Motorworld Read online

  It’s the same story in America, too, where the Farrah Fawcett hairdo of 1975 still reigns supreme.

  In Italy, even the policemenists look like they’ve just come off a catwalk. One I found, standing on a rostrum in the middle of a Roman square, was immaculate, as was his routine. Each wave of the hand, each toot of the whistle and each twist of the body was Pans People perfect. Never mind that the traffic was completely ignoring him, he looked good, and that’s what mattered. Looking good in Italy is even more important than looking where you’re going.

  Which is why I made a special effort to ensure my linen jacket was especially crumpled on my visit to Turin. The supercars may hail from Modena, and Alfa is up in Milan but, historically, Italy’s coach-builders clustered around the big boy — Fiat — Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino.

  And as they sat there, waiting for Agnelli to commission this or that, or maybe a customer to want something a little different, they were surrounded by the best art in the world. Show me someone who says there are more beautiful buildings than those in Italy, or more beautiful art, or clothes, and I’ll show you someone who’s never been there.

  When you’re surrounded by such magnificence, it’s bound to rub off. And that’s why, when a car manufacturer wants something really special, he picks up the phone and calls one of three men: Giorgio Guigaro, Sergio Pininfarina or Nuccio Bertone.

  Let me list a few of their past credits so you get the picture. The Mark One VW Golf and its coupé sister, the Scirocco. The Lexus Coupé. Every single Ferrari. The Isuzu Piazza. The Peugeot 205. The Peugeot 504 convertible. The Alfa 164. The Peugeot 605. All the recent Maseratis, the Fiat Coupé, the Opel Manta… how long have you got?

  And on top of this, the chaps roll up at various motor shows from time to time with ‘concept cars’ which then influence all the world’s other designers. It is not unreasonable to say that 80 per cent of all cars on the road in the world today were designed in, or influenced by, Turin.

  Turin is to car design what Melton Mowbray is to pork pies. I put this to Mr Guigaro. He said, ‘Er… I think Turin is to cars what Silicon Valley is to computers.’

  I didn’t catch what Mr Pininfarina said because you don’t listen when you’re in the presence of greatness, and believe me he is great. He designed the 355. That makes him God in my eyes.

  And there’s a priest in Maranello who might agree with this. Don Erio Belloi is the spiritual leader in the village where Ferraris are made and where the race team is based.

  On a Sunday, when the scarlet cars are out doing battle somewhere, this place is like a scene from The Omega Man, only Charlton Heston is at home watching the Grand Prix as well.

  I wanted to interview Erio badly about the town’s obsession with Ferrari, because I thought he’d moan a little bit about how the Formula One calendar clashed with his services.

  The first indication that this might not be the exact tack of the interview came when he said we could meet at any time on Sunday except when the Grand Prix was on. And the second came when I was shown into his study. Instead of bibles, the bookshelves were groaning under the weight of Ferrari memorabilia, and the walls were plastered with technical drawings of the 456, pictures of Enzo — to whom he administered the last rites — and Gilles Villeneuve, his favourite driver.

  Did he, I asked when the race finished, ever think unsaintly thoughts about other teams in the Grand Prix circus. ‘Yes,’ he replied a bit too quickly. ‘It is bad to think if someone else dies [Ferrari] will win, but there is a bit of that.’

  That’s what you’re dealing with in Italy when it comes to Ferrari. They don’t have a Queen or a Princess Diana. They don’t have cricket. They haven’t had an empire for 2500 years. But they don’t care because they’ve got Ferrari.

  Here is the only team to have won Le Mans and the Formula One World Championship in the same year. And not just once either, but three times. Here is the only team in the world that makes its own engines and its own chassis. Here is the team which has won more Grand Prix than anyone else.

  Italy has always been at the top of the sport, even before Ferrari came along in 1947. There was Maserati and, right up to the late fifties, Alfa Romeo too. In one year, Alfa were so dominant that their driver pulled into the pits on the last lap to get his car polished. Then it would look smart as it crossed the line.

  If Michael Shoemaker did that today, Murray Walker would have a duck fit.

  But do you know where all these old racing cars have ended up? Well it certainly isn’t Italy. If you want to find the best racing Alfas of yesteryear or the great GT Ferraris from the sixties, look in Switzerland or Britain or Japan.

  This is because they became so valuable no one would ever dare to take them out on the road. Largely, they sit in hermetically sealed museums, roped off and assaulted with air conditioning. Many will never turn a wheel again.

  And that, to an Italian, is just incomprehensible.

  Cuba

  The Caribbean: an arc of diamonds in a jewel-encrusted sea. Palm trees. Ice-white beaches. White-hot sun. And the gentle strains of Bob Marley to accompany your multicoloured, multi-cultural early-evening drink. From Trinidad in the south to Cancún in the north, it’s pretty much the same story, only the authors are different. Some of the islands were shaped by the British, some by the Dutch and others by the Spanish and French.

  But then there’s Cuba, whose most recent history was penned by Lenin. The colonial gloss is gone, or lost in the smoke from burning civilian planes which the Cuban air force has just shot down. Cuba could be one of the world’s most sought-after holiday destinations. But thanks to Castro, it’s beaten into 184th place by Filey.

  Let me explain by reviewing a restaurant in Havana. Called The 1830, it’s an elegant seafront property where a maître d’ from 1955 bows an effusive welcome and clicks his fingers, indicating that a hitherto unseen minion should park your car.

  Another click and another bowing minion, starched tea towel draped over his left arm, ushers you into one of the four dining rooms, each of which offers a fine view of the Gulf of Mexico.

  The tablecloths are white linen and the glassware is heavily leaded crystal. In 1955, this would have been one of the country’s top eateries where you would have rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway and Frank Sinatra.

  Today, it is still one of the city’s finest eateries but that’s like saying the Mahindra Jeep is one of India’s finest cars.

  The first indication that all was not well came when we examined the fixtures and fittings more closely. The wood in the door frames was held together with worms and everything looked as though it had last seen a lick of paint in 1958. Which is probably about right. It turned out too that the glass was not leaded. It was heavy because of all the dirt on it.

  Then there were the menus which talked of wild and exotic dishes, but none seemed to be available which is why I asked for spaghetti bolognese to start, followed by chicken and fresh vegetables.

  Fifteen minutes passed, followed by a further fifteen minutes. Then, we waited a quarter of an hour while fifteen minutes slid by and then, all of a sudden, we noticed another fifteen minutes had gone by. Fifteen minutes afterwards, one of the white uniformed waiters wheeled some food to our table on his trolley.

  There was my spaghetti bolognese and there too, surprisingly, were my vegetables, which looked as though they’d been put in the pan back when I’d applied for my visa. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want these vegetables with my chicken.’ ‘Certainly sir,’ said the waiter. Actually, he spoke no English so it could have been, ‘You miserable capitalist pig. I hope your wallet catches fire, fatty,’ but never mind.

  I knew the spaghetti was wrong just by looking at it. There was a crust on the sauce which indicated, correctly, that it was stone cold. Again the smiling waiter arrived who, when he understood what I was on about, plunged his finger into the bolognese and nodded. Yes indeed, sir. It is cold.

  Back it went and another fifteen minutes wen
t by as they heated it up. There are no microwaves in Cuba. When it returned, the grated cheese had melted and merged with the pasta, which had been under a grill for a quarter of an hour. But none of this mattered because there, in the sauce, was the dimple mark where the waiter’s finger had been for a wiggle.

  I simply shoved it away and sat back to enjoy the sounds of Mrs Mills on the piano. She was terrible and her instrument was worse but I forgot about it when the French windows imploded. The disco outside had begun to pump ‘Thriller’ out at 400,000 decibels but Mrs Mills was unmoved; she soldiered on with her rendition of some fifties’ favourite, proving what I’d begun to suspect. She was as deaf as one of the legs on her piano.

  Then I noticed the smiling waiter bearing down once again with his trolley and my plate of vegetables which, after another half hour in the pan, had begun to resemble soup, and my chicken. Or was it?

  To try to ensure they got a Michelin star, these people had obviously used one of the tyre company’s products in their cuisine and now I was charged with the task of eating it. It was impossible so, again, I gave up and reached for my drink.

  Which had gone. So keen were the staff to act like top-quality hosts and hostesses, they tended to clear your glass the instant you put it down, whether it was empty or not. According to the bill, I’d had eighteen daiquiris, whereas my head the following morning suggested I’d had none.

  The bill was £25 each, which explained why we were the only customers that night. Twenty-five pounds is what the average Cuban earns in five months. Cuba is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked.

  Since Russia went all lovey-dovey in 1991, aid to their former friend in the Caribbean has virtually dried up, which means petrol has soared to £2.50 a gallon and there are no takers for Castro’s nickel, or his cigars or even his sugar. Iberia is the only major airline that flies from Europe to Havana, so you need to be a determined and persistent tourist to actually get there.

  Then you have to find somewhere to stay. Cubans are banned from even the lobbies of the big hotels so the government feels free to charge what it likes for the rooms. And what it likes tends not to be what you and I like. They cost a bleeding fortune and all the services, being Russian, broke down four years ago and can’t be fixed because there are no spare parts.

  Against this sort of background, you would expect to find car-free streets but that simply isn’t the case. They are chock-full of, mostly, American cars from the forties and fifties.

  Even though America has had a trade embargo with Cuba for 30 years, ingenuity has kept these dinosaurs going… after a fashion.

  I mean, let’s face it: if, all of a sudden, no new cars were imported into Britain, you wouldn’t throw your Cavalier away just because one of the windscreen wipers had come off. And even if there were no Halfords on every street corner you still wouldn’t give up.

  You’d jury-rig some kind of device to clear the windscreen when it rains, and that’s what they’ve done in Cuba.

  And they’ve gone further too. You couldn’t possibly afford a can of brake fluid out there, even if you could find any, so they’ve worked out that a mixture of alcohol, sugar and shampoo does the job nearly as well.

  But what about the engine? Surely, if that goes bang and you can’t get parts, you really have had it? Nope. You simply remove the power unit from a Lada — and they were everywhere when the Russians were in town — and fit that instead.

  Most of the old cars out there have Lada engines these days, which is a little sad. We met one chap with an Aston Martin DB4, and he really believed that one day, when Castro is gone, it will fetch $100,000. Well, apart from the complete lack of paint, the total absence of any interior trim and the Lada engine coupled with a Moscovitch gearbox, he might be right.

  You see gullwing Mercedes-Benz, Chevvy Impalas, Cadillac Coupe de Villes and countless other rare breeds spluttering around on Lada power. And on every street corner, someone is hooking up a bucket of water to the mains power supply to recharge their 40-year-old battery.

  God knows how this works but the sparks and the steam suggest some kind of reaction happens in the bucket. Some kind of reaction happens at the power station, too, which, in rural Cuba, only supplies power for four hours a day.

  Che Guevara looks down on the desolation that his revolution helped to create. Communism and cars go together about as well as haddock and ice hockey.

  Obviously, any form of motorsport is right out of the question here, and not only because Che Guevara thought it was decadent. However, at weekends a few intrepid souls take their Lada-powered yank tanks to the old motorway out of Havana and race from bridge to bridge.

  This is not high-speed stuff. Indeed, most of them — particularly one car, which started on petrol but switched over to cheaper kerosene when the engine was hot — couldn’t even keep up with our Daihatsu tracking car.

  They also have sumo events where two cars go head to head and try to push each other over a line painted in chalk on the road. Exciting it’s not.

  Finding Che Guevara’s car, on the other hand, was. For twelve years it had been sitting in a garage, untouched and unloved, so that when we rolled into town no one even knew what sort of Chevrolet it was. And I know more about antique clocks than sixties’ Americana so I can’t enlighten you either, other than to say that it was knackered.

  Nothing worked. Because it was a ‘symbol of the revolution’ no one had been allowed to swap the V8 for a Lada unit or replace the fifties’ brake fluid with Wash ’n’ Go.

  We employed nine people at 50p a day each and set them to work on getting it going again while we went off to have some fun.

  I have become a keen diver in recent years and had cunningly written a piece in the script which required me to appear under the water with a tank strapped to my back, preferably by a reef near a deserted white beach.

  A small island off the south coast of Cuba was located, scouted and deemed to be perfect. They even had scuba gear there.

  And it came with the personal recommendation of two Dutch guys who were out there buying up seafront properties. ‘Oh yeah,’ they said. ‘It’s a great little island but you’ve got to get there first…’ And with that, they were gone, laughing strangely.

  The next morning we found out why. The aeroplane was a small twin-engined thing which, from a distance, looked like a farmyard animal. Closer inspection revealed that the brownness was a result of much rust.

  The tyres were flat and the engines were of a type that simply defied belief. If Karl Benz had come up with this version of internal combustion in the 1880s, he’d have given up and become a greengrocer.

  Inside, things became worse. Much worse. There were no windows and the seats were only half-fastened to the floor. Seat belts? Forget it.

  Miraculously, the engines fired and somehow the plane became airborne, I assume. Without windows it was hard to be sure but after five minutes I figured we would have hit something had we still been on the ground so I knew all was well.

  Then it wasn’t well at all because the entire cabin filled with smoke. No kidding, I had to endure a half-hour flight, not even being able to see that there were no windows. All I could see was those two Dutch guys laughing.

  But then we were down in what looked like paradise. Unusual birds sang strange songs in vivid trees. The water was aquamarine and the beaches really were as white as driven cocaine.

  A gaily coloured bus which looked like it might have been used by Stalin himself took us to the hotel, which sat right on the beach. Perfect. Er… no.

  Fashioned from concrete, it had water spurting from every air-conditioning unit but, surprisingly, the pool was empty. Good job too because in the scum which clung to the sides and floor I found life-forms that are in no books. David Attenborough could have made an entire series in it.

  Most of the guests were on the beach, where we found the bar, a straw edifice which oozed charm and tranquillity. But the reason why it was so peaceful was simple. It had no drin
k. No beer. No rum. No Coke. Nothing.

  And it was pretty much the same story in the dining room, though at least here there were some forlorn European honeymooners to laugh at as they picked their way through some rock-hard boiled eggs.

  You just know what had gone on in the poor bloke’s mind, before deciding to reject the Maldives and Mauritius and Antigua. I’ll take her somewhere exotic, somewhere none of her friends have been. She’ll be impressed. We’ll go to Cuba.

  Poor sods.

  They couldn’t even dive because we’d commandeered the only boat and the only two sets of scuba kit. And then the real fun and games began.

  Keith, the cameraman, has the buoyancy of balsawood and even when he wore a weight-belt that would have sunk a killer whale he was still having trouble getting below the surface, especially as he was burdened with an underwater camera which floated.

  I had problems of my own though. My buoyancy vest leaked like a sieve so that it was a jet-propulsion pack. The torrent of escaping air rushed me around the reef like Marine Boy and frightened away all the fish too.

  It was a pathetic spectacle. The world’s most revered broadcasting organisation and we had a cameraman who wouldn’t sink, a presenter who was doing Mach 2 and a director who couldn’t dive and was forced to hang around on the surface with a snorkel.

  Then our chartered captain had a heart attack. Probably from laughing at us.

  It took two days to film our opening sequence for the programme, then it was time for THAT flight back. We were nervous without any real need because we had a different plane, which had windows.

  And not much else. It had been built in Russia shortly after the war and last serviced in 1953. You would not believe how much smoke poured out of the engines as we trundled down the runway, dodging dogs, and lumbered into the air.

  But as we settled down, I appreciated the view, which really was exquisite. It was a perfect summer’s day, which meant one thing… thunderstorms.