Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
What Happened to My Car
.
High summer, 1998. You could tell that it was the weekend for the annual T in the Park
music festival just up the road from us at Balado because it was bucketing with rain. We
were the proud owners of two 911s at the time; the old blue K-reg we still have, and a
dark blue Carrera 4 coupé which was Ann's car. I was going up to Glenfinnan for the
weekend and asked to take the coupé because the soft top has a bad and very un-Teutonic
habit of leaking if left out in heavy rain. Ann was happy for me to take the coupé and the
car and I had a grand old time even though it was raining so hard I almost thought I was
in Glenfinnan already. Everything went fine until that bit of road approaching the sign for
Fersit.
I'd been pressing the car fairly hard over the last few miles and couple of dozen bends
or so, whenever I could see I had a whole clear road ahead to play with, and the car hadn't
shown any sign of going skittery at the back or anywhere else, but I just overcooked it
totally on that curve; the rain was the heaviest it had been during the whole journey so far
and there was a lot of standing water where the verges were struggling to clear the rain
fast enough off the tarmac. A slight change of surface where one bit of road met another
as I set the car up for the bend, and the back of the car spun away, sending the rear arcing
round to my right.
What was really annoying was that I thought I'd caught it, twice; I opposite-locked,
thought I'd got it straight, but then it went the other way, heading for the gentle slope of
grass and heather on my own side of the road. I corrected again, still not braking, but the
rear went whipping back to the direction it had first thought of and almost immediately
we left the road and whumped up onto the very slightly uphill side of the road, connect-
ing with a small raised ridge hanging a couple of metres over the tarmac. There was a
very loud bang indeed and the airbag detonated. I think I must have closed my eyes at
this point because when I got this terrific whack on the head it took me a moment or two
to realise I'd rolled the car and I was now upside down, skidding along the road on the
911's roof. I'd have been hanging by my seat belt if the roof hadn't caved in to press on
my head and the top of the driver's seat, so keeping me wedged in.
The bang on my head transmitted itself down my spine and I felt something sort of
click in the middle of my back. (This didn't hurt at the time but gave me painfully sleep-
less nights a fortnight or so later when we were in South Africa, holidaying and doing
publicity; I found the only way to alleviate the pain sufficiently to get to sleep was to lie
in the bath.)
Round about here, sliding along the road upside down, I put my hands over my head
(or under my head, if you want to be technical about it, given that I was inverted at this
point). It did occur to me even at the time that this was a fairly pointless action, but I
couldn't really come up with much else to do. I remember thinking, quite clearly, Oh,
