The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (48 page)

As I climbed aboard the great man was tucking into a bowl of corn-flakes with his female personal assistant.

I got changed, then asked him what he thought of the
TG
circuit.

He grinned. ‘You cal that a circuit?’

His PA chipped in sympathetical y, ‘Michael’s just being mean.’

‘Wel maybe it’s OK for road cars and this kind of thing, but that chicane in the middle with that bump

– it’s no good for
real
performance cars, I think.’

I felt myself bristling. My patch may have stunk of cabbage, but it was stil my patch. Sure it wasn’t Fiorano, but the bumps, curves and cambered braking areas were ideal for assessing vehicle dynamics.

‘I hear that you’re racing bikes now?’

His eyes lit up. ‘Wel , I’ve competed in one race of the German National Championship.’

‘So you’re keeping pretty busy?’

He nodded. ‘I have also rediscovered my passion for karting … And you … what do you do?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘this and that. I’m racing in GT, checking out some NASCAR. I was pretending to be James Bond last year, and today I’m pretending to be you.’

I admired the way that Schumacher operated within his own centre of gravity. He had huge inner confidence, of course, but I saw straight through the talk of bikes and karts. Like al racing drivers, he lived for the contest. We were interrupted by his cue to hit the stage. He reached for his helmet. ‘How long have you been doing this?’

‘For a few years …’

‘There have been many of you, yes?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure how much they’ve told you …’ It was weird:even talking with my fel ow Stig, the greatest F1 champion of al time, about to be revealed on TV, I stil felt uncomfortable giving anything away.

He shook my hand as he left. ‘Hope to see you later.’ Then, thinking about it: ‘Maybe not though?’

I wished him luck and went to find a monitor. He kept everyone on tenterhooks for a moment, then removed The Stig’s helmet. The audience loved it. Cool as a cucumber, he exchanged banter with Clarkson, who’d decked himself out in a startling orange shirt.

‘And do you find it a bit boring,’ Jezza rol ed his eyes, ‘when the same person endlessly wins al the time?’

Michael responded with the kind of smile that both charmed the pants off the audience and made it clear that he didn’t find that boring at al .

They kept the ‘reasonably priced car’ sequence for last, once he had vacated the premises in his private jet.

The Stig turned over the engine with the Liana in first, so it lurched forward and stopped. Then he stal ed, restarted the motor and couldn’t find the gears.

Cogs shrieking, he nudged the stick into reverse as it started crawling forwards. Once in second, he kangaroo-hopped down the road like a teenager on his first driving lesson.

The first corner approached and he skidded straight at the camera crew, half spun on the grass, made a late turn and dribbled away at 10mph towards Chicago.

The Liana understeered straight on, front wheels skidding, then careered off the track at about 50mph. Iain pegged it away, arms waving, as his camera smashed the windscreen, dented the roof and flew high into the air.

They didn’t show the bit when I was texting on a mobile phone as I sped towards the Hammerhead chicane, but cut to me heading down the wrong side of the tyre wal and final y getting lost somewhere in Surrey.

Back in the studio, Jezza and Hammo grappled for a moment with the possibility that Schumacher wasn’t The Stig after al . Until the credits rol ed, I wondered whether I had just filmed my own epitaph. I half expected Clarkson to announce in ringing tones, ‘Some say The Stig’s forgotten how to drive, so we’ve had to get a new one …’

‘Compliments on your shitness out there, Stig,’ James said. ‘There’s some very funny stuff here.’

High praise, given the Brummy editor’s exacting standards.

L
uck had always been on my side when it came to juggling my
Top Gear
commitments, but having been asked to attend the National TV Awards to col ect our prize for most popular factual programme, I had to switch at the last minute to extra rehearsals for the live show. There were plenty of wil ing standins but fastest off the mark was Grant. ‘Your loss, my gain,’ he joshed as he rushed off to the red carpet. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but I clung onto my helmet bag a little too tightly before passing it to him.

I spent the night perfecting a 720-degree lateral spin in a converted London Taxi whilst a suitably attired Grant col ected the gong and snuck off in a limo. The paparazzi fol owed the wrong man and ended up snapping Wil , our production assistant, as he left head office wearing an
I Am The Stig
T-shirt. The next morning, the hapless PA found himself unmasked as the man in the white suit.

I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way when Red Bul needed someone to run their F1 car at Silverstone. It was due for a coat of ‘glow-in-the-dark’ paint, so it could feature in
TG
’s art exhibition.

‘Vettel and Webber are busy,’ Alex said. ‘But they say they’d let Ben Col ins have a go. Looks like you’ve picked up a fine ride, Mr C.’

I put down the phone and punched the air. About ten times. The F1 run at Silverstone clashed with the studio record several hundred miles away in Guildford, but I assured the producers I could make it.

I arrived at Silverstone the fol owing morning. The air was crisp, with no cloud and a strong wind, and there was the big blue articulated transporter with the shiny blue, red and yel ow missile parked in front of it.

An F1 car never looked so beautiful as the day you drove one.

Red Bul ’s test team, al neatly decked out like walking energy cans, were busy running systems checks. I squeezed inside their beautiful machine and tried to treat it the same as any other racing tool.

‘You might need this.’ Team Manager Tony Burrows handed me the F1 equivalent of a windscreen wiper: a white rag. ‘Coulthard said he couldn’t see a thing through the paint once he was in fourth gear!’

Tony took a step back whilst one of the young Herberts sprayed the surface of the car with a fresh dol op of glow paint.

They threw every thermal blanket they had at the engine and gearbox to generate enough core temperature in the highly stressed systems. A hand reached into the cockpit and switched the ignition to position one. The engineer put revolutions through the motor, ‘bumping’, using a remote toggle. Once in ignition two, the beast awoke. The engineer blipped the throttle from his control panel.

Once the heated tyres had been chucked on I held in the paddle clutch, made plenty of noise with the gas and turned out onto the track.

I was used to F1 power from my old Le Mans racer and I’d tested a few older F1 models in the past, but nothing compared to the tautness of a ‘current’ machine. I squeezed the throttle and it settled into the tarmac. Enough squeezing; I dumped it. The engine howled. I flicked the gear paddle. My neck took the strain and sure enough, as soon as I reached fourth at 150mph, the gloopy paint spread across the bodywork and lashed across my visor. Momentarily blinded, I backed off a touch, wiped the
fromage
from my visor and blasted towards the Becketts complex.

From then on I kept my foot buried and wiped away wave after wave of the stuff as the car’s vortex spun it in al directions. A few drops of rain made the whole process al the more interesting, with the car squirming and spinning its wheels out of the turns in third gear.

The job was done by 10.45am. I thanked Tony and his crew and hauled ass down to Dunsfold to jump into the new Corvette ZR1 and the V10 powered Audi R8.

I loved Corvettes, so I expected the ZR1 to amaze. With its supercharged V8 motor pumping 638bhp through a lightened frame, it was descended from a line of pure, simple-to-drive powerhouses that were wonderful y balanced and deceptively fast. There was no mistaking its berserk level of power, but as soon as I reached a corner the rear end started to pitch, wobble and lose stability.

Corvettes ran on primitive-looking but superbly effective transverse leaf spring suspension, similar to that of a Land Rover. It resembled a stack of plywood, but meant you could buy something with Lamborghini performance for a fraction of the price.

The newer Vettes had sophisticated magnetic damping. Electric impulses changed the fluid’s viscosity, altering its performance a thousand times every second, to absorb bumps and shift its weight. This one sensed its front wheels lifting from the copious extra thrust, considered the steering angle and automatical y softened the absorption rate of the rear dampers to generate traction. I reckon it could have set the fastest time ever for a production car around Dunsfold, had it not been for the fact that the modulation between harder and softer settings cost cornering stability. In damp conditions it was only three seconds adrift of the Gumpert hypercar, a stunning result for a mass-produced model.

The Audi R8 with its 5.2 litre V10 detonator was 100 horsepower shy of the Corvette, and the Dunsfold stopwatch was pitiless when it came to grunt. The R8 relied on balanced handling to account for the shortfal and its best time came in a ful second behind the Vette.

With its squat profile and sunken shoulders, the Audi looked like the Veyron’s baby brother – a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Dropping a V10 into it was a stroke of genius. So was giving it a four-wheel drive system with a predominantly rear-driven bias, al owing you to corner on rails or wave the tail at will. The R8 was poised and precise. The smal but perfectly formed rear wing did little to conceal its front-loaded bias when you steered in, which got the juices flowing. It pitched in and you had to hang on, especial y under heavy braking.

On my second timed run it bit me as I slowed for Turn One and went skidding sideways down past Iain’s camera at 90mph. The lap was wasted as far as posting a time was concerned, so I dropped down a gear and torched the throttle. The R8 fol owed a predictable line for 300 metres with smoke pouring off al four tyres. That’s what I cal ed handling.

After a day like that, I needed no reminding of how fortunate I was. To real y enjoy your job is a most desirable position to be in.

But the urge to race was nagging at my soul. I needed my sense of purpose to be defined by the outcome of ruthless competition. I wanted to be the author of the events shaping my life, and to do that I needed my own identity back. The words of the Blackpool palm reader echoed hauntingly in my mind: choose one path over the other. I set about getting my face in front of teams in earnest and reacquainted myself with the dark art of the cold cal .

I envied The Stig. He was as welcome at A-list parties as he was on the grid of the Indy 500, NASCAR and even Le Mans. With the helmet off I knew I’d have to adjust to the kind of reception Clark Kent got when he put away the cape. But to my astonishment I found that with my feet firmly back on the ground, life as Ben Col ins looked a lot more interesting than I’d ever imagined.

Out of the blue, I was contacted by my old team from Rockingham, Ray Mal ock’s, and given the opportunity to race their car in the European Le Mans Series. I flew out to Portugal to meet both the team and the machine.

The Lola Honda Prototype, with its closed cockpit, giant fins and fat slick tyres, looked more like an F-16 fighter jet than a car.

The high revving engine whizzed over the bumpy circuit and blind flowing crests. The downforce sucked me into the tarmac as I took the corners at three times the weight of gravity. The view ahead played on fast forward, the competition was up close and personal and the impatient racing driver was home again.

RML proved why they were leading the championship by running a faultless operation al weekend. I ran the final stints into the night and took the chequered flag, barely visible through the glare of the rubber-blasted windscreen. We won the race.

Epilogue

O
utside my little white bubble, the horizon in fact stretched away towards infinity. Replacing the constant fear that my world could unravel in the press at any moment with a ticket to ride through free space began to make sense. No more what ifs; more what’s next? The world is fil ed with extraordinary people making things happen every day. Bigger car chases and faster races. It was a cracking final series. Thanks to the magic of Harry Potter’s best friend Ron Weasley, aka Rupert Grint, we put a new star at the top of the board in the latest incarnation of the reasonably priced car – the Kia C’eed. Rupert slammed around the newly-surfaced Dunsfold circuit in a time that was significantly faster than anyone before him. Pretty impressive for a softly-spoken twenty-something who drives an ice cream van in his half-term breaks from Hogwarts – but almost immediately under threat from a different kind of Hol ywood magician.

‘Stig, come and meet, er, Tom …’

Hammo and James stood chatting with a familiar figure outside an Airstream – one of three – the size of a B-52 bomber. In a loose grey sweater, jeans and gold-rimmed aviators, Tom Cruise looked ready for any mission Wilman could throw at him. Hammond was in his element too, frothing at the mouth about the
Top Gun
star’s recent acquisition of one of Steve McQueen’s restored ‘Indian’ brand motorbikes.

Tom gave me a winning grin as he shook my hand. He couldn’t have smiled more broadly if he’d tried; even the big black cloud that suddenly appeared overhead failed to dampen his spirits. ‘Man,’ he said,

‘we’re gonna have a blast out there. The rain makes the car spin out easier, right?’

I nodded. ‘It can be pretty extreme – like
Days of Thunder
, but without the thunder.’

Tom took a while to join me by the Kia; he stopped to greet
every single
member of the crew on the way. None of us felt starstruck, though; his excitement was too infectious.

‘So nobody knows who you are, right?’

‘Nope, not even my kids.’

He clapped his hands and laughed.

I normal y drove two recce laps with each celeb. Tom wanted six. I eased off a touch for the superfast Fol ow Through at the end of my run.