HIGH ROAD
Grand Tour
The historic Mille Miglia entices drivers—and spectators—in a 1,000-mile rally through the Italian countryside.
BY HOWARD WALKER
Modern mega-horsepower sports cars are all well and good, but for raw, hard-core, adrenaline-pumping thrills, there’s nothing on the planet like a vintage racing Jaguar.
Loud doesn’t come close to describing the sound of the exhaust. It snaps and snarls and barks like an attitudinally challenged rottweiler. With every blip of the throttle, those little hairs on the back of your neck snap to attention like a Buckingham Palace guard.
I’m driving the best of the beast. Back in 1956, this British Racing Green “long-nose” D-type competed in the Le Mans 24-hour race, blasting down the circuit’s legendary four-mile Mulsanne Straight at over 180 mph.
We’re not on a racetrack, though. We’re rolling through the middle of Florence on a Saturday afternoon. And we’re doing 70 mph, on the wrong side of a shopping street, with literally thousands of people on the sidewalks shouting and cheering and begging us to go faster.
Welcome to the 2008 Mille Miglia. Brescia to Rome, and back to Brescia. Two-and-a bit days. Thirty-six hours of driving. Nearly 400 of the world’s greatest sports cars. A thousand miles.
The rally is a re-creation of the famous Mille Miglia (it translates to Thousand Miles) road races held between 1927 and 1957.
I’m sharing the driving with Jaguar’s new boss and old friend Mike O’Driscoll. He used to head up Jaguar in the States before getting the call at the end of last year to run the business globally.
Prior to landing in Brescia, neither O’Driscoll nor I had spent much more than a few minutes behind the Jaguar’s skinny, wood-rimmed wheel.
It was enough time, however, to fill me with mild panic at the thought of the Jag’s estimated $6 million value, and its cantankerous, thigh-spasm-causing, heavy racing clutch.
After enjoying the delights of a gala dinner the night before and a day spent show-boating this very famous Jaguar through the ancient streets of Brescia, we roll up for our 9:34 p.m. start.
The rain that started as drizzle 15 minutes earlier has now morphed into a full-blown Florida-style monsoon. Not good. We’re already soaked to the skin, the pristine route book—our guiding angel for the next 1,000 miles—rapidly reverting to pulp. It’s a three-hour run to the first night’s stop in Ferrara.
Thankfully, the sun is beating down the next morning as we leave this eleventh-century walled city. It’s a good 12-hour drive to Rome. I spend 30 minutes prior to the restart prying apart the waterlogged pages of our route book.
There’s a page in it from the organizers reminding us that the Mille is a rally, not a race. A regularity event. Fast, they say, is not important.
At that point, an Italian motorcycle cop blasts past, encouraging us to follow in his wake and leave a group of slower cars behind. Speed limits? What speed limits?
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