The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (41 page)

I seriously admired these guys and found we had a lot in common, except that I preferred not to be run over by a car or in any way set fire to or shot off a horse at 50mph. But that’s just me.

We were nailing the car chase and getting to grips with the pod car. At first it felt like it would topple over every time I turned into a corner, so we built up gradual y to ful speed. My distance from the car’s centre of gravity added a pendulum effect that clouded the normal sensation of driving and made my caged office feel like an out of body experience. I gained confidence with each run, but in the end it took a leap of faith to determine whether it actual y had a tipping point.

‘Can I give it the big one, Ian?’

‘Oh, go on then,’ he said. ‘Start on those damp bits of track before you try dry land.’

The wet surface made it less likely that the car would dig in and rol over. Even inside a steel frame, if it did flip I was a long way from bul et-proof.

I blasted up the runway and yanked the handbrake.
Ooooh, shi it.
As the suspension took the strain my metal cage wobbled and gyrated. The Merc swung through 90 degrees, I rocked around in my seat and it seemed certain that something unpleasant was about to happen until the car came to a stop.

Buoyed by this, I put the pod through its paces on the slalom course of ‘Old Broad Street’ and managed to get it to powerslide, which felt even stranger. It could J-turn and was actual y better than the standard Merc at high-speed reversing because you had a bird’s-eye view of the streets below.

It was a spooky ride for the passengers inside the carriage. With no sight of the driver or even a working steering wheel, they had no idea where the car was going, when it would speed up or suddenly come to a stop. Giving the boys passenger rides became a popular gig during down time. I showed them how to drift their front-and rear-wheel-drive police cars, and Rowley showed me how to do a handbrake turn in a 12-tonne beer truck.

I sat in the cab and Rowley nailed it until we were doing about 55, then he swerved hard right, hard left and cranked the air brake. The rear axle seized up, wal owed and spun around to fil the coned street we had marked out.

‘Aha, aha,’ Rowley crowed. ‘Won’t be quite as cosy as that on Southwark Bridge, I facking tel ya.’

He wasn’t lying.

Our first destination for filming was Bank tube station at 5am one Saturday morning. We brought a new kind of congestion to the capital in the form of stunt men and action extras by the hundred, scores of crew and the cast of a Hol ywood blockbuster in the making.

‘Today we will be smashing a lot of cars and I want everyone to switch on,’ said Steve Dent, setting the tone for Day One.

Everyone was fitted into their various costumes: pin stripe suits, post office uniforms and innocuous bystander get-ups. I sported a Nick Cage wig and tan suit for the perfect ‘Man from Del Monte’ look. The dark brown bouffant perched on top of my head made me look like a prize tosser and Rowley let me know it.

The strongest antidote for Rowley was Pete Miles, a loveable rogue from the West Country who baited him remorselessly.

‘’Ere Ben, watch this,’ as he pretended to harvest a giant bogey, a piece of broccoli, from his nostril.

Rowley eyebal ed the green matter on the tip of Milesy’s finger, whereupon it was flicked onto his sleeve.

Rowley dropped his cappuccino but otherwise was frozen rigid by the kryptonite.

‘Get it off,
get it off
,
OFF
.’

The streets in and around Bank tube station were in regular Monday morning mode, except that nobody was moving. Everything was on pause. Vehicles were stationary and every face was turned in the same direction, waiting for a single command.

The first assistant director cal ed over the loudhailer, ‘Lock it off.’

‘We’re locked up.’

A water bowser squirted its contents across the empty streets. Continuity throughout the chase was important, and the producers had decided that it was raining.

‘Stand by, cameras.’

‘Rol ing.’

Steve shouted, ‘Stand by.
Action
.’

The engines began to rumble. A 12-tonne Ful ers beer truck driven by Milesy charged into view and

‘commuters’ dived out of its way. There was no way the truck could stop in time for the traffic lights and a postal van was already turning across the intersection.

The clash of metal and glass made the ground shake; it was the kind of shunt people didn’t walk away from.

The truck hit the van so hard amidships that they momentarily became one. It then slid into the traffic island, flattened a bol ard and creased the light gantry. The driver pul ed the steering hard left. There was no room for manoeuvre in the ‘traffic’ but it didn’t stop him. Milesy knew that five cameras were recording his every move and this was a one-take wonder. He ploughed through a Vauxhal Vectra as it backed away and tore down Prince’s Street towards Threadneedle, grazing the Georgian brickwork of some Spanish bank.

‘CUT. Reset!’

I craned my head around the street corner and watched the show. I was ten years old again. Our immediate concern was for second-generation stunt veteran Franky Henson, the driver of the postal van.

Franky climbed out grinning like a space cadet but otherwise unscathed. The first a.d. went into overtime clearing the area. Within three minutes the only sign of the crash was the broken traffic light, which wasn’t in the script.

We moved on to St Paul’s Cathedral, an unlikely location for a street chase and a showcase in precision driving. Fifty ‘stunt priests’ were roped into the act, which involved handbrake-turning the Mercedes on to the cobbled entrance, then sliding it through the bustling crowd of Bible bashers.

Mr Cage made his way over to the pod and eyed me warily as we were introduced. I tried to act like it was an everyday occurrence to sit on the roof of a car and race through a bunch of monks. He was much slimmer than I expected, delicate even, which explained why my tan suit had pinched my gusset somewhat.

The actors climbed aboard, along with the movie’s director. It seemed their fate rested in my hands.

The priests packed together into an area the size of a living room. Steve actioned me through my radio earpiece, and I accelerated the pod into the cobbled square. The priests were thronging around the car, waving their umbrel as and shaking their fists at me in protest. Some of the furious faces were so convincing that on the third take I thought I’d run someone down and abandoned the shot to stop and check.

The next take Cage started improvising and I heard him yel ing ‘
Stop, Stop
,’ so I did. The director shouted,

‘They’re just acting;
keep going
!’

The pod was scheduled to work al the way through the chase, but in the end it only came out a few times. There was a scene where Cage was being shot at by the baddies in the Range Rover. The Merc drifted through a right-hander to get away and slammed sideways into a double-decker bus. As it straightened out, it got rammed from behind by the Rangie.

Rob had perfected the transition slide on the airfield before doing it for real in front of Nelson’s Column and it was on the nail. Then it was my turn to do it with the actors on board the pod. I sat on a throne of a zil ion battery boxes with $2 mil ion worth of cameras rigged to the right and front of the Merc beneath me. I didn’t care about the kit, but I was a little apprehensive.

‘We just want a tap,’ came my instruction, ‘to give the actors a feel for what’s going on. Nothing heavy, but it’s got to look
real
. There’s money in that car, so don’t screw this up!’

No pressure then.

I lined up on a side street at a right angle to the bus’s line of travel. The pod was a pig to turn sharply. As I ran through the ‘what ifs’ in my head, the director turned helpful y to Cage. ‘It’s OK, the driver real y knows what he’s doing.’

The stunties were rubbing their hands together; everyone’s ass was on the line.

‘ACTION …’

We set off towards the T-junction and the double-decker barrel ed straight at us. It got very big very fast. Every instinct screamed to brake and avoid it. I pitched into the corner and aimed just behind the front wheels. There was a little knock as we hit it and the sound of panels crumpling before I downshifted and accelerated away. I pul ed up near the director to confirm everyone was OK and kept my job a little longer.

Some of the most intense scenes were filmed at Southwark Bridge, with little or no margin for error.

Cage holds a precious artefact out of the window before throwing it into the Thames in an effort to distract the villains. Duly distracted, the Range Rover skids to a halt, fol owed by the pursuing beer truck. Rowley moistened his lips uneasily as the rescue divers climbed into their inflatable boats, in case he overcooked his mark. Sure enough, the bridge never looked so narrow as when his truck, laden with phoney beer barrels, handbrake-turned and skidded across four lanes of carriageway to stop with just a couple of feet to spare.

Capturing the essence of speed was essential for a film featuring cars powering through London at 100mph. To keep up with the pace we needed a camera car with serious grunt. The Volkswagen Touareg with its 5-litre V10 Twin Turbo motor manned up to the task and I drew the long straw to drive it.

Gunshots rained down on the fleeing Mercedes and some stray rounds struck the beer truck, so the beer barrels started exploding. The pursuit ran through a police blockade and al hel broke loose. The cars weaved through four lanes of oncoming traffic, a taxi toppled on to its roof and sixty beer barrels rocketed up into the air as the stuntmen exchanged fire.

My view of the action through the Touareg’s windscreen was partly obscured by a ten-foot-tal steel frame extending from the bumper for elevating the camera. Its operator sat behind me whilst the second unit director viewed the action through his monitor. The camera itself was very much in harm’s way. Even though the beer barrels were made of rubber rather than steel, they were spinning towards us at 60mph.

With fake beer spurting high into the air and cars smashing into each other a few metres away, I did my best to steer a course through the beer barrel asteroid field. After five takes one of the barrels bounced curiously from the tarmac and smacked the camera head on. The director loved it, so the shot ended up in the final cut.

Thirty cars were destroyed in the course of the production, including eight police cars in a roadblock that turned into a demolition orgy.

The film was a box-office hit and my broken bones benefited from the ‘time off’, but the secrecy of my other life, my
Top Gear
life, was gradual y being eroded. I did an interview with my local paper about the London car chase and the first question was, ‘Are you The Stig?’

The rest of the interview centred on the movie, but not one word of that made it into the three-page feature they published, which was entirely about me being the man in the white suit. Thankful y the story didn’t go national, that time.

There were other own goals. I’d sometimes arrive on jobs in person to discover that the people I was meeting were expecting The Stig. The al -seeing eye of the Internet and ‘free press’ col ated rumours and every scrap of information they could get hold of, adding fuel to the flames.

I relied on the fact that there was no evidence that I had ever worked for
Top Gear
, and the white helmet was my shield. Then, one day, I was walking across London in character to promote
Top Gear
magazine when a piercing camera flash went off ahead of me. It defeated the dark visor and snapped a clear image of part of my face.

Georgie joked that it looked like Damon Hil …

T
here was an unwritten rule for The Stig that I strived continuously to overturn. He was never al owed to compete in a race in the ‘real world’; his air of invincibility could never be put at risk. The frustration for me was that The Stig could have landed the kind of plum racing drives that Ben Col ins had always dreamed of – and my bid to have him compete in NASCAR and Le Mans fel on deaf ears.

Then, in 2007, the rules were bent.

‘We’re doing the twenty-four-hour Britcar race with you and the presenters. We need you to go to Silverstone and train them.’

My only issue was that the race coincided with the date Georgie was due to give birth. I suggested staying at home but, bless her, Georgie said she would rather watch paint dry than have me hovering at home with an egg timer. I kept my phone with someone I trusted whenever I was on track, in case I had to do a runner.

Britcar was an amateur-friendly format hosting a mishmash of different GT racing categories. The bottom category was more or less for road cars.
Top Gear
got themselves a diesel 3 Series BMW. It was sporty enough – perhaps – to raise the pulse of a Tibetan monk, but on a Grand Prix circuit it was a pretty tame ride. Nonetheless, we were going racing.

First order of business was to get the boys their race licences. I cal ed Jeremy ahead of the first session and he seemed to be taking it seriously.

‘You’d better give me some proper lessons, because Silverstone is a circuit which has permanently mystified me. I did mil ions of laps there once and never had a clue what I was doing.’

Buoyed by his sincerity, I looked forward to the training session. After al , I knew Silverstone backwards.

I met Jeremy outside the pits and he was exuding confidence.

We climbed into a hired Lexus. Jezza coiled himself into the passenger seat with the top of his helmet jammed into the ceiling. The seat motor strained as it wound him rearwards for several minutes.

As I explained the basics of steering position and trail braking he started twitching and nodding his head as though the world might end if I didn’t shut up and drive. He was staring longingly at the pit lane exit. I rol ed my eyes and drove off.

I hauled the Lexus in and out of the fast sweepers and casual y explained why, when and how the car would understeer or oversteer moments before it did, so that he could anticipate and feel the dynamics.