by Guy Martin
PART OF SIGNING to race for Honda on the roads, after all I’d said about not going back, was being given the opportunity to ride the legendary Honda Six.
This bike, that Honda built for the 1967 season and named the RC174, was a development of the original Honda six-cylinder GP bike, the 250cc RC164, that made its racing debut in the summer of 1964. Back then the rules weren’t as tight as they are now, so engineers and factories could really use their imaginations to solve problems and improve the breed.
Each racing class was, as they are now, limited by an upper cylinder capacity, so Mr Honda and his engineers decided they would make more power by increasing the rev limit their bikes could safely reach. This is where it gets a bit more complicated. The upper limit of what an engine will rev to is governed by a bunch of different factors, but the main one is the mass of the piston and the length of the stroke; both these relate to the speed the piston can travel at. It’s possible for a single-cylinder 250cc bike to have almost countless different bore and stroke dimensions to reach the 250cc displacement, but there is a balance between the size and mass of the piston, and the stroke and how that relates to the speed the piston travels that naturally governs how fast it can move.
Successful British racing bikes of the 1950s and early 1960s, like the 500cc Manx Norton and AJS 7R, were simple and effective singles, but they were often outgunned by much more complicated, and more expensive, Italian multi-cylinder bikes like the MV Agusta triple. The Italian triple could rev higher and make more power for a given cylinder capacity. There are downsides to multi-cylinder bikes, but when they’re good, they have the advantage over singles.
Honda took the idea of multi-cylinder bikes to extremes. They built a 250cc twin, then a four-cylinder 250 and a 50cc twin, back when that was still a GP class. They also built a five-cylinder 125, called the RC148, in 1965 to compete against Suzuki’s two-strokes. The Honda 125 revved to 22,000rpm and its most famous racer, Luigi Taveri, reckoned he had to keep it revving between 21,000 and 22,000rpm to get the most out of it. Remember, rpm means revs per minute. Each of the tiny little pistons are going up and down 360 times per second! A modern Superbike, like the Honda Fireblade SP2, revs to about 13,000rpm. Honda’s five-cylinder 125 is a very underrated motorbike.
In the mid-sixties Honda had their hands full in the 250 class with Phil Read on the Yamaha two-stroke. The multi-cylinder solution had worked in the 50 and 125 classes, and Taveri was world champion on the five-cylinder 125 in 1966. Honda already had a four-cylinder 250, but it wasn’t fast enough, so they started developing a six-cylinder 250 in January 1964. They weren’t hanging about. They had an engine running in June of that year and were racing the finished bike just two months later.
Time was so tight that to get it from Japan to its first race, at Monza in Italy, Honda paid for three seats on the plane from Japan, then arranged with the airline to take the row out so that the bike could fit there because they couldn’t guarantee there would be room in the hold. When it arrived in Italy, Jim Redman, the rider who had convinced Honda to debut it at that race, pushed it out of the plane, down the steps and through customs! He led the race, this amazing, revolutionary bike’s first race, but it overheated and Redman ended up third.
By 1966 Honda had signed Mike Hailwood for his first full season on the bike, the best rider in the world at the time, perhaps ever. Together they beat the two-strokes to the 250 title.
Honda were also competing in the 350cc grand prix series, with a four-cylinder, but the smaller six was quicker than it. So they increased the size of the bore to make the 297cc 1967 RC174 that could race in the important 350 class. Hailwood won the 350 title, too.
My Honda Six ride was set for a Sunday in June at Castle Combe race circuit near Bath. I’d raced the Krazy Horse Harley chopper at DirtQuake, at King’s Lynn, the day before and as soon as I was done there, me and Shazza drove down to near Castle Combe, where we’d been booked to stay in the poshest hotel. We met up with Neil Tuxworth and his missus, and George Beale, whose bike I was going to ride, and his missus. The next morning we had breakfast, no rushing about; drove to the track and found we had a place to have a quiet cup of tea. I was already thinking, This is amazing.
Then I saw the bike. I already knew is wasn’t the actual RC174 that Hailwood had raced in the 1960s; only two were ever made, and two spare engines, but it’s an exact replica that George Beale had made. Even so that didn’t take any of the gloss off riding it. George is a right interesting and dead knowledgeable bloke. He’d run GP teams in the 1970s and 1980s, sponsored dozens of riders and was Barry Sheene’s team manager for a while. He’d been a bike dealer; bought and sold rare racing bikes; is a consultant to specialist auction houses and has made a business out of making replicas of amazing old race bikes. He started in the early seventies when he needed a part for the AJS 7R he owned. He needed an exhaust and you couldn’t buy one, so he went to a company in Birmingham, the only people he could find who could make a perfect replica. But they wouldn’t make just one; they had a minimum order of 50. George must have really wanted that exhaust, because he ordered 50 and started selling them. People asked him for other parts and he realised there was a market, and he ended up making so many parts that, in the end, he started building complete 7R replicas.
He made replicas of other racing bikes, like the Italian Benelli, and was visited by a mate of his who ran Honda’s official museum. He asked George, ‘Do you fancy building a replica Six?’ And that’s how it came about. Honda not only gave him permission to copy their bike, they bought the first replica from him.
When it was nearly time for my go on the bike I got my black leathers on and walked over to where the bike would be started and warmed up. George and Neil Tuxworth were my mechanics for the day. As soon as it came to life I was sure nothing had ever sounded more violent than a Honda Six. When the bike is running the springs in the carbs aren’t strong enough to push the slides back, so when you let go of the throttle it just sits at those revs. You have to physically close the throttle.
It is only 297cc and makes 66 horsepower, about a third of what a modern TT Superbike makes, but it’s bloody intimidating when you hear it being warmed up. I made sure I had earplugs in.
The bike has absolute instant throttle response. There’s nothing else like it. The revs rise and fall so fast as the six individual exhaust pipes bark a noise that I’ve never heard a motorcycle make before. You think it’s a normal classic when it’s on a steady throttle, but as soon as you rev it you realise there’s nothing normal about this engine. It’s a sound I’ll never forget.
Then it was time to ride the Honda. The components in the engine are so tiny, valves like roofing nails, but it didn’t feel like it’s made of watch parts. The riding position is cramped. I couldn’t believe they could get six cylinders into such a small space.
One of the downsides of making power from increasing the rpm of an engine, which is what these Hondas were all about, was the engine has what’s called a narrow powerband. That’s nothing physical, it means the engine only makes its peak power in a very limited rev range. If you’ve never ridden a motorbike with a narrow powerband, the easiest way to explain the feeling is this: when you’re driving up a hill and the car begins to slow down and the engine revs drop, you know you’ve got to shift down a gear to get the engine spinning and making more power again. Drop it a gear and you begin to accelerate again. When the car slows down, it’s dropped out of the powerband; by changing gear you’re allowing the engine to start spinning and making power again.
These little multi-cylinder motorbikes had such narrow powerbands that they needed very close-ratio gearboxes to keep them spinning without losing too many revs. The Honda Six has a seven-speed gearbox to compensate. I was up and down the gearbox like a fiddler’s elbow to keep it in the powerband and I was only having a fairly gentle ride round. Going into Tower Bend I would normally go down two gears on a Superbike, but I was going back five on the Honda. It was designed t
o rev to 17,000rpm, but George said it would be better not to rev it above 16,000, so I made sure I didn’t.
Honda didn’t have any drawings for the engine, so when George came to tool up to make the replicas he used a French firm called JPX who specialise in aircraft and F1 engines; they said it was the most difficult engine they’d ever seen, and it was made in the mid-sixties! JPX made over 500 drawings of components. There are three different sizes of conrod big ends in the same engine and seven different main bearings. The tiny pistons, just 41mm in diameter, are machined from solid. To make a set of six carbs cost £18,000 twenty years ago.
Take the noise and the numbers on the rev counter out of it and it wasn’t that different to riding a normal motorbike, but it’s hard to ignore the noise and the numbers.
When I was on track I wasn’t pushing it, I was just riding it. I’m not a showman, but I could imagine that people were there to hear that bike. I would travel to hear it, so I made sure I was revving it as hard as George would let me.
I did five laps before I could feel oil on my boot and it was causing my foot to slip on the peg. If it was going on the peg I knew there was a good chance it was going on the back tyre and had an oil leak, so I came in. The last thing I needed to be doing was chucking that thing down the road. There are only six in the world, and if you want one they cost over £450,000. When I looked there was oil on the tyre.
The oil was being blown out of the breather box. George explained they had a problem with early four-strokes, but he’s sorted it since I rode it. When I went out again it was still blowing oil, so I only had eight laps in total, but it was still a great experience.
The Honda Sixes were Mike Hailwood’s favourite racing motorbikes because they were so easy to win on. It was the most amazing bike I’d ever ridden. It makes 74 horsepower, has four tiny valves per cylinder, and six individual carburettors.
There are only a handful of bikes I’d put on a list of those I would love the chance to ride: the Britten, the Honda Six and Steve Burns’s Monster – the turbocharged Spondon Suzuki that I read about in Performance Bikes magazine when I was a lad. Those are the benchmark motorbikes for me. There are fantastic racing motorbikes, like the Honda NSR500 and the RC211V, but there was nothing particularly groundbreaking about them. I would possibly add the Honda NR500 to the list, the oval-piston grand prix four-stroke that I’d seen at Honda’s Motegi museum.
If I had to rate them, I’d say George’s Honda Six was better than the Britten, which is a bold statement. The Britten, that I rode in New Zealand, was like nothing else, and so strange to ride because of its handling characteristics, but the Honda Six felt like a conventional motorcycle, just more extreme. How it revs, how narrow it is, how light it is, how close the gearbox ratios are, how fast it accelerates for a 55-year-old 297cc motorbike.
The Honda Six, the five-cylinder 125 and the twin-cylinder 50, with its 12-speed gearbox and four valves per cylinder, were all amazing. You don’t see anything like that any more. All the rules are made to homogenise the bikes, and cars, to control costs, except for rare races like the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, the Time Attack series for four-wheelers, and machines competing at places like Bonneville. I’m not dismissing the work of the engineers in MotoGP or F1, because they’re exploring marginal gains to get half a per cent of improvement to edge ahead of the competition, but there’s nothing to encourage radical thinking and mad investment, stuff that really gets people talking.
For a while I thought about blowing a load of money on one of these properly historic bikes. I spent a while thinking about buying a Britten when one was offered up for sale at £300,000. It was at the time I was buying the house I’m in now and I couldn’t buy both. I made the right decision, 100 per cent, no regrets at all. Even at nearly half a million quid a go, they don’t struggle to sell these Honda RC174 replicas. One came up for sale after I rode at Castle Combe and George Beale did contact me, but I never got back to him. I don’t need bikes like these. It’s someone else’s masterpiece, not mine. I’ve realised if I’ve got spare money I’m better off ploughing it into my own shed to allow me to build my own stuff.
If I got the chance to ride the Honda again I’d snap their hands off. It was an amazing experience.
CHAPTER 7
‘Loading shit in the trailer takes more precision than you’d think’
I’VE NEVER RELIED on racing or TV for money. Trucks were always Plan A, but the TV job means I could buy stuff like the pub or a tractor, to make sure I’m all right in the future. I bought my first tractor, a Fendt 9-Series, a few years ago so I could rent it out and earn a few quid while I was working on the trucks. For instance, the tatie firm pay £30 per hour and they pay for the diesel in my tractor. While I was at Moody’s either my mate Tim Coles or his nephew young Ben Neave would drive my tractor. I’d get the rent for the tractor and they’d get the hourly rate for driving. On the days neither of them could do it I would.
Fendts are meant to be the Rolls-Royce of tractors, but mine was trouble so I sold it and bought a John Deere and it hasn’t been a bother. It shouldn’t be either, it’s only a year and a half old. It’s done 1,200 hours. That’s how you rank a tractor. You don’t say it’s done 20,000 miles, you say how many hours it’s worked. You might do 8,000 hours without anything major going wrong on a tractor like my John Deere.
A tractor like mine won’t work from October to March, then it starts the muck-spreading, followed by the potato-drilling – that’s planting the seeds. Tim does the shit-spreading, but loading shit in the trailer takes more precision than you’d think. There was a time when we had two tons of solid slurry in the bottom of the tank and that’s what inspired a T-shirt we had made and sold on the Guy Martin Proper website. On the day the shit didn’t hit the fan we were told we needed an agitator to stop the manure from solidifying. Nige the dog said he knew just the man, get Donald Trump on the job, the most effective agitator in the world.
The stuff in the trailer is called digestate. Round here a lot of it is unused and composted maize, wheat, barley, some pig shit from a big farm near here, duck shit from Cherry Valley in Caistor. Just general shit. You can use human waste as manure, but it has to be injected into the land, not spread. That’s why I don’t risk eating watermelons in places like India and China, because they sometimes use human shit on the land and the watermelons take it directly out of the soil.
The potato folk like the look of young Ben, so they’re having him back to do the ridge-forming of the fields; that’s another pass before the planting. I know what you’re thinking: surely they’d run out of stones to collect by now, but in certain fields the stone always comes up through the crust. A farm near South Kelsey removed 300 ton of stone out of the land one year; when they went back to that same field four years later there was another 300 ton. It’s real stony land in certain areas near me and it comes to the surface through ploughing. So, in the fields I work in they move the stones to the bottom of the ridges now. There’s no point in removing them altogether, they reckon.
As I’m writing this there’s a surplus of potatoes, because of a good harvest. When there is more supply than demand the price drops through the floor. In early 2018 the price of potatoes was £90 a ton, but they cost £160 per ton to grow. That’s bad business, int it? But there are times when you can get £260 per ton. Potatoes don’t seem to go in and out of fashion. Vegans eat them.
The John Deere had been sat there a couple of weeks, because most of the potato-drilling had been done. You need a big tractor like that to do the direct drilling work. Then we had Dot, so I was just doing a few bits from home.
At the back end of every summer, from August to October, the tatie-lifting job comes around. In 2017 things got dead busy, the tractor was in demand and Tim couldn’t commit to it, so I told Moody I was doing the tractor job, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks. In the end I stopped working at Moody’s altogether. When Ben was in the tractor I was in the tatie-processing factory fixing p
lant or making guards for machinery. I was earning more money than I was at Moody’s and it felt more constructive. There was no falling out, but it felt like it was time for me to move on.
The driving isn’t hard work. It’s just a case of following the tatie lifter. That’s another tractor towing a trailer with usually four Lithuanian blokes sat either side of a conveyor belt, sorting the good potatoes from the bad. They have no idea who I am. They’re kind of rude, but I like that. They don’t have to be cheerful and they don’t speak the language.
The blades of the tatie harvester go into the ground and pick the mud up and the potatoes buried in it. It has a big shovel, perhaps six-foot wide, that picks up three rows of potatoes at a time. It’s all down to the driver about how deep the shovel goes. Too deep and you’re picking up too much mud and the lads in the back have got too much to sort through; too shallow and you’re cutting into your potatoes.
The driver has three or four cameras looking at different things: the shovel; the lads in the back; where he’s going. It’s a bloody busy job. I drive alongside, and the spuds that have been sorted are loaded onto my trailer. You have to be accurate, because the potatoes are being put in five-ton boxes. Some days I was doing 150 miles a day in the tractor, because you’re back and forward to the depot to unload the potatoes. It was great.
An average day on the tatie job is get up at five, take the dogs for a half-hour walk, get back and have breakfast, fill my CamelBak and cycle ten miles to Elsham, where my tractor’s parked when it’s harvesting time and being used every day. I load two empty five-ton potato boxes and two one-ton boxes onto the trailer, then get on the CB to find out where the potato harvester is. It always leaves earlier than us. I leave the yard at seven. You might think it would be hard to find a field, out of all those in this area of Lincolnshire (there’s no numbers on them), but we get told roughly where they are, then start looking for all the wheelings in the road, the mud and shit off the tractor tyres, as we get close. The company I work for has a road sweeper that clears up the worst of it after them, but you can still see the dust on the road. I’ve had days when I’ve needed a few detours to find the harvester, but I’ve never got lost.