David Coulthard on the flip side

Retired grand prix star David Coulthard still has unfinished business with Formula 1.

Even after winning 13 GPs and finishing as runner-up in the 2001 F1 world championship, the speedy Scotsman admits there is something he still wants to do in an F1 car.

“I want to do it upside down,” Coulthard tells carsales.

He is not joking, even though he has a reputation as a prankster.

“It’s not dangerous. The science proves it works,” he dead-pans.

Coulthard is a brand ambassador for Mercedes-Benz and his other retirement projects include a television production company and an events business.

But he keeps fresh and gets his thrills with regular runs as a display driver for Red Bull Racing in one of its older RB7 cars with a howling V8 engine.

He has turned donuts on the helipad on top of the towing Burj Al Arab in Dubai, raced a taxi in downtown Cape Town in South Africa and skidded sideways in Mumbai in India.

One stunt, when he sprinted across the Bosphorus Bridge that links Asia and Europe in Istanbul, Turkey, cost him a 20 Euro fine for failing to pay his toll.

Coulthard says he enjoys the action but has been thinking seriously about an upside-down run.

“I’d have to go 140 or 150 miles per hour (225-250km/h). That’s not hard,” he says.

“The car only weighs 700 kilos and it makes 2000 kilos of downforce. So it will stick.

“The wings don’t know which way they are working. The car doesn’t know it’s that way around.”

But he knows there could be a drama, as an upside-down engine spinning at 15,000 revs could run out of oil and explode.

“The engine knows it’s upside-down. And the driver would be hanging on the belts. You don’t want an engine failure.”

An electric motor might work better and Mercedes-Benz has a Formula E single-seater racing car, but Coulthard eliminates it.

“Formula E cars don’t have any downforce,” he says.

Mercedes-Benz has run an upside-down project once before, when it staged a stunt with one of its SLS ‘gullwing’ road cars in 2010.

It was used in a television commercial to promote Michael Schumacher’s return to Formula 1 with the Silver Arrows squad, after his retirement from Ferrari with a total of seven world titles.

Coulthard says he is happy in retirement, 9kg heavier than his racing weight, but gets emotional as he describes a lap of his home track in Monte Carlo.

He won the Monaco GP twice and says hot-lapping the street circuit that is the slowest track on the F1 tour still makes him feel good.

“I never thought about the danger in F1. But I’m basically risk adverse in everything else I do. I never rattle down a hill on a mountain bike,” he says.

“I never miss driving a Formula 1 car, but talking about Monaco I can feel the movement in my body. I feel it.

“You need to live that track like you would do in your home if the lights went out. You have to know exactly what you’re doing and where you are.

“And the party afterwards, when you win…”