Targa by Stilo

The experience was almost supernatural: the most powerful of the original Targa Florio competitors would have had barely half the power I now had at my disposal. Then, when I got back to the villa and was stumbling around its olive groves trying to recover some sense of equilibrium, I found a 1926 Type 35T Bugatti built especially to do the Targa with its owner standing proudly beside it.

He asked if I’d like a ride in it and I guess because by now I must have been sporting a truly disgusting air of entitlement, because I replied that I’d much rather drive. And instead of tell me to hop it, he grinned broadly, asked if I’d driven pre-war cars before and once satisfied with my answer directed me to the seat with the wheel. I then spent half an hour charging around part of the Targa Florio in an original Targa Florio Bugatti.

I only made one small mistake. Which was to be so stoked by the island and its racing history I determined to return the following summer to show its wonders to my family. And yes, looking back, I can see the tiny flaw in the plan too, which just goes to show how blinded by the Bugatti experience I had become.

We still flew by jet, but this time one owned by Michael O’Leary complete with his highly unorthodox approach to customer care. Which turned out not to be very Lear-y at all. When we arrived instead of striding across the tarmac and into a waiting helicopter, we joined a queue longer than that which forms at the Hillary Step on the first summit day of Everest’s season.

It led to the Hertz desk whose staff were as bored and they were unhelpful, but at least we’d booked a Ford Focus estate, which would have space for my young family’s mountain of clobber and be excellent fun to drive. So when I was handed the well-worn key of a Fiat Stilo station wagon, I was able to point to my booking confirmation which said, very clearly: FORD FOCUS. Which then enabled them to point to the rather less clear small print saying: OR SIMILAR. I did toy with idea of going full Sir Humphrey and pointing than in so comparing a Focus to a Stilo it was placing a heavier burden on the logical and semantic resources of the English language than they could reasonably be expected to bear, but then my four-year-old starting crying and that was the end of that.

We’d decided we would get ‘the lap’ out of the way first. The start in Cerda is not far from Palermo and if I’d be allowed one circuit, I promised I’d spend the next ten days trailing around Roman ruins, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and being bombed by rolled up balls of offspring in various hotel swimming pools.

The pits were still there and looked magnificent. The route ran anti-clockwise, first south to Caltavuturo, then north east to Collesano before reaching the coast at Campofelice, before hammering down a straight so long it makes even the pre-chicane Mulsanne look pretty inadequate. In all it would be 44 miles of pure automotive nirvana. I would be Nino Vaccarella in a factory Ferrari 512S. The true extent of my delusion may now be becoming apparent.

We were fewer than ten miles into the 44-mile lap before the first child said she felt sick. For reasons both emotional and practical, such pleas cannot be ignored, so I slowed down and when she felt no better I slowed some more until I was holding up the coach-load of pensioners I’d passed at the start.

‘It’s no good, we’ll have to stop,’ said my wife, claiming first prize in that week’s competition for stating the blindingly obvious. So we did. And when we got going again I probably managed five minutes at a reasonable speed (for an overladen Fiat Stilo estate) before she felt sick again. Not wanting to be outdone or perhaps in a gesture of purest solidarity, her sister then said she felt ill too and just as I managed to get the car stopped again, she proved it more than just talk by actually being ill, though mercifully all over the grass verge rather than Fiat’s upholstery.

It seems incredible to me from these few years’ distance that the heartless bastard I so clearly was insisted on continuing, albeit at a pace now so slow that on the downhill sections gimlet-eyed cyclists were flying past the beleaguered, godawful Stilo at twice our speed. I must have become obsessed, filled with a crazed compunction to complete that bloody lap no matter what. So I set my jaw and grimly carried on knowing that at least no one was going to feel sick. I had reckoned without my wife. Which is how I found myself in a minority of one sat amid a quorum of queasiness and even I knew that, 33 miles in, the game was up. In 1970, Leo Kinnunen drove his Porsche 908/3 around this track in 33min 36sec. In 2006, Andrew Frankel abandoned his Fiat Stilo station wagon after 2hrs 14min and 27sec with quarter of the lap still to go and a vomit-fuelled mutiny on the back seat.

In my less rational moments I still suspect it was a conspiracy among the women in my life to get me to abandon my deranged plan and get to a hotel with a pool, and I would like to point out that no one felt in the least bit ill on the way back or, indeed, for the rest of the holiday.

Sitting by the said pool nursing a cold beer, watching the sun set behind the mountains and hearing in my head the shrieks, growls and snarls of the racing Porsches, Alfas and Ferraris that passed this place so many years ago, I finally realised it had been a fool’s errand from the start. And I knew the fault lay neither with my bored, sick children, my patient missus, nor my hard working, unloved Stilo, ghastly machine though it was. It lay with me and the Veyron.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but there was a price for driving the Bugatti on these roads: it was that I could never come back. By the time I realised it, believe me, I had paid in full.