by Ben Collins
I tore off the electrical tape, picked up the mini flashlight and checked all the fuses were pushed in. They were. I switched ECUs, the engine’s brain, plugged the new one into the mother board and flicked the ignition back on to reboot. No dice. I got back on the radio. ‘The new ECU isn’t working. Any ideas?’
‘Wait a minute.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘We’re coming out to you. Stay right there.’
Where was I meant to go …?
There must be something I could do. I looked across to the giant plasma screen on the other side of the track and saw a small Japanese driver having similar problems. He was staring down at his car with his helmet on and speaking to his team on a tiny mobile phone. After a minute he started gesticulating wildly, hurled the phone into the tarmac and stamped on it twenty times with both feet. Bad reception can really get you down.
Men in orange suits wanted me out of the car, but if I walked too far away it would be classed as ‘abandonment’ and could eliminate us from the race. Ian and Spencer turned up but couldn’t find the fault.
As a last-ditch effort I put the car in first gear and bunny-hopped it 20metres using the kick from the starter motor. This really upset the French marshals, who chased after me shaking their fists until the battery ran out of juice. Our race was over.
It was gut-wrenching. We came back to a warm reception in the pits.
They had done an incredible job, especially Brian. His beady eyes had disappeared into his skull. Guys like him never slept and he was still reviewing telemetry screens long after everyone else had cleared off. He dragged me into his data den. ‘One of your lap times was ten seconds faster than anybody else on the circuit. TEN! Bloody brilliant. Looks like the sodding fuel pump packed in. Some tossing little wire that burned out, a fifty pence component, I bet.’
Hearing that we had paced faster than anyone for nearly four hours numbed some of the disappointment, but nothing compared to actually finishing the race.
The Audis continued their faultless run to victory the following day. Our crew fell asleep around the pit. Sleep was hard to come by. When my eyelids eventually closed, the dotted white lines of Mulsanne were still whipping through my retinas at 200mph.
Chapter 6
Daytona Endurance
After the dust settled from Le Mans, I started talking to some of the large manufacturer teams about driving opportunities for the following year. I was duly informed by one representative that they were ‘talking to big names from Formula 1’. Ben was only a three-letter word, so she had me there.
Fortunately Ascari kept me for the following season for a programme that included two of the most prestigious sportscar races in the world: the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona followed by the 12 Hours of Sebring.
I decided it was time to take the plunge and leave my day job. In between races, I had been working as a brand manager for Scalextric, which included a cosy five-hour daily commute on top of training. It was fun coming up with ideas for toys. I broke new ground by creating the first Bart Simpson Scalextric set, although I got into a little trouble for developing super-sticky magnets that made the model cars travel faster than light. My friends loved it too, dubbing me the ‘smallest racing driver in the world’ and referring to my backside as a hollow extrusion.
Well, this toy racer was off to Daytona, the birthplace of NASCAR. In the 1950s moonshine runners flocked from the southern counties to race the long flats of Daytona Beach; the best drivers of the Prohibition era had honed their skills outrunning the police on country roads. Here they belted along the beachfront avenue and blasted sand into the faces of spectators. People liked that, so in 1957 race promoter Bill France built the biggest, fastest Speedway the world had ever seen.
The 2.5-mile tri oval with its 31-degree banking was colossal. Even grizzly racers were shocked by the scale of the ‘Big D’ and the sprawling edifice of its surrounding grandstands. ‘There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t scared to death of the place,’ Lee Petty once said. The whitewashed wall that encased the Speedway was ever ready to punish the over-zealous.
An infield road course had been constructed inside the oval for sport-scar racing, and that’s where we came in. My prototype rattled so quickly through the banking at Turn One that for the first few laps my eyeballs couldn’t keep up with the sweeping sheet of asphalt. It was dizzyingly fast; a 180mph turn, tighter than a jet fighter could pull.
Racing a prototype in Europe through a packed field of GT cars had taught me plenty of cut and thrust. The difference at Daytona was the sheer volume of slower traffic in the tight infield section. I now realised how Batman felt driving the streets of Gotham after igniting the after-burners on a Monday morning. If you gave any quarter, the cars you wanted to muscle past sensed hesitation and only made it harder to get by.
Getting past a prototype of equal pace was more challenging. I closed on one at 170. I couldn’t recognise his helmet but his car’s body language looked edgy. The banking amplified the suspension compression from tons of down-force and the bellies of both our machines slammed the deck at every bump. My aero went light in his dead air and I hung on to the steering pretty tight while the whole world wobbled around me.
We were bearing down on a pair of GTs running line astern. I had a good slingshot from their slipstream, moved one lane higher towards the wall and overtook. The prototype didn’t see me coming and swung out with me alongside.
The banking was beginning to flatten out for the straight, so this was not a good time to change direction. The only space left for me on the track was the high side, which was covered in sand and marbles, so that’s where I went. The steering instantly went light as the slick tyres lost contact with asphalt, scrabbled with the dirt and pointed me at the wall. A microsecond later, the rear lost traction. As the camber fell away I had to get out of the throttle and tap some brake to nudge the front away from the wall.
I passed the prototype with a front wheel locked, pitched sideways so close to the wall I thought it would shave the rear wing endplate. It may have looked ugly but I made it stick.
I cruised the pit lane later to find the guy I overtook and maybe share a laugh. There he was, overalls tied at the waist, wearing a baseball cap with big aviator shades drooping off the end of his nose. His neck was frail for a racing driver, but not for a 77-year-old. His voice sounded familiar as he chatted to his mechanic, then Butch Cassidy’s clear blue eyes saw me coming. I froze. Paul Newman, star of the silver screen for more than half a century, racer of old and charitable angel who parachuted millions of dollars into worthy causes, was the coolest dude I ever saw. And that’s exactly how I left him. He had enough people bothering him for a piece of his time.
Werner was on spectacular form and stuck the Ascari Judd on pole position. He spent the afternoon flexing his muscles under the Florida sunshine and cooking the ‘brai’ so that ‘none of you Engleesh burn my meat’.
My duty at Daytona was to develop an experimental turbo-charged engine in the sister Ascari. The words ‘experimental’ and ‘endurance’ made poor bedfellows. Not only was the engine gutless and expensive, but parts of the rear wing kept falling off.
During the race I had to watch my mirrors to keep an eye on things. After the third pit stop to repair the wing we realised that the entire wing post was being shaken loose by the deafening harmonics of the engine. It was deemed too dangerous to continue, so that was the end of that. Maybe one day we would finish an enduro event.
The twelve-hour race at Sebring was half the duration of Daytona 24 but twice as exhausting. Mars had a more temperate climate than Florida in March. And the Martians themselves were pretty conservative by comparison to the 150,000 fans who camped at the track during America’s spring break. The usual petrolheads were joined by tens of thousands of college kids who partied hard. The police brought an armoured tank to keep them under control.
Swarms of them descended from the nearby beaches for a look at some fast noisy things. Tanned babes in scant bikinis tot
ing dollar fifty plastic necklaces exchanged them at every opportunity for bodily fluids or a flash of flesh. The race fans built their own bars, converted school buses into multi-storey viewing galleries and invented my favourite gadget of all time. A 200 horsepower engine beneath the cushions enabled the devoted fan to admire the racing from the comfort of his own motorised sofa from a variety of vantage points around the infield.
The heat built up to 90 degrees with 100 per cent humidity. All the effort of physical training was worth every bead of sweat when you set about the track. It was as rough as hell. The surface was a bumpy patchwork of different materials and there were some fast, challenging corners with minimal run-off. You had to chase the heavy steering for every second as the grip came and went. The constant jarring wreaked havoc on the vehicle’s drive train, and the tyres shredded from all the wheelspin and hard braking. We ran the hardest compound tyre Dunlop could supply us.
Avoiding dehydration was a constant battle. The vital fluids in the car’s drink system tended to boil by the time it reached your mouth and scald your lips. You thought you were warm whilst driving, but when you pulled up at the end of a stint the rush of air would stop and you found yourself in the asphyxiation chamber. I sprinted from the car, pulled up my fireproof leggings and stood in a bucket of ice water, looking like John Cleese in his Monty Python days.
One of our truckies was dating a local hussy with an altogether scientific approach to surviving the weather. Red leathery skin and greasy brown hair was her defence against the sun, and she arrived every morning with an icy slab of Budweiser beer. From then until dusk, when she emptied the last can, not a single drop of water passed her hirsute lips, and her vocabulary was, like, whatever. ‘See ya’ll in the mornin’, boys, baaaaaaarp.’ A real southern belle.
I was partnered with Justin Wilson, who had just won the Formula 3000 Championship. It was great having him on board, in no small part because he was happy with my only standing order: ‘No pissing in the seat.’ This feral habit was pioneered by many notable drivers including Nelson Piquet, who apparently used to wet his pants at the end of a Formula 1 race and leave the gift for his mechanics.
As team leader in my car I drew the lucky straw to run double stints when our third driver was injured in the pit lane. That meant running flat out for just over two hours between fuelling and driver changes. The combination of the continuous high G forces and the way the car was always twitching tested driver and machine to the brink of failure, making Sebring a rite of passage. Even the track started melting part way through the race, so we had to run behind a safety car whilst emergency repairs were made.
Performance-wise we were right on the pace, having ditched the Turbo for the magnificent Judd. The Audis were running away on their grippy Michelin tyres, which at the time gave them several seconds a lap over our Dunlops. Our hard compound came to life when it mixed with the softer rubber on the track, which meant our pace quickened as the race went on. We began catching the leaders. Justin and I took turns putting the hammer down, competing with each other until we crossed the line in fifth place. At last, we had a finish!
Werner placed behind us in the sister car; beating him meant we had done something right. He had attacked Sebring with his customary gusto and kept us primed throughout the weekend with energy drinks.
At one point Werner’s co-driver made an impromptu pit stop in the night and caught everyone off guard. Afrika-Bo was snoring away in the coach when Ian Dawson burst in and dragged him to his feet. Werner grabbed his helmet, leapt into the car and drove off. His helmet was still fitted with a fully tinted daytime visor, so he couldn’t see a thing. Without floodlights, his task was as dangerous as a bush baby asking a hyena for a shoulder rub. He somehow managed to drive an hour-long stint within three tenths of our pace.
We packed our bags for Europe and geared up for Le Mans. I set about an extensive tyre-testing programme with Dunlop, and Klaas threw every resource at the project to give us a credible shot at winning the 24-hour classic this time round.
The new Ascari KZ1 supercar was on display to the crowds after years of development; this was the road car our racing project set out to promote. With all the lessons learnt from the previous year, everyone was confident of a result.
I partnered Werner and he started the race. The 60 cars filed on to the start/finish straight, and when they dropped the hammer my hair stood on end. The atmosphere was buzzing, doubly so because the 2002 World Cup was going on and the English fans opposite our pit were updating us on the England vs Denmark game using their own scoreboard. They went berserk as each of England’s three goals hit the back of the net.
Werner was whipping through the forest towards Indianapolis corner at 220mph. He lifted to turn right and the rear suspension collapsed. The rear hit the floor, lost aero grip and sent him into a horrific spin. He flew across the gravel, back on to the track and cracked into the wall at over 100 times the force of gravity.
Spencer was the first of our crew on the scene. ‘Luckily Werner’s head took most of the impact,’ he said later. ‘And there was nuffink in there to damage.’
The car was toast but Werner spent several minutes trying to get the engine going in spite of pleas from the officials. He only gave up when Spencer assured him the car was actually in two pieces.
Regardless of how the suspension fault occurred, my gut feeling was that the Ascari project was at an end. It couldn’t carry on without a major sponsor. We’d needed that Le Mans result. Come July, I was looking for a job.
I phoned every team in the book for a drive, in every series from Le Mans to Formula 1 to NASCAR. One call paid off in September just a few days before the inaugural Indycar race in the UK. I’d been bugging the life out of the organisers for a drive, and at the last minute the Series Director rang and asked what I was doing that weekend.
‘Coming to Rockingham to watch the Champ Car race.’
‘Well, bring your helmet and overalls, there’s a drive for you in the support race.’
Rockingham’s newly formed programme was based on NASCAR, America’s most popular racing series. One in three Americans was a fan; viewing audiences were enormous and the sponsorship and advertising revenues ran into billions of dollars. The stadiums, cars and fan base were all vast.
The formula for success was simple: they raced stock cars based on America’s three most popular sedans that were virtually identical in performance and available to anyone. These agricultural machines were built of tube steel, with clunking metal gear-shifters straight off a Massey Ferguson and snarling V8 motors. The circuits were mostly ovals where you only steered left. The cars were set up with most of their wheels pointing that way – so much so that you had to steer right just to drive one in a straight line.
Much to the amusement of the Americans, the UK series was called ‘Ascar’, prompting the enduring question: ‘You race Ass-Car?’ The packed grid boasted top British drivers like World Rally Champion Colin McRae, Touring Car Champion Jason Plato, some F1 testers and competitors from the USA.
They raced wheel to wheel at Rockingham’s 1.5-mile Speedway at continuous speeds of up to 180mph. Rockingham was purpose built in an industrial backwater near Corby, Northants, a town famous for … not very much. The stadium rose out of the ground like a modern Colosseum amidst a sea of tarmac parking for thousands of spectators. It was American-style BIG, with packed grandstands just metres back from the action. The track was wide enough to fit six cars side by side with gentle banking to assist the flow of speed through the four corners.
Europeans largely regarded oval racing as boring, having only seen it on television. When you attended a live race, you realised the droning pack of cars were largely out of control. It was a thrilling high-speed spectacle. The question wasn’t whether they would crash, but when and how hard.
My car was owned by Mark Proctor, a Goliath of a Yorkshireman who also competed in the series. It was his spare, and looked like many of its vital components had been
cannibalised. I sat inside its spacious cabin behind a steering wheel big enough for a bus and rearranged some electrical wiring that dangled from the roof. I resolved not to judge a book by its cover. The old girl might have it where it counts.
She didn’t.
After missing the test session with an engine problem, I got to grips with my first stock car in the open qualifying session and discovered why NASCAR racers described understeer as ‘push’. Whenever I went hard into a corner, the apex repelled the car as if it were the like pole of another magnet. I qualified two places from last and contemplated hanging myself from the wiring that had come loose again.
In the parc fermé before the race, a sports agent saw me leaning over my car at the tail end of the pre-formed grid. I tried hiding but he caught me.
‘I see you’re going well then!’
I smiled through clenched teeth. ‘I won’t be here long.’
At the rolling start, the cars sped into the first corner in side-by-side formation and slithered into the turn as they lost down-force in the hole they cut through the air. The volume of air being pushed in all directions was enough to barge neighbouring cars aside and affect their handling.
I felt the changing air pressures immediately in my inner ear. By nosing inside the car in front you could use the air buffeting from your bonnet to kick out his tail; by running outside you could suck away his air and make him ‘push’. To exacerbate your opponent’s handling problems, you sat in the same position for a few laps until his tyres burnt out.
My dog of a car floated like a butterfly in the wake of dirty air behind the other racers and stuck to the track like a squashed toad. In ‘clean air’ it was rubbish, so I had to leapfrog from one victim to the next without delay. The drivers made it hard. When people moved over on me I stuck my nose into their side and pushed back; they called it ‘rubbing’. I had a few close encounters with the wall, and at 160mph it puckered up your ass cheeks tighter than a lobster’s en route to the boiling pot.
