I always pretended not to care too much about the guests on Top Gear, when in reality I loved seeing them realize their full potential.
So when war hero Billy Baxter unfurled a white cane and started tap, tap, tapping it to find his way across the parking lot, I couldn’t help cracking a massive smile. Billy may have been completely blind, but he had the eye of the tiger if ever I saw it.
He told me that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to achieve his goal of beating a sighted celebrity’s lap time around the Top Gear circuit. The target was two minutes and six seconds, set by game show host Richard Whiteley.
Billy’s military background gave me the confidence to lean on his self-discipline to help him achieve that goal. I was mean. I barked rapid-fire instructions at him and reprimanded him mercilessly whenever he made a mistake. It was the only way to help him build a virtual picture of his surroundings in his mind and keep him laughing with his foot to the floor.
Billy was hanging on my every word and reacting to my voice so that he could apply the right amounts of steering, braking, and throttle as we rolled along. The problem with that was clear. We ricocheted our way from one curve to the next and never followed the same path twice.
What I really needed Billy to do was to think farther ahead.
By the close of play on that first day, we still hadn’t negotiated a full lap together without some kind of incident or me diving across the center console to grab an armful of steering when we veered off course. Whenever we approached the high-speed Follow Through curve at nearly 90 mph, the gap between the tire wall and the garden was just too narrow to let Billy handle the steering unaided. We were a long way from letting him fly solo. What I really needed Billy to do was to think farther ahead, even if he couldn’t look ahead.
So . . . at the end of his first day, I created a voice recording of the perfect lap. I used all the familiar vernacular, four-letter warts and all, to paint the picture of the world Billy was trying to imagine, and I timed the recording with a stopwatch to match the circuit curve by curve until we crossed the line within the time I believed he could achieve.
Two weeks later, Billy was standing in the parking lot. He had memorized the recording by listening to it every day until it was burned into his mind’s eye. We climbed aboard the gutless but reasonably priced Suzuki Liana and set off at a steady pace.
To my astonishment, we completed our first tour of the circuit without major incident. Billy’s hands were shaking with excitement, and I was bursting with pride, but I knew there was a narrow window for Billy to achieve his best before exhaustion set in. We did one more “sighting” run and then went for it.
Billy gunned the engine and tore away from the start line with a shriek of wheelspin. There’s something unforgettable about a blind man doing that.
As we twitched across the finish line and I clicked down hard on the stopwatch, I ogled the figures. It was a moment to savor.
“That felt like a good one. How fast was it, Stig?”
I opened with a confession. Halfway around, I had lied about covering the steering at the Follow Through, which meant that Billy had run the entire lap single-handed. Hard man he may have been, but there was more than sweat starting to trickle down that weathered face.
“Your time was one minute and fifty-eight seconds. You’ve beaten four sighted celebs, you legend.”
The emotion gripped us both, and I’ll never forget Billy’s achievement that day. To put it in context, Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, barely eclipsed Billy’s time by two seconds. To my deep frustration, Billy later had time added to his official score for “cutting a white line” by a few feet. Bureaucracy knows no bounds.
In a race the most dangerous time of all is the first lap, when the field is tightly packed. You have no option but to run wheel to wheel with all brands of crazies, and there’s precious little time to react to signs of trouble.
As the pack of up to fifty machines streams into the first curve at 200 mph, three or four wide, inches apart and jockeying for position, they are dangerously close. The varying inputs of man and machine ripple through the field as the speeds reduce unevenly in the braking zones. The drivers’ heart rates peak at over 180 beats per minute, turbocharging the senses with adrenaline and oxygen to think fast.
Your eyes are on stalks, searching for key indicators—a plume of dust as one car drops a wheel in the dirt, a screech of rubber, a puff of blue smoke from a locked tire or the sudden convergence of two racers, any recognizable pattern that might lead to a collision—and you’re always mindful of what’s coming up behind you. It’s not a case of whether you might need to take evasive action, it’s a question of when and how much.
To cope with information overload and to reduce thinking time, race-car drivers visualize things like the first lap many times over before the race begins. When you close your eyes, preferably not while driving, the link between the brain and the eyes is so powerful that you can still form crystal-clear images of real-life scenarios. This isn’t quite the same as dreaming, because you consciously control the scene. In the safety of your own synapses, you can rehearse how to handle complex situations as many times as you like until your responses start to feel instinctive.
Buckle up, crack your knuckles, and Enter the Dragon.
This is a powerful model for conditioning your mind and another way of seeing into the future without even needing the keys to a DeLorean. With your crystal ball in hand, now seems like a good time to pitch you some curveballs.
You now have the keys to the freedom of the open road, and on a normal day, in normal conditions, are in control of your car right up to the limit of its capabilities. What follows are the DEFCON 1 skills and techniques that will keep the beast on the leash when it tries to bite you, from skids and hydroplaning to the absolute gold standard of Hollywood stunt car control. So buckle up, crack your knuckles, and Enter the Dragon.