Free The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me by Ben Collins

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 downforce grip. After twenty laps I lost al 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 ful of lactic acid and the temptation to ease up on the wheel was immense, but that meant slowing down or ending up in the wal . I loved this beast.
    When I returned to the pits, our race engineer appeared and stepped casual y 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 bul ets. ‘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 til 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 gearshifts, mil ions 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 hel 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 al -round chal enge in motor racing.
    The eclectic mix of experienced amateurs and professionals raced an equal y diverse range of machinery, from brawny Ferrari and Porsche GTs that resembled road cars to the 700 horsepower flying saucers loosely cal ed ‘prototypes’ – basical y 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, fol owing 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 fil 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