Fabian Coulthard: Motor racers feel fear in a different way

Bathurst, lap one, 2010. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

As a motor racing driver, there are two things that people always want to ask me about.

They want to talk about crashes - especially that incident at Bathurst in 2010 - and they want to know if we feel any fear racing at incredible speeds.

I have had my fair share of smashes over the years and obviously what happened on Mt Panorama last year is still fresh in the mind.

It happened on the first lap of the most famous race on the V8 Supercars circuit, at probably the fastest corner in Australia.

At the time the Daily Telegraph called it "the greatest crash ever seen on an opening lap".

That car - or what remains of it - has become quite famous and was very popular when they exhibited it recently in Adelaide.

I remember my left rear wheel being clipped as I passed Jason Bargwanna at the start but I didn't think anything of it.

I radioed my engineer to report the contact, but told him there was no vibration resulting from the shunt and it was 'not a major'.

Talk about a misread. Moments later, in sixth gear and with the car fully loaded, the tyre blew out at 290km/h.

I rolled six times before coming to a stop.

I felt like I was upside down, backwards, sideways and back to front.

I knew it had been a big one when I didn't have to open the door to get out - the door had flown off and was sitting 100m away.

Luckily I walked away unharmed.

I also recall a big smash in 2004 driving a Porsche GT3 at Sandown and I once rolled a go-kart seven times.

It is part and parcel of the game. To explore the limits, you have to go beyond the limits and sometimes things go wrong.

If you are worried about crashing, you shouldn't be there - you can't think about it otherwise you will never amount to much in the sport.

But are we afraid? Of course, as drivers we are only human but I think we feel fear in a different way.

It is not with you the whole time; generally it might pop up during or after a close call.

Your adrenalin shoots through the roof, you recognise in an instant how narrow your escape was, and I guess you could equate that with fear.

But it all comes down to what you are used to. Just like driving 100km/h on the motorway is normal for the average punter, clocking 300km/h down a track doesn't feel that fast for a professional racing car driver. Your body adjusts and that speed feels normal.

I guess for me it has helped that my career has progressed in an incremental way through the classes.

If I had stepped straight from a go-kart, which has a top speed of 110km/h, to one of these V8 monsters I now drive, it would obviously have been quite different.