I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (3 page)

There is, however, one car company out there that has never lost sight of its role in the market place. Rolls-Royce.

Sir Henry Royce, who founded the company back in 1904, really was a one-man quote machine. ‘Strive for perfection in everything you do.’ ‘Accept nothing as nearly right or good enough.’ ‘The quality remains long after the price is forgotten.’ ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.’

You get the picture. And so did BMW. When they bought the company they could have fitted a new body to one of their 7 series. That’s what Mercedes did to create the Maybach. But instead of wandering around the BMW spare-parts
division saying, ‘What do we want?’ the engineers fired up their computers and asked, ‘What do we need?’

Plainly they looked at what Henry Royce and Charles Rolls were trying to achieve a hundred years ago, and thought, ‘Zis is vot ve must do also.’ And as a result the Phantom is quite simply the best car in the world.

Obviously, it is not the easiest car in the world to park and nor, thanks to a top speed of 150 mph, is it the fastest. I should also draw your attention at this point to the handling, which is not what you’d call sporty. Unless, of course, your everyday transport is a hovercraft.

In my experience it is not the best-built car in the world either. It’s not handmade – that’s another way of saying the door will fall off – but it is hand-finished, and that’s the next worst thing.

I heard, even before the car was launched, that on an advertising photo shoot the flying lady refused to come out from her cavity in the radiator grille. On
Top Gear
the same thing happened. And then, when I drove a Phantom to Hull, I came out of my hotel in the morning to find the statuette had hibernated and wouldn’t come out for love nor money.

I rang a man at Rolls who did his best to sound surprised. ‘The Spirit is stuck down?’ he said, with an almost pantomime level of incredulity. ‘That’s never happened before.’ Yeah right.

Inside the car BMW made a decision you might not like. Instead of festooning the cabin with a myriad of knobs and buttons, they are all hidden away in cubbyholes. You get a gear lever that allows you to go forwards and backwards, and that’s it. You get a version of the BMW i-Drive computer with most of the functions removed. And most of the time the computer and satellite-navigation screen are hidden behind a perfectly normal, analogue clock.

As a result it’s no more daunting in there than in a Georgian drawing room. You sit on a supremely comfortable chair – it’d be even better if it were a wingback, I’m surprised it’s not – overlooking acres of leather and wood. You’re never tempted, as you are in the Maybach, to push a button just to find out what it does. And then having to spend the rest of the journey trying to find which button undoes whatever it is the first button did.

This makes for a hugely relaxing drive. So relaxing, in fact, that you sometimes forget that you’re in a car.

I did. I was trundling up a motorway the other day, doing 60 mph, in a long snake of other cars, also doing 60. Only, unlike any of the other drivers, I could not feel the road passing by through vibrations in the wheel and I could not hear the engine, big and V12-ish though it was. I have had long soaks in the bath that were more stressful. I have been on tropical beaches that are more noisy.

After a while I became so detached from reality that I put on my indicator and tried to overtake the car in front. Sounds fine except for one thing. I was already in the outside lane. I came within an inch of hitting the central crash barrier and to this day I wonder what on earth the chap in the car behind felt when he saw a three-ton, £250,000 Rolls-Royce indicate, to show the driver wasn’t asleep, and then drive off the road.

I’d like to think he nodded sagely, turned to his passenger and said, ‘My, to have detached the driver so completely from reality that must be a well-engineered car.’ But I suspect he probably said, ‘What a twat.’

That’s the thing about driving a Phantom. You could pull over and give someone the entire contents of your wallet, and they’d look at you like
you’d just given them the entire contents of your stomach. Stop at a junction to wave someone out and instead of a cheery wave you get a sneery V sign. On the pavement you are a normal person with ears and a spleen. In a Rolls you are the bastard love child of Fred West and Harold Shipman.

I quite like that. I like it because it shows cars, despite the best endeavours of Kia and Hyundai and Daewoo, are still able to raise the blood pressure a bit. It’s good that nothing more than a mass-produced collection of iron ore, rubber, sand, cow skin and petrochemical by-products can still raise a bit of bile.

I also like it because from inside you really don’t care. It’s like walking into a fighty football supporters’ pub in a suit of armour. There’s a sense of ‘and what are you going to do about it exactly’.

This really is a vast car. And, because the Laws of Automotive Styling say that the tyres must be exactly half the height of the car itself, they come up to my thigh. Then you have the radiator grille, which is bigger than my first flat, and the bonnet on which you could quite easily have a game of cricket. Certainly you could have a very major crash in a Phantom and simply not know.

There’s also a sense of imperiousness, a sense that you really are driving round in Queen Victoria. It’s the effortless power and the sense of empire. Yes, the leather may come from Bavarian cows, and all the components may arrive at the underground factory having already been assembled in Germany, but for all we know Elgar’s quill was bought in Munich. It didn’t stop his music from being as English as the Malvern Hills.

I loved my time with the Rolls as much as everyone else hated it, and me, for having one.

It’s not easy to decide which of man’s creations is the most beautiful. It may be a painting, or a garden, or a building or perhaps one of Jordan’s breasts.

Once, on a glorious summer’s morning, I saw the Humber Bridge rising out of some dawn mist and thought it might well be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. But then there’s the SR-71 spy plane and the Aston Martin DB7 and the Lamborghini Miura. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao isn’t too shabby either.

However, after a long walk round the garden I’ve decided that the most jaw-dropping, eye-watering, hand-biting man-made spectacle of all time is the 1965 Riva Aquarama speedboat.

There’s something about the angle of its prow and the positioning of that wraparound windscreen: it was actually based on the panoramic cinema screens that were popular at the time and
this is the reason why the boat was called the ‘Aquarama’.

Then you have the leatherwork in white and turquoise that seems to go so perfectly with the deeply polished mahogany hull, and the whole thing is finished off with a tail that tapers and flares just so.

Now, that the most beautiful man-made creation should have come from Italy is no surprise. There’s a passion for aesthetics in Italy that you simply don’t find anywhere else. But what about the most beautifully made creation? Is it the 1995 Honda Civic or maybe the Great Wall of China? Perhaps it’s one of David Linley’s wardrobes or a Brunel steamship? We shouldn’t forget the Whitworth rifle either.

Well, I’ve just had another long walk round the garden and I’ve decided that the most perfectly crafted of all man’s achievements, with the greatest attention to detail and quality, is, in fact, the 1965 Riva Aquarama. Oh, and it’ll do 50 mph. All things considered then, quite a boat.

Riva began to make boats on the spectacular shores of Lake Iseo in northern Italy way back at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To begin
with the products were simple, robust ferries really, but pretty quickly, this being Italy, they turned their attention to the notion of going quickly.

By 1934 they were going very quickly indeed. So quickly, in fact, that one of their 1500cc racers actually set a world speed record on water.

After the war things changed. Old man Riva, the third generation of the family that started it all, was keen to carry on making bash ’n’ crash racers but his son, Carlo, had seen the new boats coming in from America and had other ideas. He wanted to make quality products for the leisure market.

There were furious rows over which direction the company should take. Some were so bad that Mrs Riva would have to step in and physically separate her brawling husband and son. And then one evening Carlo fell to his knees and said, ‘Father, you can take that bottle from the table and hit me over the head with it. You can kill me, but I have to make my boats.’

Dad relented and Carlo was in business. At first he didn’t appear to be very good at it. Fed up with the racing teams who argued that they must have a discount in exchange for all the publicity they
brought, he doubled the price and scared them all away. Within weeks, then, he had no customers at all.

He also had no money, so he went to see the Beretta family who had made a fortune from guns. They gave him enough to buy six engines and off to America he went.

The first port of call was Detroit, where he had a meeting with the company that made the boats he so admired: Chris-Craft. They listened politely to the young man from Italy and said they’d be only too happy to supply him with engines providing he bought 50. That was 44 more than he could afford.

The next day he went back to see them and with a lot of shrugging said he’d love to buy 50 but sadly the post-war Italian government would only allow him to import six at a time. Very sorry. Nothing he could do. Hands are tied. The boys at Chris-Craft fell for the story hook, line and sinker and Carlo got his V8s.

Back at home he set about annoying as many customers as he could. Once, a German industrialist came to the factory and placed an order, then made the mistake of laughing when he was given the delivery date. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘There’s
no way you Italians could manage that.’ Carlo threw him out.

He was completely obsessive. He colour-coded the staff’s coats so the people in the woodyard wore red and the people in the engine bay wore yellow and so on. This way, if he looked out of his glass office and saw all the coats mingling, he’d know immediately that something was wrong.

Colleagues roll their eyes when they talk about the old days. ‘I remember once,’ said one, ‘we spent all night going through pictures of our boats to see which was best for our publicity material. We didn’t get finished until dawn, and then Carlo messed them all up again to see if we’d pick our original choices a second time around.’

Putting that much care into the pictures shows just how much care he put into the boats. He used the latest varnishes and varnished them again and again. And then again for good measure. The Italian motor industry was using 1.5 microns of chrome on its cars. He was using 30 microns on his boats. He was so pathological about quality that it was taking an age to get anything out of the factory and into the water. He reckoned on spending 1,500 hours to make one boat – a ludicrous amount of time for what was only an open
pleasure craft – but pretty soon he was spending 3,000 hours on each one. Sometimes more.

Small wonder they became known as the Rolls-Royce of boats, the Stradivarius of watercraft.

However, while his time and motion was a bit skew-whiff, his timing was impeccable because his crowning achievement, the Aquarama, came along in 1962. Which was pretty much the precise moment when the jet set really got into its stride.

In the olden days the idle rich played a bit of tennis and read a few books and that was about it. The only excitement came when someone decided to have a war. But then, towards the end of the fifties, they suddenly found that thanks to the jet engine and the helicopter they could pretty well go where they wanted, when they wanted. St Tropez for breakfast. St Moritz for lunch. St Albans for dinner even.

The epicentre of all this, the maypole in the playground if you like, was the South of France. And that meant they needed a boat, and because they were very rich they needed the best, and that meant that they all ended up at Carlo Riva’s door.

Over the next few years the list of celebrity customers became a joke. He sold boats to Stewart Granger, John Barry, Rex Harrison, Peter Sellers,
Brigitte Bardot, Karl Heineken, Sophia Loren, Joan Collins, President Nasser, Victor Borge, King Hussein, Ferrucio Lamborghini, Prince Rainier, Roger Vadim and Richard Burton. The Aquarama became a mahogany passport to the high life.

Over in the States Chris-Craft were horrified and immediately stopped supplying engines, but this didn’t stop Carlo. By then he was on such a roll he simply made his own. Beautifully, of course.

Eventually the boat-building world turned to glass fibre, which was tough and resilient, but Carlo refused to buckle. ‘Here in Italy,’ he told me once, ‘we won’t take a shit unless the lavatory seat is made from wood.’

His staff were equally vehement. One day, at Portofino, a Riva salesman was to be found berating some poor chap who’d dared to park his plastic gin palace in the harbour. ‘Go away,’ he shouted. ‘Portofino is a beautiful place full of cultural heritage and only beautiful things can come here.’

It was no good though. The plastic boats started to take over and the Aquarama, at £250,000, started to look preposterously expensive. It soldiered on until 1996, by which time 3,760 had
been made. But by then Carlo had sold the company to Vickers, who had introduced a glass-fibre cabin cruiser and were concentrating on restorations.

Horrified, he tried to buy the rights to his old boat back. But Vickers said no. Carlo told me it ‘hurt his heart’.

Today you can buy one of his reclaimed Aquaramas for £250,000 – exactly the same as the damn thing cost new. But whatever, you will have one of the best-handling sports boats ever made. There’s no power trim, no adjustable this and active that. You just get the wooden hull and two V8s, but that’s all you need.

Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, once asked to try one out. He was told that if he could turn it over, he could have it. And Gianni, being Gianni, tried. But couldn’t.