Guy Martin: ‘If it goes wrong you’ll be on the ground pretty fast and that will be the end of you’

Guy Martin enters our Zoom call on an electric bike, his face obscured by a helmet. It seems an appropriate introduction to the motorbike racer turned television presenter, arguably best known for injuring himself on screen. “That’s very Guy Martin,” laughs the director of his latest “daredevil” documentary, tasked with holding the phone for him as he cycles into shot.

Like all of his programmes to date, Martin’s latest project absolutely reeks of petrol: in what must be many men’s dream, he has spent lockdown learning to fly a fleet of historical planes, including a Tiger Moth, American Harvard and, in his toughest test yet, a Hawker Hurricane – taking it head-to-head in the first “dogfight” with a Messerschmitt 109 in the skies above Kent since 1940.

Under the expert tutelage of vintage aircraft specialist Anna Walker, the premise is to find out if he could have cut it as a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, when The Few – with an average age of just 20 – held off the Luftwaffe, despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

Martin has been fascinated by the Second World War for as long as he can remember, his interest sparked by his father, Ian, who named his son after Wing Commander Guy Gibson, an RAF pilot who flew in the Dambusters raids. “I asked my mum when I was seven or eight when the war was going to end,” he recalls, “because my dad was always going on about it.”

Both his grandfathers fought in the war, but barely breathed a word about it to their families. His paternal grandfather, John, was in the Royal Marines and landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, returning to the Normandy beaches with Martin, his father and uncle on the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994. Even then, his grandfather remained tight-lipped about his experiences. “I’m sure they’ve seen stuff, which is why I never really pushed it,” Martin says.

His maternal grandfather Walter, on the other hand, fought for the Nazis after Germany invaded his home country of Latvia. Does having grandfathers on both sides of the conflict change how he sees the war? Not particularly, says Martin, given he doesn’t blame Walter: “He was a conscript – he was made to join when Germany invaded Latvia.” After the war, Latvian soldiers were exonerated by the Nuremberg trials and surviving conscripts were allowed to settle in the US and Britain as political refugees.

After his 2014 documentary in which he restored a Spitfire that had been buried in France for decades, Martin’s new show celebrates the unsung hero that won the Battle of Britain – the Hurricane. A slightly slower but much more stable gun plane, it was common wisdom, says Martin, that it was best to fly in the former but fight in the latter.

He does a decent job of demonstrating the incredible danger Hurricane pilots put themselves in. At the end of one sortie, Martin climbs out of the cockpit visibly exhausted from the constant G force exerted on his body. During another, the wings shake alarmingly when he takes a turn just a fraction too tightly.

Other than a nauseating mistake where he causes an unexpected nosedive, Martin seems a natural in the cockpit. During the programme’s climactic dogfight, a former Red Arrow is sent to fly against him – but even he can’t shake Martin off his tail.

“That’s just because of my background,” says Martin, describing the feel of flying a plane as being not too different from driving a tractor.

Despite decades of speed racing, breaking his back twice in crashes, and thinking he was about to die more than once, the Hurricane cockpit felt even hairier. “If it goes wrong you’ll be on the ground pretty fast and generally that will be the end of you,” he says, somewhat cheerily.

Martin displays a remarkably cavalier attitude towards his own life. Although he’s retired from road racing, he hasn’t given up his bike by any means. His attention has instead shifted towards breaking records, his next challenge going a mile at 300mph on a sit-on bike, a feat that has claimed the lives of several riders who have attempted it so far. “I’m not trying to be dramatic or anything, but it is something worth dying for,” he says.

In previous interviews, he has suggested that he’d be doing well to make it to 40, a birthday that will be coming for him in November. Does he still stand by that? “Yeah, I still think I’ll be doing well to make it,” he says, as his director, James Woodroffe, puts his head in his hands.

And what does his family think of his appetite for danger? It’s a mixed picture, he says. His partner Sharon is surprisingly supportive, despite the pair having a three-year-old daughter. “With the missus, we’ve been together seven years and I was doing stupid things when I met her and I’m doing stupid things now, so she’s used to it,” he says. “She understands because I met her through road racing… She’s known loads of people who have died [in crashes].”

His mother, on the other hand, remains worried, particularly as Martin’s father was a motorbike racer, too. “Mum’s become a Bible basher and she says it’s all because of me,” he laughs. In 2010, he had a nearly fatal crash in the Isle of Man TT, where he broke his back after being thrown from his bike into a wall.

The race was halted while paramedics raced to save his life. There was one person who was optimistic about his chances, says Martin: “[Mum] told me: ‘I knew it would be all right because He told me so.’ ”

Outside of the television work and Kamikaze motorbike work, Martin keeps busy with his strikingly modest other jobs. He turned down a presenting role on Top Gear after the exodus of Jeremy Clarkson and Co in order to keep working as a truck mechanic in Grimsby. He also runs a small tractor company, leasing vehicles and drivers to farmers when needed. Last year, he was struggling to find enough drivers, so he drove tractors himself every day from March until the end of harvest in October, only taking the odd day off for filming.

He recalls once having to pass up a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to film in the RAF’s centrifuge trainer, which teaches pilots how to deal with G force so strong it can cause you to pass out. Martin cancelled because “some bloody MOT had come up in Grimsby that Guy couldn’t get out of”, says Woodroffe, resignedly.

So if he doesn’t need the work, why does he keep putting himself in harm’s way? “It’s the risk, it’s like nothing else,” he says. “I can only imagine [it’s like] heroin, and I’m addicted.”

Guy Martin’s Battle of Britain is on Channel 4 on Sunday at 9pm