Motorworld (15 page)

Economically, Monaco is tied to France because they both use the same currency, but all similarities stop there. If something costs £10 in France, it will be £2.5 billion in Monaco. One shop tried to charge me £65 for a child’s romper suit. We paid £140 for two small bottles of Heineken in Jimmyz, the nightclub.

Money, in fact, is what makes Monaco tick. The police,
the hospitals, the street lighting and all the other state services are paid for by a company called SBM which owns the four big hotels and the casino. This means that the local residents pay no tax.

Think about that. If Schumacher lived in Germany, 40 per cent of his salary would go to the exchequer. By having a flat in Monaco, he saves more than $7 million a year. That’s a lot.

All you need do to get in on the act is prove two things: that you have enough money in the bank to last a lifetime and that you’re not French.

Yes, to be born French really is to win second prize in the lottery of life. Your wife will have hairy armpits. You will have to converse in a stupid language, in which a table is somehow female. You will know that you have lost every war in which you’ve been involved for 900 years. You will be forced to eat horses and you will not be allowed to eliminate your taxes by moving to Monaco.

The population there currently numbers 28,000, of whom 5000 are born-and-bred Monegasques who work in the shops and at the factory which makes, among other things, the door handles for the Toyota Carina. Strangely, these people are not allowed in the casino.

The other 23,000 are made up thus: a bunch of Italian Mafia hit men, a whoop of American super-billionaires, a couple of hundred racing drivers, Boris Becker, some other Germans, a crateload of northerners from Britain and even the odd Australian.

Obviously, the appeal of Monaco for these people is strong. No tax. Everyone else is nouveau riche too. And
there’s no danger of finding you have French next-door neighbours.

But there is a price to pay, and when it comes to property, it’s just preposterous. A three-roomed flat halfway up an ugly tower block costs half a million quid. To rent a five-room penthouse suite could be £20,000 a month.

Mind you, think about it. If you had 20 million in the bank, you’d be getting about a million a year in interest, £400,000 of which would go to the Revenue. Rent of £240,000 a year suddenly doesn’t seem so bad, does it?

Unless the income-tax people in your own country manage to prove that you don’t really live in Monaco at all, that it’s just a postal address.

The rules say you must actually be there for six months and one day in each calendar year but there are ways round this. You simply pay your estate agent to go round to your apartment every day to make a few phone calls. Then, if anyone asks, you can provide an itemised bill showing that you really were in paradise on the days in question.

And what a paradise. If you could be transported to Casino Square right now, whatever time of day or night it is, I guarantee you’d see at least three supercars.

The car sales figures here make for some pretty amazing reading, by which I mean Mercedes outsells Ford. Sure, Renault is at number one in the charts but in 1993, Bugatti outsold Rover. Yes, in Monaco, the £300,000, 200-mph EB110 was more popular than the eminently sensible Metro.

And that was its downfall. You see, in Monaco, it is
not necessary to drive the most expensive car on the market, but to turn up for dinner at the Hôtel de Paris and find someone else is already there with an identical car is a social gaffe second only to vomiting on Princess Caroline.

One car salesman told me that the hardest part of his job was knowing which restaurants and which clubs are favoured by which people.

‘I simply couldn’t sell someone a red Porsche Turbo if I knew someone else who goes to the same parties already had one. I would suggest he bought a different model, or had a different spoiler fitted, or went for a different colour,’ said our man.

This, I think I’m right in saying, does not happen in Rotherham, but that’s because to the good people of South Yorkshire, a car is just that. In Monaco, it is the last item of clothing you put on before you go out. Out there, a garage is simply a large wardrobe.

The trouble with Bugatti is that, for a time, it was
the
car to have, but when there were more than a dozen fighting for attention in the main square the impact was lost. You’d have been better off with a TVR Griffith.

I know this because I had one and I was the coolest dude in town. You wanna know what Steph’s like in bed? You talk to me. Me and Albert? I call him Al – and I’m the one who laughs when he walks into a nightclub and says, ‘Okay girls. Stop your grinning and drop your linen.’ He does this a lot, apparently.

My Griffith was by no means the most expensive car in Monaco and, having been driven there from England, it
certainly wasn’t the cleanest, but no one else had one and that is what counted.

Outside every large hotel, club or restaurant, uniformed doormen would indulge in prolonged bouts of fist fighting to decide who’d get the privilege of parking it. In every traffic jam, girls with impossible hair and comic-book legs would lean in and purr. And once, after I’d given it a full-bore take-off up the hill in first gear, I was stopped by an Italian millionaire in a Ferrari F40 and asked if I’d like to swap.

This really does happen out there. I know of one chap who offered to buy Michael Shoemaker’s Bugatti after the two met in a gym, but pulled out when the world champion said it was beneath his dignity to actually deliver the car.

Then there was the Australian who ran into a Lamborghini salesman at the Beach Club and asked simply, ‘Are they any good?’ Once he’d been assured, by this most unbiased of sources, that they were, he ordered a £165,000 Diablo.

Another guy saw a Lancia Delta Integrale cruise by while having lunch at the Hôtel de Paris and told his sidekick to find the owner and buy it.

To be a car salesman out there, you need to move and shake at the right places. You need the right clothes, the right hair, the right wristwatch and an ability to speak at least five languages. Very few people ever walk into a car showroom when they need a car; they meet you at a party and the deal is done.

But you have to be at the party in the first place.

While I was there, Rinspeed, the Swiss car company,
launched its new supercharged Roadster by parking one outside Jimmyz, the nightclub. People saw it, met the salesman inside and a sale followed.

Well that was the theory, but unfortunately, I pissed on their bonfire by turning up in the Griffith. The Rinspeed may have raised an eyebrow or two but that Griffith lowered everyone’s underwear. The aquamarine paint job helped, but the noise usually clinched it so I had to spend all night turning down ever-more ludicrous and tempting cash offers.

It’s not mine, I’d wail. We don’t care whose it is, we want it and here’s a fistful of money, came the reply.

Yes, people do go out at night with 50 grand in their pocket – especially if it’s their round. There’s one woman who leaves the casino every night of the week with £3-million-worth of jewellery about her person. But even at 4.00 a.m. she knows she is in no danger because in Monaco there is no crime.

By which I mean there is no petty pilfering. Largely this is because people with hundreds of millions of pounds in the bank are not big on mugging or house-breaking. Why go to all the trouble of nicking a car when you can just buy one?

But what about the thousands of visitors who come to Monaco every year? Surely, a few of these ne’er-do-wells in their coaches and their shellsuits are not averse to a bit of robbery?

Perhaps, but Monaco has them covered by 160 security cameras that sweep the streets and a further 1000 or so in garages, hotel lobbies and even the lift in our car park.

That, all on its own, would keep everyone in check, but to make absolutely sure, there is one policeman for every 40 residents in Monaco.

Now these guys learned everything they know from Russia’s special forces. There are rules in Monaco and if you don’t like them, the policemenists will escort you back to France where you can convalesce.

If you are smartly dressed and driving a Ferrari you have nothing to fear, even if you’ve just broken the economy of a Third World country. It doesn’t matter if, after one phone call, you’ve destroyed a factory in Tennessee and put 500 people on the dole, you are the sort of person they want in the sunshine state.

But if you are wearing jeans and driving a van, you will be stopped at every road junction. Your papers will be checked over and over again. They will harass you and hassle you, only pausing to salute Gordon Gekko as he slides by in a Roller.

Before we could film anything, we needed heavy-duty government permission and there was no question of trying to get by on a wing and a prayer. We’d set up our camera and one of theirs would see, so that within minutes, Clouseau would be on the scene, wanting to know our mothers’ maiden names and whether our next-door neighbours kept budgerigars.

Every night outside our hotel two policemen would blow their whistles interminably, pulling over anyone whose face didn’t quite fit. In Monaco, it is against the law to look odd.

Unless you have an electric car. There is no greater
demonstration of this country’s immense wealth than the government’s current obsession with battery-powered vehicles.

They offer huge discounts to anyone who buys such a car, and are about to provide free charging points around the city, but the total number sold to private individuals so far is… nought. In Monaco, people are not interested in saving money.

I spent a few days hanging around with one 28-year-old guy who vehemently denied that he was a playboy, but there was some evidence to suggest he was not being absolutely honest.

First, there was his boat which, at the time, was away in America being equipped with new, more powerful engines. Then there were his cars. He said he didn’t have so many these days, only ten, but my, what a collection. There was the Bugatti, of course, the Ferrari, of course, the Porsche 911, of course, the army Jeep and the Lamborghini LM002, which he used as a day-to-day runabout. And why not? I mean, it’s ideal in the crowded streets and so easy to park.

He also had a 40-tonne truck which he bought to take his Bugatti to Finland where he set a world record for driving on ice – at 180 mph.

Quite a life, I’m sure you’ll agree. But we haven’t got to the subject of girls yet. He had bedded every single one of the best-looking women in southern France, and maybe the whole of Europe, now I come to think of it, but said that the best was a Texan, who did amazing things with dogs and video cameras apparently.

However, when I was there he was about to take up
motor racing again so he was giving women a rest. ‘Just for today’, you understand. Then he wandered off with someone who had a blonde head and some legs, but that was about it.

He was one of the lucky ones though. Because everyone there is so rich, and so handsome, and so chiselled, it is quite normal to have 50 million in the bank, no spots and a Mercedes but to end up on your own every night.

Sit in the Café de Paris and just watch. You will see the same cars going round and round and round for hours, their desperate Latino drivers eyeing up everything with a pulse. It’s sad, and horrid.

And it gets worse when the Grand Prix rolls into town. The parties get phonier, the rich get richer and the police plumb new depths on the bolsh-o-meter. And on top of all that, the locals pack up and leave.

Half of me says they do the right thing but as I sat in the Sporting Club, watching Belinda Carlisle strut her ample stuff at the Marlboro party, I began to wonder. I had Chris Rea to my left and Jean Alesi to my right as the roof slid back to reveal a monster fireworks display.

The champagne was Bollinger, the caviar was Russian and the waiters made George Hamilton look ugly. This was weapons-grade conspicuous consumption.

But there was more to come. I ended up on a massive boat in the harbour, cummerbund akimbo, talking to a girl who appeared to be wearing nothing at all. It was warm, the stars were out, the vodka was tinged with a hint of lemongrass and all around, truly beautiful people were having a truly beautiful time.

Monaco has been described as the world’s first wildlife reserve for humans but if that’s the case, let me tell you that being an exhibit there is industrial-strength fun.

This chapter is dedicated to Uday Rao Kavi. A fine man.

Calcutta is a remarkable city, known throughout the subcontinent as a city of thinkers, a place where they prefer to discuss cricket than play it. If you can ignore the soot-blackened brickwork and the completely opaque air, you will marvel at the buildings, built with the vast money brought to Calcutta by the British East India Company.

You will seek out the Fairlawn Hotel where you will tuck into winter-warming soup, roast beef and spotted dick. Outside, you will see people cooking their supper on open fires.

Me, I was more taken with a bright-yellow Lotus Esprit Turbo which had just cruised by.

Calcutta is where they make the Hindustan Ambassador – better known as the 1950s Morris Oxford – and the luxurious Hindustan Contessa, an old Vauxhall. Every single car on the streets is a Hindustan of indeterminate age and condition. Some have brakes. Some have steering. Some have suspension. Some have none of these things and are therefore a bit worrying.

But there, in the middle of it all, was the yellow Lotus. What kind of moron would drive a car like that in a country where driving is not a chore or an art form? In India, driving is something you learn to do badly.

And that leads me neatly on to the Indian driving test.

The examiner finds a quiet piece of road and asks you to demonstrate that you can make the car move and stop. Then he gives you permission to take part in what is by far the most dangerous game on earth: driving on the subcontinent.

Visitors may laugh but what passes as mayhem is, in fact, carnage. Even though there are only 29 million vehicles in India – just four million more than we have in Britain – they manage to kill 164 people every day. By way of comparison, we kill just thirteen.