Motorworld Page 8

  But there will always be anti-establishment figures who want to bring down free thought and democracy. Idealism will never go away, it just surfaces every few years with a different corporate identity.

  And in the 1990s it’s back under the environmentalist banner. This time, though, the idealists are really on to something because in their quest to bring down commercialism and give power to the people, they have touched a raw nerve. If we carry on like this, the planet will die. In five minutes of geological time, we have turned paradise into a rubbish skip. The Dutch will drown.

  And the Swiss have gone for it big time. In 1985, someone with a beard announced that the forests in Switzerland were dying and that drastic action was needed, right now, if the whole country wasn’t to become Europe’s first desert. He even gave the problem a worrying name — Wallestappen.

  This terrified everyone: their green and lush country had cancer. The green movement got a toehold, which is all it ever needs to put a stranglehold on common-sense politics and lower speed limits were introduced, not for safety reasons but for the sake of the environment.

  They even talked about an immediate overnight ban on all cars without catalytic converters. Well that’s just great — a million cars off to the scrap heap, no compensation for the owners and the polluted air from factories in northern Italy and southern Germany still tumbling over the borders.

  Today, there is more wooded area in Switzerland than there was ten years ago but, even so, surveys show that 70 per cent of Swiss people still think the forests are dying.

  The forests, in fact, are fine. It’s Switzerland’s car enthusiasts who are dying. A recent count showed there are only seven left.

  One is Franco Sbarro, whose factory and school is in the twee little lakeside town of Grandson. Here he teaches students from all over the world how to design cars, an art he practises down the road in his workshop.

  This is a remarkable place because slung up in the rafters you’ll find a couple of BMW M1s, several rare and exotic motorcycles and the odd GT40. And that’s not all because one room is stuffed full of engines. He has a couple of 3.3 Porsche turbo units, a Ferrari V12 and even a Merlin from a WW2 Spitfire.

  Customers simply pick an engine and Sbarro tosses a few styling ideas at them. Maybe sir would like a mid-engined Golf? Or perhaps a Fiat Cinquecento-type car with a Lamborghini 12-cylinder motor? Anything is possible.

  I drove a car that had started out in life as a Ferrari Testarossa but which had been stripped of its original body and equipped with something truly outlandish in plastic. It had no windscreen, looked like it had just landed and had two huge tubes running down the flanks. These acted as rollover bars but also fed cool air from the front of the car into the mid-mounted engine.

  Then there was the swimming-pool-blue car. This one had a Jaguar V12 engine mounted at the back, but that was all it shared in common with a normal car. It looked like something U.F.O.’s Commander Straker would dream about driving. It didn’t really work though because it had a 75-foot turning circle and a steering system where the wheel was connected to the front wheels via a vast drum of yoghurt.

  What is wrong with this picture? In Switzerland, there are said to be eight million guns in the hands of the six million population. Kalashnikovs are fine and can be bought for about £300. Grenade launchers are acceptable too — and they’re even less. But the TVR Griffith is too loud, so it had been banned.

  It was also not as fast as it should have been. Indeed, it was not as fast as a Metro but this, said Sbarro, was because it isn’t finished. It was designed simply as a styling exercise, a car to turn heads and snap knicker elastic, something it did rather well. I got through three pairs in an hour.

  It’s odd to find such remarkable cars being made in Switzerland and I put this very point to Monsieur Sbarro, who answered quickly, ‘Ah yes. But I am Italian. I just live here.’

  It’s just about the same story down the road at Rinspeed. This little outfit started out in life as a tuning workshop but has now moved into full-scale production with the aluminium-bodied Roadster.

  It has a supercharged, 5.0-litre Ford Mustang V8 engine, rear tyres like lawn rollers and an interior that simply must have been designed by artist Roger Dean. To complete the picture, the test car I drove was bright orange.

  Again, quite a surprise to find such a car being made in Switzerland. Er, well it isn’t. It’s actually built in America.

  The last true Swiss car company was Monteverdi, which made some beautiful and very fast machines until the late seventies but these were styled in Italy, powered by Detroit engines and Monteverdi is a very unSwiss name, if you ask me.

  The Swiss will tell you that many cars have been made there over the years but really, they can’t have been serious ventures because I hadn’t heard of one.

  And anyway, we’re talking here about a country where there is no motorsport. When Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes left the road at Le Mans in 1955, killing 88 spectators, the rest of the world mourned but Switzerland simply banned all forms of competitive track-based car racing. And because it’s still in force today, the Swiss Touring Car Championship is staged in Germany and France.

  Cheesy. Not my grin. The man. Cheesy was one of those people who could put a smile on anyone’s face. In the villages, he chugs along on his vintage motorcycle and sidecar combo but, on the open road, he prefers the thrill of two-wheeled motoring so we rode along like this for, oh, about twenty miles. If he’s caught, he faces life imprisonment.

  The Swiss have lost their love for cars, but you can’t say the same about their relationship with the motorcycle. Outside Japan, they have the highest two-wheeler ownership levels in the world, and we’re not talking about miserable little mopeds either.

  The streets are chock-full of chopped-down, beefed-up Harley-Davidsons and Yamaha V-Maxes, all of which are far too noisy to be legal. And yet this is deemed acceptable.

  There is also the Ecomobile, a motorbike with an enclosed cabin and quadraphonic sound, that looks like a cross between a helicopter and an egg. It’s a pretty groovy device this, with little stabiliser wheels that drop down when you stop, but it costs £50,000 which is a bit off-putting. Swiss labour rates are blamed and it’s a shame because I rather liked it, in the same way that I find Kate Moss attractive. She isn’t… but you know what I mean.

  I will say though that there was something desperately clinical about it. It was a bike, but it wasn’t, somehow. It was too high-tech, too clean and too functional for that. And it wasn’t a car, either, because it didn’t have enough wheels. It was neither here nor there.

  And the same went for the Love Ride we encountered. This was a Sunday morning meet where a couple of thousand Hell’s Angels tore around the countryside on their Harleys with Peter Fonda at the head of the column… raising money for charity.

  There was something very unthreatening about the whole show. I spoke with a guy who hadn’t washed his hair for twelve years, or cut it for six. He hadn’t shaved in a month or bathed in a year and he was bedecked in leathers and filthy denims.

  But he wasn’t scary because on the back of his jacket it said, Hell’s Angels — Swiss Chapter, and there is something very comfy, reassuring even, about anything with the word ‘Swiss’ in it. It’s like beating someone to death with the Mail on Sunday.

  Plus, instead of the goat’s blood I expected to find in his glass, there was orange juice. Had he ever murdered a virgin or kicked someone’s teeth in, I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I have a fantastic collection of milk-carton tops. Would you like to see them?’

  Mad, but what do you expect from a country that has declared war on the car, even though it failed to declare war on Hitler; a country that finds the AK47 acceptable but has outlawed the TVR Griffith.

  This is not a place visitors can fathom easily. I suggest you don’t even bother trying.

  Vietnam

  When we were choosing which countries to feature in Motorworld, there were important consid
erations. Would we get a suntan? Were the girls good-looking? How much was beer? If we were satisfied on these fronts, we’d ask whether there were enough motoring-related stories within the country, and whether each would back a central proposition.

  In Italy, all the stories would be about passion. In Detroit, we had a social tale to tell. In India, we wanted to know why so many people were killed on the roads.

  The tricky bit was making sure that the story each week was different. Having done four-wheel drive to death in Iceland other countries with lots of rugged terrain went out of the window.

  The BBC executives understood this and nodded sagely whenever we discussed it. But why, they kept on asking, are you going to Vietnam? There aren’t any cars there. It’s communist. What if they think you’re American? How the hell will you get there? What about visas? And, from the accounts department, ‘How much is it going to cost?’

  Frankly, my answers were rubbish. I put on my serious face and talked in long sentences, using the words ‘whom’ and ‘synergy’ a lot, but the real reason I wanted to go was much simpler.

  A year earlier, while very drunk in a Wandsworth pasta restaurant, a friend who had emigrated to Saigon told me what happened in the city centre on a Sunday evening.

  He explained that a thousand or more teenagers climbed onto their mopeds and rode round a preordained route. And he said they were all dolled up with no place to go because they don’t have enough money. They had to ride past bars full of entrepreneurial big-nosed businessmen but they couldn’t afford to stop for a beer.

  They’re poor beyond the ken of Western man and yet, he said, they all have mopeds.

  It didn’t make sense but I could see the visual impact of a thousand or more Vietnamese kids on mopeds cruising the sultry streets of Saigon all night long.

  And coupled to the fact that Vietnam had just become the 49th country in the world to have a car industry, it was enough. Vietnam was going to be a Motorworld country.

  Looking back, I would say that this was the second-best decision I ever made; the first being to take up smoking.

  Before I went there, I’d always thought of Vietnam as somewhere that existed only to line the pockets of Hollywood fat cats. Vietnam was an excuse for Sylvester Stallone to cover his ample frame in mud. Vietnam was a war; not a country.

  My only experience of Vietnamese people was either at a restaurant in Fulham or as a lot of scuttling midgets in straw hats throwing hand grenades into Huey helicopters.

  In fact, this lot weren’t really people at all, just a collection of Oriental extras on the big screen who got blown up for a living.

  I didn’t even know that ‘Viet Cong’ meant ‘Communist Vietnamese’ or that ‘Charlie’ was a nickname derived from the latter half of the VC radio call sign — Victor Charlie. The Americans had told me, endlessly, that they were simply a bunch of barbarians who made people play Russian roulette. And that, given half a chance, every six-year-old would put a land mine in my underpants.

  The trouble is, of course, that since that last American helicopter heaved itself off the roof of the embassy there, we’ve heard an awful lot about ’Nam from the Yanks, but almost nothing at all from the country itself.

  And this is hardly surprising. Here was a nation that had fought off the French, only to find that Sylvester Stallone was on his way. They’d beaten him too and that was it. They shut the doors on what they saw as a stupid, interfering world. And got on with their version of communism.

  It was pretty tough by all accounts. Escaping boat people talked of a regime where coloured clothes were not allowed and motor vehicles were strictly outlawed. It made Moscow circa 1963 look like Surrey.

  However, running a dictatorship is hard work and people usually tire of the effort, so after fifteen years the Government began to relax. Today, they’re all on a day bed, sipping Pimms and having their feet massaged by half-naked Fijians. Vietnam is the most laid-back place on earth.

  Sure, you can’t set up in business there without a Vietnamese partner and every film crew has to be accompanied by two government minders, but these are not the sort of people who wear jackboots in bed and gaze longingly at your fingernails. We had a couple who looked like schoolteachers from Somerset.

  The Americans have restored full diplomatic relations, the French are back, half the bars have exactly the same clientele as the White Horse in Fulham and the Koreans are building sixteen hotels a day.

  In a few years’ time, Saigon will look like a cross between Singapore and Bangkok. It will be horrid beyond words. But in 1994, it was heaven.

  As a general rule, you should never judge a city, or especially a country, by the run from the airport to your downtown hotel. If you did that going from Heathrow to London, you’d think all England looked like Hounslow.

  But in Vietnam, go right ahead, because our trip from the plane to the hotel was fabulous. There was an almost Mediterranean balminess to the place and the simple low-wattage streetlights only illuminated the nocturnal insect life in their immediate vicinity, so it was unusually dark too.

  The daily thunderstorm had just finished erupting and the air was clear and still. The houses, for the most part, were in darkness too and only a few mopeds were out and about.

  At this point, we’d been on the go for a while. We’d filmed for two weeks in Detroit, then flown for fourteen hours to Japan where we’d worked for another two weeks. It had been a brutal month, without a single day off, when we flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, and then, after a four-hour stopover, on to Saigon.

  Actually, it’s called Ho Chi Minh City these days, but I was too tired for that sort of nonsense.

  However, our driver kept us awake with a fantastic series of improbable manoeuvres that can only be described as breathtaking. He drove on whichever side of the road he saw fit and at crossroads, even when he didn’t have the right of way, simply kept going. He reckoned that, as most people have mopeds, if there were to be an accident, we’d be fine.

  Then there were the traffic lights — a graphic indication that Saigon is moving with the times. However, though they have been installed and are working, no one has explained to the locals that red means stop or that green means go. To our driver, and to all the other four million people in Saigon, they’re just pretty lights on poles which have no meaning.

  By the time we hit the Rex Hotel it was nearly midnight but we were wide awake. So we went to the Q Bar.

  And then we went to a dive full of Australians called Apocalypse Now. And then the Caravelle. And then some place where we sat on the floor and another place where we fell on the floor. And then we started to wonder if it was worth going to bed because it was only an hour until we’d have to get up.

  So we had a cyclo race instead. The cyclo is a bicycle at the back and an armchair at the front. You, the big nose, sit in the chair while Charlie sits on the saddle, pedalling you hither and thither. To go across town costs about three pence.

  However, if you splash out, your chauffeur will pedal faster which, of course, leads to a silent version of Formula One. The person with the most money wins the race.

  Now then. The Western world can do you all sorts of spectacular cars but none is quite so refined or quiet as the Vietnamese cyclo — a sort of bicycle-armchair combo that’s yours for a day for about 10p (including driver). Give him 20p and you get there twice as quickly.

  There was something rather colonial about sitting there, cross-legged as a local pedalled as fast as he could to try and catch up with the cameraman. But it wasn’t until we found ourselves going six abreast down Saigon’s equivalent of Regent Street that I started to ask myself a big question.

  What kind of a country is this?

  If you can think of any other big city in the world where you could race in such a way, please let me know because, for damn sure, I’ve never been there.

  Vietnam is relaxed because it hasn’t really been exposed to the full horror of the Western tourist yet.

  You are oc
casionally pestered by street urchins who are trying to sell godawful postcards and I was pickpocketed once. But even though sex is very openly for sale, don’t be mistaken: this is not like anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

  Because the Americans have been kept out for so long, there’s no McDonald’s, no pavement Coca-Cola dispensers and no one has been exposed to the violence of Hollywood. There are no gangs, and no one wears their baseball cap back to front.

  You pay for everything with dollars but the government is trying to stop that. Under pressure from the idiots at the World Bank, steps are being taken to reintroduce the ridiculous dong.

  This is a currency that makes the lira look sensible. To buy a street vendor’s postcard, you need a shoebox full of the stuff. To buy an authentic wartime Zippo lighter, you’d need a Sherpa van to carry the cash. Oh, but don’t be tempted, because on the bottom of a real Zippo you’ll find it was made in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

  On the bottom of the Vietnamese equivalent, which is scarred and battered to give that ‘I’ve been through hell’ look, it says, ‘Rocky. Made in Japan.’ Western tourists are stupid but I fear even Wilbur and Myrtle will see through this ruse.

  They will, however, be impressed by the products of what was Vietnam’s first car factory. Tucked away in a jungle ten miles from Saigon is a hut where 30 shoeless women and children sit in silence all day, chopping up beer and soda cans which are then bent and folded to become model helicopters, cars and trucks.

  And they’re brilliant. I have a Citroën Traction Avant which, in a former life, was a Heineken can. The cameraman paid the designer £5 to make a model of his camera. The guy was a genius but his biggest problem was a complete lack of artwork to copy.

  When the producer gave him a dozen copies of Top Gear Magazine, stuffed full of pictures of Lamborghinis and Ferraris, he squeaked like a baby. I swear if we’d have given him a million pounds he’d have been less delighted.