My dad had Parkinson’s and he was shaking a lot from the nerves of the whole thing but he was so happy for me. Jo was there too. I stood on the car and jumped off the roof. It was amazing. I had such a lump in my throat, it was unbelievable. As I stood there, it felt like a dream.
There were some tears. But this time, they were tears of joy. We had achieved it. We had won. I knew things would change for Jo and I. It was not the end; it was the start. No wonder we all wept again…At last, after the caravan, the hard times and our struggle to survive, we had arrived. That afternoon, in the heat of Dubai, standing on that podium with my family there to share our joy, I knew I had realised my dream. But I knew, too, that it was just the first step.
I took that championship, in the end, on number of races won. Dirk Muller and I finished level on 111 points for the season. It was that close, so close. My superior preparation, that of the team and my absolute determination to succeed had carried me through. That is the way I saw it. I knew I would win and that in my mind nobody else had a chance.
After that final race, Frank Diefenbacher, one of the Seat team drivers, drove his car back to parc ferme and fell out of it. He collapsed with heat exhaustion. He was taken away and put on a drip. The poor guy was so knackered he could hardly stand up, barely breathe and had no chance of speaking properly for a while. He was utterly crushed by those conditions.
Yet he had been just one place in front of Dirk at the finish of the race.
As I let things sink in, I realised that if he had flaked out a lap earlier, or before that, I would not have been champion. Dirk would have passed him and my dream would have been all over. But his courage in producing that fighting finish and crossing the line had secured my first international title. Those are the margins you work with all the time in motor racing.
Not only did I prove I was the quickest driver there that year, but I won the championship against all the odds – against the might and experience of BMW Schnitzer and N-Techology Alfa Romeo who were doing anything possible to win the championship. I do believe that Schnitzer are one of the best racing teams in the world. They are a top team in every way and I have a lot of respect for them. Their budget must have been double our budget. The Alfa Romeo team with their four cars were also very strong and resourced well, too. They had a great driver lineup: Gabriele Tarquini, Fabrizio Giovanardi, Augusto Farfus Jr, Thommo…all good drivers.
I thought it was pretty impressive to go into that European series and to win there so quickly – in only my second season. In my first year, they could not even pronounce my name. I remember when I went for an interview with a local television station in Guernsey and they told me they had gone to the first race, in Valencia, and asked a load of the other drivers about me. Every one of them said, ‘Well, we sort of know who he is, but we don’t know much about him’. My BMW colleague Jörg Muller was interviewed and he said, ‘Ja, of course, we know him, and now he is in BMW – but he hasn’t proved anything’.
I just shook my head and said to myself: ‘You know nothing.’ I have always said that my critics have helped me and being the underdog has helped me too. Those things have kept me very hungry. I could have been the racing driver who turns up with the big shades, the glamorous watch and the sun tan and just straps himself into an ultra-fast car and goes out and does the job. That would have been lovely, but it has never been like that for me.
My work ethic has always been to roll my sleeves up and graft. It has had to be. It carries over from my ordinary life and always has done. I have the habit of wanting to do it myself and wanting to see a job done well, even if I have to help. This still spills into my non-racing life too. Not long ago, we had builders doing some work on our house in Guernsey. I got so frustrated that I actually rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in there myself. I really enjoyed it. And I’m sure I did the job pretty well! I learned to work like that early in my life and it has never left me. My family always worked hard and I hope we always do.
There is no doubt that I have needed that kind of grit in my touring car career. Nobody really believed in me to start with and I had to overcome a lot of other people’s doubts. But when I won the 2004 European Championship everybody was clapping, all of them, up and down the pit lane. All the big teams were saying ‘Bloody hell! He’s actually won it. He has gone and done it…’ I remember them all coming out of their garages in Dubai and I was in tears. It was so emotional for me.
In 2003, I had showed my speed and people knew that I was good, but they still did not believe it. They thought Alfa would still be the number one, but my grit would not let me give up. I never give up. After 2004, everybody predicted that the competition would be back strongly – and they were right because 2005 was tougher, 2006 was even tougher still and 2007 was even tougher than that! But I won all three times, taking the title and keeping it. The problem, for me, has been that with each passing year, more and more people did not want me to win. Not only did they want to see a change, they wanted the power structure to work. If there was going to be someone dominating that series, turning it into a private empire like Michael Schumacher seemingly did in Formula One, they certainly did not want it to be me.
Unlike Formula One, Touring Cars is a contact sport and the politics are such that when things go in a certain kind of way you can end up being barged off the track. Yes, literally. There is also the penalty known as success ballast, reverse grids and rule changes all the time. The rules are not even necessarily the same for all the teams. At different times there has been one rule for one and something else for the others. I have always sensed that there was a huge amount of respect for me, but also that there has certainly been a big drive to stop me from winning the championship year on year. In a way, I guess it is understandable. But I have taken no notice. I have just gone out there and done my best to do my job. I have ground out the races and the results by squeezing everything I could from the package we had each year.
It was the same grit that has worked for me all through my career. It is the grit I saw in Nigel Mansell and that I have also seen in Lance Armstrong and a few other people. Maybe it is a bit of bloody-mindedness, too. And you do need talent. Do not think it can be done without talent. But talent alone is not enough. Everything you achieve in life needs hard work and there are few, if any, people who break that rule. I have always worked to achieve everything from polishing cars for my dad, selling on the forecourt, hustling to find sponsors and teams and then improving my own racing by looking, listening and learning at every opportunity. I have also worked tremendously hard at my fitness and I am sure that it was one of the decisive factors in 2004.
Before the Dubai decider that year, there was a little bit of time off after the Oschersleben meeting. I was 12 points behind, but I still had not given up. I had decided that I would do anything and everything to compete and stay in contention. After you have made a decision in your life to leave home and pursue your dream, like I did when I left Guernsey, it is not asking much to work your socks off to keep that dream alive.
I trained very hard. And I trained in a way that seemed logical to me, but caused quite a stir later on when a lot of other people found out about it. I put my race suit on, I put my helmet on and I got in the sauna at Kings Club, a gym and fitness place, in Guernsey, two minutes’ drive from my house. I was doing boxing in the sauna in full race gear. It was a public club, so plenty of people would have seen me there in my race overalls and helmet, but I did not give a damn what anybody thought. I trained on a bike. I did ‘boxercise’, sit-ups, press-ups, running…I did everything I could. I stayed in the sauna for the length of two races, an hour and a half, nearly every day. I just wanted to be quick in Dubai and I would do anything I could to help myself. People said I was crazy and maybe I was, but it worked.
I trained really hard and physically I was fit. I felt super-fit. But, more importantly than that, most importantly of all, I was mentally fit. My head was ready. My mind was clear and set. I did a lot of meditation. I knew that Dubai, in September, would be awful. I knew we were preparing for ambient air temperatures of 42
