My death, volume 2

It is a strongly pushed opinion that your life flashes in front of your eyes before you die. I don't believe this to be true. In actual fact, I know it is not true. I have evidence in that, I am dead and it never happened to me.


There was, however, a time when I thought I was going to die and didn't! That certainly put a lot of things into perspective. Nothing makes you appreciate life more than the fear of imminent death.


Although I can now inform you that being dead is not really as bad as you may have first anticipated.

I had just turned 16 and my birthday present was to spend a week at the Jim Russell Racing Driver School at Donington Park.
I had been Karting for a couple of years but my father was keen to move me into cars because the Super One Series (the U.Ks national Kart championship) was so damn expensive.
I too, was keen to move to cars because to me, Karting was only ever a means to get into racing. A lot of drivers make a whole career out of racing Karts and good luck to them, but I never really saw the appeal of it as a career.
Don't get me wrong, I loved racing Karts and still do on occasion. But, to me at least, it still feels like you are driving it because you want to be driving a real single seater. It is the same problem as I had with the Baby Grand.
A Baby Grand is an excellent stand-alone race car, but to me it is just a poor substitute for a V8 Late Model. Now I have probably offended loads of people but I am sorry, that's how I feel. And anyway, as I have explained before, you don't exist!

Race school was great! It was a lot better than normal school. They put us straight into the race cars to get us used to driving them. This was fairly easy for me as the only other things I had driven was a Cortina around my dad's garage, a Sierra Cosworth at Goodwood and my Kart.
The cars were Vauxhall Juniors. Van Diemen chassis with Nova engines in and a Hewland gearbox.
The first thing you notice when you get in one is that you cannot see directly in front of you. This is common in all the single seaters I have driven since. You kind of drive like a dog with its head out of the window. You can see enough to drive but if you ever wonder how Formula One drivers manage to run into the back of each other so easily, you really need to sit your ass in one of these cars.
The clutch was so stiff and had such little travel that you were never really sure if you had pushed it down or not. The gear shift was an 'H' pattern on the right of the car, you had to pull it towards you against the reverse spring to make sure it was in neutral before you started it up. It is a habit I still do today.

None of this is really important. Nor will any of this tell you how I died. In fact, nothing in this entire blog post will tell you how I died so all you morbid fuckers can turn off and tune in next time, if that is all you came to see. I am, after all, the kind of human wreckage that you love!

At the end of race school was a Vauxhall Junior race. Super Bikes were on that weekend so we had a surprisingly good crowd for a club meet, although we were basically cleaning the track for them to qualify on.

I got the pole for the first race by about 4 seconds. I led forever and then the piece of shit car broke down.

Again, that is not really important, I just slipped it in the because I like to stroke my own ego.

The JRRDS allowed me a second race by way of apology and it is here where the tale really begins...

I wasn't dead.

Or at least, I am pretty sure I wasn't. My memory of being alive is hazy at best. I was starting at the back of the grid and was in no mood to fuck about. So, when the lights went green (Yes! back in my day, lights went green instead of just out!) I started passing cars wholesale.

About mid race, I decided to do Craners flat out. If you don't know the corner, look it up on a map of Donington Park. The car, who to be fair, had pointed out on the lap previous that it might not be interested in this idea, wasn't interested in this idea, and threw me off the track.
The car spun onto the grass. I dipped the clutch and hit the brake.
I had not learnt that I must come out of the brake to stop the car spinning, so spinning I was towards the Old Hairpin. And in between myself and the Old Hairpin was the 100 yard board.

Yard boards were a new thing if I recall correctly.
They were white, square and were numbered in order of there appearance before a given corner, 150 (yards), 100 and 50.
More important than this though, they looked like concrete.
Having never seen one close up before, I had no reason to believe they were not concrete.
My weak, teenage mind also knew that a 4x4 square of concrete would tear myself and the Van Diemen to which I was strapped, clean in half.

Faced with that impending doom (god i love that word!), my mind wandered to all the things I had never done. All the people I would miss when I could never see them again. All the things that I am sorry for and the people I wanted to say sorry to before I died. I saw the life I should have lived flash before my eyes, not the one I had lived.
The 100 yard board loomed up on me like a square, white reaper of death and then exploded all over the car, revealing its true form.

Polystyrene.

As the car stopped, all the thoughts that had been buzzing through my head just seconds before stopped and my body checked the engine was still running and then drove back to the pits. The need to go home and hug everyone I had ever met didn't hit again until a couple of hours later.

Before I died properly, I tried to make sure I was the best person I could be. Unfortunately, I have a few character flaws that means that I didn't always come across as I meant. And a few others that just make me an arsehole.
I am convinced somebody else is responsible for these flaws, I just haven't worked out who yet.

Anyway, the moral of this part of the story is, life has a habit of being shorter than you think, so love each other.

Start now.





***All the crap you see written here is Kelvin's opinion and not that of his associates, race team or marketing partners.***