The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (7 page)

But it was not to be. The feedback – via GT – was that I was ‘too old’. PSR wanted to take on Justin.

Halfway though the next season I made the jump to Formula 3 National Series instead.

The Formula 3 car was made of beautiful carbon fibre. Everything from the steering wheel to the gear lever were proper bits of kit. It had sophisticated push rod suspension like a Formula 1 car, with four-way adjustable dampers and a range of critical settings for tuning them.

It reacted to infinitesimal inputs from the driver. Visualising a perfect lap in your mind’s eye was the only way to make the tiny adjustments needed to shave off the thousandths of a second on every corner that constituted the difference between pole and the rest.

Everything ran on a knife edge in Formula 3. It was the birthing pool for F1 talents, from Mansel to Schumacher and the great Ayrton Senna.

I won most of the remaining races from pole position, with fastest laps and a couple of lap records. It was time to move up to the International Formula 3 series and duke it out with the big boys.

In 1997 I took the seat vacated by Juan Pablo Montoya at Fortec. They were running Mitsubishi engines which had monstered the field in ’96. The team manager reckoned that with me and Brian Smith (an Argentinian!) we should win the championship hands down.

Unfortunately the new spec Mitsubishi was a dud. Brian, Darren Turner, Warren Hughes (who ran Mitsubishi) and I only scored a handful of podiums between us.

It was time to prepare for the British Grand Prix support race at Silverstone. As always my old man was on hand, Marlboro in one hand and stopwatch in the other. He marked my split times through the different sectors and told me where I needed to improve.

He was so charming and gregarious, but he set the bar pretty high. I loved him to bits, but there were times when it wasn’t that easy being his only son – or one of his workmates. They dubbed him ‘Bionic Bil ’

because his idea of downtime was to stop working between midnight and five in the morning.

Having a poor engine meant that driving bal s-out through the corners became
de rigueur
. I drove back to the pits after the kind of lap I could only repeat twice without crashing and sat down with David Hayle, my engineer, aka ‘Mole’. Sweat dripped off my finger as we moved the cursor along the analysis screen. Formula 3 was al about perfectionism and absolute focus on one thing. Once that attitude became ingrained, it never left.

Mole lowered his specs and gave me a penetrating look. ‘Do you need a few minutes to gather your thoughts, mate?’

I shook my head. ‘Let’s get it sorted before the next session.’

I recognised Dad’s cough a mile away. ‘Mark Webber’s eating you alive coming out of Luffield …’

I was stil glued to the monitor. ‘We know.’ I gritted my teeth, ‘We’ve got power understeer in slow corners.’

‘Why haven’t you done something about it then? You look dog slow.’

My heart pounded and I leapt to my feet. ‘Wel go and smoke your fags at Maggots then.’ We were standing eye to eye. ‘I’m
pissing
on Webber through there.’

No one
talked to him that way. His blood was boiling; my temples were pulsing. Silence. Dad tweaked his sideburn between finger and thumb. We would never come close to blows, but my money would have been on him if we had.

‘Give it the beans at the weekend, son.’ And with that, he left.

A couple of days later I did some media work with Uri Gel er. It turned out that he was a car nut, a hazardous hobby for someone that warped metal just by touching it. I met him at his mansion on the Thames. He had a 1976 Cadil ac that was covered in 5,000 bent spoons. He was a lovely guy and made absolutely superb coffee.

Uri didn’t just bend spoons; he somehow managed to draw a shape that I had only pictured in my mind’s eye: a broken arrow with a cross in its tail. He was ful of common sense about sport psychology and was fascinated by my sponsor-finding chal enges and my search for a competitive ride to propel me to F1.

He conjured up an image I’ve recal ed many times since, whenever I’ve felt frustrated: ‘Each of us resides inside a bottle that is being carried by the current of a powerful river: fate. The shore is too far away to reach, but we can rock the bottle by running at the sides and though our efforts are smal by comparison to the current we can influence our direction: perseverance.’

I believed in reaching the shore.

I rang Mum ahead of the race. After witnessing my first season she never attended in person.

‘Hey, Mum, I met Uri Gel er today.’

‘You’ve upset him, you know?’

‘You mean Dad? I know. Al he does is criticise …’

‘He’s very proud. He probably didn’t tel you, but he said he watched you al day at some fast corner cal ed Maggie; said that you were the bravest …’

I swal owed hard. I was such an arsehole.

‘We need more than bravery with this bucket. Maybe Uri can bend the pistons. Is Dad coming to the race?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. He’s cross.’ She sighed. ‘You’re both too
alike
.’

Uri arrived in the Grand Prix paddock as we were celebrating my team-mate’s birthday a few hours before the start of the race. Brian’s dad asked him to bend the knife we used to cut the cake, then rubbed it on the exposed part of the race car’s exhaust system for luck. Uri left for the grandstand, setting off a chorus of car alarms in his wake.

The race got under way. Brian and I did our best to impress the Formula 1 teams in attendance, but he started to lose power and limped back to the pits. Joe Bremner, his number one mechanic, was first on the scene.

‘What the bloody hel ’s gone on here?’

The exhaust had neither bent nor cracked; it had completely disintegrated – but only where Uri’s knife had touched it. I don’t buy into hocus-pocus, but none of the mechanics had ever seen anything like it before.

We didn’t see the fabled forkbender again after that.

I spent a couple of years bouncing around America and Europe, maturing my skil s alongside some truly great drivers like Scott Dixon and Takuma Sato. Scott went on to become the king of Indycar Racing.

When I partnered him in Indy Lights he was one wild Kiwi who partied himself horizontal. He could also turn on the steely-eyed resolve in a heartbeat when it counted.

I also partnered Honda’s Formula 1 protégé Takuma Sato, a wily, wiry, utterly fearless Japanese.

We won races in International F3 and I came second in the Marlboro Masters World Series round at Zandvoort. Taku outqualified me in the dry, but in testing at Spa in Belgium I was comfortably faster in the wet. My car was so good that I was the only driver taking the infamous Eau Rouge corner flat out. As the race itself got under way, the waterlogged track was quickly obscured by a dense mist of spray. Taku pul ed into the lead and was first to come within sight of the teams as he blatted down the pit straight, towards Eau Rouge …

Boyyo, Taku’s sublime race engineer, was perched on the pit wal . He dropped his lap chart, hastily grasped his radio and whimpered ‘No Taku, don’t …’

The rain was much heavier than it had been during the test. Taku made it past the first painted kerb with his foot welded to the floor, ran into a pool of water, aquaplaned and spun 180 degrees, straight into the tyre wal . It was pure 24-carat bal s, and I absolutely loved him for that.

My performances were enough to gain some interest from a couple of Formula 1 teams and I investigated an opportunity to become the test driver for Arrows. This was the break I’d been longing for since Day One. I didn’t have a manager, so Dad came to the meeting to impart some common business sense to the discussion.

We had a chat with a couple of nice chaps from their commercial team. We guzzled tea and biscuits in the boardroom until it was time to bring out the brass tacks. The test drive was mine for a very reasonable

£1.5 mil ion.

I tried not to choke on my tea and wondered what they charged per gulp. I was appal ed at my sheer ignorance of the industry and the level of finance shaping these decisions. The sponsors who had supported me so far would turn tail and head for the hil s.

But I had a back-up plan. It worked for Michael Schumacher; maybe it would work for me.

T
wo mil ion roadside spectators watched the 1903 race from Paris to Bordeaux. Two hundred and seventy-five drivers slammed their cumbersome rides of metal and wood up and down dale for the glory of a face ful of dust, in what was dubbed the ‘race of death’ after numerous fatalities along its 351-mile stretch.

Road racing was shut down, but their mission to measure the advancement of design through competition survived.

The Automobile Club de l’Ouest responded by creating a closed Grand Prix circuit at Le Mans in 1906, and the twenty-four hour course along the main roads to Mulsanne and back via Arnage in 1923.

The route from Arnage was later altered to take in the fearsome Porsche curves, a sequence of fast encounters where the outcome of each bend determined the fate of the one fol owing. A last-ditch heave on the brakes at the Ford chicanes led onto the pit straight for a glancing moment at the pit board before engaging on a lap where 85 per cent of the journey would be spent on ful throttle or braking because your life depended on it.

I travel ed to Le Mans in 1997, to pre-qualify a 600bhp turbocharged Porsche GT2 for the 65th outing of the endurance classic. By lunchtime the car was ready and I was blasting over the kerbs of Dunlop chicane, under the bridge and down to the Esses where you cornered at a seemingly impossible speed, veered left, then shimmied right over a blind rise.

Tertre Rouge was no mere dal iance. The ancient flowing right had to be taken bal s to the wal in fourth gear to v-max the motor on the 4-mile Mulsanne straight. The Porsche 456s of the Eighties stretched their legs to 253mph here before the chicanes were put in. I settled for a humble 194, dispatching the chicanes with a twitter from the abs, hurling in and chasing away again, hanging on to the bouncing tail. I was stil learning the place as I went; at 8.5 miles per lap it took over ten minutes just to run three laps. Then I noticed black smoke bil owing over the treetops.

I kept on it as far as Mulsanne corner, the slowest point on the circuit, with a curved braking point that welcomed the brave and the good to overcook it and wind up at a roundabout ful of locals taking photos and gnawing French sticks. Been there, done that, worn the onions.

The Porsche bucked from the hard lip of the blue and yel ow apex kerb and stopped just in time to keep me on the black. From a virtual standstil I nuked the gas, spooled up the turbo and began the long charge to a top speed of 202 on the approach to Indianapolis, the fastest road race corner in the world. But that smoke was too much to be a BBQ. My heart wasn’t in it any more. I coasted and turned right at Arnage towards the Porsche Curves.

There was smoke everywhere, mostly from the trees where a raging bal of fire was being tackled by the marshals. A few bits of torn bodywork lay on the grass along with something that didn’t belong there and I wished I hadn’t seen – the shocking remains of a helmet belonging to a young French knight cal ed Sebastian Enjolras, who had been kil ed at high speed moments earlier.

Our entry was withdrawn before the race and it would be four years before I could return to continue the journey.

There was never a straight line in my career. I was given a drive at Donington in an ageing Le Mans prototype, the highest category above GT. The car I wanted to be in was the Ascari piloted by South African Werner Lupberger, a silver arrow with vents like shark gil s, a razor-sharp nose and plenty of sponsors on the livery. It was reliable, fast and sexy. My machine was dayglo orange dotted with black rectangles that neatly camouf laged the tank tape holding together the bodywork.

Werner was on pole. As he led the field in this round of the FIA World Sportscar Championship, his engine cut out. My misfiring heap was barely mobile at the time and promptly died at the same corner, so I walked back to the pits with him.

Werner was as brown as a berry, with hair like a hedgehog and a thick Afrikaner accent. He looked exceptional y fit. In the course of conversation he mentioned that Ascari was running a series of shoot-out tests to find him a team-mate. He suggested I go for it.

The team was owned by Klaas Zwart, a Dutch engineering genius who made a bil ion from the oil industry. Klaas was bald and tanned and never sat stil .

‘There’s twenty guys on the phone right now, F1 drivers some of them, and none of them can match Werner’s pace in the Ascari. Tel me why I want you in my team …’

I told him I would win races, that I was the man to push Werner, that no one else would work harder.

Klaas took me at my word and arranged an evaluation test. Next stop, Barcelona.

Even at 7am the heat was making its presence felt. Ascari’s number one mechanic, Spencer, looked me over with unsmiling eyes. His work area was spotless, every spanner, every component just so. We made a fitted foam seat and I asked about adjusting the pedals.

‘That’s how Werner drives it. Should be good enough for you.’

The Circuit de Catalunya had some brutal y fast corners that went on for ever. The other turns flowed from one to the next, giving little respite. I watched Werner exit the fast corner on to the pit straight at 130mph. Within 300 metres of him stamping his foot to the floor, it was licking along at 180 and generating nearly 4G in the corners. He brought it into the pits and the belts over his chest rose and fel as he drew breath. He stripped to the waist, revealing muscles as shredded as Rocky Balboa’s, then chewed into his drinks bottle like a butcher’s dog.

I climbed aboard, tightened the straps until I could barely move and scanned the array of switches and LED lights that lined the dashboard. I began firing the engine and heard the most beautiful bark of V10

power. The Ascari LMP’s Judd F1 engine churned out 650bhp on a Lola chassis. With no power steering it demanded hand-to-hand combat.