‘I told myself I wasn’t having any more fast cars.’
SINCE I STARTED earning a few quid racing, I’ve spent a big part of it on flash cars that I usually keep for a while, before waking up one day thinking, ‘Martin, what are you doing?’ Then I sell it and go back to whichever van I have at the time.
I have owned BMWs, a Porsche and an Aston Martin, but the car I’ve owned the longest is a 1972 Saab 96 that I bought for £300 when I was 21. And I’ve still got it.
When I bought it, the car was a dysentery brown, but I could see the potential. Me and my mates Matt, Benny, Johnny and Jonty all painted the Saab. We gave it a coat of matt black and then added hot rod flames on the bonnet and front wings. We re-trimmed it with leopard-print fake fur too.
It was all done so we could take it to the local hunt ball. Fox-hunting is a big thing round this area of Lincolnshire. In fact, it seems bigger now than it was before they banned it. They don’t call it fox-hunting any more, just hunting. They put a trace out for the dogs to follow. They still get foxes, though.
I’ve never been on a hunt, but we did visit the kennels when I was at junior school. Fox-hunting keeps all the Yah-Yahs happy, but the hunt ball was on our social calendar because all the farmers’ fit daughters would get dressed up and go.
We finished the Saab just in time and it must’ve worked, because I ended up meeting a girl, Charlotte – a horse trainer, who I went out with for three years.
The Saab wasn’t my first choice, though. I really wanted a Volvo Amazon, and the whole desire for an old Swedish family car came from a bloke called Stuart Clifford. He was a truck driver, who worked for Bill Banks’s BB Haulage. He was really into hang-gliding, and he would live over in Tenerife for most of the year doing that, but he’d come back and drive for a few months to earn some money. When he was in England he’d drive around in an old matt black Amazon saloon with Swedish number plates on it. ESO 172, I think the registration was. If he was ever pulled over by the police he’d start talking in a made-up language that must have sounded like Swedish, because he would get let off without the coppers ever realising he had no UK tax or insurance. He was a cool dude, in his early forties when I was in my late teens.
The story turned bad for him when he developed cancer and went through a couple of operations to try and sort it, but the job was buggered. He’d been told it was terminal, so he went to Kirmington airport, or Humberside Airport as it’s known now, and rented a car. Next, people reckon, he bought a gallon of fuel in a can, and drove flat-out down the A46, between Nettleton and Market Rasen, aimed the car straight at a tree and that was it. Lights out.
My mate Dobby, whose house I lived in when I moved out of the farm in Kirmington, is a retained fireman who was called to the scene. He pulled him out of the car, but it was already much too late. Stuart didn’t want to make any mistakes with this job and it wasn’t a nice scene. Dobby thought he knew who the driver was straight away because Stuart had had a finger missing for a few years. If you’re going to go out, go out in a blaze of glory. I had admiration for him, though I’m glad I didn’t have to clear up after it.
A while later Stuart’s Amazon came up for sale. Someone else had got hold of it, but I couldn’t afford it and the engine was a bit knackered, so I ended up with the Saab 96 instead. I still always wanted an Amazon, though.
I bought my first proper fast car at the end of 2005, a year I’d won a lot of races in Ireland. I’d always fancied a fast car and the limited edition BMW M3 CSL caught my eye. It was the stripped-out version with a carbon-fibre roof and 3.2-litre, straight-six engine. I thought it was mega. It blipped the throttle when you changed down the gears using the semi-automatic gearbox. The induction roar sounded a treat. I did a few track days in it too.
Then, halfway through the following year, 2006, I had a mad yearning for something faster for track days, so I bought a Porsche GT3 RS. I’d have only been in my early twenties.
The RS was the stripped-out, non-turbo 996 with a full roll-cage and a whale-tail spoiler. It was white with red stripes on the bottom of the doors, that said GT3, and red wheels. It looked like it had crashed into Halfords. I had 204 mph on the clock and thought that was probably enough and sold it. As long as I have a van, I don’t need a car, but I do like them.
Then, in 2007, BMW came out with the V8 BMW M3. I went to the local BMW dealer in my lunch-hour in rigger boots and dirty old trousers held up with baling wire. I think part of buying that car was to show the salesman that he shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but it was me who made the bigger mistake. I got the first V8 M3 in the area, but I didn’t like it. It was a big comfy thing, totally different to the CSL. It was set up more to be loaded up and driven to the golf club than hammered around Donington on a track day. I sold it and lost a fortune on it, saying to myself I’d never have another fancy car ever again …
Still, while I’d owned the Porsche and BMWs I had always really wanted an Aston Martin. If I had nothing better to do in my dinner hour I’d look on the internet at my dad’s work. I used to visit the Pistonheads website, where I saw the V12 version of the Vantage had been released and there was one registered and on sale. That meant I didn’t have to order it and be on the waiting list. I had known this version was coming out for ages and had rung a dealer called JCT600 in Yorkshire, asking when they could get one. They didn’t even ring me back. Even though it was over £120,000 I was really tempted.
For a few years, I’d been getting financial advice from my mate Mad Nige, and I thought I’d give him a call about the car. I’d met Mad Nige when me and Kate were in Colours Night Club, on Douglas seafront, during the 2004 Isle of Man TT. We got talking and he invited us to meet him the next day, when he’d take us up in his plane. It was my very first TT, so he didn’t know me from Adam, but we just hit it off. I loved talking to him and he looked out for me up until he died in 2011. He was an advertising salesman, but he became my financial adviser, even though he had no experience in it.
When this V12 Aston came up, I rang Mad Nige and told him I wanted to buy the car, asking him if he thought I was stupid to buy it. He said, ‘Fuck it. Get it if you want one.’ As I said, he wasn’t a qualified financial adviser.
I had the car for two and a half years and did just over 3,000 miles in it. The novelty soon wore off. The seats jammed. The electric windows jammed. There were faults with the paint. It suffered from bad build quality and bad finishing.
When that particular box was ticked, the Aston just ended up sitting in a barn on the Lancasters’ farm, long after I’d left and was no longer living there or seeing them and their daughter, Kate. I think I’d only ever wanted an Aston Martin because my dad said they were mega. A bit of the attraction was buying one to take Dad out in it.
One thing that really turned me against Astons was that I’d always thought gentlemen drove them, but then I decided it was just dickheads. What changed my view was seeing everyone drive them with the LED sidelights on. I thought they must come on automatically and you couldn’t do anything about it, but you have to turn the switch for them to come on, so people are turning them on to say, ‘Hey, look at me!’ They want everyone to know they’re driving an Aston Martin. Cocky buggers …
When I had agreed to sell it, I was quite nervous going to pick the car up from the farm. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the farm’s fork-lifts had picked it up and turned the Aston on its roof. Kate could have, perhaps should have, tipped brake fluid all over the bodywork, but she just sprayed WD-40 on the windscreen. She wanted to pee me off, but was still too nice to do anything too bad.
When I sold the Aston, I lost an absolute fortune on it. With the depreciation it cost me about £20 for every mile I did in it, so I told myself I wasn’t having any more fast cars. That lasted only until a friend who I stay with in Ireland, Paul Dunlop, no relation to the racing Dunlops, showed me a film of a Volvo Amazon estate that was faster than a Ferrari 458 Italia. And it was for sale. There and then we started looking for the code for Sweden and rang the owner. Two more phone calls and we’d done the deal.
This car won an award at the SEMA show, the world’s biggest modified car show, in Las Vegas, and was voted Sweden’s coolest Volvo. It’s a 1968 Volvo Amazon, but it’s a two-door – and Volvo never made a two-door estate. The builder of the car, who works for Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg, cut the B pillars and doors out of an Amazon saloon and welded them into the four-door body. The front doors are longer, so it gives the car a much nicer look and it’s easier to get in and out of. The back doors are welded up and filled in. The roof has been subtly lowered too, meaning all the glass has had to be trimmed. It has a NASCAR rear differential and one-off 19-inch wheels. The paintwork is better than any Ferrari I’ve ever seen. The front grille is hand-beaten and took two weeks to make. The red leather interior was made by the same people who trim the interiors of the £900,000 Koenigsegg Agera R.
The AP brakes, the hubs and the suspension struts are all from a Koenigsegg supercar. It has Öhlins suspension; FIA bucket seats; five-point harnesses; a fire extinguisher system; full roll-cage; a racing ignition … The fuel filler has been moved to the roof. The engine bay is so tidy, because things like the battery are all hidden away. It has a Sparco steering wheel and a dash out of a P1800 Volvo, because it’s slightly better looking than an Amazon’s.
The engine is a 2.6-litre turbocharged, six-cylinder Volvo T6. The car is an extreme Volvo Amazon, but it’s still a Volvo Amazon. It makes 780 horsepower and runs on £3.80-a-litre E85 race fuel. I love it, even though at the end of 2013 the timing pulley stripped off the end of the crank and wrecked each of the six pistons and all the valves. I’d had 3,000 trouble-free miles out of it and it was going to be the last drive of the year. It definitely turned into that. Luckily I was only on the way to Caistor for a pint of milk when it broke.
The only thing that is disappointing, other than the crank problem, is that I’ve peaked. It’s impossible to have anything better than this car. It’s the fastest car I’ll ever go in.
When I bought the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, one of the engines out of a Lancaster bomber, the fella I bought it from had a Ferrari F50, worth a million quid; a Ferrari F40; a Lamborghini Countach; a Ferrari 355 GTB … He had all the gear, and as lovely as it all was, I wouldn’t swap any of them for this Volvo.
The Merlin engine is something else too. It’s a 27-litre V12. Each cylinder displaces over two litres per stroke. It makes 1,600 horsepower.
I have to prime the engine before I start it, getting the oil pressure up. If it’s cold I have to warm the oil, with a hot air blower on the oil tank, to thin it. It is mounted on a specially made trolley.
It can sit it at 2,200 rpm without it wanting to move on the trailer it’s mounted on. Every exhaust stub has a constant glow of flame out of it, running onto the front of the exhaust stub directly behind it. It’s angry. It’s difficult to put into words what it’s like having a hand on the throttle of this thing. I’m like a dog with ten dicks every time I start it up.
It cost £35,000 and is out of a 1942 Lancaster Bomber, the first year of the Lancaster. It’s the same engine they used in the Spitfire. Before 1942 they used a different design of engine for the Manchester and Stirling bombers, and I’ve heard the RAF lost more planes through engine failure than enemy fire. The introduction of the Lancaster changed that very quickly.
Mine will run on normal petrol station pump fuel, that’s held in tanks on the custom-made trailer the engine is mounted to. It only needs Avgas, high-octane aviation fuel, when it’s running masses of boost pressure, from the supercharger, and under a lot of load at high altitude.
The Merlin lived at Moody’s for a while, before I moved it to a mates’ farm. He wasn’t sorry to see it go after what it did to his workshop. One day I decided to see if I could get the rev limiter out of it and run it a bit harder. I managed to disconnect it, meaning I could get the propeller spinning faster, and rang my boss, Mick, to ask if he wanted to walk over the yard from the offices to hear it going.
He came over with his phone to video the action and stood in front of the propeller – it has a full-sized propeller attached – while I was behind the seven-foot-long motor, controlling the throttle.
I got the engine cracked up, flames spitting out of the headers, then gave it a bit more throttle than I’d been allowed when the mechanical limiter was still on it. A second later my heart was in my mouth as the trolley started moving. I killed the ignition, but the propeller was still spinning and the trolley still had its momentum. There was nothing more I could do. Moody jumped out of the way and hid behind a truck that I’d been servicing, swearing loudly, his smartphone now just filming the ground and his trouser leg, as the propeller cut my beautiful hand-built Rourke bicycle in half, chopped a wooden staircase into kindling and chewed a chunk out of a concrete block wall before the propeller stopped spinning. The rubble from the wall damaged the truck I’d been working on. And I think we got away lightly.
I was a nervous wreck for a while after that. I was worried I’d wrecked the ultimate in stationary engines, that wasn’t quite as a stationary as I would have liked it, but after a good look over it, the only damage was some scratched paint on the propeller. It’s some kind of machine that engine.
Since I crashed the Kawasaki AR50 into the Fiat Punto at Barnetby Top, the 1997 accident that started me on my racing career, I hadn’t owned a road legal bike for years. Then I bought the Martek – a turbocharged one-off Suzuki.
I first saw this bike years ago, at my mate’s bike shop, Chris Gunster Motorcycles in Grimsby. I could see how well everything had been made or modified, the engine mountings, the frame and the exhaust … It was in having some work, and even though I hadn’t owned a road bike since I was an apprentice I said, ‘If that ever comes up for sale let me know.’ Gunster told me, ‘Oh that’ll never be sold.’ Then six or seven years later he told me it had come up, but looking nothing like it used to. It had been sprayed with Suzuki blue and white colours and had fluorescent pink wheels and a rats nest wiring loom, but I could see beyond that.
It was running and making decent horsepower, but the work done to finish it off wasn’t up to Martek’s standard. The original builder, Mark Walker, had sold it unfinished and someone else had got it running. I went out for a test-ride and it was the quickest thing I’d ever been on. It made my Fireblade TT Superbike of the time feel like a moped. It was ridiculous. Even off the turbo it felt quicker than my Superbike.
When I bought it, people were surprised what I paid for it (I’m not telling how much), but the work done by Mark Walker and Richard Todd, the other founder of Martek, and the parts they fitted and fabricated themselves were the business. I wanted the whole bike to be the same quality as the best bits of it.
I took the Martek to pieces the first week I had it, which was the back end of 2009 or early 2010, and it was still in pieces in 2014. It doesn’t disappoint me it’s taken this long. It’s been built a few times, but I take it to bits again because I’m not happy with something.
The engine is based on an oil-cooled Suzuki GSX-R1100 and it’s turbocharged. I was going for 500 horsepower until I talked to a turbo expert. I liked the sound of 500 bhp, it’s a nice round number, but I was told that while I could tune this engine to make 500 bhp, one run on the dyno and the gearbox and clutch would be scrap, so now I’m going for a decent 350 horsepower, after which I’ll ride it a bit, then park it up and move on to the next project.
The engine made 320 bhp when I got it, but only on 120-octane fuel. I want a genuine 350 running on pump fuel. Then I plan to use E85, fuel with 85 per cent ethanol. It’s good for getting big power out of turbo engines, but it’s a bit of a journey into the unknown.
The petrol tank has been chopped about to leave room for one of the turbo pipes and now only holds eight litres, so the bike will pass everything but a filling station.
I know the look I want to go for, a modern café racer look. When I’ve finished, it’ll look nothing like the bike I bought. I want it to be a bike that Mark Walker looks at and says, ‘I like that.’
I’ve prepared and built race bikes on and off since I started, but the Martek got me back into owning and working on bikes that are road legal – or kind of road legal. I love the attention to detail that’s needed. You can’t daydream, everything has to be 100 per cent. But I don’t tune as many engines as I used to and I don’t know if I could do it full-time, because everyone wants a million-quid job, but no one wants to pay for it. With a modern Superbike you can’t just do one thing, you have to do the complete engine to make any improvements. It’s an expensive job and no one wants to pay, so I don’t want the hassle. People cut corners, then when it blows up it’s the engine builder’s fault. With the trucks I can say, if you’re not going to do it right I’m not working on it. It keeps things simple.