Guy Martin

by Guy Martin

  For a record like this there was a balance to strike between wanting to practise, but not wanting to shag my legs out on these two-mile sprints. After a couple of practice runs Dave and I quietly agreed to go for it.

  We got round the corner and onto the runway well, and I was as close as I needed to be. Rourke had welded a bumper bar onto the handlebars of the bike so if I rammed into the back of the truck I wouldn’t fly over the handlebars.

  During the run the truck got away from me, meaning I began to lose the tow of the slipstream. I’d been told I shouldn’t get out of the seat to pedal because it would unsettle the bike and be potentially dangerous at the speeds we were talking about, but I forgot that, got out of the saddle and pedalled as hard as I ever had. The truck had a monitor set up showing a live feed of me so the driver could see exactly what I was doing. When Dave saw that I’d dropped back, he let his speed lower slightly at the exact same time as I stood up to accelerate, so I battered into the back of the truck at 80-odd miles per hour.

  I kept pedalling, thinking the muscles were going to rip off the back of my legs, until it was time to brake. I’d reached 111 mph pedalling a pushbike. This bike was a fixed-gear, so you can’t stop pedalling until the bike is completely stationary. If you forget, like I did, it reminds you sharpish by nearly breaking your legs. The bike threw my feet off the pedals at over 100 mph.

  I don’t usually watch any of the TV footage we film, but I wanted to see some from that run. There’s a shot from a Vauxhall Insignia, that’s doing over 80 mph, and the truck comes past with a bicycle behind it. It doesn’t just overtake, it flies past. I watched it and thought, ‘That’s me!’ It looked mental.

  After Bruntingthorpe I couldn’t sleep that night because the buzz was so massive from riding a pushbike at 111 mph a fag paper’s width from the back of a truck. But we wanted to go faster. As of the end of July 2013, trying to go faster than I had on that day in Leicestershire would be the most terrifying thing I’d ever done on two wheels.

  The idea someone came up with was to run on Pendine Sands. This Welsh beach was a famous, then notorious, site for British land speed record-breaking. It was first used in the 1920s, and chosen because the retreating tide leaves the strip of sand very flat and quite compact. Back then I think they used as much as seven miles of the beach. Back then the roads were so terrible this probably seemed liked the perfect place – a motorcycle magazine of the time called it ‘the finest natural speedway’, but sand isn’t tarmac or concrete. It’s far from perfect for record attempts.

  Malcolm Campbell used Pendine Sands to set the world land speed record at 146 mph in Blue Bird in 1924. It was broken time and again until Campbell raised it to 174.22 mph in 1927. He was in a battle with the Welshman J G Parry-Thomas and his car Babs. Parry-Thomas had held the record and was trying to win it back when he crashed at 170 mph. The driver died and Babs was buried on the beach until it was dug up and restored decades later.

  I arrived at Pendine Sands at 10pm the night before the attempt. I was told to meet in a restaurant, and when I got there it was totally bunged, every table full. Everyone in the restaurant was part of the record attempt: helicopter pilots, medics, runners, directors, cameramen, soundmen, cycle fitness blokes, bicycle designers, truck racer, truck mechanic … I wouldn’t have wanted the bill for Saturday.

  We met on the beach the next morning. James Woodruff, the director, had done the whole risk assessment and had a laminated sheet full of plans and timetables, all done with military precision. The idea was to build up to the attempt, in 5 mph steps, like they suggested we should do at Bruntingthorpe. At the airfield it was clear that me and the truck driver, Dave Jenkins, gelled pretty quickly and we could make much bigger jumps. My legs have only got so much in them; I can’t keep building up slowly and slowly.

  The laminated sheet said the first attempt should be 40 mph, but I said, ‘Fuck that. Let’s chuck a gear in the bike that allows us to do 100 mph.’ The biggest gear available on the day had potential for 122 mph.

  Dave said his truck felt squirrely at 40 mph. Not unstable, but not planted either, so he thought we should go for 70 or 80 as the first attempt. I’m glad I listened to him.

  We did two miles at 70 mph and I couldn’t see a thing. The sand was blowing up on the inside of my helmet and covering the visor. And the slightest indent left in the sand by the truck was massively unsettling the pushbike. When you ride on tarmac, the tyres are deforming, the wheel rims are flexing, the frame is flexing too, while the road surface is remaining constant, the datum point. But riding on the beach, the sand was moving, while the bike and its tyres were staying the same. The sand couldn’t exert enough force on the bike to make it flex, and it was the most alien feeling in the world. It wasn’t stable and I couldn’t turn it. Every time I tried to turn, the front felt like it wanted to tuck. And this was at 70 mph. It turned everything I knew about feel on its head. It just wasn’t right.

  I told the crew, ‘That’s mental. And not in a good way.’ I even gave one of them my mum’s phone number. That’s how sure I was that I was going to crash. It wasn’t the pressure of there being over 20 people on the beach, just for this attempt, or the money that had been spent. The TV people would’ve stuck to my decision. If I’d said, ‘No, it’s too dangerous,’ they would have known I’d said it for a good reason. The final decision was purely down to me, but if I hadn’t tried it I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. It was a five-hour drive home and it would’ve been torture if I had given up on it.

  I pulled on my helmet, 100 per cent sure I was going to crash. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when and how bad … I asked the bicycle mechanics to put the big gearing on the bike so we could have one go at it, adding, ‘Because this is going wrong.’ I knew that the more attempts we made the more indents we would press into the sand, and that would make riding even more dodgy.

  While the gearing was being changed on the bike, I taped up all the underneath of my helmet to stop the sand finding its way up.

  I had a quiet word with Dave, the truck driver, saying, ‘When I crash you need to get your foot down and get out of the way. Let me crash by myself.’ The monitor in his cab meant he could see what I was doing and I knew his gut instinct would be to back off, but that would have been disastrous.

  I wasn’t comparing myself to Evel Knievel at Wembley in 1975, when he knew he wasn’t going to make the jump but still went for it anyway because so many people had turned up to see him, but I do think I had an idea of what Evel was going through.

  We set off and I’ve never pedalled harder in my life. I wasn’t getting any kind of buzz. I was just shitting myself. It was a horrendous feeling. I was told by Dave Le Grys, who had helped with training advice for this record, that I should never stand up to pedal because it unsettles the bike as you’re pulling on the bars and swinging the bike from side to side. Stay in the seat was what the expert said, but again, I couldn’t help it. At 40 mph I had to stand up, because the truck was getting away. I couldn’t let the truck leave me, because I didn’t want to do another attempt, so I just had to stand up. I stood up four times on that run. The last time was at over 100 mph.

  Again, when Dave the driver saw that he was getting away he’d slow down, just as I’d stood up to catch him, so I’d bump into the back of the truck. The difference in speed when we hit might have only been 5 mph – the truck slowing to 78 mph while I had increased my speed to 83 mph to catch back up – but I could feel the whole bike flex as it tried to chuck me over the bars.

  Taping up my helmet did stop the sand finding its way in, but it caused the inside of the visor to steam up, so I could hardly see a thing. The back of the truck had boards at the side, at an angle, to try and stop some of the sand pelting me, but if I went off line and nudged them with my handlebars it would be game over. So we put big lines made of white tape at the edges to show me how far I could safely move either side of the centreline of the truck. My vision was so obscured I could only just s
ee the vague outline of the white lines as I was pedalling like hell along the beach.

  In the end I was clocked at 112.94 mph, 1.5 mph faster than on the concrete at Bruntingthorpe. The beach course was three and a half miles long and I was pedalling at over 100 mph for two miles of it. I’ve no idea how I survived it, because I was not in control. It doesn’t matter how wild the TT and other road racing looks, because I’m still in control. I wasn’t in control on that beach. I was just blind and lucky.

  Instead of thinking I’d got away with it, I left Wales with ideas of wanting to do 200 mph. As long as the lead vehicle could do 200 mph, and we had the room to do it, doing 200 mph is no harder than doing 100 mph. In fact, the faster the truck went the easier it was, because the air being pushed around the truck would curl around like a wave and fill the low pressure area behind the truck, where I was tucked in. So it felt like a tailwind: 200 mph – it’s got to be done, hasn’t it? Another episode of Speed concentrated on a human-powered aircraft, the HPA. It was another tough challenge, but not quite as dangerous to my life or limbs. I was told, before filming, that 530 people have been into space, but only 450 have flown a human-powered aircraft. So it wasn’t going to be easy.

  The aircraft was designed by Alex and Ben, a couple of proper boffins from Southampton University. Ben was a mature student, Alex was a lecturer, and they got three students involved in helping to make the plane for the attempt.

  The main wing structure was foam cut with a hot wire machine, that Ben had made himself; material like thick clingfilm, and carbon-fibre wing spars. A pushbike was strapped to the bottom of it. Southampton University have been involved in attempts like this for decades and I loved seeing the science and history behind it. I even got to fly a glider as a practice for piloting the HPA.

  We first tried the HPA at Lasham, near Southampton. The finished plane weighed 27 kg, but it had a massive 20-metre wingspan. We made the attempt at first light, when the air is best for flying. The plane got off the ground, about two feet, for about a distance of five feet. The Southampton lads called it a short flight and were pleased, but I broke one of their beautiful foam and glass-fibre propellers.

  I thought I’d have the muscle to pedal it, but after testing the power output at a cycling velodrome, with a fancy crankset and dashboard measuring the power, we found out, after my initial burst of pedalling, I was nowhere near powerful enough. While the plane builders were creating the plane, I was training like mad to make sure I could produce 400 watts of power for four minutes. That takes a lot of doing, but if I couldn’t, the thing would never fly.

  The event we made the attempt at was the annual Icarus Cup, for human-powered aircraft, near Northampton. Our goal was to be the fastest; we weren’t going for duration or distance. I might have the power, but I was too heavy, much heavier than the world record holder, a German with less meat on him than a butcher’s shoe.

  The conditions at the Icarus Cup suited our design, and I got the plane off the ground, this time for a proper flight, not a hop, skip and a jump. Our air speed was 29 mph with a 10 mph headwind. It wasn’t enough to break the world record, but it was the quickest at the competition. I had done a fair bit of cycle training to be able to get this thing into the air, and afterwards some of the students from the university tried pedalling and they couldn’t get it off the ground, so the training paid off.

  The hydro-bike was another dangerous scheme. The idea was to aquaplane a motorbike across a lake. A 450-cc motorcrosser was modified by a couple of switched-on fellas in their fifties, Charlie and Graham. They had a fair bit of involvement with amphibious vehicles, so they knew about lift and thrust. Underneath the engine of the bike was a computer-designed skid plate, designed to act like a speedboat on the surface of the water. The rear wheel was fitted with a sand tyre with paddles, exactly the same as riders use in Californian deserts. We took the bike to a Welsh lake and went for it. Things didn’t go according to plan. Well, I say that, but the plan was so hare-brained that perhaps it did.

  I was told to ride at 50 mph into the lake, so Charlie and Graham could work out what angle the skid plate needed to be set at, and so the scuba divers knew where the bike would land on the bottom of the lake and they could practise retrieving it. The rescue team wanted me to crash time and time again in the shallows to see how I’d crash in the deep water. The motorcycle had a small float attached to it so the divers could locate it when it sunk, but there was a risk that the rope would tangle around my leg and drag me down. It did once in the practice, so they strapped a knife to me.

  I asked Spellman, ‘Is this dodgy?’ He told me that plenty of BMXers do jumps into lakes. I thought, ‘Right!’

  I was hitting the water at over 50 mph, hung off the back of the bike, trying to get it to take off and lift out of the water, so the rear paddle tyre would dig into the water, but the bike would start see-sawing and I’d go over the handlebars at 50 mph, hitting the water head first. There was no lack of commitment on my part. I look back now and think, ‘Was it a good idea to ride into a 25-metre-deep lake on a motorbike?’ If I sat and thought about it I would’ve talked myself out of it.

  In the end I rode across Bala Lake in North Wales for a distance of 64 metres. It wasn’t the 100 metres we were aiming for, but it was still some achievement.

  The challenge I was most nervous about was the toboggan speed record in Austria. I’d nearly knocked myself out practising for it. I was on a skateboard, well a longboard, lying down, riding down a hill, but the trucks – the skateboard’s axles – weren’t tight enough so it started tankslapping. When I tried to correct it, the thing chucked me off. It left a right scar on my hand and scratched my face, and that was just before the 2013 TT. I had a pushbike helmet and some gloves on, but I wasn’t about to ride a skateboard in leathers. Course not.

  We went to test a few variations of the sledge at the indoor snow dome in Castleford, West Yorkshire. The slope there is 11 degrees, but from the top it looked steep enough. We had consultants from Sheffield University doing the maths who said, ‘At this angle of slope and this density of snow; the weight of the sledge; the weight of you, you’ll probably do 34 mph.’ And I did 34 mph and that was enough for me. When I walked over to the brains of the operation they said, ‘That’s all right, that’s all going to plan. The slope in Austria is 45 degrees and if everything goes to plan you’ll do 177 mph.’ And they said it all with straight faces!

  We cut it really fine to attempt the record. Two of the weekly shows had already been aired, before we drove out to Andorra in early January, 2014. The weather in Europe hadn’t been suitable and things were tight. In the end we settled on a speed skiing slope in Grandvalira. I drove out with a carbon-fibre sledge that had been designed by Terry Senior and Nick Hamilton. The design had undergone all this advanced fluid dynamics testing until the designers came up with a canopy for me to hide behind. Then it was made by EPM Technology, the same way F1 racing car bodies are made. It was a trick thing. But I still crashed it … The second time I went down the slope it got all out of shape when I started to brake, then it flipped, cracking the bodywork. Not an ideal start, but luckily we had a replacement body.

  Again, like all these attempts, the time comes when it’s shit or bust. We hauled the sledge up the mountain, and after a last pep-talk from Olympic gold medal skeleton bob racer Amy Williams, I climbed on further up the mountain than I’d attempted before.

  This time there were no mistakes. The sled ran as straight as an arrow, and the dragster-style parachute deployed without fault, slowing me down. We’d smashed the record. The run of 84.39 mph was over 21 mph quicker than the previous record, set by Rolf Allerdissen in 2010 in Austria.

  People have talked about banning real road races like the TT, because riders are sometimes killed, but the racers would simply find something else dangerous to give them their buzz. Attempting these records made me think that the kind of people who race on the roads wouldn’t be happy just watching TV or walking the dog when i
t came to the weekend. It’s not how we are wired up.

  In 2012, I got involved with a TV show presented by the bicycle stunt rider Danny MacAskill. The mountain-bike-trials rider had become famous when the film of him riding his bicycle around and over obstacles in Edinburgh went onto YouTube. It was filmed by a friend and shows Danny riding along the top of a iron railing spikes, using a tree as a ramp for a backflip, bunny-hopping to the moon … The film had over 30 millions views. He did a brilliant follow-up, Industrial Revolutions. When he does a 180-degree jump from one train track’s rail to the other, it blew my mind. Danny ended up leaving the bicycle shop he worked in and getting Red Bull sponsorship, advert appearances, opportunities, travel and injuries. He’s a self-made man. I was, and still am, a massive fan. He’s a legend.

  MacAskill was making a TV show called Daredevils: Life on the Edge for Channel 4. It was about ‘risk takers’ and what drives them. Danny would go out and meet people in the extreme sports world, like people who walk between cliffs on slack line ropes, wing-suit fliers … and me.

  The plan was for me to take him for a pillion ride on my 1000-cc Superstock bike around Kirkistown race track, a short circuit in Northern Ireland. Danny, my mechanic, had fitted a road bike’s twin seat and pillion footrests to my 1000-cc Superstock race bike.

  It was all touch and go, because MacAskill was still recovering from a broken back. His surgeon wasn’t happy with his plan of going for a ride, but he was well up for it. Also his collarbone had been surgically pinned not long before and seemed to be uncomfortable as he pulled on some one-piece leathers he’d borrowed for the day.