AFTER RUSSIA, THE next filming job I was involved with was finishing off the classic Williams F1 programme. There was still a lot to do. When I’d left for Moscow, the engine wasn’t even in the car.
Before the break for Russia we’d been doing a load of stuff on the engineering side of things and watching the engine being dyno’d was a highlight. Formula One and top motorcycle racing teams know the safe operating limits of every component on their vehicles. So, for instance, if a crank has a competition life of 100 hours before being rebuilt or replaced, the team note down how many hours the car has run with that crank in it. Each crucial component has its own diary or database, updated at every test session or race. Obviously, if another component has twice the life, it doesn’t need refreshing at the same time. Keeping good records is especially important when engines are being taken out of a certain chassis, put in another one then maybe back again. Over the 35 years since it raced, the exact history of how many hours this particular Cosworth DFV V8 motor had been run for were lost so it needed a racing engine specialist, like Judd Power, to check everything over in the engine. Williams did the same for the chassis, checking and double-checking everything.
When the engine was finished it was strapped to Judd’s water-brake dyno. This is another kind of dyno to the one I describe later, in the chapter about my sheds. It does the same job as the rolling-road type I have at home, but Judd’s water brake is designed to test engines out of vehicles. It’s still measuring torque, and allowing laboratory-style testing, but it looked like it had come out of the Ark. It did the job, though, and was a dead interesting part of the whole job. The time on the dyno is another round of checks to make sure the engine is not going to shit itself.
The DFV engine made 520 horsepower on Judd’s dyno. That’s an output shaft figure. Power is lost through the gear and driveshafts, so it wouldn’t measure 520bhp ‘at the wheels’ on my rolling-road dyno.
At this point I was back to filming two days a week, and working at the truck yard the other three or four, depending if they needed me in on a Saturday, which can be a busy day in the haulage world because a lot of maintenance is scheduled in.
The next day of filming we were at Williams, where I helped rebuild the gearbox and fit the engine in the car. We had another day at Williams, fitting the bodywork, doing all the finer detail bits, putting the wheels on, then doing the first start-up. The engine had run on the dyno, and all these boys know what they’re doing, but there’s always a bit of nervousness when it comes to starting something up for the first time, especially a car as historic as this one. Keke Rosberg won the Monte Carlo Grand Prix in it! And I was going to drive it, the next day in fact.
Williams chose Turweston airfield, a stone’s throw from Silverstone racetrack, for my first go in the restored FW08C. It was a gentle test for the car, and somewhere I could concentrate on getting to grips with it in a straight line.
Karun Chandhok, the Williams test driver and F1 TV pundit, who’d been a mentor and expert in the filming so far, went out and did half a dozen lengths of the runway, then it was my turn.
I was driving straight up and down, getting a feel for the car, getting used to the gearbox, the sensation of speed. I’d already driven another single-seater at this point, the Formula Three at Pembrey, so having my head out of the car and seeing the two fat front wheels spinning and moving as I steered wasn’t anything new to me.
The Williams gives a lot of feel through the suspension. I felt like I was an integral part of the car. The steering rack is set up so the wheel only needs half a turn from lock-to-lock. You’re not having to pass it through your hands when you’re doing U-turns, like you would in a normal road car. The feeling of the downforce was really noticeable. As fast as that Williams is, 500 horsepower, 500kg, it still doesn’t have the brutal speed and ferociousness of my Volvo estate. Round a track, if I was in the Volvo I would not see which way this 35-year-old F1 car went. The Williams would win a standing start drag race, but if we got a bit of momentum into it, if we drove, side by side, up to 60mph then had a roll-on race in a straight line, my Volvo would eat it alive. The old F1 car wouldn’t get its nose in front and probably wouldn’t go over 170mph, where my Volvo will do 200mph.
Sitting in the old F1 car made me realise just how much has changed in the years since this car was competitive. The steering wheel is like something out of a Jaguar XJS, with green leather covering. The dashboard has just two dials on it and five big toggle switches either side of it. You change gear with your right hand, selecting gears and shifting through an H-pattern gate like a conventional car; it didn’t even have a sequential box never mind paddle-shifts. Lots of things about driving a car like this are unfamiliar, but not everything.
The next opportunity I got to drive the car, and the first time on a proper race track, was back at Pembrey, the South Wales circuit where I’d tested the Formula Three Dallara Mercedes. And, like the previous time, the weather was terrible, pouring down all day.
The lads from the Williams Heritage team, who I’d got to know well by this point, were all there. They’d all been F1 mechanics at the cutting edge, before moving to the historic side: Bob, Steve and the foreman of the job, Dickie Stanford. Dickie had been Nigel Mansell’s race mechanic, then Williams’s chief mechanic and team manager.
The mechanics were busy preparing and checking the car while we had a team meeting. Dickie Stanford read out the rules and told us how it was all going to run: Karun’s going to go out at this time, he’ll do this many laps, he’ll come in, stay in the car while we take the bodywork off, sit there for ten minutes, then go out and do five laps, then he’ll come in and you’ll do five laps.
When Karun drove the track it was obvious it had a lot of standing water on it. He wasn’t hanging around, and I could hear it spinning up and see it moving under acceleration from 100 yards away. He drove back into the pits, the team gave it a once-over, to check that no hoses or anything were loose, then he did another session before it was my turn.
Before I put a foot in the car, one of the mechanics wiped the smooth soles of my driving boots clean, so I wasn’t driving with slippery wet boots. It feels strange holding your feet up, like a show pony, to have another man clean the soles of your shoes, but it’s about keeping the car in one piece, not pampering me.
I stalled when I first tried to leave the pit garage, and the car took a bit of starting after that. I think the engine was flooded because I hadn’t kept the revs up, but it was no bother after that, and I didn’t stall it again.
When I first went out I thought I was going to struggle to see because the water was covering my visor, but when I got up to speed it was blowing off so I could see where I was supposed to be going.
It was a private test day, just me on track. The car was fitted with Avon wets and the rears were throwing up massive plumes of water, eight or ten foot into the air.
I was treating the car very carefully. It was aquaplaning a little bit in the slower parts of the track, and though I wouldn’t have gone around quicker in my Transit, I wouldn’t have been far off the lap times I was doing in the old F1 car. I’m not sure what we learned that day and the team were already talking about fitting in another test day, at Thruxton, before I left for the long drive home.
By now, it had been confirmed how the programme would end, like a lot of TV programmes do, with a challenge to give the whole thing a point. I’m fascinated by the processes of building a replica of a First World War tank, or restoring a 1980s F1 car, but just rebuilding a historic vehicle isn’t enough for TV, you need a deadline. And, because Williams had said they didn’t want it racing in the FIA Masters Historic Formula One series, the compromise of me taking on Jenson Button had now been agreed. The 2009 F1 world champion would drive the Williams FW08B six-wheeler, a real oddball F1 car that showed brilliant performance in testing, but could never race because Formula One’s governing body, the FIA, changed the rules, that effectively banned it before it could even make a competitive start.
The FW08B has four-wheel drive, and the rear four wheels are all powered. The FIA banned that. It has ground effect. The FIA banned that. And it had six wheels. The FIA said F1 cars could have a maximum of four wheels. That was it; the development hit a dead end, no way around it.
The TV lot managed, as they always seem to, to get everything arranged and the Thruxton test happened at the beginning of June. I’d finally get to drive the car in the dry. It was more time in the car, more time to get used to the gearbox and a few more laps to try and find out how hard I could push the F1 car. I was allowed to do two sets of four laps of a circuit I know well, on an open practice day. Eight laps in total, because Williams didn’t want to put many miles on the car; they just wanted me to have a feel for it in the dry. I drove home thinking, I’ll be all right. I went ten seconds a lap faster in the second four-lap session than I did in the first session. I learned that the faster you go, the more committed you are and the better the car feels. You show it a bit of commitment and produce a bit of downforce for the air going over the wings. The next time I’d be in the car would be in five weeks’ time, at Silverstone, for the handicap head-to-head race with Jenson Button. I thought I’d be laughing.
Our exhibition race took place on the Thursday of British Grand Prix weekend in July. I’d been filming the start of another programme the day before, the one about the history of the Dakota aircraft, but that’s a story for another day. I’d been in Coventry, not far from Silverstone, and it would’ve made sense to stay in a hotel close to the track, but, if I can, I always prefer to drive home. That meant I was up at half four, as normal, to walk the dogs, have breakfast and leave at six. I’d made good time, I was early, but stopped for a cuppa, a few miles short of Silverstone, in the petrol station where I realised I needed to weaken the mixture. I only stopped for five minutes, but as soon as I turned off the A43 onto the road leading to the circuit, the traffic ground to a halt and I was late. Again.
The place was already rammed with folk, the campsites filling up with camper vans, ice-cream vans turning up, all the lasses that work in hospitality turning up, media signing on … Sarah, one of North One’s assistant producers, was waiting for me with passes. We got a couple of bikes out of the back of the van and cycled into the circuit to meet Jenson Button and the team.
A few weeks before I’d been a guest at the Sheffield Doc Fest, a film festival that concentrates just on documentaries. I was asked by Channel 4 if I’d do a question and answer thing on stage with Suzi Perry. They don’t ask much of me, so I said I would.
North One edited some clips together and Williams turned up with a modern F1 car. We did this hour-long thing onstage in the City Hall and I think it was a good do. There were two lasses onstage translating what we said into sign language and I reckon they had the hardest job of the night, trying to convert my ramblings and swearing into something that the hard of hearing could follow.
It was at the Sheffield do, a month or summat before the British Grand Prix, that it was announced I’d be racing Jenson Button. Up until that point only those involved with the programme knew the plan. Suzi Perry had asked if I’d ever met him. She wasn’t the first to ask this – Ewan, the TV director, had when we were filming at Pembrey – but they both got the same answer: Where would I have ever met Jenson Button? He doesn’t come and empty the bins at the truck yard. He doesn’t work at the MOT station. Where would our paths have ever crossed?
While I haven’t met Jenson Button, I have met Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden, Jorge Lorenzo, David Coulthard … Even though I keep myself to myself when I’m there, I’ve been to the Goodwood Festival of Speed where people like Jenson Button go. Telling Suzi Perry that there’s no chance we’d have ever met is my way of trying to talk the job down. That’s me doing my self-defence. There’ll be some psychology behind it that I’m not clever enough to understand, but I know that’s what I’m doing.
As part of the deal for North One being able to film at the F1 grand prix it had been agreed that me and Jenson Button would do a meet the fans thing onstage. A compere, a very official looking lassie in a Formula One shirt, was asking a few questions.
A hundred or so people turned up, the weather was perfect and there were lots of shirts off and beer bellies out. Jenson is obviously very good at that sort of thing, talking to the camera and the crowd, where I’m a bit of a knobber.
We weren’t on track till after four in the afternoon, so I got a good chance to talk to Jenson. I was impressed with what a nice bloke he was. He’s a year older than me, lives in California, does triathlons, so he’s still a fit unit. He races a seriously fast Honda NSX in a Japanese Super GT series. It is nothing like a road-going NSX, but looks like one, and he was second in the championship when we met. We had a bit of pushbiking in common, so I asked if he’d heard of the RAM, the Ride Across America, or fancied doing it, and he had heard of it. He had also heard of the Tour Divide, or he said he had, but I noticed a look of vagueness when I mentioned it. He’s an intelligent bloke, though, so perhaps he couldn’t understand my accent.
I had a bit of time before anything else needed doing and I had wanted to go to Earls, the brake hose and oil line people who are based on a trading estate just outside the circuit, to get some hoses for the Nürburgring Transit, but I didn’t really have enough time, so I sat in the café by myself and watched the world go by. We were in the top pit, where the Formula Three teams were set up. There were a lot of busy people, a lot of pink chinos and loafers with no socks and a lot of young drivers with their perfect hair, the right sunglasses and their shirts off. I’ve never been confident enough to walk around with my shirt off. Then it was back to filming.
We had both been asked to bring pushbikes with us and part of the day was the pair of us cycling around the track. Jenson was asking me a load of questions about motorbiking. He has a Ducati Panigale, a full-on Superbike for the road, and not very practical. I wondered where the enjoyment in riding one of them on the road was. I reckon you want a Triumph Tiger 800, mate, but I kept my mouth shut.
We had GoPros on the bikes, and he was giving me a bit of advice, telling me where the late apexes were and where he’d go down a gear, but he admitted he was only making educated guesses, because he’d never driven either of these cars.
We weren’t swapping numbers and we are nothing alike, but I liked him. I respect what he’s done and what he’s still doing, by racing in Japan; it sounds like he was doing it for the love of racing.
After we did the lap on the bikes I had a word with Dickie Stanford, the team foreman. We spoke about how we were going to do this head-to-head. We couldn’t call it a race, it was an exhibition. The plan he came up with was for both of us to be out on track together, have a rolling start, do three laps, then Jenson would come into the pits for 20 seconds while I stayed out, then for him to go back out and try to catch me up in the remaining three laps.
Before the head-to-head, we were given two laps to warm up. I’ve never driven, or ridden, Silverstone in the format we drove that day. Only F1 and MotoGP race it in that configuration. When British Superbikes race at Silverstone they miss some of the corners.
The six-wheeler Jenson drove is legendary among Formula One fans. It’s like the one that got away. Imagine what F1 cars would look like now if the FIA hadn’t put the anchors on the mad innovations of that era. But it is an ugly car.
Back at the Thruxton test day, I had met Frank Durney. Durney was one of Williams’s designers in the FW08C and the six-wheeler era. He said he thought I might be better off in the car I was going to drive because people didn’t know how to set up the ground-effect cars. It had given me a bit of hope that I’d have any kind of advantage over Jenson Button, a driver who’d spent 17 years racing in Formula One. I told Dickie Stanford this at Silverstone and he reckoned that even with its sideskirts removed the six-wheeler would have way more downforce than the Williams I was driving, so there was no way Jenson’s car would be worse. That pissed on my bonfire.
We made our way onto the track for our two sighting laps. Jenson said I should follow him for the first, just to see the racing line for these kinds of car, then he’d said he was going to press on a bit to get a feel for the car. And that’s what he did. He didn’t fuck off, but he put a decent gap between us fair smartish.
The downforce of the six-wheeler was obvious straight away. As the car moves forward, air comes through front scoops, and is channelled under the car to a chamber to create a vacuum that sucks the car to the ground. Smoke was pouring off it down the straights. The ground-effect cars have skirts down the whole edge of the car, with Teflon sliders that rub on the track when the ground effect pulls the car down. The skirts seal the car to the tarmac, and, in turn, give the tyres more grip. The smoke is coming off the sliders and they leave black tramlines down the track.
The cars are loud and rattly. They’re not as noisy as my BSA in full song, but they’re loud enough.
After the two sighting laps we pulled into the pits and I didn’t have any time to think about the circuit and what I could do to improve. Two laps isn’t enough for me to get my eye in driving a car that’s still quite unfamiliar on a track I don’t know well. Perhaps it’s long enough for a driver of Jenson Button’s quality, but not for me. He was supposed to have a test in the six-wheeler at Thruxton, but he didn’t turn up. He must have been confident. Before Silverstone, he’d never driven a Cosworth DFV-powered car before. Neither had he driven a six-wheel vehicle before, but he got in it, a car he’d never even seen before, and cleared off. I wasn’t willing to push as hard as he was. He has so much more experience and feel for a car like this than I do.
Karun was there. He’s very knowledgeable and, when he talks, I listen, but there wasn’t a lot he could tell me that day.
It reminded me that the TV lot don’t really understand how that sort of racing situation works. I can’t be fast straight away. They thought: Turn up at Silverstone, have half an hour track time, we’ll do a race of some sort or another, it’ll be fine. But it’s no good for me and the competitive nature I have.
Me and Jenson both sat in our cars, in the pit lane, for three or four minutes while the mechanics gave both cars a final once-over. Then it was time to go.
The last thing I was told before I went out was ‘Don’t crash it.’ Saying that didn’t do anyone any favours. I knew what the car meant to the history of Williams and all the folks involved. It didn’t make me do anything any different, but it’s a strange thing to hear before you’re going out.
We set off again, out of the pits and towards the start/finish line, at the back end of the circuit. We did a side-by-side rolling start. I was umming or aahing whether to be in second or third gear, but I left it in second and revved the nuts off the V8.
Jenson beat me into the first corner and I noticed how settled his car looked, drawn into the track both by the ground effect and, no doubt, his skill as a driver. I don’t know how much slower the first of the non-ground-effect cars, like the one I was driving, compared to the ground-effect cars was per lap, but it did make a difference.
All that was going through my mind was, Don’t crash it. I don’t think anyone has ever said it to me before, and it didn’t change the way I drove, but it was there, in my mind. My plan was to get on the back of Jenson in the hope he’d pull me along. If I could see where he was braking and turning then I’d shadow him as best I could. It only took one turn to realise he had so much more commitment into the corners and so much more corner speed than me. The reality slapped me around the face: he’s one of the top 1 per cent of racing drivers in the world, he’s won 15 F1 races, of course he’s going to smoke me.
If I’d got straight out of the car at Thruxton and had got into it at Silverstone the next day, I would definitely have put up a bit more of a fight, and been closer at the finish; but driving a single-seater is not the sort of trade you can pick up just like that. I was still getting used to the lateral G. You don’t get that with a motorbike. I did have a few slides and the car was pushing on, understeering, around a few corners, so I wasn’t pussyfooting about. I was hard on the kerb on the way in and hard on the kerb on the way out in a few corners, which left me thinking I couldn’t have done much more.
Rob Wilson instructed me in his technique of keeping the car level at Bruntingthorpe. That all went out of the window at Silverstone. Well, I say it went out of the window; it never even entered my head. There was too much going on. Like I said, it’s not something you can pick up, it needs hours, days, of repetition so you’re doing the things Rob Wilson teaches without thinking. I still had so much of the car to learn. I needed to master driving the Williams before I could apply advanced driving methods.
One of the trickiest things about learning to drive the FW08C fast is the six-speed gearbox, and how precise you have to be with the gear lever. When you’re driving a car or van and you shift from second to third, you move the lever forward two inches, across two inches and forward another two inches before you select third. In the race car the movement was about a third the distance, so it was easy to select the wrong gear.
One time, when I was doing my best to keep sight of Jenson, I was trying to change from fifth to fourth, but I found second by mistake. I had a feeling I had it in the wrong gear, so I let the clutch out dead steadily. The rear wheels began to lock up, so I put it back into neutral. If I hadn’t realised it was in second and I’d let the clutch out normally, it would’ve over-revved the motor and buggered it. That would have been as bad as crashing it. One missed gear like that loses you a couple of seconds or more and knocks your confidence in making a fast gear change the next time you have to shift down.
Jenson entered the pits at the end of his first half of the exhibition race and he was still in the pits when I drove by. I don’t know when he came back onto the track, but he wasn’t long catching me up. He said he’d showed me a wheel on the turn that leads onto the straight to warn me, but he knew I hadn’t seen him, so he accounted for that, backed off there and got me on the brakes at the end of the back straight into the next turn. It would’ve been messy if he hadn’t backed off and we’d come together on that corner.
This time, when he overtook me, I didn’t take any notice of what he was doing. I just had to concentrate on how I was driving. And, compared to him, that was slowly.
It was noticeable that my tyres had gone off, because they were so soft. They’re made by Avon, in Wiltshire, the only company that currently makes suitable tyres that’ll fit these old cars, but Williams put big Goodyear stickers on the side, because that’s what the car used originally and they want them to look authentic, with all the same branding as they had in the 1980s.
Jenson’s car had four driving wheels at the back and two front wheels that steered. There were other six-wheel experimental F1 cars. The Tyrrell P34, from the mid-seventies, was designed with four small-diameter wheels at the front, that all steered, and two driven wheels at the back. Their idea was to lower the car’s frontal area and improve aerodynamics. That thing won a Formula One race, in 1976, with Jody Scheckter driving.
Another British company, March, thought that improving the traction would make for quicker lap times, so they put four driven tyres at the back, but it never raced. Ferrari tried that configuration, too, and, again, never raced. Then came Williams, who proved the concept would work, in testing, before the whole six-wheel era was over.
After I saw the chequered flag I pulled into the pits and stayed sat in the car thinking about how I’d driven, trying to work out what I’d done. Jenson came over and had a natter and told me, ‘You were shit into that bottom corner, you should’ve been later on the brakes,’ which I knew. He was constructive in some other areas. There was no effort to blow smoke up my arse, and I appreciated that. We both knew I was shit.
And that was the last I saw of him. He had to go and do some filming. He’d be back to Silverstone every day because he commentates for one of the TV channels. He’s dead good at it. I’ve got respect for him as a driver, no doubt, and also as a talker. I think one of the differences between me and someone like either Jenson Button or Suzi Perry is, if I’ve got no interest in a subject, I’ve got no interest in it and I can’t turn it on and do a professional job of talking about it. I get the idea they both can. Mave, my mate who made The Boat that Guy Built programme with me, he could do that, too. I don’t wish I could do it, like I wish I could drive an F1 car as fast as Jenson Button can, but I still respect it, because it’s not easy and I recognise it as a skill.
When I took my helmet off I probably had a face like a smacked arse, because I felt I’d let the mechanics down, I’d let everyone down. I should have been beaming from ear to ear, after getting to race Jenson Button in Keke Rosberg’s Monte Carlo F1-winning FW08C, but I got smoked, and I was disappointed.
I know if I’d have pushed any harder I reckon I’d have ended up in the barrier or in the gravel, not because I was on the car’s limit, but because I was on the edge of my limits. I was understeering and getting slides, even though I was going slower than Jenson Button, because he would pick a different line, or have the car settled on its suspension better, or be balancing the throttle and brake differently – all those little things that make drivers like him the best in the world. It’s the same way that he probably couldn’t jump on a motorbike and stay with me around the Southern 100 course, even if I was on a bike I’d never sat on before. I knew my limits and I brought the car back safely.
I have a lot of confidence in my inner confidence: I do what I can do and I do no more. If I’d had another five laps, I’d have got quicker, and if I had another five laps, I’d have gone quicker again. But people don’t get opportunities like this, to drive cars like the Williams FW08C on Silverstone during British Grand Prix weekend, so I’m not whinging. But I am disappointed I wasn’t quicker.
The whole experience of being involved in rebuilding the car, meeting all the people – Steve, Bob and Dickie – was great. Probably the thing that stuck in my mind the most is spending a few hours with Dan at Judd, the company that checked, rebuilt and dyno’d the Cosworth DFV motor for Williams. I spent the day looking at all the oddball F1 engines they were working on, and at Judd’s own engine, that is used in LMP2, the Le Mans Prototype series. The place was great, but Dan was, too. He’s a bit older than me, and has two daughters who both race mini stock cars. I think they might use Mini engines, and the rules are dead tight so he’d bought an old water-brake dyno off eBay for £500 to fine-tune them. When I heard that I thought, That’s ace. He was dead into it.
The whole experience was fun, and I like learning, so that part of it was good. I wasn’t driving home in the Transit feeling like I had to have another go of that. I sound like a right ungrateful bastard, but what was I doing? Driving round seconds off Jenson Button’s pace. Still, it was a great opportunity.