The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (43 page)

We were so far behind that it seemed reasonable to take some sil y risks. I overtook as many cars as I could; some were pootling along at 40mph. Their fear was our opportunity to claw back lost time. I revel ed in the conditions; it was licensed madness. When it became impossible to see past the windscreen the race was stopped for safety reasons.

They restarted it several hours later when the fog had thinned a bit and, at Jeremy’s suggestion, poor James was sent out into oblivion. The rules required the presenters to drive a minimum percentage of the race, otherwise I could have done the lot for them. James was cautious, but even at a fraction of my pace he fired through the gravel trap a few times. Jeremy talked at him on the pit-to-car radio the whole time:

‘Drive faster … Slow down, save the tyres … More speed James …’ and so on. If that didn’t encourage him to get to the end, nothing would.

I slept on the floor for a total of two hours. I could sleep anywhere as long as my head was higher than my chest and my knees were bent for circulation.

The morning after, the presenters looked like zombies. Their driving styles were overloading the front tyres, chewing the rubber down to the wire cords, so we kept a careful eye on them as they ran their final stints on autopilot.

James’s body was present but his mind had long since gone home and was waiting for the rest to catch up. He stared vacantly across the garage, fondling an empty teacup. Hammond had the giggles and was banging out pieces to camera, his spirits lifted again. Jeremy was running on a kind of delusional overdrive and had turned a mysterious shade of purple. He brought the car home and I take my hat off to him

– he’d managed a running commentary through nearly every single lap he’d driven throughout the race.

I was extremely proud when they eventual y crossed the line, third in class. That the BMW finished at al was a miracle.

Georgie – equal y miraculously – held on to her waters and I hightailed it home. Forty-eight hours later, she started contractions. It was time to become a dad.

Attending the birth was not the ‘mystical experience’ I’d heard it described as by new-age men in the media. It looked pretty damn awful to me, but the conclusion was magical. A determined little girl wrapped me around her finger on Day One and I drove our new family home comfortably below the speed limit.

As for my racing career, my recently acquired knowledge of the Square Mile wasn’t helping me raise the finance needed to run a go-kart race, let alone a NASCAR campaign, but I kept my radar on.

I’d started writing for
Autosport
magazine, reviewing new and exciting racing cars. Out of the blue, they sent me to Orlando, Florida, to drive Red Bul ’s top-flight NASCAR at Lakeland Speedway. It was a dream ticket.

The last British hopeful who went to the States hunting for a NASCAR test was British Touring Car Champion Jason Plato. They welcomed him with a little southern hospitality.

Introduced to the legendary Dale Earnhardt in the pits, Jason waxed lyrical about the prospect of joining the series. Dale never took off his wraparound sunglasses and his moustache barely moved as he drawled, ‘This here racin’ ain’t for puppy dawgs. This here’s where the big dawgs take a piss.’ That’s why they cal ed Dale ‘The Intimidator’.

On my arrival at Lakeland I was told to look for the team’s crew chief, Randy Cox. It came as no surprise. On my previous visit to America I’d met Dick Trickle, the famous racing driver.

Randy bolted me into the Camry without so much as a shock and awe safety briefing. It was stuffed with so many restraints I had to wedge myself into the seat.

‘Y’al set?’

I gave Randy a thumbs up.

‘OK, let’s go.’

I had 800 horsepower at my command in an instant and, with it, a hurricane of sound.

At the end of each short straight I leant heavily on the brakes and worked at straight-lining into and past the apex. The car nose-dived and fired in with superb accuracy and stability. I screwed the speed off, let the big girl turn through the middle and fol owed the test driver’s advice by opening her out towards the large black tyre marks on the retaining wal as I exited. The power, the beautiful power sang and screamed on the straights as the wheels spun over invisible bumps in the asphalt.

The ever-present concrete wal would punish the slightest deviation from the racing line. It was a superb feeling, like street racing but with more grunt and grip. I drove harder with every lap and my twenty-something passes went al too quickly. It left me wanting more.

‘Where do I sign?’ was my first question as I clambered out of the car. If only it was that easy.

The al -important debrief with Randy took place the same evening at Hooters Bar over a bowl of chicken wings and a beer.

‘When you first drove outta the pits I was takin’ bets from the guys on which lap you’d crash,’ he chuckled. ‘But the times you did in that car, with that set-up, were real y impressive.’

I’d narrowly outpaced their benchmark time on lap seven, in spite of driving on older, slower tyres.

Not bad for a first drive at a new track, but that’s where the honeymoon ended. Red Bul already had a driver lineup, so I thanked the team and flew back to the UK. They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at al .

Series 10 of
Top Gear
was there to console me. Jenson Button had attacked my time in the Suzuki the previous year and failed to beat it. (He subsequently won the Formula 1 title, so I seriously doubt that keeps him up at night.)

Lewis Hamilton was next in the queue. He’d just ended his first season in F1, wiped the floor with his team-mate and former champ Fernando Alonso and narrowly lost out on the title. Now it was time for the Big One: what could the lad from Stevenage do in a Suzuki fartbox?

I’d heard so much hype about Lewis that I was keen to check him out for myself. He arrived in McLaren team gear, but hanging loose. He was disarmingly laid-back and we warmed to him immediately.

I drove him around the slowly drying track to show him the best lines. Apart from Webber, I think he was the only F1 driver to let me do that. I wanted to help him adapt to the majestic Suzuki so I could see what he was truly capable of. I reminded him to get it sideways into the penultimate corner and pin the throttle, not to drive it properly like an F1 machine. The more I explained, the more he listened. This was no prima donna. Sure, he was composed, but not in the least arrogant.

The odd thing about his laps was that they didn’t look special, they were neither lairy nor super-smooth, yet his times in the wet were absolutely stunning. He was doing 1.46, then 1.45 whilst the track was stil greasy.

His dad told him not to spin the wheels off the start line, said it was costing him time. Their rivalry was al too familiar. Lewis reacted by sticking an extra thousand rpm on his next launch and smoking the bags. He was having fun, bouncing and jiving to a cool track he found on the radio, ‘Dub Be Good to Me’.

With footage in the can from his earlier runs, we waited for the conditions to improve. When Lewis went again he produced a time of 1:44.7, just 0.3 of a second slower than my best on a ful y dry run. I went and checked the track. Many of the corners were practical y dry, but not entirely. I played back his in-car footage and felt that he cut some cute lines through the Hammerhead chicane; but nothing unsporting. Even so, his lap was
exceptional y
fast; he was clearly a special talent. What I admired most was the way he did it so effortlessly and with such humility.

A
n impeccably turned out Italian driver in his fifties picked me up at Milan Bergamo airport in an equal y pristine Mercedes E Class. His immaculately honed features reminded me of Christopher Lee, aka Saruman, the slaughterer of Hobbits in
TheLord of the Rings
. From the moment he tossed my luggage into the boot until we reached our destination he kept away from the middle pedal as he guided his Mercedes missile through the rugged scenery at a cool 100. He never spoke either, apart from when a pair of construction trucks blocked our progress.

‘Che cazzo stai facendo qui?’
he hissed. The hapless drivers yielding their ground immediately. No one screwed with Saruman.

After that brief interruption, I dozed off whilst the best taxi driver in the world dispatched 150km and final y rounded a hairpin to reveal the picturesque resort of Riva, nestled on the shore of Lake Garda. We descended sharply into the spectacular basin hewn into the Dolomite Mountains by ancient glaciers. The sun twinkled on the vast restless pool of water below.

Riva was ful of buses downloading their quota of blue-rinsed and pastel-suited holidaymakers. They joined the ranks of cool Italians wearing insect-like sunglasses and an army of Germans chomping on Frankfurters and chips.

The twisting Gardesana road, with its unparal eled views and dramatical y claustrophobic tunnels, was a driver’s paradise. Winston Churchil cal ed it the Eighth Wonder of the world. I cal ed it heaven, because it was my first day on set as a member of a James Bond stunt team to film the opening chase scene for
The Quantum of Solace
.

Production schedules for big movies lasted several months at a time and filming had become more than a part-time role for me. There was a familiar camaraderie with film crews, but I spared more than a few thoughts for my Army mates who were serving overseas with distinction.

I had reluctantly cal ed time on my Army career when it final y became impossible to balance al my commitments, but the bond of brotherhood was unbroken. Military service had changed my outlook on the world forever; anything felt achievable, especial y when you were with the right people.

Many of us brought our families out and I was joined by my very own Bond girls. With breakfast under the canopy of a fine restaurant and the water lapping at our feet, Georgie and I found Garda life very appealing. Our baby girl nodded off with the occasional point and shriek of ‘Ca’ – short for car in my book, but Georgie insisted she meant ‘cat’. The unforgettable scenery, sharp company and Italian glamour made

‘work’ seem like a holiday.

Balancing multiple high-octane roles was chal enging in every sense. Above al , experiencing such a variety of cutting-edge machinery was the spice of life.
Top Gear
needed me to return to England to film a

‘Scud’, the Ferrari 430 Scuderia. Ferrari only had it in the UK for one day and Wilman was adamant that I got on a plane.

The Scuderia edition was the super-light, super-sporting, weapons-grade version of the mid-engined Ferrari 430, itself a balanced demi-god. It was the kind of tool that founder Enzo Ferrari first set up his factory to build: uncompromising engineering excel ence.

The Scud was epic. It was stripped of al but the basic functions and the weight reduction spent the horsepower al the better around the track. The soft leather wheel was chunky to grip. A flick of a dial to

‘race’ mode denied any electronic traction interference and upgraded the paddle gearshift from stun to kil .

Each staccato crack beckoned the next gear in just sixty mil iseconds.

Schumacher had a hand in the development process that had begun with the original mid-engined Dino in 1970, before passing through the 308 to the 355, and the 430 was the ground-breaking result.

Within a lap I recognised that no supercar had ever held this level of mechanical front grip. It gave such phenomenal feedback through the steering that you felt every movement of the tyre. It was as if the car knew where you wanted it to go before you did.

There was no time to chew the fat with Ferrari before I sprinted back to the airport and returned to Italy. Just enough to say their car was magnificent and had we been on fresh tyres, rather than a set pre-digested by Clarkson, the lap time would have been much faster.

Subsequently, I tested the Ferrari 458 and for a nanosecond was beguiled by its voluptuous styling into believing it was better than the Scud. But you can’t improve on perfection, and certainly not by replacing a vital organ like the handbrake with a push-button fuse. That real y only left the Scud with one rival for the mantle of Uber-Coupe.

The Aston Martin DBS was one of the most sophisticated machines on the market, perhaps the best al -round sports car ever built. Its graceful curves kept its brute performance covert; beneath the mature exterior was a recalcitrant wild child. It boasted six litres of devilish horsepower, total ing over 500bhp. The V12 engine responded to every mil imetre of movement in the throttle, like an F1 car. It howled on ful song but reduced to a whispering burble at low revs. The ceramic brakes clamped like vices but with such sensitivity that you could modulate them at the limit of grip from its fat tyres.

There was scarcely any visible difference between the DB9 and the DBS, yet the slightly lowered, delicately enhanced suspension turned the girl next door into a supermodel. Beneath her hemline, the heightened technology of the braking and traction control systems was streets ahead. Where most anti-skid systems prevented the tyre from getting anywhere near to locking during braking, the Aston’s onboard computer took it to the limit several times a second and you sensed its work underfoot.

The traction control was equal y aggressive on acceleration. You could leave it turned on, stamp the right pedal with a mere modicum of ability and impress your friends without decapitating them.

The scooped bucket seats wrapped around your kidneys, forging man with machine. Ergonomical y, the driving position was perfect, with the centre of the helm directly in line with the shoulders, creating a natural 45-degree bend at the arms and easy legroom. The DBS had stacks of grip but she ran on the edge, reacting to the slightest toggle of the wheel, biting your hand off if you were rough. Once you stuck it sideways though, you could spin the tyres like Catherine wheels al day long. Just as wel I practised that extensively for a job that was already in the pipeline.