Last year the performance of rostrum men Martin Finnegan and Guy Martin announced that a new order may be about to emerge in TT affairs. MacMcDiarmid spoke to the duo and looked back on their battle for supremacy in 2005
It wasn’t for the lead, but one of last year’s most riveting on-track duels was between the two most outstanding young guns of road racing today. It came in the Senior at the end of what had been an up-and-down week for both the riders involved, Martin Finnegan and Guy Martin.This matters, for however much the authorities play around with classes and programmes, and whatever inducements or lack of them exist, the one thing on which the future of theTT will hinge is the quality of its up-and-coming riders. Last year these two men – each with very different backgrounds but also closely linked – began to make their mark as futureTT stars.This year both are anxious to confirm their new status among the top rank.
For added poignancy, only three years before the emerging Englishman had worked as a race mechanic for the Irishman. “He was good, too,” added Finnegan over a paddock cuppa a day before their Senior face-off. “One morning I came out at eight o’clock and he was cleaning underneath the bottom yoke with his toothbrush. That’s dedication.” Martin Finnegan – hails from Lusk, just two miles from the Skerries circuit north of Dublin.
Anyone who’s watched him will be aware that the muscular Irishman’s spectacular style is instantly eye-grabbing – witness Stephen Davison’s stunning photograph of him crunching down into Barregarrow Bottom, sparks and shards of fibreglass in his wake. No one leaps higher over Ballaugh, or gets it more sideways into corners, than the former Vitrans Honda rider. Nonetheless, smoothness, not brute force is supposed to win TTs, and there were signs that his style was becoming noticeably smoother.
Cool and relaxed, he also has the mindset to tackle the mental marathon that two weeks against the Mountain Course represents. He’d already begun TT ’05 in fine style, grabbing his first TT rostrum position with third place in the Superbike race. Now just 25, Finnegan already had a mountain of experience behind him. A former Irish motocross and grass track champion, he began road racing in 1999, and just 12 months later won the 250cc Newcomers race at the Manx Grand Prix. Few riders of that age have that much Mountain Circuit experience.
And that certainly includes Martin, who rocketed to prominence two years ago in his first meeting over the Mountain. Although he rode last year for Ireland’s Uel Duncan Racing, he actually hails from the village of Kirmington, near Humberside Airport. Now aged 24, his motorcycle pedigree is slimmer than Finnegan’s, although his father, Ian, used to contest theTT. In fact riding off-road scares Martin half to death. “I’m useless at it,” he grinned, “it frightens the life out of me. In the air I just freeze.”
Put public roads under his wheels, though, and Martin is something else. In 2004, as a total TT newcomer who’d only previously seen the course on video, he lapped at an astonishing 122mph to place seventh in his first Senior and clinch the newcomer’s award. Although he’s the first to admit that position was helped by a glut of retirements, tongues have been wagging about his potential ever since. Perhaps just as crucially, even those doubters who’d suggested he was too wild, too fast too soon, must have been impressed by his control and maturity last year. Martin’s pretty feisty off the bike, too. While Finnegan rarely gets animated and speaks in a laid-back Irish burr, Martin gives the impression of brash self-confidence, rattling off words as if they were wheelspin.
Although a big softie at heart off the track (he’s a patron of theWallace and Gromit Children’s Charity, for a start), he has a temper, too. In 2002 after an altercation with an official at Rockingham race course, he slammed his laptop shut on his fingers, telling him to “stick your championship up your arse.” Not surprisingly that outburst got him suspended from UK short circuits. Undeterred, he decamped to Drumahoe, just outside ’Derry, and took up road racing instead. In his first season he won the newcomers support class and hasn’t looked back.
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