by Ben Collins
The Saab held the lead for about 10 metres until Nick gave it the berries. In moments he was airborne and gone.
The old Saab lolled around in the corners and was in no hurry down the straights. To its credit, the pudding-like suspension made it entertaining to drive; the rear rolled and slid when I jammed it into the corners. I ran out of steering lock to stop it from spinning at the penultimate corner, and by the time I gathered it up and approached the finish line, I could already see a smug looking fighter jock hovering above it.
I crossed the line in 1 minute 37.9 seconds. It had taken Nick just 31.2 seconds to set the outright track record.
I gave it my best shot, but he refused to hand me the keys …
With a few episodes under my belt I was getting used to Top Gear’s guerrilla filming and they were getting used to my unorthodox method of training the celebrities. My goal was to beat Jodie Kidd’s celeb record of 1 minute 48.0, and that meant pushing people hard. I just needed a celeb who was willing to hang it out there.
On the morning of my fifth episode I was completing a vital experiment with a bald man in a toupé. He sat in the passenger seat whilst I hammered three cars up and down the runway to see which one was best at keeping his wig on. The syrup stood firm at 140mph in a Mercedes SL, so we had a winner.
Jim Wiseman was standing by the luxurious Suzuki Liana, awaiting the celebrity guest. He checked the footage coming through the clamshell recorder for the Suzuki’s minicams. One was positioned right in the eye line of the driver, to pick up their reactions or pieces-to-camera.
Dennis, our minicam perfectionist, double-checked the exposure. There was no rain in sight but he was dressed in his all-in-one waterproof anorak, prepared as ever for the worst.
‘Good picture, Dennis. Are these secure?’ He nudged the clamps that held the cameras to the roll cage.
‘When have I ever let you lot down?’ Dennis moaned.
Simon Cowell strolled down the airfield towards us. He looked momentarily bemused by the cartoon scene of me dressed like a storm trooper alongside Tintin and Mutley, standing by a cheap rental car.
His smile broadened again as he rolled up his black shirtsleeves to shake hands with everyone, instantly sweeping his TV’s Mr Nasty persona to one side. Pop Idol was already a huge hit, and every TV format and pop act he touched was turning to gold.
We fitted Simon out with a seriously unflattering helmet, an ‘egg’ as he called it, and climbed aboard the Liana.
I explained that the best way to drive the lap was with his hands firmly at ‘a quarter to three’ and his thumbs just over the steering wheel’s T-bar. Most people thread the rim through their grip as they turn. Why? Because that was the rubbish we were all taught to pass our driving tests. I urged Simon to fix his, and cross them all the way over. He’d know immediately when he’d gone into a corner too fast. When your arms run out of lock, the tyres have long since run out of grip.
We’d leave braking until the last possible moment, I said, and in some corners it would feel like making an emergency stop. Simon remained expressionless, nodding occasionally and cocking his head to one side as he thought about it.
I drove a slow lap to pinpoint the corners. It was surprisingly easy to get lost in the featureless landscape.
‘This time round I’ll go flat out, so you can see it won’t tip over.’
The speed didn’t faze Simon whatsoever; he could have been signing another record deal in the Sony boardroom. I knew I could really push him.
He got into the driver’s seat and wiggled the gearstick, which crunched in anticipation.
‘You really have to hand it to Jeremy,’ he said. ‘What a piece of shit.’
I told him to rev it to three and a half thousand and just dump the clutch. ‘Don’t slip it like you would in Sainsbury’s car park.’ As if Simon hung out at Sainsbury’s.
We sped off. After a single sighting lap, he began marrying every suggestion I made with small adjustments to his rather basic style.
Simon drove like my mum, with an upright posture and a stiff upper lip. He did shuffle the wheel through his hands to take the corners; the habit was clearly too ingrained for me to change it in the short time we had together. I focused his attention instead on taking a wide approach to the corners and gauging his speed by looking ahead.
What set him apart, made him truly sublime, was his ability to feel the level of grip the car was producing and to match that with precisely the right speed for each corner. He was a real natural.
When he cocked up, he would laugh or call himself a wanker. When the Liana pirouetted at warp 9 through clouds of dust and grass, he remained as calm as a Hindu cow and asked, ‘What happened that time?’ in a tone that was drier than Ghandi’s flip-flop.
I explained the tiny adjustments he needed to make to his line into the corners, turning in later to give the tyres less work to do on a continuous arc, where to brake less and carry extra speed.
His improvement impressed him. After a few laps he said, ‘You’re really good. Who are you?’
Coming from a talent scout with the world at his feet to someone looking for a way ahead in it, there was only one logical answer. But I didn’t give it. After nine laps of my backseat driving, I stayed silent for a lap and he didn’t make a single error. Simon was ready to go solo.
Dennis rolled the in-car cameras and Jim politely asked Simon for ‘plenty of chat’. I suggested he put in a banker lap first time round, nothing too crazy.
Every lap began from a standing start, which enabled us to chat to Simon and move cameras during the re-set. He set off to the shrill sound of spinning tyres and I followed his progress from the edge of the track.
Jim and I watched transfixed as the Liana crossed the line. Jim carefully angled his stopwatch in my direction in case any of Simon’s people were peeking. It was within a second of the lap record.
Simon pulled up, his elbow on the window ledge, and asked what gear he was supposed to use in the second corner.
‘Second.’
I asked him to brake later at the penultimate turn. The next lap was audibly faster; we could see him wrestle the steering. I got him to brake later, corner by corner, and he went faster every lap.
Simon took a cigarette and water break and asked how he was doing, but we couldn’t let him know before his interview.
His eyebrows disappeared beneath his immaculately sculpted hair-line. ‘Do you seriously expect me to believe that?’
Yes we did.
We bolted him back into the five-point harness. I always found that the most uncomfortable part of my job; I never quite got used to reaching between a celebrity crotch and yanking a strap across their balls or breasts.
As Simon put in some more fabulous laps, Wilman turned up to check on things. Jim showed him his notepad.
‘Bloody Nora.’ Wilman gave a soft-shoe shuffle. ‘Don’t tell him.’
Simon shared our enthusiasm, so we kept pushing him until he reached a plateau on around lap ten. I told him it was an excellent time that he probably wouldn’t beat.
Andy then offered him a passenger ride in the Noble M12 supercar, so I wheeled it out.
The M12 was light as a feather. Its V6 motor was powered by twin turbochargers that took time to spool up before belching the machine forward with gigantic thrust. By selecting the right gears and keeping the turbo’s pressure peaking, I could slide the car all the way up to 80mph. I was keen to register a reaction from Simon, so I gave it my best shot.
He remained as cool as a cucumber, arms folded and a serene smile on his face. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t. I fired the car across the bump at the tyre wall corner at 135mph and, when his panel judge composure didn’t flinch, I drove back to the pits to drop him off.
Wilman reappeared. ‘Could you just give Simon a go now?’
Nightmare. Had I known that he’d be driving, I’d never have shown him the machine’s full potential. He was too good a mimic.
I kept my be
lts loose so that I could reach the steering wheel from the passenger seat if I had to. Simon dumped the clutch, just like I’d taught him in the gutless Suzuki. The twin turbos went ‘whooooshhhhh’ and the car was tearing down the track at 100mph eight seconds later.
He started trying to copy the fast power slides I’d been doing. We were so close to losing it that I didn’t dare distract him by speaking. We approached the super-fast tyre wall corner. I told him to back off where I hadn’t.
Simon took an apocalyptic amount of speed in and I knew we were going off big time.
The car spun at 120mph and I leapt across to fling the steering hard over into opposite lock. That sent us down the tarmac, bought a little time and shed some speed.
I was keen to avoid the grass because the car might roll. Once we started going backwards I yanked the handbrake and hollered at him to stand on the anchors. Cowell hit the pins and grinned. I think it meant we were even.
We’d come to a rest on the grass after narrowly missing two landing lights that could have ripped the bloody doors off.
‘Now, really, what happened there?’ Simon cackled with laughter. ‘You went in too fast is what happened. Please, let’s go back in so I can collect my P45.’
We bumbled back on to the track and returned the car to its owner. Simon had really enjoyed himself, which meant the crew did too. I’d never seen someone with no experience adapt so quickly to a supercar and wring its neck.
Jim pulled in his footage and I went to the Outside Broadcast truck. Brian Klein, the Studio Director, was sitting in front of a raft of TV screens and waving his hairy arms about. He was wearing a typically garish outfit that comprised a vertically striped T-shirt, knee-length white trousers and leather shoes.
Brian controlled the crowd via his production assistants. They scurried around the floor, moving any gargantuan men out of the way of camera and bringing forward the pretty girls, whilst juggling the three presenters to make sure they were saying the right things at the right time, cueing the pre-recorded footage and keeping an eye on the unedited stuff streaming in hot from the track. All these inputs were performed live to the assembled audience whilst being time coded for packaging into a one-hour show for broadcast four days later.
After a well-executed interview in which Jeremy opined that bus lanes should be banned and traffic wardens exiled, they ran Simon’s lap. They stitched on some loony driving from his early runs, but the finishing time was what counted: 1.47.1, nearly a second faster than the track record. Simon double punched the air and Brian smiled at me, raising the little black carpets above his eyes before he settled back to his control panel.
With Cowell at the top of the leaderboard, only one other marker needed setting straight. Black Stig held the Top Gear track record on a 1.23.7 power lap, courtesy of the mighty Lambo Murcielago. To beat that, I needed some serious kit.
Porsche kindly delivered an appropriate weapon with their Carrera GT, a quantum leap in design and performance from their standard line of midlife crisis cures. The GT was panned by limp-wristed critics because the ceramic clutch was too aggressive for pulling away at traffic lights, making it prone to stalling. Driven right, it launched like a scalded cat.
It had a belting 5.7-litre V10 lump in its core, fat tyres and enough front grip to strip the surface off the tarmac. The shrill V10 strafed the ears like a Le Manster. It drove like one too. The GT was light on aerodynamic grip, making it delicate and edgy in the corners but so rewarding once you learnt to apply less steering than normal. That knowledge came the hard way. I spun at least three times during practice. When you drove it on the limit the throttle response was so precise that if your foot moved slightly over a bump it would spin.
The interior wasn’t Ferrari fancy but was no less beautiful, with carbon weave and subtle leather trim around a seat that came straight from the Starship Enterprise. The giant golfball gear knob was a lazy drop from the wheel, making it vitally accessible during gob-stopping bouts at the helm when the engine ran into the rev limiter mid-slide and a rapid upshift was required.
Jim Wiseman gave me some time to warm up the GT. I took it down the runway and killed the tyres, weaving left and right on full opposite lock, smashing the throttle and braking to a stop to red up the carbon brakes.
It was only ever me versus the track for a power lap. I treated it the same way as a qualifying session and summoned the great drivers I had raced with over the years, guys like Webber and Sato, who would fight me tooth and nail for every hundredth of a second. They may not have been at the track that day, but as Darth Vader aptly put it, I felt their presence.
There were some funny looks from the cameramen, and the deep voice of experience boomed over the radio: ‘Not to be contentious – but are we actually gonna have a car left to film?’
‘It’s OK, Casper,’ Jim replied. ‘Stig’s just warming up the tyres; stand by to shoot in a minute.’
Jim let me drop the hammer without delay. I sawed at the wheel throughout a frenzied lap and the GT popped the record by just over a second, giving me plenty to fold my arms about.
Casper and Ben worked their magic behind the cameras, with Iain May shooting from an elevated mobile platform, or ‘cherry picker’, which boasted a maximum speed of 4mph. Iain’s thinning blond hair and hooded eyes gave him a distinctly mature look, but during the long pauses between takes he shifted its position with all the enthusiasm of a five-year-old on a Tonka Toy.
‘Don’t park it there yet, Iain,’ Casper hissed. ‘I’m on a big wide as he comes through the tyres so you’ll be in frame. Let me get one more shot, then I’m going tight.’
Camera-talk was slowly sinking in. If Casper was shooting a ‘wide’ profile it meant I needed to keep it fully lit for a considerably longer distance than if it was a ‘tight’ close-up moment in one corner. It was fascinating to watch the film crew work together and to be giving them the confidence to creep nearer the action. As the trust grew on both sides, the crew employed their superb skills to define the whiplash-quick shooting style that Top Gear became known for.
Iain ended up lying in the gutter less than a foot from the track as I howled past his shoulder at max speed. Most cameramen would press record and walk away. Top Gear crews put their necks on the line and operated manually in order to pull focus and pan with the car.
The lairy cornering shots were achieved in much the same way. Jeremy and I would fly sideways into the corner with the crew rotating through different positions, a hair’s breadth from our intended line of travel. The boys covered every angle within minutes. Having them so close to the gliding cars focused the mind as much as any motor race, and we never took our eyes off them.
We were expected to get it right first time, so I stopped asking for practice. ‘Fine to practise, Stiggy,’ became the refrain, ‘but we’ll just roll cameras anyway.’
The Spanish Yeti, Dan the cameraman, legging it across the track with a Steadicam stabilised mount attached to his torso, was the most unnerving sight of all. He sprinted to and fro, capturing tight gritty sweeps of the action, with his curly black mane flowing in his wake.
The end of my first series came up fast and I wondered if I’d be asked back for another. My hopes were buoyed when a contract arrived in the post, but it was retrospective and was followed by a pay cheque made out to ‘The Stig Only’. I was sure the bank had already heard the one about Donald Duck, and unlike Batman I needed the money, so I straightened that one out sharpish with Accounts.
With no certainty if or when Top Gear would need me again, I pressed on with the Army.
Chapter 15
A Walk in the Park
The ground froze overnight, and as the sun came up it cast a magic light across the frost-dusted valley. My ground mat had to be snapped and folded like cardboard. I started warming up my shoulders to prevent the shooting pains across my back and neck caused by the five-hour marches. The straps on my ancient bergen had lost their padding and cut into my shoulders like cheese wire.
I pressed the store-man to exchange it for a newer one, but the SOB refused. The Chief Instructor just laughed.
We formed up for the morning brief in the middle of a cutting covered in loose shingle and stones from the quarry. The senior NCO emerged from his ‘twat wagon’, an ugly box-shaped Land Rover. He was in jovial mood.
‘Mornin’, gentlemen. Little surprise for you all today: owing to the fact that it’s Christmas there’s no march today, so you can all go back and get your ’eads down …’
Silence. We’d all been here before.
‘No takers? OK then, suit yourselves.’
I was called across to the wagon to receive my first rendezvous point. I read the grid and found RV1 with the tip of my compass … on the farthest side of the map, bloody miles away. I looked at the instructor in disbelief.
‘Having trouble motivating yourself this morning?’
‘No, Staff,’ I said, and jogged away.
Typically, the routes were no longer than 25 kilometres as the crow flies, with ascents in the region of one to two thousand feet. This monster tab looked at least 5k longer, and taking the wrong route could add an hour and result in a fail. I opted to go straight up the side of a sheer waterfall, reducing me to a snot-faced mop of sweat within metres of the start line.
I managed to scale the wall of the ravine and make it on to open ground, but things didn’t get any easier. Every conceivable physical obstacle stood in my path. The correct procedure for river crossings was to strip naked, suit up with Gore-Tex and wade across, facing upstream. That seemed over the top for the stretch of water that now confronted me. It was 15 feet at most from bank to bank. I could clear half that in one bound.
I misjudged the depth, submerged and disappeared downstream, saturating every bit of my kit and sorely weighing myself down. I cursed my stupidity, but thanks to an earlier rushed barbed wire fence crossing that had nearly ripped off my family jewels, my crotchless trousers vented quickly.
I plodded through endless fields of ‘babies’ heads’ – clumps of ankle-high bog-grass that rendered forward movement almost impossible – and braced myself for crossing Death Valley, so named for its double-dip profile and the fact that so many recruits had voluntarily withdrawn from the course after climbing it.