JETHRO BOVINGDON
A brush with disaster causes Jethro to reassess the risks we all take
‘The rear is now fully unloaded and completely out of sync with hurried, panicked steering inputs’
DOWNHILL, COLD WIND WHIPPING AROUND my neck and cheeks and the mighty Eau Rouge (or Raidillon, depending on how pedantic you’re feeling) climbing steeply just out of sight. Suddenly we jerk left and right and the sickening feeling of a pendulum that isn’t going to stop takes over. We’re into a proper tank-slapper now, the driver meekly calls out ‘oh no’ in a hopeless lament and the car whips left again. The rear is now fully unloaded and completely out of sync with hurried, panicked steering inputs, and as the pendulum swings one final time the viciousness of the movement sends the world all out of kilter. Now it’s my turn to cry out. ‘Oh shit, we’re going over…’
Once you’ve accepted the inevitability of what’s about to happen, it’s strangely peaceful. The violent forces that were whipping you from one direction to the other are dissipating now that you’re up on two wheels. The angle slowly becomes steeper and steeper, there’s enough time to calculate how best to minimise your shape and, for a moment or two, everything is quiet and calm. Then the impact. The sound of metal scraping along tarmac, the sense that time hasn’t just reasserted itself from the slow-mo build-up, but is now running out of control and at double or triple speed. Yet the sequence won’t end. The scraping, the twisting of metal, the debris skittering down the road behind us. It just goes on and on. It’s at this point that I decide I will never, ever, let anyone drive me in a golf buggy again.
There is still some mystery as to how and why this happened. It is/was a very quick golf buggy (I’d seen 50kph earlier); it looked a bit pimped-up with diamond stitching for the seats and little alloy wheels, and I think maybe it had been raised an inch or two for that tough off-road look. Perhaps this tweak and the effect it had on the centre of gravity was the single biggest contributor to our bizarre crash on an access road to the paddock at Spa.
Luckily, nobody was seriously hurt. That sounds dramatic, but tipping over in a golf buggy with no seatbelts at maybe 25mph, especially as there were three of us rearwards-facing on the rear bench, is one of those stupid things that sounds funny but could be a bit of a life-changer. I had to drive to the local hospital for two of my colleagues to have X-rays after extensive checks at the medical centre. It was certainly the biggest shunt at the circuit that day. Strangely, on the way out to Spa I’d been listening to Matt Farah’s The Smoking Tire podcast with guest Brian Scotto. You might know him from the Amazon documentary The Gymkhana Files as Scotto was the director for many of Ken Block’s maddest and most spectacular videos. The podcast basically covers the issue of what’s next for the Hoonigan brand since Ken’s untimely passing, and on several occasions whilst listening I’d thought about how it’s nearly always something else. Time was when being a racing driver meant you had a high chance of meeting your end in a car. Luckily, that’s mostly a thing of the past now (although I write this soon after the tragic news of Craig Breen’s passing). So often it’s something innocuous or ‘recreational’. A freak accident out of nothing.
Schumacher’s skiing accident still haunts me. He was such a hero of mine, so untouchable, not so much man as a machine built for driving with Teutonic efficiency laced with a knife-edge artistry that seemed to be sent directly from the gods. Ken Block was different. So much more accessible, but no less heroic. Ken was just a guy doing things we want to do in our dreams.
The Gymkhana Files surprised me, mostly because Block didn’t come across as a lunatic taking irrational risks. He was considered. Cautious, even. He interrogated ideas from colleagues and at times dismissed certain stunts that were simply too dangerous or impossible to achieve consistently. You could see his brain ticking along all the time, assessing risk and weighing it against the spectacular results. In the context of this insight, his accident seemed even more cruel.
I’m aware this is turning into a ramble. I guess the point is that paying attention in our cars is crucial. Be safe. Don’t take unnecessary risks. But as holiday season approaches it’s more of a reminder that crappy hire cars on narrow lanes when your guard is down are even more dangerous, even if they only have 50bhp. That jet-skis and golf buggies and scooters and e-bikes and all that stuff that you don’t operate every day and seem fun to muck around on don’t have airbags and crash structures. And that 25mph is pretty bloody fast when you’re about to impact an access road in Spa with your bonce. Sideways in a Ferrari with lookouts and plenty of slow recce runs? Flat-out in an F1 car on a quali lap? Jumping through San Francisco in a fully prepped WRC machine? That stuff probably won’t get you. Everything else could.