W10 Driven
I DID SOME PANIC-INDUCED NECK TRAINING FOR THE THREE WEEKS BETWEEN THE PHONE CALL AND THE DAY AT SILVERSTONE
EVERY RACING DRIVER in the world, in any category, watches Formula One and thinks, “I wonder what the car that’s winning the championship must be like to drive?” All of them would want to know just how good the best F1 car on the planet is.
F1 has been the pinnacle of our sport for 70 years, and the fact that only a handful of drivers today get to race a top car capable of winning races makes for a lot of jealous racing drivers around the world. So you can understand my utter surprise when the phone rang late last year to ask if I’d be up for driving a 2019 Mercedes. “What – a current car? You mean this year’s car? Not some demo hack that’s been put together to do doughnuts in?” Yep, Mercedes was offering me the amazing opportunity to drive the very W10 that would be competing in the final races of the season.
Now, I’ve got to give a lot of credit to the Mercedes F1 team. It is in the middle of an extraordinary run of success that started in 2014. It doesn’t really need the publicity of inviting someone other than their existing drivers into the cockpit. But, amazingly, the team was completely open to the idea of letting me – someone who has never driven one of its cars before –
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