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Guy Martin and Triumph ready for the speed record

The English daredevil is counting down the days until the new undertaking: 400 miles per hour aboard the Triumph Rocket Streamliner​

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Forget the image of Guy Martin sipping tea from a big cup decorated with sweet hearts as he admires the scenery peacefully. Set aside even those times when the most bizarre road circuit rider in the world worked as a truck mechanic in his dad’s garage.

Guy was born to take risks, period. In fact, the rider from Lincolnshire, a county located in the peaceful English countryside, already holds two rather “special” records, both astride a bicycle: 78.15 miles per hour of speed recorded on the “Wall of Death”, a sort of cylinder that is 90 degrees perpendicular to the ground where our hero pedalled like a mad hamster, in addition to the 112 miles per hour on a beach following a truck, pedalling and using the aerodynamic slipstream provided by the huge motorized vehicle. Even a lunatic like him defines this experience laconically with a never before used adjective: “horrible”.

Not content with all of this, unfulfilled by dangerous road circuit races, Guy is now ready and so is his new vehicle, a Triumph Streamliner powered by twin turbo, methanol guzzling engines that unleash about 1000 horses at 9000 rpm, basically a true two-wheeled missile..

This monster has a suit made of an extremely lightweight Kevlar and is aerodynamically the fastest result that the English company could create to seek the new speed record of at least 377 miles per hour, although the project chief, Matt Markstaller and Guy Martin himself are aiming for something more like 400 miles per hour (about 644 kilometres per hour). Hurry up, boys, because James Toseland is also preparing for the same undertaking.

As you can see in the bennetts.co.uk video on Channel 4, the location for this attempt will be the “usual” Bonneville Salt Flats, located in the state of Utah, not far from Miller Motosport Park where SBK and AMA have raced in various editions. It was a rider from the American championship, Italian-New Yorker Jason Di Salvo (he’s not a Sicilian-American gangster from the fifties, but a skilled rider who raced in the Supersport championship with Triumph, as well as a few World Grand Prix wild cards) who, in a test using the same vehicle, had a catastrophic crash in 2013 when the engines caught fire.

But none of this frightens Guy, who is counting down the days until the big event: “I can’t wait to get in the Triumph Infor Rocket Streamliner and speed over the Bonneville Salt Flats in the summer… I know that they have built an incredible vehicle to give my team and m the best possible chances to break the two-wheeled speed record.”

Of course, there will be no lack of TV coverage for team Martin, already the start of the British show “Speed with Guy Martin”, a series where Guy recounts his various undertakings, from the first to the last. There are only two doubts left: the exact date of the event, which should be between the 21st and 25th of August, and a dilemma that has haunted the English rider’s fans for years: ok, Guy, the more you risk the more fun you have, but could you please tell us how the devil you ride with your forelocks inside the helmet covering both eyes?

 

 

Translated by Jonathan Blosser

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