The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (34 page)

I jammed the car through the final two corners to clock a 1.22.9; a ful second faster, but stil short of the 360CS.

I prostrated myself before the Ferrari engineers and apologised profusely. Their young test driver was the first to greet me as I went to inspect the damage.

‘Sti iga, donta worry, Sti iga. You are a driver, you are pooshing. At Fiorano, we have many cars. We damage many cars; it’s OK.’

Top man.

Ferrari was no shop window, it was a stable of racers. Urban legend had it that if you returned a bag of wreckage bearing the prancing horse emblem to the factory gates at Maranel o, red-suited worker bees would always gather to repair it. The spirit of competition was in their blood.

‘The car is fantastic, but it just won’t turn in like the 360. I don’t understand it.’

He scratched his chin in deep contemplation. ‘Before you hada Pirel i tyres, Sti iga. That’s i t! Today you hava Bridgestone.’

Eureka. Pirel i tyres were two seconds a lap faster than Bridgestones back then.

I gave Wilman the good news. ‘We should do a feature on tyres, don’t you think? Look at the difference it makes …’

‘Not if you actual y expect anyone to watch the programme,’ he said.

G
oing from a 200mph Ferrari one week to a diesel Golf the next was a major change of pace.

Pushing smal everyday motors to their limit felt cruel at first. Their front wheels begged for mercy and their underpowered engines strained through every gear with an asthmatic wheeze. But I got used to it. I took inspiration from another breed of racing driver. Men with no remorse or mechanical sympathy.

Touring car racing, I decided, was different from any other category. It permitted drivers to do to each other al the nasty things that were forbidden elsewhere. Touring cars were graced with minimal aerodynamic bodywork because they were loosely based on the smal production road cars they resembled.

As a result, they were employed more like a weapon than a surgical instrument.

If someone barged you out of the way to take the win, there was no headmaster to whinge to. You noted the name and number on the door and repaid the favour at the earliest opportunity. The drivers were

… assertive.

‘Remember your idea about
TG
doing something with footbal ?’ Wiseman said.

‘Absolutely. Which footbal ers are you talking to?’

‘Wel , it’s not exactly what you suggested, but it does involve footbal … kind of. It should be real y mega.’

Car footbal consisted of a giant bal , two teams of five cars liveried in red and blue and a bag of nuts behind the wheel, which included Matt Neal, Tim Harvey, Dan Eaves, Rob Huff, Tom Chilton, Russ Swift and me. Russ and I were the odd ones out, as pro drivers but not touring car racers. He looked docile enough, but was a legendary stunt driver who pul ed twenty handbrake turns before breakfast and spun J turns through impossibly tight spaces for elevenses. I was keen to see his voodoo in action and take him on.

The venue needed to be big enough to host a bunch of speeding cars trying to outscore one another. We figured that if Bruntingthorpe airfield was long enough to land the Vulcan nuclear bomber, it would suffice.

James May captained one team and made his selections. The Stig couldn’t play in this game, he hates footbal , so I joined Hammond’s team as myself. Hammo and I were a little nervous about me being visible on
TG
again; we’d only just recorded another film together with a skateboarder against a ral y car. It was tricky pretending not to know each other, so we avoided eye contact.

We made our way over to an unremarkable fleet of brand-new Toyota Aygos, the type of box your dotty aunt might cal a ‘sweet runabout’. Little bug-eyed headlights looked nervously at the prospect of pil age at the hands of ten twisted joyriders.

We knew we hadn’t been cal ed in to drive within the DSA guidelines, but no one real y expected to write off ten brand-new cars …

James ‘Boicey’ Bryce, a protégé of Ridley Scott, was directing the shoot and explained the format:

‘What we want to do today is start off with some precise driving shots, hitting the bal to see if you can actual y knock it into the goal, with no contact. We’l stop the game after about ten minutes to check cameras. Then we might al ow a little contact and gradual y build up the tempo.’

Sideways grins suggested otherwise.

My Aygo was a demonstrator fresh out of the dealership and stil smelt of sweet silicon. The plastic steering wheel and reasonably priced instruments gleamed. She had been careful y delivered with paper sheets in the footwel s and plastic seat covers.

I chucked those out straightaway, wedged a couple of pennies into the handbrake button and taped them down with gaffer –
et voilà
, a flyaway handle.

At first no one knew what to do; it was the school disco with everyone hanging around the sidelines to see what would happen next. I weaved my car around the pitch and pinched the waist-high inflatable bal from Wiseman, who was marshal ing on foot.

You could dribble by knocking the bal forward and accelerating behind it. It was so light that the air speed would raise the bal off the ground and you could careful y place it on the nose or windscreen to drive it along. The trick was anticipating when the bal would rol off centre, steering into it and using the wind to line it up again. Straightforward, until someone suddenly parked in front of you.

The more confident drivers became with the bal , the less wil ing they were to share it with anyone else. Stealing and ‘tackling’ became increasingly aggressive and Russ was taking no prisoners. He shot across my bonnet so fast I thought I’d accidental y driven across a motorway. I had to brake and swerve hard to avoid him. He was utterly ruthless. I admired the fact that he was defending his territory. Two could play that game.

The only problem with car footie was that the damn bal kept blowing away in the wind. The cameramen, Wiseman and Boicey, spent much of their time booting it back into play and trying not to get run over. When Wiseman found himself holding the bal surrounded by a gaggle of impatient Aygos, Boicey radio’d a stop.

‘We’ve got some great stuff here, guys. We’re just going to keep filming now. Keep an eye on your in-car cameras. If the light goes out, get it recharged and watch out for the marshals. You can make a little contact now.’