The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (16 page)

Jim and I watched transfixed as the Liana crossed the line. Jim careful y angled his stopwatch in my direction in case any of Simon’s people were peeking. It was within a second of the lap record.

Simon pul ed up, his elbow on the window ledge, and asked what gear he was supposed to use in the second corner.

‘Second.’

I asked him to brake later at the penultimate turn. The next lap was audibly faster; we could see him wrestle the steering. I got him to brake later, corner by corner, and he went faster every lap.

Simon took a cigarette and water break and asked how he was doing, but we couldn’t let him know before his interview.

His eyebrows disappeared beneath his immaculately sculpted hair-line. ‘Do you seriously expect me to believe that?’

Yes we did.

We bolted him back into the five-point harness. I always found that the most uncomfortable part of my job; I never quite got used to reaching between a celebrity crotch and yanking a strap across their bal s or breasts.

As Simon put in some more fabulous laps, Wilman turned up to check on things. Jim showed him his notepad.

‘Bloody Nora.’ Wilman gave a soft-shoe shuffle. ‘
Don’t
tel him.’

Simon shared our enthusiasm, so we kept pushing him until he reached a plateau on around lap ten.

I told him it was an excel ent time that he probably wouldn’t beat.

Andy then offered him a passenger ride in the Noble M12 supercar, so I wheeled it out.

The M12 was light as a feather. Its V6 motor was powered by twin turbochargers that took time to spool up before belching the machine forward with gigantic thrust. By selecting the right gears and keeping the turbo’s pressure peaking, I could slide the car al the way up to 80mph. I was keen to register a reaction from Simon, so I gave it my best shot.

He remained as cool as a cucumber, arms folded and a serene smile on his face. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t. I fired the car across the bump at the tyre wal corner at 135mph and, when his panel judge composure didn’t flinch, I drove back to the pits to drop him off.

Wilman reappeared. ‘Could you just give Simon a go now?’

Nightmare. Had I known that he’d be driving, I’d never have shown him the machine’s ful potential.

He was too good a mimic.

I kept my belts loose so that I could reach the steering wheel from the passenger seat if I had to.

Simon dumped the clutch, just like I’d taught him in the gutless Suzuki. The twin turbos went ‘whooooshhhhh’

and the car was tearing down the track at 100mph eight seconds later.

He started trying to copy the fast power slides I’d been doing. We were so close to losing it that I didn’t dare distract him by speaking. We approached the superfast tyre wal corner. I told him to back off where I hadn’t.

Simon took an apocalyptic amount of speed in and I knew we were going off big time.

The car spun at 120mph and I leapt across to fling the steering hard over into opposite lock. That sent us down the tarmac, bought a little time and shed some speed.

I was keen to avoid the grass because the car might rol . Once we started going backwards I yanked the handbrake and hol ered at him to stand on the anchors. Cowel hit the pins and grinned. I think it meant we were even.

We’d come to a rest on the grass after narrowly missing two landing lights that could have ripped the bloody doors off.

‘Now, real y, what happened there?’ Simon cackled with laughter. ‘You went in too fast is what happened. Please, let’s go back in so I can col ect my P45.’

We bumbled back on to the track and returned the car to its owner. Simon had real y enjoyed himself, which meant the crew did too. I’d never seen someone with no experience adapt so quickly to a supercar and wring its neck.

Jim pul ed in his footage and I went to the Outside Broadcast truck. Brian Klein, the Studio Director, was sitting in front of a raft of TV screens and waving his hairy arms about. He was wearing a typical y garish outfit that comprised a vertical y striped T-shirt, knee-length white trousers and leather shoes.

Brian control ed the crowd via his production assistants. They scurried around the floor, moving any gargantuan men out of the way of camera and bringing forward the pretty girls, whilst juggling the three presenters to make sure they were saying the right things at the right time, cueing the pre-recorded footage and keeping an eye on the unedited stuff streaming in hot from the track. Al these inputs were performed live to the assembled audience whilst being time coded for packaging into a one-hour show for broadcast four days later.

After a wel -executed interview in which Jeremy opined that bus lanes should be banned and traffic wardens exiled, they ran Simon’s lap. They stitched on some loony driving from his early runs, but the finishing time was what counted: 1.47.1, nearly a second faster than the track record. Simon double punched the air and Brian smiled at me, raising the little black carpets above his eyes before he settled back to his control panel.

With Cowel at the top of the leaderboard, only one other marker needed setting straight. Black Stig held the
Top Gear
track record on a 1.23.7 power lap, courtesy of the mighty Lambo Murcielago. To beat that, I needed some serious kit.

Porsche kindly delivered an appropriate weapon with their Carrera GT, a quantum leap in design and performance from their standard line of midlife crisis cures. The GT was panned by limp-wristed critics because the ceramic clutch was too aggressive for pul ing away at traffic lights, making it prone to stal ing.

Driven right, it launched like a scalded cat.

It had a belting 5.7-litre V10 lump in its core, fat tyres and enough front grip to strip the surface off the tarmac. The shril V10 strafed the ears like a Le Manster. It drove like one too. The GT was light on aerodynamic grip, making it delicate and edgy in the corners but so rewarding once you learnt to apply less steering than normal. That knowledge came the hard way. I spun at least three times during practice. When you drove it on the limit the throttle response was so precise that if your foot moved slightly over a bump it would spin.

The interior wasn’t Ferrari fancy but was no less beautiful, with carbon weave and subtle leather trim around a seat that came straight from the Starship
Enterprise
. The giant golfbal gear knob was a lazy drop from the wheel, making it vital y accessible during gob-stopping bouts at the helm when the engine ran into the rev limiter mid-slide and a rapid upshift was required.

Jim Wiseman gave me some time to warm up the GT. I took it down the runway and kil ed the tyres, weaving left and right on ful opposite lock, smashing the throttle and braking to a stop to red up the carbon brakes.

It was only ever me versus the track for a power lap. I treated it the same way as a qualifying session and summoned the great drivers I had raced with over the years, guys like Webber and Sato, who would fight me tooth and nail for every hundredth of a second. They may not have been at the track that day, but as Darth Vader aptly put it, I felt their presence.

There were some funny looks from the cameramen, and the deep voice of experience boomed over the radio: ‘Not to be contentious – but are we actual y gonna have a car left to film?’

‘It’s OK, Casper,’ Jim replied. ‘Stig’s just warming up the tyres; stand by to shoot in a minute.’

Jim let me drop the hammer without delay. I sawed at the wheel throughout a frenzied lap and the GT popped the record by just over a second, giving me plenty to fold my arms about.

Casper and Ben worked their magic behind the cameras, with Iain May shooting from an elevated mobile platform, or ‘cherry picker’, which boasted a maximum speed of 4mph. Iain’s thinning blond hair and hooded eyes gave him a distinctly mature look, but during the long pauses between takes he shifted its position with al the enthusiasm of a five-year-old on a Tonka Toy.

‘Don’t park it there yet, Iain,’ Casper hissed. ‘I’m on a big wide as he comes through the tyres so you’l be in frame. Let me get one more shot, then I’m going tight.’

Camera-talk was slowly sinking in. If Casper was shooting a ‘wide’ profile it meant I needed to keep it ful y lit for a considerably longer distance than if it was a ‘tight’ close-up moment in one corner. It was fascinating to watch the film crew work together and to be giving them the confidence to creep nearer the action. As the trust grew on both sides, the crew employed their superb skil s to define the whiplash-quick shooting style that
Top Gear
became known for.

Iain ended up lying in the gutter less than a foot from the track as I howled past his shoulder at max speed. Most cameramen would press record and walk away.
Top Gear
crews put their necks on the line and operated manual y in order to pul focus and pan with the car.

The lairy cornering shots were achieved in much the same way. Jeremy and I would fly sideways into the corner with the crew rotating through different positions, a hair’s breadth from our intended line of travel. The boys covered every angle within minutes. Having them so close to the gliding cars focused the mind as much as any motor race, and we never took our eyes off them.

We were expected to get it right first time, so I stopped asking for practice. ‘Fine to practise, Stiggy,’

became the refrain, ‘but we’l just rol cameras anyway.’

The Spanish Yeti, Dan the cameraman, legging it across the track with a Steadicam stabilised mount attached to his torso, was the most unnerving sight of al . He sprinted to and fro, capturing tight gritty sweeps of the action, with his curly black mane flowing in his wake.

The end of my first series came up fast and I wondered if I’d be asked back for another. My hopes were buoyed when a contract arrived in the post, but it was retrospective and was fol owed by a pay cheque made out to ‘The Stig Only’. I was sure the bank had already heard the one about Donald Duck, and unlike Batman I needed the money, so I straightened that one out sharpish with Accounts.

With no certainty if or when
Top Gear
would need me again, I pressed on with the Army.

T
he ground froze overnight, and as the sun came up it cast a magic light across the frost-dusted val ey. My ground mat had to be snapped and folded like cardboard. I started warming up my shoulders to prevent the shooting pains across my back and neck caused by the five-hour marches. The straps on my ancient bergen had lost their padding and cut into my shoulders like cheese wire. I pressed the store-man to exchange it for a newer one, but the SOB refused. The Chief Instructor just laughed.

We formed up for the morning brief in the middle of a cutting covered in loose shingle and stones from the quarry. The senior NCO emerged from his ‘twat wagon’, an ugly box-shaped Land Rover. He was in jovial mood.

‘Mornin’, gentlemen. Little surprise for you al today: owing to the fact that it’s Christmas there’s no march today, so you can al go back and get your ’eads down …’

Silence. We’d al been here before.

‘No takers? OK then, suit yourselves.’

I was cal ed across to the wagon to receive my first rendezvous point. I read the grid and found RV1

with the tip of my compass … on the farthest side of the map, bloody miles away. I looked at the instructor in disbelief.

‘Having trouble motivating yourself this morning?’

‘No, Staff,’ I said, and jogged away.

Typical y, the routes were no longer than 25 kilometres as the crow flies, with ascents in the region of one to two thousand feet. This monster tab looked at least 5k longer, and taking the wrong route could add an hour and result in a fail. I opted to go straight up the side of a sheer waterfal , reducing me to a snot-faced mop of sweat within metres of the start line.

I managed to scale the wal of the ravine and make it on to open ground, but things didn’t get any easier. Every conceivable physical obstacle stood in my path. The correct procedure for river crossings was to strip naked, suit up with Gore-Tex and wade across, facing upstream. That seemed over the top for the stretch of water that now confronted me. It was 15 feet at most from bank to bank. I could clear half that in one bound.

I misjudged the depth, submerged and disappeared downstream, saturating every bit of my kit and sorely weighing myself down. I cursed my stupidity, but thanks to an earlier rushed barbed wire fence crossing that had nearly ripped off my family jewels, my crotchless trousers vented quickly.

I plodded through endless fields of ‘babies’ heads’ – clumps of ankle-high bog-grass that rendered forward movement almost impossible – and braced myself for crossing Death Val ey, so named for its double-dip profile and the fact that so many recruits had voluntarily withdrawn from the course after climbing it.

The incline was sheer at times, making the climb truly biblical: you had to dig in with your fingernails.

It was three steps forward and four back, knowing al the while that every agony would be repeated on the second peak.

After Death Val ey I put in a short cut through a range of fel ed trees. The layers of broken branches snagged every movement or gave way to shred the front of my shin.

An hour later the fog descended again and a few cairns appeared ahead that I couldn’t place on the map. I had a ‘dead stop’ if I walked too far, because there were cliffs behind the RV I was looking for. A sensation of weightlessness would give me the first hint I’d walked too far. But where were the bloody cliffs?

Eventual y I saw one of the lads to my right amidst the sea of fog.

‘Hey, do you know where the RV is?’

He was too engrossed in his map to reply. I checked mine and shouted again. After a while I realised I was shouting at a smal tree. I final y made it to the last checkpoint and limped over to the woods we were using as a holding area to stick up my basha and get my head down.

An hour later I was woken by a five foot five pocket rocket with a voice like Cartman from
South
Park
. ‘Wel , that was fucking emotional,’ he puffed. His little legs had to spin like cartwheels to keep pace over the hil s. I peeled back an eyelid as Cartman’s bergen crashed into the deck.