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Tiff Needell's column
Tiff looks back on his most extreme motoring week
I've been lucky enough to have some pretty interesting times in my career, but I think I've just completed my most extreme motoring week ever! If I tell you it began with a MkVII Jaguar at Goodwood and ended with a line-up of supercars outside the Paris Opera House, you'll get some idea of what I mean. Add in a drive across a Bolivian salt lake in a Ferrari 599GTB Fiorano for good measure, and you can see it really was seven days to remember.
The Goodwood Revival meeting was, as ever, a most magnificent occasion at the West Sussex venue. It's a complete time warp, where you can lose yourself in a world which is an exact replica of the way motorsport was 50 years ago. As a boy, I fell in love with racing there, and even if you only have a passing interest in competition, I'd recommend you book your tickets for next year.
While the big Jaguar wasn't exactly the kind of car I dreamed of racing, I had huge fun wrestling this two-tonne monster around the course, harrying the leaders until the drum brakes had enough and I was forced to go into 'pump the pedal' mode. I also drove a 1963 AC Cobra, which proved to me that you can have too much torque for your own good - as every prod on the throttle provoked the 4.7-litre V8 into breaking the traction of the skinny rear tyres.
After a day driving something completely different - little white balls at a Peter Alliss charity golf event - it was off to Bolivia to film my part in Ferrari's Panamerican 20,000, an epic 84-day adventure featuring two 599s driven by a succession of motoring journalists from Rio de Janeiro to New York. My destination was Uyuni on the shore of one of the world's greatest salt lakes, in the middle of which sits the Salt Hotel, made entirely of blocks of salt.
That's where I found the two Ferraris. Unfortunately, there were also five chase cars and three service vans, so my dream of being given a map and a survival kit and told to get on with it faded away! Having already told you in these pages why I thought the 599GTB was better suited to the road than the track, I'd thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate exactly how capable a grand tourer it is. But instead I found myself on a convoyed cruise!
Day one on unsurfaced roads saw us travel 125 miles at a brain-numbing average of 15mph, and even when we hit tarmac for day two, we rarely got above 80mph. But I guess if it was my job to deliver two supercars 20,000 miles across terrain more suited to a Land Rover, I'd be equally cautious. Only minor niggling faults had occurred by the time we arrived in La Paz, and if nothing else we'd proved that the ride quality and seats left us fresh and ready for more - and there were no nasty rattles or vibrations to indicate that the going had got too tough.
The Ferraris still had 71 days to go, but I had a mere 24 hours to get to France's capital to flag off a fleet of supercars on a five-day tour to Cannes. No Gumball Rally-style madness here, simply a gentle five-star cruise to the south coast. I was offered a spare seat in a Lamborghini Murciélago, - but after that mammoth week of motoring, all I wanted to do was go home...
Tiff Needell is a presenter on Channel Five's motoring programme Fifth Gear and is also a motorsport writer and commentator
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| That's where I found the two Ferraris. Unfortunately, there were also five chase cars and three service vans, so my dream of being given a map and a survival kit and told to get on with it faded away! | |
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The Goodwood Revival meeting was, as ever, a most magnificent occasion at the West Sussex venue. It's a complete time warp, where you can lose yourself in a world which is an exact replica of the way motorsport was 50 years ago. As a boy, I fell in love with racing there, and even if you only have a passing interest in competition, I'd recommend you book your tickets for next year.
While the big Jaguar wasn't exactly the kind of car I dreamed of racing, I had huge fun wrestling this two-tonne monster around the course, harrying the leaders until the drum brakes had enough and I was forced to go into 'pump the pedal' mode. I also drove a 1963 AC Cobra, which proved to me that you can have too much torque for your own good - as every prod on the throttle provoked the 4.7-litre V8 into breaking the traction of the skinny rear tyres.
After a day driving something completely different - little white balls at a Peter Alliss charity golf event - it was off to Bolivia to film my part in Ferrari's Panamerican 20,000, an epic 84-day adventure featuring two 599s driven by a succession of motoring journalists from Rio de Janeiro to New York. My destination was Uyuni on the shore of one of the world's greatest salt lakes, in the middle of which sits the Salt Hotel, made entirely of blocks of salt.
That's where I found the two Ferraris. Unfortunately, there were also five chase cars and three service vans, so my dream of being given a map and a survival kit and told to get on with it faded away! Having already told you in these pages why I thought the 599GTB was better suited to the road than the track, I'd thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate exactly how capable a grand tourer it is. But instead I found myself on a convoyed cruise!
Day one on unsurfaced roads saw us travel 125 miles at a brain-numbing average of 15mph, and even when we hit tarmac for day two, we rarely got above 80mph. But I guess if it was my job to deliver two supercars 20,000 miles across terrain more suited to a Land Rover, I'd be equally cautious. Only minor niggling faults had occurred by the time we arrived in La Paz, and if nothing else we'd proved that the ride quality and seats left us fresh and ready for more - and there were no nasty rattles or vibrations to indicate that the going had got too tough.
The Ferraris still had 71 days to go, but I had a mere 24 hours to get to France's capital to flag off a fleet of supercars on a five-day tour to Cannes. No Gumball Rally-style madness here, simply a gentle five-star cruise to the south coast. I was offered a spare seat in a Lamborghini Murciélago, - but after that mammoth week of motoring, all I wanted to do was go home...
Tiff Needell is a presenter on Channel Five's motoring programme Fifth Gear and is also a motorsport writer and commentator
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