Worms to Catch Read online

  We had a regular Ford Transit to get around in when we were out there, but it was a size you can’t get in England. The smallest one in America is L1 H1, only a little bit bigger than a Transit Custom (which isn’t really a proper Transit; the smallest proper Transit in Britain is the L2 H2 – that’s a longer wheelbase, higher top than the American one). The van we’d borrowed had a V6 in it. Ford don’t sell the Transit Custom in America, the model our race van was built out of.

  The race van was following us from Ely on a transporter driven by Nam, a Chinese fella, who didn’t speak a lot of English, but was a good bloke. I razzed up and down, up and down in the Transit we were using as our regular transport until Nam turned up, then I got into the race van and cracked on.

  Similar to what we’d seen at the Bruntingthorpe test, our Transit would only do 148 mph before I ran out of runway and had to start braking. It was pulling sixth now, though, and still accelerating, but we were going into the race not knowing what it was capable of. I thought it would do over 150, but I was beginning to get the inkling that we’d come a long way to not go as fast as we thought we would. I was feeling a bit pessimistic but I kept my gob shut. The lads working on the job were more confident. The good news was that the van behaved itself, but everything was running a bit hot.

  When we were driving back from Eureka we had to stop while real cowboys and cowgirls herded cattle over the road on horses.

  Amateur races in America, like the Nevada Open Road Challenge, get the local towns involved with their events. I’d seen it at Colorado Springs, the nearest big town to Pikes Peak, and it was the same here. On Friday there was a car parade through Ely, starting at the school, with all the racing cars driving through the town with the locals and tourists lining the street. Ely has a few casinos and stuff, and is a nice enough place, but it’s a bit backwards. We were taught blackjack in an Ely casino for the TV cameras.

  After the parade there was a car show, held outside the local knocking shop, the Stardust Ranch, for the Hookers’ Choice competition. I don’t have any experience with brothels, but this was like a bar – a tidy, well-used bar, but with women not wearing a lot schmoozing about. It wasn’t like Grimsby’s Chicago Rock Cafe that my sister Sal and I used to work in, but it didn’t scream ‘whorehouse’ either. It was far from a shithole.

  The lasses looked like they’d done some miles and they had a few quid on them, meaning they thought they looked the business. I suppose they have to in that game. Prostitution is legal in some counties of Nevada – not the whole state – and it was obviously legal here, so the business wasn’t hidden, like it is at a ‘massage parlour’ in Grimsby.

  The custom show was judged by the women who worked at the brothel. They looked around the cars and picked the one they’d most want to get shagged in. It was strange to have a race with a parade that had started off at a school and was now having custom cars being judged by prostitutes, but that’s what happened. The Transit won, but I was asleep in the van when they were handing out the prizes, and Paul and Stu from Krazy Horse collected the trophy.

  On Saturday, the day before the race, I met with John Putnam, my navigator. We took his uncle Frank’s 2008 Mustang for a recce of the race route. John is in his early fifties, the president of a geology and topographic mapping company. He’s a big bloke, nice, polite and clean-shaven. He lives in Oregon, not far from Matt Markstaller, the man behind the Triumph streamliner. His uncle Frank is one of the main men behind the Silver State Classic Challenge and Nevada Open Road Challenge races. Frank’s Mustang had been sat in Vegas for a few weeks after being driven back from the Chihuahua Express, another race like the one I was entered in, that is held down in Mexico. Both John and Frank had competed in it. Frank owned a casting company that made stuff for Freightliner trucks, the same company Matt Markstaller worked for.

  It took us four hours to do the recce, because the course is 90 miles long and you have to drive back to the start. John was zeroing his rally computer, which was calibrated to the wheel speed. The course is a bit boring, being mainly straight with just a few little bends in it. And if you get caught speeding in the month up to the event you are disqualified, so I was going dead steady.

  Back in Ely the van was being scrutineered to check it was safe to race. Krazy Horse Paul reckoned some of the race organisers didn’t really get what we were trying to do with the van. They couldn’t understand why we didn’t just do it in a car. If I had to explain, you wouldn’t understand. Because of that they were nitpicking over the van, but it passed. I didn’t have the same experience. The folk I met said stuff like, ‘You’ve come all the way from England to race a van? Fair play.’

  There were also some grumblings that I’d been let straight into the 150 mph class even though I was a rookie. All newcomers are usually limited to something like the 110 mph class, so it was a bit controversial.

  After the recce, the night before the race, Dan and James decided to rip back into the van again in the car park of the hotel. They wanted to move the radiators and intercoolers to help with the cooling of the engine. They removed the mesh from the front bumper and repositioned the carbon-fibre bumper to try to allow some more air into the engine. I was there watching them for a bit, trying to help, but there was only room for two and I was a spare pair of hands that weren’t needed, so the rest of us went to get a steak. I ordered one the size of a car bonnet.

  The race was an early start, probably to cause the least amount of disruption. I was up at five, we met on the street at six, then the 100-odd cars that had entered all drove in a convoy with a police escort for the 30-odd miles to Lund, where the race starts. Some of the cars aren’t road legal, but most are modern sports cars, Mustangs, a few old muscle cars. The drivers are gentlemen racers, old boys with money driving Lamborghini Diablos, and Dodge Hellcats, the most powerful production muscle car ever, with 707 horsepower from the factory.

  I had all my gear on: proper driving boots, fireproof overalls. I had to use a car helmet, not my regular AGV, because car helmets have fireproof linings (though a fireproof lining might have been a good idea for at least one of my bike helmets). John and I had intercoms in our helmets so we could hear each other at 150 mph.

  Like I’ve explained, the race is a time trial and run in classes, the winner of each being the closest to the perfect time of their class’s designated speed. So if it took 38 minutes and 10 seconds to cover the course at that speed, the winner is the closest to that time. We could change our class at the eleventh hour, if we wanted, and go in with the 145 mph lot, 130 or whatever. I still wasn’t feeling optimistic, and maybe that was because I hadn’t been working on the van. I didn’t doubt Dan and James, but the van had never done the speeds it had to do. I spoke to Krazy Horse Paul, wondering what he thought I should do. He said, ‘Go in the 150 class. What’s the worst that can happen?’ And that was it.

  The 150 mph class, with me in it, went first, followed by the 90 mph lot. After them, the 180 mph group were flagged off. The 150 mph class had 16 entries, the second most after the 110 mph bracket, which had 18 cars entered in it.

  As soon as we left the line I had my head on, like I was going road racing. I was listening out for John’s notes, ‘Fast, sweeping left, going into tight section right.’ There’s a bit of driving to be done, but not much.

  The upper speed limit for our class was 165 mph, with a lower limit of 145, to stop people doing the route at 190 then parking in front of the line and crawling over right at the perfect time for the 150 mph average.

  As soon as we got over 100 mph the wing mirrors blew in. The van no longer had its regular Transit mirrors – it had fancy, and much smaller, Formula Two things. With the mirrors folded in, I couldn’t see if anything was coming behind us.

  I wasn’t nervous, but I didn’t know how the van was going to deal with the bends because it was top heavy. On the recce we’d gone through some of the bends at 75 or 80 mph in the Mustang, and I told John, ‘If we can’t do these at 150 mph in
our Transit we’ve got problems,’ because they were such slight bends. I soon found that it wasn’t so straightforward when I went through some sweepers at 150 mph and knew about it. The way to deal with corners was not to drive through on a steady part-throttle, but to back off the throttle before the bend, then get back on it going through to keep the van accelerating and settled on its suspension. It seemed to like that more.

  The Transit’s new twin-turbo V6 revved to over 7,000 rpm, which is a lot when you think I hardly ever go over 2,000 rpm in a Transit normally.

  We were burning two gallons of pump petrol for every mile when we were flat out. That’s why we needed 200-odd litres. The Volvo is worse than that. When it’s on song you couldn’t tip it away faster. Nothing drinks it quicker than that Volvo.

  I had enough time to think this was a mega thing to be doing. It was the first time we had it close to flat out, because everywhere we’d tested was an airfield, with a maximum length of two miles and a dead stop or a tight bend at the end. They weren’t long enough to allow the Transit to slowly but steadily accelerate to reach its top speed. It was different out on the Nevada roads – I could just keep it nailed. Up until that point I thought the Transit could only do 150 mph, and I was just concentrating on the job, until I heard John the navigator in my helmet intercom saying, ‘You’d better back off – you’re doing 170.’ The ‘tech’ speed for the 150 mph class was 165, so if I’d gone through one of the speed traps at 170 we’d have been disqualified. The van felt like it had more to give, so it might have a 175 mph top speed as it is now. It took three miles of constant acceleration to get above 150 mph.

  In the Transit’s class was a Ford Mustang, nine Corvettes, a Lamborghini, a Nissan 350Z, a Mercedes AMG, an Ultima GTR and a Dodge Viper. Every competitor in the 150 mph class was within 1 mph of the target average speed, and that was over a 90-mile-long route. The 150 mph class is the toughest. Anything faster needs a load of expensive kit installing, like a fire-extinguisher system in the cab and under the bonnet, a full roll cage and five-point harnesses. You’re allowed in the 150 mph with regular seatbelts and a small roll cage. One bloke was racing a Ferrari F40, a million quid car, in the 110 mph class.

  Once I was in top gear I didn’t need my foot planted on the floor. When it was up to speed I could back off the throttle and just hold it there, at 160 mph. On the boost it didn’t really matter where the throttle was. Driving like that made everything a bit smoother. It would rev to 7,000 rpm through the gears, but it wouldn’t in top gear. With that differential ratio it was geared to do 200 mph, but it didn’t have the power to rev out in top gear, so that speed was just theoretical. I can’t think of another race where you’d go so fast for so long without backing off for a corner.

  I had a timer by my side, showing us where we were in relation to the perfect 150 mph run. At one point we were 20 seconds behind schedule, but we were doing 165 mph so clawing back the time.

  There’s one section, 20 miles from the end, called the Narrows, where there are some twisties for about two miles and you can drop below the lower ‘tech’ speed. I didn’t want to push it through there – I’d have looked like a right wanker if I’d crashed.

  I crossed the line at perfect zero on my timer, but 100 metres before the finish line John’s computer zeroed to a reference point he had and told us that we were actually eight seconds out. It was probably down to the expansion of the tyre. Our start time was 8.16am, and the perfect time for the run was 36 minutes. We were 36 minutes and 8 seconds. That’s going some to cover 90 miles – in a van. My target speed was a perfect 150 mph, but the actual speed was 150.5789 mph. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But the winning speed was 150.001 mph, set by Robert Wood, driving a British Ultima GTR, a British supercar, with a Chevy V8 engine that you can buy ready to drive or in kit form. They reckon it was the fastest accelerating production car in the world when they launched it. Wood didn’t have a navigator, but he looked like he had half a NASA space station on the passenger side of his dashboard. He was working with Atomic time, like the timekeepers of the race did. If you’re working from GPS it depends on what satellite you’re getting the signal from if you have a delay or not. There’s more to it than that, but fair play.

  Our Transit had all the safety gear you needed to enter the unlimited class, but it would have got smoked. The fastest unlimited class car was a Chevrolet NASCAR with a fibreglass body over a spaceframe, powered by a normally aspirated, great big V8, running on slick tyres. It went through the speed trap at 233.8 mph and averaged 209.9 mph. The owner had to put a different back axle in it to work on the road, because they’re built for going around banked oval tracks, and the camber of the wheels is strange because of that. Even at those speeds he didn’t break the course record. That still stands at an average of 217.5570 mph set by Jim Peruto, driving another Chevrolet NASCAR in 2012. That’s an average of 217 mph over a 90-mile course.

  Because of the early start it meant my race was all over before nine in the morning, but plenty of other cars had to come through, so we were probably waiting three hours for them to finish. We were parked out in the middle of the desert, with nothing there but a hot-dog stand. My race boots were a bit tight, so I took them off, and I was walking around in my bare feet eating a hot dog and looking at the cars as they turned up. I got yarning to a matey-boy with a really tidy Mustang. I enjoyed talking to people, instead of them talking to me, because no one knew who I was. Considering the speeds folk were doing, and it’s only amateur enthusiasts in road cars, I was dead impressed that only one car broke down out of 150-odd, and no one crashed.

  I’m right into the amateur American motorsport. There’s no interviews, no ‘I’d like to thank the Monster.’ No one’s putting the right pair of sunglasses on before being photographed. No one cares. It made me think about going back to Pikes Peak with the Rob North wall of death bike, once I’ve stuck a supercharger on it, but I don’t know if I ever will.

  Half the film crew were at the start and half were at the finish. Once they got what they needed they cleared off back to Vegas, leaving me and John to drive 20 miles south on the road, to a petrol station, where I had the first decent cup of tea I’d had since I’d been in America. Paul from Krazy Horse was with us and we were there a couple of hours, waiting for the trailer to turn up. The Transit wasn’t road legal, so I didn’t want to risk driving it all the way to Vegas. Eventually, Nam turned up with the car transporter and FT13 AFK was loaded up.

  I had enjoyed the whole experience, but I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d rather be in Dan’s and James’s position of working on the thing. I hadn’t been about for this programme because it all clashed with the wall of death. It was still my van but it didn’t mean anything like as much to me as the wall of death bike did. The lads from Krazy Horse and Radical had been working their bollocks off to sort the van out while I was tossing it off around Las Vegas on a borrowed motorbike. Then I would just go drive it. I felt like a Top Gear wanker or summat. I’d have much rather been doing it, then sticking someone else in it or letting me drive it. It reminded me that I don’t want to be a TV presenter. I want my cake and I want to eat it.

  The cost of building the van went way over budget. The TV lot had £120,000 in it and were keen to get some of that money back, so they offered to sell it to me for £30,000, but it was still the van I’d bought back from the insurance company for £900, albeit with over a hundred grand spent on it. I liked the van, but I didn’t want it 30-grand badly. Then North One thought they could sell it in America, but that wasn’t an option, so I told them, ‘It’s no use to me as it is. Just turn it back to a road van and I’ll have it back,’ and they said, ‘Oh, you can have it, then.’

  The next plan for it is to leave it in America for when I fly out to Bonneville Salt Flats to attempt the land-speed record in the Triumph streamliner, and try to break a record with it at the same time. I don’t know what potential the Transit has. Radical reckon it’s fit for 200 mph. I’m not convinc
ed, but I might be wrong and there’s one way to find out.

  The Monday morning after the Transit race I was waiting at the hotel for the bus to the airport and had some time to kill, so I went on to the hotel computer for an hour, looking at flights to Canada for the Tour Divide, which I still hadn’t sorted. The North West 200 was on when I was out in America, and I hadn’t thought I should have been there, but I looked up the results and saw that Malachi Mitchell-Thomas had died and Ryan Farquhar had crashed on the TAS BMW.

  Mitchell-Thomas was 20 and had won the Manx Grand Prix the previous year, the Manx being the race run on the same circuit as the Isle of Man TT, but aimed at riders of classics, amateurs on modern bikes and those looking to step up to the TT. I didn’t know him, but people had good things to say about him. It was his first year racing in Ireland and he’d got permission to race at the North West. I wasn’t allowed to race there in my first year, even though I’d been racing in the British National championship and had been racing the national road races in Ireland, so they must have made an exception for him because of that Manx experience.

  Ryan Farquhar, the Northern Irish rider I’d raced against more than any other rider in my whole time on the roads, had a massive crash at the North West too, but survived. Reports said that he was seriously ill at the time, with a load of broken ribs and a lacerated liver. Ryan is very different to me, but I’ve always respected him. He’d retired a few years before, after his uncle died after a crash at the Manx in 2012. I’d written in When You Dead, You Dead that I was surprised he’d made a comeback and that I hoped he’d keep looking for something else to replace the buzz of racing. He was 40 when he crashed at the North West. John McGuinness and Bruce Anstey have proved you can still be right on the pace in international road races well into your forties, but if there are very good reasons that made you stop racing, and it seems like Ryan had them, then remember them. He was on the mend when I wrote this, which is great news, and so much better than it sounded in the first couple of weeks after the accident, when he was in and out of intensive care.