Notes From the Hard Shoulder (13 page)

Anyone who thinks that being a racing car
mechanic is a swanky wheel-changing job doesn't know his arse from his elbow-jointed extension piece, and that includes me.

There I was, no less a revered spannerist than James May, owner of an allegedly 99-piece chrome-vanadium socket set and best 'specials' bicycle builder of the fifth form, and I was holding a rag. If you were at
Donington Park for round 12 of the
BTCC you would, I hope, have noticed how brightly the two silver A4 Quattros of Biela and Bintcliffe gleamed in the watery June sunshine.

It probably didn't help that I arrived for my first day as an
Audi pit technician, Saturday, precisely half a day late. By then, practice for the first race was over and there was nothing for it but to have lunch in the motorhome – pork fillets with veg and gravy followed by cheesecake, which was excellent. After an hour or so of digestive repose watching
Le Mans on the motorhome telly, I finally entered the dark portal of the pits, hoping to have a look at some telemetry or perhaps join the discussion on tyre choice. That was when I was handed the duster and the bottle of wax. After I'd polished the cars, I washed a pile of alloy wheels. I completely missed the second practice session as I was too busy cleaning the garage floor.

Still, the garage is a fascinating place, even when observed from all fours. There's the toolkit – drawer after drawer of beautiful stuff, with every last spanner, socket, ratchet and extension piece allocated a cut-out
slot in a cosseting bed of foam. One corner is devoted to a huge, gleaming plinth on which, with the aid of computers, light beams and other black magic, minute adjustments to camber, toe-in and weight distribution can be made. Everything is absolutely spotless, thanks in some small part to me on this occasion.

You should see underneath the car. I crawled under Biela's hoping for a quick nap, but was stunned into wakefulness by the cleanliness of everything. Even the floorpan is polished, the better to prevent dirt sticking to it and making the job of gearbox and engine changing messy. It's not like your road-going A4. There's no underseal for a start, and the alternator and power-steering pumps are driven from the rear diff rather than the engine, to preserve a few vital horsepower; less than half the engine's output is directed to the back, so they only sap that bit of it. That steering pump is an area of concern. The BTCC A4 is geared at a mere 0.9 turns lock-to-lock, and if the pump fails – as it had done a few weeks previously when a stone fouled the drive belt – then the driver is not strong enough to overcome the leverage of the unassisted wheel and ends up in the gravel, as Biela did.

Dinner was roast turkey with all the ancillaries followed by jelly and ice cream, after which I retired to the hotel with the chaps. Now I thought Saturday nights in race season would pass in a stress-relieving riot of drinking, brawling, seducing and sword-fighting, but tonight it was just a few quiet pints in the bar and some talk of racing. That first practice session had been revealing; it was wet, and our boys, with the advantage of four-wheel drive and hence able to move
off the dry racing line on to the slippery stuff for overtaking, had been running first and second until the track started to dry out. Then, encumbered by a 65kg weight penalty levied for being too fast last year, they dropped back to 9th and 12th. What we wanted was a wet race.

Next day the sky, scrutinised over several bacon and egg sandwiches, looks promising. At 09.30,15 minutes before morning warm-up, light rain begins to fall. Biela wants his 'wet' ratios, which means a gearbox change. Panic? No, the job takes only about 12 minutes. An engine change takes an hour and a bit. The 24,000-mile service should take about 45 seconds, then. I am allowed under the car for the final part of the job, bolting the gearbox cover plate on. The socket slips on the shallow nut and I punch myself in the face.

Our chaps are 2nd and 7th in warm-up, but we need more rain. Biela wants the other gearbox back and I'm invited to help, but by the time I've found a pair of heat-resistant gloves, the box is already swapped. I squirm to the rear diff to help fit the tubular prop shaft. There are no bolts – I push a spring-loaded pin home and, with a satisfied grunt, mate the shaft's female end with the diff's pinion. The bloke at t'other end slides the whole thing forward on to the gearbox and the locating pin snaps into place with a faintly unconvincing ping. Is that it? Presumably, as the exhaust is now being dragged over my chest. This simply slots into place – it's still hot – and is retained with a handful of bolts. Everything on the car has a torque setting and the blokes know them all by heart.

As the race approaches, tension builds. I meet the drivers in the garage – can you imagine this happening
in prima donna Fl? – and what an unlikely pairing they are.
John Bintcliffe is small, stocky and bounces around like an excited schoolboy.
Frank Biela is lanky and languid, lurking around with a permanent hunted expression on his face, probably because he's usually having a crafty fag where he shouldn't.

When the pit lane opens, half an hour before the start, the excitement palpably intensifies. It's been declared a wet race, allowing us to switch from slicks to wets but not the other way. So we're out on the grid on slicks, hoping. The sky gleams like mercury, but the track is merely damp. Not damp enough. Almost at the instant the first drop hits my face the cry for wets goes up and the world goes mad.

Air tools rattle like small-arms fire; the single big nut on each axle spins; wheels fly in all directions. My job is to roll the slicks across the grass and heave them over the pit wall to waiting arms. The knack is to get the wheel rolling, give it a bounce and then tip it over the wall like a volleyball. At my first attempt I was run over by my own wheel.

I watch the start from a trackside box, the cubbyhole full of computers and telly screens where you expect to see
Frank Williams looking po-faced. Beavis and Butthead streak away from 9th and 12th and arrive at the first corner first and second, but I don't really notice this as I'm busy scanning the now deserted grid for signs of the propshaft.
And it's Biela
...
from Bintcliffe ..
.
with Al-ain Me-nu in the Renault some way off but looking dangerous.
It stays like that, thanks to steady rain, until the last half of the last lap, when that lunatique Menu pips Bintcliffe. But first and
third is Audi's best result for ages and there's much rejoicing over lunch of mixed grill in a bun.

But the weather's improving, which means it's getting worse as far as we're concerned. For race two, a decision is made to change the spring rates on both cars, a job which, with the aid of an air-driven spring/damper compressor, takes a tad over 20 minutes. In the tumult of ratcheting, banging and hissing of air, I fail to make any contribution whatsoever. Just as I reach out to pass a tool or spring, it disappears in a flash before my eyes, whisked away by sleight of practised hand, with the result that I just wobble around the car permanently half a second behind the proceedings. But I do manage to change some wheels, mop water from the cockpit and wax both cars again.

Then I put the fuel in. It comes in a huge plastic barrel with a sort of spring-loaded bung on the end. This is up-ended over a self-sealing filler in the A4's boot. Press down and the fuel just glugs in. Cock it up, though, and you'd fill your boots with petrol. A few blokes stand well within arms' length for this bit.

For the race, I'm elected to the board – Biela's pit board, that is. One bloke fills in the time and lap details from a huge box of letters and numbers, and I hold it out as he streaks past. I remember this race as a series of small numbers. Each lap, the man on the stopwatches turns with ashen face and yells in my colleague's ear. He then reaches into the numbers box, sometimes for a higher digit, sometimes a lower one. In my clammy-handed excitement I almost drop the board over the wall. It has happened, apparently.

But the track is just a bit too dry for the A4s. At the end it's Menu from Harvey, with Biela third and Bintcliffe fourth. But this is still excellent going, and the motorhome is full of rejoicing over the day's results. Yet even as Biela climbs the rostrum, the technicians are already beginning the huge, tedious task of dismantling the garage and packing all the equipment into the trucks.

I don't envy these guys so much now. The racing is much more exciting from the inside, but beyond that there's hard graft and too many weekends away from home. For two days, though, I felt the satisfaction of one who has made a contribution, even if it was only a small blob of elbow grease, the sundry of the pit lane. If you watched the races on the telly, you may just have noticed a bloke in the pit lane wearing a regulation Audi paddock fleece but completely the wrong trousers, looking knackered yet apparently doing sod all. That was me, that was.

It is said that an Englishman's home is his castle. Rubbish. Kings and lords live in castles, and I'm pretty sure they're never asked to put some shelves up or do a spot of Hoovering.

It's why so many chaps have
sheds. A shed offers the solitude that poets, philosophers and other deep thinkers have always craved; an oasis of personal squalor that some ancient and immutable social law says should not be invaded by anyone else.

Trouble is, a shed first requires a garden, and that, eventually, will need weeding. A more elegant solution is what I would call a
camper van but what is more correctly known these days as a motor caravan.
A camper van offers similar sanctuary but with a constantly changing vista; a rolling shed giving access to the greater garden that is England's countryside. That same sense of fetid insularity can be enjoyed bang in the middle of a national park, with the added advantage that no one is going to ask you to mow it.

This was the plan – to travel, snail-like, with a microcosm of home at my back and to stay, alone, in those places where I'd often wished I could if only there was a hotel, but which would actually be spoiled by the presence of one. If not the middle of nowhere, then at least well into its interior. Exmoor, then – a part of the world pretty much as Adam would have known it.

On my first morning in the van, I had to acknowledge that I had only half succeeded. From one steamed-up window I beheld an expanse of soft green pasture complete with low-lying dawn mist and whinnying pony. From the other, an uninterrupted view of Exford Post Office.

I pulled back the camper's sliding door and met the postman. There was nothing for me. 'That's a pretty rough breakfast,' he said.

'What is?' I asked, even as the stench of burning reached my nostrils because I'd left the price sticker on the bottom of my new camping kettle.

'Boddingtons,' he said, indicating the array of spent cans on the floor.

'Nah,' I assured him. 'That was last night's dinner.'

This wasn't entirely true. The main course had been a robust steak 'n' chips at the nearby and slightly riotous
Exford White Horse Inn, after which I had
intended to drive a few miles up a road notoriously haunted by a spectral horse-drawn hearse (the harbinger of an imminent death, apparently) and into an area of moorland reckoned to be stalked by a giant, sheep-mauling black cat. There I would erect the hinged concertina that was the camper's extending roof and settle down to commune with nature, especially as there was no lavatory installed.

But as I drove an
Exmoor fog descended so that, by the time I located a grassy pitch some 10 miles away, I wasn't sure if it was a layby or the green of a golf course. I sank into a fitful sleep but awoke an hour later with a thumping head and freezing feet. I'd parked on a slope and was sleeping the wrong way round. Reversing the bed arrangement restored a certain amount of inner calm but by now the pea-souper was host to every demon that had ever dwelt within the minds of men. And I'd forgotten to fill the integral water tank. So I returned to the village green, where the camper's curtains admitted a little of the warm and comforting glow given off by the windows of the Crown Hotel.

Still, breakfast – taken out in the sticks – would be a belter, and it was. Bacon, eggs, sausage, kidneys, beans, mushrooms, black pudding, tomatoes and some local and healthy-looking wholemeal bread. Everything except the tea, and including a few areas of the upholstery, was fried.

It's amazing what you can forget to take with you on a camper van holiday. Much of it is obvious – bedding, pans, pants – but those little things that are crucial to the smooth running of a household, and are
taken for granted at home, are easily overlooked. Brown sauce, for example, and a pan scrubber. A sprig of Exmoor bracken makes an effective substitute – for the pan scrubber.

Bloody hell, I'd only spent one night and cooked one meal in the van, and it already looked and smelled like a student bedsit, an illusion enhanced by jazzy seat fabrics suggesting that the place hadn't been decorated since the '70s.

I suppose I should take a moment to introduce my unflagging ally on this trip; the
Celeste Motor Caravan, converted from a Volkswagen
Caravelle mini-bus by an independent company called
Bilbo's Design. It's incredibly well thought out, and comes with a rear seat that converts to a double bed, a smaller bed area for an infant inside the accordion roof, a compact cooker, a fridge, a sink with electric pump and drainage tank, and curtains all round. There are two tables, a swivelling front passenger seat and battery-powered mood lighting.

If you want full sanitation and servants' quarters, you have to move further up the range and buy a true motor home, with a bathroom and what have you, but that will be something much bigger. The compact Celeste is really designed for use on organised caravan sites with shower blocks, and can be hooked up to a permanent mains electricity supply. It's a metal tent, if you like, only much better – it's properly equipped, entirely waterproof and comes ready assembled.

It's also a lot better than a normal caravan. For the enthusiastic motorist, towing a caravan is pure misery. They are slow, cumbersome, wide enough to become
wedged in several parts of the Exmoor landscape, they create all sorts of rearward visibility problems and generally have even more tasteless interior trim. The Celeste is as wieldy as a large estate car and its rear-view mirror shows exactly what's behind you. The duvet, usually.

The downside of the motor caravan is that if you're going to own just the one vehicle, then you are committed to taking your holiday accommodation with you on every journey, even to the supermarket. This is deeply ironic in an age when so many of them will deliver to the home.

The mini-bus on which the Celeste is based is in turn based on a humble builders' panel van but, independent artisans being a much fussier breed than they once were, vans are pretty good these days. The Celeste – daft name, but it's a caravan tradition – fairly bowls along, the oily throb of its gutsy 2.5-litre turbo diesel overlaid with the rumble of an errant beer can somewhere in the back. It's worth taking a bit of care over correct stowage in these things. There's a place for everything in the Celeste and on the largely straight A-road route between London and the West Country everything seemed to be in its place, in accordance with the old maxim. Once on the winding stuff, however, I became reacquainted with a few items of unfinished washing up from the breakfast. I also forgot to latch the door of the fridge and got egg all over the floor.

I felt a bit of a fraud after the earlier Exford incident so my determined plan for the second night was to spend the day exploring the area and eating ice cream before locating a remote spot with a sea view for the
night. And so I simply roamed Exmoor, returning the vigorous waves of other motor caravaners (this had me confused – I thought I'd left the roof up or something) and marvelling as the wonder of creation unrolled before me in widescreen format. And all the while I knew that I could, at any time, simply park up, brew up and even nod off.

How I laughed as I sped past the vacancy signs on family hotels and the hordes of people crammed into small restaurants. I admit, though, that it was quite difficult to drive straight past the Ilfracombe Tandoori with only the ingredients for a fish-finger sandwich on board.

Eventually, I settled on a small plot overlooking Woody Bay, arriving just as the sun tensed for its final plunge into the sea and threw a last, defiant burst of liquid gold over everything. Even a bottle of vegetable oil looked beautiful when illuminated by its reflected glory.

I raised the roof, erected the table and prepared the seafood delicacy. It was nine o'clock, and the remainder of the evening would be spent in reading and quiet contemplation; solitude and blissful silence broken only by the occasional interjection from a sheep in the adjoining field.

That night, as I lay in the faintly fetid interior of my Celeste, I wondered what it was that made the motor caravan so appealing to someone who would regard normal caravaning as the most loathsome experience on earth, were that accolade not already reserved for anything to do with tents. Something certainly did.

At around £28,000 the Celeste represents an outlay roughly equivalent to nearly 300 days' worth of quality
bed and breakfast for two, or about 10 years' holiday accommodation. That's one way of looking at it, and a way that makes it seem expensive.

But here's another. It's still a good deal cheaper than that second home in the country we all secretly yearn for. Yet, essentially, that is exactly what it is. Anywhere you like.