Coming down the Mendocino coastal range on a one-anda-half-lane semipaved road dropping 2,700 feet from Buck Peak to Point Arena, the brakes gave out. They’d been soft for a couple of days, but now the pedal went to the floor at seventy miles an hour. On one side, ready to swallow an oversteer spinout, was a hungry ravine. On the other side, set for smacking an understeer slide, was an angry wall of rock. In the middle was oncoming truck traffic. My codriver, unflappable Detroit investment banker Fred Schroeder, closed the little plastic lip on his Starbucks cup—never a good sign. And I was driving a priceless item of automotive history.
The modified 1939 Chevrolet coupe had belonged to Juan Manuel Fangio. This was the last extant specimen of the Chevys in which Fangio got his start during the 1940s. They were built by his genius mechanic brother, Toto. Juan Manuel ran them in the Carreteras, the incomparably punishing South American long-distance road races. One course went from Buenos Aires across the Bolivian Andes to Lima, Peru, and back—ten thousand kilometers mostly on dirt and gravel. Surely I could make it ten miles to Point Arena. Best not to think about the two solid axles, the leaf spring suspension, the yard-long clutch throw, school bus steering wheel, no power anything, and mechanicals old enough to get IRA disbursements without tax penalties.
But the spirit of Fangio was with me, he who won five world driver’s championships after the age of forty. Or, more likely, the spirit of Fangio was with his car. The Chevy went down the mountain with adult authority—no toddler body roll, no childish darting into the middle of the road, no infant squeal of tires. It just went, down switchbacks as tangled as life, down grades as precipitous as the known alternative. Meanwhile the unskilled driver was yanking the tiller 360 degrees hand over hand, pounding the chassis to find brake pressure with one foot and pumping up revs with the other, crashing into second and then first, looking for a little anchorage from an engine with its tachometer punching redline and blasts and backfires exploding from its exhaust pipes.
The Chevy itself was blissfully calm. And it elevated me into a state of sweaty tranquillity. The machine, the pavement (though I wished there were more of it), and I became one, serene and focused. I was keenly aware of, yet indifferent to, the woes of the material world, some of which were coming straight at me overloaded with hay bales.
I got us to Point Arena in perfect unity of being and nothingness, also in one piece. The Fangio Chevy emptied my mind like no Zen you ever heard of. Of course it would have emptied my wallet too, if I’d put it in a ditch.
I have discovered the middle-aged, overfed, comfortably off car nut’s road to inner peace. (And it has nothing to do with India.) The secret is driving vintage automobiles too fast. The path—the Tao, if you will—is the California Mille, a four-day, thousand-mile, all-out classic car run across the valleys, over the mountains, and along the coastlines on the most spectacular back roads in northern California. No dumpy ashrams are visited. No tedious meditation is practiced. No pointless kabbalah babble is heard. (Although there’s plenty of praying: “Lord, don’t let me go over the cliff!”)
The California Mille was established in 1990 by San Francisco auto enthusiast Martin Swig. It commemorates the Mille Miglia, raced from 1927 to 1957 through the middle of Italy at astonishing speeds in equally astonishing Italian traffic: Brescia-Rome-Brescia. To qualify for the California version, a car must have been eligible to compete in the original. Swig and his friends decided to found their Mille, as Martin put it, “Before some jerks got the idea first.” In other words, Martin wanted an event in which ex-president Clinton could not enter his Mustang.
The California Mille starting line is Nob Hill, with the drivers flagged away from the forecourt of the splendid Fairmont Hotel. Did I mention that I also discovered truth, wisdom, and beauty for the middle-aged car nut at the California Mille? Especially beauty. We fellows in our most expansive years of life (“Honey, the cleaner shrank these khakis.”) don’t get much credit for artistic sensitivity. We fall asleep during the ballet. At gallery openings we head for the bar to make friends with José and see if he’s got anything better than lukewarm white wine. But gaze upon the starters’ grid at the Mille and see the finely honed aesthetics of curmudgeonly men.
Looks like a million dollars, and we’re talking certified checks. There were the ten Ferraris, a prancing horse Augean stable of them (but sparkling clean)—lustrous Barchetta, radiant Berlinetta, resplendent 375MM Spyder driven to victory at the Nürburgring by Alberto Ascari. Of Jaguars, a whole cathouse was on hand—SS100, XK120s, a C-Type, and the XKSS progenitor of the E that sits in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. AC Ace Bristols appeared, the most graceful sports car of the 1950s with bodywork later to be borrowed by the Shelby Cobra. Mercedes 300SLs worked their sturdy Teutonic charms, especially that Lorelei of price, the Gullwing Coupe, which has lured many a man into Chapter 11. Porsche 356s and Speedsters hunkered, pretty as poison gumdrops. And Porsche Spyders too. If looks could kill … And with James Dean they did. There was an Aston Martin DBR2 showing compound curves beyond the dreams of Frank Gehry and a gill-slitted Maserati 200SI that could star in Jaws IV if anyone were idiot enough to put it in the water. Plus dozens of other ravishing cars, seventy-two all told, an orgy of vehicular pulchritude including a La Dolce Vita of Alfa Romeos with their labially suggestive grilles culminating in a Zagato 1900 double-bubble-silhouette coupe. God bless you, Anita Ekberg.
Why the appeal of old cars? Aren’t there beautiful new cars to be driven? Perhaps. But modern automobiles are filled with electronic weasel works and the mice mazes of computerhood. We old guys can’t understand them. And when it comes to contemporary beauties that we can’t understand, we have our second wives.
Fabulous wives, I may say, many of them along as codrivers and one, Esta Swig, in her own Alfa Tipo IV.
Then came truth. Moment of same, to be precise: when I had to drive one of these things. My worst experience with the Fangio Chevy was in downtown San Francisco, getting it up the barely cable-car-climbable California Street from the Fairmont’s garage to the starting line. The friction point on the clutch pedal is so far out from the floorboards that my left knee was waving in the air like a Balinese dancer’s. There’s no hand brake. The engine runs grumpy when cold and gas has to be kept on, but to heel-toe between the brake pedal and the accelerator would require the shoe size of a Yeti. I stalled in traffic. The Chevy has a floor-mounted starter button. I now needed not one but two more feet than I was born with. And when I did get restarted, frying clutch smoke billowed behind me.
The green flag dropped. I was off into the whimsical motoring of San Francisco’s eccentric population. The Chevy is right-hand drive, per the rules of the road in prewar Argentina. It came equipped with two playing card–sized mirrors clipped on the windshield pillars, but I had broken one off already by opening the driver-side door wide enough to get my duck-shaped self into the little canvas rally seat. (Oh gosh, was that the very mirror that Fangio looked into and saw … Yow! Taillights! I’m in the wrong lane!) The shift lever, on my extra-clumsy left side, is goal post–length with first down distances between gears. A change into second put my fist into the passenger’s lap for an untoward intimacy with Fred Schroeder. Going to third I bashed the instruments, which, except for the tach, were wonky anyhow because of a last-minute conversion from a six-volt to a twelve-volt battery. Fourth and I whacked myself in the …blippity-blip went the turn signal. It’s not self-canceling and thus had been indicating, for blocks, that, besides being in the wrong lane, I intended to plow into a row of parked cars.
And so forth in a swivet across the Golden Gate, through Marin County, and into the Sonoma Valley where, finally, there were gridlock-free curves and bends. I began to feel a little confidence in my hulking ride. It overtowered the lithe elegance of fellow competitors, outsized even a 1928 4.5-liter LeMans Bentley and a massive 1955 Chrysler C 300. But the Chevy had qualities to equal its heft. It tracked like a train through the esses and with nothing Amtraky about the ride.
We went over to the Napa Valley and up, being passed by Ferraris and their ilk to be sure, but I was getting faster. In the tight turns near Clear Lake I found I could keep pace with Miles Collier who was driving a Cunningham C-1, the prototype of Briggs Cunningham’s brilliant sports/racers of the 1950s, the only C-1 in existence. Then I noticed that Mr. Collier and his wife were wearing Panama hats that stuck, without fluttering, above the brim of their windshield. They were not, maybe, really pushing the C-1. “I think we’re going about thirty-five,” said Fred Schroeder.
I made my first pass not quite on a blind curve but on a very nearsighted one. There was power enough to spare from the Chevy’s Blue Flame Six, but the effortless business of driving that we daydream our way through in a new car was effort-intensive in 1939. Even the gas pedal required an emphatic shove. It made me appreciate the esteem in which a good wheelman was held by 1930s gangsters—not to be compared to the Crip or Blood finger-steering a Lexus in a drive-by shooting today.
On the arcs and crescents east into the Sacramento Valley I hooked in behind Max Hobson in his 1931 Chrysler LeMans roadster. This, on its vermicelli-narrow tires, is even more of a handful than a ’39 Chevrolet. I couldn’t keep up. But it wasn’t really my fault. My aged cohort isn’t slowing its pace going down the road, or going to the bathroom either. There’s a distinctive rhythm to midlife male high-speed driving—fifty-five minutes of to-hell-with-the-brake-lights and five minutes in the weeds beside the highway. At the drivers’ meeting before the Mille, Martin Swig suggested a signal for us to give to other participants if we stopped because we needed a urologist rather than a mechanic.
The route looped west into the mountains on roads as grueling as going to work for a living. Being temporary chief executive of the Fangio Chevy, I had panicky decisions to make at each crossroad, disastrous wrong turns lurking on every side, crookedness coming at me seemingly from all directions, peaks and dips of NASDAQ dimensions to survive, deadlines to meet. (What’s the line through that curve? Don’t get dead.) I was actually living in the metaphors used for business life. And I was feeling the fear businessmen my age actually feel about the absurd trust that the world puts in us. We trade the stocks and bonds on Wall Street, run the Federal Reserve, control the IMF.*
And my situation was even worse. My pal David E. Davis Jr., dean of American automotive journalism, had loaned me this car. He was friends with Juan Fangio. Fangio, when he was dying, in 1995, asked the trustees of the Centro Cultural y Tecnológico Museo del Automovilismo “Juan Manuel Fangio” to give the Chevy to Davis. When David E. went to Argentina to accept the gift, Toto himself drove the car right into the museum’s lobby. David E. has spent a bazillion restoring it. And now David, who was somewhere behind me in a magnificent Mark IX Jaguar, would see his dream dashed to pieces—no figure of speech—at the bottom of a canyon. But we graying fifty-somethings get up and go into the office anyway and manage the bazillion-dollar portfolios whether we’re frightened or not. Or, in this case, we clamber back behind the wheel after a quick break. (Thumbs up for a call of nature!) And we hardly ever let on that risking other people’s money is nine-tenths of the fun.
Fred took over when we returned to I-5 in the valley. And we had a problem. We could not go seventy-five. At seventy-four and a half miles per hour a violent shudder set in. Something to do with worn rear shocks and spring harmonics, we said to each other with the usual car nut capacity, when talking car talk, to blow more smoke than’s been inhaled. Anyway, steering wasn’t affected and the Chevy stayed straight. But we were dice in a backgammon cup. There was only one thing to do—go a hundred. The shudder vanished. Truckers, low-riders, and dads ferrying Cub Scout–pack minivans gave us the full bladder signal as we passed everything in sight.
At Red Bluff we turned east into the Cascade Range on logging roads picketed by stands of enormous pines. Navigation, hitherto handled with aplomb by Fred, fell to pieces under me among the big trees. “Turn right at the big tree!” I shouted. “The other big tree! Not that big tree! This big tree! Look out! You’re headed right for … a big tree!”
“Maybe you’d better drive,” said Fred. He relinquished the controls just in time for the long northwest run up the Hat Creek Valley where there were enough twists in the road to keep me from going a hundred, and pride (and vibration) wouldn’t let me dip below eighty. We arrived at the Best Western in the town of Mount Shasta … “Shaken, not stirred,” Fred told the bartender. We had driven 446 miles on the first day. Most of the aging machinery had survived and all of the aging drivers. A banquet was spread. The wisdom of hoary gearheads was exchanged. And don’t think that we lack it. Juan Fangio made a toast in 1986 to a sport “based on permanent values of manliness, bravery, mobility, and honesty.” Who but a veteran car nut would think to include the cardinal virtue mobility in his list of ideals? Although most of the wisdom I heard that night in Mount Shasta was along other lines. “Always,” said the sage next to me, “walk a mile in another man’s shoes. You’re a mile away, and you’ve got his shoes.”
Deeply dined, with healths thoroughly pledged, we took our cognacs and cigars into the parking lot to survey our aristocracy of transport. Is a little snobbery incompatible with inner peace plus beauty, truth, and wisdom? I was walking with Camilo Steuer, who had flown from Bogotá to drive his 1955 Alfa Spider Veloce in the Mille. “These are cars,” said Camilo, “of the soul, not of gold chains.”
No offense to the memory of Dale Earnhardt but motor-sports could use some class. It is the traditional responsibility of the gentry to do the dangerous, foolish things in life. Wars became vulgar when just any old person was drafted to fight them. Not that the California Mille is really dangerous or that I’m a member of the upper class. But there’s such a thing as a natural gentleman. Fangio was a humble mechanic from the potato-growing town of Balcarce. And if danger and folly are the provenance of oligarchy, then my incompetence with the Fangio Chevy made me at least a duke.
A duke with, the next morning, an ignominious speeding ticket, a mere sixty in a forty-five zone. This in a town with the humiliating name of Weed, where I was written up by a young twerp of a highway patrolman who was oblivious to the car’s regal bearing, uninterested in its noble pedigree, and not impressed by the lordly note of the Chevy’s engine. “You’re pretty loud too,” said the twerp.
This was the only unexalted moment of the remaining three days. But now that I’ve found truth, wisdom, and all that stuff I realize how egocentric and unevolved it is to dwell on my own bliss. So I’ll stop right here with the recitation of the delights I experienced in the California Mille. I’ll say nothing about the ecstatic thrills of the two-thousand-foot climb to Gazelle Summit on the wiggles, steeps, and skinnys of escarpment roads where the Weed speed limit seemed like space launch velocity—and a launch into space was available at every hairpin. I won’t report that there’s Elysian scenery in the remote Scott Valley running north through Xanadu gorges to the wondrous Klamath River, which I won’t even mention despite the fact that it’s a fly fisherman’s paradise though somewhat cluttered with whitewater rafting bozos, but they might be amusing to catch and release too.
I kept making Fred drive and Fred kept making me drive because neither of us could chase nimble Porsches while steering a ton and a half of Chevy and, at the same time, drink in the glories of nature (and the Seiad Valley Volunteer Fire Department’s excellent cup of coffee). And neither of us could decide whether driving or gawking was the most fun. But I won’t speak of that. In fact, just to name the geological features of Route 299 to Humboldt Bay would be to flaunt the good time I was having (and on expense account, at that)—Nixon Ridge, Lord Ellis Summit, Tip Top Ridge.
I want the reader to be as happy as I am. And it would only make you feel bad that you weren’t there if I said we stayed at the luxurious Eureka Inn or that the Fendale loop out to California’s Lost Coast is so sublime it must be kept a state secret from everyone who owns an RV or that, at the Little River Inn south of Mendocino, proprietor Mel McKinney has the best cigars this side of the Hotel Nacional in Havana. Likewise I’ll avoid any reference to Humboldt Redwood State Park and its stately Avenue of the Giants. (Nice but, personally, I think, too many trees.) I won’t tell you that we traveled an additional three hundred–odd euphoric miles beyond Humboldt in a heaven-to-heaven zigzag between mountains and sea until we arrived in jubilation at the groaning boards in the pleasure gardens of Napa Valley’s Far Niente restaurant. And I’m certainly not going to brag about how I got better at driving the Fangio Chevy.
I got much better. I almost got good. I apprehended that the Chevy, despite an undercarriage as clunky as a trolley’s and a suspension design dating to the days when a table model radio was bigger than a NASA mainframe computer, was perfect in its handling. The back end didn’t push. The front end didn’t pull. The faster I’d go the better I went. Bad brakes? So what. If I couldn’t stop when I ran out of road, well, who wanted to stop?
My joy increased with every hour until I attained satori on the Point Arena road. Never mind that the car is stronger than I am and has more guts. So much so that I would have been hard put to screw things up. The point is, I’m enlightened. I finally understand the message that all the great teachers, saints, and visionaries have been trying to convey to man, particularly to middle-aged car nut man: “Buy an Alfa Romeo 8C 2900A [first, second, and third place in the 1936 Mille Miglia] and let the wife and kids go on welfare.”