Guy Martin was born in November 1981 in Grimsby. He is a lorry mechanic by trade and earned an apprenticeship with Volvo when he was 16. He began racing on motorbikes in 1998 and competed for the first time at the 2004 Isle of Man TT and went on to 17 podium finishes at the race over the years. An appearance on an ITV programme about the 2009 TT led to a parallel TV career hosting shows including The Boat That Guy Built and How Britain Worked.
In his Letter to My Younger Self, Martin looks back on a childhood obsession with engineering, crashes and parenthood.
At 16, I was just obsessed with engines and motorbikes. That’s all. I used to have an AR50 Kawasaki moped when I was 16. It’s knackered, but I’ve still got it and I’m going to do it up. My whole life revolved around making that motorbike go faster. 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.
The way I was brought up was work, work, work. My mum and my dad just worked all the time. It was never forced on us that you will work, work, work, but that’s all we had ever seen. 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 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. The harder you work, the better you’ll do. That was the sort of thing we were taught, without it being shouted and screamed at us.
I was brought up in and around Grimsby. That area was the mainstay of my life. And there were always trucks around. It’s all we heard about from my dad. I was always interested in what he was doing and there was loads of technology on trucks. Any school holiday, every weekend, or on Friday nights after school I’d go to work for my dad on the trucks because I loved it. I could earn a few quid and was always learning. My dad’s the best. I’ve got all the respect for him, but working with him was bloody hard. He was all about the way it’s always been done. And I always wanted to try something different.
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I had a big crash one day. I didn’t hurt myself, the police dropped me back home, but I thought, this is only going one way. So I needed to go motorbike racing. From that point, I just work, work, worked to earn enough money to buy a bike to go racing. I’d not even passed my car driving test. Any spare money didn’t go on driving lessons, I spent it on motorbike racing.
2006: Guy Martin on The Bungalow stretch of a TT race on the Isle of Man. Image: Adrian Japp / Alamy
I wasn’t very good at school. I didn’t do very well, but for some reason I convinced myself that I was going to go to college. I think I lasted one term. Then I got an interview at the local Volvo truck garage and worked there. And I learned so much. They’d let me do anything – taking engines to bits, building engines, and I loved it. I could not get to work quick enough. And we were earning great money – because I was doing 78 hours a week at 16. And that helps you save money to go motorbike racing.
I used to take drugs just to be able to work more. Because the more I raced, the more expensive it was, so the more I had to work. So I was working three nights a week down the docks after my day job. And I used to take ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin just to be able to work enough to earn more money to go racing motorbikes. That’s how it was.
My heroes weren’t the motorbike racers, they were legendary motorbike engine builders. A bloke called Chris Mayhew, who I still see now, and Tony Scott and Nicky Kennedy – and they got me interested in Phil Irving, who wrote a book in the 1940s called Tuning For Speed. 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.
2011: With fellow TT riders (from left) Conor Cummins, Ian Hutchinson and Michael Dunlop at the Closer to the Edge premiere in London
The clowns in a circus don’t pay to perform – but that’s still how it is in motorbike racing. Everyone is paying to be there. Only the very top racers in the British superbikes would be getting paid. I ended up racing in the British Championship, working all these jobs to afford it. But I loved it. And I was getting so much faster – until I told one meeting organiser to stick his championship up his arse when I got a time penalty. I was just young and dumb. So I went over to Ireland and started racing there, me and a couple of mates did pretty well, racing out the back of a van. I could have done even better if I’d been full time. But I never stopped working.
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Nothing would surprise my younger self more than being on TV and having a bestselling book. Because I still think, who would be interested in someone like me? We’re 15 years into making TV programmes and every time we are looking at new contracts I think, they’ll get wise to me, they won’t want to do it again. But they haven’t yet. And I’ve not lied. I’ve not pretended I’m anything I’m not. I come and do the filming jobs, but mainly I work on a farm and in a truck yard.
I’m 44 years old now and I have never voted once. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I am always reading. George Orwell’s 1984 was a massive turning point for me – he who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past. And I suppose that’s one of the main reasons I haven’t voted. I’m open to new ideas, to different thinking but I also know there’s a lot of lies and bullshit. So I don’t like to get involved in politics.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s in 2018 and it hasn’t changed my life one bit. But what it does do is make it easier for other people, especially [my wife] Sharon, who’s been in my life for all these years. It makes it easier for other people to understand why I do these stupid things and why I get all these obsessions.
I’m trying to learn not to be such a selfish bastard, right? I’ve just got married. We’ve got a child, and I’m trying to learn to be a bit more empathetic. Because where I was brought up, we don’t talk about our emotions. And I’m still like that. So I’d like to tell my younger self it all comes good in the end and everything happens for a reason. Me and Sharon have been together 12 years, but I was 44 when we got married, which is a bit late. But we got there, we’ve got a kid, and although we have challenges, it all came right in the end.
2026: Joining an RNLI crew in the new series of Guy Martin:Proper Jobs. Image: Danielle Watkeys
Looking back, I’m so pleased we had a daughter. At the time, I wasn’t bothered if I had a son or a daughter. But if I’d had a son, I think I’d have just tried moulding him into my way of thinking and obsessions with trucks, tractors, racing motorbikes. My wife and I have absolutely zero interest in horses but my eight-year-old is absolutely obsessed and now she’s got the loan of a pony. The obsession I have with understanding mechanical things and trying to make things go faster, she has the same with horses.
If I could relive one day, it would be that day I won at Pikes Peak [in Colorado, 2014]. I was sat at the top of the mountain after winning the race, and I had a copy of Animal Farm inside my leathers. So I just finished that book while I was up there – having just won this race on a bike I’d built in my shed. That was pretty special. Out of everything I’ve done, my younger self would be most proud that I spent four years building a motorbike in my shed, took it to America, and won at Pikes Peak. It was the first and only time a turbo motorbike has ever won there.
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I’m still building motorbikes in my shed. This time, I’m trying to be the first ever to reach 300 miles an hour on a conventional motorbike. Because I love going fast and I love being scared. For one of my TV shows, I ended up going 112.94mph on a push bike on Pendine Sands. And that’s probably the most frightened I’ve ever been. So I’m six years into the project and I had a good breakthrough last year. I’ve already done 260.658 miles per hour in a standing mile. But it’s not an ego massage, it’s a science experiment.
Guy Martin’s Proper Jobs is on Dave at 8pm on Sundays
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