road racer<\/a> and at the Isle of Man TT in particular. He never won at the TT, although it was long thought that it was a matter of time for him as he achieved 17 podium finishes in total, including eight between 2009 and 2011.<\/p>\nThe first part of Martin\u2019s career was self-funded, and he worked to be able to pay to race.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t very good at school,\u201d Martin wrote in his\u00a0Letter to my Younger Self\u00a0edition for Big Issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t do very well, but for some reason I convinced myself that I was going to go to college. I think I lasted one term.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cThen I got an interview at the local Volvo truck garage and worked there. And I learned so much.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019d let me do anything \u2013 taking engines to bits, building engines, and I loved it. I could not get to work quick enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we were earning great money \u2013 because I was doing 78 hours a week at 16. And that helps you save money to go motorbike racing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin\u2019s enjoyment of racing meant an increasing amount of the money earned from his garage job was being spent on it. That meant he had to work more to be able to pay his way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to take drugs just to be able to work more,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
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\u201cBecause the more I raced, the more expensive it was, so the more I had to work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo 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\u2019s how it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy heroes weren\u2019t racers\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Martin ended up racing for well-known teams like Wilson Craig Racing and TAS Racing, he maintained his interest in the mechanical side of motorcycle racing throughout his career.<\/p>\n
In fact, he writes that his idols growing up were engine builders rather than riders: \u201cMy heroes weren\u2019t the motorbike racers, they were legendary motorbike engine builders.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA bloke called Chris Mayhew, who I still see now, and Tony Scott and Nicky Kennedy \u2013 and they got me interested in Phil Irving, who wrote a book in the 1940s called\u00a0Tuning For Speed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cAll I ever wanted to do was race. It wasn\u2019t really an obsession.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took for me to stop racing six or seven years ago to realise it wasn\u2019t 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. \u201c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Isle of Man TT racer, now TV star, Guy Martin has opened up on drug use early…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,251047,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-498970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-guy-martin","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}