Best Car, Worst Car, Dream Car: Alex Brundle

Next up in DSC’s Best Car, Worst Car, Dream Car roster is 2020 United Autosports LMP2 driver Alex Brundle.

Both my worst, and my best are both Nissans!

I’m sure that the teams that ran both cars would agree that they were exceptional at both polar opposites!

Best Car

The best race car I’ve ever driven is the Zytek Z11 SN the car I drove at Le Mans with my Dad and did the ELMS in with Greaves Motorsport (pictured below with Brundle Snr. aboard).

The reason is, partly that I’d come out of single-seaters and got the real sensation that everything was massive, every single track just feels massive. The cars feel massive when you head out at Le Mans, the circuit feels massive and that car had such a reassuring balance to it that you point the steering wheel, and it just went with the minimum of fuss.

It was conceived originally as a giant killer around European tracks to take on the might of the big manufacturers and not necessarily so much for the high-speed straights at Le Mans.

The front end was just planted, so much so in fact, we just had to run it with the least downforce you could where it would actually have a sensible balance even at Le Mans because the front just made so much squash.

This was a car that when the opposition was the original ORECA 03 and the Morgan Oak that you know you’d rock up at Signes (at Paul Ricard), and just go in flat out as though it didn’t exist.

It would deal with all that G and the apex kerb, and the kerb on the exit with no fuss whatsoever, it made one of the highest speed corners in racing feel like a kink in the road down to the coast!

Not rocking up quite as quick as the current cars do, but almost and man the downforce. It was the only one of the pre-2017 LMP2 cars where the downforce was in the same league as the cars we have in the class now.

And this was when the competition was pretty old school. And the Zytek had something of the old school about it, Alastair McQueen described it to me as a ‘posh Radical’ before I drove it, I think to just chill me out a bit before I tried it for the first time.

It definitely was a hell of a lot more than that. It was beyond everything I expected!

Worst Car

It’s something that I only tested at Bruntingthorpe. And it is unfair, perhaps, for me to judge it because it was really, really early in its development phase.

And that’s the Nissan Zeod which we jumped in at Bruntingthorpe and I have a distinct memory. You will remember it had a tiny three-cylinder combustion engine (pictured below) and theoretically an EV system except when I went to test it, the system wasn’t up and running yet.

So I distinctly remember being pushed down the airfield at Bruntingthorpe in a Transit van preparing to bump start and fire up the three-cylinder engine which then we had ongoing problems with.

It was quite good when it was running. I think the aero concept worked quite well, but poor thing. I mean, the poor guys from RML were running the car and man, weeks and weeks they spent trying to get it sorted.

I was only there for a couple of days in it so I didn’t have to suffer the whole thing.

Dream Car

I’ve been in an XJR12 (fr a recent story alongside his father for Motor Sport Magazine) which was just, you know, a privilege. Honestly, the thing is just mega. That was incredible.

The one that I really, really lust after having a go in is the XJR14.

I know the two cars are just a model jump apart but if you look from XJR9 all the way through to the XJR12, then the cars are kind similar, clearly evolutionary, a linear curve.

But then the XJR14 was Ross Brawn’s car and that is just a jump into outer space!

A photography student asked me recently for a project, what did I think is the most aesthetically pleasing racecar in the world. And I think it’s probably that one. It is beautiful. It’s one of those ones I have to say gives me chills to this day, to look at it, to hear it and all of that.

And you’re in an amazing position. Because you’ve got someone you can ask across the dinner table. What was that like?

And I do, and I have and I get the same anecdote: “Imagine so much downforce that you could run slicks in the wet and it wouldn’t matter!”

That does nothing but fuel my lusting after driving one I can tell you!

In learning a little bit about classic racing as I’m slowly doing, and there is much to learn, oh my goodness!

What I’m learning is that those who are prepared to run their classic cars are displaying incredible bravery in doing so. Because obviously if you bend or break it, it’s an absolute travesty. It’s a nightmare. But there is some kind of opportunity to fix it.

But really, if you crack a carbon fibre monocoque historic car, then that is real damage. It’s lost, it’s game over. So, I mean, it’s really to be commended. The bravery that people show in, in running their Group C machinery in the way they do and I’m incredibly thankful to those people for daring to do so.