Video: Guy Martin says he’s only at the North West 200 to: “Get signatures. It’s a means to an end.”

Terrific BBC journalist Stephen Watson is covering the North West 200 road races for the channel right now (go and see it at BBC NI in the channel’s excellent ongoing coverage of the event) and last night he caught a few minutes with a chatty Guy Martin. You can watch this very interesting bit of footage below:

Martin might have recently claimed that he didn’t reveal his decision to shut the door on big-event racing like the North West or the TT, but he did and he had. If you weren’t here on MoreBikes.co.uk back then this is what we ran from him LAST NOVEMBER… this is a direct quote… you’ll notice that he says he’s done with racing right here.. LAST NOVEMBER… here it is: “When I was lying on sofa with a broken back I knew I’d had enough. It’s all the same shit going on from year to year. I’ve done as well as I could as a hobby racer, to go faster I’d need to dedicate my whole life to it and I’m not willing to do that. I have walked away and I’m racing on my own terms. My Martek is on its way to New Zealand and I’m racing it in a hill climb out there. I’m going to have a go at breaking the motorcycle lap record at the Nürburgring, then I might build a car to race at Pikes Peak and then do something else. I’ll do more flat tracking next year than I’ve done this year.” As an after result of those quotes, many were surprised when Martin signed for Honda to contest selected road race this year.

Martin is riding the new Blade as team-mate to John McGuinness. The current rumble in the paddock is that the bikes are well off the pace at the moment and there’s a lot of head scratching going on to try and get the all-new litre bike going quicker – and Martin makes more than a passing comment about this in the interview.

He also talks about the desire to go racing again and why he chose to come back (or was lured back, depending on your, his and Honda’s point of view).

You can see in this great bit of TV interviewing that whatever was going through Martin’s mind LAST NOVEMBER seems to have now been put to one side whilst he goes out to tweak the  2017 Honda Fireblade and get his eye back in for road racing before going to The Island in a couple of weeks.

But it’s a bit of a weird interview in places, not least of all because Martin says that riding at the high-end NI event is a: “Means to an end,” so that he can get race signatures in order to get out and contest this year’s TT races.

What do you reckon? Is this Guy just being Guy or do you see it in some other way?