The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (30 page)

With the filming over, I made the transition from Superman back to Clark Kent in the urinals and joined the lads in the open-deck bar. The boys switched their heavy cameras for lager and melted into the leather sofas. Brian Klein was grinning from ear to ear.

‘Did you see him with those blokes? I mean, honestly, Ben, you’re like the Pied Piper for
Sun
readers.’

‘Wel , I saw something tonight I would never have dreamt possible,’ Jezza gasped. ‘A Spaniard running,
actual y
running. Welcome to the English way of life, De Castro.’

‘Fuck you, Jeremy, at least our government isn’t run by a bunch of Scots gits.’

Jeremy laughed so hard he choked on his beer.

To make good our departure without giving my game away, Jeremy drove off stealthily in the lime green Lambo. I ran through the back al eys, caught him up and swapped seats for the journey up the mountain.

Weirdly, it was the first time I’d ever driven with Uncle J on the open road. The ribbon of polished tarmac that led up to Rhonda from the coast is one of the most breathtaking in Europe. It was a clear night, and the soft moonlight showed just enough of the rock face lining the road to see ahead without drowning out the stars. I didn’t worry about the drop into oblivion to my left because the Lambo was sensational at fol owing precisely the path I ordered. The V10 bel owed at the moon and we just flowed up the winding road on a magic carpet.

Jeremy cal ed his wife and held his phone into the air. ‘Can you hear that? Ben’s driving us up the mountain. It’s just epic.’

Epic or not, as soon as we got into town he started busting my bal s about the route, insisting we take his one.

‘So which way now, Sherlock?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, you’ve come in the wrong way, man, turn left. No. Right.’

‘Wel , which one is it, Jeremy? Left or right?’

‘Are al racing drivers devoid of brains
and
sense of direction, or is it just you?’

I never argued with Jeremy, he was too bloody good at it.

‘Shut up … you … fucking talky man …’

He roared with laughter at his own expense for the second time that day, and the name has stuck with him ever since. Crucial y, it bought me twenty seconds in which to figure out the way to our hotel.

I found the Bul Ring and then home.

The close of another day in paradise.

S
ome days I maxed as many as fifteen different cars with no lead-in. With the time constraints of filming, I learnt to skip the foreplay and adapt quickly to al comers. The Ron Jeremy of cars.

In a racing car the belts welded your body to the chassis, and you felt the reaction to every bump or force physical y. A road car was more subtle. You hung loose like a surfer harnessing the power of a wave.

Whether I raced a car for years or drove it for a few minutes, I developed a connection with its soul.

The secrets poured out once you knew how to listen. Some spoke softly, others shouted from the pulpit with a loudhailer.

There was only one Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Bugatti Veyron was just as extinct the moment it rol ed out of the factory, a relic of our time. Future generations, driving smal gas-and electric-powered cel ophane composite cubes, wil look at the Veyron in museums and say, ‘Wow, those guys in the Oil Age were cray-zee, but clever.’

For once, statistics real y painted the picture with the Veyron.

Its heart was a mighty 16-cylinder engine. A normal car had four cylinders, so that was like having four engines under the bonnet. Four turbochargers spun maximum power instantly from the 8-litre motor, with ten radiators cooling al the systems.

It developed a gargantuan 1,001bhp and 1250 NM of torque at the stroke of the pedal,
from any
speed
, to bend space-time and blur the road at 253mph. The engine didn’t propel the wheels as much as shove mil ions of cubic litres of the earth’s atmosphere out of the way at one third of the speed of sound.

The tyres were only rated to run at top speed for fifteen minutes, but at 250 you emptied the fuel tank in twelve minutes anyway. My favourite stat: the motor consumed an estimated 45,000 litres of air per hour.

Complicated physics and supercars normal y equal ed frequent and catastrophic mechanical failure.

Volkswagen group, owner of Audi and Lamborghini, bought Bugatti and provided the Veyron with the metronomic reliability of a Swiss watch in a way that only German engineers could.

There wil never be another production car so dedicated to the purity of speed, so perfectly delivered, and the economics of sel ing a car for £850,000 that costs more like £3m to produce are unlikely to return soon, unless the Pharaohs make a comeback.

In 2005 I knew none of this bar the price tag, which failed to impress me. Racing cars were far more valuable and were built to be thrashed, not worshipped. I had to get to the basement of the NatWest Tower, locate the car and drive it, fast, from London to Milan.

The three presenters had raced across Europe from Alba in Northern Italy to determine the fastest way of transporting a fresh truffle to England. Contrary to popular belief, the
Top Gear
races were for real.

Hammond and May flew in a smal Cessna and hitched a ride on the Eurostar; Clarkson drove the Bugatti over the Alps, crossing Italy, Switzerland and France.

A tracking crew had chased Jeremy across thousands of kilometres of countryside to record his journey. My job was to recreate the trip in reverse with another crew to capture the necessary pick-up shots.

The clock approached midnight as I headed through the giant glass doors that opened into the Tower foyer. The place was deserted apart from a uniformed guard on the front desk. It felt like Bruce Wil is wandering around the Nakatomi building in
Die Hard
. I scaled a smart escalator and took a long ride in the main elevator to reach the Vertigo bar on the 42nd floor.

The lift doors opened into the dim blue lighting of the reception area. Camera kit was strewn across the carpet, surrounded by a throng of soundmen, cameramen, producers and directors.

Iain May, beer in hand, spotted me and began singing, ‘It’s only just begun – for you …’ His shift was over.

The first objective was to get the Bugatti keys off Clarkson and go film ‘some footage of London’. I wandered around the oval room and found the presenters steadying themselves with a few bevvies with Andy Wilman and Nigel Simpkiss.

Hammond and May looked relieved to be standing more than two inches apart, after thirty-six hours crammed into the tiny Cessna. They hadn’t reached the stage of the Russian cosmonauts on the MIR space station, who passed written notes to one another so they didn’t have to speak, but they were close. May hunched over a cocktail table with his hair draped over the ashtray, and Hammo leant against the bar, sinking Belgium’s finest without letting it touch the sides.

Clarkson had won, so he was in jubilant form, propping his fag up in the air like an antenna and reminiscing about the last couple of days. He handed me the key and grinned. It weighed heavy in my hand, solid metal bound in red patent leather, the Bugatti oval enamel ed in the centre.

‘You’l fucking love that.’

‘Real y?’

‘Oh …’ He shook his head. ‘Epic.’

The inbound crew were soaking up the booze. It looked like the makings of a damn good party, but we had orders from Nigel to get moving.

Down in the basement, producer Alex Renton and a giddy Jim Wiseman were circling the Bugatti like frenzied hornets. Wiseman was wearing a shocking set of Elvis sunglasses.

‘Nice shades, Jim.’

‘With a future this bright, you know it makes sense. Speaking of which,
mmm
, I see you’re holding the keys to a
Vey
-Ron. We’l see you out of here, mind the kerbs.’

I climbed inside the cabin and landed in the U-boat captain’s chair. I shut the door and felt the cockpit pressurise. Gauges and dials littered the maroon leather dash, poised to confirm when every one of the 1001 horses had been deployed. The main console was made of tortoiseshel -patterned steel. A pistol-grip gear selector at its centre looked primed to fire torpedoes. The wheel was so sturdy it must have been solid cast metal. Al the controls were hard-wired to the functions of steering, gearbox and engine.

I pushed the start button, and a heavy-duty starter motor screeched the engine reactor into life.

The Veyron had been boxed in, nose into the wal of the underground car park. Rear vision was poor, probably because nothing stayed close enough to worry about. But it meant that my first minutes behind the wheel were spent sweating bul ets, reversing it up a narrow parking ramp at less than one mile an hour.

Casper and I final y headed into the amber night. A single wal op of the throttle dealt with the Blackwal Tunnel, then we headed east into the City. The crew stopped somewhere near ‘Wal ’ at 2am to set up an elevated tripod, to get a glimpse of the Bugatti hammering around a big roundabout system. Then the police turned up.

Casper’s brow furrowed as he climbed out of the passenger seat. A few minutes later he was back.

‘Spoken to the Law. They’ve got a message for you: “Give it some shit”.’

My pleasure.

With adult supervision, I floored the Bug around this roundabout for the next twenty minutes. In a straight line the four-wheel drive could accelerate the rig from 0 to 60mph and back to 0 again in less than five seconds.

I reached under the steering wheel and depressed an innocuous silver button to disengage the traction control and dumped the throttle at the traffic lights. The four wheels clawed at the greasy road then shot off. I aimed around the corner and clung on to the wheel just to stay in my chair. It grappled its way across the wet manhole covers with a few minor slippages along what was otherwise a 90mph tramline.

My exuberance got the better of me that night as the warm glow emanating from Casper’s camera encouraged my right foot to slip on the empty carriageways. The kidney pinching thrust that went with every impulse of the accelerator was in a class of its own, and compel ingly addictive. Even the strobing flashes through the Limehouse Link tunnel failed to bring me back to the real world. F1, eat your heart out.

We picked up our German escort from VW some hours later and began the two-day journey to Italy.

Getting from A to B took longer than the actual race, because we kept stopping to position film crew and because every traffic cop in Western Eurpope wanted to see how fast it would go.

The Bug had a paddle shift to pick from seven gears or you could leave it in automatic and take pot luck. It paid to remember which one you were in. If you floored it in ‘D’ there was a slight delay as the gearbox considered the most powerful cog. By the time you realised what was going on, the acceleration thumped you into the back of the seat and you entered warp speed. Nothing on the autoroute moved like this. It was like flying a UFO after someone had pressed the pause button on the rest of the traffic.

For any good road trip, you needed a wingman. Frenchie was a loveable wide-boy from the production team who, as he constantly reminded me, had once owned an MX-5: ‘Rear-wheel drive, did doughnuts, my pride and joy,
tragical y
caught fire and burned to a cinder one day …’ He wiped his eye.

Frenchie took his duties seriously, kept the Bug brimmed with snacks and occasional y noted signposts between bursts of neck-breaking laughter every time I so much as tickled the throttle.

There was a burst of static from the radio. ‘Turn right at this junction, please, we’re going left to film you …’ We’d almost forgotten Nigel was there. ‘No, sorry, come with us now. Take the left.’

The left lane was heaving with traffic at a red light whilst my lane was green. I hooked the indicator to a chorus of French horns.

‘I feel your pain. A thousand pairs of Gal ic eyes burning into the side of your faces.’

‘Thanks, Nige.’

Actual y, the eyes didn’t give a monkey’s about the side of our faces. They were simply captivated by the Veyron. We drew a crowd wherever we went. As we thundered through the bucolic countryside people waved from the fields, and children ran towards it as we cruised slowly through the vil ages. Back on the open road, treelined boulevards whirled by as I snapped at the gear paddle like a junkie on a crack pipe.

We stopped to film at a remote wood and a crowd gathered within minutes, young and old, some taking photos, some just marvel ing that such things could be. The Bug made everyone smile; it conjured anew the innocent delight we can al feel when admiring a beautiful y crafted automobile.

‘OK, Mr Col ins, time to move on.’

Nigel set up a camera in a copse for a panoramic shot of the Bugatti crossing a smal suspension bridge over a sparkling river. I zapped across in the blink of an eye.

‘Fuck me,’ Frenchie groaned from the footwel , ‘did you feel the G as we came round the bend?’

I was grinning like an idiot. ‘Mega, isn’t it?’

Nigel was back on the radio almost immediately. ‘Let me know as soon as you’ve turned, please.’

We had a specific time permit to film through the Mont Blanc tunnel, crossing the border from France to Italy, so we couldn’t hang around.

After a brisk contretemps with a construction truck we made it back on to the main drag and overtook everything except the fuel stations. I coasted down every mountain in neutral to save fuel, using modest blats to sail past other cars like they were signposts. Even so, we guzzled fuel. Nigel was beginning to tire of my incessant requests for a top-up.

We made it to the tunnel in the nick of time. Ben Joiner hopped in with me to film as the orange lighting danced around the interior. With CCTV monitoring every mil imetre, I didn’t break the speed limit, but I flicked the throttle as soon as we were out and watched Ben’s smile spread from ear to ear.

We set up at a motorway service station to do an al -wheel-drive launch to 100mph, which the Bug achieved in five seconds. The VW engineers had to phone Bugatti’s head office in Germany for permission to engage the launch control system. We changed the setting from stun to kil by turning a magic key behind the seat. The whale tail wing rose behind me and the Bug’s active suspension lowered the nose into the ground like a raging bul , ready to charge.