Boy racer
Max Wakefield
I WENT to Milton Abbey, a school that was attended by children who had come last in every exam they had ever taken. During rugby matches, pupils who were not playing were made to watch on the touchlines and shout out the letters that made up the school's name. We all rattled through the spelling of 'Milton' OK, but as no one knew how many Bs there were in Abbey or if the Bs were followed by a Y or an E, the chant petered out every time. I was bottom of a school that couldn't spell its own name. Understandably, it didn't seem to me worth trying very hard in lessons, so I spent all day drawing the Ferrari P2s, 3s and 4s I had seen on the covers of car magazines.
One afternoon, when I was about 13, I joined the kart club at the local racing track. Soon it was my turn, and I realised almost immediately that here, finally, was something that I could be good at. Flags were waving frantically for me to slow down, but I had found my element, and in no time I was lapping faster than anyone
else. It all made perfect sense. Just as no one could explain spelling to my satisfaction, I couldn't explain how to drive to my friends, The right reactions just came naturally. Almost every night since that day I have dreamt about racing Ferraris from the P series.
During the holidays my first cousin and I practised our driving skills in a beatenup old Saab that was missing a large part of its exhaust pipe and could be heard on the other side of the county. We would also have practised in an Austin but I ran it head-first into a tree. The problem with an addiction to speed is that you have to keep going faster, so, despite having no money, I soon wished together an immensely powerful motorcycle. It was vast and I was tiny. I couldn't kick-start it but had to jump on its back going downhill, whereupon it would explode into life and I would roar off with my front wheel high in the air.
It was on this motorbike that I learnt the most important lesson for an aspiring racing driver: slow everything down, relax, and let the subconscious drive. Nothing felt as fast as that bike until last year, when I drove a Formula One car for the first time.
By my mid-twenties, I had given up childish hopes of racing professionally. An accident with a motorbike had left my right arm crippled, but, perhaps more crucial than that, I had a wife, children and a mortgage that refused to leave my conscious mind. I was employed working as part of a team running a nightclub, and the endless worries that accompanied that also prevented me from letting my instinctive self take over.
In the end, it was the nightclub that took me back to racing. Howard Spooner, the owner of the club, invited me on a corporate driving day, and it was as if I was 13 again on the go-kart circuit. There were many other drivers, among them a Formula One test-driver. I climbed into a little car and found that the ability to let go had returned. Two laps later I had the record time and, no matter what the Formula One test-driver did, he couldn't beat it. Then, as if my life were being orchestrated by outside forces, it happened that there was a place available to drive a single-seater in two races run by the owner of the corporate hospitality. I came second in both races.
With incredible generosity, Howard bought me a racing car. Sadly, it appeared that the car could read. It would look up at the race calendar on the garage wall and choose the same dates to blow up. But whether we completed a race successfully or not, more important was the fact that we were building a team. As a driver, your livelihood is in the hands of owners, and your life in those of your mechanics. You need to like and trust both absolutely in order to win.
My next car was an F3000 that had belonged to Emerson Fittipaldi's nephew and had won the championship ten years before. F3000 is the step below Formula One and. although I knew it was never going to be a very competitive car, I was still disappointed by how slowly it went when we tried it out at Donington. Here was another lesson. Contrary to what one might expect, the better a car is, the more difficult it is to drive, But the more time I spent in it, the faster my F3000 became, until it seemed to become part of me: every other car on the circuit was prey; every overtake a kill.
During our maiden F3000 season, I was regularly on the podium and set a class lap-record. I was fastest on several occasions. So towards the end of the season we thought about hiring an old Formula One car for our final race at Le Mans. If it went well, we would try to cobble together a Formula One budget for 2002. My schoolboy dream looked set to become reality.
When a Formula One car starts up, the noise is so savage that people have been known to run away or burst into tears. They are designed without compromise: every twist and turn is there to enable the car to forge its way around the track more quickly than its peers. Their metallic guts are hewn, cast, machined, milled, measured, polished and placed together with a watchmaker's skill.
Before the race, against instruction from the team, I turned the boost on the turbo up to full power. I did it as the lights started their countdown to begin the race, and for some reason the knob fell off in my hand. I let it fall to the floor and put both hands on the wheel. I saw the green light; there was a silence, and for a moment I wondered if the thing was broken. Then, without seeming to consult me, a wallop of 1,100 horsepower ripped the tyres away from the road and I could feel my body deform as the car and I were flung into space, wheels spinning and slithering all the way up to 180mph. The car spat flames and never pointed in a straight line, but the calm navigator in the back of my mind managed to thread the vehicle along the invisible line that optimises a vehicle's abilities and one's own.
As I write, I'm looking at the glass trophy now: 'Le Mans. 30 September 2001, Winner,'
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