After forty minutes the balaclava began to itch like hell. The only place to give my head a break was the mothballed room Jim Wiseman had shown me where the test pilots used to change for pre-flight. It was more like a jail cell.
Paint flaked off the damp, yellow-stained walls; the red-painted concrete floor had survived an earthquake and the windows were too high to see out of. It was furnished minimally – with a rump-numbing, standard locker-room issue wooden bench. My only company was a plump beetle that I named Reg. He usually made an appearance mid-morning and scrambled across the pock-marked floor.
I waited there for hours on end, to be summoned to go ballistic on the track in whatever vehicle was lined up for filming. Food was brought to me and eaten in solitary confinement. In between eating and driving, two of my favourite pursuits, I busied myself reading books or doing press-ups. I pestered racing teams on the phone and drifted off into the recesses of my brain. It was like The Shawshank Redemption, minus the shower scene.
Only Andy Wilman, Wiseman and a couple of the producers knew who I was. I was just a voice behind a mask. Even the presenters were in the dark. When I coached the celebrity guests, none of them knew my name. They never saw my face. My helmet always stayed on with the visor shut.
It didn’t take long to slip into my new routine.
It would begin with a knock at the door. The world turned Polaroid as I pulled on my helmet. The familiar scent of its resin bond filled my nostrils and the wadding pressed against my cheeks. I paced down the hall and on to the airfield to receive instructions from the director. People stopped in their tracks and stared at me like I was E.T.
The director swept his curly locks behind his ears and extended his hands, framing a square with his thumbs and forefingers as he breathlessly visualised the scene he was looking for.
‘What we would like you to do, if you can, Stig, is pull away really fast. And spin the wheels. Can you do that?’
The cameraman, a North Face advocate with white blond hair, crouched like a rabbit six inches from a Porsche 911’s rear wheel, evidently focused on the hub. ‘Hi, I’m Ben Joiner,’ he said. ‘Am I all right here?’
I nodded. I was hardly being asked to skim the barriers at Daytona.
I red-lined the Porker, flipped the clutch and vanished in a haze of smoke.
The radio crackled. ‘Cut, cut, cut … Wonderful. Let’s do that again, but this time look at the camera first and then go!’
We did it again. And again. And again. Filming took … time.
I began to get my head around the compromise between fast driving and spectacular driving for TV. Sometimes it overlapped – a fast lap could be as exciting to behold on the screen as on the stopwatch, but that was rare.
I studied the edit inside a minivan with James, a dour young Brummie who received the footage hot from the track, tapped a whirlwind of inputs on to his hieroglyphic keyboard, and deftly dissected it into a meaningful sequence for broadcast.
To enhance the viewing experience – and to keep my new friend James at bay – I threw in some wheelspins and lashings of lurid cornering to complement the more sedate looking but faster driving shots.
The Porsche was down to set a time, but it was pissing with rain and the track was flooding in the straights. Just completing a 140mph lap without spinning on to the turf had been an accomplishment.
Andy Wilman wandered down and collared me. ‘Can’t you do something?’
‘What did you have in mind? A good time is out of the question. The car aquaplanes from second right up to fifth on the straights.’
‘The old Black Stig was a dab hand round this place, y’know. Amazing car control in the wet. Just do something. Something … interesting.’
Andy could already push my buttons like a jukebox.
As if by magic, the eight-year-old in my brain had a great idea. The Follow Through corner was named when Andy designed the layout of the Top Gear track with Lotus test driver Gavan Kershaw from Naaaarwich (which some people know as Norwich). ‘The cars will be going bloody fast through this bit,’ Gavan explained. ‘You wouldn’t want to go off, that’s for sure.’
Andy is rumoured to have got quite excited at that point. ‘You mean if you went off you’d shit yourself and follow through?’
I asked Jim Wiseman to reposition the Follow Through cameraman. I’d decided not to share my plan with him. If things went wrong, I could always blame the weather.
I pounded the Porker around the lap as per normal. As I exited the Hammerhead chicane the adrenalin began boosting. As every gear-change propelled me closer to the money shot, I started to wonder if this was such a good idea.
The rain slashed across the windscreen, I turned right into the Follow Through and buried the throttle. The Porker fired several warning signals but I was able to straighten up and point it towards the gap between the tyre wall and the verge. The pools of water were so dense they were picking the whole car up and aiming it in a load of different directions. For my plan to work, that was precisely what I needed.
Forty feet to go.
I passed my previous braking point and kept it lit, steered straight, leant left and handed over control to the Rain God.
The water lifted all four tyres off the tarmac and the steering went ghostly light. I passed through the tyre wall at a rude angle at just under 120mph. There wasn’t a sound as the car pinged into its first 360-degree spin.
I stayed on my original line of travel, which was good news. It gave me 300 feet of runway to sort things out before I ran into the landing lights. To cap this manoeuvre in style I needed to end up facing in the right direction.
Once I was going fully backwards on the second gyration, I straightened the steering, then turned it gently right to swing the front around. I was still shipping at around 100, so I had to manhandle out of the manoeuvre with some hard opposite lock to catch the rear for the last time.
Gotcha.
I skirted the gutter bordering the runway and peddled round the final corners to cross the finish.
I pulled alongside Jim for a debrief.
‘Fucking hell. Are you all right?’
‘Sure. How did it look?’
Jim rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t know if it’s better or worse that you did that intentionally …’ He contacted the main camera unit on his radio. ‘Biff, did you get that?’
‘Uuh … Oh … Yeah … We got it.’ ‘Iain, what about you?’
‘YYYAAAAAAAAAP (enormous burp). Got it.’
‘What’ve you got, Jim?’ Andy quizzed.
‘The mother of all spins. Stiggy’s changing his underpants as we speak. So am I, for that matter.’
‘Good work. Get ready for the celeb, he’ll be here in fifteen.’
With
