Eye witness

14.09.15

“When [JLR PR boss] Rich Agnew approached me about the F-Pace stunt, it wasn’t going to be a record attempt. I didn’t want to do it unless Tanner [Foust] and Greg [Tracy] were happy. I’d worked with them when they set the record in 2012, they were mates, you know? Tanner said: “Go for it… two wise-asses from America don’t need it.”

“We had to work out the physics involved in doing a loop in a 19m-high structure equivalent to six storeys. That was all done by a company called MLM in Ipswich, overseen by my mate Martin whose former assistant Matthew worked it all out using pencil, paper and calculator. “Do 52mph going in, you’ll pull 6.5, stay in second, you’ll be generating zero g at the top and doing 15mph.”

“I got hold of a smaller loop to get my head in the game, while the new structure was built at RAF Bentwaters. I did seven practice runs on it a day, but after that you get a bit queasy. The cars are usually built from the ground up, but this time we had two modifed F-Paces. They were stripped out, had full roll cages, and the suspension was beefed up: the components are designed to break at 4g, for safety reasons, but we needed more out of them. Moving it all to Frankfurt was a huge logistical thing... eight fat-bed artics.

“We knew the car could do it, and that I could do it, but the one thing we didn’t factor in was the weather. I did a run the night before, but on the day the weather was so bad, we came within a whisker of cancelling. The track was slippery, and if you watch in slo-mo you can see that I applied opposite lock on the way into the loop, over-corrected a bit, and got wheelspin at the top with no traction at all. The loop wasn’t that wide, so there wasn’t any margin for error.

“The most dangerous bit is the moment you enter the loop, when all the energy is slamming through the car. If the accident starts there, it’s going to be big. It would only go wrong at the top if I slammed on the brakes, otherwise there’s enough forward momentum to fnish the job.

“We did the loop again in Shanghai this year. Apparently, it was watched by 27m people. People wonder how we can possibly top it. Wait and see…”