by Guy Martin
Chris Hoy came to track cycling from racing BMX. I asked if he knew Dave Maw, my mate Jonty’s brother who I mentioned in When You Dead, You Dead. Dave was three-time world champion and sadly died at a young age in a car crash. Chris Hoy said, ‘Dave Maw! Do you know Dave Maw?’ I explained that I didn’t, but I knew the family. He was a year younger than Chris, but he was winning more.
Multi-million-pound America’s Cup racing yachts are designed to be hydrofoils, like our pedalo, so the TV lot decided that it would be good telly to get me out on one of these cutting-edge boats. They sorted it for me to spend a day with the best, Sir Ben Ainslie and his whole crew.
It was another example of TV bullshit, to be out on this massive multi-million-pound racing yacht to see how a hydrofoil worked, but I wasn’t complaining, because again, what an honour and opportunity. I knew the name Ben Ainslie from hearing it on the radio, but I didn’t know anything about him. He’s won medals at five consecutive Olympic games, including four golds. He’s also won 11 sailing world championships, and he’s been awarded an MBE, OBE and CBE and been knighted. Everyone on that boat had massive respect for him, and they were all hard bastards.
It was a brilliant experience. That crew are as fit as. When you see them with their hand on the handles of a winch, spinning it like hell, it’s what they call grinding, and they’re powering everything on the boat. The rules say you are not allowed to have any stored energy on the boat, so it all must be man-powered, and that’s what the grinders do. I did a bit of it and it’s bloody hard work. All the controls are mirrored on either side of the boat, and the way it’s leaning determines which controls the crew use.
We sailed out of Portsmouth towards the Isle of Wight, and I was mucking about grinding for a bit, then they did proper race simulations. The boats lick along at 40-odd knots, which is pretty fast on water. I found out that whoever wins the America’s Cup decides when the next one is, where it is and what the rules are. There are only ever six boats, including the previous winner. The next one is 2017.
The budget of an America’s Cup team is massive. The team I was with, the Land Rover BAR team, had something like a £150 million budget. It makes MotoGP look like club racing at Mallory Park.
Ainslie is one of the most respected men in the sailing game. He was brought in as the tactician of the struggling Oracle team at the last America’s Cup, in 2012–13, after the Oracle team had lost four of the first five races, and helped them win it. From what I’m told no one had ever made a comeback like it. He’s very posh, not a messer, but all the crew were gritty bastards. We were out on the water from nine till two, then they had a training session, with a personal trainer, after that. It was all very structured.
I had a tour of the headquarters and saw they have an office full of 20 people, a lot of them ex-Formula One, most doing boat design for the team. You’d have to see it to believe it, because I’ve never seen anything like it.
Back at pedalo-design headquarters in Lincoln I saw the fancy carbon-fibre catamaran hull that had been made. The record was set using an air propeller, but the Lincoln lot decided to use a water propeller. The design of it was called a highly skewed, asymmetric prop. It was developed for submarines because it’s quieter than previous propellers. I was told that this design was also more efficient, converting more of their energy into forward motion. Ron explained all this to me and it sounded good. I was convinced.
The catamaran hull would also have hydrofoils attached. These work like a plane’s wing, but in water. The foils produce lift, at a certain speed, pushing the hull up and out of the water, reducing the drag and increasing the potential speed. Ron also had an idea to fill the centre between the two hulls, so when the hydrofoils lifted the boat out of the water there would be a ground effect helping to keep it up on the hydrofoils. This idea was used by the Ekranoplan, Russia’s experimental ground-effect aircraft. The one I’d heard of was the KM, an enormous Ekranoplan that was first tested in 1966. It’s the oddest-looking plane, with stubby, broad square wings, a massive tail wing and eight jet engines, mounted four on each side just behind the cockpit, with another two jet engines on the tail, so ten in total. American spy satellites spotted it at a test site, and after first thinking it was a half-built plane, waiting for the rest of its wings to be bolted on, they worked out what it could be and nicknamed it the Caspian Sea Monster. You look at this thing and think, Mother Mary! It was a sort of seaplane, but it only flew 20 feet above the water or ice. It was so big, and could carry so much cargo, that it needed something for the air beneath its wings to push against to be able to fly. The idea was that it could transport more weight more efficiently than traditional transport planes of the time, and it could. It was also harder to spot with radar, which was useful in those Cold War times. The Russians built loads of different prototypes, but the whole Ekranoplan idea didn’t come to anything in the end. The Caspian Sea Monster was tested until 1980, when it crashed and sunk. I was finding all this fascinating, but I still wasn’t convinced that the boat being built would be as successful as it needed to be.
The first test of our boat was at Burton Waters, where we’d met Ron to hear his plan at the start of filming. The pedalling gear wasn’t fitted to the boat yet, so we towed it with another boat to try to prove the theory of the hull. It tried coming up on the hydrofoils, which were on something like four-foot-tall stilts, but they kept breaking. They were reinforced, we’d try again and they’d break again.
Once the pedalling gear was fitted, we returned to test the boat again. The asymmetric prop had to spin at 3,000 rpm, so it needed a gearbox to convert my pedalling cadence to that huge rpm, but the gearbox was only small so that kept breaking too. Then the chain alignment was out, and it kept chucking the chain off.
It all seemed to be going tits, when a couple of Ron’s former students, Jez and Simon, who both worked for Siemens in Lincoln, got involved. Jez and Simon redesigned the gearbox, working in their sheds every night. They made it all work, but the concept was fundamentally flawed. Really they just shined the shit.
When we visited Ben Ainslie’s America’s Cup design office, we showed one of their designers photos of our boat and he wondered out loud, ‘Why haven’t you used an air prop? Why do you have two hulls instead of one?’ We didn’t really have an answer – it was what Ron and his students had decided.
James Woodroffe, one of North One TV’s executive producers, took all this in and, when the Lincoln boat was looking like a shower of shit, he decided to put a plan B into action. He contacted a bloke called Mike, from down Bristol way, who designs and builds racing Moths. These are small, single-hull sailing dinghies that use hydrofoils. James arranged for a single-hull boat with an air propeller to be built. If nowt else we could compare the two concepts. Mike was a real switched-on lad, younger than me, and he assembled his version of the potential record breaker in my back garden.
As the record-attempt day drew closer I met with the Lincoln lot at Burton Waters for extra tests when the cameras weren’t there, because I was that into it. I’d been down a couple of nights after work and a couple of Sundays too – I don’t want to just rock up on a filming day – but we were still way off the record. I would power this boat lying in a recumbent position, so legs out in front of me, lying back, not a regular cycling position, because it’s more aerodynamic, but it wasn’t making enough of a difference.
Time was running out. It was planned that I’d do a practice day, then go for the record over two consecutive days on Brayford Pool in the centre of Lincoln, but another spanner was thrown in the works, making me think that perhaps the whole thing was doomed. Brayford Pool was choked with thick weed that would wrap around the hydrofoils and the water propeller.
Both boats came, and Ron looked like he’d got the hump when the plan B boat turned up, so we prettied it up to say it was single hull versus twin hull and water prop versus air prop. And it was – there was no denying it. The Lincoln team’s Ekranoplan idea never happened. They ra
n out of time to get it sorted.
We had nothing to lose so I gave it a go, attempting two runs with the Lincoln boat, but it went terrible, with loads of weed getting wrapped around the hydrofoils. Mike said the hydrofoils were so sensitive that one strand of weed could stop them working, and he didn’t even bother unloading his plan B boat.
I did the two runs and it was back in the van and time to work out a plan. We found some clean water in a place called Carsington Water, near Derby, and headed there the next day with both boats.
We knew the Lincoln boat wasn’t going to bother the record, but I gave it another go. In that boat the harder I pedalled the harder it seemed to get. The Carlos Fandango asymmetric prop was so hard to turn, and it was jarring me every time I turned the cranks. I could only get a cadence of 60, when I really needed twice that. It was knackering. I was the fittest I’d ever been, coming off the back of the Tour Divide, but this required a different kind of pedalling. It was cough-your-lungs-up-for-a-couple-of-minutes effort.
Then I had a go with plan B, and nothing broke or gave any bother, but it was slow.
Neither of them got up on their hydrofoils. The MIT boat, the Decavitator, used a ladder system of hydrofoils and it obviously worked. The fastest I went was 5.45 mph, about a quarter of what I needed to match the record. I don’t even think Chris Hoy would be able to go four times as quick as me. A few people have tried to break Drela’s record since 1991, and it still stands.
The effort, both plans A and B, was a failure, but it showed that the records we attempt and usually break during the filming of Speed are not easy, and failing every now and then never hurt anyone. With three or four other record attempts coming up before the end of the year, I was hoping that I wasn’t going to make a habit of failing, though.
CHAPTER 18
I laughed and reminded her I wasn’t here to go steady
ATTEMPTING TO BREAK the outright motorcycle land speed record had been on the cards since I flew out to see Matt Markstaller in April 2015. That one-night trip, to Portland, Oregon, had been sold to me as making sure I could fit in the Triumph streamliner, because it was built with someone six inches shorter than me in mind. Markstaller is the hot rod builder and truck research and development engineer who had been paid by Triumph to build a motorcycle capable of breaking the land speed record, which at the time was 376.363 mph. I now realise that the trip was more of a job interview, with Matt making sure he wanted to work with me.
I must have said the right things, because the first record attempt was set to be in August 2015, but, as you already know, I broke my back, and Bonneville was flooded anyway. The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah were formed when a prehistoric salt lake, 1,000-foot deep in places, dried up over hundreds of thousands of years, leaving all the salt and minerals that were suspended in the water to self-level and form a flat surface. People have raced cars on it since 1914, with regular annual speed meetings held there since the end of the Second World War. Now, weather permitting, there are three or four speed trial events, for cars and motorbikes, held there every year, and other private tests and record attempts on top of that.
The majority of the outright land speed records of all time have been set at Bonneville, but the car record is now so high, at 760.343 mph, that Bonneville isn’t big enough for them to get up to speed and slow down, so they look for other deserts. The folk behind the British Bloodhound SSC, which has a target speed of 1,000 mph, have prepared their own track in South Africa. Hundreds of racers still bring their hot rods and streamliners to see what they can do, with no dream or possibility of setting the outright car record. They’re looking for class records, personal bests or to break their own limits.
If the salt is in good condition Bonneville is just about long enough for motorcycles to reach 400 mph, though nobody has yet. Every outright motorcycle land speed record since 1956 has been set in Utah. Obviously, it would be good if it was longer, because it would be less important to accelerate smoothly up to top speed and you wouldn’t have to worry too much about losing traction as you got up to it. If you had longer to accelerate you’d also need less power, so there’d be less strain on the machine, but it’s a vicious circle. If people had a longer track, they’d still use more power and aim to go 450, not 400. We always want more power.
A year to the week after the Ulster crash I was on a flight from London to Salt Lake City, Utah, with my big sister Sally, some folk from Triumph’s Leicestershire headquarters and the regular North One TV lot for a week of testing in the streamliner.
After a two-hour drive from the airport, we reached the hotel in Wendover, the nearest town to the salt flats, late on Wednesday. The streamliner wasn’t due to arrive from Portland until the next day, but I’d been told that another team aiming to break the motorcycle land speed record was testing on the salt, and I was dead keen to have a mooch around. I wanted to find out as much as I could about the job, so early the next morning we drove out mob-handed to see what was occurring. Looking at how another team and rider were set up was an opportunity too good to miss.
Ten miles from Wendover, off Interstate 80, there’s a turn-off that leads to the salt flats. The tarmac ends, and there are two signs telling you, if you needed telling, that you’re on Bonneville Salt Flats. The salt stretches as far as the eye can see, to mountains over 20 miles away. The land is public, so people can drive on to it, but there are traffic cones set out and folk parked to discourage people from driving out when racers are testing.
Four or five miles on to the salt we found the BUB team and its owner, Denis Manning. Manning has been involved with motorcycle record breakers since 1970, when the Harley-Davidson streamliner he had summat to do with set a record speed of 254.84 mph with the late American road racer Cal Rayborn in control. Manning used to own a company making motorcycle exhausts called BUB, and his bike, the BUB Seven Streamliner, was the world’s fastest motorcycle in 2006 and 2009.
I looked into a bit of history of motorcycle speed attempts. The official motorbike record broke the 300 mph barrier in 1975, when Don Vesco went 302.9, in Silver Bird, a twin-engined streamliner using Yamaha TZ700 two-stroke road-racing engines. Vesco broke his own record in 1978, with Lightning Bolt, a new streamliner with two turbocharged Kawasaki Z1000 engines, going 318.6. That record stood for 12 years until Dave Campos, in a twin-engined Harley-Davidson, went 322.2 mph. It was another 16 years before Rocky Robinson in the turbocharged twin Suzuki Hayabusa-powered Ack Attack went quicker, raising the speed by 20 mph. Just two days later Chris Carr in the BUB broke it again, and became the first man to do an average of over 350 mph in a motorcycle streamliner. Over the next four years the record went back and forth between the BUB and Ack Attack, with Rocky Robinson and the Ack Attack coming out on top in September 2010, with their 376 mph two-way average, but their top recorded speed was 394 mph.
Setting a land speed record is not just a case of hitting the fastest ever speed for a second. The machine must do two passes through a timed mile, one in each direction to account for tailwinds or gradients. And the second run must start within two hours of the first one. A one-way speed is determined as the average speed through the mile, and bikes are often going faster at the end of the timed mile than when starting it. The two speeds are added together and divided by two to give the record speed.
The BUB team were dead friendly. Manning and his son worked together with a crew of six or seven trusted old hands. It was obvious they’d been at it for years, and they were happy for me to ask questions, though I’d been warned to take everything Manning told me with a pinch of salt (there was no shortage of that). I’m not stupid, though. I know enough to realise when someone’s bullshitting, and I didn’t think they were. Or not too much, anyway.
Manning explained that their bike had been in development for 16 years and had a purpose-built V4 engine in it. They cast the casings, the full lot. I was impressed. It got me half-thinking that just bolting two motorbike engines in a streamliner was taking the easy rou
te, but other than the BUB bike, every record since 1966 has been held by a streamliner powered by two modified production-bike engines. The bike that currently holds the record, Ack Attack, has two Suzuki Hayabusa engines in it.
The other thing about the BUB is that it is the only streamliner, except for the Triumph, that has a monocoque chassis. By that, I mean the body of the machine is what gives it its strength. All the other streamliners have a steel frame or skeleton that the bodywork is bolted to. Manning and Markstaller agree that the monocoque is the safest construction, but one of the main organisations that run speed trials on Bonneville, the Southern California Timing Association, don’t allow monocoque bikes to run at their meetings. They’re more set up for cars than bikes, so Manning started his own BUB Speed Trials, purely for motorcycles, and the meeting still runs now, but with his ex-daughter-in-law running it. The reason fans of monocoque designs are convinced they’re better than regular space frames with bodywork attached is because they believe a monocoque keeps its shape better in a violent crash and stays sliding on its side, while a space frame streamliner can lose bodywork more easily in an impact and develop a sharp edge that can dig into salt and flip it into the air.
The week before I left for Utah, another racer aiming to break the land speed record had died testing at Bonneville. Sam Wheeler was 72, and he had been racing on the salt flats since 1963. He’d gone over 200 mph as early as 1970, and his top speed was 355 mph. He built his own streamliners, and the current one was powered by a single Suzuki Hayabusa Turbo.
I’d read that, in 2006, he’d crashed at over 350 mph and survived. This time eyewitnesses reckoned Wheeler was doing closer to 200 mph when the 500bhp streamliner started fishtailing. I was told it slid for a while, which is the best you can hope for when a streamliner crashes, but then flew up in the air and came down hard, and then it did the same again. The rider was alive when he left Bonneville, but died soon after. The news was horrible, but it had also got me even more interested. Before I heard this I’d thought breaking a land speed record was just a case of pointing the right machine at the horizon and getting on the throttle. I didn’t think it was much of a challenge for the rider, but now I knew that it was this dangerous, it was a different kettle of fish.