Feature in The Look in The Mirror magazine
February 17th 2001

She spends her working days driving some of the fastest, most exotic cars on our roads, but it is surprising Vicki Butler-Henderson has the confidence to get behind the wheel at all following a terrifying incident in her childhood.

When the Top Gear star was just 12, she saw her mother thrown from a car and left for dead on a busy dual carriageway in a horrific crash. Her mum Valerie was left fighting for her life in intensive care after the accident, which Vicki, now 29, says was the most frightening moment of her life.

"The worst thing is that I felt very guilty about it for a long time afterwards," she says. "I'd insisted on riding my pushbike back from the station after she'd picked me up from school, so mum was following me in the car.

"She'd also got my little brother Charles, who was then about five, with her, but luckily he escaped with just bruises. I heard a huge bang as I cycled along with mum behind me. The other driver was having a heart attack, I think, and hit mum's car. Mum was thrown out and lay in the road unconscious.

"I remember throwing my bike down and running across the busy road to get to her which, looking back on it, was very dangerous in itself. Luckily some people had stopped and one of them was a nurse. They got an ambulance and mum was rushed to hospital, by then on the verge of life and death.

"She was in hospital for three months and had broken every bone in her body down her right-hand side. The first time I went to see her she had her jaw all wired up and there were all these wires sticking out of her. It was awful."

Amazingly, that horrific crash never put Vicki off getting behind the wheel. Perhaps it is because driving is in her genes. Born in Essex and raised on a Hertfordshire farm, Vicki comes from a line of racing enthusiasts. Her grandfather Lionel regularly competed in kart races and his son Guy, Vicki's father, raced in the British Karting team. Vicki's brother Charles, now 22, is a racing driver and instructor.

"Being raised on a farm - arable and pigs, so we had the land and the smell - I'd learned to drive a tractor by the time I was 12," smiles Vicki, who admits she was, and still is, a real tomboy.

"From a very early age I'd sat on daddy's knee as he drove tractors, so it was in my blood, I suppose. I'd also help out with the bailing during harvest and all the other jobs, so I was very fit and active."

Although she is very well-spoken, thanks to a wealthy background which saw her educated at one of the country's top girls' schools - The Perse School in Cambridge - Vicki is very down-to-earth. She loves nothing more than a few beers and a curry, and talking about her passion for racing.

"One day I asked daddy if he would buy me a proper racing kart, which he did," she says. "We then went racing every weekend, which was great fun. They were proper two-stroke karts with 100cc engines.

"I raced karts from the age of 12 to about 17. After that I passed my driving test and started racing single-seater cars at the big circuits like Brands Hatch and Silverstone.

"I was determined to reach Formula One, but the plan fell to pieces quite early on because there was no way I could get the budget to race in Formula Three for a full season. This was 1989, when the markets had crashed and nobody would put up the £30,000 funding for me."

Vicki then ventured into journalism as a road tester and writer for magazines such as Car Mechanics, What Car and Auto Express. For her first job she was based in Peterborough, where she shared a house with four men.

"We had such fun. All the boys looked after me, they were very protective and I looked after them," she says with a smile. " Just platonically, of course. We had a great laugh, buying pints for 70p down the local disco. It was a fun time in my life."

Talking of boys, romance is something Vicki's not keen to talk about. She has got a boyfriend but admits that relationships conflict with her hectic life.

"I've been so busy yet finally I've met someone who wants to be more a part of my life than anyone else before," she says. "But I'm just too independent sometimes for a relationship. I have no time to ask anyone else for their opinion. He doesn't even know I've just bought a £5,500 Ducati Monster motorbike, something I've wanted for years."

She also has no desire to have children. "When I was younger I thought I'd be married with kids by now. I was very broody right up until my sister Charlotte, who's 30, had her son last year. But it put me right off. My nephew's the most beautiful thing ever, but I just don't want my own at all."

Vicki, who shares a house in Hertfordshire with brother Charles, is happy to be one of the lads, belying her glamorous TV image. She admits she can't cook and lives on toasted sandwiches.

"I bought myself a Breville two years ago and it's like my oven. I make everything with it, it's a godsend," she says. "I'm sure my diet is so unhealthy that I'll probably drop dead in a couple of weeks.

"Only last Christmas my family came to mine for lunch. Mum gave me this turkey and all the stuff that goes with it and I said 'I can't do it, mum, I just can't do it'. In the end Charles and I just pushed a whole orange into it and stuffed it in the oven. We didn't have a clue."

Vicki admits her outspoken nature and incredible knowledge of cars and all things mechanical often intimidates men.

"I'll be at a party and they'll come up and ask my views on what they should buy in whatever price range, and I give them the advice but they don't listen at all. I find that quite annoying, especially when all you'd rather talk about is sex and boozing," she says with a laugh.

"I was at a car exhibition recently and this woman came up and asked me for an autograph for her son, who was too frightened to come up himself. She told me he'd said I was a bit of a man-eater.

"Also, I do have some strange fans. On Top Gear I tend to use words like 'spanking' and 'flashing' a lot to describe cars, but some people have got the wrong end of the stick and thought that this was what I got up to in the boudoir. Still, I suppose it's nice to know I'm entertaining people of all ages."

Her spontaneous nature has got her into all sorts of scrapes. Her most embarrassing moment was while filming for Top Gear, just outside a monastery in Italy.

"I was absolutely bursting to go to the loo so the boys in the crew said they'd walk a bit further away and let me go behind one of the cars parked on the road," she recalls with a chuckle.

"All of a sudden I heard this car come round the sharp hairpin bend and the man in it was apparently the monsignor of the monastery. The boys said he drove past with a big grin on his face.

"I'm one of those people who always seem to get into scrapes, but I always have a laugh, that's for sure."