AFTER LATVIA I was back on the trucks and putting in a lot of miles on the pushbike, training for the Tour Divide. I did a few days’ filming around Lincolnshire in early September for a programme about the Vulcan bomber’s last ever flight, only a month after the crash. It involved going through the whole take-off procedure in the Vulcan. I was as sore as hell in that, but I didn’t make a fuss in case someone said it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to do it. I’d taken the day off work, so I wanted to get on with it. The seats weren’t comfy, then there was the G-force, and even just getting up and down the stairs into the dead cramped cockpit was hard enough, the state I was in. It wasn’t the worst pain in the world, but it wasn’t good. It was worth it for the experience, though. We did exactly what a crew would do for a take-off, just stopping short of leaving the ground. I knocked the power off at the moment it wanted to leave the runway, then put it back on and the Vulcan wheelied. I also biked up to Inverness in January to the Strathpuffer endurance event to see how I’d cope on a bike and sleeping rough.
Then some more TV stuff was offered, when the BBC backed out of their Formula One deal three years early, because of budget cuts, and Channel 4 took over as the free channel to show the races. They asked if I wanted to be involved with some presenting. I didn’t have to think about it for a minute, and told them, ‘Thanks very much, but it’s not for me.’ I’m not a pundit. I don’t want to be seen as someone telling someone else how to do their job. Some folk have made a job of talking about it, and that’s fair enough, the job needs doing, but it’s not for me. There might be another way of doing some TV bits on the technical side with the F1 in the future, but I had plenty on with the wall of death and the Tour Divide, so I didn’t really need to be doing telly stuff when the season started.
A while later, Channel 4 wanted me to show my face at a press-night thing in London. It was a big party for the sponsors and advertisers, and all Channel 4’s top bods were there. They’d rented out a fancy place in London to show clips of all the stuff that was going to be on the channel in 2016. Channel 4 and North One don’t ask much of me on the PR side of things, because they know I don’t like doing stuff like that, but both had asked me. I do bloody well out of the job, getting all sorts of opportunities, so I went.
While I was there Neil Duncanson, the boss of North One, said they had another idea. They wanted me to race a bike against a Formula One car. That was more up my street, and it could be filmed in two days, in the middle of February, before the F1 season, when things weren’t too busy. I know plenty about Formula One, because I read Race Engine Technology magazine, and I was dead excited about it.
Over the next couple of weeks, more meat was put on the bones. It would be me versus David Coulthard. The hour-long programme would be filmed at Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix, and we’d have the place to ourselves for two days. The finished programme would be shown in the week before the start of the F1 season to help get people talking about the races being shown on Channel 4.
Coulthard would be driving a 2012 Red Bull RB8. Ideally, I wanted to use my Martek, the Pikes Peak bike, but I was too busy concentrating on building the wall of death bike to get it properly fettled, so Mark McCarville, the foreman from TAS (Temple Auto Salvage), the team I’ve raced for since 2011, brought over the BMW Superbike for me to ride. It gave the team a bit of coverage, so they were happy, and the closer the date came the more genuinely excited I was to get a chance to race against an F1 car.
I’d never met David Coulthard before the first morning. I was told later that he’d wanted to phone me up beforehand to suss me out, but the TV bods had put him off. I wouldn’t really know what to say to him on the phone, but I got on with him from the off when we met at Silverstone. He’s a nice, polite bloke. Articulate. Mick Moody deals with his brother, Duncan, because the Coulthards are in the haulage business. I got his brother’s name from Moody and mentioned it to David, thinking it might be a bit of a conversation starter, but he explained that he knew nothing about the road haulage side of things. Disappointingly, he didn’t even have a Class 1 truck licence, but we still had plenty to yarn about. He was interested in the TAS race bike, and I think he liked it that I was dead interested in the car. He knew everything about the set-up – spring rate, spring pressure, shims, brake biases – but he didn’t know much about the recovery system the cars use now. I was never short of conversation with him.
The set-up of the two teams couldn’t have been more different, and I heard it made for a good TV programme (but I never watched it). On the bike side were me and Mark. He’d set off at one in the morning to get the ferry over from Northern Ireland, with the bike and everything else we needed in the back of a high-top Vauxhall van. Coulthard had an 11-man pit crew, including one bloke they’d flown in from France especially to start the car.
The Red Bull RB8 is a 750 horsepower, 2.4 litre, V8 worth £5 million. It’s the model of the car Sebastian Vettel won the 2012 Formula One title in. Coulthard, who has 13 Formula One race wins and 62 podiums to his name, had been involved in the development of the RB8 somewhere along the line.
When I saw the car versus bike challenges the TV lot had come up with, I didn’t think the bike stood a chance of winning any of them. The first was a quarter-mile drag race the wrong way up Hangar Straight. There were some cones lined up to show where the start was and the finish line was a bridge over the track. I lined up and looked to my right, where it’s not another bike, it’s David Coulthard in a V8 F1 car! Bloody brilliant. I was on the Superbike spec BMW S1000RR. It has launch control, but I wasn’t using it. I’m quicker setting off and controlling it manually, balancing the throttle, clutch and rear brake. With all the grip and power the F1 car’s got, I thought Coulthard would smoke me. It was my first time on a superbike since breaking my back six months earlier, but I got off the line much quicker than the car. I was pressing hard on the back brake, to keep the front end down, and leading the car up to the halfway mark. Coulthard was coming fast and he just beat me, by three-tenths of a second. The terminal speeds were 159 mph for the car and 157 mph for the bike. Everyone was amazed how close it was.
The next challenge was braking from 100 mph. We did a lap of the track before coming on to the straight, where the car pulled up next to me. I set the speed and Coulthard matched me, because the bike has a speed read-out on its dash but the car doesn’t. When we reached a line of cones we slammed on the anchors. The bike didn’t stand a chance. If I braked too hard I’d lock the front wheel, risk skidding and losing the front, or I’d stoppie over the front of the bike. I’m braking with two fingers, feeling for the grip. Coulthard just pushed on the pedal as hard as he possibly could. They reckon F1 drivers push on the pedal with enough force to shift two full-grown men. The car could just lock its brakes and skid to a stop, and that’s what it did. The car stopped from 100 mph in just over 50 metres. It took me 24 metres longer to come to a standstill, but there wasn’t a lot of control going on in the car’s lane – it was just locked up, going in a straight line, white smoke pouring off its fat tyres. We were quite even in the first bit of braking zone, until the car’s tyres generated more heat and made it stick to the track surface even better and increase the rate it slowed. Coulthard ruined a pair of tyres beating me, though.
In between the challenges I had chance to quiz the mechanics to death. The car’s steering wheel alone cost £27,000 and had a button on it that squirted a drink into the driver’s gob. They don’t even have to suck their own drinks. I had a go at changing a front wheel too, and on the second attempt I managed to do it in two seconds, about the same time an F1 mechanic is expected to do it in, but obviously I wasn’t under the pressure of a pit lane halfway through a race. If I was ten years younger I’d jump at the chance of being an F1 mechanic. Coulthard had a go at changing the bike’s back wheel and did it in less than a minute, longer than a TT mechanic would take, but I was still impressed.
Porsche has a Human Performance laboratory at Silverstone. They do physical assessments of folk and advise them on what they should do to improve their performance, from exercise to diet, and more specialist advice like dealing with competing in extreme heat. We went there and did a few physical challenges against each other. One involved pulling on this thing that measured hand grip while you lowered your right arm from horizontal to down by your side. My hand still had a load of metalwork in it from the crash a few months before, so I wasn’t confident I’d win this one either. They reckon Aussie driver Mark Webber has a 65-kg grip. Coulthard’s was 49 kg – mine was just under 36 kg.
Next was a test of reaction time, using a thing called a BATAK machine. It’s a frame with red lights in the corners and middle, a bit like something you’d see in an arcade on Cleethorpes seafront. You smack the buttons when they light up, in a random order, and see how many you can put out in a minute. We were told that an F1 driver at the top of his game can turn off something like 60 in a minute, twice as many as the average person. Coulthard had done it before and scored 37. I was just behind with 35 on my first go. Another one I’d lost.
The car they were using, the RB8, was a few years old, for a couple of reasons. Driving a current car, even for a TV programme, would break the F1 testing ban. The other reason is that new F1 cars are too complicated to use for something like this. They have energy-recovery systems to make the most of the power the cars make. There are friction brakes on the wheels, like a regular car or motorbike, but they also have a retarder like on a truck. When you use the brakes on your car the forward motion is converted into heat that is just lost to the atmosphere. So instead of wasting the energy, they load the engine using a motor. An electric motor is bolted to the gearbox, and it works a bit like a starter motor but in reverse, so instead of trying to turn the motor forward, it is trying to turn it backwards, and acts like a brake. This motor works as both a motor and a generator to charge the battery when the car is braking, so when the car exits the corner it can use the energy it’s just put in the battery to power itself and to give extra acceleration. Cars like the Toyota Prius have used similar ideas for years.
Because F1 fuel regulations are so tight the latest cars do another dead clever thing. When it goes into a corner a turbo car needs to vent the pressure in the plenum chamber – the pressurised airbox the engine breathes from – so you don’t stall the turbo. But dumping the pressure you’ve built up into the atmosphere is also wasting energy. So, instead, the two halves of the turbo, the intake and exhaust, are split and linked with a shaft. The turbo can spin at 120,000 rpm, so the shaft runs through a gearbox with an output that drives a motor. Instead of dumping the plenum pressure, this motor connected to the shaft acts as a brake to slow down the turbo, and then reverts to being a motor to spin the turbo back up and reduce any turbo lag. It’s dead clever. The saying is that racing improves the breed, and F1 is the pinnacle of racing technology.
Another two races were organised for day two. The first was a slalom through nine cones spread in a straight line over 150 metres. It was a bit like a motorcycle CBT course. The car went first with its new front tyres, giving it more front grip. David explained that the throttle pedal movement is only summat like 50 mm, a couple of inches, and he was spinning the rear wheels to get the back end sliding to line up for the next gap between the cones. I was doing the timing with a stopwatch, stood right next to the finish line. There was a 30- or 40-metre gap between the last cone and the finish line, enough for him to gun it. He accelerated past where I was stood, two metres away, and I could feel the exhaust pulses in my chest. I stopped the clock at 12.87 seconds. He was happy with that, reckoning he had some good momentum. Then it was my go. I took it easy, dead smooth, swinging through the cones that were far enough apart to allow an F1 car through, which wasn’t hard. I did it in less than ten seconds. We’d won one at last, but if I hadn’t won that one I’d need to pack in.
The final test was a race around the Silverstone circuit. The TV lot looked at the F1 lap record and the motorbike lap record. The Superbike lap record at the time was 2:03. The F1 lap record was over 30 seconds quicker. So the car was quicker, no question, and a handicap race was the answer to keep things more interesting. It was worked out that a car should be able to do four laps in the time a bike could do three. Coulthard hadn’t raced an F1 car for years and I was rusty, so it was a fair comparison.
Like in the drag race, I got off the line quicker and beat him into turn one, so I was happy with that, but he went around the outside of me and left at warp speed. He had to do 3.6 miles more than me, but he was doing 120 mph through Copse and I was nearly 40 mph slower, with my knee on the deck and the bike weaving and spinning on the cold track on the exit.
It was like swimming with a shark. I knew that if he did catch me I just had to keep doing what I was doing, not lift it up or be worried he was going to stick it underneath me. And he did catch me in the Farm section, with not much of my last lap to go. When he got me in his sights he couldn’t take much out of me while we were both accelerating down the straights, but he made up so much time in the braking area. Obviously, there are no mirrors on a race bike, but I knew he was there, because I could hear him. The current F1 cars aren’t as loud, but the car they used in the programme was the last of the V8s, and it was noisy – and actually a quicker car than the new one. He just came around the outside and it was game over. It was an honour to be involved with something like this.
We had Silverstone to ourselves, so after filming I did some laps, mucking about, and by the end of it I thought, I’m bored of this now. It was another confirmation that I’ve had enough of racing motorbikes.
We didn’t swap phone numbers – I’m not one for handing my number out and my phone is never turned on anyway – but if you’re reading this, David, I’m still waiting for my invite down to Monaco.