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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 approached my first qualifying session with the intention of re-enacting my best driving at every corner. As an inexperienced driver, just re-creating a way of driving through a corner time after time was a big challenge. It was key to posting consistent lap times. To the surprise of everyone in the championship, I qualified third on the grid.
After a short lunch break it was time for the race. I stumbled out of the Kentagon Restaurant with a bellyful of nerves and beef casserole. I was immediately accosted by a race official with a breathalyser.
I breathed gingerly into the machine. ‘Do you actually catch anyone drunk on race day?’
‘Five so far.’
I didn’t even drink, but I was apprehensive.
‘You’re all clear.’
I hurried to the pits and climbed into the car. My young mechanic straddled the top cover and heaved down on the shoulder straps with all his weight, strawberry-faced with the exertion.
After confirming that I could still breathe, he shot me a knowing smile that said, ‘One lamb, ready for slaughter.’
‘Good luck,’ he said.
I gave him a gobsmacked thumbs up. My heart rate was off the Richter scale. Wave upon wave of adrenalin hardened my veins. The back of my throat swelled, my mouth dried and the left side of my face tingled. What the hell am I doing? I was so tired. I hadn’t slept the night before and would rather have griddled my testicles on the exhaust than drive at that particular moment.
Get a grip, I thought, I’m here to get to F1. Problem was, so were the other lads.
Sweat on the pad of my left foot made my toes slip inside my boots as I depressed the clutch and nudged the gear-stick left and forward. Every movement I made felt strained and heavy.
Moving into the pit lane, I joined the two long columns of the dummy grid. After what felt like an eternity (no more than five minutes) we were waved out of the pit lane under a green flag. More adrenalin, and now I needed to piss.
The copious advice I’d been given swirled around in my head. ‘Lay some rubber on the start line for extra traction’, ‘Warm the tyres up’, ‘Anticipate the start lights’, ‘Go when the red goes out, don’t wait for the green’, ‘Don’t look in your mirrors’. After one short lap we formed up on the grid. I searched the start line gantry for the lights.
A white board with ‘five seconds’ written on it suddenly appeared from behind the gantry. Acid flooded my stomach.
Three seconds later the red lights sparked up. I knew that sometime between three and eight seconds after that they would switch to green.
The engines in front of me began revving. The driver alongside started chasing the throttle – on, off, on, off, louder and louder. Adrenalin dumped painfully into my chest and my heart slowed into a hard, raging thump. The force of the beats was so strong I had to drop my chin and open my mouth to catch a breath. I winced; my eyes glazed over. GREEN.
I bolted off the start line, then the wheels spun wildly. Another car instantly appeared to my right, then two others powered up to my left as we approached the first corner. I was jammed right in the middle.
My thumping heart slowed, crashing against my ribs with the weight of a sledgehammer. For a moment I thought the damn thing might actually stop.
I swallowed hard, gulped for air and edged into the fast sweeping right-hander at Paddock Hill. I was at the centre of a swarm of jostling machines, so close you could have covered ten of us with a blanket. Somehow my body carried on the business of driving and breathing.
The pack screamed through the dip at the bottom of the hill. The car in front bottomed out in the compression, shooting a shower of sparks at my helmet. I followed the four leaders into the tight right at Druids, narrowly avoiding the one immediately in front as he jammed on his brakes earlier than I expected.
Gears changed on auto-pilot, iron-clenched fists dragged the steering from one direction to another. We blasted through the fast Graham Hill left-hander line astern, like a rollercoaster without rails.
Wheel to wheel, nose to tail, we hammered along the short straight at nearly 100mph. As we sped into the Surtees Esses I was so close to the guy in front I couldn’t see the raised kerb past his rear wheels. My jaw clamped shut.
I somehow braked for the final corner, the right called Clearways. I went in too fast and lost control of the front wheels. I knew I’d lose a position if I couldn’t accelerate on to the straight. I forced the throttle to try and drive out of the mistake. The car was already past the limit and the rear snapped sideways. Already off line for the corner, I slid off the edge of the track into the gravel trap and towards the welcoming tyre barrier.
As the wall approached I pushed harder on the accelerator, peppering onlookers with stones from my spinning wheels but maintaining enough speed to get back on to the circuit. Having lost just one position, I rejoined the pack and we buzzed down the pit straight to complete the first lap. I was exhausted.
During the eleven laps that followed spectators were agonised and baffled by the sight of me driving defiantly on the racing line as my competitors drove for the inside, time and again, in a bid to overtake me.
My father choked his way through two packets of Marlboro in the space of twenty minutes, lighting each fresh fag from the last. Every time I came round he was shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Defend, defend, DEFEND YOUR LIIIINE!!!’
I heard nothing over the din of the engine. I was busy driving as fast as I could. Moving off line to defend meant driving slower and that didn’t compute. I stayed persistently wide, braked as late as I dared and aimed at the apex of the corners like a missile.
I was oblivious to most of my near misses, but Dad had a bird’s eye view as the other vultures pecked at my heels. Our wheels were interlocking at over 100mph and a single touch would have easily catapulted me into the air.
By some miracle, I finished unscathed having conceded a handful of positions. One of the spectators was a journalist called Charles Bradley, who had observed my antics from Clearways corner. A shard of flying gravel had cut his cheek, but he still gave me my first mention in Motor-sport News: ‘Ben is frighteningly fast …’
I was intoxicated. I’d lived more in twenty minutes than in the rest of my life put together. The time that passed between races was just that, time passing. I dreamt racing, day and night. All my aspirations now centred on becoming the best driver in the world. After a couple more races, I managed to lead one, but was harpooned out of contention by the second-placed car – yet again I’d failed to defend the corner. But the taste of potential victory was firmly entrenched. I decided I should win every time from then on. In blinkered pursuit of that goal, I discovered ever more inventive ways to have enormous accidents, from silly shunts to full-blown hospitalisation.
On the Brands GP loop, I tried to outmanoeuvre two drivers by speeding around the outside of both into the super-fast Hawthorn right-hander. The guy on the inside squeezed the one to his left who did likewise and shoved me on to the grass at 120.
I hit the Armco with such force that my head would have hit my knees had the dashboard not intervened. We never found the front left wheel, but the whole front right corner went into orbit and landed on the straight in front of my team-mate. On the second bounce it took the sidepod clean off another car, then bounded into the trees.
I finally came to rest a few hundred metres down the track, regained consciousness and slowly opened my eyes. I was coated with bright green algae that inhabited the gravel trap. Like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, I’d been slimed. The car now resembled a bathtub, a bare chassis with a single wheel loosely attached by some brake cable. My dense cranium had even broken the steering wheel.
Over time, I broke every component of the car from the drive shafts to the suspension, gearbox, engine, chassis, everything. I once tried to find a little extra power in a drag race to the chequered flag. I pushed harder on the accelerator, which broke the solid cast metal throttle stop and ripped the throttle cable out of the carburettor.
After I wrote off my third chassis, it was clear that the ‘balls out’ strategy needed fine-tuning. During qualifying at Lydden Hill I was on the limit through a fast right when I had to lift off to avoid a spinning car. Seconds later, I was spiralling through the air and sitting in a bathtub again.
Dad sprinted to my side, absolutely livid. Not only was he funding this enterprise, but it would have been his neck on the block if I’d been converted into a limbless corpse. I couldn’t make the race, so I climbed into his car for a very long, silent drive home.
I knew he was pissed from the way he was twiddling his sideburns. After half an hour he said, ‘What the fuck were you doing waving your arms around like that anyway? You could have lost an arm.’
‘I was just ducking …’
He shot me an incredulous look.
‘I’ve just had to buy that car you trashed. If they can’t bend it straight, your season’s over.’
It was my much needed wake-up call. It seemed I had an answer for every catastrophe, but no sense to avoid one. I had to preserve the car, only risking it in measured bursts when absolutely necessary.
A part-time job in a warehouse packing cheddar cheeses the size of breeze-blocks provided plenty of opportunity to analyse past events. I spent the rest of my time hanging out with my newly acquired girlfriend and practising essential driving skills in her Ford Fiesta. Georgie was a bit special in more ways than one. She could do a handbrake turn and spin the wheels at the same time. It was love at first sight.
I figured out that even if I was the best driver on a given day, I would never win every race because there were too many circumstances beyond my control. My problem was, I’d been forcing it. Every race had a natural order, a structure I had to respect and learn to predict. Once I accepted that, the frequency of my visits to the podium exceeded those to the infirmary.
I was totally focused on learning the craft. My body began reacting like an alarm clock, ‘going off’ weeks in advance of a big race. I prepared my logistics ahead of time, drove the track a million times in my head.
My naïve concept of sportsmanship took a hammering at Castle Combe. I learnt the ropes the hard way from my ‘team-mate’, a Formula First veteran who led the championship. He had a nose like a beak that found its way into my side of the garage whenever anything worthwhile was going on. Then it was all smiles, which front rollbar was I running, what tyre pressure worked best and so pleased to meet you, Mr Potential Sponsor, here’s my card.
Later the same day I was leading him through a very fast corner on the last lap. He poked his nose up my inside but I held strong on the outside. He couldn’t get through, and it felt like he steered into me and punted me off.
I slid across the grass like a demented lawnmower and rejoined to finish fifth, just behind him. A crimson haze descended over me, but I managed to resist the temptation to T-bone him on the way into the pit lane, drag him from the car and use my helmet on him as a baseball bat.
The next race was at Cadwell Park, the best track in Britain, with more pitch and fall in its curves than Pamela Anderson. I had terminal understeer in qualifying and ended up running behind my ‘mate’ in third place, but I had my evil eye on him. I drove the wheels off my machine and discovered the power of controlled aggression. The car bent to my will and unleashed a furious pace. The closer I got to my old pal, the more mistakes he made. We approached a section called ‘The Mountain’ where an S bend climbed a steep gorge and before I had the pleasure of dispatching his ass personally, he spun off the circuit. Good karma.
Motor sport was dog eat dog, which went against the grain after five years making friends for life in the process of surviving boarding school. Popularity in racing lasted as long as you were competitive, and people were prepared to go to any lengths to remain so. I found one driver stealing my engine one night; another team sabotaged my suspension. But there were always a few rays of sunshine.
The final race of the year was at Snetterton in Norfolk, which had been a Flying Fortress base in the Second World War. Two giant straights connected two lurid high-speed corners and a couple of slow ones. I managed to get the team’s senior mechanic on to my car. Colin was a grey-haired Lancastrian who’d won the championship with my team-mate. He had eyes like Master Yoda and talked me through what to do if and when I was in a position to actually win.
‘Around this track the last thing you want to do is lead the final lap. Whoever is in second will draft past the leader on the back straight unless you slow down, so don’t get stuck out in front or … Jeezus Chriist!’
Colin’s gaze suddenly disappeared some way over my shoulder. ‘Look at ’er, she’s gorgeous!’
Still grappling with his advice, I looked to up to see the blonde bomb-shell swinging down the pit lane. Glimpses of her perfectly sculpted figure appeared from beneath a leather bomber jacket as she swished back her hair and beamed in our direction.
‘That’s my girlfriend, Georgie.’
‘You must be jokin’!’
He had a point. I couldn’t quite believe it myself.
I’d met her when we were seventeen and she took my breath away. I fell in love with her on Day One – she has one of those smiles that make you feel like the six million dollar man. My mates and I were all horrid little oiks who spent our whole time playing rugby and pouring buckets of water on to girls’ heads as they walked beneath our windows, so I didn’t give much for my chances. But a few months ago I’d somehow summoned the balls to invite her to a racing dinner – a very glamorous affair (not) at Brands Hatch’s onsite hotel – where she won a tyre trolley in the raffle. She seemed to enjoy watching my car come back with fewer wheels with each successive contest. I can’t think why; she was far too attractive and kind to be with me. When she entered a room my mouth filled with tar, reducing my vocab to Neanderthal grunting. Yet here she was looking lovely and looking at me, but …
‘What do you mean – slow down to win?’
‘Rule number one: to finish first, you must first finish, right? With these cars you sit two car lengths behind the ones in front to catch their slipstream and draft past ’em on the straights. If you get one on yer tail, back off into the corner so he can’t get a run on ya.’
I shared my newly acquired wisdom with Georgie over lunch. She was riveted. ‘So does that mean you won’t crash in this one?’
‘I hope so,’ I sighed.
The race that followed was a drafting masterclass. I became embroiled in a four-way scrap for second place whilst the leader ran away. Against every instinct, I backed off through a flat-out bend to put some space between me and the three cars in front. I braked slightly early for the next corner, Sear, then smashed the accelerator.
I hauled up behind the guy in front as he zigged left to overtake the other two running line astern. I stayed put and felt the suction of the two-car draft propelling me down the straight.
Whilst the relative speeds of the other three cars hardly changed, mine doubled. I pelted past all three in one move. I was fully clear as I approached the Esses corner and was so excited I nearly forgot to brake.
The leader was too far ahead to catch but I summoned the fury I found at Cadwell and strained every bit of speed out of my black bullet. I closed in on the final lap but not enough to pass, until he made a mistake at the final bend. I powered out of the chicane and we raced to the line. I won it by one tenth of a second.
Crossing the line first meant the world to me. And I’d learnt some key truths about the sport. Had I forced my overtaking moves early on, I would have crashed. Had I not driven flat out through every corner of every lap, I would have lost the crucial tenth of a second needed to win. It was a delicate balance, knowing when to risk everything and when to hold back. Luck had been a factor, but at least I had started making my own.
Chapter 4
Snakes & Ladders
My second season produced a 100 per cent finishing record. A string of podiums and race wins put me into the lead of the Vauxhall Junior Championship, battling with talented pilots like Marc Hynes and Justin Wilson, two of the most genuine blokes in the sport. Marc was sponsored by Nestlé Ice Creams and looked a bit like one himself: a tall teenage vanilla speckled with hundreds and thousands. Justin was on his meteoric rise to Formula 1, somehow squeezing six foot four of northern sinew into a soapbox racer every weekend to post stupendously fast lap times.
I dropped cheese packing in favour of studying for a law degree, which absorbed nearly all my time when I wasn’t racing. Turning into a very focused, self-centred daredevil meant my relationship with Georgie suffered. She gently bounced me into touch, and I was so hell bent on my career that I refused to acknowledge that my heart was, in fact, irretrievably broken.
My luck on track dried up around that time and I lost the championship to Mr Hynes, finishing alongside Wilson. But it was enough to get me noticed by the crack outfit run by Paul Stewart, Sir Jackie Stewart’s son. Paul Stewart Racing was known for one thing in every category they competed in: winning.
PSR ran a team in the next rung up the racing ladder called Formula Vauxhall Lotus. The cars ran on fat slick tyres with Formula 1 style wings that shoved the rubber into the tarmac and a 2-litre engine that propelled the car through corners at over 145mph. Sexy piece of kit.
The first test was at Donington Park, a grey circuit in the Midlands. Its sequence of fast, flowing turns was made famous by Ayrton Senna’s gutsy overtaking moves on the opening lap of the 1993 Grand Prix. I watched it more times than I can count.
I scanned the colourful articulated trucks lining the old brick pit lane and found the polished blue and white of PSR at their head. The team were always decked out in matching blue clothing and had a systematic approach to everything they did. The mechanics were like young doctors, and their work area looked like a spotless surgery. I prayed no dirt fell from my shoes as they clacked across the pristine plastic flooring.
Graham, or ‘GT’, the team manager, was a young guy with an endearing smile that belied his ruthless inner ambition. Underneath the rosy-cheeked veneer was a head shrinker who probed the depths of a driver’s every performance via the onboard data logging system and by asking difficult questions.
‘Did you notice we put another hole of front wing on, and you ran a heavier fuel load? How many laps do you think these tyres have done? Do you think a stiffer rear rollbar would help you through the fast corners if we drop the ride height and adjust the camber for the low speed? Why did you change your line into Turn One after lunch?’
Graham used onboard computers that logged the car’s information and driver inputs. They were recorded so accurately that you could analyse every movement of the steering, brakes and throttle to develop the perfect style, which further deepened the mental dimension.
The Lotus accelerated from 0 to 60mph in three seconds and took me by surprise at first. The scenery went flying by and the engine was bumping off the rev limiter, demanding the next gear. Something clicked in my brain that day, because I never sensed speed the same way after that. Once I got used to it, nothing ever felt fast again.
The blind crests of Donington’s Craner Curves were not for the faint-hearted as the sharp descent doubled your acceleration through a long left. In a machine like the Lotus with more relative grunt than grip, you hung your balls over the wing mirrors to take Craners flat, then wrestled the chassis across to the left in time to put your affairs in order for the equally hairy off-camber right known as ‘Old Hairpin’. With tyres stretched to the limit, a tiny error of timing was punished by a rapid departure from the black stuff.
I prepared for a new tyre run to see what time I could set. GT squatted next to me and rested his arm on the sidepod. If I could just impress him enough, Jackie Stewart’s staircase of talent could lead me all the way to F1. After a silence, GT gave me a warm smile. At last I was winning him over. Then he casually said, ‘We’ve just been watching Wilson at the Old Hairpin. He’s flying, head and shoulders braver than anyone else there.’
The words cut me to the bone. I’d have preferred him to have called me a raging poof.
The winter air was crisp, ripe for the engine to produce its best power. After a mega run out of the first corner I took Craners flat out with a squeak of understeer from the new tyres, without compromising my line for the Old Hairpin.
The engine bounced off the limiter in top gear, I dabbed the brake and guided my missile right, carrying an extra 5 mph. It went in so fast the front wheel floated over a blurred apex kerb. I held on, ran wide and mullered the big exit kerbing. Dust spewed up and I knew the lap was already miles faster than anything the others had managed. I wanted to monster their times.
I left my braking super late into the next corner, a fast cresting right, at just over 140. The brake pedal hit the floor. I pumped again. Nothing. I was travelling 60mph too fast to make it. I was leaving the circuit. By the third touch of the brakes I was skipping across the grass, spinning sideways through the gravel trap, then airborne for the remainder of my journey. I stonked into the barriers with the rear left wheel first. It ripped off the suspension, shattered the gearbox casing and whipped the nose into the wall, shattering the front wing. What a ride!
My body took the impact well. I withdrew my hands from the wheel before it spun violently through 180 degrees, which would have broken my wrists had I clung on.
I explained what happened to Graham, who never looked up from his computer when I walked back in. ‘Did you kerb it at the Old Hairpin?’ he asked matter-of-factly as he frowned at my speed graphs.
‘Big time.’
‘Sounds like pad knock-off then.’
‘What’s that?’
The mechanics tutted behind me as they unbolted tangled remains of bodywork from the chassis and half the gravel trap unloaded on to their operating theatre.
‘Sometimes when you hit the kerbs, it knocks the pads away from the discs. You have to pump the brake pedal back up to get them working again.’ He waved a hand up and down for emphasis.
Well, wasn’t I the moron? That kind of general knowledge would have been more useful at the start of the day, but that was how it worked with racing. You either figured it out, or got spat out.
Graham sucked his teeth with interest as he calculated my split time, acknowledging it would have put me fastest by a considerable margin. Then he looked me in the eye to ask if my neck was OK. Seemed he was warming to me after all.
The structure of the Winter Series consisted of two heats that qualified the drivers for the final at Donington – ‘winner takes all’.
Graham taught me that there were no friends in a race and to ‘kill the car’ in the warm-up lap. The difference this made to the temperature and performance of the tyres and brakes over the first lap was significant and helped launch me into the lead of the qualifying heat.
I found myself battling with a Japanese regular from the series who was pressuring me with every trick in the book. He was tapping my rear wheel to unsettle my car into the corners, then driving into the back of me in the straights. The rev counter buzzed higher as the rear wheels left the ground. The gloves came off.