Confessions
of a test driver.
Ford has some fantastic test tracks; Lomel in Belgium being the track of choice for Euro projects, a set of tracks so varied and extensive that is is very easy to end up lost. But often in engineering we don't need a massive test track, just a small piece of private road to do a quick check, and both the engineering centres in Cologne and in Basildon have their own modest sets of tracks, you can see them on Google Earth.
One day when I was working at the UK facility, I was asked to take some recent graduates out for a track familiarisation lesson. Easy enough; take a pool car out, load it with fresh faced youths all excited about being on a test track and drive round every track pointing out the important bits. What can possibly go wrong..
The car I ended up with was a Taurus that had kevlar body panels so that it was the same weight as the, as yet unveiled, Mondeo. Possibly the dullest use of exciting composites, ever. What they didn't tell me was that the car had been in a modest crash the previous week and the body panels had been hastily refitted so it could complete testing. But I found out.
The session started well enough, as we rumbled over cobbles and other special road surfaces, then a bit of a spin round the steering pad and then on to the ironically titled 'high speed' circuit. This is a simple pair of straights joined by banked corners, it was built in the 60's and 'high speed' meant something different back then, it was made from big concrete slabs which are about as smooth as a circle drawn on an Etch-a-sketch.
As I accelerated out of the first banked curve onto the straight, life suddenly became more 'challenging'; the bonnet unclipped and flipped up completely obscuring the windscreen, Luckily I was only doing about 90mph! As I slowed rapidly, trying to remember where the road was the last time a saw it, the bonnet decided to seek out a new life elsewhere and flew up into the air like a big composite albatross. With the obstruction gone accelerated and continued my lesson, but oddly the passengers had gone very quiet.
Fast forward a couple of decades and we find yours truly on the Cologne test track, this time in the passenger seat with a laptop controlling the engine, on the back seat is another engineer with a laptop controlling the gearbox and running tests on it, and finally in the drivers seat is another transmission engineer attempting to drive consistently whilst gearbox temperatures and pressures are checked. I was required to alter the engine torque reaction during gear changes, but after a few hours of driving steadily up an down the same track my brain began to melt with boredom, which is usually the precursor to something silly happening. Whilst we ere driving steadily along I changed the engine calibration in what I considered to be a potentially amusing way, a gentle brush of the accelerator pedal would simply give full power, but only after the next gear change so it would come as a nice surprise. It seemed to take an absolute age for the driver to finally change gear, but as soon as it was engaged we shot of up the track with a chirp of wheel spin and some fairly impressive torque steer, and a lot of German swear words. Boredom relieved.
When I was at Bentley a long time ago, they had a tendency to use public roads, particularly the splendid roads around north Wales, instead of a test track. Being a small company they didn't have their own track, although we could use the helicopter landing pad as a skid pan if we asked nicely.
Our most experienced and trusted test driver was known as 'Swamp Donkey' due to an unfortunate bowl related medical complaint, and on this particular day He and I were taking it in turns to 'asses' a Ferrari, all part of the job don't ya know. After completing my assessment, and coming to the conclusion that it was a Ferrari and absolutely as expected, it was Mr Donkey's turn which commenced with him finding a quiet road and checking that the car was working properly, including an emergency stop to check the ABS cut in correctly. With all systems go we headed for the hills, rather faster than I would have thought reasonable, but he knew what he was doing, allegedly. As we crested a blind left hander, before us appeared a bin lorry, the refuse operatives were not expecting a high speed Italian sports car to come hurtling around the corner and took the very sensible precaution of dropping the bins and running for cover. Immediately spying the hazard Mr Donkey called upon his years of experience and training, and stood on the brake pedal with all his might. Intriguingly it was at that precise moment that the Ferrari's ABS failed, the warning light gently illuminated to alert us to the peril and the car went very sideways. I do believe some of the onlookers broke into applause as we drifted past the truck, certainly I was impressed. Impressed that is until Mr Donkey's bowl problem filled the small cabin with possibly the worlds worst smell, and what'ya know; the window switches had failed too.
Millbrook remains one of my favourite test tracks; there is the usual variety of special surfaces and high speed tracks, but there is also a legendary two mile banked track and also the most entertaining hilly track, now entitled the 'Alpine Route', which is like a tarmac roller coaster, its the track used in the James Bond film 'Casino Royale' where the Aston gets rolled.
One one occasion I was doing a spot of 'performance assessment', and for some reason that baffles me I was paired up with an engineer who's job was to develop refinement and quietness. Never in his whole life had he driven fast, in fact even modest progress round the corners produced requests to 'steady on', which became a bit tedious after a while and was also hampering my tests. So taking a pragmatic view of the situation I could see that a) I needed to drive on the limit and that b) my whining passenger was strapped in and so could be ignored, so I accelerated. Corner after corner came and went in a blur of sideways wheel spin and drift. The engine roared and the brakes squealed, but the passenger merely went quiet, and a bit pale. One of the last bits on the route is a bit of a jump, by all accounts we got quite good air and when we landed the front cross member glanced off the road surface. Probably quite a rude thing to do in a prototype Rolls Royce. All in all a job well done.
When I asked if my passenger was all right all he managed to say, in quite a shaky voice, was 'I didn't know these cars could do that', and to be fair neither did I beforehand.
The high speed bowl has seen many dramas unfold over the years, there are a number of lanes for different speed tests, lowest speed at the bottom and highest at the top of the bowl. There is a neutral speed on any banked track where the pull of gravity is matched by the inertia pushing out so you can let go of the steering wheel and the car will carry on staying in lane, and the top track at Millbrook has a neutral speed of 100mph. On one occasion I was testing a Corvette at near maximum speed, you cant go quite Vmax because as the speed rises above the neutral speed you end up turning left more and more, at 175mph the tyres were scrubbing quite badly and I had to pull back into our pit area regularly to check wear rates, how Tiff Nedell managed to keep that F1 on there for so long at near 200mph is quite astonishing. Anyway, back to this Corvette; on one tyre inspection a manager came over and pointed out that the decorative wheel nut caps had come off all the nuts on the right hand side, not surprising really with those forces on them, and I probably should have thought about it beforehand and removed them. Being a typical manager, with very little grip on reality, he demanded that I walk round the track and find them all. I pointed out that walking a track with cars doing three figure speeds was not only not allowed but suicidal, I the pointed out that if the caps came off at 175mph pointing upward on a two mile bowl they could well be in the next county, finally I invited him to bugger off and let me get on with my work.
Another occasion on the bowl involved a moral dilemma. I was testing another Bentley, although it looked standard it had a very special engine in and had no electronic limitations. As I radioed in my intention to enter the track, as is the procedure, I was informed that there were a set of Porsche Cup race cars doing demonstration drives to prospective customers. Now here's the thing, race cars often have lower gearing and reduced top speed so that they accelerate faster, these things were flat out at about 160, but I needed to test performance and temperatures at significantly faster speeds.
I knew it would be very embarrassing for the demonstrators to be overtaken by what appeared to be a standard Bentley, questions would be asked and possibly sales lost; how can a Porsche race car be slower than an old British bus. Still a job is a job, so I built up speed, pulled into the top lane and flashed the racers over, one after another, as I wafted past them at some considerable speed. One drivers jaw dropped as I went past, probably because I was running the test from my computer and what he saw was not only a standard Bentley going past, but the tweed jacketed driver working on a laptop at the same time, insult to injury?
You might think that driving fast is always fun, and to be fair it usually is, but occasionally the tedium ruins the experience. Like the time I was testing special fuels for an international oil company, I had a Jaguar XKR which I re-calibrated to make the best use of each fuel. Unfortunately on one run we had too much fuel and needed to remove about 40 litres, but the car has a very effective anti siphon system and so removing fuel requires taking the car apart, something we couldn't do as we had borrowed it! So I had to drive round the high speed bowl, accelerating from 100mph to about 170 (I had removed the speed limiter) repeatedly until the fuel was burnt off. The first lap was fun, but after the second it was getting a bit nauseating. There is a small bump in the track about half way round, and I found that accelerating hard as I hit this resulted in a degree of sideways progress, which at least relieved the boredom.
Of course there are many more stories, some of which involve testing cars that never went into production, some involve procedures of questionable legality, but most involve colleagues who would loose their jobs if the truth got out. And as I suspect they have just as many stories about me I am going to keep my gob shut!
Ralph
Hosier
