Then there are races that are cool, and the opposite is true: you’re struggling to get tyre temperature.
The worst thing in a cool race is that you’ll be 15 laps into a stint with worn tyres – a ‘stint’ being the period of time you spend on a set of tyres – and then you get a safety car going slowly. At Spa, it’s often cold, but the thing with Spa is that you’ve got a lot of high-speed corners, so you can get heat into the tyres. It’s the circuits that don’t have the high-speed corners that are more tricky. Other cold circuits? Australia can be cold. Silverstone, Austria. A beautiful circuit, it’s stunning, the Austrian race. A tiny little circuit, but beautiful surroundings, it’s really pretty, very green. But it’s very cold.
Plus it’s full of Red Bull fans.
BIG TRUCKS
So this all began with my best mate Chrissy Buncombe’s 40th birthday looming and me scratching my head, trying to think what to get him.
I had no idea until I spoke to another mate who said, ‘What about doing something, like, in a car? You know, considering that Chrissy is a racing driver as well…’
Which was like, Whoa. The answer was there right in front of me.
We’re going to do Baja.
Baja 1000 is a desert race held at the Baja California Peninsula every November. At 1,000 miles long, it’s the longest off-road race in the world. Various types of vehicle classes compete on the same course with classes for cars, trucks, motorcycles, ATVs and buggies. It’s like a cross between Wacky Races and Mad Max.
And it’s So. Bloody. Cool.
So that was it – happy birthday, mate, we’re going to do Baja, my treat, and the idea was that we’d rent a buggy, the lowest category, and one of us would drive, one would co-drive, that was the idea. So, his birthday, I told him, he was made up about it, and I was, like, Right, I’m going to go down to check out where they make these trucks. Brenthel Industries, in California, a nice, two-hour pootle down the coast. Got there and walked in, seeing big off-road trucks, thinking, Oh my God, these things are mega, getting a bit excited now, feeling the project shift from ‘nice idea’ to actual pistons and metal.
I said to the owner guy, Jonathan Brenthel who runs it with his brother, Jordan, ‘Do you do buggies?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘we do – we do this off-road thing, it’s called a Class One. It’s like 600 horsepower though, it’s not like the bottom category.’
‘How much is that to rent?’
‘For Baja?’
‘Yeah, for Baja.’
‘That would be a hundred grand.’
I swallowed something hard and jagged. I said, ‘A hundred grand. That’s quite a lot of money, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and went on to explain that ‘you need a week of practice and you have to run through all the systems, and then there’s the race itself. If you have a bad day it could take you up to thirty-five hours.’
‘Thirty-five hours?’
‘Well, yeah, you’re not doing a hundred miles an hour the whole way. You’re off-road. Some sections are twelve miles an hour.’
There are actually two courses for Baja: the point-to-point, which is about 900 miles, for which the current best time is just over 21 hours, and ‘the loop’, which is fewer miles, and has been done in just over 16 hours.
I was, like, ‘Okay, so what about these trucks here? These off-road trucks? How much are they to rent?’
‘They’re a hundred grand.’
I’m starting to wonder about his pricing system. Is everything a hundred grand here? This is a lot of money, my earlier excitement replaced by wondering if I should have just got Chrissy a Fast & Furious boxset. ‘Okay. Then how much to buy one?’
He said, ‘Well you can buy it for $190,000 and I’ve got one for sale with two engines, 450 horsepower, 550 horsepower, brand new.’
Now, sure, I’m the one who bought not one but two yachts. But even to me that sounded better business sense than renting one for the day, even with the costs of running it for the Baja because you don’t just buy the car, you need a team to run it for refuelling, tyre changes and all that.
‘I’ll take one,’ I said.
Chrissy came over for testing and we went out into the desert. At this stage it was just a tubular frame with no body and it looked like a proper Mad Max car, the scariest-looking thing you’ve ever seen.
I jumped in with Jordan, me in the driver’s seat, him in the passenger seat. It’s an upright seat, really elevated. I was going over bumps that were six, seven feet high, and it felt awful. I was only doing 35 miles an hour and the truck was going all over the place, and I was yelling, ‘Is this good? Is this all right?’ at Jordan, because it sure as hell doesn’t feel good or all right.
‘It’s all right,’ he tried to reassure me, until we’d done the whole loop, at which point he took a deep breath like at last the torture was over, and said, ‘Right, I’m going to take you for a drive now.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not very good as a passenger, I never get in as a passenger.’
He said, ‘No, you need to let me drive. You need to see what this truck can really do.’
So I thought, Okay. Right. Swapped places. And we went to the same section and I’m not kidding, he took the bumps at 90mph.
‘Look what it can do,’ he bawled as we raced headlong towards towering dunes. I’m like, brace, brace, brace, but then – boom – it was like climbing a staircase; this thing was literally floating over the dunes.
‘I’m flat, I’m flat, I’m flat, I’m flat,’ he was shouting as we reached top speed, and still the truck was eating up these dunes. What happens is that when you go at speed, the truck never falls into the bumps, so it just floats across the top. It feels counterintuitive, like driving with downforce. With downforce you have to get your head around the fact that the quicker you go, the more downforce you generate, the more grip you have. It’s exactly the same downright wonky thinking at work here. The faster you go in this truck, the more capable it is over the desert terrain.
‘Now we’re going to go across some squarer bumps where you have to slow down,’ yelled Jordan.
‘You what? It looks exactly the same,’ I replied. ‘How do you know that’s a square, not a rounded-off bump?’
He said, ‘You’ll get used to it, it’s the angle and the colour of the sand.’
I said, ‘It’s all the same colour, isn’t it? It’s yellow.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ he assured me.
But I drove again and I was so lost. It was the most fish-out-of-water I’d ever been.
Chrissy was the same. We were both, like, This is batshit crazy driving. We were testing that truck like we’ve never raced anything in our lives, but also enjoying it in a weird way and then we did more laps, more times, a couple more days, it was, like, we love it, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. Why? Because we’re both racing drivers and as I’ve already pointed out, racing drivers love to learn. Learning something, pushing it to the limit. That’s what really turns us on.
So we did a race earlier this year, the Mint 400, and we did 130 miles each.
Chrissy did it first, and we were pretty pleased, thinking we’d got the hang of the truck, until we looked at the times and discovered that we’d qualified last, one-and-half minutes off the pace. This on a five-minute course.
He was like, ‘I don’t get it. I feel like I’ve lost all my racing skills. It’s just so different.’
Not to be deterred we set off on the race itself, and after two hours each of driving it in the desert, we loved it and we were actually doing pretty well. In terms of speed, the trucks are very quick. They can do 145mph on dirt, which is seriously quick for that kind of surface, plus you feel like you’re doing twice the speed you are. It’s like driving a speedboat, basically.
We worked out that you’ve got to relax, because if you tense up, you’re going to roll it. One of our guys did that. He hit a bump wrong during his stint, rolled it, it landed on its whee
ls, he got it back to the pits, they welded some things up, and we carried on – all in the dark.
We ended up finishing 19th out of 45 in our category. Not too bad, all told, and it certainly left us looking forward to Baja, which looks like being absolutely wild (it is, at the time of writing, yet to happen). After all, it’s proper lawless, Mad Max tackle. You drive through housing estates and along dried-up riverbeds. Spectators stand dangerously close (and are constantly getting mown down if the YouTube videos I’ve seen are anything to go by).
A lot of trucks get stuck in the sand, because it’s really silty and these things are proper heavy. Sometimes you get eight or nine trucks stuck because the first truck got wedged in the sand the rest have had to stop and got stuck themselves.
In the Mint 400 there are fuel stops and we’d stop to swap drivers, but at Baja we don’t stop for eight hours. For eating we have nutrition bars and gels that you squirt in your mouth. Although most people who race there don’t eat properly, we’re determined that we will, because it makes a massive difference, especially when you’re driving at night. You need focus.
As for going to the loo, you have to wear a catheter on your willy and piss in the truck so it goes down your trouser leg and comes out the bottom. It’s like being in The Flintstones.
And I suppose that secretly (and even not-so secretly) I love all that. It’s old-school, grass-roots racing. I mean, you go up through the categories in motor racing and they get so much more serious as you go up from Formula Four to Formula Three, and then to Formula One. It’s super serious when you get to the top and if you’re not super serious with it then you’re out on your ear, and rightly so.
But even so, you look back at those old karting days and think what great fun it all was.
And of course there’s no pressure. I don’t go in as Jenson Button, Formula One champ, I go along as Jenson Button, just another bloke. To be honest, not many people in the US even know who I am. Like when I first went to the Brenthel brothers, Jordan said to me, ‘Do you have any experience?”
I looked at him and smiled, because I thought he was taking the piss. He wasn’t. ‘Yeah,’ I said, I’ve been circuit racing for many years, racing Formula One for seventeen years.’
He said, ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’
He didn’t really know what Formula One was. And then on the way home, he texted me saying, ‘JB, that F1 stuff is so rad,’ (Californian, see), and ever since I’ve been taking the piss out of him for being in the motorsport business but not knowing what Formula One is.
And that’s been the way with all the people that are partnering with us. Most of them have no idea about Formula One, which is great because it’s a very level playing field, and helps build a real team atmosphere, which is something I definitely miss from motorsport. Super GT has that, but this is another level of chilled – guys who have the opportunity to go racing in trucks. It’s really cool and a great challenge. Something new to learn.
THE SWAG
1. THE ENGINES AND THE LOVELY NOISE THEY MAKE
Remember that Imola pole lap? How I said we’d be talking about the noise it made? Well, this is the bit where I talk about the noise it made.
Okay. First thing to note: It’s a V10, and I love V10s. I like V8s less and I really dislike V6s.
V10s, though. Whoosh. The noise that a V10 makes is unreal: high-pitched yet dangerous; full-throated and insistent. And if you think it sounds good on your phone’s speaker, imagine being in the cockpit. Even with earplugs fitted the noise is awesome, and I mean that literally. It takes your breath away. It envelops you – it puts you at the centre of the machine’s industry; it reminds you that you’re not so much the driver of this incredible piece of machinery as a mere component of it.
Nowadays, of course, they use more powerful engines than that. What I drove then was probably 850, maybe 860 horse-power, whereas now they’re over 900 horsepower. Even so, they’re a V6 engine compared to a three-litre, and they just don’t sound the same.
Nor do they feel the same. The V6 1.6 is turbocharged and has the electronic recovery system, which gives it 160 horsepower of electric power. When I was in Barcelona for Sky TV we compared my Barcelona Brawn pole-position lap – which was in a V8 – with Valtteri Bottas’s pole position in a 1.6 litre V6 at the same circuit. From the line to turn one, which isn’t that far, he had pulled about 10 metres on me just in the tiny little straight, because of how much more power he had.
On the approach and then through the corners, our respective speeds were similar. But then as soon as he accelerated out of the corner, he gained speed – simply because that’s the way it works with the electric power and turbo-charger. They’re faster.
So fast equals good, yes? True. But – and it’s big but for a driver – they’re not as nice and not nearly as much fun to drive. Whereas in the V10 and V8 era, you’d get on the throttle, sense the power coming in more gradually on the corner exits and feel at one with the car, knowing that you were absolutely in control of it, now it’s just bang, there’s power there, but you don’t feel like the one in charge.
Overall, though, and speaking more as a fan and pundit than as a driver, it’s the noise I miss most. Moving from V10 to V8 was a bit of a wrench, because they didn’t sound quite as good, and that carried us through from 2006 to 2013 – and then 2014 was the new hybrid era, which we’re still in, and I remember everyone was, like, ‘Oh my God, what have they done?’ Because the whole thing about F1 was the feeling of being about a mile away from the circuit and hearing the cars going round. It was beautiful. And if you had guests at a race weekend, you took them to the garage, and watched their reaction as soon as the car was started. They’d be like, ‘Oh my God,’ big grins all over their faces.
I understand the reasons why – don’t get me wrong, I’m an enthusiastic recycler, and I think it’s quite possible to simultaneously miss something and yet approve of its passing – but the fact is that it’s just not quite the same. I mean, I’m sure Mercedes are happy because they’ve won almost every race with the hybrid engines, but it’s just not that beautiful noise it used to be.
It’s the same right across the board. These days supercars now have a little speaker in them to make them sound more supercar-ish, but to me it just sounds fake.
Then you’ve got Formula E, where everything is electric. So obviously the cars aren’t very loud, but it’s a massive championship and all the manufacturers want to be involved because it’s the testing ground for what will soon be the dominant technology.
And that’s all good. But I still kind of wish that we could let Formula One have its beautiful-sounding engines.
2. MECHANICAL GRIP VS DOWNFORCE
So we all know what downforce is, yes? It’s grip, but grip that is generated via the aerodynamics of the car, whereas mechanical grip is what we have on our road cars – grip that is generated chiefly by the tyres.
I don’t know if it’s true of all racing drivers, but personally I feel like I have a complicated relationship with downforce, and perhaps now is the time to try and make sense of it on paper.
Firstly, I always felt in the past that it’s better to have mechanical grip because you know what you’re getting. I believed that it was simpler for everyone to understand, and that you can race more excitingly with mechanical grip, which allows proper wheel-to-wheel racing in a way that downforce does not.
After all, when you picture cars racing, you see images from films and TV or old-school motorsport: cars jockeying for position, drivers wrestling with the wheel, a scrappy synthesis of man and machine. The contemporary Formula One model, where cars make use of aerodynamics to sweep imperiously past one another, is anathema to all of that. To the uninitiated it looks like one car simply passes the other, and it can be difficult to understand why that has happened.
But that’s what I see with these rose-tinted spectacles I’m currently wearing. And having now raced in Super GT where mechanical grip is more powerful than the d
ownforce, I actually find it tougher to understand what the car is doing. I find it much more difficult to do what I need to do to improve the balance of the car.
For that reason I struggle when it comes to setting up the Super GT car and really pushing it to the limit, whereas if we had lots of downforce, well, I know how that works. After 17 years I’m used to it.
And I really never thought I’d hear myself say that, because I always thought mechanical grip was better.
I first encountered downforce in Formula Three, having come from karting, which was mechanical grip, pure and simple, and I struggled at first. Moving on to F1 was good, to begin with, because the car I drove – the Williams FW22 – was such an easy car to drive. So easy, in fact, that I didn’t really put a lot of effort into learning about aerodynamics. It was only when I suddenly had a difficult car to drive – the Benetton B201 – and I really had to work on it. So yes, they did need to sit me down and teach me about aerodynamics and the best way to get lap time out of aerodynamics and it’s really important. It sounds silly but I remember thinking, Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me this earlier? It’s something you really have to learn because it seems so unnatural.
I can’t really advise on how to drive a car with lots of down-force. You need to get in one, which you probably won’t be able to do until you’ve mastered the mechanical grip of another category. It’s one of those weird catch-22 situations.
3. THE DREADED SIMULATOR
I’ve got a confession to make. Last year I bought a PlayStation. That’s not the confession. That’s just setting the scene for the confession.
How to Be an F1 Driver Page 11