GUY MARTIN
£ Guy racing the
2015 Northwest 200
day permanently just yet. But we will
see.” And with his trademark widemouthed smile that follows, I can tell
Guy’s telling me – next subject boss,
we’re finished with that one.
Personally I think Guy is nearing the
end of his time on the international
road racing scene. Not because he has
lost the love for racing, but because he
dislikes the way event organisers try
to manipulate him – as we witnessed
recently at the North West 200, when he
was lambasted for speaking his mind.
In the TAS Racing team, team manager
Philip Neill gives him enough rope to feel
the breeze of freedom. Whilst his teammates cruise in shiny new 4-series BMW
cars courtesy of the team, Guy prefers
his trusty Transit van.
He doesn’t want to be bought or
owned by anyone, whether sincere or
otherwise. Guy gets more pleasure out
of gleaning 100,000 miles from a set of
Ford Transit brake pads than anything
else. That’s just the way he is. He also
keeps all the grips from his winning
bikes, whilst discarding, giving away or
trading his trophies. He just loves a deal.
Guy is a reluctant celebrity and racing
did allow him to simply be Guy Martin;
the truck mechanic from Grimsby. These
days however, his love of mountain
biking is looking more likely to replace
the adrenalin buzz of road racing.
“You see there’s so much I still want to
do and I’m planning on doing the Tour
Divide next year, which is the toughest
mountain bike time trial on the planet,”
the Lincolnshire man says of the 2,745mile route in North America.
“It starts the week after the TT, so I’d
need to be there preparing that week,”
he explains. Guy’s preparation for the
2016 event has already started (he’s
going back out to America in July),
leaving him as an almost definite nonstarter at next year’s TT Races. After the
recent events at the North West 200,
where he got hammered by the media
for simply stating he was ‘bored’ of
riding around chicanes, I’d say this will
also be his last year at the Irish event.
One thing Guy will be filming this
year is a short, sharp ten-minute live
programme, where he will attempt to
break the 100mph barrier on a purposebuilt Wall of Death close to his home:
“We are building a bike for it and are well
into that project and work is very busy,
so yeah,” he tails off.
Guy has achieved something crazy like
eighteen Isle of Man TT career podiums,
with broken chains, engine failures and
150mph crashes, putting an embargo on
that coveted victory which he so richly
deserves.
A TT victory is a bucket list entry that
his TV salary can never buy him, and an
un-ticked box that I believe will haunt
him for the rest of his life if he doesn’t
get to complete it. Guy’s not a pipe and
slippers man, even though he repeatedly
makes the un-PC comment that he
might take up smoking, as it looks ‘so
fu*king cool’.
How fitting would it be in thirty years or
more, if he could unwrap those unfiltered
Woodbines, suck a mouthful of strong
aroma, spi B