This article contains strong, offensive language, as does the accompanying video. Yes, it’s a bit sweary at parts, so if you’re offended by that kind of thing it’s probably best if you have a look around the rest of the website (which isn’t offensive) instead. If F-Bombs and stronger doesn’t bother you, then read on!

By Mick Palmer

‘Heading down Craner Curves the car stepped out. “FUCK!!!!” my head screamed. “We’re going straight into the bastard gravel!!” So much happened in that instant. I could see the massive rooster of spray in the passenger side mirror in the periphery of my vision on the right. I could see Brad on my left sawing at the wheel like a psychopath trying to quickly hack up a body before the police arrived. The violent rumbling of the tyres gripping the track shuddered through my rectum, and I’m sure my arse responded with an even bigger, and more preposterous thunderous convulsion. Nevertheless we still went right then left, and not off into the sandy brown pile of stones that was about 50 meters away, that had momentarily filled my vision as if I was being buried face first into it. People tell you that when you get into a proper bespoke racing car that the braking, and the acceleration, will shock you the most (okay, the braking did bury my gonads into my stomach and leave me walking funny for a bit.) All I can say about that soaking Donington experience was “FUCK THAT!” It’s the lateral grip that catches you off-guard. Holy shite! That moment, with that driver, in that car, in that weather, in those corners. It was a vastly colossal and mammoth middle finger to everything I could not be arsed to learn about in physics when I was at school. It simply defied logic that what I was experiencing was happening. All of that happened in what? Half-a-second?’

Birmingham: January 2023.

The Racing Car Show. Also known as the the Autosport Show. After a Covid Lockdown break it was back for 2023. I dragged my arse down to the Deep South. No , I’m not confusing Birmingham in England with Birmingham, in Alabama – Birmingham, England to me is the Deep South. Christ, Leeds is practically in France if you’re from my neck of the woods, so Brum is a different world for this Northerner (proper North that is, none of that Liverpool or Manchester are in the North shite.) Two days away from home, staying at the posh environs of Travelodge in Tamworth (home of former Iron Maiden vocalist Blaze Bayley. Tamworth, not Travelodge, I’d like to think he can afford better than that, because the place was a bit crap compared to the upper class Premier Inn…..)

I travelled to the show to see new and familiar faces from the TCR UK Championship. Interviews for the 2022 season review and 2023 preview were sorted for Motor Racing UK Magazine, and then a wide ranging chat with new championship coordinator Ashley Gallagher. At the end of the conversation he said that for the TCR Media Day there would be passenger laps in a TCR car, and that he’d get me into one. ”Wowzers! That’d be a treat – but it’ll never happen,” I thought. It was a moment of glory for being considered though.

You see, that kind of thing never happens with this magazine. I pick up other mags and see journalists being given some top opportunities. Resident racers getting test drives, staff being invited to fancy end of season awards, free shit to review, jaunts to factories or behind closed door sessions – but not us. There have been promises of things – and silence when I’ve followed them up. Our driver Sam hasn’t had a sniff of a test, apart from a sneaky review when offered a shot of a Ginetta G56 on a trackday. Nobody sends us piles of crap to write about (haven’t got room for it really,) but I admit I stretched the truth. I have been invited to post season nosh ups with drink and cabaret acts, but sod that, no chance you’re getting me into a fucking suit – I’d consider it if I could wear my Live After Death T-Shirt and a pair of camo shorts – but the Royal Automobile Club has a dress code that I wouldn’t be seen dead in (the future coffin plan will see one Iron Maiden top adorning my corpse when I go.) I’d be slapped down at the door.

In February the TCR UK media officer Phil brought it up again and I thought “hey, maybe it will happen.” There was a bit of hope there, and in mid-March an email arrived formally asking if I’d like a ride in a TCR machine before the lunch break on the TCR UK media day at Donington Park. I think I answered with a “YES!” before I’d finished reading the thing.  Still didn’t think it would happen though, something would come up to interfere….

With this news though I took a positive angle, I considered how I’d document the occasion. I mean, it’s been more than 20 years since I first ventured into F1 in composites. I’ve been to tons of races as a fan, journalist and photographer, I’ve loads of people in racing I consider as good friends, but in all of that time I have never even so much as taken to a track in a rental kart, never mind hit a circuit in a race car, so it was a fuck off massive deal. I’m a bit of a GoPro fan. So I bought the Chesty mount, thinking I could film my reaction for posterity. Maybe post it online if it’s any good, well that didn’t work out quite right……

The weekend after my adventure the Australian GP was on the box. Sky F1 commentator David Croft (possibly on the day after my TCR passenger experience) took to the Albert Park circuit as a passenger in a top lever Tourer with Anton de Pasquale. A Supercars Mustang was their steed. There were a few differences, and a few similarities between his ride and mine. We were both in Touring Cars on well known tracks. We’re both on the large side, and both plopped on the same type of helmet. He had a race suit, I had a wrist band. We both had an out then in lap (although the plan was for me to get a hot lap.) He had a full film crew and a host of onboard cameras, I had a single GoPro, and I knocked the bloody thing, so you miss most of the action when you watch it back. He said his experience was “absolutely awesome,” I said mine was “fucking smart.”  I think we got the same buzz, but what about that experience for me on the day?

Well, I signed on, got my wristband and helmet and headed to the hospitality garage. It was a tense place with an interesting array of people in there Multiple Touring Car champion and ex-F1 racer Gabriele Tarquini spilled a coffee (and professed a love for English biscuits) as he sat with some members of the Hyundai Racing camp. I plonked myself down at a table where I was joined by Mark Paulson who was on duty for Autosport, and we chatted with TCR Europe commentator Paul Jeffery. Outside it had been on and off pissing down all morning. My boots were up to the ankles in shit from being down trackside at The Old Hairpin shooting a session when the rain had upped it’s intensity. There had been a couple of red flags across the morning, and when it came for the passenger rides the track surface was still sopping wet. And worryingly there had been a red flag while Joe Public was getting taxied…..

We didn’t know what car we were going to run with as I headed outside. Paul Jeffery was first out from the media side of things and climbed into our mount. The Audi RS3 LMS TCR of Brad Hutchison. As he was being slotted into the passenger seat a second red flag was thrown. Two passengers had now tasted the gravel. I stood outside for the 15 minutes it took for the circuit to be cleared and re-opened. I have to admit my arsehole was opening like theatre curtains readying for what would be a massive, and very loud, performance. The crew backed the car out, and off they went. Out lap, fast lap, in lap, then another red flag.

Now, at this point I thought “shit the bed, it’s going to be cancelled” but this is the coolest thing of all. Even though we were now eating into the lunch break, TCR UK extended the session so that everybody could get one lap in. It would be out of the pits, and straight back in.

I can say that when my opportunity arrived getting in the car wasn’t glamorous at all. A fat lad like me squeezing in-between that scaffolding was not a pretty sight, and neither was the moment when the crotch strap was rammed into my nether regions. There is a German Goregrind band called Cock and Ball Torture who I enjoy listening to on occasion, but before getting into this car I didn’t envision ever partaking in the pastime, but, as a tubby fella I needed strapping in good and proper. After all, the maximum weight compensation in TCR UK is 40kg. I’m closer to 117, so the handling might have been be a little off. My jelly belly could have caused an unrecoverable tank slapper of its own had it been free enough to start flapping from side-to-side……

Because of the red flag delays there was only time for leaving the pits and coming straight back in. That was fine. Of course I wanted more, but, Brad was going to ‘make it count.’ I had hoped to preserve the moment properly. The original intention had been to point the GoPro at my face to record my reaction, but from the angle that it would have to sit at all that would be on display would have been the contents of my nostrils, and the opportunity to work out which teeth I’ve had knocked out over the years. And let’s be honest, when you watch reaction videos on YouTube it makes you want to find the person who ‘reacts,’ put them in a sack and brick them before dumping them in a river. I’m irritating enough without being ‘that’ wanker. So, at the last moment I turned the thing around and got it set up, before knocking it.

Not everything is was a loss though, when you watch it back. Even though half of the screen at the start is the inside of the roof, the ‘moments’ when grip becomes a bit less are visible, as you can see Brad fighting the car reflected, turns out it’s actually quite cool, and towards the end of the lap – the part where my testicles are further assaulted under braking, the camera rights itself with the forward G-Forces! Like I said, not quite the budget of Sky F1…..

As we trundled down the pitlane I had to raise my right arm for the marshal to see to allow us onto track. A bright yellow wristband was the key to an assault on the senses that I’ve never received before. Once the man in the orange suit allowed us to go it was foot down and bang, bang, bang up the gears before braking for Redgate, the right hander that leads to Craner Curves, via Hollywood.

Right. It was fucking fast, but the senses and visual overload interpreted things very differently to even a club racing driver. I suppose lapping up the experience instead of controlling it gives a very different perspective. Two things I noticed. The sound. I’ve heard it from onboard from various types of Touring Car racing, but for a brief flash it threw me back to the nineties and playing TOCA on the original Playstation. It was THAT sound. A quarter of a century on and I was actually experiencing it! And I thought the car was going to tip over.

Yes, really. Into Hollywood the car just seemed to keep going right. That was the only part of the lap where time seemed to slow. I don’t know if it was my head moving left a little, and the left hand side of the car compressing, but my brain was having a meltdown. It was telling me that the suspension on these things are so stiff that it could only lean this far if it was going over, but it wasn’t. As the next section would prove.

Heading down Craner Curves the car stepped out. “FUCK!!!!” my head screamed. “We’re going straight into the bastard gravel!!” So much happened in that instant. I could see the massive rooster of spray in the passenger side mirror in the periphery of my vision on the right. I could see Brad on my left sawing at the wheel like a psychopath trying to quickly hack up a body before the police arrived. The violent rumbling of the tyres gripping the track shuddered through my rectum, and I’m sure my arse responded with an even bigger, and more preposterous thunderous convulsion. Nevertheless we still went right then left, and not off into the sandy brown pile of stones that was about 50 meters away, that had momentarily filled my vision as if I was being buried face first into it. People tell you that when you get into a proper bespoke racing car that the braking, and the acceleration, will shock you the most (okay, the braking did bury my gonads into my stomach and leave me walking funny for a bit.) All I can say about that soaking Donington experience was “FUCK THAT!” It’s the lateral grip that catches you off-guard. Holy shite! That moment, with that driver, in that car, in that weather, in those corners. It was a vastly colossal and mammoth middle finger to everything I could not be arsed to learn about in physics when I was at school. It simply defied logic that what I was experiencing was happening. All of that happened in what? Half-a-second?

There was more in The Old Hairpin, except that had the added pleasure of cracking the kerbs on the outside after Brad caught a slide that sent him a little left of the intended apex. “Shitting Nora” I thought. “This is going to see me firing a rapid Trouser Mauser.” Again, the grip was simply indescribable. But it was weird. Going over the kerbs. I’m not sure if it was the car, or if a sensory overload momentarily separated me from my physical being – I heard them, but didn’t feel them. For all these years Playstation and XBox controllers have been lying to me. Those things have tried to give my wrists RSI (I’ve got four kids, so don’t go with that as the reason!) on Forza and Gran Turismo, but it was simply absorbed with no sensation. I really thought it would turn my buttonhole Khaki and call for a change in understrides, but it didn’t.

Past Starkey’s Bridge and towards McLean’s pushed me a little right before the car itself was nipped right. It really was a lot less of a corner from inside. The braking was not what I thought it would be and the speed carried through was more than I expected, as was the getting back on the power. Coppice however was more. That rise and blind apex. I’ve seen it many times with onboard footage, but being so low in the car, barely peering over the dash, it seemed like we were going to have to drive up Niagara Falls. As the car crested the blind right turn there was again another greasy surface influenced slide to be caught. Again, my old rubber tea towel holder felt the head of the turtle wanting to escape, but it was nothing to worry about. In the world of the TCR driver it was just another lap (albeit slowed by the lard man in the spare seat.)

Starkey’s Straight was something mind. It seemed serene in respect of not being thrown from side-to-side, but as the car got faster and faster I knew that we were going to have to slow down. In all honesty, after about a minute in the car I thought I had it licked, but I hadn’t. This was the first time I’d feel the full effect of the braking – into the chicane. I didn’t brace myself being so confident that I was now an expert Touring Car Racer, but two things happened when the brakes were applied, my head snapped forward, and I lost a painful game of conkers with the strap between my legs. It wasn’t a sharp painful moment, but I’m sure the belt separated my saddlebags from my pelvic region. I did gulp as we went through the chicane, before the car was backed off and brought into the pits for the next passenger. I struggled out of the roll cage and walked like John Wayne to the garage door to steady myself with one thought going through my mind: “I wish I’d volunteered to go first, I’d have gotten three bloody laps in!!”

If the opportunity ever arises again I’d jump at it – and if it does I’ll do a proper, polite job of sharing the experience…..