by Guy Martin
The first Dirt Quake I raced in was at King’s Lynn in 2014. There had been a couple before that, and I’d read the reports in Sideburn. Then, when Gary asked if I wanted to race a Harley chopper supplied by Krazy Horse, I was well up for it – and it was a free weekend, so …
The Harley I raced wasn’t too chopped, but it definitely wasn’t a race bike, and I won on it. The next year Krazy Horse changed it, going for a bit of a truck theme with it. The bike had longer forks, tassels on the end of the handlebars, those chrome silhouettes of women that truck drivers used to bolt to their mud flaps, and exhausts that kicked straight up at the air and had flappers on the top, like some American trucks have. I won on it again. This would be my third year.
Dirt Quake is a two-day event, held over Friday night and Saturday. It’s run with the help of the club that run the British dirt track championship, the DTRA (Dirt Track Riders Association). They run their regular races on a Friday night, with the daft Dirt Quake stuff on Saturday. I hadn’t ridden dirt track for ages, so I entered the Friday night races too.
The DTRA has a few different classes: Pro, for the fastest riders; Restricted is one class below; Rookies is for beginners; Vintage and Thunderbike. The last of these is the championship for bikes that have steel frames and older engines – not the modern 450 motocross engines that are the fastest bikes out there – as the Thunderbikes are not old enough to be considered vintage. The right man on a good Thunderbike could still give the best 450 a run for its money, though.
I entered two classes, Pro and Thunderbike. I took three bikes, my modern Honda CRF450 that I’d raced at the Superprestigio, Marc Márquez’s indoor dirt track race in Barcelona; a KTM, which is another modern 450, but I didn’t end up riding it; and my Honda CR500, which I bought from John Roeder, an American ex-serviceman who still lives in England. The CR500 is a mish-mash of all different parts, with a 1980s 500 cc two-stroke engine from a legendary motocrosser at the heart of it. The early CR500 engines are known for being vicious, and mine is an early one, with the longer stroke. I don’t know why a longer-stroke two-stroke motor would be more vicious, but it probably isn’t down to just the stroke. It’ll have something to do with the porting too.
When I was 12 or 13 my mate Aaron Ash somehow got hold of a Maico 490, a massive two-stroke motocross bike. Along with our friend Mark ‘Shorty’ Nichols, we would ride it around the fields and gravel pits. It scared the shit out of me. It was the only experience I’d had of big single-cylinder two-strokes, but I’d heard boys talk of CR500s. They were the next generation, liquid-cooled and reed-valved, and the CR500s blew the Maicos away.
The CR500 had sat in my kitchen all year, since the DTRA round at Dirt Quake in 2015. The night before the race I got the wheel starter out and said to Sharon, ‘If it starts I’ll take it tomorrow.’ It struck up right away. There were a few bolts missing, because it vibrates like buggery, and it needed a bit of tidying up. Basically, it’s alright – Tim Neave used to race it and won the DTRA Thunderbike championship on it – but I want it spot on. There’s a load of bits I’d like to do to it, but I’d done bugger all. And all I did on the Thursday night was tighten a few bolts, oil the chain and wash it. But the experience of racing it again has made me keen to get it exactly how I want it. I’m not slagging it off, but I want it to be more me. It doesn’t need a lot of money spending on it, just time.
I raced the 450 in the Pro class with the fast lads like Ade Collins, Alan Birtwistle and Ollie Brindley and did shit. In the DTRA you have three heat races, in each of the classes you race, to try to qualify for the finals. I was that rusty, I was just getting the hang of it by the end of the night, but I wasn’t bothered. I’d have been better off just riding the CR500 in both classes, and I could have done that. They’re so different to each other, the old two-stroke and the modern 450 two-stroke, and the 500 is actually easier to ride, which I never would have thought. The two-stroke is a bit lighter than the modern Honda, and the power isn’t all or nothing, as you’d expect a two-stroke to be. It pulls from low revs and is dead usable. The thing that isn’t very user-friendly is starting it. It hasn’t got a kickstart, which makes it hard to start.
I qualified for the Thunderbike final, but then I stalled the CR in the holding area to go out for the final, and I couldn’t get it bump-started. I had a wheel starter with me, but I was holding everyone up, so I just waved to say, Don’t wait, go without me.
Sharon and I were going to sleep in the van, but I had three bikes – the two Hondas and the KTM 450 – the wheel starter, tool box and the dog, so there was no room. We didn’t have to sign on till 11 the next day, so we drove home and did it in an hour and a half without going mad.
I was up early and did a few things with the Martek, the bike I raced at Pikes Peak, half hoping I could get on a track day at Cadwell that Robspeed, the local Grimsby bike shop, were running the following week. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it, and I didn’t. Then we set off back to King’s Lynn to see what I’d be racing.
After winning the chopper class two years on the trot, I told Paul, the boss of Krazy Horse, that if I was going to do it again they should make it harder for me. He just laughed. By now, Krazy Horse had been a big part of the wall of death, because they’d built the Indians, and also the Transit for the Nevada Open Road Challenge. They really went to town with the Harley.
When we were in Vegas, doing the van thing, Paul wasn’t making a big deal about the bike, but he said, ‘Some boys I know in Sweden are making us a frame and we’ll use some 22-inch over forks.’ He explained that it meant the forks were 22 inches, or 56 centimetres, longer than the ones in the standard Harley Sportster. I knew it would be interesting, but it was hard for someone like me, who isn’t that into choppers, to know what forks that are 22 inches longer than standard would look like. I reckoned it would be alright, but nothing prepared me for what it looked like when I saw it at the track.
If you saw this 1200 cc Harley being pushed into a custom show you’d think it would have a chance of winning a prize. It was wild-looking. The frame and petrol tank were bare metal, but the bike was well built, everything really well machined, all the wires and cables well routed. At past Dirt Quakes, the Krazy Horse bikes I’d raced looked daft on purpose. The first year, the petrol tank had been left to go rusty on the outside, the following year it was painted all different colours with spots of aerosol paint, and they looked good, but nothing like this. It was impressive.
I like the whole event. The wall of death was up in the middle of the track. I’d visited Ken Fox two weeks before, at an American car show in Tatton Park, because I hadn’t seen him since the Channel 4 wall of death thing. The Fox family run two walls, and it was Ken’s eldest son Luke, his family and crew at Dirt Quake. I thought I might have a go on the wall, but I never got round to it.
I like the people who race. My mate Shorty and his missus, Hannah, come to watch. He loves his bikes, but you wouldn’t get him to any other motorbike event. Me, Shorty and Butch were the first of us Kirmo lot to go on a road trip to a foreign track. We went to Cartagena in southern Spain for a few track days, with a stop in Benidorm on the way home to see Sticky Vicky’s notorious performance.
The race is held at King’s Lynn speedway track, and the pits are only made to comfortably house 16 speedway bikes. For Dirt Quake there are nearly a hundred bikes crammed in. We took Nigel, and he wasn’t bothered about the noise – it’s all he’s had since he was a nipper – but he was a bit miserable. He was going through a lazy phase. I was parked up next to a bloke called Vince and his missus, Holly. I’d seen him the year before, a cool bloke.
Dirt Quake attracts the right sort of people. It’s just lads and lasses into all sorts of stuff. There were some cool cars parked up outside. A 1950s Dodge Coronet pulling a trailer with an old Triumph and an even older Harley on it. I got talking to another bloke in the chopper class. I had my John Deere body warmer on, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m just mucking about with an old John Deere TVO engine.�
� That’s a type of diesel engine that you start running with petrol then swap to diesel when it gets hot. It was interesting, not motorbike talk, though I’m happy talking about motorbikes too. Anyway, the following week he sent me a letter written in the neatest handwriting, telling me about this van he’s converted with a six-cylinder Mercedes engine in it, saying he’s got 450 horsepower out of it. He’s definitely not a messer, because his handwriting was so neat.
Gregory, the Scania man from France, was there too. I’d first met him when I raced at Le Mans. He had come over with some French mates of his, and he brought me a load of Scania stuff, like he always does, so I gave him a Tyco TAS jacket that only the team get given. He’s quite well up at Scania, so he’s good for information, and he was telling me a bit about a new model due to be released later this year.
A few people wanted stuff signing, but not enough for Brian the Chimp to make an appearance. (Brian is my inner chimp, thanks to Dr Steve Peters’ book The Chimp Paradox.) Fiddy, from the British helmet company Davida, gave me a couple of TT scrapbooks to read between races. They were dead good, and there was even a bit about Freddy Frith, the late motorcycle world champion from Grimsby. He was Grand Prix 350 world champion, back when that was an important class, in 1949. He won all five grands prix that year, and he was one of the few racers who won TTs either side of the Second World War.
Carl Fogarty was there too. He was working for an insurance company that sponsors Dirt Quake, and they’d invited him along. He was racing a trick modern Triumph street tracker, so he wasn’t in my class. We said hello, but didn’t have much time to talk. I knew him a bit because I’d interviewed him at his house for Performance Bikes magazine years ago. He’s a legend.
Then it was time to race the chopper. You’d look at it and you wouldn’t even think it would get around a corner on a speedway track, but it was nowhere near as bad as it looked. I was surprised. I wasn’t overthinking any tactics – just turn the throttle and see how we go. The back end would step out, but it wasn’t as predictable as the Harley I’d raced the year before. On the previous chopper, which was nowhere near as long, I had the confidence to hold it in a drift, but the back end of the long bike felt like it snapped out of line more quickly and less predictably. When it let go, it let go. Strangely, I didn’t have one front-end moment. I thought it would be worse because it had no weight on it. I could see the line on the track where the grip was, and I’d aim for that, but the front end was that far in front of me I had to make the decision about where I wanted the front wheel much earlier. If I didn’t get it right, the front tyre was in the loose stuff, but it still wasn’t washing out. The bike understeered, but it never folded; it just pushed wide, in a very progressive slide. It wasn’t like a normal dirt track bike, where the front end goes suddenly and you have to support the bike on your foot. The chopper’s front wheel seemed to be sliding nearly all the way through the corner, but by putting a bit of weight through my left foot – I had a steel shoe strapped to the bottom of my boot – it was half-controllable.
Overtakes were fun. If you’re up against someone of a similar speed and you’re both racing normal bikes, you edge up the inside of them at first, hoping they’ll leave enough room for you to come through, and not turn sharply in front of you. Because dirt track bikes only have a back brake, and the back end will skid if you brake too hard, overtaking isn’t just a case of getting up alongside someone and block passing them on the brakes. Do that and you risk sliding off and taking both of you out. The chopper was different. I could show them a front wheel and they knew what was coming three weeks later. It was like a warning shot. I still needed full commitment, but I was laughing.
I won my first heat race, and I didn’t think it was going to be that easy. For the second race I went on the back row and still won, on the last corner of the last lap. The big V-twin was accelerating well down the straights. I’d brake in a straight line and then tip it in. I wasn’t drifting it in like I would on a dirt tracker.
In the final I was a bit too hard on the throttle on the loose dirt and got the back end out. It let a rider called Odgie come past on an old 650 BSA. He was 62 years old and was doing well. I could’ve put a pass on him, but it might have been a bit hard. I was a bit annoyed I didn’t win, but I thought the bike was great. Paul Krazy Horse came up after the race and said, ‘We’ve succeeded! You said make it harder, and we did.’
It reminded me that Dirt Quake is not the kind of place where you can turn up and try to be cool. A load of French nutters were there dressed as the Simpsons. There was another French lad who came over on his own, in a people carrier with a Yamaha 500 in the back. We were parked next to each other, and I offered him a sandwich and he made me a coffee. He raced at Dirt Quake, and that night he was getting the late boat to Calais, so he could go kitesurfing off the French coast the next day, then back to work in Paris on Monday morning. He said he cleaned windows on skyscrapers in the summer and went to Alpe d’Huez to work as a ski instructor in the winter. I thought, You cool bastard!
Something else happened the other day that made me think of Dirt Quake. I got in the works van and Capital FM was on, so Belty must have been in it last. Capital FM is more Radio 1 than Radio 1. Everything is super and awesome and ‘like that!’, with every sentence having an upward inflection at the end of it. Radio 1 is setting the scene for how the youth of the nation is meant to look and act – what’s trending, who is tweeting this and following that. Capital FM is trying so hard to be like Radio 1, but trying too hard. I was listening to it for half an hour, just fascinated by what they thought was worth saying. Some of the music was alright, but I wondered if I was so uncool that I couldn’t find one thing they were talking about the least bit interesting. I’m not in that world, and I don’t want to be in it. I’m not against Twitter, but I don’t want it ramming down my throat. Some of the motorbike world is similar, where people feel they have to keep up with the Joneses. It annoys me now that people have loud exhausts on their motorbikes. I think, You’ve only fitted that to be seen and heard. But I’ve got bikes with noisy exhausts. Another example is someone saying to me, ‘Your brother can do this lap time round Cadwell.’ And I thought, Does that make him a better person? You couldn’t find a nicer person than our Stu and it wasn’t him saying it, but it made me wonder why this bloke seemed to be judging him differently because he was two seconds a lap quicker than he used to be. I was in that scene when I was in the British championship, before the whole laptop, Scarborough, going to Ireland period of my life. And I saw that if you could do a particular lap time, you could move up the social hierarchy. Dirt Quake is nothing like that. That’s why I like it.
CHAPTER 16
You need a lot of power to run the dribble bar
I SOUND LIKE a right flash bastard when I think how many vehicles I’ve ended up with. I made a list and it looks daft, but I’ve still got the first motorbike I ever had on the road, my Kawasaki AR50. I don’t sell much, and others have come with deals. When I was planning this book, Andy Spellman thought it might be interesting for me to talk about them and how I came to own some of them.
Other than the AR50, the vehicle I’ve owned the longest is my 1972 Saab 96. I nearly swapped it years ago. A mate was going to buy it, because I wanted a Volkswagen Variant Fastback, but he didn’t in the end and I’m glad. It’s matt black with hot rod flames and a fake leopard-skin interior.
I have the world’s fastest Volvo Amazon, which I bought from Sweden in 2011. It has a modern six-cylinder Volvo T6 turbo engine, and it’s the fastest thing I’ve ever been in. Other than my Transit, it’s the vehicle I use the most. I bet I’ve done 5,000 miles in it, and I took it to Lincoln on the way to do some filming. Nige was in the back, and I don’t know why, but he hates it. It might be the howl from the turbo that sets him off. Sharon says she doesn’t like it either, but she does really. When she’s in, she’ll say, ‘Go on, then,’ encouraging me to give it some.
It’s originally a 1968 estate,
but Mattias Vöcks, the bloke who built it, has changed nearly everything. He’s an engineer at Swedish supercar manufacturer Koenigsegg. I normally want to change or improve stuff other people have built to make it my own, but I’m happy to leave the Amazon, though I have spent a lot of time spannering it. It’s broken down twice, and I’ve had to fit a new crank to it.
It runs on E85, fuel that is 85 per cent ethanol, 15 per cent unleaded. You used to be able to buy it from pumps in Britain. It’s good for this car, because it’s very knock resistant, meaning it’s not prone to detonation (also known as knock or pinking), so you can use loads of turbo boost, but you also need to run a lot of ignition advance because the ethanol is very slow-burning when it’s in the combustion chamber. To make the most of this, you light that fuel a lot earlier, so when it reaches its optimum flame path, the piston is in the right place. You light it 60 degrees before top dead centre. You might run a naturally aspirated engine 25 degrees before top dead centre, at the most. You also have to burn more E85 than petrol, so it uses 30 per cent more fuel. E85 has a similar cooling effect to nitromethane, which drag-race engines run on. Top fuel drag cars are the quickest accelerating things on the planet, reaching 100 mph in 0.8 seconds, and they can burn 35 litres of fuel in a single quarter-mile run. A family car, doing 50 miles to the gallon, would cover 385 miles on the same amount of fuel. It takes 1,000 horsepower just to run a top fuel dragster’s supercharger, but once the supercharger is spinning it helps the engine produce 10,000 horsepower. They’ve only just managed to measure how much power to fuel a dragster makes using strain gauges.