Meet Tessa Whittock: the DIY drifter and Hollywood stunt driver

“Yeah, there's been some hostility and some comments, but as long as you can take the banter but also give it back, I kind of stop it in its tracks.” Tessa Whittock revels in being a female in what's seen as a man's world. Drifting. Tuning. Wrenching. Stunt driving for billion dollar Hollywood blockbusters. “Sure, there’s that element of, ‘oh, because you’re a girl, you’re getting special treatment’,” she laughs, “or ‘you’ve qualified better than I have because you’re a woman’. No. It’s just how I drive. I’m better at it than you are.”

Tessa has crammed a heck of a lot into her 33 years. She’s an ex-investment banker who taught herself to drift on dirt using an old Suzuki Vitara with the four-wheel drive disengaged. “I’ve always been mad for cars and tractors because of my farm upbringing. I love a tractor! When I was 14, my dad had a friend who had an RX-7 which we took to Santa Pod. And there was this drift taxi. I got in – an R32 Skyline – and literally from that day forward I was like, ‘oh my God, how can I do this?’”

So, having blown up her first car the day after passing her test (a shonky Corsa) and quickly upgrading to some choice hot hatches (Fiesta ST and Corsa VXR Nürburgring Edition), Tessa saved up until she bagged a beloved Nissan R33 Skyline at just 21, and could take the art of going sideways pro.

Photos: Tom Barnes

Drifting can be a nomadic experience. Tessa reminisces about loading up her van with spares, hitching the Skyline onto a trailer and heading off across the UK, or to France, Germany, Italy or as far as Poland for a weekend’s tyre torture. “Like a lot of people I’d met my other half drifting, but I knew I wanted to compete. I did my first round in the UK and hated it because they were a*******s. I felt that I got treated unfairly, but I thought, you know what? I’ve saved quite a bit of money – I’ll go to Europe and compete instead.”

Besides being handy behind the wheel, a knack for diagnosing and fettling your car is essential too. “I feel like you need to as well because if you don’t understand what’s the matter with your car, you shouldn’t be driving it. I get told off a lot of the time for laying in my racesuit under a car doing something. But 95 per cent of drifting is getting ready for each event, making sure every nut and bolt is tight. Only five per cent is enjoying the drifting.”

Tessa’s next build is a ‘best of both worlds’ Supra, built to be easily switchable between smoky drift spec and lap time-shredding track day spec. “It’ll start at 600bhp but there’s a guy in the US who’s got his up to 1,200 horses – I could easily get up there”, she grins.

Balancing a drifting career, a ‘how to safely go sideways’ school and Frankenstein cars to build would probably be enough for most people. Not Tess. If she looks familiar it’s because you’ve watched the Rome car chase sequence from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and seen her stunt driving in a sequence with Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise himself.

“Alarms went off at 4am, to go to hair and makeup. I’ve got quite a lot of hair and they didn’t want to cut it, so I had to have a wig on that would survive jumping a Hummer down steps and crashing through walls. Then we’d head to set for about 6ish and be ready to start when Tom Cruise arrived.”

It’s as big budget as they come, but a lot of the chase was a one-shot chance. “I’d only get one, because usually the car breaks, so I had to be pretty on point with a lot of stuff. I did go training in both the Hummers, to get the hang of a Hollywood trick, the ‘hydro-brake’. It’s basically a hydraulic handbrake pedal, so you can lock the rears up and swing the car around with your foot, meaning the audience doesn’t see your hand pulling a big obvious stunt lever. Going from tarmac to cobbles is trickier than people might think,” Tessa says airily.

And you know she was good, because Tom’s requested her services for the next one. Expect something to go very sideways, soon.