Werner was on pole. As he led the field in this round of the FIA World Sportscar Championship, his engine cut out. My misfiring heap was barely mobile at the time and promptly died at the same corner, so I walked back to the pits with him.
Werner was as brown as a berry, with hair like a hedgehog and a thick Afrikaner accent. He looked exceptionally fit. In the course of conversation he mentioned that Ascari was running a series of shoot-out tests to find him a team-mate. He suggested I go for it.
The team was owned by Klaas Zwart, a Dutch engineering genius who made a billion from the oil industry. Klaas was bald and tanned and never sat still.
‘There’s twenty guys on the phone right now, F1 drivers some of them, and none of them can match Werner’s pace in the Ascari. Tell me why I want you in my team …’
I told him I would win races, that I was the man to push Werner, that no one else would work harder. Klaas took me at my word and arranged an evaluation test. Next stop, Barcelona.
Even at 7am the heat was making its presence felt. Ascari’s number one mechanic, Spencer, looked me over with unsmiling eyes. His work area was spotless, every spanner, every component just so. We made a fitted foam seat and I asked about adjusting the pedals.
‘That’s how Werner drives it. Should be good enough for you.’
The Circuit de Catalunya had some brutally fast corners that went on for ever. The other turns flowed from one to the next, giving little respite. I watched Werner exit the fast corner on to the pit straight at 130mph. Within 300 metres of him stamping his foot to the floor, it was licking along at 180 and generating nearly 4G in the corners. He brought it into the pits and the belts over his chest rose and fell as he drew breath. He stripped to the waist, revealing muscles as shredded as Rocky Balboa’s, then chewed into his drinks bottle like a butcher’s dog.
I climbed aboard, tightened the straps until I could barely move and scanned the array of switches and LED lights that lined the dashboard. I began firing the engine and heard the most beautiful bark of V10 power. The Ascari LMP’s Judd F1 engine churned out 650bhp on a Lola chassis. With no power steering it demanded hand-to-hand combat.
Werner chilled out and enjoyed the show as I spent my first laps hitting the rev limiter. The Ascari accelerated so fast that you had to pull through the gears on the sequential box as fast as your arm could snatch the lever. The power would spin the wheels in fourth gear on a dry track, so you didn’t switch off for a second. The wind at 180 blasted through the open cockpit and tried to rip your head off.
Braking from high speed using the giant F1-style carbon disc brakes involved standing on the pedal. I applied twice my body weight in pushing force to activate the down-force grip. After twenty laps I lost all feeling in my right foot.
The faster I dived into the corners, the more the wings gripped and the heavier it steered. It was like going ten rounds in the boxing ring and I was hanging off the ropes. My arms were jacked full of lactic acid and the temptation to ease up on the wheel was immense, but that meant slowing down or ending up in the wall. I loved this beast.
When I returned to the pits, our race engineer appeared and stepped casually in front of the car with his clipboard. Brian was wiry and had a moustache like Dick Dastardly. ‘How was that, then?’
There was no disguising the effort I’d put in. My chest was heaving and I was sweating bullets. ‘This car … is awesome … the best thing I’ve ever driven.’
Werner asked me how I found the steering by comparison to Formula 3.
‘F3 was a piece of piss.’
‘Yessus, man,’ he grinned. ‘Wait till you try it on new tyres; that makes it even heavier.’
At the end of the day Brian gave his verdict on my performance. Werner’s time charts were metronomic, mine weren’t, but I was the first driver they’d tested who could match his pace on old tyres. The seat was mine. I was signed by a works team.
To max the speed of a Le Mans car for four hours at a time required a supreme level of strength and endurance. It meant starting a completely new physical training regime.
I spent four hours a day in the gym, pushing tonnes of weights in a variety of unpleasant ways – attaching them to my head, running with them and pushing repetitions until I could barely lift a pencil. Then I’d run or swim for hours to build stamina.
Back in the days of leather helmets and goggles, an endurance race was a different kettle of fish. When Duncan Hamilton won Le Mans in 1953, he was so drunk that the team offered him coffee during the pit stops to keep him going. He refused, accepting only brandy.
These days Le Mans was a twenty-four-hour sprint. The cars withstood thousands of gear-shifts, millions of piston revolutions and constant forces on every component. You couldn’t afford to break them, but you couldn’t afford to slow down either. You took turns with your team-mates to thrash the living hell out of it. We drove every lap like a qualifier. The physical and mental commitment to maintaining that performance was absolute, making it the purest all-round challenge in motor racing.
The eclectic mix of experienced amateurs and professionals raced an equally diverse range of machinery, from brawny Ferrari and Porsche GTs that resembled road cars to the 700 horsepower flying saucers loosely called ‘prototypes’ – basically Formula 1 cars wearing pretty dresses.
Audi’s prototype was the one to beat. Their mechanical reliability was matched by outright pace. A gearbox change used to take a couple of hours in the old days. Now when Audi blew one, they bolted on another, complete with suspension joints, in just four minutes.
In 2001 the rain was torrential for nineteen hours of the twenty-four, and the swarm of cars skated along the straights like skipping stones.
From midnight until four in the morning I hammered around an eight-mile track, avoiding an accident every time I put the power down.
On my first visit to Le Mans I was lucky to even make the graveyard shift, following a disastrous run in the daytime. The crew had whipped off the wheels and banged a fresh set of tyres on to the red-hot discs whilst I stayed in the car. As the fuel hose slammed home and started pumping, I felt cold liquid fill the seat of my pants.
I thumbed the radio button. ‘I think I’ve got fuel running down my neck.’
A look at the fuel rig revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but my backside was swimming in icy liquid.
There was no time for debate. Besides, I couldn’t believe it myself. I drove away and my skin began to tingle at first, then started burning. This wasn’t imaginary. I was forced to pit again. Werner was in the crew bus attending to the blisters on his hands and caught the first glimpse of my burning buttocks.
‘Vok, you all right, man? That’s one hot botty.’
Hours later it was my turn to drive again. Raindrops the size of golf balls created eruptions in the standing water. A journalist saw me waiting my turn in the garage and said, ‘You must be absolutely dreading this. It’s your first time here, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t wait to get out there,’ I said, jogging on the spot. ‘This is what it’s all about.’
He probably wrote me off as cannon fodder.
The team manager was Ian
