This is a tale of two parallel, but very different, universes. One, which I am about to inhabit, exists in a contract of mutual trust and responsibility. It celebrates good things: aural and visual beauty, mechanical wonderfulness, excitement, skills, thrills. The other exists under a lowest-common-denominator, nanny-state philosophy except when hypocrisy intervenes. Joy is absent in case someone gets hurt and sues someone else. This is the one from which I have just escaped.
Where can they be, these universes? The second one you know well. It's the one in which you can get three points, a fine and maybe even a loss of livelihood if you are antisocial and irresponsible enough to endanger entire communities by doing 34mph in a 30mph limit, yet which allows a Shropshire policeman to carry on as if nothing has happened after being acquitted of dangerous driving following a 159mph 'test run' on the M54 in an unmarked Vectra. Couldn't he have used a test track instead? Or if not, can we please have one rule for all of us? You don't have to be a policeman to have taken an advanced driving course, to be, as the judge put it, the 'crème de la crème'.
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| Some cars had recce teams go on ahead to see if they'd fit inside narrow Italian archways |
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The first universe couldn't be more different. Its space is Italy, its time is the weekend of the Mille Miglia. This spectacularly surreal event was a full-on road race from 1927 to 1957, 1000 miles around closed roads starting and finishing in Brescia and heading as far south as Rome. It's best known for Stirling Moss's 1955 win in a Mercedes-Benz SLR; he drove this thinly-disguised Formula One car single-handedly for the whole route, navigated by
Motor Sport's Denis Jenkinson and his winding reel of pacenotes.
The Mille was revived in 1977 as a time trial (less hazardous than the race of yore), and has run most years since - every year from 1986. The route is broadly similar, cars (375 this year) are either cars which ran in the original races or are of a type which could have done, and nowadays the roads aren't closed. It's a time trial, with low average speeds and heavy penalties for arriving at a control too early. The regulations shout that this is not a race but a regularity competition with a strong cultural and touristic element. Yes, and the Pope's a protestant.
