Guy Martin says road racing wasn’t the real thrill

Few Isle of Man TT racers have transcended the worlds of motorcycle road racing and prime-time TV quite like Guy Martin. It seems like, in just a couple of years, the Lincolnshire-based truck mechanic turned TT racer, turned TV star, went from being an outspoken but entertaining competitor to a household name.

But it turns out Martin’s rise to the top (well, almost) of TT lore, and subsequently TV, wasn't quite what you’d expect, with a number of surprising and humorous insights resulting from a recent interview with him published in the Big Issue. 

The Big Issue might not be the first publication you’d name when listing outlets to find out the inner workings of a road racer’s psyche, but nonetheless, here we are. In the interview, published 15 February, Martin talks about his early life, and how a “knackered” Kawasaki AR50 served as his apprenticeship into riding and fiddling with bikes.

“My whole life revolved around making that motorbike go faster,” Martin said. “And it wasn’t 50cc, which was all we were allowed at 16. I made it 80cc then I got a big bore kit for it and made it 101cc. I just wanted to understand how a two-stroke engine worked and make it go faster.”

He went on to talk about his family life at home and, as you can imagine for a man who seemingly never stands still, the ethos was on cramming as much into the working day as possible.

“My mum and my dad just worked all the time,” he said, speaking to Adrian Lobb. “We didn’t see a lot of my dad, because he was always at work. My mum trained to be a nurse when I went to secondary school but before then she used to work in the fields, picking taters [potatoes] before the big harvesting machines came out. We all used to go straight from school into the fields and give her a hand. If you want owt, you work for it.”

Racing bikes wasn’t the “buzz” he chased

The most surprising admission from Martin is that it wasn’t the “buzz” of racing around the Mountain Course that kept him going, but the thrill of playing with “mechanical things”.

“All I ever wanted to do was race. It wasn’t really an obsession. It took for me to stop racing six or seven years ago to realise it wasn’t the buzz of racing I was chasing. It was the buzz of fiddling about with mechanical things and trying to understand them and make them faster or more efficient.”

While this may come as a surprise, given the fact that every other TT racer in history talks about the on-track action as being the key driving force behind them doing what they do, if we look at Martin’s past life and post-racing career work and interviews, it starts to make more sense. Since taking on TV presenting, Martin’s work has rarely touched on the subject of road racing. Sure, it’s a footnote and an undertone to every episode, but the topics of conversation are generally about history, sociology, engineering in general, and speed.

There was also that famous interview that Martin did while on the MotoGP grid at COTA in 2019. Surrounded by the fastest racers on the planet, on arguably one of MotoGP’s best circuits, Guy seemed almost uninterested in the racing - he was there to ogle the bikes! On TV, Guy has rebuilt a canal boat, a Spitfire, and a replica of a World War One tank - it’s the building, fixing, fettling and tinkering that seems to make Mr Martin tick.

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