather was wet and cold, but I was dressed for it, so I wasn’t feeling it. Northwave thermal winter boots, leggings over Lycra and waterproof trousers over the top, and a raincoat. The lack of daylight was a problem I hadn’t thought about. But cycling in the dark for so many hours a day changes how you feel.
That night I stayed just below Wick, right in the very north of Scotland. I’d done a big chunk of riding, and I hadn’t been hanging around, but that was it. The TV lot knew something wasn’t right. I got up and realised, This isn’t happening. The film crew had swapped back and forwards a few times. I got to John O’ Groats by one in the afternoon and hated admitting I couldn’t do it, but I had to tell them, This isn’t happening, boys.
After what I’d put my body through that year, it was just a challenge too far. I keep saying I want to try to break myself; well, I’d just about succeeded. I was gutted I’d let myself down. I thought I had enough of a stubborn head and mental strength to get over some sore legs, but the strain on my Achilles and the repetition of tens of thousands of pedal rotations was too much. It wasn’t the worst pain I’ve ever felt, not like slipping in the shower with a broken back or hospital porters using my broken leg to open some heavy swing doors in a Manx hospital, but it was relentless. The only time it didn’t hurt was when I reached a big hill and I stood up pedalling, pushing into it.
No one at the TV company was trying to talk me into keeping going. Shazza, the one who was getting me out of bed and onto the bike at four in the morning, the one encouraging me to keep going, could tell I couldn’t go on.
A lot of time and money had gone into it and there wasn’t a single thing to salvage. From the TV point of view I either did it or I didn’t. And I didn’t. Dead simple. Plenty of the stuff we do for telly is ambitious and it doesn’t always go according to plan, but we’ve always managed to get something out of it to make a programme, even when it was that pedal-powered boat thing that was a total failure. Not this time, though. I let everyone down.
There was plenty I know now I could’ve done differently. I should’ve had more time off. I should have had more time getting used to the new bike or just used a proven bike, that I’d done loads of miles on. I do think if I’d set off on one of my bikes, that I was used to riding, I might have been able to do it, but ifs and buts are pots and pans, and if my auntie had balls she’d be my uncle …
And I wouldn’t do it in winter. On top of all those other excuses, the snotty cold, working like mad, New Zealand, China, Tour Divide … the other part was all the darkness. In Scotland I wasn’t having much more than eight hours of murky daylight, and cycling in pitch black affects you. You’re just not seeing anything. I thought I’d be all right, because I’d cycled up to the Strathpuffer, the far north of Scotland, in winter, and then competed in the 24-hour race, but this was different.
On the Tour Divide I could have sat down and cried my eyes out and it wouldn’t have made a single bit of difference, because I was on my own. It was all on me. Shouting and screaming was just wasting energy. I just had to keep moving forward, even at 1mph; it didn’t matter, I was one step closer to the finish. That was the mindset I got into in America and I couldn’t get into the same mindset on the ride around Britain, because there was too much support. As good as it was, that’s not why I do things like this.
With everyone heading home, me and Shazza had one night in a B&B in Inverness before driving back to Lincolnshire and I was in a bad mood, not talking, miserable, brooding. We got home late on Saturday, I was back to work on Monday … I gave the pushbike a miss for a while. I could still feel the pain in my heel. I wasn’t about to start running, but I could get on with stuff in the yard. Then work till Christmas. There was no point in resting now.
CHAPTER 4
‘No one I knew thought it was a good idea. Not one person’
BETWEEN THE PUBLICATION of the hardback of the last book, Worms to Catch, and the paperback version going to print I’d been asked to write another chapter to update readers on what was happening. The final chapter of the paperback was me explaining that I was signing for Honda to race the new Fireblade. Neil Tuxworth, Honda Racing’s top man in Britain, had been visiting me, planting the seed of the idea of me riding for Honda on the roads. It got the gears turning. I couldn’t stop thinking, You’re a long time dead, and I’d returned to the thought of not
wanting any regrets when I was too old to race. I don’t know what had changed from the summer, when I’d been riding from Canada to the Mexican border on my mountain bike, following the route of the Tour Divide on my own. Back then I knew I was done with serious motorbike racing. I wasn’t done with bikes or racing, just the level of road racing I’d got to and the parts of it I wasn’t enjoying. I was finished with it. I told everyone. I wrote it in the book. The Tour Divide made me think I should’ve packed in racing for teams years ago. There it was on paper.
Then there was this new 2017 Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP2 on Dunlops, and I thought, Fuck it, I’m going to do it. This was the very same package that John McGuinness and others had used to win races for years. I’d always be wondering, What if …? if I didn’t try it. No one I knew thought it was a good idea. Not one person. They all reminded me that I was so convinced when I’d come back from the Tour Divide that I’d made the right decision to pack in, but I couldn’t see beyond the opportunity in front of me. And who has never changed their mind? I was in.
The road racing I’m involved with is all production bike-based. By that I mean the bikes start life as road bikes anyone can buy from a dealer. The bikes Valentino Rossi and Marc Márquez and the rest of MotoGP boys race look like TT bikes or World Superbikes, but they’re pure race bikes, built in batches of two or three at a time with no parts shared with road bikes. MotoGP bikes are slightly faster around a track than racing Superbikes, that are built from a road bike, but not by much.
This is worth explaining because when a brand new road bike is released, race teams around the world have to wait for the factory to build the bikes before they can get hold of them to carry out all the changes they need to turn the road bike into a race bike and start testing. The road bike my 2017 race bikes were based on was the special edition of the regular CBR1000RR Fireblade, the Fireblade SP2. It was ready later than the regular Fireblade, so when it eventually arrived at Honda Racing’s UK headquarters, in Louth, it felt like everything was happening at the eleventh hour.
There were three different levels of Fireblade in 2017. The regular one was called the CBR1000RR Fireblade. There was a fancier one, the CBR1000RR Fireblade SP, and a top of the range model, the CBR1000RR Fireblade SP2. Compared to the base model, the Fireblade SP had semi-active Öhlins suspension, different brakes, a load of electronic rider aids, a titanium petrol tank and a lighter battery. On top of that, the SP2 had a slightly different cylinder head, bigger valves and different wheels. If you went into a Honda dealer to buy the Fireblade SP2 road bike, they’d want £22,500 off you and there aren’t many road bikes that are as trick.
The first chance I’d get to ride it was at a four-day test in the middle of March, which is about when I’d get on any team’s bikes for the first time, so the timing wasn’t a problem. What was a problem was the fact the Hondas we’d be riding weren’t built into full Superbike racing specification in time for this test. That meant I’d be riding the Superstock, not the Superbike versions. These two different classes are both based on the same road bike, but the Superbike is a lot higher state of tune than the Superstock, and the rules allow a lot more modifications from the road spec, so it can take a lot longer to get the ideal settings.
The test took place at Circuito Monteblanco, near Seville, over by the southern end of the Portuguese border, a track I’d never been to. I drove down in the Transit with Francis (who smacked Nigel the dog in When You Dead, You Dead, if you remember). I could have flown out, but I had my Martek in the van because I was supposed to be doing a track test story with Performance Bikes magazine, me racing the Martek against Kawasaki’s supercharged H2 road bike at the Almería circuit.
Even though Francis lost his wallet in a Spanish petrol station on the way down there, we made real good time. He was annoyed – he’s a Scotsman, course he was annoyed – but we didn’t have time to go back. We ended up stopping at a hotel the night before the test, a few hours’ drive short of the circuit. Because I had my Martek and tools in the back of the Transit I ended up kipping on the front seat of the van while Francis stayed in the hotel. I sleep the best in my van. I loved all that and had missed that part of the racing – the road trips to testing, driving out to Spain to do a job. No bullshit, just riding plenty of laps, working with the mechanics to improve the bike, then going out on track to do it all again, riding till the tank was empty.
I’d never been to Monteblanco before, but Honda go there every year. It’s cheap to rent the track, compared to other Spanish circuits, and they can do what they want there. Because they’ve done their pre-season testing there for a few years they know what times the previous bikes have done, so they’ve got a measuring stick, which is useful. Honda’s world endurance and road racing boys were there: John McGuinness; Jason O’Halloran, the Australian-born British Superbike racer; Dan Linfoot; Lee Johnston and a couple of other Honda teams were sharing the test.
Like I explained, we only had the Fireblade SP2 in Superstock specification for this test, the one a lot closer to the road bike spec, but any time on the bike was handy.
I hadn’t been on a race bike for 18 months and I expected it would feel like it was ripping my arms out and battering me with the messy ends for the first few laps, until I got acclimatised to a modern race bike again, but it was … just all right. I told my foreman in the team, Roger Smith, that I thought it was slow. He pointed at the van with my Martek in it and said, You’ve been riding that, haven’t you? And I had, but not much, only a couple of laps on the test track. I know bikes enough and I can evaluate them pretty well, so I knew my gut feeling wouldn’t be too far off.
I kept riding and loved the whole experience of being a part of the team. I loved them listening to what I was saying and me listening to what they were saying. There was no tension being in the same team as McGuinness. I might have said some things in the past that he didn’t agree with and he’s probably done the same, but he knows I have massive respect for him and, not just that, I like the bloke, too.
McGuinness wasn’t having the best time at Monteblanco, though. He had a few issues including the front brake sticking on and nearly chucking him over the handlebars, and then I came off at the end of the first day.
I have less experience with Dunlop tyres, because most of the teams I was with had deals with Pirelli and Metzeler, and each manufacturer’s tyres have different characters. Some have less ultimate grip, but when they start to slide they’re more predictable, so you can keep them sliding and not feel like it’s going to spit you off. Other manufacturers’ tyres have more grip, but when they do eventually let go, it’s a lot more sudden, harder to predict and harder to control. I didn’t know where the limit of these new tyres was so I kept pushing, was trying to get a slide or summat, to let me know where the limit was, then I ended up on my ear, thinking, Oh, that’s way before where I thought the limit would be.
Then McGuinness crashed, and he’s not a crasher. He didn’t hurt himself and he hardly marked the bike. I was new to Dunlops, but he knows them back to front and said he didn’t like a particular front tyre, so we stopped using it. There are lots of different compounds (that means the recipe of the rubber; it’s not rubber, but let’s not get into that) and different constructions (that’s how stiff the carcass of the tyre is, the carcass being the metal, Kevlar and/or canvas that the ‘rubber’ tread is bonded to). Tests like this include trying new tyres out, so it wasn’t too unusual. That’s what testing’s for.
I was enjoying being part of the team more than I was enjoying riding the bike. The quickshifter wasn’t working and the blipper didn’t work. You could say that’s all part of the process of developing the bike, but it shouldn’t really be. It’s a road bike, so it should work, but there were no alarm bells; because this was Honda, it’d all be right. It took for me to get the wiring diagram out, find the quickshifter on it and say, ‘Why don’t we solder this wire to that wire?’ to try and sort it. We got mine working and we did the same to McGuinness’
s. Without the quickshifter working the test is a bit pointless. This bit of kit has been used on race bikes for years and even some road bikes come with them.
The quickshifter is a sensor fastened to the gearshift pedal that cuts the ignition when it feels the rider’s foot shifting gear. It means that a bike will change gear smoothly with the throttle still open. On a bike without a quickshifter you have to chop the throttle to take the pressure off the gear selector to shift smoothly. Not only is a quickshifter fractionally quicker than shifting normally, it changes so suddenly that it keeps the bike more settled on its suspension, there’s less weight transfer than if you had to roll the throttle off and there’s less load on the front tyre. When you’re shifting down the gears, from fourth to third to second, another message from the ECU – the electronic control unit, the bike’s brain – ‘blips’ the throttle for you to match the engine and gearbox speed. In the past riders would do it themselves, give the throttle twistgrip and a little tweak, but with advanced electronics and fuel injection the ECUs can do it for you. But the blipper wasn’t working either.
So, without the quickshifter you’re not testing the bike how you’d race it. It’s pointless really. We were knocking the rust off, but not a lot more.
Even with these niggles I did a lot of laps, 100 a day for the four days I was there, and I felt it. There are motorbike riding muscles that I hadn’t been using for a year and a half, and this was all part of the process of getting back into it.
While I was doing all those laps, I was trying to convince myself I was enjoying it, but I wasn’t. I was loving sussing out wiring diagrams and soldering bits, but not the riding.
At the end of the test, we loaded up for the drive to Almería to meet Performance Bikes magazine for the Martek track test. We got over the mountains, near Gibraltar, and it was pissing it down. I thought it would be all right the next day, because the track is in Tabernas, mainland Europe’s only official desert region, but it wasn’t. It was chucking it down again, so I got the Martek out of the van for a few photos in the car park, loaded it back up and we set off on the 24-hour drive back home. On the drive back to England I hoped I’d have the feeling that I’d really missed riding, but I didn’t.