The Man in the White Suit_ The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me - Ben Collins [70]
Eighty feet out she replied, ‘If I hit the tyres, will I hit my face?’
Sixty …
‘You might but—’
Forty …
‘I can’t hit my face.’
Twenty …
‘Fine. Just steer left. NOW!’
I pushed the wheel an extra inch and we wobbled through. A slave to the schedule, there was only so much extra guidance I could give Geri. During the final safety briefing, her hands were shaking. She was so over-psyched that she set quite an average lap time, but she did manage an unusual pirouette past the crowd on the start line. I knew she was desperate for some sign that she’d done OK.
‘You did really well,’ I said. ‘Especially in the quick corners; you were very … brave.’ There’s a limit to what a chap can do from behind a heavily tinted visor.
My words seemed to fall like daggers. She fought back the tears, thanked us and disappeared off into her motor home.
‘You heartless bastard,’ Wiseman whispered.
I often forgot that being my passenger could get quite extreme. Eddie Izzard, the transvestite comedian, arrived during a monsoon. He was a stellar bloke; definitely one of the boys.
I took him round the lap and aquaplaned on a puddle. Eddie shouted so loud I thought he was having a heart attack. ‘Oh my God, oh my GOD … Ooooooohhhh, fuuuuuuuuuuck …’ It was an uncanny impression of my mother.
We rattled through a 90-degree slide for about 200 metres, then I gathered it up and carried on. It was no biggy, but it brought on Eddie’s motion sickness. He had to climb out of the car after each run to stop himself throwing up, but he never stopped smiling and never gave up. He might dress up in women’s clothes, but he was hard as nails.
Some comedians were plain scary. Jimmy Carr arrived by UFO and fluttered down from Outer Space, ready to unleash Armageddon on mankind. Lovely bloke; complete nutter. Don’t be fooled by the baby face. Once you looked closer into those counter-sunk chestnut eyes you saw the beast within.
It was Jimmy’s second visit to Top Gear and he had beaten Simon Cowell to top of the leader board on his first, so we were expecting great things.
He kept jumping on the accelerator too early in the corner, a cardinal sin in my book, and it made the front wheels skid. He wound fifty turns of steering to compensate and eventually I’d had enough. I yanked the Wand of Plenty and spun him off the track.
Jimmy’s eyes widened. ‘Whoaa, what happened then?’
Hmm. Human after all.
Jimmy drove the hell out of the car and was wildly inconsistent, either super fast or you needed a calendar.
We lost count of the number of times he spun. When we played back his in-car footage he looked totally impassive, even when the thing was flying backwards off the circuit at 100mph. And he never braked when he did that; he totally lacked any sense of self-preservation.
Each time he pulled up to the line for another assault I did my best to get a grip on the situation.
‘Are you looking for the braking markers I showed you into that corner on the back straight? You haven’t made it round there once yet …’
‘Yes, yes. I think so.’ He paused, eyes glinting. ‘Hmm. Which ones?’
‘Brake at the fifty but don’t steer left until you reach the arrow board. If you can do that, you should stop spinning on to the grass. Can you give it a go?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
I urged the crew to stand well back.
Jimmy made several more wild passes. Unfortunately for him, the rules for that particular episode were that we only counted the time recorded on the sixth lap, rather than the best lap-time overall. Jimmy’s sixth included a 300-metre detour across the grass, so his time was over two minutes. His best time would have put him fastest.
As he walked back to his UFO, the mud-caked Liana gave a sigh of relief. A plume of smoke rose from its blown gasket. Pigeons fell dead from the sky and flowers wilted as he ambled by. Jimmy was great sport.
The problem with comedians was you never knew when to take them seriously. Within minutes of meeting