The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me. Ben Collins
arrived in the Grand Prix paddock as we were celebrating my team-mate’s birthday a few hours before the start of the race. Brian’s dad asked him to bend the knife we used to cut the cake, then rubbed it on the exposed part of the race car’s exhaust system for luck. Uri left for the grandstand, setting off a chorus of car alarms in his wake.
The race got under way. Brian and I did our best to impress the Formula 1 teams in attendance, but he started to lose power and limped back to the pits. Joe Bremner, his number one mechanic, was first on the scene.
‘What the bloody hell’s gone on here?’
The exhaust had neither bent nor cracked; it had completely disintegrated – but only where Uri’s knife had touched it. I don’t buy into hocus-pocus, but none of the mechanics had ever seen anything like it before.
We didn’t see the fabled forkbender again after that.
I spent a couple of years bouncing around America and Europe, maturing my skills alongside some truly great drivers like Scott Dixon and Takuma Sato. Scott went on to become the king of Indycar Racing. When I partnered him in Indy Lights he was one wild Kiwi who partied himself horizontal. He could also turn on the steely-eyed resolve in a heartbeat when it counted.
I also partnered Honda’s Formula 1 protégé Takuma Sato, a wily, wiry, utterly fearless Japanese. We won races in International F3 and I came second in the Marlboro Masters World Series round at Zandvoort. Taku outqualified me in the dry, but in testing at Spa in Belgium I was comfortably faster in the wet. My car was so good that I was the only driver taking the infamous Eau Rouge corner flat out. As the race itself got under way, the waterlogged track was quickly obscured by a dense mist of spray. Taku pulled into the lead and was first to come within sight of the teams as he blatted down the pit straight, towards Eau Rouge …
Boyyo, Taku’s sublime race engineer, was perched on the pit wall. He dropped his lap chart, hastily grasped his radio and whimpered ‘No Taku, don’t …’
The rain was much heavier than it had been during the test. Taku made it past the first painted kerb with his foot welded to the floor, ran into a pool of water, aquaplaned and spun 180 degrees, straight into the tyre wall. It was pure 24-carat balls, and I absolutely loved him for that.
My performances were enough to gain some interest from a couple of Formula 1 teams and I investigated an opportunity to become the test driver for Arrows. This was the break I’d been longing for since Day One. I didn’t have a manager, so Dad came to the meeting to impart some common business sense to the discussion.
We had a chat with a couple of nice chaps from their commercial team. We guzzled tea and biscuits in the boardroom until it was time to bring out the brass tacks. The test drive was mine for a very reasonable £1.5 million.
I tried not to choke on my tea and wondered what they charged per gulp. I was appalled at my sheer ignorance of the industry and the level of finance shaping these decisions. The sponsors who had supported me so far would turn tail and head for the hills.
But I had a back-up plan. It worked for Michael Schumacher; maybe it would work for me.
Chapter 5
Le Mans 24
Two million roadside spectators watched the 1903 race from Paris to Bordeaux. Two hundred and seventy-five drivers slammed their cumbersome rides of metal and wood up and down dale for the glory of a face full of dust, in what was dubbed the ‘race of death’ after numerous fatalities along its 351-mile stretch.
Road racing was shut down, but their mission to measure the advancement of design through competition survived.
The Automobile Club de l’Ouest responded by creating a closed Grand Prix circuit at Le Mans in 1906, and the twenty-four hour course along the main roads to Mulsanne and back via Arnage in 1923.
The route from Arnage was later altered to take in the fearsome Porsche curves, a sequence of fast encounters where the outcome of each bend determined the fate of the one following. A last-ditch heave on the brakes at the Ford chicanes led onto the pit straight for a glancing moment at the pit board before engaging on a lap where 85 per cent of the journey would be spent on full throttle or braking because your life depended on it.
I travelled to Le Mans in 1997, to pre-qualify a 600bhp turbo-charged Porsche GT2 for the 65th outing of the endurance classic. By lunchtime the car was ready and I was blasting over the kerbs of Dunlop chicane, under the bridge and down to the Esses where you cornered at a seemingly impossible speed, veered left, then shimmied right over a blind rise.
Tertre Rouge was no mere dalliance. The ancient flowing right had to be taken balls to the wall in fourth gear to v-max the motor on the 4-mile Mulsanne straight. The Porsche 456s of the Eighties stretched their legs to 253mph here before the chicanes were put in. I settled for a humble 194, dispatching the chicanes with a twitter from the abs, hurling in and chasing away again, hanging on to the bouncing tail. I was still learning the place as I went; at 8.5 miles per lap it took over ten minutes just to run three laps. Then I noticed black smoke billowing over the treetops.
I kept on it as far as Mulsanne corner, the slowest point on the circuit, with a curved braking point that welcomed the brave and the good to overcook it and wind up at a roundabout full of locals taking photos and gnawing French sticks. Been there, done that, worn the onions.
The Porsche bucked from the hard lip of the blue and yellow apex kerb and stopped just in time to keep me on the black. From a virtual standstill I nuked the gas, spooled up the turbo and began the long charge to a top speed of 202 on the approach to Indianapolis, the fastest road race corner in the world. But that smoke was too much to be a BBQ. My heart wasn’t in it any more. I coasted and turned right at Arnage towards the Porsche Curves.
There was smoke everywhere, mostly from the trees where a raging ball of fire was being tackled by the marshals. A few bits of torn body-work lay on the grass along with something that didn’t belong there and I wished I hadn’t seen – the shocking remains of a helmet belonging to a young French knight called Sebastian Enjolras, who had been killed at high speed moments earlier.
Our entry was withdrawn before the race and it would be four years before I could return to continue the journey.
There was never a straight line in my career. I was given a drive at Donington in an ageing Le Mans prototype, the highest category above GT. The car I wanted to be in was the Ascari piloted by South African Werner Lupberger, a silver arrow with vents like shark gills, a razor-sharp nose and plenty of sponsors on the livery. It was reliable, fast and sexy. My machine was dayglo orange dotted with black rectangles that neatly camouflaged the tank tape holding together the bodywork.
Werner was on pole. As he led the field in this round of the FIA World Sportscar Championship, his engine cut out. My misfiring heap was barely mobile at the time and promptly died at the same corner, so I walked back to the pits with him.
Werner was as brown as a berry, with hair like a hedgehog and a thick Afrikaner accent. He looked exceptionally fit. In the course of conversation he mentioned that Ascari was running a series of shoot-out tests to find him a team-mate. He suggested I go for it.
The team was owned by Klaas Zwart, a Dutch engineering genius who made a billion from the oil industry. Klaas was bald and tanned and never sat still.
‘There’s twenty guys on the phone right now, F1 drivers some of them, and none of them can match Werner’s pace in the Ascari. Tell me why I want you in my team …’
I told him I would win races, that I was the man to push Werner, that no one else would work harder. Klaas took me at my word and arranged an evaluation test. Next stop, Barcelona.
Even at 7am the heat was making its presence felt. Ascari’s number one mechanic, Spencer, looked me over with unsmiling eyes. His work area was spotless, every spanner, every component just so. We made a fitted foam seat and I asked about adjusting the pedals.
‘That’s how Werner drives it. Should be good enough for you.’
The Circuit de Catalunya