The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (5 page)

During the eleven laps that fol owed spectators were agonised and baffled by the sight of me driving defiantly on the racing line as my competitors drove for the inside, time and again, in a bid to overtake me.

My father choked his way through two packets of Marlboro in the space of twenty minutes, lighting each fresh fag from the last. Every time I came round he was shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Defend, defend, DEFEND YOUR LIIIINE!!!’

I heard nothing over the din of the engine. I was busy driving as fast as I could. Moving off line to defend meant driving slower and that didn’t compute. I stayed persistently wide, braked as late as I dared and aimed at the apex of the corners like a missile.

I was oblivious to most of my near misses, but Dad had a bird’s eye view as the other vultures pecked at my heels. Our wheels were interlocking at over 100mph and a single touch would have easily catapulted me into the air.

By some miracle, I finished unscathed having conceded a handful of positions. One of the spectators was a journalist cal ed Charles Bradley, who had observed my antics from Clearways corner. A shard of flying gravel had cut his cheek, but he stil gave me my first mention in
Motorsport News
: ‘Ben is frighteningly fast …’

I was intoxicated. I’d lived more in twenty minutes than in the rest of my life put together. The time that passed between races was just that, time passing. I dreamt racing, day and night. Al my aspirations now centred on becoming the best driver in the world. After a couple more races, I managed to lead one, but was harpooned out of contention by the second-placed car – yet again I’d failed to defend the corner. But the taste of potential victory was firmly entrenched. I decided I should win every time from then on. In blinkered pursuit of that goal, I discovered ever more inventive ways to have enormous accidents, from sil y shunts to ful -blown hospitalisation.

On the Brands GP loop, I tried to outmanoeuvre two drivers by speeding around the outside of both into the superfast Hawthorn right-hander. The guy on the inside squeezed the one to his left who did likewise and shoved me on to the grass at 120.

I hit the Armco with such force that my head would have hit my knees had the dashboard not intervened. We never found the front left wheel, but the whole front right corner went into orbit and landed on the straight in front of my team-mate. On the second bounce it took the sidepod clean off another car, then bounded into the trees.

I final y came to rest a few hundred metres down the track, regained consciousness and slowly opened my eyes. I was coated with bright green algae that inhabited the gravel trap. Like Bil Murray in
Ghostbusters
, I’d been slimed. The car now resembled a bathtub, a bare chassis with a single wheel loosely attached by some brake cable. My dense cranium had even broken the steering wheel.

Over time, I broke every component of the car from the drive shafts to the suspension, gearbox, engine, chassis, everything. I once tried to find a little extra power in a drag race to the chequered flag. I pushed harder on the accelerator, which broke the solid cast metal throttle stop and ripped the throttle cable out of the carburettor.

After I wrote off my third chassis, it was clear that the ‘bal s out’ strategy needed fine-tuning. During qualifying at Lydden Hil I was on the limit through a fast right when I had to lift off to avoid a spinning car.

Seconds later, I was spiral ing through the air and sitting in a bathtub again.

Dad sprinted to my side, absolutely livid. Not only was he funding this enterprise, but it would have been his neck on the block if I’d been converted into a limbless corpse. I couldn’t make the race, so I climbed into his car for a very long, silent drive home.

I knew he was pissed from the way he was twiddling his sideburns. After half an hour he said, ‘What the fuck were you doing waving your arms around like that anyway? You could have lost an arm.’

‘I was just ducking …’

He shot me an incredulous look.

‘I’ve just had to buy that car you trashed. If they can’t bend it straight, your season’s over.’

It was my much needed wake-up cal . It seemed I had an answer for every catastrophe, but no sense to avoid one. I had to preserve the car, only risking it in measured bursts when absolutely necessary.

A part-time job in a warehouse packing cheddar cheeses the size of breeze-blocks provided plenty of opportunity to analyse past events. I spent the rest of my time hanging out with my newly acquired girlfriend and practising essential driving skil s in her Ford Fiesta. Georgie was a bit special in more ways than one. She could do a handbrake turn
and
spin the wheels at the same time. It was love at first sight.

I figured out that even if I was the best driver on a given day, I would never win every race because there were too many circumstances beyond my control. My problem was, I’d been forcing it. Every race had a natural order, a structure I had to respect and learn to predict. Once I accepted that, the frequency of my visits to the podium exceeded those to the infirmary.

I was total y focused on learning the craft. My body began reacting like an alarm clock, ‘going off’

weeks in advance of a big race. I prepared my logistics ahead of time, drove the track a mil ion times in my head.

My naïve concept of sportsmanship took a hammering at Castle Combe. I learnt the ropes the hard way from my ‘team-mate’, a Formula First veteran who led the championship. He had a nose like a beak that found its way into my side of the garage whenever anything worthwhile was going on. Then it was al smiles, which front rol bar was I running, what tyre pressure worked best and so pleased to meet you, Mr Potential Sponsor, here’s my card.

Later the same day I was leading him through a very fast corner on the last lap. He poked his nose up my inside but I held strong on the outside. He couldn’t get through, and it felt like he steered into me and punted me off.

I slid across the grass like a demented lawnmower and rejoined to finish fifth, just behind him. A crimson haze descended over me, but I managed to resist the temptation to T-bone him on the way into the pit lane, drag him from the car and use my helmet on him as a basebal bat.

The next race was at Cadwel Park, the best track in Britain, with more pitch and fal in its curves than Pamela Anderson. I had terminal understeer in qualifying and ended up running behind my ‘mate’ in third place, but I had my evil eye on him. I drove the wheels off my machine and discovered the power of control ed aggression. The car bent to my wil and unleashed a furious pace. The closer I got to my old pal, the more mistakes he made. We approached a section cal ed ‘The Mountain’ where an S bend climbed a steep gorge and before I had the pleasure of dispatching his ass personal y, he spun off the circuit. Good karma.

Motor sport was dog eat dog, which went against the grain after five years making friends for life in the process of surviving boarding school. Popularity in racing lasted as long as you were competitive, and people were prepared to go to any lengths to remain so. I found one driver stealing my engine one night; another team sabotaged my suspension. But there were always a few rays of sunshine.

The final race of the year was at Snetterton in Norfolk, which had been a Flying Fortress base in the Second World War. Two giant straights connected two lurid high-speed corners and a couple of slow ones. I managed to get the team’s senior mechanic on to my car. Colin was a grey-haired Lancastrian who’d won the championship with my team-mate. He had eyes like Master Yoda and talked me through what to do if and when I was in a position to actual y win.

‘Around this track the
last
thing you want to do is lead the final lap. Whoever is in second wil draft past the leader on the back straight unless you slow down, so don’t get stuck out in front or …
Jeezus
Chri st
!’

Colin’s gaze suddenly disappeared some way over my shoulder. ‘Look at ’er, she’s
gorgeous
!’

Stil grappling with his advice, I looked to up to see the blonde bomb-shel swinging down the pit lane. Glimpses of her perfectly sculpted figure appeared from beneath a leather bomber jacket as she swished back her hair and beamed in our direction.

‘That’s my girlfriend, Georgie.’

‘You must be
jokin’
!’

He had a point. I couldn’t quite believe it myself.

I’d met her when we were seventeen and she took my breath away. I fel in love with her on Day One

– she has one of those smiles that make you feel like the six mil ion dol ar man. My mates and I were al horrid little oiks who spent our whole time playing rugby and pouring buckets of water on to girls’ heads as they walked beneath our windows, so I didn’t give much for my chances. But a few months ago I’d somehow summoned the bal s to invite her to a racing dinner – a very glamorous affair (not) at Brands Hatch’s onsite hotel – where she won a tyre trol ey in the raffle. She seemed to enjoy watching my car come back with fewer wheels with each successive contest. I can’t think why; she was far too attractive and kind to be with me. When she entered a room my mouth fil ed with tar, reducing my vocab to Neanderthal grunting. Yet here she was looking lovely and looking at me, but …

‘What do you mean – slow down to win?’

‘Rule number one: to finish first, you must first finish, right? With these cars you sit two car lengths behind the ones in front to catch their slipstream and draft past ’em on the straights. If you get one on yer tail, back off into the corner so he can’t get a run on ya.’

I shared my newly acquired wisdom with Georgie over lunch. She was riveted. ‘So does that mean you won’t crash in this one?’

‘I hope so,’ I sighed.

The race that fol owed was a drafting masterclass. I became embroiled in a four-way scrap for second place whilst the leader ran away. Against every instinct, I backed off through a flat-out bend to put some space between me and the three cars in front. I braked slightly early for the next corner, Sear, then smashed the accelerator.

I hauled up behind the guy in front as he zigged left to overtake the other two running line astern. I stayed put and felt the suction of the two-car draft propel ing me down the straight.

Whilst the relative speeds of the other three cars hardly changed, mine doubled. I pelted past al three in one move. I was ful y clear as I approached the Esses corner and was so excited I nearly forgot to brake.

The leader was too far ahead to catch but I summoned the fury I found at Cadwel and strained every bit of speed out of my black bul et. I closed in on the final lap but not enough to pass, until he made a mistake at the final bend. I powered out of the chicane and we raced to the line. I won it by one tenth of a second.

Crossing the line first meant
the world
to me. And I’d learnt some key truths about the sport. Had I forced my overtaking moves early on, I would have crashed. Had I not driven flat out through every corner of every lap, I would have lost the crucial tenth of a second needed to win. It was a delicate balance, knowing when to risk everything and when to hold back. Luck had been a factor, but at least I had started making my own.

M
y second season produced a 100 per cent finishing record. A string of podiums and race wins put me into the lead of the Vauxhal Junior Championship, battling with talented pilots like Marc Hynes and Justin Wilson, two of the most genuine blokes in the sport. Marc was sponsored by Nestlé Ice Creams and looked a bit like one himself: a tal teenage vanil a speckled with hundreds and thousands. Justin was on his meteoric rise to Formula 1, somehow squeezing six foot four of northern sinew into a soapbox racer every weekend to post stupendously fast lap times.

I dropped cheese packing in favour of studying for a law degree, which absorbed nearly al my time when I wasn’t racing. Turning into a very focused, self-centred daredevil meant my relationship with Georgie suffered. She gently bounced me into touch, and I was so hel bent on my career that I refused to acknowledge that my heart was, in fact, irretrievably broken.

My luck on track dried up around that time and I lost the championship to Mr Hynes, finishing alongside Wilson. But it was enough to get me noticed by the crack outfit run by Paul Stewart, Sir Jackie Stewart’s son. Paul Stewart Racing was known for one thing in every category they competed in: winning.

PSR ran a team in the next rung up the racing ladder cal ed Formula Vauxhal Lotus. The cars ran on fat slick tyres with Formula 1 style wings that shoved the rubber into the tarmac and a 2-litre engine that propel ed the car through corners at over 145mph. Sexy piece of kit.

The first test was at Donington Park, a grey circuit in the Midlands. Its sequence of fast, flowing turns was made famous by Ayrton Senna’s gutsy overtaking moves on the opening lap of the 1993 Grand Prix. I watched it more times than I can count.

I scanned the colourful articulated trucks lining the old brick pit lane and found the polished blue and white of PSR at their head. The team were always decked out in matching blue clothing and had a systematic approach to everything they did. The mechanics were like young doctors, and their work area looked like a spotless surgery. I prayed no dirt fel from my shoes as they clacked across the pristine plastic flooring.

Graham, or ‘GT’, the team manager, was a young guy with an endearing smile that belied his ruthless inner ambition. Underneath the rosy-cheeked veneer was a head shrinker who probed the depths of a driver’s every performance via the onboard data logging system and by asking difficult questions.

‘Did you notice we put another hole of front wing on, and you ran a heavier fuel load? How many laps do you think these tyres have done? Do you think a stiffer rear rol bar would help you through the fast corners if we drop the ride height and adjust the camber for the low speed? Why did you change your line into Turn One after lunch?’

Graham used onboard computers that logged the car’s information and driver inputs. They were recorded so accurately that you could analyse every movement of the steering, brakes and throttle to develop the perfect style, which further deepened the mental dimension.