by Ben Collins
Three hundred pairs of eyes turned in our direction from across the silver service. Tim’s rusty red suit had seen five innings too many, and my scrunched black number was more bin man than Batman. Then Sir Jackie appeared, the triple Formula 1 World Champion, former Olympic clay pigeon wizard and one of the most meticulous and successful drivers of all time.
Decked out in immaculate tartan trousers with creases that could slice roast beef, a beautifully cut tweed jacket and a bonnie cap, Jackie had the presence of a laird. He gave us both the once over and his beady eyes fell on me like a hawk. I sensed there might be warmth behind them if you were in reach of the podium.
The PR told him our starting positions. ‘Tim is seventh and Ben is twelfth after a shunt in the second heat.’ I wished she hadn’t.
‘Looks like you have some work to do today, lads.’
Och aye, that we did.
Jackie picked up the microphone and delivered a perfectly manicured talk about the team and the format of the day. We were excused.
I knew I had to impress him if I wanted to stay with PSR, and that meant really delivering in the final. I had the overtaking opportunities mapped out in my mind, the perfect start and the fastest laps. Scripts rarely survived first contact with the enemy, but preparing for success improved your odds.
I strapped in and sat on the grid with nothing left to consider except:‘patience, measured bursts’. Jackie made his extended walk down the grid, chatted with Graham for a bit before turning to me. ‘Just remember, lad, it’s what you have up here [pointing to my head], not down there[pointing to my balls] that wins races. The difference between the exceptionally brave and the plain stupid is a fine line.’
I listened carefully to the great man’s advice, but something told me that I would definitely need my balls for this one.
The personnel cleared the grid – bar Roland, who held the jump battery. You fell in love with that last man the way a patient loves his nurse. Before going solo into the unknown, he was your final contact with the world. He signalled a thumbs up and cut the umbilical.
I stared at the pack of racers ahead. The green flag sent us off for the warm-up lap. Cars wove from side to side; one or two accelerated past their closest competitors and nearly collided. Everyone had eaten their Shredded Wheat that morning; no prisoners would be taken in the main event.
The formation closed up at the final chicane. I jumped on and off the throttle and brakes to ensure they were hot as hell. I found my pair of solitary black lines on the grid. You guys are going down …
First gear, revs to 5,400, the clutch bit.
The bright yellow five-second board rose over the gantry. Engines began pulsing. I crept forward an inch.
Red lights came on, then straight off; release, I was gone.
Everyone else froze, I powered off the line, instantly passing two crawlers and sliding past a third as I made the dreaded gear-change through the dogleg from first to second that could put you into a false neutral, with the race passing you by.
The drivers criss-crossed, searching for track position on the dash to the first corner. A queue stacked up on the inside, so I lunged for the outside to pass two on the brakes, hanging on as we squeezed over the jagged exit kerbs. I emerged wheel to wheel with another driver as we accelerated towards Craners. I had the inside line but on cold tyres the odds were even. He lifted first and I surged past. Sixth place already and closing on fifth.
We snaked through the back section of Donington and towards the chicane behind the pits where Jackie was hosting his VIPs. I wasn’t lined up close enough to have a pop at the guy in front until he hesitated and braked early. I accepted the invitation and zapped past. I rode the inside kerbs and slithered sideways on to the straight, adjusting my sights to the view of just four cars ahead.
My Japanese friend in his silver bullet was pushing hard behind the lead group. I gave him a few close-ups in his mirrors to let him know he was next on my menu but it was hard following through the fast turns; you lost the air over the front wing and understeered wide. Running wide compounded the loss of grip because you ended up on the dirty section of track that was rarely driven on, typically covered in ‘marbles’ – chunks of rubber of various sizes that had the same effect as stepping on a banana skin.
After a trouser-ripping 130mph moment on the marbles, I remembered … patience. The opponent’s turn in was heavy-handed and would lead to a mistake if I waited. We nosed over the rise on to the back straight at Coppice, I cut the apex, kept the front wing in clean air and got a run on him.
We drag-raced to the chicane. I pulled alongside, inches apart, and forced his hand. He braked desperately late, compromised his entry line and struggled to accelerate away. I sailed past into the next corner, the very place where we’d built sandcastles a day earlier. That left nine laps to pass two more and catch the leader.
With the race at full pelt, overtaking became harder, as drivers picked their optimum lines and dug in, but I held an advantage under braking. The front group were racing hard for position, trying to force a way past. It was winner takes all.
I lined up on Justin Wilson in third place. I got a run on him at Old Hairpin and gave him enough trouble through McLeans to pass him on the way out.
I chased down second into Redgate and found that my tighter line into the corner was yielding a couple of tenths a lap. The cornering mantra was always ‘slow in, fast out’; taking a wider entry maximised your speed down the straight. But when the car allowed it, you could drive ‘fast in, fast out’. It bagged me second place.
I saw Marc Hynes in the distance. Mr Whippy had managed to steer clear of the carnage I caused in the heat and was chasing down another championship. I was faster, but catching him with only a handful of laps to go was a tall order.
I set fastest lap after fastest lap until I finally got to sit on his gearbox. He was sluggish through Old Hairpin. I aced it. I powered up his right side, around the flat-out kink towards McLeans. With time running out, Marc put me on the grass.
I needed tarmac to round the kink at 120. As I went sideways my life should have flashed before me, but I was treated to a close-up of his Nestlé Ice Creams livery instead. I kept enough throttle trimming the lawn to lose only five car lengths. He had to defend at the chicane. I could taste victory as we rushed to complete the penultimate lap.
As I prepared to knobble Marc with the scissor shuffle, we were red flagged. A big accident behind us meant the race was being stopped. The jammy dodger took another title win ahead of me in second and Justin in third.
GT appeared, positively beaming. ‘If you can drive like that every time you’ll piss it next season. Incredible race; Jackie thought it was fantastic.’
A dream ticket was at the tips of my fingers. With the benefit of their vast experience I would have a clear shot at winning the main title …
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 Mansell 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 Bill’ because his idea of downtime was to stop working between midnight and five in the morning.
Having a poor engine meant that driving balls-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 all 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 still 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. ‘Well 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 Geller. 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 Cadillac 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 full of common sense about sport psychology and was fascinated by my sponsor-finding challenges and my search for a competitive ride to propel me to F1. He conjured up an image I’ve recalled 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 small 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 Geller today.’
‘You’ve upset him, you know?’
‘You mean Dad? I know. All he does is criticise …’
‘He’s very proud. He probably didn’t tell you, but he said he watched you all day at some fast corner called Maggie; said that you were the bravest …’
I swallowed 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 hell’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 skills 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 pulled 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 wall. 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 wall. It was pure 24-carat balls, 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 million.
I tried not to choke on my tea and wondered what they charged per gulp. I was appalled 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 hills.
But I had a back-up plan. It worked for Michael Schumacher; maybe it would work for me.
Chapter 5
Le Mans 24
Two million 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 full 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 following. 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 full throttle or braking because your life depended on it.
I travelled to Le Mans in 1997, to pre-qualify a 600bhp turbo-charged 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 dalliance. The ancient flowing right had to be taken balls to the wall 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 still 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 billowing 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 full 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 yellow apex kerb and stopped just in time to keep me on the black. From a virtual standstill 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 ball of fire was being tackled by the marshals. A few bits of torn body-work 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 called Sebastian Enjolras, who had been killed at high speed moments earlier.
