Guy Martin by Guy Martin

Author:Guy Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753551547
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER 11

Steam-cleaning muck from under trucks

Work. Work. Work. Work isn’t the TV job or motorbike racing, that’s all stuff I do away from work. Work is, and most probably always will be, fixing trucks. I’ve been doing it since I was a nipper. Except for a few months here and there, most recently after I left my dad’s place in 2010 and worked as a labourer, I have been a full-time truck fitter since leaving school and going to John Hebb Volvo as an apprentice. Even for some of the time I was living in Ireland me and Johnny, my mate and mechanic, were fixing concrete trucks during the week for one of the team’s sponsors. I’ve had other part-time jobs at the same time as the trucks: glass-collecting; engine-building; driving trucks down the docks; bit of harvesting to help out on the farm, but the constant is trucks. Now I work for Moody International in Grimsby, servicing Scanias, preparing them for MOTs and getting brand-new ones ready for IVA tests. I reckon I’d give up the TV job and racing before I pack in the trucks.

I started working for Mick Moody in early 2011. You may remember, if you read the autobiography, I was handcuffed, arrested and stuck in Scunthorpe nick on the way to the interview. It didn’t stop me getting the job and I’m still there, but at times my boss has had to be more flexible than most would be. I cleared off to India for two weeks, then there’s all the racing commitments and filming an average of one day a week for most of the year, but I graft when I’m there and leave enough notice for him to get cover if he really needs it.

Moody works in the office on his own. There’s probably room for eight people to work in Moody International’s four-room, one-storey office, but it’s just Mick and whoever he’s selling trucks to, or drivers coming in and out. I’m in the shed a hundred yards away. It’s a tall, steel truck shed with two roller shutter doors, both tall and wide enough to let a Scania Topline through. When it’s windy the doors make a hell of a noise, rattling in their runners. The traffic on the A180 dual-carriageway, right outside the back, rumbles past all day and night too, but I’ve got used to it now.

If it was empty you could probably squeeze four trucks, without their trailers, into it. In the far corner is a storeroom. A workbench runs down the right-hand side and my black Snap-On work station is butted up to the storeroom. A staircase, the one the Rolls-Royce Merlin propeller half-demolished when I took the restrictor off it, leads up to the top of the storeroom and big parts are held up there. I work, in and out of the pit, on the left half of the shed. Most of the right-hand side of the floorspace is covered in parts of older trucks we’re doing up to show standard.

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