Like the song goes, I heard it through the grapevine.
‘They’re going to call you.’
Various people telling me. They’re going to call you. Any day now. And I’d be standing by the side of my pool thinking, Bugger. Really? Maybe I should change my number…
The problem was that my last race in Formula One (or what I thought at the time would be my last race in Formula One) had been at Abu Dhabi in 2016 and it had been awesome. It wasn’t a great race – I’d retired with a broken right front suspension – but in many ways that didn’t matter, and probably even improved the situation, because it meant that I’d had my own little farewell before the end, without competing with the podium celebrations (which I would have overshadowed, obviously).
My team was all there, giving it the big goodbye: my friends and family, Brittny, the whole crew. It was a fantastic send-off and no better way to end 17 years in the game, a lifetime spent on planes, in motorhomes and being squeezed into the cockpits of cars. Yes, it was the stuff of boyhood dreams, and no way do I want to give the impression that I’m at all ungrateful about any of that because I spent those 17 years pinching myself at my good fortune, but…
There’s always a ‘but’. My father had died in 2014, and with him went some of me. Not my passion for racing, which as you’re about to find out, has never dimmed. But my taste for the life of Formula One. Without him the paddock hadn’t been quite the same. Not only that but I was mentally and physically exhausted – tired of what is, after all, a repetitious life. And there comes a time when, no matter how great it is, you want a break from that repetition. So I’d turned my back on F1 and decided to do something different for a while: take part in triathlons, do a bit of decorating. I wanted to enjoy the freedom from the various pressures of the sport: the teams, the teammates, the sponsors, the media, the whole brilliant but physically and emotionally exhausting merry-go-round of it all. For the first time in my adult life my home was more than a crash pad; I was starting to think of putting down roots, and in Brittny I’d met someone with whom I wanted to share that experience, who maybe was the catalyst for it all. I’d even earned my Californian driving licence, and I was shortly to be scratching my racing itch by competing in Super GT.
In other words, my ducks were in a row.
And F1 did not feature.
Hey, I thought. Maybe the grapevine is wrong on this occasion. Perhaps the call will never come.
And then the phone went one morning and it was McLaren principal Eric Boullier, who told me that Fernando Alonso wanted to go off and drive the Indianapolis 500, which was taking place on the very same day as the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix, which meant that…
‘I want you to come and race at Monaco in May.’
It was the beginning of April, so I was like, ‘But I haven’t driven the car. I haven’t done any racing since November last year. I’ve been out here training for triathlons and decorating. If you need advice on what shade to paint your wall, I’m your man, but chucking me in at Monaco…?’
The thing is that as a racing driver, it doesn’t matter what you drive, you want to be prepared because you still care what people think, and I was well aware that the season had featured one of the sport’s biggest-ever rule changes. The car would be a completely different animal. Not just a new chassis but bigger tyres, heavier, wider, and with more downforce.
‘You’re the reserve driver,’ Eric pointed out in the face of my obvious reluctance, ‘this is your job.’
‘Oh okay. Um, let me have a think.’
I was stalling. Eric and I both knew that I was contractually obliged to drive. Even so, I looked at my pool. I thought about Brittny, who was pottering about in the house somewhere, and I called Richard Goddard, my manager. ‘Can I get out of this?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Well, not really, no. I mean, they’re paying you a lot of money to basically do nothing this year apart from be on call in case they need you.’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t think they’d need me.’
‘Well, they do, Jenson. They want you to drive their Formula One car in probably the world’s most prestigious Grand Prix. Hard life, isn’t it?’
Richard knows about as much about being a racing driver as I know about managing racing drivers. Which is to say, quite a lot, actually, and certainly much more than the ordinary Joe. But still not the full enchilada. What’s it like to sit behind the wheel of a racing car? How does it feel to be a part of the Grand Prix circus? The kit, the clobber? The rituals, rules and rivalries? How to take a corner, how to run a motorhome and why you should never, under any circumstance, buy a yacht.
All the stuff you’re about to find out, in fact – assuming you read on.
Anyway. I got the picture, ended the call and had a quick word with myself. A couple of minutes was all it took, and when I rang back it was with a revised approach. ‘Cheers, Eric,’ I said, ‘I’m really excited to be racing for you again.’
And I meant it, I really did, because my philosophy in life is that when you set out to do something, whatever it is, you have to do it properly.
Especially when you’re contractually obliged to do so.