Some people were born to fly and you’ll find plenty of them on the Red Bull Air Race circuit. MOTORING meets last year’s world champion to find out more about one of motorsport’s most thrilling series.

Imagine yourself some several hundred feet up, hurtling at something like 200mph towards a small gap between two 25-metre high inflatable pylons. This is not just another day in the office.

This is a simple taster of the Red Bull Air Race, a motorsport where winners and losers are almost always separated by nothing larger than tenths of a second… a high octane challenge in three dimensions where danger, noise and excitement are pretty much guaranteed.

An Atom with wings

Stop a while and make a mental note of a typical aerobatics plane. It weighs around 650kg and sends 300 horsepower or so to its single four-bladed propeller. Its power-to-weight ratio is similar to that of an Ariel Atom, but it has wings. It can do a series of high turns pulling 6G – that’s six times the force of gravity. Participants regularly pull 10G. It can go up, down and around in any way you can imagine – not that your stomach will thank you for it.

Nigel Lamb is the Red Bull Air Race World Champion for 2014 and he’s gearing up for the new season. The 58-year-old Brit has a vaguely South African accent, acquired from his youth in what was Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Flying is in his genes, right from when he first applied to join the Rhodesian Air Force, aged 11.

“I just wanted to fly,” he says, “and the only opportunity I could see was through military training. I think we’d just done ‘how to write a letter’ in school or something, so I thought I’d write to the air force. They told me the first thing to do was to stay in school,” he adds with the first of many genial laughs.

Total freedom

Nigel describes the mountains he explored in his African youth with real fondness, recalling the feeling of wanting to soar from them like a bird of prey. But the peace of gliding wasn’t quite right for him.

It’s a kid’s dream. You’ve got this machine: it’s your wings, and when it all goes well, it’s amazing

“A glider gives you three dimensions but it’s more serene. There’s a huge attraction to that, but the high-performance aerobatics machine can do absolutely everything; tumble, glide backwards, go end-over-end; you’ve got total freedom of three dimensions.”

Carbon technologies have enabled huge leaps in plane performance over the last decade. Their agility and speed makes even the most amazing supercars feel sluggish. Nigel sums it up with an effortlessly deep statement, “It’s a piece of equipment that you strap to your body to enable you to fulfil your three-dimensional dream.”

Nigel Lamb

Simple, high-octane racing

The appeal of the Red Bull Air Race is simple. Anyone of any age can understand its formula of: man + machine – penalties = time.

One by one, each racer, after spending hours with their teams mapping out the fastest route through pairs of large inflatable pylons (called airgates), sets their time. Success and failure are separated by the tiniest of margins.

Consistency is definitely key, especially this year. “I reckon that this year you could win the championship without winning a race,” Nigel says.

“The difference between winning and finishing in the lower points could be one turn that you didn’t get right, so you have to be so focused. But it’s a kid’s dream. You’ve got this machine: it’s your wings, and when it all goes well, it’s amazing.”