Racing was risky but sex was safe

As a 15-year-old I’d been at Brands Hatch, clinging to the fence at Druids corner for the very first Formula Ford race in 1967, and I’d seen my dream take a real shape. This was to be my way in — if only I could find the money. Formula Ford began with a £1,000 price tag — multiply by 25 to put it into modern money — so it wasn’t cheap, but it made for a very level playing field and the cars were easy to maintain and run.

Two years later, the first thing I did when I left school in the summer was to borrow Mum’s Morris 1000 and head straight for Motor Racing Stables, the racing drivers’ school at Brands Hatch. With an instructor sitting alongside, I did an evaluation lap in a Ford Cortina 1600E. Despite having watched races there from almost every vantage point, it seemed very different from behind the wheel with the rise and fall of the circuit limiting the view.

From there I was allowed to head for the garage of the Formula Fords, where I sank myself into a single-seater racing car for the first time. No seatbelts, no seat adjustment, a cushion if required, but at just over 6ft I slid into the fibreglass seat as if it were made for me. The euphoria of the moment is hard to describe. Nervous ... apprehensive ... terrified of stalling it and making a fool of myself. The pedals were so close together I could hit them all at once; the gearlever was just a little stick to the right of the steering wheel, but the view ahead was mesmerising. I could almost reach out and touch the front wheels.

I was wearing my own open-face motorcycle helmet with a pair of goggles and my head was sitting well above the little Perspex wrap-around windscreen. No gloves, no overalls, just a T-shirt, sweater and jeans — simple days.

The instant response of the steering, the front wheels bobbing up and down in front of me, the rush of adrenaline surging through my veins — if I’d wanted to be a racing driver before, I was now completely addicted to the idea. I’d had my first fix of the most intoxicating drug and I was hooked.

But racing belonged in the future. When Mum came into the room to inquire who had called she must have thought I looked ill. “Are you in trouble? Was that the police?” A certain amount of communication with officers of the law wishing to debate some of my early driving experiences had convinced her that I would be arrested any day.

“I’ve won that Autosport competition,” I told her, waking from a trance. “I’ve won a Formula Ford Lotus 69F.” I think I said it several times, trying to convince myself that it actually was true.

I was about to become a bona fide grand prix driver and only one thing came to my mind: the haunting bass line of Fleetwood Mac's The Chain

Fast-forward nine years. I’d spent the best part of the previous winter in limbo, on a very short list of two for a top Formula Two drive — and the decision hadn’t gone in my favour. It’s a devastating experience, but you just have to pick yourself up and battle on. Now I was at home in bed, listening on the radio late in the evening to the fourth Formula One world championship race from Long Beach, when Clay Regazzoni, driving for Ensign, had a massive accident.

At the end of the main straight, the brake pedal had broken and he’d plunged straight into an abandoned car, then the tyre wall. The impact folded the car around him. It was obvious that he was seriously injured which, I am afraid, meant only one thing to me — there would be a drive going at the next race.

Five weeks later, I was on the grid at Zolder in Belgium. The two-minute board had been raised. The Team Ensign mechanics had started the engine and left me alone. I was about to become a bona fide grand prix driver and only one thing came to my mind: the haunting bass line from Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain, which had been adopted as the BBC’s grand prix signature tune.

Somehow I felt I must be watching this on the television but I wasn’t. Two days before, I had been 23rd fastest with 24 qualifying. Now, alongside me, was double world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, on the row in front, the future world champion Keke Rosberg and just ahead of him future quadruple world champion Alain Prost — it was a pretty classy bottom six.

The green flag waved and, with Fleetwood Mac still playing in my head, we set off in formation on the traditional weaving, tyre-warming lap. Red light ... hold a steady 9,000 revs and ease the clutch up to its biting point. Green light ... slip the clutch ever so slightly before dumping it completely as you hammer the throttle to the floor. Flick up through the five-speed gearbox with the tiny lever to the right of the steering wheel and plunge downhill towards the first corner. Nothing, but absolutely nothing, gives a bigger adrenaline rush than this — the opening corner of your first grand prix.

I stayed ahead of Emerson for four glorious laps before conceding the place. By lap 12 we were up to 18th and 19th, until without warning the engine suddenly lost power exiting the chicane behind the pits and emitted the dreaded death rattle. There was nothing I could do other than switch everything off and coast to the side of the road.

It had been a weekend racked with emotion. Less than a decade after I’d had the incredible luck to win a racing car I’d worked my way up to the summit of a huge mountain. The problem was that I was only there on probation. I had no management team, or even a manager, and no private backers to help open doors. It was the most satisfying moment of my career but all the time I knew it might not last.

There’s only one thing certain about motor racing and that is that nothing’s certain. It sounds glib but it’s true. I needed another source of income and something else to keep me occupied. When it came, it was, as most things in my life, unplanned and unexpected.

In 1985 I was at Mallory Park in Leicestershire watching a friend race, when I was dragged into a commentary box to help out. The use of an “expert analyst” was still quite a rare thing then, and it wasn’t long before I had the BBC on the phone to see if I would be interested in joining Murray Walker in the commentary box for the various Formula Two and Formula Three races it was covering live for Grandstand. My broadcasting career had begun.

Of course, James Hunt was Murray’s man for the grands prix, in the greatest commentary pairing of all time, but I don’t think James was too bothered about the smaller stuff. Working with Murray and the BBC team thus became an education in a whole new world and yet they were pretty much like a racing team — except they drank more. Not that Murray was a drinker; indeed, he was always off to bed early, leaving me to be led astray.

In the spring of 1987 the BBC was on the phone again with an offer that would turn in a direction that I had never even considered. Yes, I’d watched Top Gear on the television — first presented by the likes of Angela Rippon and Noel Edmonds in the late Seventies and now hosted by William Woollard — but it was a consumer programme looking at new road cars and checking how many suitcases you could get in the boot. Not really my sort of thing.

However, they had been planning to do an item about the new Formula First single-seater racing car. Fortunately for me, their presenter, Chris Goffey, had broken his leg, so off to Brands Hatch I went.

In 1989 some lanky kid with a mop of curly hair suddenly turned up on the show. The programme was about to change for ever When I arrived I was greeted by Chris, attired in plaster and with crutches. The idea was that he would still present the item and I would simply be doing the driving for him. As it turned out in the final edit, you wouldn’t even see me without my helmet on in my debut item — a concept the Stig would make famous some 15 years later. Unlike the Stig, though, I was allowed to talk, and when they found that I could drive right on the limit and describe exactly what was happening at the same time it almost seemed to be a eureka moment. How could I possibly do that?

Having watched so much on-board footage of motor racing, which often makes it look like anyone could just sit there and turn the wheel, I’d also made the conscious decision to make it “look” exciting as well.

I’d decided that a bit of sliding about with some controlled oversteer would at least make it appear to be a bit more difficult. (While this worked brilliantly on the television it didn’t do my racing reputation any favours — because the quick way is, of course, the neat and tidy route.) And so the idea of Top Gear having a racing driver had been born.

In 1989 some lanky kid with a mop of curly hair suddenly turned up on the show. The programme was about to change for ever. Jeremy Clarkson had been invited to do a few items with a slightly more — how shall I put it — irreverent view of the world of motoring. It was a formula that saw the viewing figures begin to climb, and it wasn’t long before Jeremy suggested that one of his old mates, who knew everything there was to know about old classics and second-hand deals, should be brought on board as well. So Quentin Willson arrived on our screens.

By 1993 Top Gear had taken off to such an extent that the team was pictured on the front cover of the Radio Times, and the first Top Gear magazine was launched in the October of that year with Jeremy, Quentin and myself as the lead columnists. The boys were on the move.

Motor racing was still my first love, though, and having conquered grand prix I set my sights on endurance racing. The Le Mans 24-hour is the endurance race, the one that every driver wants to do, even though it’s the most dangerous. Or perhaps because it’s the most dangerous. At around 1pm in the afternoon of my fifth Le Mans, in June 1989, I was sitting on the pit wall as James Weaver, my co-driver, ticked off the laps of another stint. At Le Mans you normally drive for 14 laps, a time determined by how quickly you get through your 100 litres of fuel — you need to average near that 14 laps or you’d run out of your car’s allocation before the end.

You could easily change drivers in the time it took to refuel. It did mean that you were only ever out of the car for about an hour and 50 minutes at the most, but I’d never been one for sleeping much during the race in any case. Having finished a stint, I’d pick up my previous set of overalls and fireproof undies from the tumble dryer, which simply kept on tumbling for the whole 24 hours, then change into these dry clothes and dump the sweaty ones back in the dryer. Still buzzing, there would be time for a coffee and a snack and then a brief lie-down to chill out for a while — usually with Radio Le Mans quietly cackling away in the background, keeping me in touch with the race.

That afternoon, my hot, tired, aching muscles were wishing for a long soak in a hot bath, but instead I was watching for the red Porsche to appear out of the chicane for the 11th time so I could begin to think about screwing my earplugs back in, donning the fireproof balaclava and helmet, and preparing myself for another hour in the oven. But instead of driving past, James came stuttering up the pit lane.

The fuel lamp was shining brightly inside the cockpit as he stopped at the pit; he was almost out of fuel a full two laps early. Without thinking, my helmet was on and I was clambering into the car. The tyres were changed and the fuel was going in. It was all done in less than a minute and the stop had gone like clockwork, but why had James pitted so early?

My first concern was simply to concentrate on getting the tyres up to temperature and not doing what I’d done last year, falling off at the first corner. The next priority was to pull the belts tight once I hit the Mulsanne straight for the first time and then have a good look around the gauges to check they were all reading what they should read. Strange, why was the fuel gauge down so soon after a refuel?

Then I checked the mirrors ... big red ball ... checked the mirrors again and the big red ball was going at the same speed as me. I was on fire. I now knew where the missing fuel had gone. Between the tank and the engine the car had sprung a leak, and the missing gallons had just ignited. Somehow my mind was still operating with amazing clarity. Concentrating 100% and pumped full of adrenaline, despite having had virtually no real sleep for more than 30 hours and having already driven the equivalent of four grands prix during that time, this was no time to panic.

I checked the mirrors — big red ball. I was on fire. Things were going to get very hot, very quickly There was no fire or smoke in the cockpit but I knew that as soon as I stopped that big red ball was going to catch up with me and things were going to get very hot, very quickly. Of course the car had its own on-board fire extinguisher, but I reckoned that was best kept for when I stopped — but where? I’d been trying to remember where I’d seen the biggest fire engine parked up and reckoned there was one at the end of the pit straight, so I cracked my seatbelts open — didn’t want them snagging — got the door just open to make sure that was okay as well, then gracefully flambéed my way past the packed grandstand, to provide them with a nice after-lunch dessert, with my finger hovering over the extinguisher button.

When I stopped, the whole car seemed to be enveloped by the flames — I hadn’t reckoned on the wind that was coming from behind me — so having set off the extinguisher, I was greeted by a wall of flame coming in at me as I burst out of the door. Fortunately I was through it and away in an instant and no personal harm was done — except for the bollocking I got a week later for not closing the door on the way out to minimise cockpit damage.

Looking back, I’m still immensely proud that I made it to the ultimate level of my sport.

I’m also strangely satisfied that I got there at a time when motor sport was still dangerous and sex was still safe, rather than the other way round, as later transpired. For many of us the knowledge that we were driving a fine line between being fast and potentially having a big accident was all part of the sport’s attraction. It heightened the experience and concentrated the mind, demanding a much finer margin of error — to be quick you had to be right on that line, but step over it and you paid a heavy price. With the massive tarmac run-offs of today, finding the limit on many corners presents little challenge; now, if you overstep the mark you simply recover on the run-off.

Of course the last thing anyone wants is someone being hurt doing the sport we love and, despite my era being much safer than it had been just a decade earlier, thanks to Jackie Stewart’s crusade, three drivers from that Zolder grid — Gilles Villeneuve, Elio de Angelis and Patrick Depailler — would all die at the wheel of grand prix cars, while Didier Pironi was so badly injured that he had to quit the sport.

The dilemma is how to keep the challenge of that fine edge without endangering the driver — but then without the danger you lose that edge.

I enjoyed the fact that I drove at a time when the only driver aid was the mechanic who buckled you into the car. No power steering, no paddle-shift gear change, no telemetry feeding information to a bank of computers in the pits, not even a rev limiter to stop you blowing up the engine: it was all down to the driver. The deft arts of “heel and toe” and “short shifting” are long gone, as is the instant penalty of a missed gear that could so easily lose you a place or blow your engine — the cockpit was a far harder and much busier place than it is now and consequently a much more rewarding one.

To pre-order your copy of Tiff Gear, published on April 7, at the special price of £16.99 (rrp £19.99), including free postage, call the Sunday Times Bookshop on 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/bookshop. The first 50 orders will receive copies signed by the author.