The Man in the White Suit_ The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me - Ben Collins [123]
I could tell he had the touch straight away, if a little rough around the edges, but I wasn’t about to encourage the son of a bitch. I was in agony. He powered out of the asphalt on to the loose gravel, pulled the wand again and as we slid back on to the tarmac the Merc dug in, gripped and rocked. I tensed up, held on to the door handle and bit my lip hard. The veins in Rob’s arms flared as he gripped the steering and kicked the throttle to try and skid the Merc down the street.
After a number of unsuccessful runs, I explained why it was tricky to drift an automatic without a clutch to pop the tail out. The C Class was super-planted because of its stiff suspension and low centre of gravity, so it required some manipulation to set it free. He offered to trade seats. ‘But you’d better not jump straight in and stick it sideways down this alley.’
It dawned on me then that this was a test. I drove quietly down the alley until I reached the gravel, then lifted off the gas, turned right and buried the throttle to produce a single powerslide at a higher speed than if I’d gone in using the handbrake. As I came back round towards the tarmac I made sure it was fully sideways and, as it hit the sticky stuff, chucked the steering the other way and used the momentum to transition slide down the alley. My ribs were killing me, but I figured it was hurting Rob’s pride more, so I kept on it. I managed the whole exercise one-handed. Rob just said: ‘Bastard.’ Thank God for that.
With as much nonchalance as I could muster with balls of sweat dripping off my face, I said, ‘Yeah, it’s a good car.’
So began my life as a stunt driver for a Hollywood film. I met the rest of the fifty-strong team for rehearsals at Bovingdon outside London. Another day, another airfield. Some of the guys wore old crew shirts from mega movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, Casino Royale and Saving Private Ryan. These were the men who’d fallen off every horse, down every set of stairs and burnt in every inferno I’d seen on the big screen during the previous decade. The scripts were etched on their faces, bodies and X-ray charts.
One of the stuntmen was entertaining a couple of old sweats with his showreel. I watched through the cracks between my fingers as he leapt 200 metres from the top of a hyperbolic cooling tower at an electric power station, without a parachute, to land on a modest stack of cardboard boxes. The audience nodded with approval.
The range of talents amongst the ‘stunties’ was remarkable. Brian was a bareknuckle boxer, shining proof that the expression ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’ was a dangerous lie. His muscles were terrifying; I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that his ‘Dark Advenger’ tattoo was misspelt. There were ex-military folk, motocross champions, sword fighters, silent types and so on.
Remnants of black hair dye from a recent movie were visible in a few. And all seemed to have a cappuccino or fruit smoothie on the go from the onsite catering van that transformed this barren strip of concrete into a charming place to hang out.
There was lashings of the kind of black humour you expect from a dangerous profession. One boy limped towards the rest of the group with legs covered in ghoulish lacerations and purple and yellow bruising.
I’d already been introduced to the self-appointed mouthpiece of the group. Rowley had worked in film man and boy. He loved it. His full lips quivered as he saw me clock the walking accident. ‘Car knockdown,’ he said.
‘What?’
Rowley laughed like a cockney drain. ‘Got hit by a car yesterday. How’s them legs, Bradders?’
Brad shot us a sheepish smile. An intense, muscular man to my left added quietly, ‘Not fast enough, eh, Bradders …’
‘You mean you’d rather be hit by a car going faster?’
‘’Course,’ continued Stuart, aka Russell Crowe’s double from Gladiator. ‘Only get hit once then, don’t ya?’ He was rolling