Читать книгу Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars - Boris Johnson - Страница 4

Being overtaken by a lady driver in a little car triggered a crisis of virility in our motoring writer. Luckily, help was at hand from Alfa Romeo’s new

156 Selespeed.

She was blonde. She was beautiful. She was driving some poxy little Citroën or Peugeot thing with enormous speed and confidence. And she had just overtaken me on the inside of the A24 on the way to Dorking. And let me tell you, I wasn’t having it.

Because if there is one thing calculated to make the testosterone sloosh in your ears like the echoing sea and the red mist of war descend over your eyes, it’s being treated as though you were an old woman by a young woman. Especially when you are behind the wheel of an Alfa Romeo.

As I watched her rear waggle ahead of me, I quietly breathed the battle cry of the Alfista. My fingers found the electronic Selespeed gear buttons, positioned right there on the steering wheel like the buttons on a Formula One machine—or, indeed, like the zappers on an F-15E Strike Eagle, as used over Serbia to release the smart bombs and send them into Slobba’s sock drawer—and click, my thumb depressed the left-hand button, marked with a minus sign.

And somewhere in front of me, in less than one and a half seconds, though I cannot vouch for the technical accuracy of the terms, the cormthrusters actuated the crabbing-pins. And, at precisely the moment I ordained, the machine changed down to third with the kind of throaty roar one might expect from a Turin stadium when Juventus equalise against Lazio.

‘Avanti!’ I hissed. ‘Prestissimo!’ Then click with the thumb, down to second. The car howled out of the Leatherhead roundabout like a quark from a cyclotron and, with her bobbing number plate now in my sights, the whole endocrine orchestra said: ‘Go. Take.’ You can’t be dissed by some blonde in a 305.

As I watched her rear waggle ahead

of me, I quietly breathed the battle

cry of the Alfista.

The electronic Selespeed gear buttons, positioned on the steering wheel like the buttons on a Formula One machine or the zappers on an F-15E Strike Eagle.

Yes, there is something about the very marque, Alfa, that makes the seminal vesicles writhe like a bag of ferrets. From the age of eight, when I made a model of some vintage machine, I have known that it stood for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. That great factory on the Padan plain where hatchet-faced Italians tune, tune and tune the engines they love until they burble, like the cooing of sucking-doves outside your bedroom on a Tuscan hilltop as the morning sun strikes the honey-hued stone; or like the blib blib blib of Lavazza coffee gently ejaculating through the nozzle of an espresso machine. And it was then, no doubt, that I conceived my passion for the cars that have ruled my life.

There was the beautiful, red 33 Quadrifoglio 1.5, which went like a bomb until the left-hand headlamp connected with a meat-pie van on a Cornish B-road at 1am and the elegant rectangle of the chassis became a parallelogram. There was the silver GTV, whose porous engine block produced such a pall of brown smoke that you couldn’t see out of the rear and Dutch police would arrest you for violating EU emission rules.

Finally there was the gorgeous, high, square-rumped Alfa 90 2.5 V6 injectioné: the kind of car in which Mafia dons were conveyed to meet Giulio Andreotti or Bettino Craxi in the good old days when the rust welled up beneath the paintwork of the Alfas like the great bubo of corruption beneath the skin of Italian politics.

As I think of that leal and trusty steed, I get all choked up remembering the day it died beneath me of a burst aorta on my way up the M1 to address a group of Tory activists in Llangollen. I was then forced to commandeer a taxi from Luton to North Wales at the cost of an average family holiday, arriving around 9pm to find my audience mutinous and pie-eyed on wine and cheese.

Seething, therefore, with those compound humiliations, I sought a kind of revenge in this the latest and most gizmo-encrusted Alfa 156 2-litre T Spark saloon; and you could feel the life-giving, baby’s-brain-enhancing lead-free petrol surging hormonally into the cylinders, or possibly the carburettor, or wherever it’s meant to surge. And soon that blonde was right back in front of my gorgeous, gouged-out snout, which looks a bit like a halloween lantern with a harelip.

And now we were coming into the Box Hill death run, where bonkers bikers yowl up and down from dawn till dusk on the dual carriageway. On any other day I would be tensed, white-knuckled in the slow lane, but today we were both giving those motorcyclists the humiliation they deserve, carving up the Kawasakis, and arum arum arum araaaagh, she took one and I took him too, our exhausts breathing contemptuously into his astonished face. Then we took another, and araaagh went the Alfa with the bubbling moan of lava in some volcanic pool of Etna, and now there was a clear stretch.

Whether this blonde knew she’d been

engaged in a test of a man’s waning

virility, I neither know nor care.

It was her or me. There was no excuse. There was no competition, not when the Selespeed contraption ensures that the interval in which you can move from third to fourth is tinier than the interval between a traffic light turning green on the Via Veneto and the man in the Fiat behind parping his horn, slapping on his door and shouting at you to move. Whether she saw me I do not know; and whether this blonde was aware that she had been engaged in a test of a man’s waning virility I neither know nor care.

But I tell you this. My Alfa took her from behind, and I fairly thrummed it down into Dorking—‘Now you’re Dorking,’ I congratulated myself. And by making use of the high double-wishbone suspension system I was able to make a kind of genuflection to the speed limits, then round the cyclotronic roundabouts, and ho for Horsham and victory…Or so it should have been.

Perhaps it was complacency; perhaps I just forgot to look in the mirror. Whatever it was, we came to a roundabout a couple of miles later, and—testa di cazzo!—there she was, up there on my right shoulder as we came into the ring. She had the drop on me. She was pulling away and plick my thumb twitched reflexively on the Selespeed button to bring the engine down into first and turn the car into a monstrous uncorseted roaring of kinetic energy…

And plick I clicked again, plick plick plick and—stronzo figlio di cazzo!—the sodding thing stayed in second and there we were, wallowing on that roundabout, with as much élan as a piked porpoise. And as the tears started from my eyes, suburban Beemers flashed and honked, and her rump wiggled away for the last time…

Perhaps I might have caught up with her eventually, except that just then, without warning, my five-year-old child vomited all over the back seat, including the magnesium structure and submarining beam. Next time, give me a gear stick.

Vital statistics

Engine 2-litre, 16V Top Speed 134mph Acceleration 0–60mph in 8.6 secs Mpg 33.2 Price (1999) £21,993