by Guy Martin
I bought my first second-hand milling machine at the age of 19, from money I’d earned doing barrow jobs, work on the side. I was building race engines, for other riders, from that age, but if I’d been able to go to somewhere like the JCB Academy I’d have had a head start. The idea of it is not a million miles away from an idea me and Andy Spellman have been working on, to have a place in Lincolnshire where local lads and lasses can visit on school trips and learn about some of the trades and careers open to them. We want to open their eyes beyond working in a call centre or in a shop; not that there’s owt wrong with those jobs, they’re just not for everyone.
Martyn Molsom, one of JCB’s chief engineers who I’d met through the tank project, was showing me around and we drove to each site in a Volkswagen XL1, the little £100,000 limited edition hybrid that does over 300 miles to the gallon. Like most, if not all, motor manufacturers, JCB are looking to the future of different fuel sources for their products. Loads of their stuff is diesel and, because so much of it works in cities, there’s pressure to make greener options. Having the Volkswagen on test was a way of seeing how other companies solve similar problems.
JCB are pushing for electric. They’ve launched an electric mini-digger, but they haven’t just taken the diesel engine and fuel tank out and put the electric motor and batteries in its place. No, they’ve looked at it in a whole different manner. It makes me think, Does an electric digger or backhoe loader need to look like a diesel one when it becomes electric? The counterweight and the driving position could change. They also spoke about how inefficient tracks were, there’s that much drag with tracks, compared to wheels, so they’re always looking for something that would work right when it is on wheels. I could’ve listened to them for hours.
At the headquarters they have a visitor centre, called The Story of JCB, a permanent £5 million exhibition. It’s like a museum, but they don’t like it being called that, and it’s dead interesting too, with machinery from the entire history of the company, a full-size wireframe excavator made by the artist Benedict Radcliffe and a display about the armoured backhoe excavators they sell to the American military. It was explained that mines have gone off underneath these JCBs and the drivers have climbed out unscathed. The military-spec ones cost £250,000 for the regular version, and £350,000 for the armoured one fitted with bulletproof glass, and they’ve sold 1,000 to the US Army alone.
The company aren’t afraid of showing they’ve earned a few quid out of the job, and there is a display of models of all the aircraft JCB have owned, going back to the 1960s. They have a fleet of private jets, not little ones either, and Sikorsky helicopters. They’re planning to build a £60 million golf course near the World Headquarters, to bring the Masters there. I don’t know a lot about golf, but even I know that’s a big deal.
What must that company be worth? And they want me to hand out awards to their best engineers. JCB encourage all their staff to keep studying and gaining more qualifications, and this do, in their own plush auditorium, was a prize-giving, recognising the achievements of staff from the young, newly qualified designers right up to senior management level.
I was asked to hand out the awards and framed certificates, which I was happy to do, then there was a bit of a question and answer session. Some of JCB’s headquarters’ best folk are saying stuff like they’re big fans, and they love the stuff I do, and it makes me feel a bit awkward. I don’t know what it is they love. I’m just a wanker, so I can’t see it myself. And it’s not my upbringing that makes me like that. While my mum’s worse than me, and she won’t take any compliments, I reckon if my dad was praised he’d get a strut on. He loves all that. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.
During the Q&A someone asked about tractors and I told them I had a John Deere. That changed the atmosphere in the room for a minute or two. JCB are on the edge of the tractor world, with the Fastrac, that they have been building since 1990. It was a whole new and very specific kind of tractor. It’s not a 15-furrow tractor, like my John Deere; it’s more of an agricultural hauler. It’s the perfect thing for pulling a digestate spreader. And it’s quick, for a tractor. Not many folk complain about being stuck behind a Fastrac on a country road. I do prefer to buy British if I can. I bought the Aston Martin, and it bit me on the arse, but I don’t regret it. If JCB built the kind of tractor I need for the work I want it to do I’d definitely look into buying one, but they don’t. Yet.
At the end of the presentation, after all the awards and all that had been done, one of the top brass introduced their new electric mini-digger, as it drove onto the stage, and let me have a go in it. Then the brightest lads and lasses wanted to talk to me. Again, I don’t know why. I’m not even an engineer, I’m a mechanic. A fitter. I can do a bit of machining, but I’m not a toolmaker. When I see them I think I should’ve worked harder at school.
On the drive over to Staffordshire that morning I was in the same mindset I’d been in for most of the year: look how much I’ve got on at work, how much I’ve got on in the shed: do I need to be driving across the country and spending the day with JCB? No, not really, I realised, but I knew it was the right thing to do. And I’m glad I did. I had a brilliant day and felt better for doing it. I’d go as far as to say they’re an amazing company.
CHAPTER 20
‘Where would I have ever met Jenson Button? He doesn’t come and empty the bins at the truck yard’
AFTER RUSSIA, THE next filming job I was involved with was finishing off the classic Williams F1 programme. There was still a lot to do. When I’d left for Moscow, the engine wasn’t even in the car.
Before the break for Russia we’d been doing a load of stuff on the engineering side of things and watching the engine being dyno’d was a highlight. Formula One and top motorcycle racing teams know the safe operating limits of every component on their vehicles. So, for instance, if a crank has a competition life of 100 hours before being rebuilt or replaced, the team note down how many hours the car has run with that crank in it. Each crucial component has its own diary or database, updated at every test session or race. Obviously, if another component has twice the life, it doesn’t need refreshing at the same time. Keeping good records is especially important when engines are being taken out of a certain chassis, put in another one then maybe back again. Over the 35 years since it raced, the exact history of how many hours this particular Cosworth DFV V8 motor had been run for were lost so it needed a racing engine specialist, like Judd Power, to check everything over in the engine. Williams did the same for the chassis, checking and double-checking everything.
When the engine was finished it was strapped to Judd’s water-brake dyno. This is another kind of dyno to the one I describe later, in the chapter about my sheds. It does the same job as the rolling-road type I have at home, but Judd’s water brake is designed to test engines out of vehicles. It’s still measuring torque, and allowing laboratory-style testing, but it looked like it had come out of the Ark. It did the job, though, and was a dead interesting part of the whole job. The time on the dyno is another round of checks to make sure the engine is not going to shit itself.
The DFV engine made 520 horsepower on Judd’s dyno. That’s an output shaft figure. Power is lost through the gear and driveshafts, so it wouldn’t measure 520bhp ‘at the wheels’ on my rolling-road dyno.
At this point I was back to filming two days a week, and working at the truck yard the other three or four, depending if they needed me in on a Saturday, which can be a busy day in the haulage world because a lot of maintenance is scheduled in.
The next day of filming we were at Williams, where I helped rebuild the gearbox and fit the engine in the car. We had another day at Williams, fitting the bodywork, doing all the finer detail bits, putting the wheels on, then doing the first start-up. The engine had run on the dyno, and all these boys know what they’re doing, but there’s always a bit of nervousness when it comes to starting something up for the first time, especially a car
as historic as this one. Keke Rosberg won the Monte Carlo Grand Prix in it! And I was going to drive it, the next day in fact.
Williams chose Turweston airfield, a stone’s throw from Silverstone racetrack, for my first go in the restored FW08C. It was a gentle test for the car, and somewhere I could concentrate on getting to grips with it in a straight line.
Karun Chandhok, the Williams test driver and F1 TV pundit, who’d been a mentor and expert in the filming so far, went out and did half a dozen lengths of the runway, then it was my turn.
I was driving straight up and down, getting a feel for the car, getting used to the gearbox, the sensation of speed. I’d already driven another single-seater at this point, the Formula Three at Pembrey, so having my head out of the car and seeing the two fat front wheels spinning and moving as I steered wasn’t anything new to me.
The Williams gives a lot of feel through the suspension. I felt like I was an integral part of the car. The steering rack is set up so the wheel only needs half a turn from lock-to-lock. You’re not having to pass it through your hands when you’re doing U-turns, like you would in a normal road car. The feeling of the downforce was really noticeable. As fast as that Williams is, 500 horsepower, 500kg, it still doesn’t have the brutal speed and ferociousness of my Volvo estate. Round a track, if I was in the Volvo I would not see which way this 35-year-old F1 car went. The Williams would win a standing start drag race, but if we got a bit of momentum into it, if we drove, side by side, up to 60mph then had a roll-on race in a straight line, my Volvo would eat it alive. The old F1 car wouldn’t get its nose in front and probably wouldn’t go over 170mph, where my Volvo will do 200mph.
Sitting in the old F1 car made me realise just how much has changed in the years since this car was competitive. The steering wheel is like something out of a Jaguar XJS, with green leather covering. The dashboard has just two dials on it and five big toggle switches either side of it. You change gear with your right hand, selecting gears and shifting through an H-pattern gate like a conventional car; it didn’t even have a sequential box never mind paddle-shifts. Lots of things about driving a car like this are unfamiliar, but not everything.
The next opportunity I got to drive the car, and the first time on a proper race track, was back at Pembrey, the South Wales circuit where I’d tested the Formula Three Dallara Mercedes. And, like the previous time, the weather was terrible, pouring down all day.
The lads from the Williams Heritage team, who I’d got to know well by this point, were all there. They’d all been F1 mechanics at the cutting edge, before moving to the historic side: Bob, Steve and the foreman of the job, Dickie Stanford. Dickie had been Nigel Mansell’s race mechanic, then Williams’s chief mechanic and team manager.
The mechanics were busy preparing and checking the car while we had a team meeting. Dickie Stanford read out the rules and told us how it was all going to run: Karun’s going to go out at this time, he’ll do this many laps, he’ll come in, stay in the car while we take the bodywork off, sit there for ten minutes, then go out and do five laps, then he’ll come in and you’ll do five laps.
When Karun drove the track it was obvious it had a lot of standing water on it. He wasn’t hanging around, and I could hear it spinning up and see it moving under acceleration from 100 yards away. He drove back into the pits, the team gave it a once-over, to check that no hoses or anything were loose, then he did another session before it was my turn.
Before I put a foot in the car, one of the mechanics wiped the smooth soles of my driving boots clean, so I wasn’t driving with slippery wet boots. It feels strange holding your feet up, like a show pony, to have another man clean the soles of your shoes, but it’s about keeping the car in one piece, not pampering me.
I stalled when I first tried to leave the pit garage, and the car took a bit of starting after that. I think the engine was flooded because I hadn’t kept the revs up, but it was no bother after that, and I didn’t stall it again.
When I first went out I thought I was going to struggle to see because the water was covering my visor, but when I got up to speed it was blowing off so I could see where I was supposed to be going.
It was a private test day, just me on track. The car was fitted with Avon wets and the rears were throwing up massive plumes of water, eight or ten foot into the air.
I was treating the car very carefully. It was aquaplaning a little bit in the slower parts of the track, and though I wouldn’t have gone around quicker in my Transit, I wouldn’t have been far off the lap times I was doing in the old F1 car. I’m not sure what we learned that day and the team were already talking about fitting in another test day, at Thruxton, before I left for the long drive home.
By now, it had been confirmed how the programme would end, like a lot of TV programmes do, with a challenge to give the whole thing a point. I’m fascinated by the processes of building a replica of a First World War tank, or restoring a 1980s F1 car, but just rebuilding a historic vehicle isn’t enough for TV, you need a deadline. And, because Williams had said they didn’t want it racing in the FIA Masters Historic Formula One series, the compromise of me taking on Jenson Button had now been agreed. The 2009 F1 world champion would drive the Williams FW08B six-wheeler, a real oddball F1 car that showed brilliant performance in testing, but could never race because Formula One’s governing body, the FIA, changed the rules, that effectively banned it before it could even make a competitive start.
The FW08B has four-wheel drive, and the rear four wheels are all powered. The FIA banned that. It has ground effect. The FIA banned that. And it had six wheels. The FIA said F1 cars could have a maximum of four wheels. That was it; the development hit a dead end, no way around it.
The TV lot managed, as they always seem to, to get everything arranged and the Thruxton test happened at the beginning of June. I’d finally get to drive the car in the dry. It was more time in the car, more time to get used to the gearbox and a few more laps to try and find out how hard I could push the F1 car. I was allowed to do two sets of four laps of a circuit I know well, on an open practice day. Eight laps in total, because Williams didn’t want to put many miles on the car; they just wanted me to have a feel for it in the dry. I drove home thinking, I’ll be all right. I went ten seconds a lap faster in the second four-lap session than I did in the first session. I learned that the faster you go, the more committed you are and the better the car feels. You show it a bit of commitment and produce a bit of downforce for the air going over the wings. The next time I’d be in the car would be in five weeks’ time, at Silverstone, for the handicap head-to-head race with Jenson Button. I thought I’d be laughing.
Our exhibition race took place on the Thursday of British Grand Prix weekend in July. I’d been filming the start of another programme the day before, the one about the history of the Dakota aircraft, but that’s a story for another day. I’d been in Coventry, not far from Silverstone, and it would’ve made sense to stay in a hotel close to the track, but, if I can, I always prefer to drive home. That meant I was up at half four, as normal, to walk the dogs, have breakfast and leave at six. I’d made good time, I was early, but stopped for a cuppa, a few miles short of Silverstone, in the petrol station where I realised I needed to weaken the mixture. I only stopped for five minutes, but as soon as I turned off the A43 onto the road leading to the circuit, the traffic ground to a halt and I was late. Again.
The place was already rammed with folk, the campsites filling up with camper vans, ice-cream vans turning up, all the lasses that work in hospitality turning up, media signing on … Sarah, one of North One’s assistant producers, was waiting for me with passes. We got a couple of bikes out of the back of the van and cycled into the circuit to meet Jenson Button and the team.
A few weeks before I’d been a guest at the Sheffield Doc Fest, a film festival that concentrates just on documentaries. I was asked by Channel 4 if I’d do a question and answer thing on stage with Suzi Perry. They don’t ask much of me, so I said I
would.
North One edited some clips together and Williams turned up with a modern F1 car. We did this hour-long thing onstage in the City Hall and I think it was a good do. There were two lasses onstage translating what we said into sign language and I reckon they had the hardest job of the night, trying to convert my ramblings and swearing into something that the hard of hearing could follow.
It was at the Sheffield do, a month or summat before the British Grand Prix, that it was announced I’d be racing Jenson Button. Up until that point only those involved with the programme knew the plan. Suzi Perry had asked if I’d ever met him. She wasn’t the first to ask this – Ewan, the TV director, had when we were filming at Pembrey – but they both got the same answer: Where would I have ever met Jenson Button? He doesn’t come and empty the bins at the truck yard. He doesn’t work at the MOT station. Where would our paths have ever crossed?
While I haven’t met Jenson Button, I have met Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden, Jorge Lorenzo, David Coulthard … Even though I keep myself to myself when I’m there, I’ve been to the Goodwood Festival of Speed where people like Jenson Button go. Telling Suzi Perry that there’s no chance we’d have ever met is my way of trying to talk the job down. That’s me doing my self-defence. There’ll be some psychology behind it that I’m not clever enough to understand, but I know that’s what I’m doing.
As part of the deal for North One being able to film at the F1 grand prix it had been agreed that me and Jenson Button would do a meet the fans thing onstage. A compere, a very official looking lassie in a Formula One shirt, was asking a few questions.
A hundred or so people turned up, the weather was perfect and there were lots of shirts off and beer bellies out. Jenson is obviously very good at that sort of thing, talking to the camera and the crowd, where I’m a bit of a knobber.