Born to Be Riled (22 page)

You don’t speak Thai and you don’t understand the nuances of the legal system.

And yet when we go abroad on holiday, we’re all quite happy to pile into a rental car even though we can’t read the signposts, we don’t understand the customs and, more often than not, everyone is on the wrong side of the road.

In Britain, if someone flashes their lights it means
they’re waving you through, but elsewhere it means ‘Look out, I’m not going to stop.’ However, you won’t realize this until you’re half-way through your windscreen.

So what I’ve attempted to do in the limited space here is try to offer some advice for those who will be driving abroad this summer.

Let’s start in America, just outside Miami airport, where the slip road joins the Florida turnpike. You’ve been rammed, gently, from behind and you’ve climbed out to inspect the damage.

This was a mistake because the man who ran into your rear end is a Colombian drug dealer who will now shoot you, your wife and your children. Then he’ll help himself to all your belongings.

Locals say that if you’re rammed, you should drive around until you see a policeman… but this is not sensible either. You see, if Plod is confronted with a hysterical Limey babbling away in an accent he doesn’t really understand, he will shoot you so he can get back to his seventh doughnut of the morning.

It is possible, just, to get out of the Miami district without being murdered, but then you face an altogether new problem. The road may be wide and straight, but do not, however tempting it might be, exceed 70mph.

Your American rental car is simply not capable of high-speed travel and will, if you push it, bounce off the road into a swamp. Whereupon you will be eaten by an alligator.

Other tips: you must pay for fuel before filling your tank, which is stupid because you have no idea how much your tank will take. Nevertheless, don’t argue or try to
buck the system because most petrol pump attendants in Florida are daft and armed – a lethal combination which will result in you springing a leak.

It’s also worth remembering that in America most establishments have valets with massive teeth and idiotic red waistcoats who will volunteer to park your car. When they return it, they will expect a tip, but you can get round this by pretending to be Icelandic.

Whatever you do, do not claim to be Romanian or Czechoslovakian because the valet will think you’re a commie and may try to shoot you.

The best piece of advice I can give to anyone thinking of driving in America this year is… have you thought about Europe?

Italy is perfect, but be aware that your rental car will be a wreck with a shagged engine. This will make any foray into the autostrada’s overtaking lane tantamount to dancing with the devil.

In Italy, they don’t wait patiently for slower cars to move over, and nor do they flash their lights or attempt to get past on the inside. They just ram you.

Life is a lot more disciplined in Germany, of course, but I can’t think of a single reason why you would want to go on holiday there.

France is much nicer, but whatever happens do not take your own car across the Channel. There is something called ferry psychology which means that as you approach Calais to come home you will definitely be driving too fast.

This is either because you are late for the sailing on which you’re booked or you’re miles too early, in which case you’re hurrying to catch an earlier boat. Either way,
you’ll be caught speeding and made to pay a fine so massive that when you get home, your house will have been repossessed.

And don’t try claiming you can’t pay, because then they will take your car, and your wife… out to dinner where she will fall for their Gallic charm and leave you to a life of meths and shop doorways.

The most popular foreign destination for British tourists is Spain, which is one of those strange facts that I can never understand. Like why is the motorway central reservation always littered with shoes?

I really don’t like Spain, but I will admit that their roads, these days, are simply superb – smooth, wide, fast, and free in large chunks from too much in the way of traffic. If you’ve ever wondered where the European Union spends all its money, have a look at Barcelona’s motorway network. And then get out there and enjoy it. You paid for it.

Briefly, because I’m running out of space here, I should warn you that wildlife is a massive problem elsewhere in the world. In Britain, we are unused to rounding a bend to find the road blocked by half a ton of snorting muscle, but in Australia, camels and kangaroos regularly play chicken. In India it’s cows, and in Sweden even more people are killed by errant elks than by razor blades and Mogadon.

In the Caribbean, mercifully, large animals are scarce but then the cars they rent you would lose if they went head-to-head against a breeze. In Barbados be very careful indeed to avoid what is basically a Suzuki Alto with no bodywork at all.

In fact, it’s probably best to avoid going abroad in the
first place. Me? I’m off to the Isle of Man for some fresh air, some invigorating scenery and the joy of being able to drive through it without the burden of speed limits.

I’ve spent the last year working on a new television series all about big boys’ toys. This means I’ve shot the rapids in New Zealand in a 100mph jet boat. I’ve flown an F-15 fighter jet. I’ve done the Reno air races in a 1942 Mustang P-51 and in Sweden I lost my liver to a drag snowmobile that could do the standing quarter in 6 seconds… whilst wearing women’s clothes.

But the high spot was to have been my time in the world of Class One offshore power boat racing.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is about as good as sport gets. The 4 ton boats are a subtle blend of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics so they skim along the surface of the sea, with just the bottom half of their propellers in the water.

Each uses a
brace
of 1000 horsepower, 8.0 litre Lamborghini race engines which make a noise that can curdle blood at 500 paces. Only once have I heard a sound to beat it: Bob Seger at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1976.

In rough water the drivers simply go as fast as they dare, which means that all the expense, all the technical development and all the power is wasted if the guy has nothing in his pants. It’s not like car racing, where you can do a crossword while going down the straights. You’re on water which moves and wobbles, and you are
being beaten to death inside that Kevlar cockpit. For days after a rough race the two-man crews pee blood.

To get to the bottom of power boat racing we filmed one of the boats being made, and I went out for its first ever shakedown run on the Solent late one Saturday evening in May. It was good. We hit 148mph which, technically speaking, is pretty fast.

And then I faced the agonizing choice of deciding which race I’d watch – St Petersburg, Beirut, Tunisia, Norway, Dubai or the first round, which was to be held somewhere I’ve wanted to go for 25 years.

Capri: an island in the Mediterranean which was home to the emperor Tiberius. And then nothing much happened there until the 1930s, when Gracie Fields arrived.

Some say it was named after
capreae,
which, as everyone knows, is the Latin for goat. Others, having found strange skeletons embedded in the limestone, say it’s more likely to be derived from
kaprus
, the Greek for wild boar. Either way, it seems to have nothing to do with a crummy Ford.

In recent times, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell have been holidaying there so I figured there’d be a jet-set backdrop to just about the most glamorous and dangerous sporting spectacle the world has ever seen.

But getting there is not easy. You have to fly from Gatwick, which is always depressing – all those lard arses in towelling tracksuits and tight perms off to Torremolinos. Then you land in Naples – the only city on the planet where a red traffic light means go.

And then you have to reverse onto a car ferry which only has three tins of beer on board. And when you get to Capri they won’t let you off unless you can prove you live there. This was hard, because I don’t. But if you argue
with an Italian in a uniform for long enough, he will eventually tire of the exchange and allow you through.

So we were in Capri at last. Er, not exactly. We were on the harbour wall – which was just wide enough for one car – facing a stream of traffic coming the other way, trying to board the boat we’d just left.

Either I backed into the boat and went back to the mainland again or 30 residents reversed out of my way.

So it was back on the boat, and after a round trip via Naples again I found myself on the most spectacularly beautiful island in the entire world. I’ve been to the Maldives and the Caribbean. I’ve explored Mauritius and Orpheus on the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve seen the north coast of Majorca and once spent a holiday in Sicily, but you can forget all of these, and Sardinia, and Corsica and all those hideous lumps round Greece. Capri is heaven.

Every villa and every bit of cliff is smothered in that purple stuff which isn’t buddleia but looks a bit like it if you squint. Gorgonzola? No, Borden villier. Something like that. Damn pretty anyway.

And I should know because I got very, very close to it while trying to squeeze past traffic on the three-mile drive to my hotel. It was hopeless and eventually I would have to back up to the nearest passing point, which was usually the harbour.

Eventually, I learned to reverse everywhere so that when I encountered traffic coming the other way they’d assume I was backing away from a bus and would begin to reverse as well.

Still, it would all be worthwhile because I was going to see nine face-distortingly fast boats in aquatic combat. I was so excited that I clean forgot Capri is a part of Italy
and that therefore nothing should ever be taken for granted.

This may have been the first round in the championship. The drivers may have come from all over the world, and the boats had been brought on trailers on THAT beerless ferry. But, apparently, there was a bit of a mix-up with the coastguard over timing, so the event was cancelled.

It took 14 hours to get home.

Last week I went to Le Mans, where, for the first time, I was introduced formally to the world of big-time motor racing. And I’ve worked something out.

We tend to think of motor racing as being a driver thing, but this, I’m sorry to say, is not really the case. Yes, his hairstyle looks good and his teeth are shiny, but it is the car that matters most of all.

In a Williams, Damon Hill was world champion. In an Arrows, he is an amusing sideshow. Think of it in terms of cooking. Give me the freshest ingredients and I’ll knock up a supper that will cause your taste buds to die of a broken heart. Give Gary Rhodes a tin of pilchards and you’ll get a tin of pilchards.

At Le Mans, I was part of the Panoz team that had been put together by his Noeliness, Mr Edmonds, and for five days I hung around in their pit, wearing a serious expression and pointing at things.

It all began on Wednesday evening when the cars were
sent out to qualify – nail-biting stuff because the two slowest entries would not be allowed to race. A year’s work would be bundled onto the back of a lorry and sent home.

On his first lap one of our drivers, Andy Wallace, reported over the ship-to-shore radio that his Panoz was ‘absolutely f****** undriveable’. Under braking it was bouncing all over the track but, worse than that, the 6.0 litre V8 Ford engine had no power coming out of the corners.

The news was bad, but the other car was in even worse shape. Its oil repository had seemingly been modelled on a colander.

So when the session was terminated at 12.30 it seemed likely that neither of our cars would make the grade. We had one more chance on Thursday night to try and make those cars fly.

That morning, I asked by far and away our tweediest driver, James Weaver, to explain the problem, expecting him to lift the bonnet and point at a wonky part. But no. I was taken into a back room where men in spectacles were hunched over a bank of laptops, staring at graphs.

‘There,’ he said. I peered at the read-outs for some time, my face scrunched up like I was trying to read a sign from a long way away, but could make neither head nor tail of them. So he explained that the blue wheel-speed trace did not match the red rev trace; that there was a glitch, and that the men in spectacles were interrogating the engine’s electronic management system to find out why.

I’d noticed this the day before. Whenever the car came back to the pits no one ever went near the engine. They
simply plugged computers into it and banged away at keyboards in a Rick Wakemanesque frenzy.

And they kept on banging away all through Thursday and all through the vital evening practice session. And still the engine wouldn’t work properly.

The mechanics had sorted the handling problems and the drivers were giving it their absolute best, but none of this really mattered because somewhere deep in the bowels of that multi-million-dollar carbon-fibre race car there was a morsel of silicone having a genetic tantrum

Right at the end of the second practice session one of our cars had made it – just – but the other faced being eliminated by the number 50 car from Lotus, which was out there on the track doing its stuff.

It’s funny, but for three-and-a-half minutes – one lap of Le Mans – my whole life was focused on the timing screen, waiting for that Lotus to finish its do-or-die run. Every second seemed like an hour… because every second was an hour. Lotus would have been better off with an Orion diesel.

I celebrated by goose-stepping through the Porsche pit, which was considered poor form, but still those men in specs pumped away at their laptops, desperately trying to turn our engine from Aled Jones into Pavarotti.

They were monitoring everything as the race began, but even so, just two hours down the line, one of our cars ran out of juice. The driver got it back to the pits using the starter motor but this technique wore out the battery, which had to be replaced, costing even more time.