Motorworld. Part 1

Motorworld.

by Jeremy Clarkson.

Italy

I've been fortunate enough over the years to stay in many truly outstanding hotels where obsequious waiters compete for your attention with the view hard when it's Hong Kong harbour, San Francis...o...b..y or St Mark's. But my favourite is the Locanda del Sant' UffizioDa Beppe in Asti, where I stayed when we were filming the Fiat Coupe for Top Gear.It's a beautiful building, the food is as good as you'll eat anywhere and the owner redefines the concept of friendliness. Here's a man who would very probably stick his tongue down your throat if you ever went back for second helpings.But I enjoyed my fourday stay there most of all because over lunch, on the second day, we shared the dining room with an Italian family.I'm not talking here about a bearded father in grey shoes, a woman called Janet in Marks and Spencer's finest and two children. I'm not talking about the nearsilence that accompanies most British family days out.No, here we had granddad and grandma, her mother, their six children, various inlaws and an indeterminate number of grandchildren. It was impossible to say how many exactly because they were never all at the table at the same time they'd get one seated and another would be off, making tyresquealing noises round the dessert trolley.It was a huge feast which appeared to have been ruined as the eighth course was being cleared. Two of the sons started to argue so loudly that pretty quickly everyone within twelve feet was sucked in. Minutes later, it was out of control.Arms and legs were flailing from one side of the room to the other. Granny was on her feet, pointing at one of her daughters, who looked fit to burst. The babies were screaming. This was one big family bustup.Which turned out to be about the Fiat Tipo or, specifically, how economical it is. In Italy, a family hatchback can tear apart a family.Now, if they get this pa.s.sionate over the Fiat Tipo, can you begin to imagine what it's like to drive there? Well, I'll tell you. Like a rollercoaster without rules.The road from Turin down to the Italian Riviera is one of the most beautiful in Europe, but on this occasion it was being ruined.It wasn't that the ancient Fiat Ritmo in front was being driven slowly far from it but I had a 3.0-litre V6 Alfa Romeo and I wanted to go even faster. I wanted to hear that magnificent engine sing because stuck behind that Fiat it was only humming.Eventually, the road straightened out and, as I pa.s.sed, I noticed that the driver of the Fiat was a toothless peasant farmer who'd seen at least 80 summers. His face was as wizened as a walnut and about the same colour too. It could well have been a walnut, actually.But then I got down to the job in hand having fun with a great car, on a great road, in a great country and Walnut Face was erased from the memory.This was a mistake because, fifteen miles later, he was back. I'd pulled onto the wrong side of the road to make the oncoming hairpin less tight and he shot through on the inside, wheels locked and grinning the grin of a madman. He really was as nutty as he looked.For fifteen miles I'd strained to read the road ahead, not realising that the real danger was darting about in my rearview mirror. Walnut Face had been overtaken and he was going to get back in the lead if it b.l.o.o.d.y killed him. Welcome to Italy, where all the world, it seems, is a racetrack.You want proof. Okay, here it comes. Two years later, I was flat out on the autostrada but this wasn't good enough for the car behind which desperately, and very obviously, wanted to get past. It was close enough for me to notice, through the glare of its headlights, that it contained four nuns.Shortly afterwards I was testing a Sierra Cosworth in Sicily and wanted to see if Ford's claimed top speed of 150 mph was accurate. The road was straight and so I went for it.But as I was eking out the last vestiges of power, doing about 147 mph, I encountered a police van trundling along the inside lane which caused me to brake, shall we say, pretty violently. The door of the van slid back and out came a uniformed arm.This was big trouble... except for one small thing. This was Italy, and the hand was ordering me to go faster. These guys also wanted to know how fast a Sierra Cosworth would go so they could discuss it, noisily and with much fork pointing, over supper that night.As Professor Franco Ferrarotti of Rome University put it, 'We have a speed limit in Italy, of course. It is the top speed of your car.'Giovanni Agnelli, the most powerful man in the country and the owner of Fiat, among other things, goes further. 'Let's say the Italians are very hard to discipline, especially if it's something they don't like.'If someone introduces a law there which doesn't go down well with the people, they don't organise protest marches, they just ignore it. And because the police are people too, they don't bother trying to enforce it either.Speeding is a big thing. Only very recently, a social democratic minister made a big stand on the issue, getting on one or other of the country's 1200 television stations every night to talk about the dangers of driving too quickly. He imposed new laws, whipped up the police and was rewarded with the sack.In Italy, you sometimes get the impression they'd be happier to lose the Pope than to lose their right to drive like maniacs.The question that immediately springs to mind at this point is, why? I mean, we're talking here about a country that thinks an emergency plumber is someone who can get to you within seven weeks.That's six weeks to process the order, six days to order the parts and 23 hours and 59 minutes arguing with the suppliers.The actual drive from his workshop to your house, 19 miles away, is done in 30 seconds. Now, why should this be so? Why should Italians be so much faster and wilder on the roads than, say, the Germans or the British or the Spanish?Experts point to the fact that Italy has been governed over the centuries by a myriad of different rulers. Just when the people got used to one set of ideas and one set of rules, another guy would come along and change everything. Remember, Italy has had 50 governments since the war.So, individualism is a big thing. In Italy, the most important thing is to enjoy life, and if that means a few rules are broken, so what? The rules will change pretty soon anyway. The foot, they say, is more important than the shoe.On top of this, Italy has only been a consumerist, industrialised country for one generation and they still can't really believe that they can actually go down to the town and buy a car.There was never a lengthy period when only the rich drove cars, giving them the cachet they've earned elsewhere in the world. One minute there were no cars and then bang, all of a sudden everyone had a replacement for their horse or bicycle.The car in Italy has no appeal as a status symbol, says Professor Ferrarotti. 'Italians love the way they are made. They have a fascination with machinery and driving a car blends in with our anarchistic bent.'You know it's not difficult to govern the Italians just unnecessary. You can have all sorts of laws here, just so long as they're not enforced.'And you only need to look around Rome to see what he means. The law says everyone has to wear a seat belt. But no one does.The professor thinks he has a reason for this. 'Of course, seat belts are very important and the Italians are the first ones to admit it... theoretically. But if you had to use your d.a.m.n seat belt every time you got into your little Punto or your big Ferrari if there are any such things in a Ferrari well, it is like betting against yourself. It might invite disaster.'Italians are very superst.i.tious and if you wear a seat belt it displays a lack of confidence in yourself. Seat belts are a real threat to public safety. They should be abolished.'If you put your seat belt on before you even start the engine, that means you are, at a minimum, a mediocre driver. You should not be behind the wheel. Your permit should be taken away.'So here we have a country where people don't obey rules that aren't really enforced anyway, a country that is in love with machinery and, most of all, a country that was only recently introduced to the car. The love is still strong.Elsewhere in the industrialised world, except Switzerland, the first flush of the relations.h.i.+p has gone, the mistress has become a wife and everyone's more interested in its ability to cook, to sew and to be safe. I know my Mercedes is fat but she makes great hollandaise sauce. In Italy, on the other hand, they don't give a d.a.m.n if the windscreen wipers foul the steering wheel so long as it looks good. They want the car to be a pouting teenager, to be great in bed and with legs that go on for 26 miles.They may drive a Fiat Punto but what they want is a Ferrari Testarossa. And until they get one, they will pretend the Punto has a 5.0-litre V12 with red camshaft covers.In the world there are five serious supercar manufacturers and it should be no surprise to find that three are based in Italy Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bugatti. What is odd is that they're all made within fifteen miles of one town Modena.I've been there and it's an ordinary, communistrun, peasanty sort of place which you might even call a bit shabby. The people have that Mediterranean look about them illfitting suit trousers, belts fas.h.i.+oned from bailer twine, bad hats and even worse teeth. They sit around in medieval squares, chatting and smoking, only looking up to stare at a car. And there's the difference.I asked Giovanni Agnelli what makes the people of Modena tick and he said, 'They have a mania for mechanics there. When a motorbike goes by, they can tell you what sort of engine it has. Ferrari is there. There's a tractor factory there...'A cruel one that, because Lamborghini started out as a tractor manufacturer and remains one of just two Italian car firms that Mr Agnelli doesn't own. He already has Fiat, Ferrari, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Piaggio. But then he also controls around 25 per cent of all companies quoted on the Italian stock exchange, Juventus football club, the newspaper La Stampa, Sestriere ski resort and a few small concerns outside Italy like NASA.On official business, Snr Agnelli has a Fiat Croma a bicycle but for pleasure I happen to know he has a Ferrari 456.That makes him pretty special in Italy. When you drive a car like that over there, you are revered as a sort of cross between the Virgin Mary, Gilles Villeneuve and Roberto Baggio.When we were over there making the BBC series Motorworld we drove through a selection of hilltop villages with quite a convoy. Up front, I led the way in a Ferrari 355. Behind was the director in his Bugatti EB 110 and bringing up the rear was the producer in a piece of purple haze, a dollop of rolling thunder they call the Lamborghini Diablo.To see one of these cars in a lifetime is a special thing, but to find all three in a village is like coming home from work to find Halley's Comet sitting by the fire. The Ferrari brought people out of their houses, the Bugatti got them cheering and the Lamborghini caused more than a few to faint.In England, if you took a convoy like that through a village, the parish councillors would storm off down to the scout hut where plans would be drawn up for a bypa.s.s and 6-foothigh speed b.u.mps on the High Street.But I shall take to my grave the sight of a small boy in Italy. He couldn't have been more than six and he was beside himself with excitement he didn't know whether to point or to tug at his mother's dress and, if he did point, which car should he point at?We stopped there for a drink and the town just ground to a halt. They came out of the school, out of the shops and out of their houses and they wanted to see the engines, the interiors, the suspension. And when we left, they wanted to see six black lines right down the main street.Sadly though, because the Bugatti had fourwheel drive, they only got four.That said, the Bugatti had disappeared from view first. It's an interesting car this; mainly because someone, somewhere, sat down and said, 'I know. Let's give it twelve cylinders, sixty valves, four camshafts and two turbochargers.' And then someone else must have said, 'No, let's not be h.o.m.os.e.xual about this. Let's give it four turbos.'It's the fastest Italian car but it's not the loudest that accolade rests with the Diablo, which really is a 5.7-litre vibrator, a truck and a chest of drawers with a rocket motor. If you want a wild ride, this is where you queue.But if you want the best car in the world, you must have the Ferrari, which is by far and away the nicest car I will ever drive. I love the way it looks, I love its engine and I love, most of all, everything it stands for. Ferrari, in my book, is a pagan G.o.d, a steel deity, s.e.x on wheels. And that 355 represents automotive perfection.Ordinarily, when the rear end of a car starts to slide, I undo my seat belt and get in the back, but in the 355, you just dial in a touch of opposite lock and then marvel as the car simply sorts itself out.In an instant, you're back on the power, willing that 40-valve, 3.5-litre V8 onwards, slamming the gear lever through its chromed gate and glancing occasionally at the simple whiteonblack rev counter. This car has the delicacy of a quail's egg dipped in celery salt and the power of a chicken chilli jalfrezi.But that's only half the story. I could derive as much pleasure from putting this car in my sitting room and just looking at it as I could from driving it every day. And never mind that it sounds better than Puccini and can outrun a Tornado jet.That's not it.This is a car that was made by people who love cars, and it shows.They don't love cars in Germany or j.a.pan or even America. Car manufacturers there strive to get each of the component parts right, to make the product fulfil the dictionary definition of a car as closely as is possible. But pa.s.sion is not part of the equation.You could probably drive a big BMW round a racetrack faster than a Ferrari 355 and the BMW engineers would be pleased. 'Our car is faster than their car,' they would say as they put on their checked jackets and stroked their pointy beards.They would be so busy congratulating themselves that they'd miss the point. The man in the Bee Em will feel like he's just had a bath, and the man in the Ferrari will feel like he's just had s.e.x with Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson. At the same time.That's because a Ferrari has soul and a BMW does not. A BMW is an engineering masterpiece but a Ferrari is so much more than that.Look at the fuel filler cap. It's not simply a device to keep your petrol in the tank. It's actually been styled. Then there's the gear lever. It's a work of art. Every component in a Ferrari has to do more than simply fulfil its function.And it isn't just Ferrari, either. Look at the 3-litre Alfa Romeo engine. This is fitted to their equivalent of a Ford Mondeo. If it weren't for some pretty stupid taxation laws over there, this is the engine that would power Mr Fertiliser Salesman to his next meeting.Now, elsewhere in the world, an engine is simply a collection of bits, nailed rather inelegantly together. I love cars but engines bore me even more than double chemistry did on a Sat.u.r.day morning. Engines are simply there to make cars move. The end.Er... not quite. I haven't a clue what makes the Alfa V6 different but here is a power unit that's pure opera. While every motor in the world sounds like someone singing in the bath, this is the full Pavarotti.When the rev counter climbs past 5500 rpm, conversation in the c.o.c.kpit just stops. People who would rather have their legs amputated than talk about cars will actually ask what on earth is under the bonnet the London Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic? One girl asked me to stop revving the engine so high because she kept sticking to the seat.Then there's the styling. At the end of the eighties, all cars were beginning to look not just similar but absolutely identical. Car companies were employing designers from all over the world in their styling centres and national ident.i.ty was going out of the window. The same set of parameters were being fed into the same computers all over the world and the same answers were coming back.And the investment became so high that car companies began to counsel ordinary people for their opinions. If you're going to spend a billion dollars on a new car, you want to make absolutely sure it will sell, so you drag people off the street and show them the various design options.And, ten times out of ten, these dreadful people in their cardigans and their sandals will opt for the least imaginative.Italy saved the day, first of all with the Punto which, initially, looked like something from Iceland, it was so radical. But now, a few years down the line, we can see it for what it is: a truly neat piece of design. And then there was the Fiat Coupe and, more recently, the wonderfully wild Alfa Romeo 145.Cars like these have put Italian styling houses back on the map, which is a good thing because no one can create a car quite like them.This is perhaps because Italy has a monopoly on style. I don't care how many times Jeff Banks tells me that this year, London or New York, or even Paris, has taken over the mantle and become fas.h.i.+on torchbearer, I know the world fas.h.i.+on capital is Milan.In England on a hot day, women are happy to walk around with their bra straps showing. In Paris, they don't shave their armpits. And you just can't mention Germany and style in the same book, let alone the same sentence.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 coachbuilders cl.u.s.tered 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 coupe sister, the Scirocco. The Lexus Coupe. 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 Coupe, 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 G.o.d 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 Champions.h.i.+p 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 cha.s.sis. 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 j.a.pan.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 a.s.saulted 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 jewelencrusted sea. Palm trees. Icewhite beaches. Whitehot sun. And the gentle strains of Bob Marley to accompany your multicoloured, multicultural earlyevening drink. From Trinidad in the south to Cancun 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 soughtafter 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 maitre 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 gla.s.sware 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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 went 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 topquality hosts and hostesses, they tended to clear your gla.s.s 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. Twentyfive pounds is what the average Cuban earns in five months. Cuba is, not to put too fine a point on it, f.u.c.ked.Since Russia went all loveydovey 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 carfree streets but that simply isn't the case. They are chockfull 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 fas.h.i.+on.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 juryrig 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 MercedesBenz, 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-yearold battery.G.o.d 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.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 Ladapowered yank tanks to the old motorway out of Havana and race from bridge to bridge.This is not highspeed 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 twinengined 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 halffastened to the floor. Seat belts? Forget it.Miraculously, the engines fired and somehow the plane became airborne, I a.s.sume. 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 halfhour 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.Fas.h.i.+oned from concrete, it had water spurting from every airconditioning unit but, surprisingly, the pool was empty. Good job too because in the sc.u.m which clung to the sides and floor I found lifeforms 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 drink. No beer. No rum. No c.o.ke. 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 rockhard 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 weightbelt 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 jetpropulsion 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.I have been p.r.o.ne to exaggeration in the past but ask anyone on that plane what it was like and they'll start to quiver. It was truly the most terrifying half hour of my life as the plane bucked, writhed, turned upside down and plummeted.I was forever being lifted from my seat, a worrying thing because I knew that just inches above my hair was a paddle fan. Would I be decapitated before we hit the deck? It seemed important.I really did think we were going to die, but somehow I managed a smile because I thought of my daughter, who was one at the time, growing up knowing her daddy had died in a Russian plane, over Cuba, in a thunderstorm. It's a pretty cool way to go, let's face it.We came out of the clouds at treetop height and cruised at that level all the way to Havana with the lightning turning the wings blue every few seconds. And then we were back.And in need of a drink, which meant heading for the Cohiba nightclub. It is a.s.sumed that researchers on a television programme only have to find the stories, but that's just part of it. They also have to find the best hotels and the best bars, and in Cuba Andy had excelled himself.Not only did he have an endless supply of stories that went beyond the realms of 'amazing' but also he knew where to take us after a neardeath experience at 30 feet.Outside the Cohiba every night of the week hundreds and hundreds of girls hang around.'Ah,' I said. 'Here are some more people waiting for the lift marshals to stop governmentregistered cars, so that they may get a lift home.''Er no,' replied Andy. 'It's not really like that here.'Puzzled, I stepped out from our Daihatsu Sportrak and was, within ten seconds, surrounded by a dozen or more p.u.b.escent girls who, for the most part, were wearing dental floss.My word, I thought, these Sportraks have some serious pulling power, but I was a trifle wide of the mark. It seems that they were only interested in my wallet which would enable them to get into the hottest nightspot in town.In return for the $10 entrance fee, I would have them as my escorts, at my beck and call, all week. Jesus.Even more amazingly, one chap turned up in a Lamborghini Diablo, which seemed like overkill. You can get your leg over if you have ten bucks, leave alone a 150,000 automobile.I was even on the receiving end of some smouldering comeons when I tooled by on a bicycle which was powered by the motor from a fumigation pump. It wasn't the bike. It wasn't my good looks or flowing locks. It was my Visa card they wanted; that and a pa.s.sport out of the place.Technically, the girls aren't prost.i.tutes in the accepted sense. In fact, they'll go further for less, which proves really how screwedup the Caribbean's largest landma.s.s has become.I found myself wondering, as I strolled round the museum dedicated to the revolution, if Castro and Guevara could possibly have foreseen that one day their people would be asked, by their government, to eat gra.s.s.In fact, the museum is a hopeless waste of money in a country that doesn't have any. Inside a large gla.s.s tomb, there's the boat that brought the rebels over to Cuba, and outside, there are other mechanised pieces which have been preserved for all time.There's Castro's Land Rover and a Supermarine fighter. Britain, it seems, has a lot to answer for. There's also a bulldozer which had been converted into a tank, and various vans which had been used to storm the palace and so on.But, frankly, none of this matters alongside Arnol Rodriguez, who is a living, breathing relic from those revolutionary days.Along with eight other commandos, on the eve of the 1958 Cuban Grand Prix, he kidnapped Juan Manuel Fangio, who, at the time, was like Michael Schumacher, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna all rolled into one.At gunpoint they bundled him out of the Hotel Lincoln, into one of three waiting cars and took him across town to a rather ordinary twostorey house. Inside were a mother and two daughters, revolutionaries to the core, who led him upstairs and gave him steak and salad.The race went ahead without Fangio, but even the news that some hotheads had poured oil on the track, causing one car to kill six spectators, didn't take the kidnapping off the front page.The world's media was focused on this tiny island which had become known, though only dimly in Europe, as a sort of Monaco for Americans.It was a dream come true for Arnol and his merry gang, but even better news was just around the corner because when Fangio was released, he told waiting newsmen that he had been treated well and that he sympathised with the cause of the rebels.Amazingly, the great racer stayed in touch with Arnol until the day he died. The kidnapper and the kidnappee became buddies. Weird, hey?It was certainly very weird to be sitting in the bedroom where Fangio was held, talking to Arnol and knowing that he'd gone on to be Cuba's deputy minister for foreign affairs. I found myself wondering how Terry Waite would feel if one of his abductors were to be seen on TV every night meeting world statesmen like Clinton and Chirac and Gerry Adams.I didn't exactly worry about it though, because I was beginning to formulate a plan. Whenever I visit a place, I like to bring some permanent reminder home and I was being thwarted at every turn in Havana.There is almost nothing in the shops, apart from cigars, which I don't like, and shoddy Che Guevara Ts.h.i.+rts. I bought a photocopy of Che's resignation letter to Fidel and even procured a bank note from 1960 signed by beardy himself.But I wanted something bigger... like a car.The streets really are chockfull of ageing cla.s.sics which would, with a bit of attention, fetch all sorts of silly prices in the land of MTV.I'm told that in the current climate, it's hard as h.e.l.l to get them out but not impossible, and that was good enough. I mean, I'd just seen an Aston Martin DB4 slide by, and I wanted it.And that Cadillac over there. And the gullwing Mercedes in that barn. And that Porsche speedster. No kidding, you don't have to hunt for cars like this. They're everywhere.There was even a Maserati which, said its owner, was one of only two ever made. He didn't know what model it was, and the ravages of time had removed most of the clues, so I wasn't sure whether he was bluffing or not.This car was a bare sh.e.l.l. It had no engine, no interior trim, no seats, no lights, nothing. But he wanted $50,000 for it, arguing that it had once been used by Mrs Batista, wife of the former president.This was the third car I'd see that day which had once been used by Mrs Batista, but it was not to be the last. I was shown four Jaguars that had belonged to Frank Sinatra and countless old wrecks which had been vomited in by the old drunk himself, Ernest Hemingway.Si Senor, I know it is a worthless piece of junk that is not even fit for the sc.r.a.pyard but Ginger Rogers once owned it so I am asking for $100,000.And they're not going to give up either, because the haggling has only just begun.Later, when countless Westerners have told them to get lost, they'll sell for decent money, but not now.Che Guevara's car was different, though. Here was something that, we know, was used by someone famous. And here it was, after nine days of solid slog, emerging from the old town barn and seeing sunlight for the first time in twenty years.And there, coming from under the bonnet, were flames. It's strange how one reacts in a situation like this: I did 100 metres in eight seconds as I ran to get the cameraman, so that we could record this momentous event for all time.Andy, mindful of the budget and how much it would cost us if the d.a.m.ned car burned out completely, behaved rather differently. He dived into a shop, which, miraculously, had some mineral water in the fridge. To the astonishment of the owner, he paid five bucks for one bottle and then poured the contents all over a car which, to the average Cuban, was worth rather less than that.It worked out quite well in fact. We got some pictures and Andy got the fire out before too much damage was done. The only tragedy was that my drive in this important car was limited to one run down the Malecon seafront.Communism had wrecked a car. And it has certainly wrecked Cuba, but I guess we were quite lucky really. It never actually got round to wrecking a planet.

Detroit

Way back when, the good people of Detroit decided it would be a good thing to have a railway station. And this was not to be a platform with some geraniums on it either. No siree, you wouldn't be able to find Bernard Cribbins having a chinwag with Jenny Agutter in the steam here. They wanted something big. Really big.And that's what they got: the biggest, flas.h.i.+est, tallest railway station the world had ever seen. The huge marble cavern of a concourse sat at the bottom of a twelvestorey skysc.r.a.per and backed on to no fewer than sixteen platforms.Unfortunately, Detroit became the car capital of the world and large, freeflowing urban interstates sprang up like mushrooms after a summer shower. They connected the new suburbs with the downtown auto factories and frankly, no one really needed the station any more.And so, it closed down.It's still there, dominating the Detroit skyline, but today it's smashed and broken. Every slab of marble is cracked, the concourse is littered with burned mattresses and the upper floors are said to be in an even worse state of repair.But no one is absolutely certain because Detroit's railway station is at the end of Michigan Avenue and, as such, is at the epicentre of a gang war that measures 9.4 on the Richter scale.Rival outfits with silly names like the Ice Warriors fight for control of the high ground. And this is not Reggie and Ronnie Kray either. You can forget all about honour among thieves here. This is vicious like you simply would not believe.Every year 600 people are shot to death in Detroit and, in that railway station, I very nearly became one of them.The police had said we were mad to even think about going in there. 'Not even that phoney accent is gonna save your a.s.s. You go in there and you'll come out in a body bag,' said one cheery soul in a hexagonal hat.But frankly, the British perception of gangland violence is some spotty elevenyearold with a penknife. We could handle these American p.u.s.s.ies, no problem at all.It took about five minutes to find that we couldn't. We'd just set the camera up when, from the minstrel's gallery, a notveryminstrellike voice asked whether we were cops.We were then ordered to stand still and advised that, if we moved, we would be shot repeatedly. And then killed.I could have pa.s.sed muster as a statue until, from behind one of the pillars, came this guy who was about fourteen feet tall and nine feet across. Also, he was brandis.h.i.+ng what we later discovered was a 'street sweeper' a machine gun that fires 12-bore shotgun cartridges.He frisked us, checked out the camera equipment, listened quite politely while we explained we were from the BBC and then said he was going to check us out.Now this puzzled me. I was still standing there, wondering if he had a hotline to John Birt, when a girl emerged from the shadows. She last knew what she was doing in 1976. Here was a person whose hair was green, whose nose sported sixteen silver rings and whose eyes had as much life to them as cardboard.Her first words were odd. 'You're that guy off Top Gear, yeah?' 'Um yes,' I replied, wondering where my royalty cheque was if they were showing it in America. Actually, that's a lie. I was really wondering where the lavatory was because I was about four seconds away from s.h.i.+tting myself.But then her face broke into a broad grin as she explained she'd once worked as a researcher on Newsnight and she 'just luurrrved' the BBC.Within seconds, we were joined by an army of gangland downandouts, all clamouring for an interview. Christian, the least stoned and most eloquent, explained that things are pretty bad in downtown Detroit these days.Had he been shot at? 'What today? Yeah sure. I was down the gas station this morning and these guys came in. It was pretty ugly.'So we are in danger then? 'You sure are. If they want your trucks, they're going to take 'em. If they want your camera, they're gonna take it. If they want your shoes, you'd better hand 'em over, because if you don't the results could be disappointing. No... the results could be catastrophic.'We had a long chat, turned down several invitations to various parties and left. The police, waiting for us at the end of the drive, were impressed. 'When you went in there we expected you to come out through an eleventhfloor window. How in the h.e.l.l did you get talking to those guys? You ain't even black,' said one.Observant bunch, the Detroit cops.No, they really are. Two days later, we were being driven round an area of the city called Brush which had obviously just been on the receiving end of a B-52 strike. Not a single house was in one piece. Every car in every street was a wreck.There'd been a driveby shooting, two people were dead and our chauffeurs were out looking for suspects. It's OK, that's what they were paid to do. They were policemenists.We were chatting about this and that, about how no one has a job because there are no jobs to be had, when one of them, Hal, suddenly asked if we'd like to see an arrest.In the blink of an eye, the car had stopped, and two fifteenyearolds were spreadeagled on the bonnet.This would have made good footage but sadly, the Chevvy had child locks and we couldn't get out without scrabbling over the front seats and tumbling into the street with my legs tangled up in the umbilical cord that links the camera to the sound equipment.By the time we were ready to roll, Hal had pulled a small gun and some drugs from the suspects and radioed for backup... which arrived just as the crowd started throwing stones at us.Another guy was arrested and as he lay on the ground, his head pinned to the road by Hal's shoe, his friend told cameraman Keith Schofield, 'Get that on your camcorder, Johnnie f.u.c.king Video.'This was getting ugly and we already knew that everyone was packing heat. You can buy a gun in Detroit for less than half a dozen tomatoes and the statistics show that a gun is a lot more useful.I must confess that I kept staring at the tiny pistol that had been confiscated earlier and was now lying on the pa.s.senger seat of the police car. Was it loaded? Where was the safety catch? Had anyone in the crowd started firing, you should be in no doubt that I'd have fired back.And I'm the guy who had to lie in a cold room for three days after I once shot a sparrow with an air rifle.Happily, we emerged from the confrontation in one piece, even though our Chrysler Town and Country people carrier had taken a direct hit.Compared to Detroit, the rest of America is Trumpton. You ask an American if he's ever been there and he'll be too flabbergasted to answer. You can buy Ts.h.i.+rts elsewhere in the States which say things like 'Don't Mess With Me. I Have Friends In Detroit' or 'DETROIT Where The Weak Are Killed And Eaten'.That's strange because, just 30 years ago, Detroit was the most vibrant city America had ever seen. The people were rich. The factories were humming. You could hear the buzz all round the world. So what turned the motor capital of the world into the murder capital of the world?Well, way back at the dawn of automotive time, and seemingly quite by chance, a number of individuals set up shop in and around De Troit (it used to be French) making cars. A great many covered wagons had been built there and the city simply added the newfangled internal combustion engine.This city was home base to Lincoln, Cadillac, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Ford, Mercury, Chrysler, Hudson, Plymouth, Buick, Dodge, Packard and Oldsmobile. It was The Motor City.There were more carmakers than people and, to attract workers from elsewhere in the States, the pay was high. By the late fifties, the average industrial wage rate in America was $1.50 an hour but in Detroit they were getting $3.You could start work in one factory on a Monday morning and, if you didn't like it, catch the afternoon s.h.i.+ft in another later that day.Demand was phenomenal, too. These were the US boom years, before the oil crisis, Vietnam and Watergate, and everyone wanted a car: a big one with a V8 engine from Detroit. In the fifties and sixties, 97 per cent of all cars sold in America were made in America.No car sums up the times better than the original 1964 Mustang. This twodoor saloon was an adventurous departure, not only for Ford but for the whole car industry.Until the Mustang came along, every car had a specific engine and a specific level of luxury. There was no choice. But with the 'pony car', as it became known, customers could choose what motor they wanted and even what body style twodoor saloon or convertible.And there was an options list. You could go for bucket seats, for instance, or a limited slip differential or a rev counter. It could be a 6-cylinder shopping car or a V8 windinthehair tyreshredder.Ford guessed they were on to something with this new idea and reckoned they'd sell 100,000 Mustangs in the first twelve months. In fact, they sold 680,000 making it the fastestselling car of all time a record that's never been beaten.But today, the only records being made are crime statistics.So what went wrong? Well, most importantly, there was the oil crisis which made people slightly less willing to run a V8 with its OliverReedesque thirst. They wanted smaller engines and turned their attention to the newfangled j.a.panese offerings.And hey, these cars never broke down, so even when the oil problem went away many stuck with Honda and Datsun and Toyota.Then there was a.s.semblyline automation, which was bad enough, but cheap land prices didn't help either.When the car company wanted to update a factory, it didn't simply put in a robot here and a conveyor belt there. No, it shut up shop completely and built a new plant, usually out of town where land was cheaper.Detroit might have been able to cope with all these things but unfortunately there was economic trouble in the South and thousands of black workers were heading to Detroit in a fruitless search for work. They'd heard about the promise of three bucks an hour but when they got there, the cupboard was bare.Social unrest was inevitable. In 1967, the AfricanAmericans took to the streets and had themselves the riot to end all riots.Bob Seger, who at the time was an upandcoming rock and roller from Detroit, remembers coming home from a gig one night to find tanks on the streets. 'I just couldn't believe it. This was Detroit and the whole place was on fire. There were police everywhere. They'd got the national guard out. It was like a war zone. It was worse than a war zone. It was h.e.l.l.'Shortly after, the White Flight began, as respectable middlecla.s.s white families packed up and moved to the suburbs, where half the factories had gone anyway.In ten years, the population of Detroit halved from two million to one million. Even the Motown record label, which had made Detroit a world capital of music too with its wealth of black artists like Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves, Diana Ross and the Temptations, moved to Los Angeles.They weren't 'Dancing in the Streets' any more. Madonna may have been born there but she left, too.And that was it. Detroit became a wrecked sh.e.l.l whose population is still falling. There are no jobs downtown today and when Hudson's, the big department store, closed down, most of the citycentre retailers followed suit and went under too.It's hard for a European to understand this because we have no equivalent, but there is a very real possibility that one day, Detroit will implode: that it will simply cease to exist.Already, there are people in the suburbs who are proud to say they haven't been downtown in twenty years. The nineteenyearold doorman at our hotel in Dearborn admitted one night he'd never been there.He simply couldn't believe it when, every morning, we bundled our kit into the trucks and went off to the centre, even though it was only twelve miles away. He was even more amazed, though, when we actually came back each night.He obviously had a word with the manager who, one day, advised us not to go down there any more. When he found that we had to and that we preferred to drive in on Michigan Avenue, rather than down the safer expressway, he rushed off to explain to the girls on the reception desk that our rooms might become available sooner than he'd thought.Despite this att.i.tude, the mayor, Dennis Archer, is ebullient, saying that Detroit was only murder capital of the world once and that no one will beat the city in making quality cars. 'We'll take on anyone, any time,' he crows.But he's missing the point because none of the car firms is dependent on Detroit any more. GM has a factory in Mexico for chrissakes. Honda is in Marysville, Ohio. Toyota and BMW have factories in the USA too, but they're not even in Michigan.Sure, Ford, GM and Chrysler the only remaining US car firms still build cars on their home turf, but they're in the leafy suburbs. And when I say leafy, I'm talking equatorial rainforest.Should you ever need to go to Detroit, drive west from the city centre on Jefferson, past Belle Isle and make sure your windows are up. Crash the red lights too, because to stop here is to invite the unwelcome intrusion of a 9-mm slug.And then, at one set of lights, you'll notice that everything changes. On the east side, the shops are burned out and shabby. Black men shuffle around in the wreckage looking for anything that could be lunch a bedspring or a b.u.t.t end, perhaps.On the other side of the lights, the fire hydrants are painted Dulux commercial white, the street lamps are mock Tudor and the houses are immaculate and huge. Every fourth car is a police cruiser and every third person is out jogging. Welcome to Grosse Point, a lakeside suburb where the big carfirm bosses live.I hated it. This was like something out of The Stepford Wives and we'd only been there for five minutes when the cops arrived. They'd had a flood of calls about a group of guys in jeans. Jeans in Grosse Point. You'd get further in a Gstring at Henley.I swear that before we left we even saw someone cutting his lawn with a pair of nail scissors.It's not quite so bad on the other side of the city, north of Eight Mile Road which is the accepted barrier between rich and poor, black and white, civilisation and a Bronze Age war zone.These are just like any American suburbs until the Fridaynight reminder that you're in The Motor City. Or near it anyway.There's a pretty vibrant cla.s.siccar scene out there as car workers past and present feel the need to restore and pamper great cars from the days when their city was great too. They meet up at weekends with their customised, powerpacked Chevvies and Fords and discuss each other's sometimes spectacular beards over a Bud or two.They even have their own radio station called Honey which is run from the back of a fourwheeldrive truck. It simply turns up at the meeting and plays a selection of good old rock and roll.I'll tell you this. Wandering around a car park full of hot Mustangs and lowered Vettes on a hot summer's night with Bob Seger belting out of a couple of hundred car radios takes some beating.What beat it was what happened when AJ's Lounge and Eaterie closed. These guys didn't simply get into their cars and go home. No, they got in, eased out onto the road alongside each other, waiting for the lights to go green and had a race.All over suburban Detroit every summer weekend every straight bit of road echoes to the sound of supercharged V8s doing fullbore standing quarters.Big money changes hands. Bets of up to a thousand dollars are not unknown as the cars line up... on the public roads.You can barely see through the haze of tyre smoke as El Camino pickups roar off the line at full revs. Wilbur and Myrtle can only stare in openmouthed wonderment as their puny little Honda finds itself sandwiched between a limegreen Dodge Charger and an eggyellow Plymouth Super Bird.This is as subtle as a Big Mac, as restrained as a can of c.o.ke and as American as both. Big cars, big engines, big people and big beards, racing each other over a quarter of a mile straightaway.These guys spit at Ferraris and laugh at Lotus Elans. They are not interested in a car's ability to handle the bends on a switchback mountain pa.s.s. They don't care about pinb.a.l.l.sharp steering or fivevalve technology.They'd drink a pint of warm beer before they'd own up to a fondness for European and j.a.panese engines that rev to 8000 rpm.They like their V8s big and lazy and their rear tyres ma.s.sive. American street racing is straight down the line and simple. It's a national characteristic. The only thing in the world less complex than a bluecollar American is wood.One guy watched a brightblue Camaro launch itself off the line with its front tyres a foot in the air, then turned to me grinning and said, 'Chevrolets and apple pie, baby, Chevrolets and apple pie.'It didn't make sense but I knew exactly what he meant. This was heartland America.And the cops were not about to make waves, partly because they need the support of the white middle cla.s.ses. A patrol car sat for an hour in a side street watching the action before moving in.Over the car's public address system he announced that the show was over and that 'anyone on the street in ten minutes is going to jail'. It would have been terribly authoritarian and effective except for one thing. I could see through the tyre smoke and the flas.h.i.+ng lights that the guy was grinning.He knew that he was witnessing what the people of Detroit have been doing for 50 years.In the sixties, manufacturers used to bring secret new cars down to these meets and race them against the hometuned opposition. Many remember Ford rolling up one night in the early seventies with some kind of Mustang which blew everyone into the weeds. It became the Mach 1.It's stories like this which set Detroit apart. It doesn't matter where you turn, there is always a reminder that you are in The Motor City.There's a comic book sold locally where all the heroes are cars. Take a stroll round the Detroit Inst.i.tute of Arts which, amazingly, still exists downtown, and you'll note that every single exhibit was paid for and is funded by the car industry.The poets in Detroit write about cars and within a twentymile radius of the citycentre grand prix track there are five drag strips. Ben Hamper, a local boy and the funniest author I've ever read, is a former GM worker.And downtown, there are the buildings, huge and solid monoliths whose foundations are set in V8 brawn. Pick any one of them and you'll find it was built with carindustry money. They're the American equivalent of Britain's country houses, a solid and lingering reminder of a oncegreat past.And an inspiration to strive for a better future. The American car industry has owned up to the fact that the j.a.panese were an invented enemy dreamed up to disguise its own shortcomings and has now stopped making awful cars.Sure, there's still the Buick Skylark and the Chevrolet Caprice, brontosaurial machines which handle like lawnmowers and have all the visual appeal of dog dirt. But at least they're well made these days.American cars, from the seventies especially, were not only hideous to behold but they were also p.r.o.ne to catastrophic bouts of unhelpfulness. It was not uncommon to find c.o.ke cans rattling in the doors and a line worker's tuna sandwiches under the seat.And GM's answer to poor morale was to introduce the Quality Cat, a man in a moggy outfit who bounded up and down the lines, inspiring a cynical workforce to greater things. Trouble is, most of them were asleep in boxes at the time, or down at the shoprat's bar.Ben Hamper tells the story of new electronic boards which were erected throughout the factory. One day, the message read 'Riveting is fun', which made him ask the question, 'Well hey, if it's so good, how come all the management aren't coming down here in their lunch breaks to have a go?'Those days though are long gone and even the designers are back on form with cars like the Dodge Viper, the Lincoln Mark VIII and the Saturn range. They're goodlooking, inexpensive, reliable and advanced. The Cadillac STS only needs servicing every 100,000 miles and, thanks to sophisticated electronics, can cross a desert with no water in the radiator.But if you want to spotlight one car which demonstrates Detroit's new spirit, you should take a look at the Chrysler LHS.It's made by a company which, in the early eighties, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy but which is now posting profits which some say are obscene.Most American cars are too large, too thirsty and too ugly to have any appeal outside the States but the LHS is different. It looks wonderful, thanks to its cabforward design whereby the engine is shoved right up to the front of the engine bay.That lets you have a short bonnet which means more s.p.a.ce for pa.s.sengers and luggage. It's also quiet, wellequipped and fast, despite the absence of a V8 motor. I'm almost embarra.s.sed to say it but here we have a car which, by global standards, is right up there with the best.It, along with the new Fords and GM cars, means that in the short term, at least, the big three American car manufacturers are safe. But what about their birth town? What about Detroit?Well there are some c.h.i.n.ks of light. Today, right in t