by Ben Collins
Paul’s smooth baritone voice radiated the calm and control of a reflective mind. His eyebrows converged around his nose like a hawk as he listened to me explaining the laws of speed. I imagined that Paul, being a globally renowned expert in mind management, would just hypnotise the car into running smoothly around the circuit. He took a rather different approach.
From the moment we swapped seats and McKenna put his foot down, it was like watching Mr Hyde strangling charming Dr Jekyll. McKenna’s facial expressions behind the wheel could inspire generations of Picasso impressionists.
Fists of iron clenched the wheel with such force that the blood drained from his knuckles. Every gear change was like a death-blow. The faster he cornered the more his face contorted with rage. When his mouth gaped open and his tongue started lashing his ivories, I began wondering if I had missed the giant Scorpion at Hammerhead. Paul was in a dark place.
I felt thoroughly unprofessional when he caught me laughing, but I explained that he needed to relax to drive fast. I coaxed Paul towards taking a gentler handle on the controls and he posted a very respectable time.
He later hypnotised Hammond into believing he was a baked potato that had forgotten how to drive, so I figured his mind magic might extend to fixing my Achilles. He kindly recommended a healer in North London. I’d maxed out on conventional medicine and therapeutic ultrasound, so happily steered myself in the direction of the witch doctor.
Apart from the occasional blast with TG, my whole life had become centred on passing the Army course, whatever it took. I prepared all my equipment for the final exercise and streamlined my webbing with fresh bungee cord that made it lighter, tighter and very Gucci darling. I loaded essential condiments such as Tabasco and olive oil to transform my ‘rat packs’ into the kind of pukka taste sensations that would make Jamie Oliver drool.
Lastly, Dr Collins’s surgery was stocked with eight packs of synthetic ice to soothe my creaking Achilles tendon between beastings, enough oxide tape to mummify a giraffe, and elephantine doses of anti-inflammatories. For all the bravado, I was crapping myself about the prospect of failure. It would only take one misplaced step on a cold morning to put me out of action.
* * *
With my kit squared away I was ready for war, but before that I had to go and compete at Rockingham. I switched my head into racing mode. The team had been working around the clock to put the new car together. As I climbed in for the first time, Graham, the team manager, stood in front with his headcans on, arms folded. Graham was a grafter. His normally gentle face was taut and unsmiling.
‘Radio check.’
‘Good, yeah,’ Graham replied.
‘Don’t worry, if it drives half as good as it looks they won’t stand a chance.’
I got the impression he didn’t necessarily agree.
I took her out for a spin and felt the grip hook the chassis into the track again. We were back in business.
I qualified on pole and we blitzed the first race of the day. Graham personally worked one of the pneumatic wheel guns to guarantee a lightning pit stop; the sparks flew off the spinning metal and he kept me in front of the pack until we crossed the line. He was so ecstatic when I came into the pits that he threw his radio on the floor and picked me up off the ground and grinned the winner’s smile. It put us on pole for the second round later that afternoon and I planned on repeating the result.
I led the field into the rolling start and wove and slammed the throttle to get as much heat into the tyres as possible. As we approached the back straight I lined up to sweep through the final corner and allowed the other cars to form around me. Colin White’s bright green machine pulled so close we nearly collided. A gesture of intent.
I sped up and found my engine’s sweet spot in second gear as we approached the start, and the instant the flag twitched I buried the long throttle pedal. As we hurtled towards Turn One I narrowly held the advantage, committed my entry speed and opened a tiny gap. Colin held close inside.
I kept enough margin to be able to take a racing line through Two, with Colin darting inside in a futile harassing move, but my tyres just weren’t gripping enough to shake him loose. The last thing I wanted was to concede the lead and get embroiled in a dogfight.
I forced the throttle wide open through Three and skidded towards the exit wall. Colin had a run on me. The back straight was four lanes wide and I was in lane four on the right-hand side. To have the lead going into the final corner, I had to get left across the track into lane one. So did Colin.
As I covered across the track the green car went with me, then he pulled towards my inside. According to the rules I could block his move once, and only when he was fully behind. By the time I reached lane two, the green car was alongside my rear bumper in lane one. I had raced him hard; now I had to be fair and give him room. I stopped covering and let him pull alongside as we wound up to 175mph.
An almighty force rocked through the cabin as I was flung around into a spin. I instinctively jammed the brakes, took in a half breath and waited. As the car sped backwards it felt like I was falling. I stared through the windscreen at the pack of pursuers slowly blurring around me. Smoke blossomed from my tyres as the topside melted away and the canvas shredded and punctured. The wall rushed up behind me.
There was a moment of peace, then the concrete intervened. I shouted the air from my lungs on impact. My head ricocheted off the restraints and my knees walloped the steering column, then the chassis frame.
Pain flooded my body and bright spots of light burnt into my retinas, but I knew I was all right. In fact, I was livid. I wanted to see the film footage of what had happened.
The car was toast. It had pummelled the wall so hard that concrete dust enveloped the whole Texaco livery. The splayed wheel angles suggested the chassis was museum material.
I was sent to the medical facility for a once-over, but all I wanted to do was see Graham and apologise for killing his car. Things were hotting up outside the medical area. The opposition had protested to the officials about my driving and I was being summoned to the race stewards …
I stared, transfixed, at the footage. The camera had a bird’s-eye view of me leading Colin through Three. We were hellish close. I gave him room; he pulled alongside my rear wheel and then … contact. To my eyes, he steered so hard into me that I never had a chance of saving it before I hit the wall. It was a total waste of a fine machine.
The main steward eyed me nervously through his square glasses and his hands were trembling as he turned off the video. Not a good sign. Obviously, I said, he’d seen the other driver spin me off. No.
In their view, my defensive line was dangerous driving. They were docking all my series points from the weekend, which made it impossible for me to win the championship.
The racing was over for the day and my mind had already shifted on to the ranges, with Ken on my shoulder. But first I directed a volley of profanity at the stewards that would have made him fackin’ proud. Real-ising I wasn’t improving matters, I headed for the land of the brave. In spite of the calamity, I was buzzing from the win.
By the time I reached the Army training area at one in the morning the tiredness that follows a hectic race weekend was kicking in, along with a hangover from my concussion. Geordie sympathetically fed me a brew before leading me down through an abandoned camp of box-like concrete buildings. He gave me a bearing towards my new digs.
Within a few hundred metres a squadron of mosquitoes was gorging on my blood. The bearing led me to their humid HQ, a swampy wood. I squidged through the dank undergrowth.
Johnny was on stag. ‘Good race?’
‘Won one and crashed one.’
‘Welcome to Shangri-la. If the DS don’t get you the mozzies will. Get some repellent on you asap.’
I set my alarm for 0530 and passed out.
I woke early and used the time to prepare for the Combat Fitness Test. I dug my fingers deep into my bloated tendon to get it mobilised, feeling the fibrou
s tissue scrape against its outer sheath. I warmed up my calf, stretched and cloaked my ankle with the zinc oxide tape. I added a Neoprene layer of synthetic rubber for good measure.
I breakfasted with drugs and hot chocolate and walked down to the assembly area with the boys in full combat gear, bergens and all. It felt like marching to the gallows, but I was ready to run on a stump if I had to.
The DSs disappeared in their vehicles to line the route, and Jones craned his head around for a final look at his prey before moving off.
‘Prepare to double … DOUBLE!’
The opening stretch was downhill, on tarmac. I kept movement in my right leg to a minimum by swinging it like a golf club. We crossed a stone bridge over a brook and began to climb.
The sweat started to work its way through our clothing, and by the time we reached the first peak our tightly packed unit was a steam-pumping locomotive in the morning air. Earlier in the course you might have relished another recruit biting the dust, but not now. Everyone had been through hell to get this far. Tunnel vision had caused guys to break up with their girlfriends or lose their jobs. All that mattered was getting to the end.
My Achilles started to burn and I struggled with the pace. I focused on the others, the rhythm of the march, the distance to the guy in front, and dug deep to keep up.
We crashed along a dirt track and up a steep field. A few stray rocks tested our balance but not Jones, whose robotic legs churned it up at the front. His head and shoulders barely moved.
We took a road that led across an infinite patchwork of fields and I drew deep breaths, but started to slip back.
‘C’mon, Benny,’ Ninja puffed. ‘C’mon, mate.’ Everyone was hanging out of their arses.
The road kinked and curved and I pictured the ideal racing line to carry speed and power up the hill. It was a monster climb, clobbering the group down to a fast, thrusting walk.
In a lay-by up ahead a DS climbed from his Land Rover. The pressure was on. Forget tea and biscuits – it was Ken. He spotted my sorry carcass a mile away and started licking his lips.
I, dumb beast of burden; he, master.
‘It hurts, yeah? YEAH?’ he shouted.
‘Yes, Staff.’
‘You ain’t got all fackin’ day!’ He jogged alongside. ‘Right, you’re gonna fackin’ sprint and catch that group in front. NOW – GO! Fackin’ move, you cunt.’
Bollocks to my leg – anything to get him off my back. After a gutbusting 250-metre sprint I caught the tail end of the main posse, but I couldn’t live with them. I fought a lonely battle to complete the march without crippling myself in the process.
A decade or so later a radiant sight appeared on the horizon, more beautiful than what might lie at the end of any rainbow: a wagon.
Ken breathed, ‘Fackin’ good maan,’ as I hobbled past. I swear he might even have smiled.
I was totally ball-bagged and almost the last man in, but crucially within the cut-off time.
We still had to complete a minefield of tests and acquire skills that were integral to the Unit to prove ourselves worthy of being counted among them. Simulations of life at the front – and behind the lines – were as hardcore as the DSs could make them. Once they had seen enough, we settled into the final stages of the exercise.
Afterwards, we sat on a muddy grass bank and re-assembled the utter shambles of our kit. My trousers were torn through the knees, my boots had been cut off, my big toe had a section missing and something green was growing out of my hands. Our own mothers wouldn’t have recognised us for the fur and grime on our faces. My bergen stank of shit. It was the best of times.
‘Well done, fellas,’ said the training officer. ‘Transport will be here to collect you in forty-five minutes. Get some packed lunches over by the wagons.’
Then he tossed our berets at us like Frisbees. It was the proudest moment of my life.
A few minutes later my neglected mobile phone connected me to the world with a mixed bag of messages. During my absence the race organ-isers had banned me from the next race meeting, then reduced my ‘suspended sentence’ to starting the next event from the back of the grid.
Chapter 17
Happy Landings
In spite of my exotic nightlife, I hadn’t missed a single episode of Top Gear and they had green-lit one of my mad ideas. A friend of mine was a shit-hot freestyle parachutist who reckoned he could land in a car if I held it steady at 50mph. We all gathered in one of those glass meeting rooms at the BBC. I made caveman drawings on a flip chart to storyboard the sequence we had in mind.
Andy, not unreasonably, wanted to know that we could actually pull this off before shelling out for a crew to capture footage of a man falling to his death, then being run over and killed all over again. He asked if we had been practising.
‘Yes.’
It was only a white lie. Tim had thousands of drops under his belt, and I could drive in a straight line at 50mph, no problemo.
‘We ran through it last week. We didn’t actually land Tim in the car, but we matched speeds with him alongside it. We know it will work.’
Tim stared at the carpet, determined not to catch my eye.
Top Gear sourced a convertible Mercedes CLK55. It had great acceleration and all the windows folded flat, making it ideal for the job of dropping a man into the back seat from 4,000 feet. Back in those days there was no speculation about me being The Stig, so it seemed logical to do the stunt as Ben Collins. I would be hiding in plain sight.
The location was RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, home to the RAF’s Bomber Command during the Second World War, then used by the American Air Force for keeping an eye on the Russians. The concrete runways were a little ancient but smooth enough to drive on.
I negotiated a day for rehearsals, followed by a day for filming. That way we could figure out if this thing was remotely possible before humiliating ourselves on national television.
Within half an hour of arriving at Bentwaters, my eyeballs were drying in their sockets from the continuous crosswind, and Tim’s expression was even darker than usual.
His parachute was a ‘Swoop’ canopy which could soar like a paraglider. As he approached the ground he would dive to build up speed, turn and slingshot forwards. It would be a bit like falling out of a swing – except he’d be travelling at 130mph just a few feet from the deck.
‘What about this wind?’ I asked. ‘Can you jump in this?’ ‘If the plane can take off, I can jump. Landing could be tricky, but we won’t know until we try.’
Fordy the cameraman, Tim’s partner in the sky, reminded me of Captain Scarlet, right down to the dimpled chin. He chewed gum and smiled at us as if he was escorting a pair of loonies on a day out from the Cuckoo’s Nest.
We pinged a section of airfield where the main runway was met by another we used for parking the emergency vehicles. It gave me a wider run-up and the converging strips marked a clear X that provided a visible reference at high altitude.
In theory, the grass on either side of it would offer a marginally softer bounce if things went wrong, but realistically, splatting the grass at 130mph wouldn’t change the texture of the human jam Tim would be spreading.
We loaded him up with his harness and padded his arms and knees. I softened the landing zone with thick blankets and foam and wound the passenger seat fully forward to give him space. For my own protection, I donned the obligatory Ray Bans.
Tim and Fordy joshed around as they climbed into the Cessna. I cranked up the air con as they took off and backed the car into position. After a few minutes I spotted the ruffled profile of a yellow parachute. It was the first time I’d seen one of these chutes deploying, and for a horrible moment it looked like it might not open. Time to switch on. The countdown began. Tim tacked back and forth until he hit 800 feet. He’d rotate at that point and head for the ground like a Kamikaze pilot on his last hurrah, then swoop alongside the car for a couple of hundred feet before touching down.
At least, that was the plan.<
br />
Without warning, Tim spiralled into a turn in front of me. I planted the throttle as he roared overhead at an incredible rate of knots. His speed dropped off within seconds and he landed as I drove past him.
‘We’ll have to do better than that, Benny boy,’ he laughed.
I decided I’d have to start in front of him; there was no other way I could match his speed.
Tim stowed his chute. ‘Let’s try the next one for real; we might as well get a feel for it.’
I craned my neck around the headrest as Tim dived into his turn and flew towards me in a blur of speed. As our paths collided I fought the urge to veer out of his way.
‘Gotta keep it straight, Ben,’ he said when he’d kissed the concrete.
‘I know,’ I said sheepishly. ‘It just feels like I’m trying to kill you.’
‘Sod it, that’s my problem. Just stick the wagon under me whatever.’
We managed three more jumps and sorted the positioning of the Merc relative to Tim’s swoop. The big problem was the crosswind. Its strength and direction were changing constantly, which played havoc with his landing distance and speed.
The closest we got was when a gust blew him sideways and his feet nearly caught the inside of the windscreen.
I called Wiseman before the close of play to call off the shoot.
‘Don’t worry. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. The crew’s already left. We might as well film whatever you guys get up to tomorrow.’
Another mate of ours arrived to take some photos and found the whole scenario highly entertaining. After a few beers we consoled ourselves that at least Tim’s death would be celebrated on global TV. His primary concern, as we rolled out our sleeping bags under the stars, was that he’d forgotten to bring his sponsor’s branded T-shirt.
Come the day, the director arrived with the crew. We filmed the Merc doing some sporty cornering to cut in with the stunt itself. Then the mini cameras were rigged to the car and Tim’s head.