How I set a world record in a Ferrari 512 TR | Thank Frankel it's Friday

My customer was the Guinness Book of Records and its then editor was both a bit of a car buff and also in need of someone to update the motoring section of the good book. So he rang Autocar and I happened to pick up the phone. For four years and for the princely sum of fifty quid a pop, I’d go through all the galleys, annotating and updating as I went.

As a child I’d been a huge fan of the book and made it my business to get a complete collection, only stopping when I hit my teens and realised there were rather more interesting things out there called girls and cars in which to invest my precious recreational time. But now that I was immersing myself back in the book for work reasons, my interest was rekindled, but in a rather different way. I didn’t want to read about records any more: I wanted to break one.

The problem was, all the existing records were impossible. So one had to be set and by someone other than me: as a contributor to the book I could hardly create a record and then set it myself. But if someone else set a record of my creation, I would be well within my rights to try and break it.

Which is how I came up with the idea of the fastest lap of a UK circuit by a production car. You might think that somewhat tenuous, little different in concept to setting a record for the fastest hundred metres by someone wearing a hat on a Tuesday, but Autocar’s editor was up for it, so I put the wheels in motion.

All I needed was a venue, a car and a driver. The first was easy: even back in the late 1980s, we were lapping the bowl of the Millbrook Proving Ground in standard road cars at average speeds no F1 machine had ever managed at Silverstone. The car was more difficult, because no-one was going to lend us their Porsche 959 or Ferrari F40 for such a purpose. So it was another Ferrari, the ugly but unfairly maligned Testarossa that we chose, not least because one was due in to be road tested.

As for the driver – I wonder how many of you remember Howard Lees? Howard was Autocar’s road test editor at the time, which made him my boss and when he wasn’t working, he’d usually be racing motorbikes. His dream was to start a magazine called ‘Fast and Dangerous’ but tragically he was killed in an aerobatic stunt plane before it could be realised. There was no-one I knew more qualified for the job, so we set a date and Howard duly pedalled the 395PS (291kW), flat-12 Ferrari around the bumpy, banked track at an average of 171mph. He described the experience as ‘interesting’ which, as anyone who knew Howard will attest, was absolutely bloody terrifying in anyone else’s language. The problem, as we knew it would be, was a lack not of power, but grip. Howard’s passenger who operated the timing equipment told how the car had to be fought around the lap, just to stop it flying off the top of the banking.

Now I had something to aim at, but it would be fully four years before I got into a car capable of pulling it off. Pleasingly, it was the Testarossa’s replacement, the radically improved 512 TR. It had a little more power, 428PS (315kW) if memory serves, but was reputed to be better still in the suspension, tyres and aerodynamic departments. It would need to be.

And so to the attempt itself. Your big fear at those speeds on banking is tyre failure. By making it corner as hard as it can while hurtling around a bank so steep you’d need a rope ladder to climb it, you are subjecting the nearside tyres to sustained loads they were never designed to take.  And an explosive deflation at over 170mph on a steeply banked track with just a thin layer of Armco between you and oblivion barely bore thinking about. For safety gear, I put my seatbelt on over my jeans and T-shirt. By my side was a cub road tester, armed with a stopwatch and nothing else. There were no independent witnesses and no GPS. We had proper timing equipment of course, but the huge sensor would have to be suckered to the side of the car where it would ruin the aero if, of course, it stayed attached which was far from a given. So a stop watch, triggered every half mile around a two mile lap, it was.

Mindful of the fact that the more time we spent on the track, the more likely a tyre would go, we timed the first flying lap the car completed. As Howard had reported, top speed was limited not by what was under your right foot, but by the driver’s ability to physically hold the car on the banking. But 512 TR was, if not exactly easy, then at least consistent and therefore predictable. It was hard work for sure but the truth is I’d been more scared on the banking in a TVR at 140mph than I was on the far side of 170mph in the Ferrari. All that time spent on the chassis and aero had worked.

When the run was complete and we did the maths, the watch showed I’d averaged 175.4mph over two miles and peaked at 177.7mph over half a mile – a modest improvement for sure, but an improvement nonetheless and one that saw me write my own name in the Guinness Book of Records. It was ‘broken’ by a 680PS (500kW) Jaguar XJ220S five years later which I was annoyed about, not because I’d been beaten, but because the record referred specifically to a ‘production car’ which the Jaguar (population: six) was most certainly not. But by then I’d given up editing the section and had no say in what was included. When Tiff Needell set the mark that stands to this day in a McLaren F1, I couldn’t have been happier.

Because records are there to be broken. Besides I still have hanging in my downstairs loo the certificate signed by Norris McWhirter, confirming the attempt’s success on behalf of the Guinness Book of Records. The record may be long gone, but that little framed picture will stay forever.