Motorworld (10 page)

But now they’re digging up the new lanes and making the intersections deliberately complicated. In towns, they are letting people in mental hospitals design the oneway systems so that they are useless and parking spaces are being cut.

This would be enough to drive every motorist to despair but to rub it in, they have gone bus-lane crazy. In Geneva particularly, they’ve crammed cars into inch-wide slots on the boulevards and avenues, allowing buses and cyclists enough space to drive around sideways.

This is costing a fortune. Quite apart from the cost of digging up roads, and making new and ever more elaborate signs, they are pumping billions into the public transport network to make it more and more attractive.

But here’s the thing. There are 1750 different banks in Switzerland, and all of them are run and staffed by fat bankers who have facial topiary and large Mercedes. And frankly, they are hardly likely to give up Strauss on the stereo and air conditioning in favour of a hot tram.

So they continue to drive to work, even though they don’t understand the new road layout, can’t park when they get there and will be fined thousands of francs should they be unfortunate enough to run over a pigeon.

The motorist in Switzerland is down on the ground with a broken nose and two cracked ribs but still the government stands over him in hobnailed boots shouting, ‘Had enough, bastard? Had enough?’

Their latest game is to ban all noisy cars and motorbikes, which is no bad thing if the limits were set by sensible human beings. But in Switzerland, they’re so draconian that the TVR Griffith is outlawed. Furthermore, cars with automatic gearboxes have to be two decibels quieter than those with manual shifters. No one knows why, and every car manufacturer I spoke to says the only way to achieve this is to make manual cars deliberately noisier.

Then there are the fines. Drive too fast and they’ll take your house and sell your children into slavery. They really are quite open about this – the Swiss government is proud of its stand against the car.

And the Swiss people are right behind them. I know we’re talking here about a people who will report their next-door neighbours for parking illegally, but when they had a referendum on the speeding issue they actually voted for lower limits on the motorway. Then they voted again for higher petrol prices.

This is not because they’re sick, or congenitally deformed; it’s because they’re frightened.

In the 1930s, Europe was under the spell of fascism, which was defeated. In the 1960s, there was the ever-present threat of communism but once again, the horror has gone away.

But there will always be anti-establishment figures who want to bring down free thought and democracy. Idealism
will never go away, it just surfaces every few years with a different corporate identity.

And in the 1990s it’s back under the environmentalist banner. This time, though, the idealists are really on to something because in their quest to bring down commercialism and give power to the people, they have touched a raw nerve. If we carry on like this, the planet will die. In five minutes of geological time, we have turned paradise into a rubbish skip. The Dutch will drown.

And the Swiss have gone for it big time. In 1985, someone with a beard announced that the forests in Switzerland were dying and that drastic action was needed, right now, if the whole country wasn’t to become Europe’s first desert. He even gave the problem a worrying name – Wallestappen.

This terrified everyone: their green and lush country had cancer. The green movement got a toehold, which is all it ever needs to put a stranglehold on common-sense politics and lower speed limits were introduced, not for safety reasons but for the sake of the environment.

They even talked about an immediate overnight ban on all cars without catalytic converters. Well that’s just great – a million cars off to the scrap heap, no compensation for the owners and the polluted air from factories in northern Italy and southern Germany still tumbling over the borders.

Today, there is more wooded area in Switzerland than there was ten years ago but, even so, surveys show that 70 per cent of Swiss people still think the forests are dying.

The forests, in fact, are fine. It’s Switzerland’s car enthusiasts who are dying. A recent count showed there are only seven left.

One is Franco Sbarro, whose factory and school is in the twee little lakeside town of Grandson. Here he teaches students from all over the world how to design cars, an art he practises down the road in his workshop.

This is a remarkable place because slung up in the rafters you’ll find a couple of BMW M1s, several rare and exotic motorcycles and the odd GT40. And that’s not all because one room is stuffed full of engines. He has a couple of 3.3 Porsche turbo units, a Ferrari V12 and even a Merlin from a WW2 Spitfire.

Customers simply pick an engine and Sbarro tosses a few styling ideas at them. Maybe sir would like a mid-engined Golf? Or perhaps a Fiat Cinquecento-type car with a Lamborghini 12-cylinder motor? Anything is possible.

I drove a car that had started out in life as a Ferrari Testarossa but which had been stripped of its original body and equipped with something truly outlandish in plastic. It had no windscreen, looked like it had just landed and had two huge tubes running down the flanks. These acted as rollover bars but also fed cool air from the front of the car into the mid-mounted engine.

Then there was the swimming-pool-blue car. This one had a Jaguar V12 engine mounted at the back, but that was all it shared in common with a normal car. It looked like something
U.F.O.
’s Commander Straker would dream about driving. It didn’t really work though because it had a 75-foot turning circle and a steering system where
the wheel was connected to the front wheels via a vast drum of yoghurt.

It was also not as fast as it should have been. Indeed, it was not as fast as a Metro but this, said Sbarro, was because it isn’t finished. It was designed simply as a styling exercise, a car to turn heads and snap knicker elastic, something it did rather well. I got through three pairs in an hour.

It’s odd to find such remarkable cars being made in Switzerland and I put this very point to Monsieur Sbarro, who answered quickly, ‘Ah yes. But I am Italian. I just live here.’

It’s just about the same story down the road at Rinspeed. This little outfit started out in life as a tuning workshop but has now moved into full-scale production with the aluminium-bodied Roadster.

It has a supercharged, 5.0-litre Ford Mustang V8 engine, rear tyres like lawn rollers and an interior that simply must have been designed by artist Roger Dean. To complete the picture, the test car I drove was bright orange.

Again, quite a surprise to find such a car being made in Switzerland. Er, well it isn’t. It’s actually built in America.

The last true Swiss car company was Monteverdi, which made some beautiful and very fast machines until the late seventies but these were styled in Italy, powered by Detroit engines and Monteverdi is a very unSwiss name, if you ask me.

The Swiss will tell you that many cars have been made there over the years but really, they can’t have been serious ventures because I hadn’t heard of one.

And anyway, we’re talking here about a country where
there is no motorsport. When Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes left the road at Le Mans in 1955, killing 88 spectators, the rest of the world mourned but Switzerland simply banned all forms of competitive track-based car racing. And because it’s still in force today, the Swiss Touring Car Championship is staged in Germany and France.

The Swiss have lost their love for cars, but you can’t say the same about their relationship with the motorcycle. Outside Japan, they have the highest two-wheeler ownership levels in the world, and we’re not talking about miserable little mopeds either.

The streets are chock-f of chopped-down, beefed-up Harley-Davidsons and Yamaha V-Maxes, all of which are far too noisy to be legal. And yet this is deemed acceptable.

There is also the Ecomobile, a motorbike with an enclosed cabin and quadraphonic sound, that looks like a cross between a helicopter and an egg. It’s a pretty groovy device this, with little stabiliser wheels that drop down when you stop, but it costs £50,000 which is a bit off-putting. Swiss labour rates are blamed and it’s a shame because I rather liked it, in the same way that I find Kate Moss attractive. She isn’t… but you know what I mean.

I will say though that there was something desperately clinical about it. It was a bike, but it wasn’t, somehow. It was too high-tech, too clean and too functional for that. And it wasn’t a car, either, because it didn’t have enough wheels. It was neither here nor there.

And the same went for the Love Ride we encountered. This was a Sunday morning meet where a couple of thousand Hell’s Angels tore around the countryside on
their Harleys with Peter Fonda at the head of the column… raising money for charity.

There was something very unthreatening about the whole show. I spoke with a guy who hadn’t washed his hair for twelve years, or cut it for six. He hadn’t shaved in a month or bathed in a year and he was bedecked in leathers and filthy denims.

But he wasn’t scary because on the back of his jacket it said, Hell’s Angels – Swiss Chapter, and there is something very comfy, reassuring even, about anything with the word ‘Swiss’ in it. It’s like beating someone to death with the
Mail on Sunday
.

Plus, instead of the goat’s blood I expected to find in his glass, there was orange juice. Had he ever murdered a virgin or kicked someone’s teeth in, I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I have a fantastic collection of milk-carton tops. Would you like to see them?’

Mad, but what do you expect from a country that has declared war on the car, even though it failed to declare war on Hitler; a country that finds the AK47 acceptable but has outlawed the TVR Griffith.

This is not a place visitors can fathom easily. I suggest you don’t even bother trying.

When we were choosing which countries to feature in
Motorworld
, there were important considerations. Would we get a suntan? Were the girls good-looking? How much was beer? If we were satisfied on these fronts, we’d ask whether there were enough motoring-related stories within the country, and whether each would back a central proposition.

In Italy, all the stories would be about passion. In Detroit, we had a social tale to tell. In India, we wanted to know why so many people were killed on the roads.

The tricky bit was making sure that the story each week was different. Having done four-wheel drive to death in Iceland other countries with lots of rugged terrain went out of the window.

The BBC executives understood this and nodded sagely whenever we discussed it. But why, they kept on asking, are you going to Vietnam? There aren’t any cars there. It’s communist. What if they think you’re American? How the hell will you get there? What about visas? And, from the accounts department, ‘How much is it going to cost?’

Frankly, my answers were rubbish. I put on my serious face and talked in long sentences, using the words ‘whom’ and ‘synergy’ a lot, but the real reason I wanted to go was much simpler.

A year earlier, while very drunk in a Wandsworth pasta restaurant, a friend who had emigrated to Saigon told me what happened in the city centre on a Sunday evening.

He explained that a thousand or more teenagers climbed onto their mopeds and rode round a preordained route. And he said they were all dolled up with no place to go because they don’t have enough money. They had to ride past bars full of entrepreneurial big-nosed businessmen but they couldn’t afford to stop for a beer.

They’re poor beyond the ken of Western man and yet, he said, they all have mopeds.

It didn’t make sense but I could see the visual impact of a thousand or more Vietnamese kids on mopeds cruising the sultry streets of Saigon all night long.

And coupled to the fact that Vietnam had just become the 49th country in the world to have a car industry, it was enough. Vietnam was going to be a
Motorworld
country.

Looking back, I would say that this was the second-best decision I ever made; the first being to take up smoking.

Before I went there, I’d always thought of Vietnam as somewhere that existed only to line the pockets of Hollywood fat cats. Vietnam was an excuse for Sylvester Stallone to cover his ample frame in mud. Vietnam was a war; not a country.

My only experience of Vietnamese people was either at a restaurant in Fulham or as a lot of scuttling midgets in straw hats throwing hand grenades into Huey helicopters.

In fact, this lot weren’t really people at all, just a collection of Oriental extras on the big screen who got blown up for a living.

I didn’t even know that ‘Viet Cong’ meant ‘Communist Vietnamese’ or that ‘Charlie’ was a nickname derived from the latter half of the VC radio call sign – Victor Charlie. The Americans had told me, endlessly, that they were simply a bunch of barbarians who made people play Russian roulette. And that, given half a chance, every six-year-old would put a land mine in my underpants.

The trouble is, of course, that since that last American helicopter heaved itself off the roof of the embassy there, we’ve heard an awful lot about ’Nam from the Yanks, but almost nothing at all from the country itself.

And this is hardly surprising. Here was a nation that had fought off the French, only to find that Sylvester Stallone was on his way. They’d beaten him too and that was it. They shut the doors on what they saw as a stupid, interfering world. And got on with their version of communism.

It was pretty tough by all accounts. Escaping boat people talked of a regime where coloured clothes were not allowed and motor vehicles were strictly outlawed. It made Moscow
circa
1963 look like Surrey.

However, running a dictatorship is hard work and people usually tire of the effort, so after fifteen years the Government began to relax. Today, they’re all on a day bed, sipping Pimms and having their feet massaged by half-naked Fijians. Vietnam is the most laid-back place on earth.