Scariest experiences ever

Mezera doesn’t really feel, or admit to feeling, fear, but he was certainly intimidated by his first experience of driving at Le Mans in a Porsche 962C, “The fastest car ever”, as he calls it, for Team Schuppan, in 1990.

Due to various bad luck and mechanical issues, he got less than 10 laps in qualifying to learn the track, and ended up 14 secs off the pace.

“The track is so long that you can find three seconds and you don’t even know where you found it, but I remember driving there, in the middle of the night, barely having seen it during the day, and bouncing it off the rev limiter in top gear on the back straight, and you have no speedo, but I asked the mechanics and they calculated it was 375km/h, and you know if you have a puncture at that speed, it’s going to be like an aeroplane crash, you’re dead,” he laughs.

“It’s so fast. Bathurst is too narrow, which is what makes it dangerous, but at Le Mans, it’s the speed that makes it dangerous.

“At Bathurst, you can’t put a foot wrong from turn two to Forest Elbow, you cannot make a slight mistake because it bites you. In all those years I was there, I don’t think I had a spin on top of the mountain.”

Just consider that for a moment – all those laps, those long endurance races, and not one spin? It’s almost super human.