What It’s Like To Drive A Car With Hand Controls

It’s probably fair to say that most of us that drive take for granted that it’s a physically undemanding task, even if properly hustling on a track. Our feet handle the pedals, our hands do steering and gears, and all the work is very evenly distributed. Unless it’s in something old and heavy, or something capable of immense Gs, driving ranks somewhere on the physical exertion scale alongside making a cup of coffee.

But what if you remove your legs from the equation? What if you don’t have any choice but to have your upper body do all the work?

I’m stood on the drizzly airfield at Bicester Heritage to find out, looking at a Subaru BRZ. The last time I saw it, it was on a lift in Mission Motorsport's workshop, repaired from a Cat N write-off state with parts sourced from eBay, and I was doing my best not to be a total liability with a ratchet.

Between now and November, Mission Motorsport – a charity that works with injured and ill forces personnel to rehabilitate them through motorsport – are transforming this BRZ from a Category N write-off into a fully-fledged racing machine. The plan is to run it in the Race of Remembrance, a 24-hour endurance race the charity holds every Remembrance weekend at Anglesey Circuit.

Having made my utterly tiny contribution to the build, I’ve been offered a go at driving it myself while hoping nothing I did snaps off at high speed. The three-driver squad that’s set to race it are all wheelchair-bound and paralysed from at least the waist down. That means the BRZ has been fitted with hand controls. This is going to take some learning, and quite a lot of instinct-fighting.

To show me the ropes, I settle into the passenger seat next to Steve ‘Dusty’ Binns. Dusty, now 61, discovered as a younger man that he had an aptitude for jumping out of planes, and served in the Parachute Regiment during the Falklands conflict. It was 20 days after returning home that he came off his motorbike, an accident that left him without the use of everything from his chest downwards.

He’s spent more of his life in a wheelchair than out of it, and in that time has been involved with pretty much every wheelchair-based sport out there, but it was a lifelong love for motorsport that got him involved with MM around seven years ago. He’s already competed for the charity, running the 2021 Race of Remembrance in an adapted Morgan Plus Four.

Unsurprisingly, Dusty makes this look incredibly easy. Once the car’s warmed up, he’s flinging it around Bicester’s bijou half-mile test track with abandon, sliding it about and really testing the abilities of the slightly witless six-speed auto ’box.

After these sighting laps, I swap sides. Dom Pearson – a former Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineer who was injured in a training accident – is guiding me. The car’s controlled with a single lever fitted behind the wheel, to the right of the steering column. Pull it towards you to accelerate, push it away to brake. Simple, right?

Well, consider the fact that modulating it completely occupies your right arm. That leaves your left doing all the steering. Firmly gripping the wheel at nine o’clock, I trundle my way out onto the track.

Fighting the instinct to touch the pedals is actually the easy part. They’re still there and fully usable, but once you’ve familiarised yourself with the controls, they may as well not be.

It’s actually driving with any finesse that’s a bit trickier. The throttle is immediate and snappy, the lever’s limited travel making it difficult to smoothly modulate. Slowing isn’t as bad – we’re used to brake pedals not having much give, so it’s a more natural feeling. Generally, though, my first few exploratory laps are on the jerky side.

At this speed, the power steering makes manoeuvring a doddle, but boy does that change as we start to pick up the pace. As speed increases, not having both hands contributing to the push-pull action of steering makes the task incredibly physical.

Once I’m more confident with the way the car responds, it’s the growing pain in my left arm that becomes the abiding sensation. You have to hold on tight and properly haul the wheel around, and after a few reasonably rapid laps, I’m struggling to maintain a grip purely from my own sweat coating the faux leather. Gross, I know.

MM’s workshop manager, Aston Dimmock, tells me a tank of fuel can last around an hour and a half at race pace. To keep this up for that long, you’d need a lot more upper body strength than me (admittedly not difficult).

But again, the team that’ll be driving the car don’t have a choice. They rely entirely on their upper body – in some cases, just their chest upwards – for all their mobility, so they have the physical attributes needed for this.

It’s not just driving that poses more of a challenge for them during the race, though. Consider driver changes, which require the driver to haul themself out by grabbing onto the roll cage. To assist this, Aston is looking into fitting a modified cage that’ll both offer something to grab onto and a bigger exit aperture.

Then there’s the matter of race licences. Dusty’s already qualified, but there are two more MM beneficiaries set to drive: Dom, who guided me in the car, and Mike Smith, an ex-RAF man who, like Dusty, lost the use of his legs after a bike crash. They both need to get their licences between now and November. This involves demonstrating not just that you can safely drive in a race situation, but that you can quickly exit in the event of a crash. Dusty shows me his ‘exit video,’ in which he hauls himself out of MM’s Morgan racer and flops onto an inflated airbed – not a luxury that’ll be afforded during the race.

A few more laps later, with confidence built up and the BRZ’s brakes on the smelly side, I pull back in, more physically spent than I’ve ever been from driving anything besides a go kart.

It was a workout just doing a few laps of this little sprint course, and I can’t possibly imagine driving like this for over an hour at a time. Getting back into my own car, I’m left with not only an overwhelming sense of relief, but even more respect than before for those who don’t let their injuries get in the way of doing what they love most: driving.