Life ​to the Limit 7 csillagozás

Without sponsors and fans you don’t race, simple as that. Either you suck it up, do your job and enjoy it, or you’re Kimi Räikkönen.

On my wall was a poster of a Ferrari F40, and as I grew older it was joined by posters of Pamela Anderson and Bart Simpson. My tastes changed over the years (sorry, Pam), but I never grew out of the F40. I ended up buying one. One minute I’m an eight-year-old kid with a poster of an F40 on my wall, the next I’ve got one. One thing you’ve got to say for my childhood car obsession – it wasn’t just a passing fad.

It’s one of the things I love about motorsports – you’re always learning, always having to adapt and develop. It’s not like tennis, where the rackets might change a bit but everything else stays the same. If you’re in motorsport, the formulas are always changing.

– ‘The test is at Jerez,’ said Hamish, pronouncing it ‘hereth’, which is how most people tend to pronounce it – being as that’s how it’s pronounced.
– ‘No, it’s not. It’s in Jerez,’ corrected Frank, pronouncing it the Brits-on-holiday way. ‘We’re not bloody Spanish, we’re English and we pronounce our letters like we’re English. So Jerez is where we’re testing.’

That moment of peace. You get it when you first put down your visor, and then you get it again on the grid when the crew have left and it’s just you and the other drivers, approaching your moment of truth. And then, even though there are nineteen other cars revving their engines, it suddenly becomes very peaceful again.

After the race we were given a police escort to the airport, which isn’t as unusual as it sounds, because in Hungary we always got a police escort, even though I’m not aware of Hungary being especially dangerous. There was one particular race where, as well as the police motorbike up front, they gave us blue lights for the top of our car, which was pretty cool. We were doing a sponsor event, so we did that and were on our way back when the police escort went the wrong way, leaving us alone. The blue light was still on so I decided to have a bit of fun, racing through lights, beeping my horn, proper Starsky and Hutch tackle. Cars were screeching to a halt at crossroads, the whole bit. And then the police bike caught up with us. I slowed right down as he pulled alongside us, looked in and shook his head very slowly. I slotted in behind him again and we continued on our way, with me feeling like a naughty little boy.

Dad would have loved the fact that Prince Albert of Monaco was in the front row at his funeral. Loved it. He would have loved the fact that his funeral was at turn one of the Monaco Grand Prix; he would have been thrilled to see all the people who turned up that day. I’m not sure about the choice of funeral vehicle, though. He always said he wanted to slide into his grave, locked up, sideways in a cloud of tyre smoke. What he got instead was a Volvo estate. Fucksake, Jense.