We Drove Across Spain Before Lunch

Casa de Something, Estoril. We stayed in under $125 a night hotels. 

        For a while I had a wonderful job.

        For example I said to Tom Bryant, the editor-in-chief of Road & Track, “remember the days when there really was grand touring and you drove across Europe from one Formula One race to another in a fast, luxurious car?  How about I go to the Portuguese Grand Prix for a weekend, then drive across Europe to go to the European Grand Prix in Nurmburg, Germany the next weekend. Stay in nifty places and Road & Track will pay for everything."
      
    And Tom said, "Great."

                 I'd cover the races and we would stay in under $125 a night hotels so my piece would be a practical guide to great places to stay without spending a fortune as well as an up close look at the movers and shakers at the top of Formula One.  Here's some snapshots taken at the track.

World Champion Damon Hill finished 2nd

World Champion Alain Prost would later buy Ligier

World Champion Mikka Hakkinen

In the paddock.  Ron Dennis in the Middle

  

 

           After the race we drove up the coast of Portugal and stayed in a small hotel on the beach. In the morning we watched the fisherman push their boats into the sea as fisherman have done in boats like this for over a thousand years. Under the beauty of the old boats and the spectacle of challenging the ocean, there was the grit of brutally hard work, small catches, and almost no money at all.

           We drove up to Oporto, and out along the Douro Valley.

  My companion wearied of sliding around hairpin after hairpin turn.  So we drove across Spain before lunch.  At a steady 155 mph the M3 was at ease and so were we.

 

We stayed in San Sebastian, next to France. In several ways, I believe, San Sebastian is the most delicious city in Europe.

 And the next day drove to the Nurburgring in the Eiffel mountains.

The M3 and the Blaue Ecke in Nurmburg

Where Dario Franchitti demo'd Juan Manuel Fangio's 1955 Mercedes W196, the one that won the world championship. The next day Michael Schumacher won the European Grand Prix in front of his home crowd.

It was a good week to go to work.

Fangio and the Maserati 250F

Stirling Moss gives a Maserati 250F a run in 2006

A couple of days ago I put up a piece on a lovely little Stanguellini I used to own but never saw.  It was a half scale copy (with a 1 liter Fiat engine) of one of the great race cars of all time, the Maserati 250 F from the era when drivers sat bolt upright behind the engine.  Here's a wonderful video of Juan Manuel Fangio driving a Maserati 250F. 
        Tom Wheatcroft who owned the Donnington Circuit  thought they were so much fun to watch, he built a bunch of replicas and raced them in a championship series all their own.  Nobody cared. 
          Which may have proved Jackie Stewart's theory that people "don't pay good money to watch the cars.  They pay good money to watch people drive them with exceptional skill.  You'd have a hard time getting someone to pay a dollar to watch you drive, Bob"  

Fangio at Reims 1957 accelerating flat out, staring down the competition.
a fuzzy photo of Jesse Alexander's great photo, hanging on my wall. 

                  True.  But if Tom Wheatcroft had been able to find a bunch of Fangio replicas to drive his replica Maserati 250Fs, he'd have drawn millions to his track.   
                  The greatest F1 drive of all time was probably Fangio and the 250F at the Nurburgring in 1957.  Tom Wheatcroft bought that car and you can pay good money (7 quid) see it in the world's largest Formula One racing car museum, based on Tom Wheatcroft's collection.