Guy Martin: When You Dead, You Dead

'The maddest 12 months of my life. The journey starts with an oddball race up an American mountain and ends with me checking myself out of hospital with a broken back. Again …'

As Guy Martin's grandfather Voldemars frequently reminded him,'When you dead, you dead.' So, before it's all over, Guy Martin is making the most of the time he’s got.

In this past year alone, Guy has raced the Isle of Man TT and finished on the podium; bike trekked through India; competed in solo 24-hour bicycles races; flown a stunt plane; broken a go-kart speed record down a French mountain and dusted himself off after a dramatic crash at the Dunrod 150 Superbike race. And he’s done all this around his day job as a truck mechanic.

But let Guy tell you about it himself: ‘This book starts in a Transit, ends in a Transit, and in between I’ve raced a few pushbikes, raced a few motorbikes and got a fair few stories to tell you.’ Spot on.

Except for one summer spent sleeping inside a truck in a concrete yard in Northern Ireland, Guy Martin has lived within 20 miles of the Grimsby hospital he was born in, on the 4th November 1981. But that hasn’t stopped the professional truck mechanic from winning multiple international road races, including eleven Ulster GPs and eight Scarborough Gold Cups, plus scoring fourteen Isle of Man TT podiums. Neither has it prevented him from presenting five critically acclaimed prime-time TV series, being the subject of a BAFTA-nominated documentary or breaking British and World land speed records along the way. Did we mention he’s also the author of a phenomenal number one bestselling autobiography? Not bad for a truck fitter.