IF YOU looked into the skies over Oxfordshire in the past few months, there’s a fair chance you would have seen Nigel Lamb zipping overhead like a motorised wasp.

That is because the 58-year-old from Thame has been gearing up to defend his title as Red Bull Air Race World Champion at Ascot Racecourse this weekend.

The contest will feature 14 pilots racing each other at speeds up to 210mph over land and water, dodging through inflatable pillars.

Pilots endure gravitational forces of up to G10 – almost three times as much as Formula 1 drivers.

Devised by the Red Bull think-tank, the company said the initial goal was to create “the most advanced aerial challenge the world had ever seen,” and says what has evolved far exceeds those expectations.

Rhodesian-born Mr Lamb races with Breitling Racing Team in an MXS aircraft. Weighing 580kg, it has a top speed of 253mph and a wing-span of eight metres.

He earned his world title in the 2014 season, and now has to defend it over a series of races which will take him to Japan, Croatia, Budapest, Las Vegas and Dallas this year.

But he said Ascot, his home race, will be the toughest challenge.

The father-of-three said: “To win a home race is unbelievable – I would really like to win Ascot this year. I’d like to win everywhere, but if I was only to win one race this year it would be Ascot.

“Actually it’s very difficult to win a home race because of that distraction.”

Competitors get a couple of test flights on the track, each one a few minutes, before they have to fly it for real.

Mr Lamb was born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1956 and was inspired to take up flying by his father, an RAF fighter pilot in the Second World War. He joined the Rhodesian Air Force at 18 and went on to fly piston aircraft jets and helicopters until 1980, when he left to join the Marlboro Aerobatics Team in England.

In 1986 he started competing in aerobatics events, and is still the only pilot to have won the British National Unlimited Aerobatic Championship eight times in a row.

And he said he has never been scared: “I’ve done it since 2004, I’ve never found it scary, it’s just fantastically challenging and phenomenally exciting.”

As for danger, he said: “How dangerous is it giving a Swiss army knife to a five-year-old? It’s all about experience.

“That doesn’t mean to say the older you get the safer you are.

“It’s what I’ve done all my life, I have a wife and three children and none of them want to see me come to grief.”

Find out more information at redbullairrace.com.