The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (37 page)

I spied Jeremy screaming around the arena on a jet-powered bicycle with a riotous grin on his face, run across stage to introduce another act and head behind the curtain for a short break. The Red Bul was on ice for him, so I handed him one as he lit up. He stubbed out the fag after four deep drags, wiped the sweat from his brow and went back on stage.

We were al owed right off the leash to create a pure driving spectacle. We even tried to make the commercials (which live performance al owed) unforgettable.

With the ‘Navman’ we unquestionably succeeded in that – but not necessarily in a good way. It was unique to the Sydney shows and it was horrible. It started with a man and wife driving on to the stage arguing about directions. Eight thousand confused Australian punters looked on from the packed grandstands of the Olympic stadium. Then Navman gal oped to the rescue.

Or rather sidled down the aisles dressed in a tuxedo, singing,
‘You’re too good to be true-hoo. Can’t
take my eyes off of you-hoo. You’d be like h-heaven to touch. I want to hold you so-ho much
…
’

I was sitting in a fake Ferrari ready to do a three-car drifting display and unplugged my earpieces to cop a better take on just how out of tune he real y was. The presenters were sitting close by, laughing and goading Frenchie via their closed loop radio mikes.

‘
French
,’ bel owed Clarkson, ‘get me a Glock 9mm. I’m going to shoot this man in the back of the fucking head. On stage. Back of head. Booofff, brains over the floor. Yes, I am. Because this is absolutely the worst thing I have ever seen.’

Frenchie cackled: ‘You would not believe what I’m hearing on my cans. If the guys on stage could hear Hammond and Jeremy right now …’ Then: ‘What’s that? The singer has ears on? Wel , I fucking hope he can’t hear us; if he can, the guy must be a stal ion to keep going …’

Navman finished off his dodgy solo by straining for a high note and dropping an octave, then handing out free satel ite navigation devices to the crowd. The now happy couple final y pissed off in the right direction to a chorus of boos. There was a scuffle in the grandstands and a section of the crowd had to be removed by security. One Australian voice echoed the mood of the audience. ‘No more facking adverts, you c**s!’

Ouch. There were stil four more to go before the show started …

I got my comeuppance for laughing at Navman when I starred in a luxury yacht commercial in Hong Kong. The build-up took place on screen. A champagne-quaffing mincer with orange skin dressed like James Bond carved up the waters in a mini action movie then switched from boat to car; as he exited the main screen, I appeared in a real live Aston Martin DB9.

Dressed from head to toe in black, I slid the DB9 across the stage on ful opposite lock, threw it into a 360-degree spin, stopped, climbed out, drew my replica pistol and pul ed the trigger. As giant bul et holes miraculously appeared on the screen, my heroics were greeted with a disconcerting amount of laughter from a predominantly male audience and whistles from a mixed crowd. Either way, I fought to hold a straight face as Colin whispered into my earpiece: ‘Ooooh, Big Boy … Big Boy with your
Big Gun
… Bang, Bang, oooohhhh yeeesss …’

After five performances we hit the town like inmates on a day break from Alcatraz. And suffice it to say that until you’ve heard Hammond on bass, May on keys, Jezza on the drums and Tiff Needel giving everything to his Sex Pistols impression, you haven’t lived.

Wherever we went the public viewed the presenters as their mates. The show was averaging 6–8

mil ion viewers in the UK, with a global audience of some 500 mil ion; the goodwil was awesome. The great thing about the live event was that it gave foreign fans an opportunity to see the show up close. In the UK, the waiting list to attend the studio was twenty years long …

It was rather reassuring that three middle-aged men cocking around with stuff could become so popular. I struggled to see them as sex symbols, but there was a unique chemistry between the presenters that was lightning in a bottle. People greeted them like rock stars. Women covered their mouths in giddy excitement and blokes sidled up to ask what the best car was. They promptly disagreed with the answer, whatever it was, hoping perhaps to engage in the kind of spirited debate they had seen so often on screen. I relished my anonymity and happily stepped aside whenever someone cut past me for a moment of their time.

It wasn’t al cakes and ale, though. In one particular bar a throng of blokes in suits and open col ars, photocopier salesmen al , gathered around Hammond in a distinctly unfriendly fashion. As I made my way over to him I noticed most of them were holding mobile phones behind their backs. The screens were lit and set on video, ready to capture some celebrity happy slapping.

I’d never seen Hammond snap, but it was obvious from the look in his eye that the countdown had begun. One idiot was trying to embrace him like an old pal. I managed to intervene, slid an arm around Hammo’s waist and tried to lead him off. His body was as rigid as a Rottweiler but he did come with me, mumbling curses al the way to the exit.

Clarkson was a force of nature, but the other two were pretty regular guys who happened to be superb at presenting information to camera. Hammond’s ability to consume a script and thoughtful y regurgitate it on to the screen was uncanny, whilst James had to, if anything, dampen his encyclopaedic mechanical knowledge to a level that befitted light entertainment. Me? I was having a bal . My responsibilities had expanded into choreography and co-ordination, so no two days were ever the same.

T
he plan was simple: drive a jet car as fast as it would go, which meant 300mph and then some.

‘The car is basical y a dragster,’ Grant explained. ‘Giant wheels at the back, little wheels at the front

– you know the kind of thing. The difference,’ he chuckled, ‘is that this baby is powered by a jet engine like the one they used for the Red Arrows.’

‘Sounds … interesting …’ I said, not believing for a second that this would come to anything.

‘It’s cal ed a Vampire. It’s been purpose built and customised by the owner. It would be the fastest thing we’ve ever featured. Ideal y we’d like a presenter to drive it, with a bit of help from you.’

I asked who was running it, naively expecting the answer to be McLaren or Wil iams. It wasn’t.

Schemes like this came and went with
Top Gear,
and the Vampire wheeze looked as flimsy as a paper fire-fighting suit. A TV presenter in a 300mph dragster? No chance. I wondered for a moment if they might drop the presenter bit and send me up and down the runway for the footage. My stomach tightened.

‘Er … Let me know how you get on …’ I said.

Two weeks later the phone rang again. This wasn’t going away. Hammond might not be available, what did I think about James May driving it?

‘No way; he won’t do it.’ The words came out without me thinking.

‘Real y, why do you say that?’

James was a sensible bloke who flew aeroplanes and pretended he couldn’t drive; he wasn’t exactly an adrenalin junky. You needed to be slightly unhinged to want to drive down a runway at 300mph like spam in a can. Sure, it took some skil launching off the line and holding the car straight, but no amount of it could save you if the engine exploded, the wheels fel off, the parachute failed or if you involuntarily shat out your kidneys with fear. You either needed to be immune to the consequences of mechanical failure, or have bal s the size of space hoppers.

‘300mph is a huge speed. It’s not like anything you experience in a normal car. I’m not saying James isn’t brave, but his idea of exercise is similar to Clarkson’s – a glass of wine and a fag. We crack 225mph at Le Mans, and even that’s a long way short of what this thing can do.’

‘I know. This thing wil do 330mph. The British record is, like, 300. Official y we’re not actual y going for it – but it would be nice if it happened.’

I imagined being at the airfield with a mirage part way down the gigantic runway. I pictured James’s doe eyes peering out of his visor, with 5,000 pounds of thrust breathing down the back of his neck. He’d flick a switch and hit 270mph within six seconds.

‘If anything goes wrong, it’l be a mighty big shunt; then it’l come down to fitness. Hammond is tough. I’d be happy doing it with him, but not James.’

Core stability and strength literal y held al your bits and pieces together on impact. There would be no smal shunts at 300mph; why else did they pack a parachute?

Grant was on the dog again the fol owing week.

‘We’ve got Hammond; he’s real y up for it. I’m sorting some kit out. We’ve got some overal s kicking around in the office, think they’re Nomex. Hammond says he’s got a motorbike helmet that he’s comfortable with—’

‘He needs a proper F1 helmet, an Arai GP5. Not the toy one he’s got for his bike; don’t let him use that. How old are the overal s?’

‘Not sure. Couple of years …’

I explained that they wouldn’t be fire retardant any more. He needed a new triple-layer Nomex suit. If the jet fuel ignited, every second would count.

‘Triple … layer …’ Grant dutiful y took notes. That was the last I heard of it until I was dispatched to a goose-infested farmyard the day before the shoot, to inspect the car and meet Hammond. I’m cool with ducks, but not geese. I hate geese. They’re evil.

Colin Fal ows had built Vampire and set the British land speed record. He emerged from a metal cargo container wearing a boiler suit and thick round glasses. He was very amenable, more of a Penfold character than a speed freak. We had tea.

Colin had no idea who I was, and I used that to my advantage to quiz him about the project. I needed to know that he wasn’t some bipolar lunatic looking to win a Darwin Award.

Legend had it that a dude once drove into the Arizona desert in an old Chevy Impala. Nothing unusual there, except that he’d strapped a solid fuel rocket with comparable thrust to an F-16 fighter plane to the roof. Forensic evidence subsequently revealed that Impala man made it up to 50mph using conventional means before he lit the candle. The Chevy then accelerated past 250.

He realised almost immediately that this was not good, slammed the brakes, melting them instantly and blowing the tyres before the car became airborne. The incinerated remains of car and driver were found three miles away, three feet deep in the side of a cliff, 125 feet from the ground. That was the funny thing about solid fuel rockets. Once you pressed go, you kept going until they ran out of fuel.

Vampire on afterburner would behave much the same, except that you could shut off the thrust controls, kil ing the propulsion and popping the parachute air brake. Assuming the parachute opened, you slowed down.

Colin swung open the corrugated steel doors to reveal his modest workshop. Vampire was smal er than I imagined but stil 30 feet long.

I gazed into the gaping chasm of the metal turbine. It had more steel veins, couplings and rivets than Michael McIntyre’s Man Drawer. It looked like a NASA experiment crossed with something out of
Thunder-birds
. I pelted Colin with questions about every aspect of the build and preparation. What kept the car on the ground rather than turning it into a missile? What did he know about jet engines? How was it fitted to the car, where was the fuel, would it blow up and kil everyone? He answered each question in detail, and with extreme patience.

He’d spent twenty years as an engineer in the Royal Air force – twelve of them on the Rol s-Royce powerplant that would be sending Richard and me down the road at 300mph.

The engine instal ation was angled so that the faster it went, the more it pressed the middle of the chassis into the road. Colin picked the engine up ‘cheap’ when it was retired from the RAF, describing it as

‘thirty years young’. The propulsion system was fuel ed by heating oil, of al things.

The tubular frame chassis completely encased the cockpit and was similar to NASCAR racers I had driven. Simple technology – wheels, springs, dampers and metal suspension attached to a metal frame that supported the whopping engine.

No stone was left unturned. What would stop the engine flying out of the frame? Had the suspension ever broken? What problems had he encountered thus far?

Colin admitted that Vampire did have a tendency to attract wildlife, having recently spilt the blood of an eight-pound rabbit. It also emerged that there had been a problem with the rear suspension in the past. A joint had shown signs of damage and might have caused an incident involving Vampire’s sister vehicle, Hel bender.

I scribbled away furiously. ‘But no one was hurt?’

‘Wel , yes …’

Mark Woodley had been at the helm of Hel bender when it veered off course during a high-speed run at Santa Pod. It struck the barriers, kil ing him instantly.

Colin showed me the modifications to the suspension which seemed to have fixed the problem. I was no engineer, but the joints looked thick and solid.

Elvington was a big open airfield without wal s, so at least there was less to hit if it did break. The downside there was the curvature of the runway. The driver had to apply a significant steering angle to counter the camber and keep in a straight line, putting additional load into the front right wheel.

I inspected the tyres and recognised the Hoosiers from racing on oval tracks. They looked pretty old, but Colin explained that they skimmed the tread to reduce the build-up of heat. Using older tyres was counterintuitive but it made sense, despite the basic appearance. The construction of a new tyre heated more under severe loading; it was part of the reason that new rubber produced faster lap times over short distances. In this scenario, that would increase the likelihood of delamination and tyre failure. And tyre failure would convert the car into a projectile.

I stared long and hard at each tyre.

The only unknown was the runway itself. I asked about track sweeping procedures, inspecting for debris after every run to remove anything that might puncture a tyre or col ide with the machinery. It was already on his agenda.