by Ben Collins
Chapter 26
Jet Man
The plan was simple: drive a jet car as fast as it would go, which meant 300mph and then some.
‘The car is basically a dragster,’ Grant explained. ‘Giant wheels at the back, little wheels at the front – you know the kind of thing. The difference,’ he chuckled, ‘is that this baby is powered by a jet engine like the one they used for the Red Arrows.’
‘Sounds … interesting …’ I said, not believing for a second that this would come to anything.
‘It’s called a Vampire. It’s been purpose built and customised by the owner. It would be the fastest thing we’ve ever featured. Ideally we’d like a presenter to drive it, with a bit of help from you.’
I asked who was running it, naively expecting the answer to be McLaren or Williams. It wasn’t.
Schemes like this came and went with Top Gear, and the Vampire wheeze looked as flimsy as a paper fire-fighting suit. A TV presenter in a 300mph dragster? No chance. I wondered for a moment if they might drop the presenter bit and send me up and down the runway for the footage. My stomach tightened.
‘Er … Let me know how you get on …’ I said.
Two weeks later the phone rang again. This wasn’t going away. Hammond might not be available, what did I think about James May driving it?
‘No way; he won’t do it.’ The words came out without me thinking.
‘Really, why do you say that?’
James was a sensible bloke who flew aeroplanes and pretended he couldn’t drive; he wasn’t exactly an adrenalin junky. You needed to be slightly unhinged to want to drive down a runway at 300mph like spam in a can. Sure, it took some skill launching off the line and holding the car straight, but no amount of it could save you if the engine exploded, the wheels fell off, the parachute failed or if you involuntarily shat out your kidneys with fear. You either needed to be immune to the consequences of mechanical failure, or have balls the size of space hoppers.
‘300mph is a huge speed. It’s not like anything you experience in a normal car. I’m not saying James isn’t brave, but his idea of exercise is similar to Clarkson’s – a glass of wine and a fag. We crack 225mph at Le Mans, and even that’s a long way short of what this thing can do.’
‘I know. This thing will do 330mph. The British record is, like, 300. Officially we’re not actually going for it – but it would be nice if it happened.’
I imagined being at the airfield with a mirage part way down the gigantic runway. I pictured James’s doe eyes peering out of his visor, with 5,000 pounds of thrust breathing down the back of his neck. He’d flick a switch and hit 270mph within six seconds.
‘If anything goes wrong, it’ll be a mighty big shunt; then it’ll come down to fitness. Hammond is tough. I’d be happy doing it with him, but not James.’
Core stability and strength literally held all your bits and pieces together on impact. There would be no small shunts at 300mph; why else did they pack a parachute?
Grant was on the dog again the following week.
‘We’ve got Hammond; he’s really up for it. I’m sorting some kit out. We’ve got some overalls kicking around in the office, think they’re Nomex. Hammond says he’s got a motorbike helmet that he’s comfortable with—’
‘He needs a proper F1 helmet, an Arai GP5. Not the toy one he’s got for his bike; don’t let him use that. How old are the overalls?’
‘Not sure. Couple of years …’
I explained that they wouldn’t be fire retardant any more. He needed a new triple-layer Nomex suit. If the jet fuel ignited, every second would count.
‘Triple … layer …’ Grant dutifully took notes. That was the last I heard of it until I was dispatched to a goose-infested farmyard the day before the shoot, to inspect the car and meet Hammond. I’m cool with ducks, but not geese. I hate geese. They’re evil.
Colin Fallows had built Vampire and set the British land speed record. He emerged from a metal cargo container wearing a boiler suit and thick round glasses. He was very amenable, more of a Penfold character than a speed freak. We had tea.
Colin had no idea who I was, and I used that to my advantage to quiz him about the project. I needed to know that he wasn’t some bipolar lunatic looking to win a Darwin Award.
Legend had it that a dude once drove into the Arizona desert in an old Chevy Impala. Nothing unusual there, except that he’d strapped a solid fuel rocket with comparable thrust to an F-16 fighter plane to the roof. Forensic evidence subsequently revealed that Impala man made it up to 50mph using conventional means before he lit the candle. The Chevy then accelerated past 250.
He realised almost immediately that this was not good, slammed the brakes, melting them instantly and blowing the tyres before the car became airborne. The incinerated remains of car and driver were found three miles away, three feet deep in the side of a cliff, 125 feet from the ground. That was the funny thing about solid fuel rockets. Once you pressed go, you kept going until they ran out of fuel.
Vampire on afterburner would behave much the same, except that you could shut off the thrust controls, killing the propulsion and popping the parachute air brake. Assuming the parachute opened, you slowed down.
Colin swung open the corrugated steel doors to reveal his modest workshop. Vampire was smaller than I imagined but still 30 feet long.
I gazed into the gaping chasm of the metal turbine. It had more steel veins, couplings and rivets than Michael McIntyre’s Man Drawer. It looked like a NASA experiment crossed with something out of Thunder-birds. I pelted Colin with questions about every aspect of the build and preparation. What kept the car on the ground rather than turning it into a missile? What did he know about jet engines? How was it fitted to the car, where was the fuel, would it blow up and kill everyone? He answered each question in detail, and with extreme patience.
He’d spent twenty years as an engineer in the Royal Air force – twelve of them on the Rolls-Royce powerplant that would be sending Richard and me down the road at 300mph.
The engine installation was angled so that the faster it went, the more it pressed the middle of the chassis into the road. Colin picked the engine up ‘cheap’ when it was retired from the RAF, describing it as ‘thirty years young’. The propulsion system was fuelled by heating oil, of all things.
The tubular frame chassis completely encased the cockpit and was similar to NASCAR racers I had driven. Simple technology – wheels, springs, dampers and metal suspension attached to a metal frame that supported the whopping engine.
No stone was left unturned. What would stop the engine flying out of the frame? Had the suspension ever broken? What problems had he encountered thus far?
Colin admitted that Vampire did have a tendency to attract wildlife, having recently spilt the blood of an eight-pound rabbit. It also emerged that there had been a problem with the rear suspension in the past. A joint had shown signs of damage and might have caused an incident involving Vampire’s sister vehicle, Hellbender.
I scribbled away furiously. ‘But no one was hurt?’
‘Well, yes …’
Mark Woodley had been at the helm of Hellbender when it veered off course during a high-speed run at Santa Pod. It struck the barriers, killing him instantly.
Colin showed me the modifications to the suspension which seemed to have fixed the problem. I was no engineer, but the joints looked thick and solid.
Elvington was a big open airfield without walls, so at least there was less to hit if it did break. The downside there was the curvature of the runway. The driver had to apply a significant steering angle to counter the camber and keep in a straight line, putting additional load into the front right wheel.
I inspected the tyres and recognised the Hoosiers from racing on oval tracks. They looked pretty old, but Colin explained that they skimmed the tread to reduce the build-up of heat. Using older tyres was counterintuitive but it made sense, despite the basic appearance. The construction of a new tyre heated more unde
r severe loading; it was part of the reason that new rubber produced faster lap times over short distances. In this scenario, that would increase the likelihood of delamination and tyre failure. And tyre failure would convert the car into a projectile.
I stared long and hard at each tyre.
The only unknown was the runway itself. I asked about track sweeping procedures, inspecting for debris after every run to remove anything that might puncture a tyre or collide with the machinery. It was already on his agenda.
All that remained was to do a seat fitting. I wanted to get comfortable with the belts and think about where the camera mounts would fit inside the cockpit. I also wanted to familiarise myself with the controls.
The sparse cockpit was fresh out of Flash Gordon, with a few gauges dotted around a metal console. At the centre lay the solid aluminium ‘butterfly’ steering bars, like a pair of upturned shovel handles joined together. My left foot held down a dead man’s pedal, which would cut the engine the instant you released pressure on it. The right foot controlled the brake pedal, which operated a standard disc from a road car. It held the beast steady at the start line whilst the engine built up revs, in the same way a commercial airliner does before take-off.
Acceleration was controlled by a pair of levers like the ones on the Millennium Falcon. The first of these wound up the jet using conventional thrust, gradually accelerating down the runway up to 170mph. The second applied the afterburner. Afterburn worked by pumping unspent fuel into the engine and igniting a flame that substantially increased the rate of burn and thrust. You applied both levers and held station on the footbrake, then you lit the candle by flicking a switch on the steering wheel and vanished into the distance. Your only concern thereafter was stopping.
Releasing the dead man’s pedal cut power but not your speed, and at 300 the footbrake would melt if you touched it. To stop, you had to pull back both thrust levers to deploy the parachute.
As far as I was concerned, stopping at the first hint of trouble was the only thing that mattered. I practised whipping my hand from the steering to the levers and knocking them back, until it became second nature. I visualised an unsettling vibration and using a reflex action to shut down in a nanosecond. Colin agreed that this would be the key part of the training at Elvington.
The sun was setting and there was still no sign of Hammond, so I rang Grant. Hammo was still filming and wouldn’t be able to join us. Also, my presence was no longer required at Elvington. I was needed at Dunsfold with Jeremy instead.
The tension sprung off my shoulders the way that it did following a pressurised race weekend. But I was leaving Hammond to fend for himself, and that didn’t feel at all comfortable.
I briefed Wilman at length. ‘He needs to sit in this thing. And don’t be surprised if he takes one look at it, turns around and goes home. This car is serious. It’s like nothing any of us has ever seen or done before.’
I ran through all the details of how the car needed to be controlled, the systems, and what Hammond and the crew should expect. How vitally prepared he needed to be to rip back the thrust bar and release that parachute if he even sniffed a problem. The jet car crew had to have priority over filming to stop and check for debris on the runway after every run, and the director had to be really careful with the placement of the static cameras.
Wilman got me to write it all down and send it to him. Hammond was really up for it, so he asked if I thought he could do it. I said he could, as long as he did as few runs as possible.
I turned back to Colin and thanked him. I said I’d speak to the director, but that, on reflection, I thought he shouldn’t allow cameras to be mounted inside the cockpit.
‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to do the first run tomorrow.’
I emailed my report before heading to Dunsfold the following morning to film the new Jaguar XKR with Jezza. Richard arrived at Elvington and got to grips with his shoot. It was like a scene out of Sliding Doors.
Richard met up with Colin and familiarised himself with the procedures. Colin banged in the first run of the day, as he had promised. Rich-ard’s early runs were textbook as he gradually built up his speeds using standard thrust. He practised the emergency shutdown drills before putting in a maximum speed afterburner run, during which he howled down the runway at 314mph. Space hoppers.
He was unperturbed by the punch in the back as the car bolted from its mark, unfazed by how much steering force he had to apply to keep it pointed straight, resolute in the face of mind-bending speed. As he popped the parachute at the end of that run, his body slammed into the five-point harness at twelve times its normal weight.
Richard climbed aboard Vampire for his final run, lucky number seven. She guzzled a load of fuel as he slipped on his blue Sparco driving gloves one more time. The crew lit his inferno. An ear-splitting roar grew into a shriek as he reached maximum rpm. He reached across the blurred, throbbing steering controls and lit the afterburner.
Richard’s neck absorbed the doubling weight of his head and helmet as he shot down the runway as a yellow streak towards the camera crew. Molecules of air blasted his helmet and shook it violently as he kept an eye on the horizon and a firm grip at the helm, steering hard to the left to drive straight.
At 288mph, Richard noticed the car pulling even more than usual. Just half a second later, the time it takes to blink, he was in the middle of a colossal accident and fighting for his life.
At Dunsfold the Jag was spinning its wheels in fourth and producing enough smoke to fill a pop concert. The good light meant we finished a little after 5pm. That was when news was filtering in via the camera crews that there had been an accident at Elvington.
I remembered standing on the rugby pitch at school next to one of my pals. A typical redhead, his wiry frame punched well above his weight. With a ball in hand he was unstoppable; he would take anyone on. He lay on the ground in front of me as motionless as a corpse. My initial shock turned to horror as his head injury caused him to convulse until the paramedics loaded him into their wagon and took him away. The hours that followed felt like days.
Russell tugged me back into the present. ‘Do you think it’s serious, Ben?’
‘Of course it’s fucking serious,’ I snapped. ‘He was doing 300 miles an hour.’
When we came to investigate the accident with the Health and Safety Executive, I met a spaced-out Hammond near a café in Bristol. He’d lost some weight and looked understandably fragile.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since his accident. I had wanted to badly. I was told to stay clear of the hospital because my appearance would have stoked the media frenzy that was already hard to control. The presenters and many of the TG team had gone to see him and show their support. Mindy, Richard’s ebullient wife, was at his bedside throughout, enduring the agony of watching her husband pass in and out of consciousness. Not knowing if he would slip away for good.
In the end I’d gone anyway, to smuggle him some junk food – chocolate, Coke, crisps – that Mindy told me he was desperate for. But I couldn’t see him.
Now he was staring peacefully out across the docks. Part of me expected him to be angry or cold towards me, but seeing him alive was all that mattered.
‘Hey, mate,’ he said a fraction slower than usual. ‘I think I got here a bit early.’
We stopped for a coffee at the waterside and I couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d copped it on my behalf. Then again, it was his daft idea in the first place.
He signed autographs for the staff and told them he felt all right and was ‘much better’.
He told me he couldn’t remember the accident clearly – except that he’d been fighting something – reaching for something maybe – when the car rolled. He desperately wanted to know if he had done it right on the day, or whether he had just cocked things up and risked never seeing his family again.
We ambled across to the HSE building and met some gentlemen in suits. They escorted us to a small meeting
room with a white board and a laptop containing all the data from Vampire’s black box.
We proceeded to run through the same old questions about Richard’s preparation and the build-up to the shoot. Richard calmly replied that he had felt prepared, he couldn’t speak highly enough of the rescue crew that saved his life, that the accident just came out of nowhere. He didn’t believe there was anything he could have done to avoid it.
I was itching to get hold of the data. I couldn’t see the screen. Some photos appeared on the desk and I pulled them across. All I wanted to know was whether Richard had reacted fast enough in the crisis. If I knew that his actions had been true, it meant that we’d armed him with a fighting chance. I needed to see that he’d pulled his parachute.
I surveyed the first image of the wrecked machine, lying on its side on the shredded field. Hanging out of their pods were the telltale white strands and the limp remains of the parachute.
The second photo was of the cockpit. The position of the thrust levers confirmed that he’d been fighting to reach the thrust levers to deploy his chute. What a fighter. He had done it right.
The telemetry recorded the speed and G-forces, and the HSE guys were doing their best to interpret them by the letter. I was keen to take my own view.
Richard was bombing down the straight when he felt the first unusual tug at the steering. Just 0.4 of a second later, the front right tyre exploded, affirmed by a drop in the car’s ride height. What impressed me was that before the tyre blew, his speed trace was already dropping. It suggested that Richard had already lifted his foot to cut thrust.
BANG. The tyre exploded.
Subsequent footage revealed that a blister had formed during the penultimate run, perhaps due to the extra forces exerted by the surface camber.
As the rubber flew apart it exposed the metal rim of the front right wheel, which nose-dived, lifting the rear left wheel into the air. That sent him sideways and hard right. Hammo applied intuitive counter-steering with his hands and applied the brake with his foot, registering as a longitudinal G-force. As the machine turned into the airstream it slewed across the runway at an acute angle. Vapour trails formed around the bodywork’s leading edges. Less than a second had passed.