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No, princess, you may not have my Fiat
Guardate un po' cosa dice Jeremy Clarkson del nostro gioiellino...
(cliccate qui o leggete qui sotto; un po' di sano inglese!)
If you are a northern businessman whose solutions-system company has just been bought for thirty-thirteen million pounds, there are any number of people on hand with advice on how best to spend all your newly acquired loot. I find, however, that the best person to consult on these matters is the former mustachioed pop star Peter Sarstedt.
Today, Peter fills his time writing songs about global warming, which is rather wearisome, but back in 1969 he wrote the definitive guide on how life should be led if Mammon were suddenly to vomit untold riches into your bank account. It was a song called Where Do You Go to My Lovely?
In it, he explains who should make your clothes, what you should wear in your hair, whose records you should buy, what sort of brandy you should drink and even what you should do if the Aga Khan were to send you a racehorse for Christmas: “keep it, just for fun, for a laugh. Aha-haha”.
Left to your own devices, you may choose to go on your summer vacation somewhere terrible, such as Greece. But if you listen to the wise words of old Pete, you know it should be Juan-les-Pins. Similarly, if you were to buy a bolt hole in Paris, as somewhere to keep your old Rolling Stones records, you might go for an apartment on the rue Saint-Honoré. Pah. Peter says you should be on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. And he’s right.
He even has some sensible advice on where you should be when the snow falls. The travel agent will tell you all about the sheer size of Val d’Isère or the wide-open China Bowl in Vail. He’ll talk about the ski-in, ski-out facilities at the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek or maybe tempt you with the joys of somewhere small and friendly, such as La Clusaz. Nonsense. You should go, as Peter suggests, with “the others of the jet set” to St Moritz.
St Moritz is the most bonkers town in all of the world. Superficially, it looks like any other ski resort, which means it resembles the outskirts of Warsaw in 1956, but the people: wow. I have never seen so much expensive hair in all my life. Sure, the Russians have more oil in their barnets than you’d find in a Kazakhstan well. And their wives are as orange as the interior of the average Lamborghini. But mostly, the whole place is crammed with people so bewitchingly beautiful that even Keira Knightley would feel like a zoo animal.
Then there are the titles. One chap introduced me to his companion and I’d nearly died of old age by the time he’d finished. “This is Princess di Contessa, di Sant’ Agata, de Baroness, Dowager de Luxembourg, Principessa . . . it went on for about a week. Until he said, “And this is Jeremy Clarkson”, and for the first time in my life I felt about six inches tall.
Mind you, if you set foot in any of the shops, you are made to feel smaller still because it is immediately apparent you are not Bill Gates, which means it’s immediately apparent you cannot afford to buy a single thing they have on offer. It’s all Hermès and Armani. God knows where the locals buy a box of Winalot or some bog roll.
Of course, you can buy a watch. Some even cost as little as £32,000. Mostly, though, they are much more than that because they all have 16 dials, a Swiss midget in the back winding all the cogs, 400 Kohinoors in the bezel, a device that summons an SAS extraction team if you get kidnapped and a facility for converting dollars into euros, which, at the touch of a button, can also convert your business rivals into pig food. Usually, they are bigger than a ride-on lawnmower.
Strangely, however, for what is certainly the watch capital of the world, nobody gets anywhere on time. When someone says they’ll be there at eight, what they mean is: “I will be there either at two in the morning or, more likely, not at all.” Probably this is because the jet set has no real concept of time. They don’t have to catch a plane because they have their own and it’ll wait. They don’t have to be at a meeting in the City at four because they don’t have jobs. They don’t even have to boil an egg, because they have an egg manager. I even met one who employed his own projectionist. And you know what? I loved it. I’ve always been fascinated by the jet set and if I had the chance to come back as anyone, at any time in history, I wouldn’t want to be Warren Beatty on the set of Shampoo in 1975 or even a hippie on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1967. Nope. I’d want to be Gianni Agnelli on a Riva speedboat in Juan-les-Pins in 1959.
Back then, easy travel had just become an option for the super-rich, which meant they could breakfast in Turin, lunch in St Tropez, fit in a cocktail in St Moritz and be at the opera in Milan by 10pm. They were making it up as they went along, sorting out the rules that were then enshrined by Peter Sarstedt. But strangely, they never really sorted out what sort of car you should drive. You see the problem in St Moritz today. It’s a mess. One chap turned up in a brand-new Rolls-Royce Phantom drop-head in white, and oh dear – that didn’t work at all. He’d driven it all the way from England and teamed his paintwork with the mountain backdrop. But it looked, I’m afraid, ridiculous.
I had a Mercedes M-class. It had the AMG 6.2 litre V8 under the bonnet, four exhausts and a restrained but good-looking body. I like this car very much but in St Moritz it was wrong as well. Certainly, the four-wheel-drive system was superfluous because this is Switzerland and any snow that falls on the road is immediately arrested.
I noticed that the Russians were partial to the Range Rover in the same way they are partial to onyx television cabinets and that most of the old guard, the ones with Scrabble high-score titles, had normal Vogues. But this struck me as a cop-out. Something they’d done because they couldn’t think of what else to buy.
Every one of the big hotels, the Kulm, the Palace and the Carlton, had an Audi R8 parked outside, among the Maybachs and Phantoms that they use as taxis, but nobody was looking. And that’s because everyone’s attention had been grabbed by a car that fitted into the place more perfectly than even Princess Caroline. The new Fiat 500. They were everywhere and everyone wanted one. There’s been a trend in recent years for bringing back old designs. VW started it when it reintroduced the Beetle; then Ford gave us the new GT, BMW relaunched the Mini and now it’s Fiat’s turn with this homage to its little people’s car from 50 years ago. It’s the most successful comeback of them all.
First of all, it’s cheap. Really cheap. The base, 1.2 litre model I drove when I came home is just £7,900. And that makes it a staggering £3,700 less than the cheapest Mini. It is bigger inside than a Mini too and, best of all, it looks better. It looks fantastic.
The looks are so wonderful, in fact, that you probably won’t care about the drawbacks. But there are a few. The headlights are hopeless, you really can’t see what’s coming from the left at oblique junctions, the engine is defeated by hills, and the ride, thanks to the short wheelbase, is awfully bouncy. Intolerably so, occasionally. This was the genius of the Mini. BMW gave it chic, want-one looks but underneath it was, and is, a proper car. One you can use everywhere, every day. The Fiat, on the other hand, is only an A to B car, and only then if B isn’t too far away.
But, my God, you come away from an experience behind the wheel absolutely loving it. It’s cheeky and nonthreatening without being pathetic. It’s practical without being boring. It’s well priced as well. And there’s something else.
It was born in the backstreets of Naples and, thanks to a burning ambition, it’s shaken off its lowly born tags. Now it’s mixing it with the others of the jet set in St Moritz. Ring any bells?
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Originariamente inviata da elkine
In racing we trust!!
