![](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125615593/472359898.jpg)
He is just a super-wealthy man, who doesn't care about others. Whenever you are near him, be it customers or staff, you get the impression that he is quietly loathing you for no good reason.There was a story going round at work (but I cant guarantee the details or accuracy, as it is all hearsay) that he was at some sort of motoring event in Europe - it might have been France or Spain - where he was testing some vehicle, had a shunt and injured somebody and he carried on, got back to his helicopter and flew off. The other person later died.I have no idea of the truth of this, nor if any of the details are correct.The other thing that springs to mind, is a story that involved me personally.The whole basis of his company, Palmersport, is to give paying customers, a day experiencing a variety of race cars, on track, with a qualified instructor next to them to both coach them and keep them safe - most vehicles were fitted with brake on/brake off pedals and an engine kill switch, or whose engine speed could be managed or killed remotely via GPS or an external button. This was on vehicles that customers drove without an instructor, of which there was 2. Unlike other days like this, like the Ferrari day at Silverstone etc. You don't have a 3 hour brief and a couple of hot laps, you are actively encouraged to push as hard as you can in the vehicles.Do a search for Palmersport, it is awesome.
There are videos with on-board laps of all the vehicles and you can see what my job was and why it was so amazing.Anyhoo, we used to get 120 people a day on these events, 6 days a week, during a season. It used to cost £1000 per person, so do the math.One day i was instructing on the Land Rover Defender off-road course.
![Degree Degree](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125615593/163196947.jpg)
The guests on this part of the day, used to drive the off-road course, which ran around the outside edges of the Caterham 'pursuit' course, which was basically a skid pan for doing doughnuts and drifting a pair of Caterham Superlights. Incidentally, this was one of the vehicles where the instructor was outside the vehicle and could kill the engine via a transponder attached to the roll hoop, if the guest looked like they were going to put it up a barrier.On this day, Johnathan's son Jolyon (the GP2 racer) and daughter (Emily) and their friends were in and I was instructing Emily.There was quite a big run off area around the skid pan and we used to use karting barriers (as they are low and will stop a Caterham nicely) around the edges. You fill these things up with water to weigh them down, but lots of them were cracked and the water had run out, due to shunts over the years.Emily and I were cresting a large, rutted incline in the Land Rover and out of nowhere Johnathan swoops in, in his helicopter and holds it at the height of this incline so he can make sure i am instructing his daughter okay, or to take a picture or whatever reason. He was at eye level with me, so he was 20 feet above the skid pan or so?Now, timing was hard on a Palmersport event and you had to work precisely to get 120 people a day round the entire venue in time and there I've got the bloody boss checking up on his little princess in his helicopter whilst the drivers on Pursuit were stopped as you could not drive under the helicopters rotor wash AND all the bloody barriers were blowing everywhere. I mean, there were dozens of broken barriers just rolling and tumbling everywhere, with other instructors literally running over a potentially live circuit trying to collect them all so that the event could continue.You now spend the rest of your day trying to make up time and, as cool as the job was, it was really tiring instructing people, as you had to be on it all the time as peoples lives were in your hands. It was so mentally exhausting, that you used to love break times, just so you could relax yourself.Now we had to spend our next two breaks re-building the fucking barriers.I have many examples of why it was such a shit company to work for, but to be fair, many more examples of why it was the best job in the world.
Enter the world of Formula 1. Your go-to source for the latest F1 news, video highlights, GP results, live timing, in-depth analysis and expert commentary. Enter the world of Formula 1. Your go-to source for the latest F1 news, video highlights, GP results, live timing, in-depth analysis and expert commentary.
![](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125615593/472359898.jpg)