TV presenter Tiff Needell recalls the day he thought his career as a civil engineer had come to the end of the road
In 1971, before the days when I got into motor racing, I was doing a five-year sandwich degree course in civil engineering sponsored by the construction firm George Wimpy. I spent every winter at university and every summer I'd be out working. We covered all the different divisions of the trade.
At that time they were building the M5 motorway and I was put in charge of a section north and south of Michaelwood services, right at the southernmost end. Just south of that was an existing road that went into the town of Cutting, on a bend, that the motorway had to cross.
The engineering system to deal with such a situation was that, first, you would dig the motorway from both directions north and south up to the existing road. After that you would build a bypassing bridge, then you could cut the old road out in the middle.
Unfortunately, my road curves coming from the north and south missed each other when the bit was cut away in the middle. I had to do some drastic fudging so everything met up again.
I was only out by about 3in, but in the precision engineering world that's massive. I was terrified that the council engineer would come and do a spot check. To be honest, looking back, they would probably have laughed it off, but I was only 19 at the time. I thought my engineering career was on the line.
Soon after I won a racing car in a magazine competition and the rest is history. But to this day when you go past Michaelwood on the M5 there is still a tiny, almost imperceptible kink in the road that I am responsible for. Even now, when I drive down that bit of motorway, my heart sinks a little.
Tiff Gear: The Autobiography of Tiff Needell (JH Haynes) is out now. He was talking to Graham Snowdon
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/apr/23/tiff-needell-my-greatest-mistake
Cobham Premier League Tobin tax Lloyds Banking Group Floyd Mayweather Savings
No comments:
Post a Comment