Thrilling fast track to reality

Jun 7 2009 by Zoe Burn, Sunday Sun

NEXT weekend, thousands of fans are expected to pack into Croft Circuit as the British Touring Car Championship pays its annual visit to the North Yorkshire track. As the build-up begins for the arrival of the UK’s largest four-wheel racing series, Sunday Sun Motorsport Writer ZOE BURN had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to enjoy a few laps of the track at the hands of the reigning champion, Fabrizio Giovanardi

IT’S probably the ultimate dream for boy (and girl) racers everywhere – to get into a car on a race track with a champion who gives you the green light to go “as fast as you want”.

So when I was offered a one-to-one masterclass with two-times British Touring Car Champion (BTCC) Fabrizio Giovanardi at Croft Circuit, it was an opportunity I just couldn’t refuse.

The Italian star is no stranger to success. Not only has he won the UK championship for the past two years, he holds three European Super Touring Championship titles, three Italian Super Touring titles and a Spanish title.

And it’s fair to say I too know my racing. Having written about both car and bike racing for more than 12 years, you’d think that when I actually got out on a circuit I would become an unstoppable speed demon, a challenger for Fabrizio’s crown who would be surely snapped up by team chiefs and offered a racing contract to rival those of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

Yet it would appear that while there’s little I don’t know about motorsport in theory, in practice it’s a very different story.

Fabrizio has driven for the highly successful VX Racing squad since 2006, getting the squad their 100th BTCC win that year and then taking their Astra Sport Hatch to championship glory in 2007 and 2008 – so there really was no better man to attempt to teach me the art of racing.

We jumped into the new Vauxhall Corsa VXR, a four-cylinder turbo 1598cc machine, with a top speed of 145mph and a 0-60 time of six seconds. Tuned by the race engineers at Triple Eight Engineering, this car can really shift, and could be lethal if it found its way into the wrong hands.

First Fabrizio took the wheel and we headed out for a couple of white-knuckle, high-speed laps. Croft is either loved or loathed by drivers, thanks to its long sweeping curves, a tricky double apex and an extreme hairpin at the end of the laps. “Are you scared?” he chuckled as we headed down the pit lane for our first lap. “Not at all,” I replied, “You’ve won the championship for the last two years, so I trust you completely.”

By now we were charging towards the first corner and I was starting to wonder just when he was going to get around to braking, when he looked at me, a glint in his eye, and said: “Well, don’t trust me too much!”

Great words of comfort they weren’t, but it didn’t matter. I’ve worked in the sport long enough to know things rarely go wrong in car racing, and I was determined to enjoy every moment of these high-speed laps with a driver as great as Fabrizio. But I was only too aware that when it came to my turn behind the wheel, it was going to seem like I was on a Sunday drive. There was no way I was even going to get close to his times, but I was determined to give it a go.

I slipped into the driving seat and we headed down to that first corner. And it was around here that the no-fear attitude I had with Fabrizio at the wheel evaporated. I’ve seen many of my motorcycle racer friends fly through the air and I’d seen cars beach themselves there, and there was no way I wanted to be this corner’s next victim.

But Fabrizio was great. He told me to drive to what I felt was right and advised me that my problem was with gear shifting – I was stressing myself out and trying to change down right in the middle of the corners – and I was also doing something even worse . . . hitting the brakes.

We did a few laps and came back to the pits, where we watched my laps on in-car and track footage. Fabrizio pointed out where I was going wrong, told me how to get more out of the car and we then headed back out to try again.

And this time it was better. I got my head around changing down before the corner and then hit the throttle on the way out. I realised I could actually drive through the middle part of the track flat-out in fourth gear without hitting the brakes and that I needed just to trust the car and go with it.

I really felt I had made a big improvement – I certainly felt I had been getting faster – but I was quite upset afterwards to discover that my top speed had only just been over 80mph. Hardly enough to set the world alight, and certainly not something that Fabrizio need worry about. And those big money offers just don’t seem to have flooded in yet.

There is a reason I write about motor racing, and that’s because I can’t actually do it! It was a fantastic experience, but I won’t be giving up the day job.