The Man in the White Suit_ The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me - Ben Collins [78]
To start us off I indicated speed and distance along a quarter-mile straight. I told them I’d indicate direction changes, raise my voice to suggest an increase in the rate of turn, follow any adjustment with ‘Come straight.’ ‘STOP!’ meant just that: slam the brakes and put the clutch in. That was really important.
We pulled away in first gear and veered off to the left. Neither my directional instructions nor the mystical smoke signals coming from his partner in the back seat could keep us off the lawn. I rolled with it for a while, but after twenty seconds of mowing I’d had enough and called for a re-set.
Off we went again. This time when we veered left, shouting ‘RIGHT’ loudly had a limited effect. We pinballed along the verge for a bit, then triumphantly approached the first corner. The painted lines that defined the track seemed superfluous, but I tried to keep him within them. We flowed off course, back on to the grass. The driver sensed the rough and began panting as I urged him to ease off the gas. He braked instead and we spun.
Trying to explain how to navigate the turns of a fluid race track to a blind man was mind-boggling. I never felt confident of even reaching a corner, let alone driving through one. Adding speed only compounded the problem of direction, because a duff steer for more than a second put us straight into the undergrowth.
A single corner required at least twenty instructions on the steering alone. Sudden corrections of the wheel rocked the suspension and made the front wheels skid; the driver panicked and hit the brakes. We never went faster than 20mph. After a few hours I sensed the driver was overwhelmed, so I threw in the towel.
‘What was he like?’ Wilman asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I feel awful saying this, but I’ve got the impression he wasn’t much of a driver before he lost his sight …’
The production team, always one step ahead of the game, had found not just one mad blind racing pilot for this mission, but two.
The next contestant was a wonderful man called Billy Baxter.
I spotted him standing in the car park. He was looking into the distance, like he was waiting for a train announcement. His head met his body at the shoulders with the robustness of a front-row forward. He was a stout fellow.
Billy had served the British Army as a member of the Royal Horse Artillery. He lost his sight to a rare disease during the Bosnian conflict, as a result of clearing up the mass graves.
His eyes aimed off as I approached him. He couldn’t see me but he was clearly at peace with his surroundings.
‘Hi, Billy, I’m The Stig.’
‘Hello, Stig.’ He held out a firm hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
His weathered cheeks creased into a broad grin. Crow’s feet around his eyes suggested he laughed a lot. He had the husky voice of a smoker and an untraceable accent: part West Country, part London cockney.
Billy had a driving partner too, but he dispatched him as soon as I offered to take him around the track myself. He listened intently as I talked him through each corner, explaining the speeds I would be doing, to listen to the changing wind rush as we accelerated. I put in a lap absolutely flat out and taught him to sense the G-forces as I turned.
Billy took the driver’s seat and I read him the riot act. ‘Do exactly what I say when I say it.’
‘No problem.’
We set off and Billy pointed the car straight ahead. We hit third gear and achieved more in our first minute together than I had during the whole of the previous day. As we headed towards the kink before the first corner, things