‘I wasn’t in control, I was just blind and lucky.’
I HAVE RACED, led and won road races, on circuits that grand prix racers have said make their blood run cold, but I’ve never been scared. I have had moments when I thought it was going wrong and I was just picking the wall I was going to crash into, but there was never fear. When I have crashed, in the moments where I hit the deck and time slows down giving me a split second to consider what’s going on, fear never comes into it. If I was scared I don’t think I could race the way I do.
So it might be strange to read that the most terrified I’ve ever been was riding a pushbike for a TV show.
After How Britain Worked was finished the idea was to make a series I was even more involved in. I’m not a normal TV presenter, for good or ill, but I’m not afraid of getting stuck in, and that meant North One could come up with some unusual ideas. The one everyone got behind was Speed.
The series was four different hour-long episodes, shown on Channel 4 at the beginning of 2014. The show followed me as I tried to break four separate records. It went into the science of making the attempt, showed the building of the kit I’d use, and then the action as I went for it. The show was made for the science and educational part of Channel 4’s programming.
The records were: British speed bicycle speed record; world toboggan speed record; world human-powered flight speed record; and hydro-bike distance record.
The first we got wrapped up was trying to break the British speed record for a bicycle, that had stood at 110 mph since 1986. It was set on a section of the M42 motorway, in Warwickshire, the day before it opened. The rider was David Le Grys and he reached that speed by using the slipstream of a Rover SD1 British Touring Car racer with a special spoiler enclosure on the back.
A flat section of motorway is an ideal place to do it, because you have a good length of well-surfaced road to get up to speed and then stop safely on. We didn’t have that option, so the production company approached the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, where manufacturers take their pre-production test cars to be put through the mill on different kinds of tracks, from the roughest corrugations to a high-speed bowl. It sounded like we had permission to use the Millbrook loop, the circular high-speed track, right up until a week or so before we were due to make the attempt, then Millbrook got cold feet, thinking that it would all end in tears, so the hunt was on for somewhere else.
The next obvious place was the Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground. It’s an old airfield in Leicestershire, often used by car and motorcycle magazines for speed testing and photoshoots. It has a Cold War-era runway, now privately owned, and is 1.85 miles long. Being a runway, it wouldn’t be as good as a bowl, because the never-ending loop of a bowl allows the attempt to go on for as long as the rider, me, has power. The runway, even one of the longest in Britain, becomes a limiting factor, but it was all we had.
For the attempt, I’d ride inches behind a racing truck, using its slipstream to allow me to pedal a massive gear. The bike was custom-made for the job. Brian Rourke, the Bradley Wiggins of 40 years ago, was a consultant. Jason Rourke, his son, is a bicycle frame-builder who created the special bike for me to ride. Simon from Hope Technology made all the gearing for the bike. Getting the right gearing was crucial.
On the day of the first attempt I got dressed in a set of Dainese leathers that I raced in back in 2010, chest protector, back protector, my AGV helmet, in the blue and pink Britten colours, and cycling shoes.
To start, we gave it a go, at a steady speed, to try things out, and it all felt all right, but we reckoned the runway would only be quick enough if I came around the top corner onto the runway at over 40 mph, a fair lick round a 90-degree corner when you’re less than a foot off the back of a racing truck.
The truck that I was slipstreaming was a MAN TGA 440. From the outside it looks like the kind of trucks I work on, a tractor unit that pulls an articulated trailer, but this racing truck is nothing like a road-going, working truck. The engine position is different, the engine’s moved further into the middle of the chassis. It has a bigger turbo and a different exhaust. The standard truck makes 440 horsepower. Dave Jenkins, the owner and racer of this one, reckons his truck makes over 1,000 bhp. Dave is an experienced truck racer, a former champion, and I trusted him from the off. It would have been difficult to get anything done if I didn’t totally believe in him.
For a record like this there was a balance to strike between wanting to practise, but not wanting to shag my legs out on these two-mile sprints. After a couple of practice runs Dave and I quietly agreed to go for it.
We got round the corner and onto the runway well, and I was as close as I needed to be. Rourke had welded a bumper bar onto the handlebars of the bike so if I rammed into the back of the truck I wouldn’t fly over the handlebars.
During the run the truck got away from me, meaning I began to lose the tow of the slipstream. I’d been told I shouldn’t get out of the seat to pedal because it would unsettle the bike and be potentially dangerous at the speeds we were talking about, but I forgot that, got out of the saddle and pedalled as hard as I ever had. The truck had a monitor set up showing a live feed of me so the driver could see exactly what I was doing. When Dave saw that I’d dropped back, he let his speed lower slightly at the exact same time as I stood up to accelerate, so I battered into the back of the truck at 80-odd miles per hour.
I kept pedalling, thinking the muscles were going to rip off the back of my legs, until it was time to brake. I’d reached 111 mph pedalling a pushbike. This bike was a fixed-gear, so you can’t stop pedalling until the bike is completely stationary. If you forget, like I did, it reminds you sharpish by nearly breaking your legs. The bike threw my feet off the pedals at over 100 mph.
I don’t usually watch any of the TV footage we film, but I wanted to see some from that run. There’s a shot from a Vauxhall Insignia, that’s doing over 80 mph, and the truck comes past with a bicycle behind it. It doesn’t just overtake, it flies past. I watched it and thought, ‘That’s me!’ It looked mental.
After Bruntingthorpe I couldn’t sleep that night because the buzz was so massive from riding a pushbike at 111 mph a fag paper’s width from the back of a truck. But we wanted to go faster. As of the end of July 2013, trying to go faster than I had on that day in Leicestershire would be the most terrifying thing I’d ever done on two wheels.
The idea someone came up with was to run on Pendine Sands. This Welsh beach was a famous, then notorious, site for British land speed record-breaking. It was first used in the 1920s, and chosen because the retreating tide leaves the strip of sand very flat and quite compact. Back then I think they used as much as seven miles of the beach. Back then the roads were so terrible this probably seemed liked the perfect place – a motorcycle magazine of the time called it ‘the finest natural speedway’, but sand isn’t tarmac or concrete. It’s far from perfect for record attempts.
Malcolm Campbell used Pendine Sands to set the world land speed record at 146 mph in Blue Bird in 1924. It was broken time and again until Campbell raised it to 174.22 mph in 1927. He was in a battle with the Welshman J G Parry-Thomas and his car Babs. Parry-Thomas had held the record and was trying to win it back when he crashed at 170 mph. The driver died and Babs was buried on the beach until it was dug up and restored decades later.
I arrived at Pendine Sands at 10pm the night before the attempt. I was told to meet in a restaurant, and when I got there it was totally bunged, every table full. Everyone in the restaurant was part of the record attempt: helicopter pilots, medics, runners, directors, cameramen, soundmen, cycle fitness blokes, bicycle designers, truck racer, truck mechanic … I wouldn’t have wanted the bill for Saturday.
We met on the beach the next morning. James Woodruff, the director, had done the whole risk assessment and had a laminated sheet full of plans and timetables, all done with military precision. The idea was to build up to the attempt, in 5 mph steps, like they suggested we should do at Bruntingthorpe. At the airfield it was clear that me and the truck driver, Dave Jenkins, gelled pretty quickly and we could make much bigger jumps. My legs have only got so much in them; I can’t keep building up slowly and slowly.
The laminated sheet said the first attempt should be 40 mph, but I said, ‘Fuck that. Let’s chuck a gear in the bike that allows us to do 100 mph.’ The biggest gear available on the day had potential for 122 mph.
Dave said his truck felt squirrely at 40 mph. Not unstable, but not planted either, so he thought we should go for 70 or 80 as the first attempt. I’m glad I listened to him.
We did two miles at 70 mph and I couldn’t see a thing. The sand was blowing up on the inside of my helmet and covering the visor. And the slightest indent left in the sand by the truck was massively unsettling the pushbike. When you ride on tarmac, the tyres are deforming, the wheel rims are flexing, the frame is flexing too, while the road surface is remaining constant, the datum point. But riding on the beach, the sand was moving, while the bike and its tyres were staying the same. The sand couldn’t exert enough force on the bike to make it flex, and it was the most alien feeling in the world. It wasn’t stable and I couldn’t turn it. Every time I tried to turn, the front felt like it wanted to tuck. And this was at 70 mph. It turned everything I knew about feel on its head. It just wasn’t right.
I told the crew, ‘That’s mental. And not in a good way.’ I even gave one of them my mum’s phone number. That’s how sure I was that I was going to crash. It wasn’t the pressure of there being over 20 people on the beach, just for this attempt, or the money that had been spent. The TV people would’ve stuck to my decision. If I’d said, ‘No, it’s too dangerous,’ they would have known I’d said it for a good reason. The final decision was purely down to me, but if I hadn’t tried it I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. It was a five-hour drive home and it would’ve been torture if I had given up on it.
I pulled on my helmet, 100 per cent sure I was going to crash. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when and how bad … I asked the bicycle mechanics to put the big gearing on the bike so we could have one go at it, adding, ‘Because this is going wrong.’ I knew that the more attempts we made the more indents we would press into the sand, and that would make riding even more dodgy.
While the gearing was being changed on the bike, I taped up all the underneath of my helmet to stop the sand finding its way up.
I had a quiet word with Dave, the truck driver, saying, ‘When I crash you need to get your foot down and get out of the way. Let me crash by myself.’ The monitor in his cab meant he could see what I was doing and I knew his gut instinct would be to back off, but that would have been disastrous.
I wasn’t comparing myself to Evel Knievel at Wembley in 1975, when he knew he wasn’t going to make the jump but still went for it anyway because so many people had turned up to see him, but I do think I had an idea of what Evel was going through.
We set off and I’ve never pedalled harder in my life. I wasn’t getting any kind of buzz. I was just shitting myself. It was a horrendous feeling. I was told by Dave Le Grys, who had helped with training advice for this record, that I should never stand up to pedal because it unsettles the bike as you’re pulling on the bars and swinging the bike from side to side. Stay in the seat was what the expert said, but again, I couldn’t help it. At 40 mph I had to stand up, because the truck was getting away. I couldn’t let the truck leave me, because I didn’t want to do another attempt, so I just had to stand up. I stood up four times on that run. The last time was at over 100 mph.
Again, when Dave the driver saw that he was getting away he’d slow down, just as I’d stood up to catch him, so I’d bump into the back of the truck. The difference in speed when we hit might have only been 5 mph – the truck slowing to 78 mph while I had increased my speed to 83 mph to catch back up – but I could feel the whole bike flex as it tried to chuck me over the bars.
Taping up my helmet did stop the sand finding its way in, but it caused the inside of the visor to steam up, so I could hardly see a thing. The back of the truck had boards at the side, at an angle, to try and stop some of the sand pelting me, but if I went off line and nudged them with my handlebars it would be game over. So we put big lines made of white tape at the edges to show me how far I could safely move either side of the centreline of the truck. My vision was so obscured I could only just see the vague outline of the white lines as I was pedalling like hell along the beach.
In the end I was clocked at 112.94 mph, 1.5 mph faster than on the concrete at Bruntingthorpe. The beach course was three and a half miles long and I was pedalling at over 100 mph for two miles of it. I’ve no idea how I survived it, because I was not in control. It doesn’t matter how wild the TT and other road racing looks, because I’m still in control. I wasn’t in control on that beach. I was just blind and lucky.
Instead of thinking I’d got away with it, I left Wales with ideas of wanting to do 200 mph. As long as the lead vehicle could do 200 mph, and we had the room to do it, doing 200 mph is no harder than doing 100 mph. In fact, the faster the truck went the easier it was, because the air being pushed around the truck would curl around like a wave and fill the low pressure area behind the truck, where I was tucked in. So it felt like a tailwind: 200 mph – it’s got to be done, hasn’t it? Another episode of Speed concentrated on a human-powered aircraft, the HPA. It was another tough challenge, but not quite as dangerous to my life or limbs. I was told, before filming, that 530 people have been into space, but only 450 have flown a human-powered aircraft. So it wasn’t going to be easy.
The aircraft was designed by Alex and Ben, a couple of proper boffins from Southampton University. Ben was a mature student, Alex was a lecturer, and they got three students involved in helping to make the plane for the attempt.
The main wing structure was foam cut with a hot wire machine, that Ben had made himself; material like thick clingfilm, and carbon-fibre wing spars. A pushbike was strapped to the bottom of it. Southampton University have been involved in attempts like this for decades and I loved seeing the science and history behind it. I even got to fly a glider as a practice for piloting the HPA.
We first tried the HPA at Lasham, near Southampton. The finished plane weighed 27 kg, but it had a massive 20-metre wingspan. We made the attempt at first light, when the air is best for flying. The plane got off the ground, about two feet, for about a distance of five feet. The Southampton lads called it a short flight and were pleased, but I broke one of their beautiful foam and glass-fibre propellers.
I thought I’d have the muscle to pedal it, but after testing the power output at a cycling velodrome, with a fancy crankset and dashboard measuring the power, we found out, after my initial burst of pedalling, I was nowhere near powerful enough. While the plane builders were creating the plane, I was training like mad to make sure I could produce 400 watts of power for four minutes. That takes a lot of doing, but if I couldn’t, the thing would never fly.
The event we made the attempt at was the annual Icarus Cup, for human-powered aircraft, near Northampton. Our goal was to be the fastest; we weren’t going for duration or distance. I might have the power, but I was too heavy, much heavier than the world record holder, a German with less meat on him than a butcher’s shoe.
The conditions at the Icarus Cup suited our design, and I got the plane off the ground, this time for a proper flight, not a hop, skip and a jump. Our air speed was 29 mph with a 10 mph headwind. It wasn’t enough to break the world record, but it was the quickest at the competition. I had done a fair bit of cycle training to be able to get this thing into the air, and afterwards some of the students from the university tried pedalling and they couldn’t get it off the ground, so the training paid off.
The hydro-bike was another dangerous scheme. The idea was to aquaplane a motorbike across a lake. A 450-cc motorcrosser was modified by a couple of switched-on fellas in their fifties, Charlie and Graham. They had a fair bit of involvement with amphibious vehicles, so they knew about lift and thrust. Underneath the engine of the bike was a computer-designed skid plate, designed to act like a speedboat on the surface of the water. The rear wheel was fitted with a sand tyre with paddles, exactly the same as riders use in Californian deserts. We took the bike to a Welsh lake and went for it. Things didn’t go according to plan. Well, I say that, but the plan was so hare-brained that perhaps it did.
I was told to ride at 50 mph into the lake, so Charlie and Graham could work out what angle the skid plate needed to be set at, and so the scuba divers knew where the bike would land on the bottom of the lake and they could practise retrieving it. The rescue team wanted me to crash time and time again in the shallows to see how I’d crash in the deep water. The motorcycle had a small float attached to it so the divers could locate it when it sunk, but there was a risk that the rope would tangle around my leg and drag me down. It did once in the practice, so they strapped a knife to me.
I asked Spellman, ‘Is this dodgy?’ He told me that plenty of BMXers do jumps into lakes. I thought, ‘Right!’
I was hitting the water at over 50 mph, hung off the back of the bike, trying to get it to take off and lift out of the water, so the rear paddle tyre would dig into the water, but the bike would start see-sawing and I’d go over the handlebars at 50 mph, hitting the water head first. There was no lack of commitment on my part. I look back now and think, ‘Was it a good idea to ride into a 25-metre-deep lake on a motorbike?’ If I sat and thought about it I would’ve talked myself out of it.
In the end I rode across Bala Lake in North Wales for a distance of 64 metres. It wasn’t the 100 metres we were aiming for, but it was still some achievement.
The challenge I was most nervous about was the toboggan speed record in Austria. I’d nearly knocked myself out practising for it. I was on a skateboard, well a longboard, lying down, riding down a hill, but the trucks – the skateboard’s axles – weren’t tight enough so it started tankslapping. When I tried to correct it, the thing chucked me off. It left a right scar on my hand and scratched my face, and that was just before the 2013 TT. I had a pushbike helmet and some gloves on, but I wasn’t about to ride a skateboard in leathers. Course not.
We went to test a few variations of the sledge at the indoor snow dome in Castleford, West Yorkshire. The slope there is 11 degrees, but from the top it looked steep enough. We had consultants from Sheffield University doing the maths who said, ‘At this angle of slope and this density of snow; the weight of the sledge; the weight of you, you’ll probably do 34 mph.’ And I did 34 mph and that was enough for me. When I walked over to the brains of the operation they said, ‘That’s all right, that’s all going to plan. The slope in Austria is 45 degrees and if everything goes to plan you’ll do 177 mph.’ And they said it all with straight faces!
We cut it really fine to attempt the record. Two of the weekly shows had already been aired, before we drove out to Andorra in early January, 2014. The weather in Europe hadn’t been suitable and things were tight. In the end we settled on a speed skiing slope in Grandvalira. I drove out with a carbon-fibre sledge that had been designed by Terry Senior and Nick Hamilton. The design had undergone all this advanced fluid dynamics testing until the designers came up with a canopy for me to hide behind. Then it was made by EPM Technology, the same way F1 racing car bodies are made. It was a trick thing. But I still crashed it … The second time I went down the slope it got all out of shape when I started to brake, then it flipped, cracking the bodywork. Not an ideal start, but luckily we had a replacement body.
Again, like all these attempts, the time comes when it’s shit or bust. We hauled the sledge up the mountain, and after a last pep-talk from Olympic gold medal skeleton bob racer Amy Williams, I climbed on further up the mountain than I’d attempted before.
This time there were no mistakes. The sled ran as straight as an arrow, and the dragster-style parachute deployed without fault, slowing me down. We’d smashed the record. The run of 84.39 mph was over 21 mph quicker than the previous record, set by Rolf Allerdissen in 2010 in Austria.
People have talked about banning real road races like the TT, because riders are sometimes killed, but the racers would simply find something else dangerous to give them their buzz. Attempting these records made me think that the kind of people who race on the roads wouldn’t be happy just watching TV or walking the dog when it came to the weekend. It’s not how we are wired up.
In 2012, I got involved with a TV show presented by the bicycle stunt rider Danny MacAskill. The mountain-bike-trials rider had become famous when the film of him riding his bicycle around and over obstacles in Edinburgh went onto YouTube. It was filmed by a friend and shows Danny riding along the top of a iron railing spikes, using a tree as a ramp for a backflip, bunny-hopping to the moon … The film had over 30 millions views. He did a brilliant follow-up, Industrial Revolutions. When he does a 180-degree jump from one train track’s rail to the other, it blew my mind. Danny ended up leaving the bicycle shop he worked in and getting Red Bull sponsorship, advert appearances, opportunities, travel and injuries. He’s a self-made man. I was, and still am, a massive fan. He’s a legend.
MacAskill was making a TV show called Daredevils: Life on the Edge for Channel 4. It was about ‘risk takers’ and what drives them. Danny would go out and meet people in the extreme sports world, like people who walk between cliffs on slack line ropes, wing-suit fliers … and me.
The plan was for me to take him for a pillion ride on my 1000-cc Superstock bike around Kirkistown race track, a short circuit in Northern Ireland. Danny, my mechanic, had fitted a road bike’s twin seat and pillion footrests to my 1000-cc Superstock race bike.
It was all touch and go, because MacAskill was still recovering from a broken back. His surgeon wasn’t happy with his plan of going for a ride, but he was well up for it. Also his collarbone had been surgically pinned not long before and seemed to be uncomfortable as he pulled on some one-piece leathers he’d borrowed for the day.
He said he’d been interested in the TT for a long time, and had started noticing me specifically in the last couple of years. He thought we were on the same wavelength.
While the film crew were fitting on-board cameras to the bikes we were chatting. We were talking about wheelies. I’m crap at them. He told me he once wheelied his pushbike for two miles. I’d struggle to wheelie the length of the garage we were stood in.
He explained that he was calculating about the risks he took, and how he can picture things in his head, see a specific set-up, whether it is something in the streets of Edinburgh or a dam in the middle of the Highlands. After he visualised them, imagined what he’d like to do, then he would push for it. Obviously he doesn’t just fling himself off stuff. He’s riding within his capabilities.
While he crashes a lot, he reckons he actually takes very little risk. He reckoned I’d jumped further on my race bike, at 160-plus mph, than he’d jumped on his pushbike, and maybe he had a point, but I’m as blown away by what he does as he seemed to be by what I do.
The TV show wanted to describe some of the psychology of so-called risk takers, so they had a psychologist called Dave Collins, PhD along for the day to monitor heart rates and give his view on stuff.
He said that he didn’t agree with the idea that people like Danny and me don’t think of the consequences of what we do. He said we just don’t dwell on what could go wrong. Danny obviously has a very good sense of what he can and can’t do; it’s just that his limit, on a bicycle, is very different to yours and mine. The psychologist went on to confirm what I already know, that I’m not a psychopath – someone who ignores the consequences of his actions.
Collins debunked a lot of the crap that is talked about people like TT racers or extreme sports folk. He reckons people who take risks have a lower susceptibility to the stress hormones, so it takes more to make them worried than someone who is nervous. He added that there is a psychological effect, that people in these sports have an identity that is tied in with their dangerous activity. We don’t see it as dangerous, because we are in control and see being on top of it as an important part of who we are. He also reckoned that there is a social effect, that risk takers gain social status because they behave in a certain way. There are a lot of things humans do that can be accounted for by an interaction of these three areas.
The psychologist said, ‘The brain and the body do very, very clever things when you push them to extremes, when you force them to function at a different level. And it is very addictive – people feel really alive in the flow state: “This is me, this is what I am.”’
The ‘flow state’, he said, is when the challenge and the expertise needed to carry it out are roughly balanced. If the challenge is greater than your ability, you’re nervous or anxious; if it’s less, you’re bored; the flow state is a space in between. I can definitely relate to that.
Collins went on to say you couldn’t race the TT unless you were really in the moment. You don’t have the time or space to be thinking, ‘Ooh, hell, I might crash.’ He’s right about that, too.
It’s hard to say if MacAskill gets the same kind of buzz from what he does as I do from racing. He said that if he was doing tricks he’d never attempted before or a line that needed a lot of speed, jumping into a lot of air, as he put it – the kind of jump, that even if he landed it perfectly, would leave him with sore wrists and ankles – it would take him a while to get over the fear. Sometimes, he said, he’d get a block in his head, thinking he was going to crash, but it only took him one attempt, whether he crashed or not, to keep going at it till he achieved what he was trying to do. His pay-off was not getting beaten. He’d have a dream scenario in his head, sometimes thinking about a jump or trick for months while he was injured, then he’d go and make it work. After it, he said, he’d get the feeling of satisfaction and relief that he didn’t get skewered by the spiky fence or break his neck. He reckoned what he did was more about achievement than adrenaline.
Collins the psychologist also talked about people experiencing different levels of ‘super-perception in moments of extreme pressure’.
Listening to that made me think of the way I dealt with the slide that led to my crash at the 2010 TT. It all happened in the blink of an eye, less than two seconds from the front tyre beginning to slide to me admitting defeat, but I tried a few different things to save the crash so it felt like so much longer.
Whatever Danny’s surgeon and his personal trainer had said to him went in one ear and out the other, because he climbed on the back of the Suzuki GSX-R1000 as the tyre warmers were taken off.
‘I want to be scared for my life,’ he said.
The crew pulled out a special belt to fasten around me with handles for Danny to hold on to, but I didn’t think he needed it. ‘Just hold on round me, you’ll be right,’ I told him. Then we rolled out into the damp and windy Irish weather.
Danny had never been on a motorbike before, not even on the back of a Honda Knobber 90, so he was stuck to me like shit to a blanket. He did well, though. We had the bike wound up to 150 mph or so. It was wheelie-ing with both of us on, and the wind would catch the front wheel when it was off the ground, pushing us a bit off line.
We did ten laps before pulling in, and the first thing Danny shouted was, ‘That was ace!’ Then he reckoned it didn’t feel scary, just fun and exciting. He couldn’t stop smiling. He said the braking was ferocious and that it was over too soon. He definitely is on the same wavelength.
As I said before, if road racing didn’t exist, the people who raced at the Ulster and the TT would find something else that gave us the buzz, whether it be BASE jumping, downhill mountain biking, slackline rope walking or some other dangerous sport or pastime. We wouldn’t be stamp collecting.