Guy Martin Quotes

I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.

I'm a sort of nuts-and-bolts guy. I'm into turning wrenches and swinging a hammer and wrenching on cars.

As a kid growing up in a rural area, I was always tinkering with parts and machinery.

Tinkering is something we need to know how to do in order to keep something like the space station running. I am a tinkerer by nature.

I remember disassembling and putting an old analog alarm clock together. It was a lot of fun figuring out why it still worked with that one spring missing.

I've always worked on my own home and different places that I've owned. I really enjoyed it. But I'm a mechanic, a motorcycle and car builder.

I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket.

There's a great deal of poetry in working out how things work, cutting bits of metal, trying to mend stuff.

My mom and dad had a store, and sometimes people would return broken stuff. I'd take it apart and reassemble it. At 16, I really understood the architecture of things.

When I was four or five years old, my grandfather showed me how to build things, paint, saw. Through years of fixing bikes, repairing lawn mowers, I learned how things work.

In theory, cars are fairly simple. If they don't start, it's either the fuel system or the electrical system. Teach yourself about the path of each in your engine and tracing it is fairly straightforward. But at the beginning, mastering each new system seems like an unreachable shore. The car is effectively a black box.

I'm quite handy with a screwdriver. I like making and fixing things.

I wasn't much into girlfriends. I was too busy tinkering in the garage.

I happen to love engineering. I love figuring things out in a spatial sense, that whole realm of working with mechanical parts, and the relationship of the parts, and things like ratios and the speeds of particular objects.

From a very young age, I liked to take apart things. All of my Christmas gifts would wind up in a million pieces. I actually recall taking apart my dad's lawnmower three times to understand how combustible engines work.

Dad was a bus driver, and when he finished work he would repair cars.

I was a dispatcher, flat-tire fixer, changed the oil, fixed the fan belts. There was nothing too good for me.

My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

I'm one of those guys who likes to piddle around in the garage and fix stuff.

I've always been interested in science. I used to take watches apart and clocks apart, and there's little screws, and a little this and that, and I found out if I dropped one of them, that thing ain't gonna work.

I'm crazy about cars, about boats, about airplanes, about anything mechanical - I'm just a boy, really, and my clients are like boys, too.

My engineer dad is where my technical acumen comes from. I remember him taking me to the factories to see how what works. Often he used to open up his motorbike to fix things and I saw how the wheels worked. His car used to be open for dissection very regularly. All this taught me and inspired me to look beyond what I could see on the skin.

I'm not very good with cars. They rebel against me.

I was going to go be an auto mechanic.