I’VE NEVER RELIED on racing or TV for money. Trucks were always Plan A, but the TV job means I could buy stuff like the pub or a tractor, to make sure I’m all right in the future. I bought my first tractor, a Fendt 9-Series, a few years ago so I could rent it out and earn a few quid while I was working on the trucks. For instance, the tatie firm pay £30 per hour and they pay for the diesel in my tractor. While I was at Moody’s either my mate Tim Coles or his nephew young Ben Neave would drive my tractor. I’d get the rent for the tractor and they’d get the hourly rate for driving. On the days neither of them could do it I would.
Fendts are meant to be the Rolls-Royce of tractors, but mine was trouble so I sold it and bought a John Deere and it hasn’t been a bother. It shouldn’t be either, it’s only a year and a half old. It’s done 1,200 hours. That’s how you rank a tractor. You don’t say it’s done 20,000 miles, you say how many hours it’s worked. You might do 8,000 hours without anything major going wrong on a tractor like my John Deere.
A tractor like mine won’t work from October to March, then it starts the muck-spreading, followed by the potato-drilling – that’s planting the seeds. Tim does the shit-spreading, but loading shit in the trailer takes more precision than you’d think. There was a time when we had two tons of solid slurry in the bottom of the tank and that’s what inspired a T-shirt we had made and sold on the Guy Martin Proper website. On the day the shit didn’t hit the fan we were told we needed an agitator to stop the manure from solidifying. Nige the dog said he knew just the man, get Donald Trump on the job, the most effective agitator in the world.
The stuff in the trailer is called digestate. Round here a lot of it is unused and composted maize, wheat, barley, some pig shit from a big farm near here, duck shit from Cherry Valley in Caistor. Just general shit. You can use human waste as manure, but it has to be injected into the land, not spread. That’s why I don’t risk eating watermelons in places like India and China, because they sometimes use human shit on the land and the watermelons take it directly out of the soil.
The potato folk like the look of young Ben, so they’re having him back to do the ridge-forming of the fields; that’s another pass before the planting. I know what you’re thinking: surely they’d run out of stones to collect by now, but in certain fields the stone always comes up through the crust. A farm near South Kelsey removed 300 ton of stone out of the land one year; when they went back to that same field four years later there was another 300 ton. It’s real stony land in certain areas near me and it comes to the surface through ploughing. So, in the fields I work in they move the stones to the bottom of the ridges now. There’s no point in removing them altogether, they reckon.
As I’m writing this there’s a surplus of potatoes, because of a good harvest. When there is more supply than demand the price drops through the floor. In early 2018 the price of potatoes was £90 a ton, but they cost £160 per ton to grow. That’s bad business, int it? But there are times when you can get £260 per ton. Potatoes don’t seem to go in and out of fashion. Vegans eat them.
The John Deere had been sat there a couple of weeks, because most of the potato-drilling had been done. You need a big tractor like that to do the direct drilling work. Then we had Dot, so I was just doing a few bits from home.
At the back end of every summer, from August to October, the tatie-lifting job comes around. In 2017 things got dead busy, the tractor was in demand and Tim couldn’t commit to it, so I told Moody I was doing the tractor job, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks. In the end I stopped working at Moody’s altogether. When Ben was in the tractor I was in the tatie-processing factory fixing plant or making guards for machinery. I was earning more money than I was at Moody’s and it felt more constructive. There was no falling out, but it felt like it was time for me to move on.
The driving isn’t hard work. It’s just a case of following the tatie lifter. That’s another tractor towing a trailer with usually four Lithuanian blokes sat either side of a conveyor belt, sorting the good potatoes from the bad. They have no idea who I am. They’re kind of rude, but I like that. They don’t have to be cheerful and they don’t speak the language.
The blades of the tatie harvester go into the ground and pick the mud up and the potatoes buried in it. It has a big shovel, perhaps six-foot wide, that picks up three rows of potatoes at a time. It’s all down to the driver about how deep the shovel goes. Too deep and you’re picking up too much mud and the lads in the back have got too much to sort through; too shallow and you’re cutting into your potatoes.
The driver has three or four cameras looking at different things: the shovel; the lads in the back; where he’s going. It’s a bloody busy job. I drive alongside, and the spuds that have been sorted are loaded onto my trailer. You have to be accurate, because the potatoes are being put in five-ton boxes. Some days I was doing 150 miles a day in the tractor, because you’re back and forward to the depot to unload the potatoes. It was great.
An average day on the tatie job is get up at five, take the dogs for a half-hour walk, get back and have breakfast, fill my CamelBak and cycle ten miles to Elsham, where my tractor’s parked when it’s harvesting time and being used every day. I load two empty five-ton potato boxes and two one-ton boxes onto the trailer, then get on the CB to find out where the potato harvester is. It always leaves earlier than us. I leave the yard at seven. You might think it would be hard to find a field, out of all those in this area of Lincolnshire (there’s no numbers on them), but we get told roughly where they are, then start looking for all the wheelings in the road, the mud and shit off the tractor tyres, as we get close. The company I work for has a road sweeper that clears up the worst of it after them, but you can still see the dust on the road. I’ve had days when I’ve needed a few detours to find the harvester, but I’ve never got lost.
Sometimes I’ll sit for half an hour waiting for my turn in the queue, because there’ll be two tractors doing my job, mine and one other. When one is full, it goes back to the factory to unload, and then I’ll drive alongside the harvester. I have Radio 4 on. I like John Humphrys in the morning. I like how he has politicians stuttering. I like the stupid stuff on Woman’s Hour. Then I change the radio over to Planet Rock. I have a book with me, or Race Engine Technologies magazine. I’ve been carrying my black book, a little notebook I’m always writing stuff in to help me remember good ideas and things to do. I started with it when I was building the Wall of Death bike.
I’ll sit in the queue while they get the headlands done, the perimeter of the field, because it’s bloody hard to run the harvester around the edge of the field and keep the tractor at the side of it, without squashing the taties, so they take their time doing that, then we’re straight into it. I love it. It’s another experience.
I nearly got stuck a couple of times, because when you’re loaded up you’ve got up to 15 tons of potatoes on a big flatbed trailer, so pulling up a hill with that behind you is hard work. When you’re moving about in a field and get slightly off-camber you think you’re going to have the thing over, but it’s always been all right. No one died.
There are times when I’ll jump in the back of the trailer and pick through the muck for taties to help out. I’m there to work. If it’s raining and the tractors can’t get traction in the fields, they’ll take the crew back to the factory and have them repairing the tatie boxes, because a fair bit of damage is done to them. The crew are over here and they’re working. Fair play.
I can be out on a 12-hour shift, so I get back to the factory at about seven, then I’ll fill the tractor with diesel, get all my stuff out of the cab and cycle home thinking how lucky I am.
Then, in November 2017, just after Dot was born, a local haulage company gave me a call saying that their two truck fitters were both off sick. They knew I was between jobs, so they asked if I’d give them a hand, see how it goes. I’d have enough stuff to do at home, but I like going to work, so I said yes.
They were understaffed because one of the fitters had steam-cleaned through his foot. I don’t know how he did that, but it made a mess. His name is Mark Hooker, someone I’ve known for years, and the brother of my mate, Alf. Alf has to have one of the best names I’ve ever heard. Alf Hooker. Think about it … Mark had his boots on, but somehow this boiling hot jet from the steam cleaner had badly burned his foot. He carried on at work, but then his foot started swelling up in strange places, as if the water had got into it. From how it was described to me, it sounded a bit like a gunshot wound. It makes a little hole on the way in, but it’s the mess it makes in the body and on its way back out again.
The other unfit fitter had had three lots of three weeks off and they don’t know what’s up with him. They showed me CCTV footage of him working on a wagon. He was on the top step, climbing into the cab, when he passed out and fell back and landed straight on his head. He didn’t try to save himself or break his fall, it was just lights out. It must be a drop of summat like ten foot, from the height of his head on the top step to the ground. He’s wasn’t coming back for a bit.
The fleet operates for a cement company, so a lot of the work is on tankers that carry cement powder, ash powder, lime powder. They have 38 Scania trucks with 42 tanker trailers that need looking after too. I learned that the tankers have a blower system to pump the powder out. It channels into the bottom of a funnel. You need a massive blower on the truck to power it. The ones this fleet have are rated 1,500cfm, that means it can pump 1,500 cubic feet of air per minute. I have a fair size compressor in my shed at home, for powering pneumatic tools, and that’s rated at 20cfm. The trailer’s blower system runs off the truck engine, so I was having an interesting time learning all this.
The job got busy, so I was doing regular 70-hour weeks when there was no filming on. I wouldn’t be getting home till ten some nights and I was up again at four. I love the pressure of it, making sure the job’s done right and quickly.
I have sponsorship deals that pay decent money and the TV job pays well, and I’ve got so many projects at home that I’ll tell you about soon that could keep me busy for the best part of six months. But none of this stops me wanting to get up at four or five in the morning to walk the dogs, have some porridge, get on my bike, ride to the truck yard, do 12 or more hours, then cycle home in the freezing cold and dark on shitty country lanes.
Do I need a psychiatrist? Friends think I do. Sharon certainly does. She thinks I’m mental. I don’t know what it is. I’m addicted to it. By the time Saturday afternoon comes I’m knackered, good for nowt.
It can’t be about the money, because I could earn loads more doing stuff for sponsors. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paying jobs Spellman turns down that I’ve been offered. Money for doing not much, but I’m not interested. It has to be right. I’m not showing off, but if I asked Spellman to get me as many sponsors and as many paying nod, smile, agree days as he could I’d be rolling in money. But I don’t. It’s not part of some bigger business plan. I just don’t want to do those things. I don’t turn everything down; I’ll do stuff with a company like Morris Lubricants, because they make good stuff that I use all the time, and they’re an interesting company.
What I’ve realised is my priorities are not in sync with most other people’s. Andy Spellman does a bloody good job, a job you wouldn’t want, take it from me, organising this, that and the other for me and the businesses and contracts, woolly hats, the TV stuff, cleaning products, sponsors and more besides. He’ll spell things out and prioritise them by how much he thinks I’ll be into them and what is realistic with the time I’ve got. ‘Well, this is what it is … this is what I think … could lead to that … pays you that but you’ve got to do this …’ Then it’s down to me to decide what I want to do. Quite often I won’t give the idea more than a few minutes’ thought but the seed is there and I’ll maybe think about it another time, without committing there and then. If I’ve said I’m preparing a truck for an MOT, and put it in my diary, it doesn’t matter what else it clashes with, I’m doing the truck. I’m solid with that whatever.
I say that I don’t give a damn what people think of me, but obviously I do, because it would break my heart if people thought I was some media type. The most important thing is my opinion of myself. I don’t ever want to look at myself and think, you dickhead. I’ve done things in the past and looked back at them and wondered, What were you thinking? I suppose that’s what being young is about, doing things that make your older self shake his head. Really I’m judging myself by my own standards. And when it comes to those I’m quite set in my ways.
I do make things very difficult for myself. I’m the opposite of water. I never take, or even go looking for, the path of least resistance. I’m wearing everything out, my brain, my body, personal relationships … Why? I don’t have an answer. Other than I want to break myself. Then what? I believe the body is a fantastic thing and it will repair itself and I’ll go again.
It wasn’t long ago that I was seeing a psychologist. In the run-up to the 2017 TT, after joining Honda, I contacted Prof. Steve Peters to see if he could tell me anything that might help me in racing. I’ve mentioned him in other books. He wrote The Chimp Paradox, a book a load of top athletes, especially Olympic gold-winning cyclists, recommended. I found it fascinating and it opened my eyes to the theory of the chimp, and how my chimp, Brian, was affecting my life, how I dealt with situations and how I could keep the chimp quiet. Many, if not most, people have an inner chimp that sticks their oar in. According to Peters there are three parts of the brain: chimp, human and computer. The chimp part gets the blood first, so it has the head start on making decisions and it isn’t the most rational. It reacts, as the name suggests, in a territorial, animalistic way. I know my chimp was sometimes out of control, but because I had become aware of this I could, most of the time, count to three to let the rest of the brain assess the situation and get a grip on things.
There’s a lot more to it than that, so I got in contact with Steve Peters, told him I was going back to race at the TT, and asked if he thought he could help me prepare.
All in all I bet we had seven or eight meetings. He doesn’t know about motorcycle racing – it’s not his world – so he’d quiz me about the races and I’d describe scenarios that could happen, or have happened, in a TT race. He’d go away, have a think about it, and the next time we met he’d say, ‘Right, you need to do this in that situation. You need to have a prompt to put Brian back in his cage.’ He explained that I couldn’t just finish a lap and then refocus. Instead, before my mind has time to wander, there must be certain points of the track where I refocus. It doesn’t matter what’s happened; that’s already happened, you’re going forward, concentrate on what’s going to happen, not what has happened. He was telling me to break it down into short, sharp sections. It’s all about controlling the chimp, not allowing him to start questioning the job, to stop him asking, ‘What are we fucking about with here?’ Put the chimp in his box, to stop him from squealing. I learned that I’ve got fairly good control over the chimp, but I lose concentration and he was helping me with that.
Sometimes my life’s a mess, because I’ve taken too much on, and I won’t take days off from the trucks unless I really have to. That causes more grief, then I’ll end up piling more on top. If I’m aiming for an end point, a goal, that is a dot on the horizon. I’ll get there, but never by a direct line. It will happen; it’s all the shit I have to deal with to get there.
Unfortunately it didn’t matter how well I practised what Steve Peters taught me; it wouldn’t make a shit’s worth of difference on that bike, but it did help in other areas of my life. I look at my Ford pickup project, the one I want to build and race at Pikes Peak sometime in the future, and think, Right, I can get the gearbox on the engine and try that in … Then I realise, Hang on a minute, we’ve got two race bikes to build for the Neave twins (more on them later), the tractor needs servicing, the classic bike needs building … Which leads back to the question, Why am I working so much?
It might have been interesting to hear why Steve Peters thought I was so addicted to work, but, really, it’s only worth finding out the reasons if I’m looking to get to the root of the problem so I can change. And, being blunt, I’m not. I’m happy how I am. The people around me aren’t happy, and that’s not a good situation, but I really can’t see me changing much.