Speed with Guy Martin

[Andrew G]

New series starts on Sunday at 8pm on C4.

Episode 1:
Guy gets back on a bike to see how far it's possible to cycle during 24 hours of non-stop pedalling.

With the help of bicycle brainiacs Miles Kingsbury and Mike Burrows, the man who designed Chris Boardman's gold medal-winning Lotus bike from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he builds a revolutionary tandem and pairs up with his friend, endurance expert Jason Miles, to see how far they can push their bodies at the Extreme Environments Laboratory at the University of Portsmouth.

In the build-up to the final record attempt at the historic Goodwood Motor Circuit, Guy also learns about the science of cooking for athletes with the Head of Nutrition at Team Sky, Nigel Mitchell, who instructs Guy to lose five kilos of weight and recommends a new diet regime.

Guy also works out the best ways of relieving himself on the move to save vital seconds. As the day approaches for the record attempt, news reaches the team that Hurricane Bertha is approaching.

[Phil H]

They contacted us regarding the Ernie Mills/Bill Paul [url=http://www.addiscombe.org/documents/1937%20World%20Hour%20Record.pdf]tandem hour record[/url]. I put them on to Chris. They seemed disappointed that there was no smartphone video of the record. They may or may not mention it.

[Jon H]

Watched this last night on demand. Enjoyable program, but I'm not quite sure how they reckoned they'd broken the existing 24 hour tandem record by riding a fully faired recumbent trike.

[Andrew G]

I enjoyed it too, although true it wasn't a tandem record. Don't know if there's a two man HPV record and if not they set one, fair play.

To be honest as soon as they mentioned Burrows at the start I knew it wasn't going to be an attempt at a tandem record. The man is a clever engineer but has a fixation on recumbent HPVs, always steers any conversation on to the benefit of recumbents for wind resistance ignoring the many down sides they have.

I think it has stopped him doing a lot better than he should have, particularly in the mainstream bike area where he has a lot of clever ideas that could have been developed more if he would be more flexible than an iron rod with manufacturers.

Joe Public won't care what it was or wasn't called though, you jest get a good programme.