Worms to Catch Read online

  By the middle of February, FT13 AFK was returned to Krazy Horse with the front half of a steel roll cage that had been fitted by Safety Devices. Think of a roll cage as a strengthening skeleton that fits inside a vehicle. Formula One and Le Mans ‘prototype’ racing cars are designed to survive very fast crashes, but road cars and vans are only tested up to a certain speed. If they’re then converted for racing they usually need extra crash protection. Our roll cage is made from steel tube, about the same diameter as a scaffold pole, welded together and then welded to the van’s chassis.

  Safety Devices made a rear roll cage that would also be used to mount the much-improved suspension to. The standard Transit has a leaf-spring back axle, but because we were increasing the power so much we needed a different set-up, and we used a four-bar linkage. The leaf spring is fine for regular van work, but Dan felt our Supervan needed something more sophisticated that would be able to deal with high-speed cornering. The van would be lowered about two inches and set up a lot more level than a regular Transit. As standard, the rear of the Transit sits higher than the front, so that when it’s carrying a load it’s not driving around with its front end in the air.

  With the four-bar set-up you have a swingarm with tie-bars connecting it to the chassis of the van. The tie-rods are connected to coilover units – where the spring coil is over the shock – that supply the suspension and damping. Even though this is a conventional set-up for some modern cars, we had nothing to mount the top of the shock to because the Transit was never designed to have it. Dan cut the front suspension turrets out of the Tourneo and made them into top shock mounts for the rear of our Transit, and these were incorporated into the roll cage. Safety Devices also strengthened the chassis behind the dash so the van almost had a space-frame chassis, making it stiff and safe. It’s trick.

  While the chassis was being modified, Radical were fettling the new engine. They fitted Carrillo con rods, JE pistons and their own inlet manifolds. Twin Garrett GTX2871R turbos had been sent to Radical to fit to the 3.5-litre EcoBoost V6. Radical had tried to get a Quaife gearbox sorted but there wasn’t time to make it, so we had to settle for the donor ’box from the Tourneo, which was out of one of Ford’s American pick-ups.

  Back at Krazy Horse, a rear wing from a Le Mans car had been supplied by Wirth Research. I met two of their design engineers, Adam Carter and Stuart Ciballi, who had both worked for F1 teams before joining Wirth. They had done some computational fluid dynamics simulations, where a computer program predicts the flow of air over an object – in this case my van. They advised us to mount the wing in a specific position and angle. They also supplied mounts to withstand 700 kg of downforce. The point of the wing was to stick the van to the road at high speed, but there was the potential for so much downforce that we’d need to bolt it to extra strengthening mounts welded on the inside of the back doors, or they’d buckle when the van really got shifting and the aerodynamic force started pushing the van on to the road surface.

  I had a go in Wirth’s race simulator to get a feel for driving fast. I’ve owned a few fast cars, done a Caterham race and a few track days, and the Volvo, my turbo six-cylinder Amazon, has taught me a few things about driving quickly, but I don’t think I’m Lewis Hamilton.

  Dan built a frame for the front air dam and sent it to motorsport bodywork specialists KS Composites in Leicestershire, who covered it with Twintex, a flexible material that’s summat like carbon fibre, but more flexible. The front air dam is basically the front bumper, but Wirth suggested the shape that would work best with the aerodynamics of the van. It had to have an opening for the radiator and turbo intercoolers, and that opening was made bigger later.

  Before the brakes and suspension had arrived, the TV lot needed a mock-up of how the van would look so they could get approval from the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, to enter the US for the race. Dan covered the framework in cardboard and duct tape, put the wheels and old suspension on and painted the lights to make it look as much like a racing car as possible. North One took photos and sent them off. The van needed a visa to get into the USA, and I did too.

  I had to visit the American Embassy in London with Andy Spellman, getting there at eight in the morning and waiting in line. There aren’t any specific appointments – it’s first come, first served. I was called to the window and asked what I did for a living. I told the fella, like I tell everyone, that I’m a truck fitter, but this wasn’t what he wanted to hear, because I was applying for a work visa to make a TV programme. I was told to sit in a corner and wait. So I waited. And waited. Then I got a call from Spellman, who was waiting outside, asking what was happening. A short while later my name was called and I got told that everything had been approved and I’d be given the work visa I needed to go to America and film the programme. Spellman had pulled some strings. I’ve no idea what he did or who he spoke to, but I’m glad he did.

  By now the van still looked a lot like mine from the outside, but it was totally different under the skin. As well as welding in the front suspension turrets from the Tourneo, Dan notched the chassis rails so it could be converted to rear-wheel drive. The standard petrol tank wasn’t up to the job, so two 120-litre ATL racing-car fuel cells were fitted in the back. The brakes were converted to CompBrake 350 mm discs with 6-piston calipers and the wheels were M-Sport OZs. The organisers recommended a tyre-pressure monitoring system to give an early warning of a tyre going down, before it blew out, and Dan arranged for bf1systems to fit one. Also on the safety side of things, a Lifeline automatic fire-extinguisher system was fitted. It had Cobra racing seats and Schroth Racing harnesses and HANS systems. The Transit really was short of nowt.

  The Tourneo was left-hand drive, but my van was regular UK right-hand drive, so Dan had to muck about swapping over the power-steering gubbins, then the van went off to Demand Engineering in Stowmarket for new turbo headers and side-exit exhausts. There were probably two-dozen companies involved in converting the van.

  Because it was a bit of a rush job to get the van ready in time to go out to Nevada for the race in May, we only had one chance to test it in England, and I put a spanner in the works by cocking up the diary dates and forcing Krazy Horse and Radical to get the van ready a day early.

  The test was planned for Bruntingthorpe in Leicestershire, a privately owned former airbase that was now used as a proving ground by manufacturers and magazines. It has a runway that’s nearly two miles long, so it’s about the best top-speed test track in Britain. But I’d double-booked myself for the Friday test day. I’d entered the Scottish two-day Pre-65 motorcycle trial, being held in Fort William at the back end of April, thinking it was a Saturday and Sunday, but it was Friday and Saturday. I’d been asked to ride it by the folk at Hope, who were one of the event’s sponsors, and didn’t want to miss it, so the TV lot set about changing everything from Friday to Thursday. It was my fault this time. I couldn’t blame anyone for writing it in the back of my diary when it should have been in the front. Bugger. My cock-up meant Radical would lose a day of fettling when they were already up against it. And the whole job was behind schedule anyway, so it was now too late to put the van in a container and ship it out to America. It would have to be flown to Las Vegas, a bloody expensive way of going about things.

  After we finished filming, I got back in the hire van (my grey Transit was in for repairs) and drove to Bruntingthorpe. I got there just before midnight and kipped in the front of the van, happy to sleep there instead of mucking about getting a hotel.

  My mate Dobby knew I was testing the Transit, so he took a day off work and drove down in his own Transit and we had an early-morning fry-up in the Bruntingthorpe café.

  The van was supposed to be there at eight in the morning, but it wasn’t. It turned out that Radical had been running the van on their dyno overnight before the test to start setting up the fuelling maps, but they reckoned that the heat in the dyno room had cooked the starter motor. The test was postponed until midday, but then th
e oil cooler split as they were loading the Transit on to the transporter to leave Peterborough. They finally got it sorted at two in the afternoon, but were still about two hours away, so we mucked about until they turned up. Dobby was in his Transit Custom, Nat the cameraman had his Mercedes Vito 116 that he thought was rocket-fast, and I was in a hired Vauxhall. We had the two-mile runway to ourselves and nothing else to do until the souped-up Transit arrived from Radical, so we started racing our vans. I’d never do it in my own van, but as it’s a rental, let’s go mental! Dobby’s was the quickest. It would do 105 mph before the speed limiter cut in. Then Spellman came in his M-Sport Transit. His had similar acceleration to Dobby’s up to 105, but, because his speed limiter had been taken off and the engine remapped to give more horsepower, it would keep going until 115 mph.

  Eventually, we got a phone call saying, ‘We’re just leaving,’ and I was thinking, I need to be in Fort William. Originally, I had to be in Scotland before seven on Thursday evening. I explained what was happening and they said they’d let me sign on the next morning, but I still had to get to Fort William, and that was seven and a half hours away on a perfect run without stopping.

  The Transit finally turned up at about half-five. From the outside it just looked like my van, but with black wheels and a big wing on the back, which is good because I didn’t want it to look all Carlos Fandango. The starting procedure was totally different to the last time I’d driven it too. I had to turn the ignition on, to energise everything, then flick the master switch to turn the ECU on, then switch the fuel pumps on, before pressing a button to start the engine.

  I started testing the van and soon worked out that the two-mile runway was long enough for it to rev out in fifth gear – when I put it into sixth the power just died. It didn’t feel like a 700-horsepower motor to me, but that could’ve been the gearing making it feel that way. There was a massive gap between fifth and sixth gear – I’d lose 2,000 rpm changing up, so the motor would drop out of the boost and lose all its momentum, meaning I had to shift down again. I was left thinking, Well, that isn’t fast enough. I knew how much work everyone had put into it all, but I was only getting 145 mph out of the twin-turbo, 3.5-litre V6, and I wasn’t very impressed.

  In the 150 mph class of the Nevada Open Road Challenge you aren’t allowed to drop below 145 (after getting up to speed) or go faster than 165. So, obviously, the Transit had to do more than 150 to average that speed, when you take the standing start and corners into the equation.

  Still, the fellas from Radical weren’t panicking. They were just saying, ‘Well, we’ll give it more boost,’ and I thought, But it won’t pull top gear. Why don’t you muck about with the back axle ratio? (This is a bit like changing the rear sprocket on a motorbike.)

  After a couple of hours in the van it was time to call it a day. The Transit was loaded back on to the transporter and I headed off to Fort William. I ended up going Stoke way, up the M6, M74 and A9. The A82 around Loch Lomond was closed overnight, so I had to go right up the other side of Scotland. I bet I was only 60 miles short of Inverness before I turned towards the west and started heading back down towards Fort Bill. I got to the A9 and it was snowing like hell and settling, so I had a couple of hours’ sleep in the van, near Stirling, and got to Fort William at five in the morning. I had another couple of hours’ sleep in the van, then went to the B&B, had breakfast with the lads from Hope and rode the trial.

  How did I do in the trial after all that? Shit.

  CHAPTER 9

  No one’s putting the right pair of sunglasses on before being photographed

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the Bruntingthorpe test, on Tuesday 10 May, I was on a flight to America to take part in the Nevada Open Road Challenge, which would take place on the Sunday, 15 May. The Transit had been flown out to Las Vegas and, because it still wasn’t 100 per cent right, Dan from Krazy Horse and Craig from North One had gone out a couple of days earlier than me and the rest of the TV lot to carry on fettling it.

  The Transit had been transported from the airport to Radical Ventures, an independent garage just outside of Vegas that sells the British-built Radical track cars. Their mechanics had changed the van’s back axle ratio and fuel pump, and stiffened up the shocks with springs flown in from Intrax in the UK, which was all done before Dan and Craig arrived. But the van had also developed clutch trouble.

  The clutch was a bit of an unknown, because when Radical use this engine in their track cars they use a different gearbox and a smaller flywheel. The Radicals are mid-engined, so the propshafts run off the gearbox. The Transit’s V6 is in the front and has a Mustang gearbox bolted to it, and it needs a driveshaft to a rear differential that drives the back axle. Radical didn’t have much experience with this set-up.

  The gears were a bit vague when I was testing it at Bruntingthorpe – the linkage didn’t feel right, but it wasn’t any bother. The trouble with the clutch came when it was being unloaded from the transporter. Whoever was shunting it off the truck frazzled the clutch, so it obviously wasn’t right, and they had done us a favour buggering it in time for us to do something about it.

  When the lads checked it they found that the clutch was properly knackered. It was replaced with a clutch from a five-litre Mustang that happened to be in the garage. Once it was back together it was still making an unhealthy noise, so they stripped it again and saw that the clutch’s main bearing was damaged. We were all there by now. James from Radical had flown out with us, and between him and Dan they reckoned the problem was down to using a prototype clutch that had come from the Tourneo, so they swapped it again.

  James and Dan did all the spannering, but I’d have preferred to be in their position, getting my hands dirty. They had the gearbox in and out, in and out, in and out. They ended up putting a Shelby twin-plate racing clutch in, and that cured it. It caused more expense too. Shelby are the legendary Ford tuners who became famous for building and racing Mustangs and Cobras back in the 1960s. It was lucky they were also based in Las Vegas.

  On the Wednesday, the day after we landed in America, the lads were still sorting the clutch, and the North One lot wanted to do some TV bullshit with me and Paul and Stuart from Krazy Horse. They had us riding around Vegas on Victory V-twins, big cruiser bikes. Stuff like this is sometimes filmed and not used – I’d done some filming on a 1980s BMW when I was riding around Latvia that never made it into the programme – but it’s better to have it and not need it than be looking for it if something goes wrong further down the line. The ride was alright, but I was beginning to feel like a bit of a TV wanker, because I wasn’t working on the van – the other lads were. It didn’t sit right.

  That night we did more filming, in the older part of Las Vegas, around Fremont Street. I’m not into Vegas, but I was getting to see stuff I don’t normally see. I had a mooch about, the camera following me as I did what I thought was interesting to film, instead of being told, ‘Go and talk to this man.’ It was like the stuff I did in India, when I visited the truck yard and spoke to the old bloke cutting valve seats and the woman who changed the tyres. I like doing that now and I’m half-comfortable with the camera. I’ve always worked with the same TV crew from the very first boat programme, and we get on well. I don’t feel awkward in front of them and they know what to say to me to get what they need. I spoke to Fremont Street buskers. There was a man and woman dressed as pirates, and she had the biggest tits I’d ever seen. There were three blokes using cooking-fat drums and bits of metal as drums, and they were brilliant. There was a good street magician too.

  Because I was a newcomer to the race I had to attend a rookie school at six in the morning on Thursday at the Las Vegas Speedway. It was partly in the classroom, and then we had to drive on the track to show we could drive a car. The race is open to all folk, so they have to make sure, I suppose. The Transit was still being worked on so I borrowed a Ford Mustang from Frank, who is a racer and one of the organisers of these Nevada races, and also the uncle of John Putnam, who’d
been lined up to be my navigator for the race.

  After the course we went to check on the van, and the lads had it all back together and seemed happy with it. I took it for a short test drive, which the TV lot were very unhappy about because I wasn’t insured, but the van felt right.

  The TV bods look after me. They rented me a pushbike, so I could go cycling early in the morning. Just 30 or 40 miles to keep my eye in. I knew the Tour Divide would fail or succeed on these mornings, and I just wanted to keep my legs turning.

  We moved to Ely, where the race was based, after a couple of nights in Las Vegas. The TV lot had a local fixer working for them, like they use on a lot of the foreign jobs. A fixer is someone who knows the local landscape and businesses and can get things done – a person who knows a man who knows a man. The fixer fixed it for us to take the Transit to a runway in Eureka, 70-odd miles west of Ely, for a last-minute test. The runway was a mile-and-a-half long, so plenty of room to test the clutch and anything else.

  Eureka is 6,000 feet up, surrounded by snowcapped mountains, but a real one-horse town of about 600 people. The bloke who ran the airfield said that planes didn’t normally bother telling him in advance if they were planning to land, so we had to keep an eye out. Normally, you have to pay the paramedics on a job like this. The TV lot dot the i’s and cross the t’s, doing pages and pages of risk assessments to make everything as safe as possible, and part of it all is having the right professional cover in place, like paramedics, firemen or whatever. It’s all about covering backsides and making sure that if something does go wrong, every reasonable effort has been made to guarantee it’s dealt with properly. North One aren’t trying to stop me doing stuff – it’s the opposite. For this test the local paramedics turned up and didn’t even want paying. They were just happy to be on standby and see what was going on.