responded.
He pressed a black button and a high-pitched squeal was followed by the rhythmic churn of the engine. It sparked into life and beat an eager pace, rumbling faster than any car I had ever heard. The sound alone was enough to splash adrenalin through my veins. I was at the edge of the unknown. The responsive throttle, the direct steering, the beating engine, the slick gearbox … All were built with a single purpose: speed.
My first laps were shonky; I missed gears and adjusted to the precision of the controls. Once I built up some speed the steering became intense and darty. When I ran over a bump the floor actually hit my backside, I was sitting that close to the ground. The sense of speed in a straight was pale by comparison to the corners.
The belts dug into my shoulders as I sped through the turns like a cruise missile, albeit a largely unguided one. I pushed the envelope a little further with every lap.
I overcooked it several times and spun at Copse, the fastest corner. The wall was close to the track and I sensed danger until the car miraculously pointed itself in the right direction. I pushed on.
The session ended in a flash, a million years too early. I reluctantly pulled into the pits and spotted Dad in the distance next to one of the Ray Ban-toting instructors. In spite of numerous No Smoking signs, he had a Marlboro 100 glued to his bottom lip and was clapping his four-fingered hand. He’d lost the little digit rescuing a horse.
My times equalled the track record for the car. Ray Ban man was telling my dad he should really get me into a race. The old man was clearly sold on this plan all along. We had to convince my mother, but I figured another trip around the country lanes should do the trick.
From that moment on, my sole ambition, my obsession was to race. The life I lost as a pilot was reincarnated as a racing driver. Every day from then until this morning my eyes opened to the same living dream. I wanted to be a Formula 1 champion. Nothing else mattered.
The traditional route to Formula 1, or to any top category in motor sport, was to compete in go-karts from the third trimester. I’d grown up competing in pretty much every other way, as a swimmer, on skis and getting out of scrapes at school. I had the killer instinct to win, but no experience of motor racing, and it was a major disadvantage. Not that I saw it that way.
I duly obtained a racing licence at Silverstone and found myself looking down at aggressive short people. Karting, with its performance so closely linked to weight, had weeded out the big ones.
I joined the bottom rung of the racing ladder: Formula First. It was derided as a championship for nutters and the scene of too many crashes. It was the cheapest form of single-seater racing and the best way to go about winning my way to Formula 1. Piece of cake.
The other drivers wore colourful helmet designs and important looking racing overalls plastered with sponsors. Dad suggested I start out with something simple based on the Union Jack. In the end I opted for an all-black race suit, black gloves, black boots and a black Simpson Bandit helmet with a black-tinted visor …
From the first day I began testing the car, every waking thought revolved around a single subject: driving fast. With no prior racing experience, I learnt the trade by word of mouth, from books about great drivers like Ayrton Senna and Gilles Villeneuve, magazine articles and television. Mostly, I learned the hard way by just doing it. And shit happened.
One bit of training saved my life many times over. I attended a skid control course, which had nothing to do with brown underpants. The instructor, Brian Svenson, was a former wrestler known as ‘The Nature Boy’. He had no neck but gave plenty of it as he talked me through his Ford Mondeo, fitted with a rig that could lift the front or rear wheels off the ground to make them slide.
Every time I turned the steering, the rear would spin sideways as if it was on ice. My hands flayed at the wheel like a chimpanzee working the till at McDonald’s. Fingernails went flying, the horn was beeping, and before I knew what had happened we were sailing backwards.
Brian pressed a button on the control panel in his lap and calmly pulled the handbrake. The car came to a rest in a cloud of burnt rubber and I relaxed.
‘Oversteer, right!’ he barked.
‘OK. What does that mean?’
‘Well in that case it means the fooking car spun around, yeah. You lost the back end, so it feels like the car is turning too much. Over. Steer.’ His words sank in.
‘When it ’appens, feed the steerin’ into the slide as fast as you can. None o’ that DSA shuffling bollocks. You’ve quick reactions, just spin that wheel across a bit further.’
‘OK, Brian.’
Off we went again. My psychotic instructor pressed more buttons as we approached a tunnel of orange cones with an inflatable obstacle at the far end. I turned the steering left to dodge the obstacle and nothing happened, so I turned more.
‘Stop turning,’ ordered Nature Boy.
‘Sod that.’ I turned more. Nothing.
Whumpf.
‘Shit.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘What happened then, Brian?’
‘Understeer, right. When you turn nothin’ happens. The car goes straight on, yeah?’
‘What should I do?’
‘Not much you can do, but turning more only makes it worse. Just get the speed off then the grip comes back.’
We upped the speed to 60. After several gut-wrenching 360-degree spins, Nature Boy taught me to flick my head around like a ballerina to see where I was going and control it. It was incredible. We would enter a corner at pace and the car would start rotating. Wherever I looked, my hands would follow and the car pointed back in the right direction.
I started to complete lap after lap of the circuit, drifting from one gate through to the next. I forgot I was even carrying a passenger until the sound of Nature Boy clapping brought me back to my senses. I realised that Brian could no longer unseat me.
‘Excellent. You’ve got it. When’s your first race?’
‘Next week, at Brands Hatch.’
‘What you driving?’
‘Formula First, at the Festival.’
‘Oh Christ,’ he said, biting his top lip. ‘Good luck. Just try and remember what I’ve taught ya. If you can tell your mechanic what the car’s really doing, you’ll go far.’
Formula First was a series for ‘beginners’. The grid for my first event boasted a karting world champion, two national champions and race winners from the previous season. Most had been racing karts since they swapped nappies for Nomex. After several days of learning to drive the car at labyrinthine circuits like Oulton Park, I arrived at Brands for my first motor race.
Brands Hatch being a former Grand Prix circuit, even I had heard of this place. Formula First was supporting the Formula Ford Festival that was host to over a hundred of the best aspiring drivers in the world.
I
