The Man in the White Suit

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 Dawson, who cut his teeth at Lotus Formula 1 team back in the days of Colin Chapman. He still had the retro moustache to prove it. Ian appeared at my side, lifted one of his radio cans and yelled into the front of my helmet. ‘It’s absolutely torrential out there. Harri’s just done three complete 360 spins down the straight at 160 miles an hour. He’s coming in this lap. We’re bloody lucky to still have a car. We’re running seventeenth. There’s plenty of time. Just take it easy.’

The intensity in his voice spoke volumes. I was holding the baby.

An empty space in front of the garage was surrounded by the Ascari boys. Fireproof masks covered their faces, but I could see Don the mad Kiwi itching his nose with the wheel gun, big Dave on the fuel hose flicking his ankle to loosen off, Spencer with the other gun bouncing on his quads to warm up.

At any moment the space would be filled and I would have twenty seconds to climb in, strap up and switch on.

Every one of the boys had a critical job to do and they shared the pressure of the moment. The fuel man had to ram the hose home in a single clean movement. It sounded easy, but it wasn’t. If he got it wrong he could barbecue every member of the team.

The mechanics on the pneumatic guns had practised the drill over and over again, so they could get clear as fast as possible without cross-threading a wheel nut. If any one of us made the slightest cock-up, it would cost seconds of hard-fought track position.

The car appeared, larger than life and shedding a heap of water. Harri Toivonen fought the belts off and leapt out. I barged past him and took his place. The seat felt wet and warm as my suit absorbed the water.

Harri lifted his visor and helped me with my belts. His face was red, eyes bulging, chest heaving. I pulled up both thumbs to let him know I was in OK and could finish the job myself.

The Ascari dropped on to the deck; the signal was given. My hands were poised over the ignition and start buttons and I cranked the motor. It was already in first gear. A touch on the throttle provoked a lightning howl. The Kraken was fully awake. I slipped the clutch and pulled away into the night.

I was soaked to the skin within seconds. Goblets of water fell out of the sky, whirring towards me at warp speed. As I slid under the Dunlop bridge my visor picked up the blurred lights of the Ferris wheel and intermittent bursts of flash photography. Only die-hard fans stayed out in this.

I sped on, my headlamps carving a 50-metre tunnel through the darkness. I accelerated away from Tertre Rouge in third gear and hammered down the Mulsanne straight, scanning for other cars, searching for puddles. The glistening surface ahead gave nothing away.

I had no idea where Harri had run into trouble. If I made the same mistake I might not be so lucky. I approached the first chicane, scanning sideways along the Armco barriers for something to reference: the marshal’s post, the tree, the gap in the wall, anything that wouldn’t move, for use as a braking point.

I turned right a little for the chicane, then regretted it and straightened again as the car aquaplaned. My stomach tightened as the wheels lost contact with the road; I resisted the temptation to over-correct the steering or brake harder and waited for the car to ‘land’. The engine note returned, telling me the worst was over.

I accelerated cautiously out the other side and back on to the straight, short-shifted into fifth gear and everything went deathly quiet.

The car hit a river of water on the left side of the track at a speed of 150mph. All four wheels lost contact with the tarmac and I travelled 100 metres in freefall. The rear of the Ascari yawed to the right, verging on a fatal high-speed spin, crossed to the right side of the track and ran fast towards the grass. Once there I had another four metres before engaging with the Armco barrier. The odds favoured a hit more than a skim. Broken suspension at the very least.

Drastic action was required.

I stopped correcting the slide and centred the steering in a supreme effort to keep off the grass. As the wheels brushed the white line bordering the circuit the puddles retreated and the car straightened up. The Mulsanne straight had two chicanes to prevent speeds exceeding 250mph. The Rain God had bequeathed it a third but I now knew where it was – and how to drive it.

I motored on, savouring the guilty pleasure of a close shave. No need to tell the team about that one. Sixth gear was redundant because you couldn’t hold the throttle down long enough in a straight line to engage it, unless I could locate the rest of the puddles. I chuntered along in fifth gear and counted the seconds between the big puddles, forming a mental map of the sections of track where it was safe to go faster next time round.

The first lap confirmed that Mulsanne was the worst affected straight and I began adjusting my lines accordingly. I remained cautious, but the car was revelling in the conditions. It was giving so much feedback through the tyres.

The team were quiet on the radio and there was no chance of seeing the pit board. I was alone, but contentedly busy in the mad world of Le Mans at night in a monsoon. I developed a rhythm and took my chances, passing one car after another, straining every rod in my retinas as I searched for a hint of tail-light or a familiar silhouette in the clouds of spray that cloaked every one of them.

The racer ahead might be a prototype as fast as the one I was driving or a GT car travelling at 100mph. The driver might be on the pace and in the zone, or half asleep, or gently urinating himself in response to the conditions.

The first he would know of my existence would be when his cockpit rocked from the blast of my jetwash as I passed his front wheels. Riskier still was tracking down another prototype caught behind one or even two of the slower GTs.

Every sensible bone in my body urged caution. But too much caution and I could be caught in their web for eternity. It was best to take a risk, splash past them and move on. I moved to overtake one guy just as he summoned the courage to hump the car ahead of him, which I couldn’t see. He swung towards me and elbowed me on to the grass at the exit of the curves. I gathered it up and outbraked him at the following chicane as two GTs collided with each other. It was carnage.

I took my chances, like everyone else. The laps flew by, an additional puddle formed on Mulsanne and I figured a cute route through it without lifting. Before I realised it, an hour had passed. The low fuel light on the dash plinked on. I flicked a toggle to engage the reserve tank for the trip back to the pits.

I drove the in lap hard, not forgetting the pit lane might be flooded too. Earlier in the day I’d watched another driver skidding a damaged GT into the gravel pit at the pit entrance. He’d tried to push it out, but was forced to abandon it by the marshals, only metres away from his pit crew who were powerless to help him.

I snaked through the barriers, slowed and engaged the speed limiter. The Ascari’s engine popping and banging like a machinegun, I found our pit amidst the jungle of hoses, boards and crews of other teams.

‘I don’t need tyres. These ones feel great; can we just check them?’ Spencer dived under the wheel arches with his torch and gave a thumbs up seconds later. With a perfectionist like Spencer you never had to second-guess the verdict.

The atmosphere vibrated with tension. Ian looked even more stressed than usual. Perhaps I needed to start pushing harder out there.

‘How are we doing? Is everything OK?’

Before Ian could answer, Klaas leaned over the cockpit. ‘Slow the hell down. You’re the fastest bloody car on the circuit. Take it easy out there, for Chrissake.’

Brian emerged from his warren of computers and calmly announced over the radio: ‘You’re in fourth place. You’ve unlapped the leaders, so you’re now on the lead lap.’

Unlapped the leaders. We were in the big league. No time to contemplate. A hiss and a thud dropped me to the deck; another roar and I was gone. Team Ascari’s Le Mans hopes rested solely on Car 20.

I wanted to get back into the thick of it, check the puddles were still where I remembered and pick up the rhythm.

After about forty minutes a yellow glow started pulsing in the gloom at the edge of the circuit. You never took the warning beacons lightly at Le Mans. I closed up on another racer and rode shotgun until we caught the safety car.

We joined the group bunched behind it, braking hard to avoid a concertina. I just hoped the guys coming up behind me would do the same. Some people swerved around to keep their tyres warm – pretty pointless on wets, worse if you spun on a puddle at 30mph.

I wanted to get past the pack quickly at the re-start and escape their muddle. It beat hanging around to be wiped out by another banzai racer coming from behind.

As we passed the floodlights I recognised former F1 driver Mark Blun-dell in an MG prototype just ahead. He might help clear a path.

I listened carefully for the all clear. ‘Safety car is in, green, green, go, go, go …’

We slithered on to the pit straight, past a near stationary Porsche GT. I had really good drive and stayed welded to Blundell’s tail-lights, hoping to see where the hell he was going in the spray. I pulled out of the jetwash, flew past Blundell and outbraked two more GTs into the first corner.

Back into the groove. The rain kept stair-rodding down. The puddles swelled and then withdrew. Every lap was different. I kept updating my mental map, sliding through mayhem and living the dream. We were closing in on the leading Audis.

The Ascari filled me with confidence in the rain, but the guys on board the Bentley coupé, with its enclosed roof, weren’t feeling the love. Their windscreen was so fogged up that when Guy Smith was driving he couldn’t see through it. The rain forced eleven retirements and a whole lot of walking wounded.

At 4am it eased up a bit. After four hours in the hot seat I was nearing the end of my stint, running the Ascari hard along Mulsanne, when something knocked the wind out of it. The engine misfired; the beast lost speed. I flicked on the reserve tank. No change. The engine was dying.

I was a long way from the pits. The Ascari managed a few more fits and starts, finally cutting all drive at Indianapolis. I pulled up at the Armco, radioed the team and got to work. If I could just remember what Spencer had taught me and Werner during our invaluable engineering induction, I was saved. I reached for the emergency toolkit with Spencer’s words ringing in my ears. ‘If you end up using this toolkit you’re probably fucked. Just do yer best.’

I tore off the electrical tape, picked up the mini flashlight and checked all the fuses were pushed in. They were. I switched ECUs, the engine’s brain, plugged the new one into the mother board and flicked the ignition back on to reboot. No dice. I got back on the radio. ‘The new ECU isn’t working. Any ideas?’

‘Wait a minute.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘We’re coming out to you. Stay right there.’

Where was I meant to go …?

There must be something I could do. I looked across to the giant plasma screen on the other side of the track and saw a small Japanese driver having similar problems. He was staring down at his car with his helmet on and speaking to his team on a tiny mobile phone. After a minute he started gesticulating wildly, hurled the phone into the tarmac and stamped on it twenty times with both feet. Bad reception can really get you down.

Men in orange suits wanted me out of the car, but if I walked too far away it would be classed as ‘abandonment’ and could eliminate us from the race. Ian and Spencer turned up but couldn’t find the fault.

As a last-ditch effort I put the car in first gear and bunny-hopped it 20metres using the kick from the starter motor. This really upset the French marshals, who chased after me shaking their fists until the battery ran out of juice. Our race was over.

It was gut-wrenching. We came back to a warm reception in the pits.

They had done an incredible job, especially Brian. His beady eyes had disappeared into his skull. Guys like him never slept and he was still reviewing telemetry screens long after everyone else had cleared off. He dragged me into his data den. ‘One of your lap times was ten seconds faster than anybody else on the circuit. TEN! Bloody brilliant. Looks like the sodding fuel pump packed in. Some tossing little wire that burned out, a fifty pence component, I bet.’

Hearing that we had paced faster than anyone for nearly four hours numbed some of the disappointment, but nothing compared to actually finishing the race.

The Audis continued their faultless run to victory the following day. Our crew fell asleep around the pit. Sleep was hard to come by. When my eyelids eventually closed, the dotted white lines of Mulsanne were still whipping through my retinas at 200mph.

Chapter 6

Daytona Endurance

After the dust settled from Le Mans, I started talking to some of the large manufacturer teams about driving opportunities for the following year. I was duly informed by one representative that they were ‘talking to big names from Formula 1’. Ben was only a three-letter word, so she had me there.

Fortunately Ascari kept me for the following season for a programme that included two of the most prestigious sportscar races in the world: the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona followed by the 12 Hours of Sebring.

I decided it was time to take the plunge and leave my day job. In between races, I had been working as a brand manager for Scalextric, which included a cosy five-hour daily commute on top of training. It was fun coming up with ideas for toys. I broke new ground by creating the first Bart Simpson Scalextric set, although I got into a little trouble for developing super-sticky magnets that made the model cars travel faster than light. My friends loved it too, dubbing me the ‘smallest racing driver in the world’ and referring to my backside as a hollow extrusion.

Well, this toy racer was off to Daytona, the birthplace of NASCAR. In the 1950s moonshine runners flocked from the southern counties to race the long flats of Daytona Beach; the best drivers of the Prohibition era had honed their skills outrunning the police on country roads. Here they belted along the beachfront avenue and blasted sand into the faces of spectators. People liked that, so in 1957 race promoter Bill France built the biggest, fastest Speedway the world had ever seen.

The 2.5-mile tri oval with its 31-degree banking was colossal. Even grizzly racers were shocked by the scale of the ‘Big D’ and the sprawling edifice of its surrounding grandstands. ‘There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t scared to death of the place,’ Lee Petty once said. The whitewashed wall that encased the Speedway was ever ready to punish the over-zealous.

An infield road course had been constructed inside the oval for sport-scar racing, and that’s where we came in. My prototype rattled so quickly through the banking at Turn One that for the first few laps my eyeballs couldn’t keep up with the sweeping sheet of asphalt. It was dizzyingly fast; a 180mph turn, tighter than a jet fighter could pull.

Racing a prototype in Europe through a packed field of GT cars had taught me plenty of cut and thrust. The difference at Daytona was the sheer volume of slower traffic in the tight infield section. I now realised how Batman felt driving the streets of Gotham after igniting the after-burners on a Monday morning. If you gave any quarter, the cars you wanted to muscle past sensed hesitation and only made it harder to get by.

Getting past a prototype of equal pace was more challenging. I closed on one at 170. I couldn’t recognise his helmet but his car’s body language looked edgy. The banking amplified the suspension compression from tons of down-force and the bellies of both our machines slammed the deck at every bump. My aero went light in his dead air and I hung on to the steering pretty tight while the whole world wobbled around me.

We were bearing down on a pair of GTs running line astern. I had a good slingshot from their slipstream, moved one lane higher towards the wall and overtook. The prototype didn’t see me coming and swung out with me alongside.

The banking was beginning to flatten out for the straight, so this was not a good time to change direction. The only space left for me on the track was the high side, which was covered in sand and marbles, so that’s where I went. The steering instantly went light as the slick tyres lost contact with asphalt, scrabbled with the dirt and pointed me at the wall. A microsecond later, the rear lost traction. As the camber fell away I had to get out of the throttle and tap some brake to nudge the front away from the wall.

I passed the prototype with a front wheel locked, pitched sideways so close to the wall I thought it would shave the rear wing endplate. It may have looked ugly but I made it stick.

I cruised the pit lane later to find the guy I overtook and maybe share a laugh. There he was, overalls tied at the waist, wearing a baseball cap with big aviator shades drooping off the end of his nose. His neck was frail for a racing driver, but not for a 77-year-old. His voice sounded familiar as he chatted to his mechanic, then Butch Cassidy’s clear blue eyes saw me coming. I froze. Paul Newman, star of the silver screen for more than half a century, racer of old and charitable angel who parachuted millions of dollars into worthy causes, was the coolest dude I ever saw. And that’s exactly how I left him. He had enough people bothering him for a piece of his time.

Werner was on spectacular form and stuck the Ascari Judd on pole position. He spent the afternoon flexing his muscles under the Florida sunshine and cooking the ‘brai’ so that ‘none of you Engleesh burn my meat’.

My duty at Daytona was to develop an experimental turbo-charged engine in the sister Ascari. The words ‘experimental’ and ‘endurance’ made poor bedfellows. Not only was the engine gutless and expensive, but parts of the rear wing kept falling off.

During the race I had to watch my mirrors to keep an eye on things. After the third pit stop to repair the wing we realised that the entire wing post was being shaken loose by the deafening harmonics of the engine. It was deemed too dangerous to continue, so that was the end of that. Maybe one day we would finish an enduro event.

The twelve-hour race at Sebring was half the duration of Daytona 24 but twice as exhausting. Mars had a more temperate climate than Florida in March. And the Martians themselves were pretty conservative by comparison to the 150,000 fans who camped at the track during America’s spring break. The usual petrolheads were joined by tens of thousands of college kids who partied hard. The police brought an armoured tank to keep them under control.