FROM CAR CONTROL TO HAND CONTROLS
Adapting to a new style of driving is a big challenge. Just ask Damon Hill, who sampled the Aston Martin of the injured servicemen at Team BRIT
The story starts back in February in the Clark Curve gravel trap with a Formula 1 world champion. He’s just found out how difficult it is to have everything you’ve ever known challenged, and how tough it is to relearn how to do things as basic as driving.
The driver in question is Damon Hill, and it’s not the first time he’s stepped into some of the most advanced machinery in its field. But unlike his title-winning Williams FW18, this is a GT car – an Aston Martin GT4. It looks like a normal GT4, so why on earth, under Hill’s spell, has it careered into the gravel trap?
The first theory posed is, ‘Is it because Adrian Chiles is in the passenger seat? I’d throw him off into the gravel if I was driving too.’ Ever the pro, there’s no sign of a smirk from Hill, having given Chiles the ride of his life while doing some TV recording.
The real reason is this Aston is controlled totally from the steering wheel, and it’s caught Hill out.
Designed for the injured servicemen of the Team BRIT squad, which is hoping to reach the Le Mans 24 Hours by 2020, the car has throttle, clutch and gearchange paddles that allow amputees and drivers with leg injuries the chance to compete on an even playing field. That is, when they’ve retaught themselves how to drive. And Hill proves it isn’t easy. “When you’re racing, things in the car become automatic,” says Hill. “It’s amazing that you find yourself doing other stuff in the process of driving, which is not possible unless you’ve made the driving side of things completely automatic. You’re not conscious of doing things like changing down and braking.
“The problem with that is it becomes hardwired and it’s hard to go back and change it. It’s a good analogy – if you suddenly had an injury, losing fingers and legs and things like that, everything is new again and the Team BRIT drivers have to relearn what they’re doing.”
Of course, it doesn’t take Hill long to turn things around. His trip to the gravel is very early in his experience with the car, but by the time he’s giving further passenger rides he’s got the thing purring.
The steering wheel itself is a revelation. It’s been designed to combat the problem that GT races are multi-driver – when you have people with different disabilities jumping in the car, a standard steering wheel doesn’t work.
“We’re an endurance race team, so each driver will have his or
her wheel,” says Team BRIT race manager Graham Horgan.
“Plug it in and your settings are there and away you go. We thought we’d try to use some technology to allow drivers using hand controls to be equalised and take part on a level playing field. There aren’t many sports that do that; most disabled sports are unique to disabled people.”
The different paddles are the reason for Hill’s off. “Because
I’m used to paddleshifts, where the right hand is an upshift and the left hand is a downshift, when I was coming out of Clearways on my first lap I went for a downshift as I was in too high a gear and I pulled the brake on and chucked it in the gravel,” he says. “I couldn’t work out what had happened. It was a completely automatic reaction. But it was the wrong one!”
It may sound relatively straightforward to convert a car to hand controls, but to make everything work reliably and quickly in an endurance environment is far from simple. Just the seven ECUS needed to control the braking system tell you all you need to know about the complexity.
But that job’s for Team BRIT’S masterful engineers. The end result is, via such complicated engineering, to make it simple enough that any of the Team BRIT drivers can jump in and get straight on the pace.
Unlike Hill, the Team BRIT drivers have had previous experience, usually in karting, where Team BRIT started out. Founder Dave Player brought hand controls to karts in a bid to help injured servicemen experience that adrenalin rush of being on the frontline, in a bid to rejuvenate them.
That grew into a Fun Cup entry for 2017, which has expanded to two cars this year, and now the GT4 is out competing, making
“I WENT FOR A DOWNSHIFT AND PULLED THE BRAKE ON AND CHUCKED IT IN THE GRAVEL”
its debut at Oulton Park last month. “Oulton was fantastic,” says Jimmy Hill, who steered the car to fourth and a class win in the Aston Martin Owners Club GT Challenge race at the Cheshire venue. “It was nerve-wracking being the first time in the GT competitively. But we were disappointed to see the race end.”
The car also appeared in the Aston Martin Festival in the Le Mans support race last weekend, but the big prize is a full-on Le Mans 24 Hours attempt, and there’s the hope of developing a similar GT3 variant of its Vantage for 2019.
Hill’s famous namesake Damon says there’s no chance he’ll be persuaded back into racing for the fear of upsetting his wife, but his support for Team BRIT is testament to his personality. “The mind is a wonderful thing, how it adapts to new challenges,” he enthuses. “Even though I’ve raced a lot and for a long time, you’re always trying to learn more when you’re driving.”
Hill definitely learned a lesson, that starting from scratch isn’t easy. What the Team BRIT servicemen have to go through is heart-wrenching, but motorsport can be something that pulls them through mentally. For that, the team and especially its engineers should be proud.