Confessions of a road tester – Part one

The weirdest of these also involved a Porsche, this time a 996 GT2 in Venice. It was the car’s international launch, and if it wasn’t for the rapid thinking of a Porsche PR man, who really did save my pancetta, I might still be staring at the walls of an Italian jail to this day.

I’m not proud of what happened, but for much of the time I was also blissfully unaware of the mayhem I’d left in my wake. This unfolded as a result of me becoming embroiled in yet another dice, this time with a smartly dressed Italian man driving an Audi RS4 on an autostrada, who wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d shown him what the GT2 could do. Which I duly did, albeit briefly, shortly after which I pulled off the autostrada and drove quietly back to the launch hotel for what I thought would be a nice cup of tea and a chat with the engineers before being taken back to Venice airport to fly home.

From my perspective, this is pretty much what happened. But from Porsche’s perspective it was a tad different, for unbeknown to me a small army of Italian policemen turned up at the hotel not long after I’d got back, wanting to know who’d been driving the red GT2 they’d just clocked on the autostrada at over 300km/h – and they weren’t anywhere near as impressed by this as the smiling RS4 driver had quite clearly been. Instead they were incredibly angry, which was fair enough all things considered, and their mood took a turn for the worse when the Porsche PR man asked them to point out which, specifically, of the six red GT2s that were by then parked up neatly in front of the hotel they were referring to.

The Italian police didn’t have cameras in those days, nor had they clocked the GT2’s registration, so after a long and heated discussion during which more than mere opinions were exchanged, they went away. And I went back to the airport entirely oblivious to what had happened. Only on the plane home did the PR man tell me how lucky I’d just been, although he never did say what (or how much) had been exchanged.

This is not, however, the biggest one I got away with, which took place a very long time ago and also happened to involve someone else on this esteemed title whose name I’m not going to disclose here (it was me and I should perhaps add by way of mitigation for all of us, we were very young, quite phenomenally stupid and, certainly in my case, have never done anything like it again – AF). Anyway, what happened was this. We’d finished our shoot late that evening but it was still light, the cars we were driving being an eclectic mix of rivals for the then-new W140 Mercedes S-Class. These included a Lexus LS400, a Cadillac Seville STS and a BMW 740i.

Only one of us knew the way back to the hotel, however, so when the person-who-shall-remain-nameless (or not… – AF) set off in the 7 Series, the two of us in the Lexus and Caddy had little choice but to follow, and at the same speed, otherwise we’d be sleeping on a park bench that night. I was last in the queue driving the Cadillac so, like the ice skater at the end of the line, I had to go extra-nuts in bursts just to keep up.

At one point an extremely long straight appeared in our collective windscreens and on seeing it, our leader in the BMW opened the taps uncharacteristically wide and held them there for what seemed like quite a while. For a few seconds all three of us were going pretty much as fast as the cars we were driving could go, which seemed rather magnificent at the time – until a lone pair of blue lights appeared a very long way behind us, at which point my heart stopped beating for several seconds and my throat went uniquely dry.

The blue lights were still a long way behind us by the time we’d sussed they were there, however, and when we did, we were already on the outskirts of a village. So by some unspoken code (none of us had mobiles) my two colleagues in front scarpered when we reached the other side of the village while I slowed right down to take whatever heat was coming my way (I’d like to say I still feel bad about showing such a shocking lack of solidarity, but absolutely no good would have come from hanging around, and almost certainly quite a lot of harm – AF).

This gave me at least 30 seconds to contemplate my immediate and longer term futures, neither of which looked good. By the time the police car caught up I still had no idea what to say other than sorry. And when finally we began our roadside discussion, me having pulled into a side turning by then, the policeman, who was on his own, appeared almost unable to believe what he’d just seen. His first words were ‘what ON EARTH do you think you lot were up to back there, and do you have ANY IDEA how fast you were going?!’

Unfortunately I did, and after a few minutes of further explanation during which I was as politely vague as I could be about who was driving what and why without actively fibbing, the policeman pointed out that his radar system wasn’t calibrated to be accurate much above 130mph, and he guessed we were doing a fair bit more than that. Gulp. He then went back and sat in his police car for a bit, and seemed to contemplate the meaning of life for a while.

After a minute or so he climbed back out again, this time looking disarmingly calm. A bit like Liquid Man. He then walked over to me with a stern but fatherly expression on his face and a grown up tone to his voice, and told me simply to ‘go away and just think about what you’re doing next time, okay?’ At which point I sort of burst into tears for a bit then just nodded, said thanks as humbly as I could, got back into the Cadillac and drove away. As you do.

Those, then, are the ones I got away with. Others I did not. I’ll write about them next week…