My Life & Cars – Mark Higgins, James Bond stunt driver, racing driver
You’ve seen the DB10, now meet the man who brings it to life in Spectre. The name’s Higgins, Mark Higgins…
‘My mum did autocross and also rallied on the Isle of Man. At the time the Mini was the car to have: it was your road car, your night-rally car, your stage-rally car – it did everything. So a Mini Cooper S was quite a cool thing. My dad was a mechanic and ran the workshop for the Volvo dealership on the island. I was born in 1971, and I remember driving some of the company cars while sitting on his lap when I was five years old. We got up to 80mph at Jurby airfield!’
With formative years such as those, it’s almost inevitable that rallying would become Mark Higgins’ calling. In fact, it seemed as if the necessary skills were already coursing through his veins: ‘It was my mum who really got my dad into rallying. He had an orange Mk1 Escort Mexico and was doing an airfield event. I was eight, and he sat me on his knee and I was drifting the car left and right. He looked across at the co-driver and said, “How was he doing that?”
As soon as he possibly could, Higgins got properly behind the wheel. ‘On the Isle of Man you can pass your full licence when you’re 16,’ he explains. ‘So at one minute past midnight on my 16th birthday I was out with my dad. And I remember driving back from the test in my auntie’s Mk1 Fiesta – I was flat out the wrong way on the TT course…
‘My first road car was a part-ex at my dad’s garage, a 1256cc Opel Cadet, rear-wheel drive. It was a great little car. The roads were a lot quieter then; we’d go out at night… You’d work just to put petrol in the car, and then go out over all the rally roads and think you were Ari Vatanen.’
Higgins’ first rally car was ‘an old shed’ of an Opel Manta. ‘My dad said, “We can’t really afford to do this,” but he’d help me all the time with spannering on the car, and I’d be down working at his garage until two in the morning trying to get it going. I did my first stage rally, still aged 16, and I was third quickest on my first stage – and then crashed on the next one. Hero to zero!
‘Then I sold everything, took a bank loan out – I told them it was a “business opportunity” – and bought a Golf GTI 16v when I was 17. I did the Manx National Rally and later in the year we did the Manx International, and won the Star of the Rally award.’
By the early ’90s Higgins was beginning to get noticed, which led to a place in the Shell Scholarship final for 1992 that featured the ‘Brat Pack’ of British rallying: Richard Burns, Robbie Head, Dom Buckley, Alister McRae, Jonny Milner… and Mark. It wasn’t to be a good experience for Higgins and his Peugeot 309 GTI, however: ‘I wrote the car off at Silverstone during the assessment. I ran out of talent, hit a tree, and broke Bertie Fisher’s ribs, which didn’t really go down well with Peugeot…’ Presumably it didn’t go down that well with Fisher, either.
Nevertheless, Higgins had a deal in the bag. ‘I’d already signed for Vauxhall for 1992 in the British Junior Championship, alongside [lead driver] Dave Metcalfe. I have that Nova GTE in my garage today. It’s my first factory car.
‘Metcalfe was the main man at Vauxhall at the time and he helped me a lot. I was with them for all of ’92, but tragically Dave was killed in a road accident at the end of the year. There was talk of getting a drive in the Group A Calibra, but I’d had a bit of an up-and-down year; I’d made a few mistakes, and at the end of the season they brought in Dai Llewellyn to drive the new Astra and supported me with a semi-works drive in 1993. We had a lot of problems with the car, and I made a couple of mistakes – I had speed, but crashes were never far away. We were all like that back in day, the cars were a bit of a handful then.’
Asquith Autosport boss Richard Asquith could clearly see the potential, as he offered Mark a drive in the Castrol Honda Civic VTEC for ’94. ‘I have that car in the garage too,’ grins Higgins. ‘It was probably one of the best years I’ve ever had. Richard helped so many young drivers – a great guy, he did it for the love of it. We did 11 rallies that season and it was just incredible. We nearly won the British Group N championship.’
Meanwhile, between rallies Higgins had been working at the Forest Experience Rally School in Wales. ‘One night the owner said he was thinking of selling up. So I said, ‘Would you take my mum and dad’s house in part exchange…?”’
It’s a measure of his father’s belief in Mark that rather than fly off the handle, he saw the positives: ‘Fair play to him: we sold everything on the Isle of Man and moved across. We ran that school for the best part of 20 years.’
As Mark began progressing towards bigger teams, one of his early outings in a Nissan Sunny GTi in 1996 led to catastrophe. ‘I broke my back in Kiedler, which nearly set me back massively. I was so worried about losing my drive that the hospital made a cradle for me and I actually got back in a car three weeks later, to see if I could move with a full cast around me.’
Then came Higgins’ year: 1997, and the British Rally Championship at its peak. ‘We were the underdogs as we didn’t have a full Kit Car like the Renault and Ford, but Nissan did develop a Kit Car version and we had a bit more power and 18-inch wheels, and that was really competitive against the full Kit Cars. It was a great car: not the quickest, but a lovely car to drive.’
After last-minute drama on the Manx that prevented Higgins from winning the rally, the championship title was nevertheless his. As British champion, he was surely on his way to going stage-to-stage against the likes of Colin McRae in the World Championship, but somehow it didn’t happen. Why? ‘The Hellmera,’ says Higgins, with audible exasperation in his voice. He means the Nissan Almera F2 Kit Car that replaced the Sunny and proved to be a complete disaster. It was a ‘fork in the road’ moment, and Higgins chose, on reflection, the wrong path.
‘At the end of 1997 I had three contracts on the table to continue in the British Championship. But Nissan had the carrot of going to the World Championship to do five rallies, which was obviously where I wanted to get to. The Almera, though, was just a nightmare. That car really kicked me. Nissan got rid of me at the end of the year – and in a not really nice way in San Remo, despite having had not a bad run.’
Higgins was back in the BRC in ’99 with Volkswagen, and returned to Vauxhall for 2000, missing out on the championship by one point. Then his career arrived at a fork in the road once again. It was the famous ‘Battle of Britain’ Rally GB at the end of 2001, where McRae, Burns, Mäkinen and Sainz were all fighting for the championship. Higgins was given the third works Ford entry in place of François Delecour and was running brilliantly in the top five, before disaster struck the rally and the Ford team.
‘Carlos had a crash, hit a spectator. Colin had already had his big crash, and Ford decided to withdraw me because of the potential of a young driver crashing. Malcolm [Wilson] was in tears when he told me. Even the spectator who’d been hit wrote in to say don’t pull out, but it was a Ford decision.’ Once again, fate was not on Higgins’ side.
Over the next few years he rallied all over the world, winning and trying to work his way back into the WRC full-time, but to no avail. Nevertheless, he was back on the top step of the podium in 2005 when he won the British Championship at the wheel of the Stobart-sponsored Focus WRC, before the championship switched to Group N for 2006 and Higgins took his third and final title in a Subaru. ‘I did a few years of the Group N World Championship, worked as Pirelli’s test driver, and had the best part of ten years rallying in China,’ he says. His rallying career finished in 2017, but his talents would still be in demand…
‘The film work came about totally by accident,’ he recalls. ‘I’d been doing a bit of TV work for Top Gear and Fifth Gear, but I was at the Autosport Awards and Ben Collins asked if I would be up for working on a Bond film. Later, I was on holiday and I got a phone call saying, “What are you doing next week? We need you in Italy for three months.’ They wanted a rally driver because it was Quantum of Solace, the scene in the quarry…
‘It was quiet for a year and a half after that, but then I did Fast & Furious and got into the other Bonds: Skyfall and the last two. I’ve also been Batman, and in the latest Fast & Furious.’
He picks out the one-off Aston Martin DB10 from Spectre and the E46 M3-based DB5 from No Time to Die as being the most fun cars to drive for the movies. ‘There was a scene when we were on a coastal road with a helicopter and a sunset – it was a bit of a surreal moment really. I remember going to watch the films with my dad when I was a kid!’
Yet one event on his home island has brought Higgins global fame on YouTube arguably beyond all his other exploits. In 2011 Higgins took on the TT course during a break in race week. ‘It was Subaru America’s idea. Originally it was going to be my brother David [also a multiple championship-winning rally driver], as he was contracted to them, but then I got a call two weeks beforehand.
‘It’s something I’d wanted to do all my life since watching Tony Pond going round in the Rover Vitesse. We broke the record on the first lap.’ And then came perhaps the greatest ‘save’ ever caught on video camera…
‘I’d always watched the bikes go flat through the bottom of Bray Hill, so I thought it’s got to be flat in the car, and it was – just about – on my own. But when we put a passenger in, the whole dynamics of the car changed and the rest is history!
‘It all started going wrong at 155mph, and I was just throwing lock at it – on the lock stops at one point. If it hadn’t come back from there it wasn’t coming back, but when you’re doing it you’re just thinking about looking forward and not giving up, because as soon as you give up you’re done. I was dabbing the brakes, playing around with stuff – there was a lot going on. The journalist [the poor guy in the passenger seat] was really calm. I think he’d been watching rally videos and thought that was going to happen at every corner!’
Higgins returned in 2014 with a new-shape car, and went faster still, before returning in 2016 with a car built specially for the job by Prodrive. With 600bhp – effectively a derestricted WRC car with a different body on top – he achieved an incredible average lap of 128.7mph.
When it comes to road cars his history is a little more sparse, and despite competing on gravel he’s never owned an Impreza, Evo, or Cosworth. ‘I had a 200SX as a company car when I was at Nissan, which was great fun as it was rear-wheel drive and went sideways. In my years of motorsport I had company cars, but I wasn’t driving for manufacturers who had particularly fancy cars at the time. The first fast car I actually bought was a BMW 535d – we put an LSD in it and it was remapped. Now I’ve got a 435d – I’ve always gone back to that diesel engine, even though I’ve had M3s. I really enjoy motorbikes too, both enduro and trackdays.’
Today, Higgins is an established professional in the film industry, but his passion is clear: ‘Film work’s been interesting, but I have to say, I do miss my rallying. If a rallying thing came along I’d be straight on it. I’ll have to get out in a car before I’m too old – I’ve got a few years left!’
