by Guy Martin
We weren’t on track till after four in the afternoon, so I got a good chance to talk to Jenson. I was impressed with what a nice bloke he was. He’s a year older than me, lives in California, does triathlons, so he’s still a fit unit. He races a seriously fast Honda NSX in a Japanese Super GT series. It is nothing like a road-going NSX, but looks like one, and he was second in the championship when we met. We had a bit of pushbiking in common, so I asked if he’d heard of the RAM, the Ride Across America, or fancied doing it, and he had heard of it. He had also heard of the Tour Divide, or he said he had, but I noticed a look of vagueness when I mentioned it. He’s an intelligent bloke, though, so perhaps he couldn’t understand my accent.
I had a bit of time before anything else needed doing and I had wanted to go to Earls, the brake hose and oil line people who are based on a trading estate just outside the circuit, to get some hoses for the Nürburgring Transit, but I didn’t really have enough time, so I sat in the café by myself and watched the world go by. We were in the top pit, where the Formula Three teams were set up. There were a lot of busy people, a lot of pink chinos and loafers with no socks and a lot of young drivers with their perfect hair, the right sunglasses and their shirts off. I’ve never been confident enough to walk around with my shirt off. Then it was back to filming.
We had both been asked to bring pushbikes with us and part of the day was the pair of us cycling around the track. Jenson was asking me a load of questions about motorbiking. He has a Ducati Panigale, a full-on Superbike for the road, and not very practical. I wondered where the enjoyment in riding one of them on the road was. I reckon you want a Triumph Tiger 800, mate, but I kept my mouth shut.
We had GoPros on the bikes, and he was giving me a bit of advice, telling me where the late apexes were and where he’d go down a gear, but he admitted he was only making educated guesses, because he’d never driven either of these cars.
We weren’t swapping numbers and we are nothing alike, but I liked him. I respect what he’s done and what he’s still doing, by racing in Japan; it sounds like he was doing it for the love of racing.
After we did the lap on the bikes I had a word with Dickie Stanford, the team foreman. We spoke about how we were going to do this head-to-head. We couldn’t call it a race, it was an exhibition. The plan he came up with was for both of us to be out on track together, have a rolling start, do three laps, then Jenson would come into the pits for 20 seconds while I stayed out, then for him to go back out and try to catch me up in the remaining three laps.
Before the head-to-head, we were given two laps to warm up. I’ve never driven, or ridden, Silverstone in the format we drove that day. Only F1 and MotoGP race it in that configuration. When British Superbikes race at Silverstone they miss some of the corners.
The six-wheeler Jenson drove is legendary among Formula One fans. It’s like the one that got away. Imagine what F1 cars would look like now if the FIA hadn’t put the anchors on the mad innovations of that era. But it is an ugly car.
Back at the Thruxton test day, I had met Frank Durney. Durney was one of Williams’s designers in the FW08C and the six-wheeler era. He said he thought I might be better off in the car I was going to drive because people didn’t know how to set up the ground-effect cars. It had given me a bit of hope that I’d have any kind of advantage over Jenson Button, a driver who’d spent 17 years racing in Formula One. I told Dickie Stanford this at Silverstone and he reckoned that even with its sideskirts removed the six-wheeler would have way more downforce than the Williams I was driving, so there was no way Jenson’s car would be worse. That pissed on my bonfire.
We made our way onto the track for our two sighting laps. Jenson said I should follow him for the first, just to see the racing line for these kinds of car, then he’d said he was going to press on a bit to get a feel for the car. And that’s what he did. He didn’t fuck off, but he put a decent gap between us fair smartish.
The downforce of the six-wheeler was obvious straight away. As the car moves forward, air comes through front scoops, and is channelled under the car to a chamber to create a vacuum that sucks the car to the ground. Smoke was pouring off it down the straights. The ground-effect cars have skirts down the whole edge of the car, with Teflon sliders that rub on the track when the ground effect pulls the car down. The skirts seal the car to the tarmac, and, in turn, give the tyres more grip. The smoke is coming off the sliders and they leave black tramlines down the track.
The cars are loud and rattly. They’re not as noisy as my BSA in full song, but they’re loud enough.
After the two sighting laps we pulled into the pits and I didn’t have any time to think about the circuit and what I could do to improve. Two laps isn’t enough for me to get my eye in driving a car that’s still quite unfamiliar on a track I don’t know well. Perhaps it’s long enough for a driver of Jenson Button’s quality, but not for me. He was supposed to have a test in the six-wheeler at Thruxton, but he didn’t turn up. He must have been confident. Before Silverstone, he’d never driven a Cosworth DFV-powered car before. Neither had he driven a six-wheel vehicle before, but he got in it, a car he’d never even seen before, and cleared off. I wasn’t willing to push as hard as he was. He has so much more experience and feel for a car like this than I do.
Karun was there. He’s very knowledgeable and, when he talks, I listen, but there wasn’t a lot he could tell me that day.
It reminded me that the TV lot don’t really understand how that sort of racing situation works. I can’t be fast straight away. They thought: Turn up at Silverstone, have half an hour track time, we’ll do a race of some sort or another, it’ll be fine. But it’s no good for me and the competitive nature I have.
Me and Jenson both sat in our cars, in the pit lane, for three or four minutes while the mechanics gave both cars a final once-over. Then it was time to go.
The last thing I was told before I went out was ‘Don’t crash it.’ Saying that didn’t do anyone any favours. I knew what the car meant to the history of Williams and all the folks involved. It didn’t make me do anything any different, but it’s a strange thing to hear before you’re going out.
We set off again, out of the pits and towards the start/finish line, at the back end of the circuit. We did a side-by-side rolling start. I was umming or aahing whether to be in second or third gear, but I left it in second and revved the nuts off the V8.
Jenson beat me into the first corner and I noticed how settled his car looked, drawn into the track both by the ground effect and, no doubt, his skill as a driver. I don’t know how much slower the first of the non-ground-effect cars, like the one I was driving, compared to the ground-effect cars was per lap, but it did make a difference.
All that was going through my mind was, Don’t crash it. I don’t think anyone has ever said it to me before, and it didn’t change the way I drove, but it was there, in my mind. My plan was to get on the back of Jenson in the hope he’d pull me along. If I could see where he was braking and turning then I’d shadow him as best I could. It only took one turn to realise he had so much more commitment into the corners and so much more corner speed than me. The reality slapped me around the face: he’s one of the top 1 per cent of racing drivers in the world, he’s won 15 F1 races, of course he’s going to smoke me.
If I’d got straight out of the car at Thruxton and had got into it at Silverstone the next day, I would definitely have put up a bit more of a fight, and been closer at the finish; but driving a single-seater is not the sort of trade you can pick up just like that. I was still getting used to the lateral G. You don’t get that with a motorbike. I did have a few slides and the car was pushing on, understeering, around a few corners, so I wasn’t pussyfooting about. I was hard on the kerb on the way in and hard on the kerb on the way out in a few corners, which left me thinking I couldn’t have done much more.
Rob Wilson instructed me in his technique of keeping the car level at Bruntingthorpe. That all went out of the window at Silverston
e. Well, I say it went out of the window; it never even entered my head. There was too much going on. Like I said, it’s not something you can pick up, it needs hours, days, of repetition so you’re doing the things Rob Wilson teaches without thinking. I still had so much of the car to learn. I needed to master driving the Williams before I could apply advanced driving methods.
One of the trickiest things about learning to drive the FW08C fast is the six-speed gearbox, and how precise you have to be with the gear lever. When you’re driving a car or van and you shift from second to third, you move the lever forward two inches, across two inches and forward another two inches before you select third. In the race car the movement was about a third the distance, so it was easy to select the wrong gear.
One time, when I was doing my best to keep sight of Jenson, I was trying to change from fifth to fourth, but I found second by mistake. I had a feeling I had it in the wrong gear, so I let the clutch out dead steadily. The rear wheels began to lock up, so I put it back into neutral. If I hadn’t realised it was in second and I’d let the clutch out normally, it would’ve over-revved the motor and buggered it. That would have been as bad as crashing it. One missed gear like that loses you a couple of seconds or more and knocks your confidence in making a fast gear change the next time you have to shift down.
Jenson entered the pits at the end of his first half of the exhibition race and he was still in the pits when I drove by. I don’t know when he came back onto the track, but he wasn’t long catching me up. He said he’d showed me a wheel on the turn that leads onto the straight to warn me, but he knew I hadn’t seen him, so he accounted for that, backed off there and got me on the brakes at the end of the back straight into the next turn. It would’ve been messy if he hadn’t backed off and we’d come together on that corner.
This time, when he overtook me, I didn’t take any notice of what he was doing. I just had to concentrate on how I was driving. And, compared to him, that was slowly.
It was noticeable that my tyres had gone off, because they were so soft. They’re made by Avon, in Wiltshire, the only company that currently makes suitable tyres that’ll fit these old cars, but Williams put big Goodyear stickers on the side, because that’s what the car used originally and they want them to look authentic, with all the same branding as they had in the 1980s.
Jenson’s car had four driving wheels at the back and two front wheels that steered. There were other six-wheel experimental F1 cars. The Tyrrell P34, from the mid-seventies, was designed with four small-diameter wheels at the front, that all steered, and two driven wheels at the back. Their idea was to lower the car’s frontal area and improve aerodynamics. That thing won a Formula One race, in 1976, with Jody Scheckter driving.
Another British company, March, thought that improving the traction would make for quicker lap times, so they put four driven tyres at the back, but it never raced. Ferrari tried that configuration, too, and, again, never raced. Then came Williams, who proved the concept would work, in testing, before the whole six-wheel era was over.
After I saw the chequered flag I pulled into the pits and stayed sat in the car thinking about how I’d driven, trying to work out what I’d done. Jenson came over and had a natter and told me, ‘You were shit into that bottom corner, you should’ve been later on the brakes,’ which I knew. He was constructive in some other areas. There was no effort to blow smoke up my arse, and I appreciated that. We both knew I was shit.
And that was the last I saw of him. He had to go and do some filming. He’d be back to Silverstone every day because he commentates for one of the TV channels. He’s dead good at it. I’ve got respect for him as a driver, no doubt, and also as a talker. I think one of the differences between me and someone like either Jenson Button or Suzi Perry is, if I’ve got no interest in a subject, I’ve got no interest in it and I can’t turn it on and do a professional job of talking about it. I get the idea they both can. Mave, my mate who made The Boat that Guy Built programme with me, he could do that, too. I don’t wish I could do it, like I wish I could drive an F1 car as fast as Jenson Button can, but I still respect it, because it’s not easy and I recognise it as a skill.
When I took my helmet off I probably had a face like a smacked arse, because I felt I’d let the mechanics down, I’d let everyone down. I should have been beaming from ear to ear, after getting to race Jenson Button in Keke Rosberg’s Monte Carlo F1-winning FW08C, but I got smoked, and I was disappointed.
I know if I’d have pushed any harder I reckon I’d have ended up in the barrier or in the gravel, not because I was on the car’s limit, but because I was on the edge of my limits. I was understeering and getting slides, even though I was going slower than Jenson Button, because he would pick a different line, or have the car settled on its suspension better, or be balancing the throttle and brake differently – all those little things that make drivers like him the best in the world. It’s the same way that he probably couldn’t jump on a motorbike and stay with me around the Southern 100 course, even if I was on a bike I’d never sat on before. I knew my limits and I brought the car back safely.
I have a lot of confidence in my inner confidence: I do what I can do and I do no more. If I’d had another five laps, I’d have got quicker, and if I had another five laps, I’d have gone quicker again. But people don’t get opportunities like this, to drive cars like the Williams FW08C on Silverstone during British Grand Prix weekend, so I’m not whinging. But I am disappointed I wasn’t quicker.
The whole experience of being involved in rebuilding the car, meeting all the people – Steve, Bob and Dickie – was great. Probably the thing that stuck in my mind the most is spending a few hours with Dan at Judd, the company that checked, rebuilt and dyno’d the Cosworth DFV motor for Williams. I spent the day looking at all the oddball F1 engines they were working on, and at Judd’s own engine, that is used in LMP2, the Le Mans Prototype series. The place was great, but Dan was, too. He’s a bit older than me, and has two daughters who both race mini stock cars. I think they might use Mini engines, and the rules are dead tight so he’d bought an old water-brake dyno off eBay for £500 to fine-tune them. When I heard that I thought, That’s ace. He was dead into it.
The whole experience was fun, and I like learning, so that part of it was good. I wasn’t driving home in the Transit feeling like I had to have another go of that. I sound like a right ungrateful bastard, but what was I doing? Driving round seconds off Jenson Button’s pace. Still, it was a great opportunity.
CHAPTER 21
‘When it’s blowing at full chat it feels like you’re in a hurricane’
THE SHED, AND spending plenty of time in it, has always been important. Some of my earliest memories are of me sat on the end of the workbench quietly watching my dad prepare his race bikes before I was sent to bed. My first experience of hands-on engineering, in that same shed, was as a little lad fixing and tuning old petrol lawnmowers that people had chucked away. I’ve always spent a load of time in the shed and now that I’m not racing the roads so much I have more time to work on my own stuff, so I’m in my sheds even more. They’re places I work on my projects, but they’re also where I’ve earned an extra few quid tuning and rebuilding engines for other people.
Since I started writing these books I’ve lived in three different houses, all within ten miles of each other. When I started the autobiography I was living in my mate Dobby’s house in Caistor. It was a big change in my life: I wasn’t living in Kirmington any more and I wasn’t working for my dad either, and Dobby’s place didn’t have a shed, but it wasn’t far from my mum and dad’s in Kirmo. Then I moved into another house and that had a decent-sized shed. It had room for my Volvo and machinery like the XYZ CNC milling machine I bought when I moved there. It had a ‘clean’ room that I used as an engine-building room. I was happy enough there until I found a half-wrecked farm with a bit of land. I won’t lie: what appealed to me was that the knackered old buildings were more shed than house. The place need
ed rebuilding from the inside out, with interior floors, new gables and roofs, but it was all about the potential of those sheds. Now, a few years after I first saw it, the sheds are not far off being right.
The sheds are split into different areas. You always have shit in the corner of your shed. Stuff you don’t use very often, but don’t want to get rid of. I had shit taking over the place before I moved, so I have a shed just dedicated to putting all that stuff in and it’s a fair size so it can store plenty of it. I’ve got the Pontiac in there, a Firebird that Uncle Rodders (who’s not my real uncle) sold me when he realised he was never going to get the project he had in mind finished. This is going to be Dot’s first car, if I have anything to do with it.
Next to the American V8 is the Mk3 Polo that Mad Adrian gave me after the engine shit itself. That’s part of my back-up plan. I have a Land Rover Defender that we bought for Sharon, but she didn’t get on with it. They’ve stopped making them now, so I thought I’d hang on to it to see if it goes up in value.
All the spare wheels for everything I own and all the spare tyres are in there. I get Morris oil in bulk, because I like treating all my vehicles to regular oil changes, and that’s in there. There are loads of framed pictures, too. I don’t have one picture hung in the house yet, so they’re all waiting to be put up. There’s loads of leftover building materials from when the house was being rebuilt: floorboards, roof tiles, toilets …
If I had to say what my number one shed was, it’s the one with my main toolbox in. I’ve got a toolbox at work, but the one I have at home is called Mr Big (by Snap-on, not me). It’s part of the KLA series, which has a deeper, longer construction, a proper heavy-duty thing. It’s five or six metres long and above chest height, and I use some of the drawers and cupboards for storage of scales, battery chargers, pastes and glues, paperwork.
I bet I’ve spent close to £100,000 over the years on Snap-on, but the toolbox I have at home was the first thing I got from my Snap-on sponsorship. They don’t normally do personal sponsorship deals (they support motorsport teams), but they have with me. I’m quite proud of that, pleased that they appreciate me as a mechanic and that they bent their sponsorship rules for me.