Guy Martin

by Guy Martin

  Kate was in tears. They asked Danny to go in the office, but he didn’t want to. Cammy and Johnny had disappeared. They all said it felt like a lifetime before the word came through that I was all right, but Danny still wasn’t confident. He remembered when Martin Finnegan was killed. Martin’s wife had been told by someone he was up and talking.

  I tried to get up and walk, but my back didn’t feel right and hurt like hell. I tried moving all my fingers and toes and it seemed as if everything was still working, but I knew I’d badly hurt something. A marshal started talking to me, dead calmly, just chatting about normal stuff. A Welsh fella – I’ve seen him since. No one was getting flustered.

  I was complaining about my back hurting, I could sense people panicking and I was strapped to a stretcher. I could feel everything, so I wasn’t shitting myself. And I’d had some morphine by then, too. That keeps a fella calm. I was dazed, but I knew I was only a stone’s throw from the hospital, so I didn’t know why they’d sent a helicopter for me. It was concerning me a bit more that they were putting me in a helicopter to take me over the road to the hospital.

  As far as I know it was the first time the Senior had been red-flagged, which is something considering what must’ve occurred in that race in the previous hundred-odd years of its history.

  When I arrived at the hospital the staff were pricking me to make sure I could feel everything. They had cut the leathers off me by this point. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t put clean pants on. I like a three-day cycle of underwear, four at a push.

  I was put in an MRI scan and it showed I’d broken four vertebrae and four ribs. They thought I’d broken my leg too, but they were looking at the mess from the old 2003 Southern 100 injury. I also broke some ribs, punctured my lung and singed my eyebrows and fringe, but worse things happen at sea.

  When people hear you’ve broken your back they think you’re going to be crippled, but a large percentage of people who break their backs aren’t paralysed. I was one of the lucky ones. The Dainese kit I was wearing did its job.

  Johnny, Cammy, Danny and my girlfriend, Kate, all got to the hospital quickly. Cammy was in a bit of a state. Even though I had been a bit distant during that TT, not staying in the house with them, we were very close. Perhaps they were still thinking, ‘Did I tighten that?’ They all have the ability to work in the stressful situation of a TT pit-stop and I trust them with my life, literally, but they must’ve been doubting themselves a bit too. It was natural for the mechanics to wonder, because it was so soon after the pit-stop. When they saw me talking and smiling, they were straight back to normal.

  My mum had been watching up at the Keppelgate, just before the run down to Creg-Ny-Baa. She knew something bad had happened. Andy Spellman arranged for the pace car to take to her straight to the hospital. He was thinking I was on my last legs. My mum’s seen it all, though. My dad’s broken his back, so it wasn’t new to her. I’m sure Big Rita wouldn’t have been panicking.

  Maybe I’m selfish, but it never even enters my head the worry that I’m putting those around me through by racing where and how I do. The only reason I’ll stop racing motorbikes is when the bullshit outweighs the buzz I get out of it, not the amount of pain I’m going to put my family through. The crash didn’t change a single thing about my attitude to racing. Not one thing. All I wanted to do was get fit and race again.

  When I was in hospital I couldn’t work out why my eyebrows were singed. Then I was shown a photo of an explosion, with orange flames as high as the top of a lamp-post, and thought, ‘That was nothing to do with me, was it?’ A full tank of fuel is going to make a mess, given half a chance.

  I was put on the ward and later in the day they brought in the local Manx rider, and TT front runner, Conor Cummins. He had a massive crash at the Verandah, on the Mountain, in the afternoon re-run of the race I’d crashed out of and caused to be stopped. He’d been pushing for the lead too when he went off the side of the Mountain, literally. Because he and his bike left the road, the race carried on.

  McGuinness, who I’d been racing nip and tuck for the lead when I crashed, broke down in the re-run and Ian Hutchinson won the race. Hutchie told me, a while later when I interviewed him for Performance Bikes, that he was about to retire with a mechanical problem when the race was red-flagged. If I hadn’t crashed when I did he’d have been out and not taken his fifth win of the week, a clean sweep which I don’t think will be repeated.

  Simon Buckmaster, the PTR boss, sent out a press release while I was lying in hospital with a broken back, telling anyone who’d listen that the bikes were more than competitive and that I had been unprofessional. The statement accused me of courting publicity. It seemed like he was telling me how to win a TT, but I don’t remember him winning one. From what I’ve heard, he started three TTs, finished two of them with a best finish of thirty-first, according the Isle of Man TT’s own database.

  It didn’t annoy me, because, as I said to the lads and as I’ve repeated many times since, those that know know, and those that don’t know don’t matter. I knew what the people who really mattered to any of us knew would think, and if some people wanted to believe something else, then we wouldn’t want to work with their kind anyway. I don’t think any of the shit that people might throw in my direction makes any difference to my career chances. If they have anything about them they know the truth, or they’ll make an effort to find it out. I’ve never given a damn about what’s written in MCN or on internet forums or what other racers thought about me. In a way I like all the bollocks and bullshit that’s spouted about me. It gees me on a bit.

  At the end of 2010 I was still considering riding for Wilson the following season. I told him it was dead simple – I would ride for him if he gave me the bikes from the off and we’d do it ourselves with more time and less panic. Wilson said that wouldn’t work, Buckmaster must have the bikes, so I left Wilson Craig to join Hector and Philip Neill’s TAS Suzuki team.

  Wilson stayed with Buckmaster and PTR, and signed the Australian Cameron Donald and William Dunlop, Michael’s older brother, to race for them for the 2011 season. William doesn’t get the same attention as his younger brother, but he’s quick, and a race winner on the roads. A few years later we’d be TAS Suzuki team-mates. Cameron is spot-on, he’s a TT winner, he understands how bikes work and he’s fast. He went one way, leaving the TAS team to join Wilson Craig, and I went the other.

  It took a year, from my crash at Ballagarey, for the shit to hit the fan but it eventually did.

  At the 2011 TT Cameron was on it, out to prove a point, and Wilson’s bikes were fast, but they kept breaking down, when the camshafts would fail. The cam they were using had a radical closing profile that was putting a lot of stress on the camshaft. The rules limited the amount of lift, so tuners look at ways of lengthening the duration the valve is open. Legendary tuning guru Phil Irving came up with the theory, or at least explained it in his famous book, Tuning for Speed, back in the 1950s. A cam is normally roughly egg-shaped, but Irving had the idea of putting a flat top on the cam. This way the valve would ‘jump’ after being flicked off the flat edge of the cam, giving more lift than the cam actually measured. But doing this puts a lot of strain on the cam, and if any race is going to find an engine’s weak spot, it’s likely to be the Isle of Man TT.

  Cameron should’ve won two races that year. Some websites and reporters called it cruel luck, but, to me, there was no luck about it. In any event, Wilson Craig and PTR fell out too. Before the end of the 2011 TT all the fairings of Wilson Craig’s bikes had the PTR logo covered up with pieces of black tape. Wilson didn’t want to give them any more publicity.

  I felt the bikes weren’t right, and any team manager looking to sign me will have seen enough to feel the same as me. It all came back to the saying, those that know know, those that don’t don’t matter.

  CHAPTER 14

  DOWN WITH A BANG

  ‘It’s probably the last time I cried. I lay there, not having the strength to l
ift myself up, thinking, “What are you doing?”’

  AFTER THE 2010 TT, I spent a week in Noble’s Hospital on the Isle of Man, and Kate stayed out there with me. The amount of get-well-soon cards and messages of support was amazing. When I got back to Kirmington I had another week off work while I limped around the farm, getting looked after by the Lancasters.

  I had been prescribed some strong painkillers and after a couple of weeks I was really struggling to get off them. In the past I’d watched Trainspotting, looked at the stories of heroin addicts not being able to kick their habits and thought, ‘You weak-kneed bastards. It’s only drugs, what’s up with you?’ And now I was addicted to these tramadol painkillers. When I needed one I would be shaking and had no energy. I had to have them. As soon as I took them I just felt normal, 100 per cent. Not high or feeling any kind of altered state, just normal, with a little bit of pain.

  At that point, so soon after breaking my back, I could hardly lift my arms up and I was constipated. I hadn’t had a shit for over a week and I was tearing myself another arsehole trying to move something. Nobody ever put more effort into having a dump, but all that would come out was a pea, or less. It wasn’t a good time.

  I was straight back on the fitness trail and borrowed a turbo trainer from my brother just to do something, to try to keep active. You bolt your bicycle to the turbo trainer rig, so when you pedal, the back wheel spins a roller, and you can increase or decrease its resistance. I couldn’t bend down to hold the bars, so I’d have it set up outside the farm and I would grip onto a drainpipe while I pedalled – just to be doing something. Anything. I was struggling mentally and physically.

  Once, during this week off work, I slipped over in the shower and started crying to myself. It’s probably the last time I cried. I lay there, not having the strength to lift myself up, thinking, ‘Fucking hell, Martin, what are you doing? Man up!’ I managed to get up before Mrs Lancaster had to come and help me.

  I went back to work, or at least trying to work, at Dad’s truck yard, but I was still not managing to get off the prescription painkillers.

  It got to the stage where my doctor wouldn’t give me any more of them, but I had some left. They came in little capsules and I had to open them, take some of the grains of painkiller out and mix some aspirin in. It took me a month of this to get off them.

  Around the same time it came out that I’d been seeing another woman behind Kate’s back. When I first met Steph she was a salesperson for a pharmaceutical drug company. She was doing an Open University course and, in 2009, she came to my dad’s to interview me for some part of it. She kept popping in and I eventually fell for her, then it all got messy. One hundred per cent my fault …

  It would lead to me splitting with Kate, leaving the Lancasters’ farm in Kirmington, where I’d lived for years, and moving in with a mate in Caistor.

  During this very low time, when I felt not much was going to plan, a mysterious and unusual character came onto the scene. I didn’t want to change any names in this book if I had a choice, but I had to alter this one. Mr X is a very serious bloke. He is deeply involved with a specific charity and had trucks to transport donations around. He approached my dad to fix one of his trucks and I ended up doing the job.

  My dad had met Mr X before I had, and told me he was very religious. The first time I met him he said, ‘I’ve been sent to see you. He’s not ready for you yet. He has big plans for you.’

  Perhaps it was because I was still coming off those painkillers, but I felt vulnerable. I must’ve done, because I took it all in.

  Mr X would regularly turn up at my work. He would arrive in Bentleys, Aston Martins, other sports cars and a very rare five-cylinder Transit that I thought was the best of the lot. I didn’t even know they existed. It sounded like he had fingers in a lot of pies, but he reckoned he spent a million quid a year keeping his name off the internet. It must have worked. When his real name is typed into Google nothing comes up. That’s bloody unusual on its own. He said he was involved with the SAS, but I had a strong feeling he had a shady past. He made me think he had links with the underworld, yet his charity now had contracts with the UK government.

  He knew my dad was into World War II and military history and he would bring him presents like random bits of Spitfires and Lancaster bombers.

  Eventually, it came out that Mr X wanted me to work for him, indirectly. He wanted my earnings to go to him and then he’d distribute some of it to me. It became clear, from the things he said – he even admitted it – that he was having private investigators do background checks on the people I trusted, like my accountant and Andy Spellman.

  I don’t know if he was running some kind of cult, but it seemed like he had followers giving him a lot of money, perhaps for religious reasons. I’m not saying there wasn’t a lot of good being done with the money, but Mr X had a lot of very nice stuff too.

  I went to stay at his house for a night. He had loads of servants. One of them would follow him with a glass ashtray as Mr X walked around smoking a huge cigar. When he got in his Jacuzzi, someone would appear with his slippers and put them by the side of it.

  It sounds ridiculous, writing about it now, because normally I’d run a mile, but he had a way about him that somehow sucked me in. And it wasn’t just me. It seemed like he worked on people in a psychological way. He told me that he saw me the racer and me the truck fitter as being both in awe of each other and looking down on each other and in conflict. It struck a chord. I didn’t feel brainwashed at the time, but with hindsight I think I was.

  I was certainly coming around to his way of thinking, starting to believe that maybe everything I earned should go to him. Mr X knew I was mad about the Britten, the extremely rare New Zealand-built, V-twin race bike – my favourite motorcycle of all time – and told me he knew where one might be for sale. He was flicking all my switches. Making me think, ‘He’s not a messer.’

  He’d helped a lot of people through his international charity work, but there were a couple of things that put doubts in my mind about him. He was rude to the people around him, the servants he would have following in his wake with a glass ashtray or slippers or whatever, and I didn’t like that rudeness.

  He said stuff like, ‘I hate myself for buying new cars, but I can’t help myself because I love them so much. I see such poverty, but I buy these cars, so the only way I can get around it is to give them away.’

  Andy got on well with Mr X at first, and they seemed to talk regularly. Andy has told me since that he was given some good advice on how to deal with me when I was acting like an arsehole towards him. Mr X offered Andy an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, but he turned it down. Wisely.

  Mr X was good to talk to. He is very intelligent in lots of ways. You could have a yarn about all sorts of things and he’d know about them. I like people like that.

  During this time Mr X was getting more and more interested in my finances. He was requesting copies of contracts I had with sponsors.

  Meanwhile, I’d been doing any kind of exercise I could from the time I got out of hospital, my injuries were healing and I was feeling much stronger. I missed the Southern 100 in July, but I was fit for August’s Ulster GP. I did all right in my first race back. I got on the podium in one of the Superbike races and it showed I could still race at fast road circuits – the Dundrod is the fastest, with lots of man’s corners. I wasn’t in any doubt, but the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and I proved I still had the balls for it, even after the crash I’d had. I wasn’t scared of dying at a road race. I was more scared of running out of teabags.

  Then came the Gold Cup meeting at Scarborough. It had been a terrible year, but a win at Oliver’s Mount would be a good way to end the season. The bikes had been back to PTR, Buckmaster’s lot in Louth, and to me they were unrideable in the wet due to the way the ignition and fuelling had been mapped, and apparently no one could, or would, do anything about it. It felt terrible off the throttle, jerky, not allowing me
to feed the power in with the finesse you need on a circuit like that in those wet conditions. The weather was miserable. Any dreams of winning at Scarborough, just three and a half months after breaking my back, were knackered. I felt doomed.

  For that Gold Cup, and other meetings in 2010, a friend of mine, Shaun the Sheep, would drive his camper van to the races and zip on the awning, and that would be our base in the pits. The bikes would arrive in the back of a van and Shaun would look after me, Danny and whoever else was spannering that weekend, keeping us fed and watered.

  I’d known Shaun from the SMR days and got on well with him. He is an older bloke, in his fifties at the time and blunt, blunt as you like, but you knew where you stood with him. Mr X must have thought Shaun was the hired help, because he was being rude to him – when we were basically guests of Shaun, in his private camper van, and good friends beyond that.

  Shaun had a rule: if you were going into the motorhome itself you had to take your shoes off. I did it, everyone did it. Prince Philip could have come by for a brew and he’d have been told, politely, ‘Shoes off, your Highness.’

  When Shaun told Mr X this he flipped his lid. The very calm and calculated exterior fell away and he started shouting, ‘Next year we’re not going to be with you! We’ve got plans!’ The mask had dropped.

  While I was watching this all develop I was in the corner of the awning cutting my slicks, slicing extra grooves into tyres with a special tool, to go out in the wet conditions. Then Shaun got Mr X by the scruff of his neck and shoved him out. I had a race to try and win, so I just kept my head down. I didn’t need to be dragged into a fight on a race day. They seemed to be dealing with it themselves.

  Meanwhile, this was far from the only relationship going to shit. I wasn’t getting along with Andy Spellman, having shut him out when he’d put some kind of F1 driver’s contract under my nose. I realise now he was just trying to help me and move the whole job forward, but it all seemed too formal. Mr X had done a bit to muddy the water, but it was my decision. Mr X wanted to take over all the dealings that Andy had helped set up and was keeping on track. Being under the spell of Mr X meant I was messing Andy about. And I was messing the North One people about. I was all over the place. I had all these opportunities, but, back then, I would probably have been happier just getting up at 5.30am, as usual, and doing five and a half days’ graft at the truck yard.