by Ben Collins
Gordon Ramsay had cooked up quite a masterpiece; nothing short of a clear dry run would beat his 1.46.38. But it didn’t stop Jamie trying, and as the snow melted he managed to put in a mega time, just a second slower than his arch-rival. As wet laps go it was the best and smoothest I ever saw.
You’d expect elite sportsmen to be good around the track, and that was largely the case, but the Lacetti wasn’t the chariot of choice for big units like Lawrence Dallaglio and Usain Bolt.
Rugby legend Dallaglio weighed in at just under 112kg, and Usain was about 95, nearly a tenth of the car’s kerb weight and almost two Lewis Hamiltons.
Dallaglio looked ridiculous in the Lacetti. His head was jammed on to the ceiling, his tree-trunk legs filled the entire footwell and his giant hands wrapped around the steering wheel like he was holding a peppermint.
He still managed a lap that was within a second of the fastest time, a storming effort given the weight handicap. I had a go at tackling Lawrence afterwards; it went badly. He lifted me off the ground by my helmet and nearly snapped my neck.
Sprinter Usain Bolt arrived at Dunsfold having set a new world record for the 200 metres in France the night before. After the press conferences he’d gone to bed at 3am, woken up a couple of hours later and got straight on a plane.
Usain is six foot five. You got a stiff neck just looking up at him. But his lilting Jamaican accent made you want to put your feet up, mix a Bacardi and fall asleep. He seemed to be waltzing through life.
He picked up the mechanics of racing in no time and was soon flying solo. He made making an effort seem effortless. He pulled in after setting a blistering time, wound down the window and gave me a sleepy smile. ‘Man, this is some scary stuff right here. It’s stressful out there.’
‘You don’t look massively stressed,’ I said. ‘You’re doing really well.’
We pulled him out of the car for a water break and I noticed his shoelace was undone. Later on they played a clip of him winning a gold medal in the 100 metres and his laces were undone then as well. Talk about laid back.
I made sure he tied it securely and we sent him out. You only have to get your laces wrapped around the throttle pedal once to realise it’s not a good idea.
Usain pulled every ounce of speed out of the car and finished off with his signature pose, pointing skywards with his hands like he was firing an arrow. Had it not been for his weight I’m sure he would have edged Gordon Ramsay out of first place. That honour was claimed by Simon Cowell on his second visit. He surprised himself by topping the times and gave Clarkson a bashing in the interview as they took turns in ribbing one another.
When it came to pure passion, no one could touch the space cowboy known as Jamiroquai. ‘Jay’ was also a walking supercar encyclopaedia. He’d set the fastest time in the Suzuki on his previous visit, under the guidance of the Black Stig. I’d always felt a bit smug about tearing a second off Jay’s time with four of ‘my’ celebs.
Wherever Jay went after that, people ribbed him about his time being beaten, and now he wanted to put things right. The pressure was on, but he was still carrying a cheeky grin. He arrived wearing some nifty Alpinestars racing boots. I could tell from his handshake that he was pumped.
‘Up for it today?’ I grinned beneath my helmet.
‘Are you kidding? This is WAR, man!’
I knew Jay was wild from a commercial I did with him for an EA Sports game called Need for Speed. I was dressed as a State Trooper and thrashing an Eighties Chevy police cruiser, a big mama, around a track. Jay slipped into the role of mad, ‘catch me if you can’, tearaway speed junkie with remarkable ease. He pulled alongside my car at 120mph in a pimped-out Nissan GTR, shot me the stiff finger, shouted ‘Fuck you, Pig,’ and roared off cackling with laughter.
As we sat in the Chevy Lacetti, I built Jay up from scratch like he’d never seen the track or driven the car before. I wanted to give him his very best shot. His lines were good, he kept it loose and he pedalled faster lap by lap.
‘How’s he going?’ Wilman asked.
‘He’s on it. He’s just four tenths of a second short of Simon Cowell. He can probably beat it if we stick with him.’
‘OK. Keep me posted; I want fireworks out there.’
Jay was super-consistent. I tried everything to pull the extra time out of him and it must have pissed him off big time to be so close, but not quite close enough.
‘Keep pushing; you’ve got to find more in the penultimate corner.’
‘I am, man. I’m braking as fucking late as I can in this HEEEAP OF SHIIIIIT. Am I there yet, have I beaten the time, can you just tell me?’
I shook my head. ‘All I can say is you haven’t done your best time yet. But you will.’
‘C’MON! You’re fucking kidding. Grrrrrrrr …’ He banged his head on the steering wheel a few times and blew out a lungful of air. He was working himself up to a performance.
‘If you really want this, the money is all in that corner over there. Brake so late that you think you’re having an accident, let go, the back end starts sliding, then bury the throttle.’
The producer raised an eyebrow. ‘Hmm, I wonder what will happen now …’
Sure enough, Jay went flying into the weeds. I decided it was time to bring out the spare. It would give the boy a chance to draw breath and gather himself mentally.
Jay went out for two more laps. We remained stony-faced. Grant told him that he could do some more laps if he wanted but that he’d reached a plateau. It was time for the ordeal of the leather sofa. He tapped his foot like a jackhammer throughout the interview, then went still as Jeremy started to read out the time.
As usual, he extracted every last ounce of tension from the announcement.
‘One minute …
‘Forty …
‘Five …
‘Point …
‘Eight!’
Jay had pipped Cowell by a tenth of a second. He leapt off the leather sofa and danced an emphatic jig. His passion was utterly infectious.
He expressed his gratitude in the best way he knew how – by scaring the crap out of me and his two mates in a C63 Merc. He shaved the wall at Hammerhead, drifting the car wide through the corner, and I couldn’t wait to get my own back. We swapped seats and I returned the favour. He chanted ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard …’ throughout the process. I took it as a compliment.
* * *
During eight years of racing around the Top Gear circuit, my glittering array of celebrity drivers had to put up with muffled rantings from behind the helmet of their white-clad passenger. There was the odd exception, however, who needed to hear my every word.
I was in plain clothes when I met Wilman in the OB truck, but he still hailed me as per normal.
‘Stig … We want to do a lap with a blind guy. Do you reckon he can do it?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Um … I don’t see why not, if he can hear what I’m saying. Can I sit next to him?’
‘Of course. But we don’t just want him to crawl around out there. It needs to be a proper lap. I mean we want him to do a time, like close to Richard Whiteley or something.’ My most challenging pupil yet was the kind of gentle soul who might run a local toy store. He had a regular, sighted driving partner with whom he’d developed his own arcane communications system. At first, they didn’t even want me in the car with them. Listening to them discussing the track and how they’d indicate the required speeds and directions made me feel like an amateur. It was so precisely coded that I couldn’t wait to see them in action.
I insisted on at least demonstrating which way the track went, so that the sighted man could take in the layout of the circuit and the blind driver could listen in. I promised to shut up the rest of the time and just observe.
So far, so good …
After a couple of laps I banged in a fast one, fast enough for them to agree I should stay in and keep talking. We swapped seats. The blind man slid behind the wheel with me alongside and his partner in t
he back.
At that moment Dunsfold looked a lot more twisty than usual and the old Suzuki Liana felt faster too. There were tyre walls, trees and concrete outbuildings that had never concerned me before. I took a reality check. If things went seriously wrong, there was only so much I could do from the passenger seat by grabbing the wheel and yanking the handbrake to spin us to a stop, but even that was not as easy as it sounded. Driving fast made some people nervous, and I imagined blind people would be no exception. I’d instructed 90-year-old ladies who, when I made the slightest correction to the steering, resisted with the strength of Schwarzenegger ripping the pin out of another grenade.
To start us off I indicated speed and distance along a quarter-mile straight. I told them I’d indicate direction changes, raise my voice to suggest an increase in the rate of turn, follow any adjustment with ‘Come straight.’ ‘STOP!’ meant just that: slam the brakes and put the clutch in. That was really important.
We pulled away in first gear and veered off to the left. Neither my directional instructions nor the mystical smoke signals coming from his partner in the back seat could keep us off the lawn. I rolled with it for a while, but after twenty seconds of mowing I’d had enough and called for a re-set.
Off we went again. This time when we veered left, shouting ‘RIGHT’ loudly had a limited effect. We pinballed along the verge for a bit, then triumphantly approached the first corner. The painted lines that defined the track seemed superfluous, but I tried to keep him within them. We flowed off course, back on to the grass. The driver sensed the rough and began panting as I urged him to ease off the gas. He braked instead and we spun.
Trying to explain how to navigate the turns of a fluid race track to a blind man was mind-boggling. I never felt confident of even reaching a corner, let alone driving through one. Adding speed only compounded the problem of direction, because a duff steer for more than a second put us straight into the undergrowth.
A single corner required at least twenty instructions on the steering alone. Sudden corrections of the wheel rocked the suspension and made the front wheels skid; the driver panicked and hit the brakes. We never went faster than 20mph. After a few hours I sensed the driver was overwhelmed, so I threw in the towel.
‘What was he like?’ Wilman asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I feel awful saying this, but I’ve got the impression he wasn’t much of a driver before he lost his sight …’
The production team, always one step ahead of the game, had found not just one mad blind racing pilot for this mission, but two.
The next contestant was a wonderful man called Billy Baxter.
I spotted him standing in the car park. He was looking into the distance, like he was waiting for a train announcement. His head met his body at the shoulders with the robustness of a front-row forward. He was a stout fellow.
Billy had served the British Army as a member of the Royal Horse Artillery. He lost his sight to a rare disease during the Bosnian conflict, as a result of clearing up the mass graves.
His eyes aimed off as I approached him. He couldn’t see me but he was clearly at peace with his surroundings.
‘Hi, Billy, I’m The Stig.’
‘Hello, Stig.’ He held out a firm hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
His weathered cheeks creased into a broad grin. Crow’s feet around his eyes suggested he laughed a lot. He had the husky voice of a smoker and an untraceable accent: part West Country, part London cockney.
Billy had a driving partner too, but he dispatched him as soon as I offered to take him around the track myself. He listened intently as I talked him through each corner, explaining the speeds I would be doing, to listen to the changing wind rush as we accelerated. I put in a lap absolutely flat out and taught him to sense the G-forces as I turned.
Billy took the driver’s seat and I read him the riot act. ‘Do exactly what I say when I say it.’
‘No problem.’
We set off and Billy pointed the car straight ahead. We hit third gear and achieved more in our first minute together than I had during the whole of the previous day. As we headed towards the kink before the first corner, things went slightly pear-shaped; Billy got a tad overexcited and I had to wrestle the wheel back from him before we collided with the concrete hut.
Billy followed my directions precisely and without delay. He had superb feel for brake pressure and graduated his acceleration.
The Liana was rock solid, but the going was still painfully slow. The first lap took us nearly ten minutes. Richard Whiteley’s time was two minutes and six seconds.
We began travelling much faster, which meant that when Billy went the wrong way it was more spectacular. We pulled wide at the second corner, with me shouting to lift off the gas, tank-slapped, spun and stopped. Billy fought the steering all the way, his innocent expression unchanged as he stared into the void. He was the salt of the earth.
‘Bollocks,’ he hissed, then rocked his shoulders like the Muttley character from Wacky Races.
The biggest frustration for both of us was when Billy took a corner really well on one lap and then completely screwed it up on the next. Without sight he had no way of ‘learning’ the track in the way I was used to. It had to be embedded through a developing sense of timing, in conjunction with the familiar tones of my voice, in a map inside his mind.
By the end of the session we’d made huge progress, but I was still steering much of the lap for him and we were nowhere near a fast time. I really liked Billy and I believed in him. I asked him what his ambition was.
‘Well, Stig, I want to beat Richard Whiteley’s time, and of course I’d give anything to go even faster. If I got anywhere near Terry Wogan [2.4], that would be amazing.’
I clicked a stopwatch and talked him through a perfect lap on a dicta-phone. I closed my eyes and rattled through the sequence of thoughts and manoeuvres that Billy had practised that day: bumps, heavy steers, gears, counting time in the straights. I crossed the imaginary finish line in two minutes and 10 seconds.
‘It’s a start,’ I told him.
I reported our progress to the boss, and heard myself promise that Billy would be able to do a time on his own, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t yet hold the steering wheel by himself. In Wilman’s world, that put my word on the line.
The next time I saw Billy was to film his performance. I could only keep him in the car for a maximum of an hour and a half, because anything more brought him to the brink of mental exhaustion.
Billy was such a genial character, but his desire to achieve a good time was written in every bullet of sweat that dripped off his nose when he drove. I had to up the ante.
‘Billy, I might be quite fierce with you this session. My language might go from PG to 18.’
He smiled and said, ‘Don’t you worry, Stig, you can throw a few fucks and shits into me! I’ve been listening to your tape every day. I’m ready.’
Our progress second time round was phenomenal. Billy naturally wanted to ease off the accelerator in the straights, but I dished out so much verbal abuse that it convinced him to keep his foot down until we passed 80mph. Years of military training kicked in and Billy kept the throttle buried. A ‘click right’ meant a small jab of the wheel and back to straight, which was handy for making small adjustments.
I set him with the correct amount of steering for the corners, but as we went faster the front wheels began to skid. That meant he had to turn more to compensate, but it only worked if he drove at the same speed every lap.
Billy gave everything as the speed piled on the pressure. We made plenty of essential smoke breaks, but I was running out of time with him. He could drive the whole lap by himself, going through all the gears, braking and steering through every corner with the exception of one, the fastest corner of the track, the Follow Through.
I placed a single finger at the base of the steering wheel and told him, ‘IT’S LOCKED.’ It was too dangerous for Billy to drive that section un
aided. The tyre barrier left just enough room for two cars’ breadths, and at 100mph it could go wrong too quickly for him to recover it. The system worked so well, and his driving was so smooth, that I had to take a look at him to remind myself he really couldn’t see.
We took our final break and I explained how close we were. Forget Richard Whiteley, we were only one second away from Wogan. Billy sparked up another roll-up. His hands were shaking. I felt a rush of admiration and affection for him. He had sacrificed so much for his country, and still had the balls to be televised in pursuit of a personal milestone.
Back in the car I did a final talk-through, highlighting areas he could improve. I got him to paint a mental picture of the perfect lap and run a commentary. Then a silent thumbs up to the camera and one simple word to Billy: ‘Go!’
Billy lit up the tyres and after a few ‘small lefts’ and ‘small rights’ we made it to the first corner. Our approach was a bit wide, but I risked sticking with it and called for a late brake and shouted ‘TURN NOW.’ I didn’t have to tell him twice. The car scythed through the corner, the front wheels pleading for mercy. Click left, left, straighten.
‘Keep it flat, Billy. Don’t lift, kink left, more left and BRAKE.’
We just missed the tyre wall at Chicago as the ABS braking clawed at the tarmac. Billy applied heaps of right lock and we exited the corner a little too far to the right.
I bellowed at him to keep his foot hard down along the fast back straight. The hair on the back of my neck began to tingle as it often did on a good run in qualifying. It was still a long way to the finish.
Billy skidded through Hammerhead chicane without cheating by cutting the corner, and powered through the gears to the super-fast Follow Through.
‘Really good, Billy – dead straight, straight, straight now, don’t blow it, don’t lift, don’t lift AND TURN …’
Billy flat-footed it through the right-hander, a corner that a third of sighted drivers never took flat.
We approached the perilous 100mph left.