The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (38 page)

Al that remained was to do a seat fitting. I wanted to get comfortable with the belts and think about where the camera mounts would fit inside the cockpit. I also wanted to familiarise myself with the controls.

The sparse cockpit was fresh out of
Flash Gordon
, with a few gauges dotted around a metal console. At the centre lay the solid aluminium ‘butterfly’ steering bars, like a pair of upturned shovel handles joined together. My left foot held down a dead man’s pedal, which would cut the engine the instant you released pressure on it. The right foot control ed the brake pedal, which operated a standard disc from a road car. It held the beast steady at the start line whilst the engine built up revs, in the same way a commercial airliner does before take-off.

Acceleration was control ed by a pair of levers like the ones on the
Mil ennium Falcon
. The first of these wound up the jet using conventional thrust, gradual y accelerating down the runway up to 170mph. The second applied the afterburner. Afterburn worked by pumping unspent fuel into the engine and igniting a flame that substantial y increased the rate of burn and thrust. You applied both levers and held station on the footbrake, then you lit the candle by flicking a switch on the steering wheel and vanished into the distance.

Your only concern thereafter was stopping.

Releasing the dead man’s pedal cut power but not your speed, and at 300 the footbrake would melt if you touched it. To stop, you had to pul back both thrust levers to deploy the parachute.

As far as I was concerned, stopping at the first hint of trouble was the only thing that mattered. I practised whipping my hand from the steering to the levers and knocking them back, until it became second nature. I visualised an unsettling vibration and using a reflex action to shut down in a nanosecond. Colin agreed that this would be the key part of the training at Elvington.

The sun was setting and there was stil no sign of Hammond, so I rang Grant. Hammo was stil filming and wouldn’t be able to join us. Also, my presence was no longer required at Elvington. I was needed at Dunsfold with Jeremy instead.

The tension sprung off my shoulders the way that it did fol owing a pressurised race weekend. But I was leaving Hammond to fend for himself, and that didn’t feel at al comfortable.

I briefed Wilman at length. ‘He needs to sit in this thing. And don’t be surprised if he takes one look at it, turns around and goes home. This car is serious. It’s like nothing any of us has ever seen or done before.’

I ran through al the details of how the car needed to be control ed, the systems, and what Hammond and the crew should expect. How vital y prepared he needed to be to rip back the thrust bar and release that parachute if he even sniffed a problem. The jet car crew had to have priority over filming to stop and check for debris on the runway after every run, and the director had to be real y careful with the placement of the static cameras.

Wilman got me to write it al down and send it to him. Hammond was real y up for it, so he asked if I thought he could do it. I said he could, as long as he did as few runs as possible.

I turned back to Colin and thanked him. I said I’d speak to the director, but that, on reflection, I thought he shouldn’t al ow cameras to be mounted inside the cockpit.

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like
you
to do the first run tomorrow.’

I emailed my report before heading to Dunsfold the fol owing morning to film the new Jaguar XKR

with Jezza. Richard arrived at Elvington and got to grips with his shoot. It was like a scene out of
Sliding
Doors
.

Richard met up with Colin and familiarised himself with the procedures. Colin banged in the first run of the day, as he had promised. Richard’s early runs were textbook as he gradual y built up his speeds using standard thrust. He practised the emergency shutdown dril s before putting in a maximum speed afterburner run, during which he howled down the runway at 314mph. Space hoppers.

He was unperturbed by the punch in the back as the car bolted from its mark, unfazed by how much steering force he had to apply to keep it pointed straight, resolute in the face of mind-bending speed. As he popped the parachute at the end of that run, his body slammed into the five-point harness at twelve times its normal weight.

Richard climbed aboard Vampire for his final run, lucky number seven. She guzzled a load of fuel as he slipped on his blue Sparco driving gloves one more time. The crew lit his inferno. An ear-splitting roar grew into a shriek as he reached maximum rpm. He reached across the blurred, throbbing steering controls and lit the afterburner.

Richard’s neck absorbed the doubling weight of his head and helmet as he shot down the runway as a yel ow streak towards the camera crew. Molecules of air blasted his helmet and shook it violently as he kept an eye on the horizon and a firm grip at the helm, steering hard to the left to drive straight.

At 288mph, Richard noticed the car pul ing even more than usual. Just half a second later, the time it takes to blink, he was in the middle of a colossal accident and fighting for his life.

At Dunsfold the Jag was spinning its wheels in fourth and producing enough smoke to fil a pop concert. The good light meant we finished a little after 5pm. That was when news was filtering in via the camera crews that there had been an accident at Elvington.

I remembered standing on the rugby pitch at school next to one of my pals. A typical redhead, his wiry frame punched wel above his weight. With a bal in hand he was unstoppable; he would take anyone on. He lay on the ground in front of me as motionless as a corpse. My initial shock turned to horror as his head injury caused him to convulse until the paramedics loaded him into their wagon and took him away.

The hours that fol owed felt like days.

Russel tugged me back into the present. ‘Do you think it’s serious, Ben?’

‘Of course it’s fucking serious,’ I snapped. ‘He was doing 300 miles an hour.’

When we came to investigate the accident with the Health and Safety Executive, I met a spaced-out Hammond near a café in Bristol. He’d lost some weight and looked understandably fragile.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since his accident. I had wanted to badly. I was told to stay clear of the hospital because my appearance would have stoked the media frenzy that was already hard to control.

The presenters and many of the
TG
team had gone to see him and show their support. Mindy, Richard’s ebul ient wife, was at his bedside throughout, enduring the agony of watching her husband pass in and out of consciousness. Not knowing if he would slip away for good.

In the end I’d gone anyway, to smuggle him some junk food – chocolate, Coke, crisps – that Mindy told me he was desperate for. But I couldn’t see him.

Now he was staring peaceful y out across the docks. Part of me expected him to be angry or cold towards me, but seeing him alive was al that mattered.

‘Hey, mate,’ he said a fraction slower than usual. ‘I think I got here a
bit
early.’

We stopped for a coffee at the waterside and I couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d copped it on my behalf. Then again, it was his daft idea in the first place.

He signed autographs for the staff and told them he felt al right and was ‘much better’.

He told me he couldn’t remember the accident clearly – except that he’d been fighting something –

reaching for something maybe – when the car rol ed. He desperately wanted to know if he had done it right on the day, or whether he had just cocked things up and risked never seeing his family again.

We ambled across to the HSE building and met some gentlemen in suits. They escorted us to a smal meeting room with a white board and a laptop containing al the data from Vampire’s black box.

We proceeded to run through the same old questions about Richard’s preparation and the build-up to the shoot. Richard calmly replied that he had felt prepared, he couldn’t speak highly enough of the rescue crew that saved his life, that the accident just came out of nowhere. He didn’t believe there was anything he could have done to avoid it.

I was itching to get hold of the data. I couldn’t see the screen. Some photos appeared on the desk and I pul ed them across. Al I wanted to know was whether Richard had reacted fast enough in the crisis. If I knew that his actions had been true, it meant that we’d armed him with a fighting chance. I needed to see that he’d pul ed his parachute.

I surveyed the first image of the wrecked machine, lying on its side on the shredded field. Hanging out of their pods were the tel tale white strands and the limp remains of the parachute.

The second photo was of the cockpit. The position of the thrust levers confirmed that he’d been fighting to reach the thrust levers to deploy his chute. What a fighter. He had done it right.

The telemetry recorded the speed and G-forces, and the HSE guys were doing their best to interpret them by the letter. I was keen to take my own view.

Richard was bombing down the straight when he felt the first unusual tug at the steering. Just 0.4 of a second later, the front right tyre exploded, affirmed by a drop in the car’s ride height. What impressed me was that before the tyre blew, his speed trace was
already
dropping. It suggested that Richard had already lifted his foot to cut thrust.

BANG
. The tyre exploded.

Subsequent footage revealed that a blister had formed during the penultimate run, perhaps due to the extra forces exerted by the surface camber.

As the rubber flew apart it exposed the metal rim of the front right wheel, which nose-dived, lifting the rear left wheel into the air. That sent him sideways and hard right. Hammo applied intuitive counter-steering with his hands and applied the brake with his foot, registering as a longitudinal G-force. As the machine turned into the airstream it slewed across the runway at an acute angle. Vapour trails formed around the bodywork’s leading edges. Less than a second had passed.

Richard began to experience lateral G-forces beyond those of fighter pilots engaged in a dogfight.

He ditched the steering and reached for the thrust levers. Exponential forces of air density flooded the cockpit as it jolted, rotated and flipped. Somehow, he grabbed the levers and pul ed them down. The chute deployed but col apsed before it could arrest his speed.

The impact with the ground came from behind; the earth hammered through the rol cage and Richard’s helmet absorbed the brunt of the blow. Sid Watkins, the renowned F1 neurosurgeon, believed that had it not been for the quality of his headgear, Hammo would have bought the farm.

HSE’s report concluded: ‘As RH sat in Vampire’s cab there was significant clearance between the rol over cage and the top of his crash helmet.’ It was a polite way of saying Hamster was on the short side, another factor that reduced the blow to his swede. I wondered if I would have been so ‘lucky’.

HSE decided that no one would face a legal charge for the incident and they gave us some spiel about how ‘Safety Management Systems’ and risk assessments could have saved the planet. I was tempted to ask where ‘Health and Safety’ stood on natural selection, but decided to keep schtum.

For good measure, the powers that be published their findings and attached my name as someone who ‘worked closely with
Top Gear
as a high performance driver and consultant’. It didn’t leave much to the imagination about my day job.

I
didn’t pay much attention to the history of Bucharest until I saw the street circuit wind its way around a building that made the White House like a Barbie Mini Mansion. Romania’s Parliament was housed in the second largest building in the world, original y built by its deposed dictator, Ceausescu, as his personal palace. The madman laid waste to 7,000 houses, churches, monasteries and a hospital to create a lavish neoclassical leviathan crammed with hundreds of chandeliers, more gold leaf than you could shake a stick at and nearly one mil ion cubic metres of local wood. He left nothing in the budget for the roads, which were as pockmarked as the surface of the Moon. Golf courses were in short supply too.

‘What’s the hotel like, son?’

‘It’s great, Dad. Klaas booked it; it’s the best.’

The tapping of keys suggested he was Googling. This could take some time.

‘It’s a long way from a golf course; I fancy taking my clubs. Is the food any good?’

‘So far I’ve had a burger and fries.’

‘
Burger
? FAT BOY. Wel , I might fly out …’

‘Let me know. I plan on winning this one. The track’s a real shithole.’

‘It does look wild. Your sort of place, I should think. Give me a cal after qualifying.’

The FIA GT Championship was holding a street race around the capital with a grid of race-tuned versions of every kind of supercar from Aston to Lamborghini, Maserati, Ferrari, Corvette and, not least, my humble Ascari KZ1.

Ascari’s newly formed team included old sweats like Spencer mixed with new talent in the form of the highly organised crew chief Neil Leyton. Gurus al , their car was so immaculately prepared you could eat your breakfast off it. Even though we were being penalised with excessive performance bal ast, she was fast and nimble.

I was on top of the world. Georgie was expecting a baby and we were getting married. The popular myth in motorsport was that kids and family slowed you down, but they had the opposite effect on me. Points made prizes, and prizes quite simply paid the bil s. I was feeling aggressive, ready to tear it up.

With the car on stands I had a slightly better view of the pit lane. I could see how many cars were due to go on track, and how many were changing tyres for another run at the pole time. I was sixteenth out of forty. With only five minutes left in the session I couldn’t afford to get caught in traffic during my final shot on new tyres. On a street track, qualifying
was
the race. It was nearly impossible to overtake once the flag dropped.