by Guy Martin
In that week’s feature race, I was racing my GSX-R1000 K5 that wasn’t quite as fast as Lougher’s Fireblade. I’d lead for a couple of laps, but then he’d come by and I’d be scratching my nuts off to keep with him. I’ve always liked Lougher. The Welshman was a veteran when I first started racing on the roads and was still going ten years later. He showed me, at my first TT, just how quick the top lads were. It was Lougher who I said was going so fast he was sucking rabbits out of the hedges, a description that became a slogan printed on Red Torpedo T-shirts.
It still felt like a carefree time, and my second TT is the one I look back on as my best ever, all things taken into account. My results were better in 2007, when I was on the podium four times, but balancing the resources and experience against the results, the race two years earlier felt more satisfying.
It didn’t start well. My Superbike had blown up at the North West. Uncle Rodders had made a fancy tank breather for it, and everyone else in the paddock probably thought it was my preparation and tuning, but it was a common fault with the Suzuki that year, the piston to bore clearance was too tight, and two hours after mine went, Darran Lindsay’s did too.
The week between the North West and the start of TT practice was a panic. I ordered the parts from Crescent Suzuki and had the crank sent to Mehew’s for him to balance. There’s nothing wrong with how the crank comes from Suzuki if you’re only putting it in the road bike, but for racing you want to get them balanced, so they run smoother. We were so tight on time we had to leave for the Isle of Man and have Mehew send it by courier to follow us over.
My dad was out with me helping for the fortnight, and we were building the engine and bolting it in the frame, late in the night before the first practice. We were filing con-rods, making sure everything fitted just right, but it meant we had no time to run the bike in.
I must have got away fairly early in the first session, because Archibald, one of the favourites, came past me. He had seen my bike leaking some oil and pulled up at a marshal post for them to put the message out on the radio to black flag me and make me stop. He ruined his lap to make sure everyone kept safe – I don’t think many racers would do that.
I stopped at Ballaugh, and it turned out to be just a sprocket oil seal, another common problem for that model Suzuki.
Archibald had helped me before, lending me a helmet when mine failed scrutineering because of a stone chip, before a race at Kells, in Ireland.
The rest of practice week went all right, and that half-decent form led into the races. I started 2005’s TT race week with a sixth in the Superbike, then followed up with fifth in the Superstock 1000. I scored another fifth in the first Junior 600 race, then bettered it by one place in the second 600 race. I’d been in the top six all week. I was starting from 15th position on the road, a fair measure of where I was in the pecking order before the week had started. The top men were Britton, Finnegan, Farquhar, Lougher, Archibald, Anstey, McGuinness … Hutchinson was racing, too.
In the final race of the TT, the Senior, I came third from a starting position of 15. McGuinness won, Lougher was second. It was my first TT podium, and my mates Finnegan and Britton, riders with more TT experience, came just behind me.
I must have gone to the press conference, but I can’t remember anything about it. I remember plenty about the race, but not much after it. It’s not so much a blur as a black hole.
It wasn’t my intention, but I was doing enough to be noticed by other teams. Still, the TT didn’t have the level of interest it has now. Back then race meetings had a different, more relaxed feel for me. Only road race fans had heard of more than one or two TT riders, and a lot of people in mainstream motorcycling thought that the Isle of Man TT should celebrate its centenary, that would come round in 2007, then stop. The ones who were writing and saying stuff like this would describe the TT as dangerously out of date, adding that it couldn’t consider itself to be a sport when so many people had died while competing there. They viewed the TT as an event that was decades from its golden era and they couldn’t see it ever recapturing any of its former glory. I didn’t give a damn about these opinions. I loved racing there and couldn’t really see it stopping any time soon.
AIM Racing approached me at the end of 2005, through a race mechanic called Dwayne McCracken. He told me they were dead interested in me joining the team. AIM was funded by the businessman Alastair Flanagan. His company, Elec-Track Installations, put the electrical systems in the Eurotunnel, worked with Network Rail and was worth squillions when Flanagan sold it.
Flanagan was in his early fifties and had a broad Scottish accent. There must have been a bit of Glaswegian in him, because he always sounded to me like he wanted a fight. He was very into his motorbikes without knowing too much about them, but he didn’t need to know a lot, because that’s what he paid experts for. He financed race teams for a few years, but doesn’t now.
Before AIM, Flanagan had bankrolled the ETI Ducati team in British Superbikes, but this was a different set-up with different mechanics and managers. The team was run by Steve Mellor, who had been one half of V&M, a very successful, Rochdale-based tuning and race team firm started by Steve Mellor and Jack Valentine. They’d had TT wins with David Jefferies and John McGuinness, but the pair had split to run their own projects. It was Mellor’s involvement that attracted me to the team. He was a clever bloke when it came to engines. The work he did on the inside of an engine wasn’t as tidy-looking as Mehew’s, but his bikes always went like shit off a shovel. AIM didn’t have direct factory support, but being the main Yamaha team on the roads meant they might have got their bikes a bit earlier to start building them.
I met Alastair at a BSB round. Once I’d agreed that I’d race for them they put a contract in front of me. At that time I didn’t really know riders got paid for racing, not at the level I was competing at anyway – I was still an up-and-comer on the roads – so I was confused when I saw the numbers for a while. I was trying to count the noughts. I didn’t know if it was £15,000 or £150,000. In the end, I saw it was £15,000 and I still couldn’t believe it.
Everything was geared up to make a good showing at the TT that year, but it didn’t happen. AIM’s Yamaha R1 Superbike had an oil leak that the team just couldn’t get to the bottom of. It caused me to pull out of the Superbike race. They thought they’d cured it, so I would go out, and it would do it again. In the end, too late to salvage that TT, they discovered it was something to do with the engine breather. Pressurised oil was being blown into this fancy collector thing, and it was the collector that was leaking. It dripped oil down a gasket line on the engine, so it looked like a failing gasket. The oil mist would then blow back onto one of my feet.
I would notice oil on the boot, because my foot would start slipping off the footpeg. Once that happens you might as well put the bike back in the van. If you’ve got oil on your boot, it could be leaking onto the tyre too. With that to contend with, I was just making up the numbers. I was sleeping in the race truck that year, and at the end of the Senior, the last race, I parked the bike, got off without saying a word and just climbed in the back of the truck. My back had gone, because I wasn’t able to take the load on my legs, so I was straining my back just to finish the race.
During the TT fortnight, a week of practice followed by a week of racing, I can wear through the soles of a pair of race boots, just with the pressure of pressing down on the knurled alloy footpegs to help control and steer the bike. I’ll wear out a pair of handlebar grips on each bike too. After the end of this race I could hardly walk. I had a DNF in the first Superbike race, was fourth in the Superstock and finished fifth in the Senior. Which, in my ambitious mind, was shit.
I was disappointed because this was a team that had won TTs. They had bloody Steve Mellor in charge, an absolute legend, but they couldn’t get to the bottom of an oil leak.
The rest of the year went better. I won the 600 race at the Southern 100 and then won four out of five races at the Ulster –
a very high point of my racing life. When you’re lining up for five races in a day, you have five minutes between each race. I wasn’t clued up on the eating and drinking back then, the whole nutrition side of things, like I am now. I’d have a quick cup of tea and a burger from a van or something.
The Ulster was the icing on a shit cake. As a stand-alone race, it didn’t matter what went on before or after. I was very happy with it and still am.
I also won the Scarborough Gold Cup, the fourth back-to-back at that event. I did a few British Supersport rounds for the AIM team, too, because the lad who was riding for them, Chris Burns, had crocked himself. It meant I rode Cadwell the weekend after the Ulster.
I nearly stayed with AIM Yamaha for another season. They were making a big push to go with Pirelli tyres. In the autumn of 2006 Flanagan, the team owner, invited me, Steve Mellor and Jason Griffiths, who had by then retired from road racing and was Pirelli’s man on the road racing side of things, up to his mansion to try work out a deal for the following season. They were saying all the right things, but I was struggling to forget all the shit we’d been through at the TT and the failure to find what was just a daft oil leak.
By this time Shaun Muir had been on to me. Back then his Hydrex-sponsored Shaun Muir Racing (SMR) team didn’t have much of a reputation. They were a small outfit and had never raced on the roads. Apparently, what got him thinking about signing me was seeing me turn up to Cadwell in the Porsche GT3 RS I had at the time. If I saw myself do that, I’d think, ‘What a cocky arsehole.’ But seeing a 23-year-old driving a £70,000 car got Shaun wondering, ‘How the hell has he got that? He must be good at riding a bike to be able to afford a new GT3.’
I like fast cars and I had sunk all my money into it. I was still living at home, or at the Lancasters’ farm, with my girlfriend, Kate, so I didn’t have a mortgage. The money came from a lot of overtime and race winnings. Whatever, the car got Shaun’s gears turning.
I raced for AIM in Macau at the end of 2006, where Shaun’s team would make their road racing debut. They didn’t paint a very good picture of themselves. SMR didn’t work out, till the morning of the race, that their petrol tanks couldn’t hold enough fuel to complete the race. Shaun had Martin Finnegan and James McBride racing for him and they set off with nowhere near enough petrol on board. It’s a long race, and a lot of it is flat-out, so you burn plenty of petrol. The SMR team had only been doing BSB races, where you could get away with a 20-litre tank. At Macau only 24 litres would do it.
And I still ended up riding for them!
Shaun Muir is a former British Superbikes level racer. He’s a straight-talking bloke, and I like that. He was a really good motocrosser who went short circuit racing. I’m sure he would admit that he got as far as his skill allowed, and that wasn’t to the top in Britain. He was clever enough not to flog it to death, and moved into owning and running a team, not riding for one, and his results speak for themselves – he runs one of the best teams in the country now. He half understood what makes me tick too, which is a lot more than most people. He was fit for his age, because he did a lot of cycling, and was probably in his mid-forties when I started racing for him.
When he was younger, he worked on the North Sea oil rigs as an engineer, and earned a decent wage, because he was a grafter. He’d then invest the money in houses and rent them out.
Shaun’s dad was one of the bosses of a big company of steel erectors in the north-east, called Booth & Partners. When his dad was ready to retire he gave his shares to Shaun’s brother. Shaun explained to his dad he would’ve liked to be involved, but was told that because he was doing so well on the rigs he could look after himself. The way I heard it, Shaun then raised the money to buy out all the co-owners and became the sole boss of Booth & Partners. Shaun also set up a corporate hospitality business that works in British Superbikes and provides the official hospitality at the TT. He owns a pub too, and still runs his race team.
I liked Shaun’s enthusiasm. He’d just been joined by Mick Shanley as chief mechanic, the man who would oversee all the technical side of things for SMR. Shanley had just come from spannering for a grand prix team, and that impressed me. I liked his enthusiasm and knowledge too. I had struggled to forgive the AIM Yamaha team for the TT failure, and I didn’t have many other options, so I signed for Shaun to ride his Hydrex Hondas. He was offering me the same money, but it was the commitment they said they were going to give that hooked me.
The first year with Shaun was mega. I was on the white Hondas which had on the side the big red logo of Hydrex, a company in the railway engineering industry. We went to the North West 200 and found the Supersport bike wasn’t quick enough, but I was on the new model of Honda CBR600, that had just been launched, and it sometimes takes time to develop a brand-new bike to get the most out of it. I qualified on pole in the 600 race, but I got smoked by Anstey on the Suzuki, Hutchinson on the Kawasaki and more besides. The race was televised, and it was plain to see, from the helicopter footage, that they were pulling away from me on the straight run down to University Corner, a section where I should have easily been able to stay in the slipstream of the other bikes. That section is nothing to do with skill, or how well you get out of the previous corner, not that either of those riders are lacking in skill or balls. In that part of the track it’s purely down to horsepower. And the Hydrex Honda 600 was down on it. I knew we couldn’t go to the TT with it like that, so I talked the team into allowing me to tune the cylinder head.
When it came to the TT the 600 felt better, and though I didn’t win, coming third in the 600 race behind Hutchie and McGuinness, six seconds covering all three of us, I broke the Supersport 600 lap record. And with an engine I’d tuned and built myself.
The Superstock bike ran out of fuel near Ramsey, a long way back from the finish line. Something had shorted out, or a fault had come up on the electronics side of things, so the ECU – the Engine Control Unit, the bike’s electronic brain – had put the engine into a safe mode, feeding more fuel, making it run stupidly rich, to try and protect it from a problem it wasn’t even having. The fuel light came on at Ginger Hall, meaning I had five miles of petrol to cover 17 miles of track.
That year, 2007, Ian Hutchinson was on the factory-supported HM Plant Honda. He was setting off sixth, I was eighth. I caught him on the road in both the Superbike and the Senior, and he put out his leg for me to pass him. You can hear a bike coming behind you, or sometimes you get a glimpse of shadow depending on where the sun is.
I didn’t have a very high opinion of him back then. He’d been going out with my younger sister Kate, and he was much older than her. I wasn’t being protective towards her, but I didn’t think it was right. He was very fair on the track in those Superbike races, though, and he’s proved to be a great TT racer.
I came second in the big races, both times to McGuinness. I didn’t have the beating of him, but felt I was still learning, and I wasn’t far off. That season would be the last year I would be using Dunlop tyres, for good or ill. The next year I was riding on Pirelli, and mainly because of their man, Jason Griffiths.
All season Buckle and Wozza were my main mechanics, with Shanley over them. Wozza is a good old boy. In his forties, he’s been about the racing scene for ages and still is. He has loads of experience and is a really nice bloke. Perhaps he was a bit too nice. At times, if I was struggling with set-up, I’d be saying we could try this and try that, and he’d agree with me, when perhaps I needed to be called a See You Next Tuesday and told to just live with the bike misbehaving a bit, get my finger out of my arse and get on with it. But it’s a fine line, because when chief mechanics do that and I know I’m right it causes friction and we get nowhere fast.
Buckle was the spanner man below Wozza. Another Lincolnshire man, a good mechanic, a keen cyclocross rider and the brother of a very good 250-cc bike racer. Buckle lived in a caravan in his parents’ yard and loved microlights. He’d shag the world if it let him. But it never did. A nice lad, but p
erhaps not the most reliable, I’d discover.
Towards the end of the year, I raced at Brands Hatch for Russell Benney’s Phase One Endurance team. This wasn’t an endurance race, just a British Superbike round that Phase One had entered because Russell was courting some sponsors.
Russell had built up his endurance team and ran it with highly skilled volunteers, not full-time paid mechanics. Still, they’d been world champions. I liked him a lot. He worked in a nuclear power station and once explained to me why tea tastes better if you put the milk in before the water. It’s a theory that would help change my life a few years later.
At Brands Hatch, just before I went out to race, Russell told me to go steady because the bike had an important race coming up, in the World Endurance Championship that was their main focus. He added they didn’t have the time, money or inclination to rebuild it if I slid off. That’s not what any racer wants to hear before they go out. Racing is pretty pointless if you’re told to go steady. Anyway, I brought the bike back in one piece and Russell must have been happy enough with what I did, because he offered me the chance to do some World Endurance rounds with him the next year, something I was dead keen to try.
Shaun knew I’d ridden for Phase One. I wasn’t hiding the fact – I couldn’t have, even if I’d tried. I told him about the offer Russell had made and he said, ‘Fine, get cracking if that’s what you want, but you won’t have a bike to race at the TT.’ He wasn’t interested in the kind of loose arrangement that I was toying with: a bit of Endurance, a good go at the roads. Instead, Shaun made an alternative offer that was for another proper go at the International road races plus a full season in British Superbikes on the Fireblade Superbike. It sounded like a great opportunity.
After that had all been aired, it was just a matter of the last race of the 2007 season, a trip out to the Macau Grand Prix, the exotic and often incident-filled race off the coast of China. I just wish the incident it was filled with didn’t involve me so often.