The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me. Ben Collins
respite. I watched Werner exit the fast corner on to the pit straight at 130mph. Within 300 metres of him stamping his foot to the floor, it was licking along at 180 and generating nearly 4G in the corners. He brought it into the pits and the belts over his chest rose and fell as he drew breath. He stripped to the waist, revealing muscles as shredded as Rocky Balboa’s, then chewed into his drinks bottle like a butcher’s dog.
I climbed aboard, tightened the straps until I could barely move and scanned the array of switches and LED lights that lined the dashboard. I began firing the engine and heard the most beautiful bark of V10 power. The Ascari LMP’s Judd F1 engine churned out 650bhp on a Lola chassis. With no power steering it demanded hand-to-hand combat.
Werner chilled out and enjoyed the show as I spent my first laps hitting the rev limiter. The Ascari accelerated so fast that you had to pull through the gears on the sequential box as fast as your arm could snatch the lever. The power would spin the wheels in fourth gear on a dry track, so you didn’t switch off for a second. The wind at 180 blasted through the open cockpit and tried to rip your head off.
Braking from high speed using the giant F1-style carbon disc brakes involved standing on the pedal. I applied twice my body weight in pushing force to activate the down-force grip. After twenty laps I lost all feeling in my right foot.
The faster I dived into the corners, the more the wings gripped and the heavier it steered. It was like going ten rounds in the boxing ring and I was hanging off the ropes. My arms were jacked full of lactic acid and the temptation to ease up on the wheel was immense, but that meant slowing down or ending up in the wall. I loved this beast.
When I returned to the pits, our race engineer appeared and stepped casually in front of the car with his clipboard. Brian was wiry and had a moustache like Dick Dastardly. ‘How was that, then?’
There was no disguising the effort I’d put in. My chest was heaving and I was sweating bullets. ‘This car … is awesome … the best thing I’ve ever driven.’
Werner asked me how I found the steering by comparison to Formula 3.
‘F3 was a piece of piss.’
‘Yessus, man,’ he grinned. ‘Wait till you try it on new tyres; that makes it even heavier.’
At the end of the day Brian gave his verdict on my performance. Werner’s time charts were metronomic, mine weren’t, but I was the first driver they’d tested who could match his pace on old tyres. The seat was mine. I was signed by a works team.
To max the speed of a Le Mans car for four hours at a time required a supreme level of strength and endurance. It meant starting a completely new physical training regime.
I spent four hours a day in the gym, pushing tonnes of weights in a variety of unpleasant ways – attaching them to my head, running with them and pushing repetitions until I could barely lift a pencil. Then I’d run or swim for hours to build stamina.
Back in the days of leather helmets and goggles, an endurance race was a different kettle of fish. When Duncan Hamilton won Le Mans in 1953, he was so drunk that the team offered him coffee during the pit stops to keep him going. He refused, accepting only brandy.
These days Le Mans was a twenty-four-hour sprint. The cars withstood thousands of gear-shifts, millions of piston revolutions and constant forces on every component. You couldn’t afford to break them, but you couldn’t afford to slow down either. You took turns with your team-mates to thrash the living hell out of it. We drove every lap like a qualifier. The physical and mental commitment to maintaining that performance was absolute, making it the purest all-round challenge in motor racing.
The eclectic mix of experienced amateurs and professionals raced an equally diverse range of machinery, from brawny Ferrari and Porsche GTs that resembled road cars to the 700 horsepower flying saucers loosely called ‘prototypes’ – basically Formula 1 cars wearing pretty dresses.
Audi’s prototype was the one to beat. Their mechanical reliability was matched by outright pace. A gearbox change used to take a couple of hours in the old days. Now when Audi blew one, they bolted on another, complete with suspension joints, in just four minutes.
In 2001 the rain was torrential for nineteen hours of the twenty-four, and the swarm of cars skated along the straights like skipping stones.
From midnight until four in the morning I hammered around an eight-mile track, avoiding an accident every time I put the power down.
On my first visit to Le Mans I was lucky to even make the graveyard shift, following a disastrous run in the daytime. The crew had whipped off the wheels and banged a fresh set of tyres on to the red-hot discs whilst I stayed in the car. As the fuel hose slammed home and started pumping, I felt cold liquid fill the seat of my pants.
I thumbed the radio button. ‘I think I’ve got fuel running down my neck.’
A look at the fuel rig revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but my backside was swimming in icy liquid.
There was no time for debate. Besides, I couldn’t believe it myself. I drove away and my skin began to tingle at first, then started burning. This wasn’t imaginary. I was forced to pit again. Werner was in the crew bus attending to the blisters on his hands and caught the first glimpse of my burning buttocks.
‘Vok, you all right, man? That’s one hot botty.’
Hours later it was my turn to drive again. Raindrops the size of golf balls created eruptions in the standing water. A journalist saw me waiting my turn in the garage and said, ‘You must be absolutely dreading this. It’s your first time here, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t wait to get out there,’ I said, jogging on the spot. ‘This is what it’s all about.’
He probably wrote me off as cannon fodder.
The team manager was Ian Dawson, who cut his teeth at Lotus Formula 1 team back in the days of Colin Chapman. He still had the retro moustache to prove it. Ian appeared at my side, lifted one of his radio cans and yelled into the front of my helmet. ‘It’s absolutely torrential out there. Harri’s just done three complete 360 spins down the straight at 160 miles an hour. He’s coming in this lap. We’re bloody lucky to still have a car. We’re running seventeenth. There’s plenty of time. Just take it easy.’
The intensity in his voice spoke volumes. I was holding the baby.
An empty space in front of the garage was surrounded by the Ascari boys. Fireproof masks covered their faces, but I could see Don the mad Kiwi itching his nose with the wheel gun, big Dave on the fuel hose flicking his ankle to loosen off, Spencer with the other gun bouncing on his quads to warm up.
At any moment the space would be filled and I would have twenty seconds to climb in, strap up and switch on.
Every one of the boys had a critical job to do and they shared the pressure of the moment. The fuel man had to ram the hose home in a single clean movement. It sounded easy, but it wasn’t. If he got it wrong he could barbecue every member of the team.
The mechanics on the pneumatic guns had practised the drill over and over again, so they could get clear as fast as possible without cross-threading a wheel nut. If any one of us made the slightest cock-up, it would cost seconds of hard-fought track position.
The car appeared, larger than life and shedding a heap of water. Harri Toivonen fought the belts off and leapt out. I barged past him and took his place. The seat felt wet and warm as my suit absorbed the water.
Harri lifted his visor and helped me with my belts. His face was red, eyes bulging, chest heaving. I pulled up both thumbs to let him know I was in OK and could finish the job myself.
The Ascari dropped on to the deck; the signal was given. My hands were poised over the ignition and start buttons and I cranked the motor. It was already in first gear. A touch on the throttle provoked a lightning howl. The Kraken was fully awake. I slipped the clutch and pulled away into the night.
I was soaked to the skin within seconds. Goblets of water fell out of the sky, whirring