Drivers Blog // Harris Irfan // sujood al-shukr

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171.6 kph.  The back has gone light and I’m countersteering away from the abyss: the looming inside wall of turn four.  Somewhat perversely, I’m telling my brain not to stop conscious thought: stay firm on the gas, but not as flat as I was a few moments ago, keep steering the other way and we can still manage this, just stay calm.

For a fraction of a second, I fancy I can pull myself out, but the moment is fleeting – this is going terminal.  The back comes round some more, both feet go in and I uncross my arms so as not to break them when the impact happens.

This is no graceful pirouette.  I’m sliding inexorably backwards, though in my peripheral vision I can see the wall on my left and it’s growing menacingly larger.  Number 40 is being guided by a higher power now and I have enough time to ask God if he could let this end well.  My next thought is for the championship – Paul is going to hate me.

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We still haven’t hit the inside wall and the tyres are still protesting noisily.  I’m waiting, waiting, waiting, then BANG, my body rocks sideways against the harnesses and my neck jolts hard just before helmet kisses cage.  The contact of my head against the cage is trivial, but the neck takes a beating.  As the car bounces off, it slews back round to face the right way and comes to a rest.  For a moment I am catatonically dumbstruck before regaining my senses and realising I need to cut the ignition.  Then silence.

I’m right in the middle of the track before turn five, pissing coolant and wondering what the hell just happened.  Then I get a grip on reality: get out of here and get to safety.  Harness off, I clamber out of a door hanging precariously on its bent hinges and debate whether to run to the inside or the outside of the track where the marshal posts are.  I’m on the far side of the circuit and there’s not a soul in sight: it’s a test session the day before the race, but I might still get mown down by an over-eager hotshoe coming over the crest of turn four, so opt to jog over to the inside wall.

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Moments later, MSW’s yellow 997 appears over the brow and immediately trails the throttle as marshals converge on me.

“Do you remember what happened?” asks a paramedic.  I nod and try to smile but he’s looking at me funny, like maybe my jaw has slackened and my eyes have glazed over.  They have, but I’m brooding over the title chase and tomorrow’s race, and what Paul will be thinking when he sees the car come back in.  The other paramedic is inspecting my helmet for any overt sign of damage.

“Do you know where you are?” he quizzes me again, looking increasingly concerned.

“Yeah, no, I’m fine, really I am,” I proffer sheepishly, though I’m not fine really, I feel like someone just rammed a meat hook in my stomach and jerked violently upwards, sluicing the pit lane with my guts.  And when I see the look on Paul’s face when he sees the damage, I know I will feel like this again.

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They’re satisfied I’m OK, and send me on my way – a lonely trek to pit garage number four where Paul is waiting for news.

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“Don’t dwell on it,” he says in an uncharacteristically kindly tone.  “You’ll be right back in it tomorrow.”  When the car arrives on a flat-bed, he takes a look at the damaged rad, bent front and rear wheels and panels on the left side of the car, and declares it readily fixable.  I wish I had his confidence – it looks a mess to me as I pack my bag for the day with a heavy heart.  The car is heading over to ARM for transplant surgery, with Cobalt Blue providing vital organs to the extent that it can.  Number 40 and number 99 are about to become blood sisters.

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“At least you’re OK, Harris – the car can be fixed,” sympathises Alex.  We look at the data trace together, but it’s not immediately apparent why this happened.  There is a throttle lift out of the sweeping high speed right-hander, but it’s not clear if this happened after the spin has already been initiated or before, and I don’t recall unsettling the car by grabbing too much kerb at the apex.  Though on old tyres, the car had been beautifully set up and chasing down Humaid Al Masoud’s Maserati before the incident, matching qualifying times from the last race on this configuration.

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Driver error?  Tyres?  Fluid on the track?  Marbles?  There was a lot of detritus off line between turns three and five, and the tyres were well past their best, but whether these were primary contributory factors, I don’t know.  My confidence is shaken and I’m not sure I have it in me to drive at ten tenths tomorrow, to really chase down that title which is still up for grabs.

“Oh!  You went off at Porsche Corner,” nods Race School instructor, Anthony Prophet, knowingly.  How come I didn’t know its nickname?

Back at the ARM workshop, Alex’s pit crew remarkably manage to graft on a door, body panels and every single suspension component on the left hand side by the evening.  My poor Cobalt Blue stands miserably in the adjacent bay minus a carbon door and a steering rack.

That evening I replay the events of the day in my head.  What made me come off at Porsche Corner?  Just the thought of entering the long sweeping series of apexes from turns one to five grips me with anxiety and quickens my pulse.  Every time I exit the virtual pit lane in my mind to replay a lap, I skip a beat and my stomach churns.  The demons in my room at night wake me with a jolt and I feel compelled to check on my boy in the next room.  Just a bad dream – pull yourself together, you fool.

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Back in the cockpit for the morning warm up session, there are sympathetic words and encouragement from the ARM and MSW teams.  I put in a few tepid laps but simply don’t have it in me to attack turn four with a flat throttle as I always have done, and am four seconds off yesterday’s class leading pace.

“That’s fine, that’s what you needed,” Paul reassures me.  “Once you’re in the race, the pace will come back.”  But I know he’s wrong.

As always on a race day, I make a ritual ablution, the wudhu, to prepare myself mentally for the drive ahead, to cleanse the soul and focus the mind.  I’m nauseous as I sit on the grid waiting for the grid walk to end, and I decide to concentrate on my breathing to stay calm.  Deep breath, pause, exhale.  In the process of trying to relax and distract myself, I realise I’m thinking too deeply about taking my mind off racing, and this only makes me even more tense.  It’s so unbearably hot in here.

Three minute board on the gantry – grid well-wishers begin to disperse.  Paul pats me on the shoulder and thunks the door shut.  It’s just you and me, baby.  Don’t let me down.

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In the cockpit, I am supplicating feverishly whilst waiting for the grid lights.  It may not be fashionable in this age of rationalism and science to have faith in God, and the brash world of motorsport may not be the last refuge of the reflective theist, but it helps me to accept that whatever will be will be.  Thoughts of mortality may be morbid in western cultures, but for me they are a daily reminder that our fate is not really in our hands and life can turn on a sixpence.  Just do the best I can and the rest is with God.

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Rolling start, a last second prayer for the safety of all, then the lights go out and apocalypse is unleashed.  A perfect start:  maybe the nervous energy helped, but my reaction time is unmatched by anyone in class.  The orange KTM one row in front attempts to block down the straight, but I hang a tyre onto the white line to avoid colliding and slip past two grid rows.  By turn one, I’m already leading GTC.  The GTB class Ferrari is alongside me and it makes sense to give it the nod to force its way in front at turn two.  No sense in fighting meaningless battles.

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For a few laps I circulate with a defensive line but it’s clear that I’m well off the pace and concede a position on almost every lap.  The complex high speed section from turns one through to six is my weakness.  Without the balls to attack the flat in fourth right hander where I came off yesterday, I’m simply getting in people’s way and though I can make a nuisance of myself for a lap or two, there’s no sense in frustrating the entire grid behind me.  One by one they pass and I focus on bringing the car home in decent shape.

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I’m finding understeer a little too early for my liking, and warn Paul as we swap at the midpoint, way down the order.  Even Paul can’t pull this one out of the bag – maybe the car is just not in the best shape after yesterday’s collision, maybe yesterday’s perfect set up just doesn’t suit today’s conditions but in any case Paul is not gaining on the back markers as he normally does.

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And then the announcement over the tannoy – there’s been a crash and a Code 60 has been declared.

“Paul, are you OK?” I radio to him.  No response.

“Paul, can you confirm?  Are you OK?” Maybe my radio is not working.  I ask Alex to radio him, but again there is silence.

I crane my neck out of the pit fence down the main straight and wait to see him on the horizon at turn 16.  Three minutes thirty-four seconds pass, the time required to complete one lap at 60kph.  Still nothing.  Those demons are starting to whisper to me.  I look across at Debbie, Paul’s wife.  If there is panic welling up inside her, she doesn’t show it.  Alex too.  The pit lane marshals cannot tell us anything but we all know it must be Paul.

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Out beyond the deadly vortex of turn one, Paul is emerging from a wreck.  His nerve ends are tingling and he is unsteady on his feet.  A glance behind tells him that not only is our title race over, but that number 40 is probably just a memory now.  Moments earlier he entered the braking zone of turn one at 248kph, allowing Tarek Elgammal’s MSW Porsche to pass, before discovering no brake pressure.

Paul knows a big one is inevitable.  His body pumps adrenalin vigorously and affords him a clarity that cuts through to the single essential purpose of self preservation.  To Tarek’s astonishment, Paul ploughs straight on, then as the first squirt of adrenalin kicks in, has the presence of mind to force the gearbox into second and grab an armful of lock to bring the back round.  If he can hit the barrier backwards, he might stand a chance of walking away.

There’s no blip of the throttle: he needs to deliberately unsettle the car to bring the back around.  Destroy the engine but save yourself, he reasons rightly.

The coolness of his conscious decision making and precise execution of action can only go so far, though.  He needs help, and the barriers are approaching at an alarming rate.  Help comes in the form of the hay bales, and then the tyre wall just in front of the solid Armco barriers.  He’s through the bales now and there’s a noticeable drop in speed.  Paul wonders if this is enough to save him.  With a sickening thud, the car impacts against tyres and almost immediately the wall behind.  He bangs his head against the roll cage and the car spins round again, pointing straight at the barrier but now stationary.

Adrenalin squirts, for a second time, though it’s already done its job.  Paul’s hand shakily reaches across to the master switch to isolate the electrics and he turns to look behind him.  Silence.  No flames.  Just the ticking of hot metal contracting.  A quick check of his bruised body – all still attached and apparently working, courtesy some remarkably lucid decision making and the miracle of Porsche engineering.  Harness off, he gingerly exits.

The rescue crew arrive: check driver, check fire, survey scene for clear up.  The paramedics begin the same interrogation they performed on me just one day ago.  Paul is ushered into the ambulance and assures the staff he is fine, before calling Debbie.

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“I am quite relaxed about the accident at the moment,” says Paul afterwards.  “I understand how it happened and on some level I have pre-programmed myself to expect that at some stage this will happen.  I would contend I controlled it as well as it could have been controlled given what I was faced with at turn one, and so would happily go chasing a fast time [in future].”

It is said that the quickest racing drivers have an unhealthy lack of imagination.  I’m not yet sure if I can match Paul’s strength of mind – for me, my racing career has taken a new philosophical direction this weekend.  As always straight after a race, I perform a sujood al-shukr, the prostration of gratitude: “Glory be to my Lord most high”.  As I reflect on my brief memories of Christophe and Pascal, today I have more than the usual thanks to convey: a salutary lesson that both Paul and I walked away from, a little wiser perhaps.

Stay safe, all.