Surviving to Drive: A Year Inside Formula 1 by Guenther Steiner

Author:Guenther Steiner [Steiner, Guenther]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Friday, 3 June 2022 – Steiner Ranch, North Carolina, USA

12 p.m.

I went to bed last night thinking about the story I am going to tell you now and I ended up having a dream about it. It’s completely foking crazy, but I promise you it’s true.

We’re going back thirty years – to 1992 for the Dakar Rally, which, that year, was Paris–Cape Town instead of Paris–Dakar. Don’t ask me why, I have not got a clue. I’d got a job as a co-driver for a service truck for one of the teams and I was seriously looking forward to it. I’d heard all kinds of stories from my colleagues in rally about the Dakar but had never been involved in any way. ‘Put it this way. It’ll be a foking adventure,’ one of them said.

One of the first things I learned about the Dakar Rally was that, as well as being one of the most famous motor races on the planet, it was also one of the biggest insurance scams, too. I cannot say who or when because I don’t know, but apparently teams used to take old race cars and then burn them out in the desert and claim on the insurance. It was famous for it.

The truck that I was co-driving had once belonged to the Monaco royal family and had been customized accordingly. It had awnings that were brightly coloured and all kinds of other shit on it. The team must have got it cheap, I suppose. Within three hours of setting off from Italy to Paris we caused havoc when the turbo charger on the truck blew. All the oil started running through the exhaust and out on to the road and within a minute there were cars sliding foking everywhere! Somehow we managed to stop the flow of oil and get the turbo charger changed without anybody being killed. Then, after the rally started in Paris we made our way to the next finish point, which was Sète on the south coast. From there we drove to Marseille and took a cargo boat over to Libya, which is when I started to realize that the team I was working for might not be quite as well funded and professional as I’d been led to believe. The boat they’d booked us on was barely even seaworthy and appeared to have no mattresses or cushions anywhere. Everywhere was just steel! When we disembarked the following day, not only could we not walk properly because none of us had slept, but we were all ready to kill somebody. Anybody!

‘Well, at least it can’t get any foking worse,’ I remember saying to my co-driver.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Have you ever been to Libya at this time of year?’

I’d assumed it would be boiling hot and dry but I was wrong. It was raining and it was cold.

‘Where the hell do we sleep?’ I asked.

‘There’s a makeshift village for the rally teams a few miles away,’ he said. ‘Some stay in motorhomes but we’ll be staying in tents.

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