Mallory Park by Marc Zakian
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We split into teams. My trio included Jamie for Basildon - a good Essex boy ready to wheel-spin the day away - and Claire, a mild mannered nursery nurse from Crawley.
I hauled myself behind the wheel of a battered Land Rover. Next to me was my trainer Amanda: five-foot-nothing of grinning off-road skills - her advice the only thing between me and a big dipper of hillside driving range. She briefed me, unruffled by the news that the only off-roading I had ever experienced was cycling along a pavement.
‘OK, put her in gear and drive up that track,’ instructed Amanda. ‘Up there?’ I replied, as if directed up the side of Everest. She fixed me with a full smile: I drove. ‘Now turn left down that path’. ‘The tracks too small,’ I whimpered. ‘I know’ replied Amanda her side-to-side grin hitting full beam. I stared blankly until she was compelled to state the obvious: ‘This is off road driving, you know…vehicle versus nature’.
With one side of the Land Rover on the path, the other hitched up onto the bank my life flashed before my eyes. ‘It won’t roll unless it goes past 45 degrees’ Amanda reassured me. ‘And if we do turn over that’s what these are for” she added pointing at the roll bars. We slid to a stop at the top of the hill, peering down onto a stagnant pool of water. “Right, no breaking, just let the gears take you down’. As we hit the water it happened – with a jolt of adrenaline I was an off-road convert.
Caution abandoned, I bumped up hills, slid down mud banks and reluctantly skidded to a halt at the end of the course. ‘How come you trusted me not to lose control, or turn into Mad Max,’ I asked. ‘You don’t worry me” she replied. ‘Last week I taught this bloke. Shaved head, piercings, tattoos everywhere. He got behind the wheel and turned into a mouse’.
Ken was waiting for me behind the wheel of a thirty-year-old Bedford truck. There is something calming about Ken, fireman and part time off-road trainer. You might be driving up an absurdly steep hill, but with Ken by your side you are invincible. Like a vintage beach pony Ken’s 4 ton camouflaged leviathan has notched up so many drivers that it navigates the course without you. The steering takes on a life of its own as it follows the rutted wheel tracks around the field. So when Ken reminded me for the fifth time not to grip the wheel with my thumbs, I reacted too slowly: as the wheels were turned by the giant ruts in the track the steering wheel whipped round viciously, delivering a painful lesson. I didn’t need reminding again.
I looked down schedule. Next up was “reverse steer with Robin”. Steering a car in reverse. How hard could that be? I’d just driven a 4-ton truck over a hill. I sprung into the driver seat. “So what’s the point of a reverse steer?” I breezed. Robin looked at me, his cherub-like features framed in the car door window. “For us to have laugh at your expense,” he beamed, explaining that the vehicle had been modified so that when you turned right, it went left, and vice versa. Robin of the children’s-book name had turned his Land Rover into the motorised equivalent of Fermat’s Theorem.
I set off, weaving around four road cones then into a garage. Reversing out in the wrong direction, I snaked back up to the start point. After a couple more Chaplinesque attempts at the course Robin decided it was too easy, and produced a blindfold. “OK, the driver wears this, and a passenger pilots”. I stared in mute disbelief, the sound my jaw dropping echoing across Mallory Park. “And we’ll time it too” added Robin, “See who’s fastest”.
I groped for the steering wheel, depressed the clutch while Jamie – my pilot - put the Land Rover in gear. As I flattened the third and fourth cone in one movement, Jamie’s guiding voice shifted up an octave. I stuttered out of the garage the wrong way, and swerved up to the finish line. Robin stopped the watch - I looked at him hopefully. “Well, you could have walked it in less” he announced. “But at least with the blindfold on you didn’t see Jamie’s face when you nearly demolished the hot-dog van”.
We walked up to the top of a hill where two gurgling Abbot Tanks puffed umbrellas of diesel smoke into the sky. On board Ken the fireman and Gerald were ready to take us for the ultimate off-road experience. I squeezed into the drivers cockpit, the lid open just enough to give me a view of the terrain. I pressed the throttle and let slip the sixteen-ton dog of war. Ken rode up top next to the turret, as we tracked across the cratered field. Being encased in 18 tons armoured metal is a sobering experience: in my minds eye I had visions of how chilling it must be to be under fire in a ready-made coffin.
Evening was drawing in as I belted myself for the last ride of the day. Brummy brothers Dave and Jim briefed me: “That’s the brake, that’s the accelerator, turn the wheel to steer. Complicated these Go Carts aren’t they”. The Christmas cracker jokes routine made me wonder if they hadn’t sniffed too many petrol fumes.
But their childlike enthusiasm was infectious, and my progression from sedate driver to kid racer was complete. Zipping round the 70-metre track at 20mph with my backside ten inches from the tarmac was strangely liberating. In the pits Dave and Jim were counting the laps and laughing. And suddenly I was laughing too; my inner child was out, and he wanted to stay out and play. In fact he had to be dragged into the pits when it was too dark for him carry on.
I had bonded with all the off roaders. For a Londoner driving is a frustrating, functional experience. They had shown me another dimension – a challenging and fun one. I said my goodbyes and sneaked my ageing Ford Fiesta out of the car park before anybody clocked what I was driving.
Heading south down the M1 a Jeep pulled alongside me to overtake - alloyed wheels, CD player at full whack, a cattle grid on the front. The driver looked me rattling along at 70mph, then pulled past. For a moment this new-born racer was ready to rumble. But there was no further for my accelerator to go. I smiled. I’d driven at through lakes. I’d driven tanks across fields. The biggest challenge this man knew was the school run. I let him pass.