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Heroes & Villains

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1: The DeTomaso Pantera

Is this an Argentinian, Italian or an American car? Not sure, but its street brawler's yankee heart crossed with latino styling set hearts racing from the pampas to the prairies. Marketed squarely at Americans when it debuted in New York in 1970, the Pantera played Euro exotic in the 'states and overblown Americano in Modena. A tricky thing to pull off. HERO

2: Dennis Wilson

Not only was he the star of Two Lane Blacktop, he was also a real Beach Boy who really surfed. Revealed his musical talent in Pacific Ocean Blue and confirmed he was the existential hero of the road we all wanted to be. HERO

3: Roadrunner

The pesky cartoon bird was the fastest through the canyons and always frustrating Wile Coyote, who of course utilised all means available, automotive and otherwise, to catch him. Not only a windup, he gave his name to the most muscly of muscle cars. Despite that VILLAIN

4: Peter Fonda

Is it just me or was Peter Fonda always an unlikely countercultural hero? When he mounted the steel pony in Easy Rider and Wild Angels, we just didn't quite believe the hype. And when he rode up the hill at Goodwood a couple of years ago, it made me cringe. Call me old fashioned but shouldn't true biker heroes be less...middle class? VILLAIN

5: Ford Pinto

Renowned for allegedly having exploding rear ends, the oil crisis era Ford was the epitome of automotive compromise. On the plus side, it used a European built, rock solid engine that was and is, used all over the place, in a rare example of our sending something over to the states that actually worked. Was cast almost every bad American TV movie of the 1970s and early 80s. On balance; VILLAIN

6: Jay Leno

Not only is he in my opinion very unfunny and non-telegenic, the way he flaunts his ridiculous car collection drives me crazy. That smug face. Those cars. Living proof that money can't buy you style. Get off our magazine pages, Leno! VILLAIN!

7: Chrysler Grand Voyager

You can bang on all day about how practical they are and how much value for money they represent and how the residual value is blah blah blah. But they are as horrible as the pond-life Alan Sugar acolytes who get ferried around in them. They deserve one another. VILLAIN

The Art of the Muscle Car

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The American muscle car: whether you worship the road that they tear up or turn your nose up at their raw, unrefined power - deep down everyone harbours a secret desire to own one. A Dodge Charger isn’t a lifelong partner; it’s a heady fling that is bound up in the remaining threads of the American dream and wrapped in celluloid.

American muscle cars are synonymous with the open road of Vanishing Point, the hatred of The Man found in Two-Lane Blacktop and are achingly cool and beautifully offensive.

In short, part of what makes a Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda and its brawny cousins so tempting is that top quality examples of this bygone genre are unattainable, and this side of the pond, wholly anachronistic.

Tear a genuine muscle car away from its natural habitat and import it to some bucolic, English scene and you'll destroy their glamour and turn them into fairground attractions.

David Newhardt’s Art of the Muscle Car is the perfect coffee table tome for lovers of these beastly beauties. The book manages to quench your visual thirst for muscle without destroying the fantasy.

The format is simple and accessible: a short paragraph covers the necessary meet-and-greet, before four-to-five choice shots show the engine, badge, bodywork, and interior of all the most important muscle car models. There are the basic stats and facts, but this isn't anorak territory.

And what accounts for the rise and fall of this brand of All American hero? For the author by the end of the 1960s the custom Hotrod scene had withered away from its post war roots. The manufacturers stepped up to the mark and released factory bred rods that could outrod the rodders.

Newhardt takes us through the muscle years of 1964-1979 in three sections; the innocent years, the excessive years and the declining years; covering 47 different incarnations of pure power. Among those are nestled a few firm favourites: the 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A, the 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird and the 1965 Pontiac GTO.

Each has its own story, both on the street and on the strip. Take the 1970 Dodge Challenger. In spite of being firmly placed in the muscle car hall of fame thanks to Vanishing Point, it was a model that only lasted a year. Why? Because of the insurance companies growing reluctance to insure muscle cars. It wasn't even a particularly successful model, finishing fourth overall on the Trans Am circuit.

That same year, the flamboyantly clad Plymouth Road Runner Superbird was released. With it's enormous spoiler, Loony Toons badge and track hugging front end, visually the Road Runner verged on downright ridiculous. But this "substance over style" road guzzler was designed for success and succeed it did, accelerating all the way through the checkered flag at the Daytona 500.

As Brock Yates finely puts it in the book's introduction; "We will never truly revisit the decade of the muscle car, but boy, what a ride we had." This might just be the perfect antidote to an Englishman's phantom nostalgia for a dream he never really knew.

Super Mario!

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If ever there was a 24 carat hall of famer, it’s Mario Andretti. Pulled over in the UK, it’s, “who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?” But for the Smokies in the USA, it’s always Mario.

On the US scene, NASCAR is King, more so now than ever. Thundering stock cars on ovals with constant contact, drafting, passing and re-passing, is what American audiences seem to want. In days gone by, Indycar racing was almost as strong and the Indy 500 drew crowds of 400,000. Road racing never caught on to the same extent. Whatever it was didn’t matter to Mario. If it had wheels, he’d race it.

Andretti is renowned as the most versatile driver there has ever been. He arrived in the USA in the fifties, the teenage son of Italian immigrant parents with two hundred and fifty bucks to their name. Inspired by watching Alberto Ascari in the Mille Miglia, he soon discovered a dirt oval close to home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and started racing.

He had Ferrari in his blood. “While I was driving my jalopy stock cars I was thinking about Ferrari,” he says. And even in ’63 when, as a 23-year-old, he won three sprint car feature races on the same day, he was thinking about Dan Gurney in F1.

Mario met Lotus boss Colin Chapman at Indianapolis, mentioned F1 and when he was given a Lotus 49 for the ’68 US GP at Watkins Glen, he put it on pole. In his first Grand Prix for Ferrari, in 1971, he won the South African GP.

A racer with a name like Mario had but one destiny

Andretti won in F1, Indycars, the World Sportscar Championship and NASCAR. He took four Indycar titles and won the F1 world championship in 1978 in Chapman’s fabulous ground effect Lotus 79. He claimed the Indy 500 in 1969.

Amazingly, when Andretti scored his last Indycar win in 1993, it meant that he had won Indy races in four different decades, finishing up with 52 wins and 66 pole positions from 407 starts!

But it was Andretti’s personality, aura and eminent quotability that made him such a star. As the last American to win a grand prix, at Zandvoort in ’78, it was a year earlier, after a collision trying to overtake reigning champion James Hunt, that Mario memorably vented his feelings.

“He says you don’t overtake on the outside in F1? Well I got news for him. If he blocks me on the inside, I’m gonna try the outside. James Hunt is champion of the world, right? Problem is, he thinks he’s King of the goddam world as well... What’s he want me to do – pick my nose and follow the King?” No F1 corporate speak back then...

Watch Andretti sweep round the outside in his signature move around 2'40''
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After three difficult F1 seasons with Lotus and Alfa Romeo following his championship success, Andretti returned to the USA to run a full Indycar programme in 1982. But when Ferrari drivers Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi suffered fatal/career-ending accidents respectively that same year, Andretti got the call to race for Old Man Ferrari once again, at Monza.

“You don’t turn it down, do you?” he said and, at the age of 42, put the car on pole and finished third. He still speaks with awe of the power of those turbos with qualifying boost – well over 1000bhp. “Like sitting on top of dynamite,” he remembers. “Man, I had wheelspin in fifth between the Lesmos...”

Once a racer, always a racer. But has there been a racer like Mario?

American Anglofailure

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This might come as a shock, but we Brits do not have a ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Anyone involved in motorcycling during the Fifties and Sixties, however, might have thought otherwise. Sure, British bikes flooded into North America as fast as the factories could ship them – but his was not the virile thrusting of manufacturing in its potent prime, it was the final spasms of the British motorcycle industry’s dying manhood.

All-American marketing knowhow played to the exotic in the heart of the Brit Empire

By the mid-Fifties, with Indian motorcycles recently dead and buried, Americans had one viable choice of home-built bike – the Harley-Davidson, which even in its sportier forms was, frankly, a fat plodder. The post-war US fashion for bobbing motorcycles (which entails ripping off tinware and bracketry and chopping short the heavy mudguards) helped to some degree. Bobbing was after all the birth of the custom scene as we know it. But sporting riders after light, quick, fine-handling machinery looked to Britain.

Well actually, they didn’t. Whether they knew it or not, they were looking to the major US importers such as TriCor, Johnson Motors and Berliner. Ran by switched-on blokes with bikes in their blood, these firms knew what the vast American market wanted and used their considerable leverage to squeeze changes and new models from England’s staid factories.

High-piped off-road exotica such as the Triumph TR6C and T120TT, Norton’s steroid-guzzling P11 or BSA’s Spitfire and Catalina scramblers poured across the Atlantic along with lithe and hopped-up road burners.

In 1965 alone, TriCor and Johnson Motors brought around 15,000 Triumphs into the States and the Meriden factory was working full-tilt to turn out about 700 bikes a week, almost 600 of which were exported, mostly to North America.

So, the Sixties progressed and America’s racers took British iron to huge success in desert races, dirt track, scrambles and road racing, while blissed-out loafer-shod glitterati cruised the boulevards of New York, LA and San Francisco on Bonnevilles, Lightnings and Commandos.

Meanwhile, back home in Brum, sallow-faced youths raised on boiled cabbage and drizzle were hunched over the elusive bike porn of US sales brochures, wondering why they were saddled with more conservative UK models that lacked the vital glint of California sunshine.

And why were they? Because the British industry was being run with the panache of a drunken monkey riding a neurotic ostrich.

Yes, there were great development engineers, not least Doug Hele (above) and Bert Hopwood who worked on some of the best Norton and Triumph/BSA bikes of the late sixties — but management had become bloated with so-called experts from outside the industry, with heads full of bile-inducing managerial nonsense.

On the other side of the boardroom table sat the Old Guard, who still believed that British was best and that those funny Japanese could jolly well have the small bike market, because they simply couldn’t build big bikes. Well, small capacity they may have been, but the States were importing ten times more Japanese bikes than British, laying down a solid customer base and dealer network. To say that the success of Honda’s advanced, slick and desirable CB750 Four of 1968 came as a surprise would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetically tragic.

Americans by now thought of Triumph, BSA and Norton as their own so casual xenophobia held back the inevitable for a certain amount of time. But it couldn’t last. As pressure from the competition grew quality control slipped. Loyal US importers were forced to spend increasing amounts of time correcting faults on British bikes fresh from the shipping crates just to make them fit for sale. Shameful.

The Brits simply hadn’t seen it coming. To say they were complacent is like saying the Ku Klux Klan is mildly provocative. Some would call it criminally negligent to sit on laurels first won in the 1930s.

At its height of British dominance of the Motorcycle industry more than 12,000 people worked at BSA’s main Small Heath factory in Birmingham. It covered 250 acres and housed the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. It takes talent to wreck a business like that.

But by 1973 it was all over, the factory levelled soon after. Triumph meanwhile struggled on at Meriden, but a debilitating sickness of mismanagement, ownership changes and union unrest finally killed it in 1983. We should be thankful that the man who bought the Triumph name and manufacturing rights, John Bloor, has gone on to create a sound company that turns out world-class bikes from a state-of-the-art factory. And this is a man who is very switched on to the American market.

Ghost to the Ghost Towns

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“You need to understand that I live in a town of eight men. No women. Out of the other seven guys, six are alcoholics. The maintenance guy is an alcoholic. The guy who runs the post office is an alcoholic. The sheriff and his ‘friend’, they’re alcoholics. So I don’t fit in too good. But I estimate that three hot chicks pass through here every week. It almost makes it worth it.”

Jacob is in his early twenties and runs Roy’s service station in Amboy, population 8: ‘the ghost town that ain’t dead yet’. Amiable, plump and a little stupid, Jacob is exactly the kind of lonely gas-pumper who gets blown away by the villain in the opening scenes of a Coen brothers movie. Like many of the other ghost towns that litter the floor of California’s Mojave desert, Amboy stands on the old Route 66 and was founded to feed and shelter the millions of migrants who headed west along John Steinbeck’s Mother Road to escape drought and famine in the thirties. But when Route 66 was bypassed by the interstates, the traffic dried up and the towns died. Amboy might not be dead yet, but it’s not looking too healthy.

So little disturbs Jacob’s days. And as a result, Jacob, we suspect, probably spends a little too much time sitting in the fierce Mojave sun. He’s impressed by the 155mph top speed of our Rolls-Royce Ghost, but certain his ancient, battered, dusty Mitsubishi is faster. “The guy I bought it from spent forty thousand dollars on the engine. It will do 287mph. He told me. I’ll never be caught speeding because that’s exactly 2mph faster than a cop car. A detective told me that.”

So what, exactly, are we doing in a £200,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost in a ghost town like Amboy? There’s more to this road trip than puns or irony. We wanted to explore California’s untidy back yard. Famously, were it independent, California would be the eighth richest nation on earth. But most of the wealth is on the coast; cross the San Bernadino mountains to the Mojave and it just gets weird. Weird landscape, like the Joshua Tree national park with its bizarre, twisted flora. Weird geology, like the inland Salton Sea, formed just a century ago and one of the hottest, least hospitable places on earth. Weird places names, like Zzyzx, Grimm, Mecca and Bagdad. And weird people: the very wealthy twenty minute’s drive from the dirt-poor; Mission Indians hosting poker on their reservations, and sun-crazed loners who honestly think their shitbox Mitsubishi will do nearly 300mph. But if that makes it sound crowded, it ain’t: it’s big and bleak and empty and slightly scary. It’s the California few know, and few get to see.

We also wanted to reconnect with a Rolls-Royce as a car, and as a piece of engineering, not a luxury good. Rolls no longer claims that famous old ‘best car in the world’ tag, but it ought to display some of the qualities that earned it that reputation a century ago; ought to take you deep into that desert at furious speed and in sybaritic luxury and without once making you worry that the nearest help is five miles overhead and just starting its descent towards LAX.

At 5.4 metres the Ghost still a colossal car; it even spills out of some plus-sized American parking spaces but it disguises its bulk beautifully and manages to look prestigious but not arrogant, exactly the pose Rolls needs it to strike in more austere times. You slide inside; it’s so well made, and from such extraordinary materials – leather that’s almost oily to the touch, fat lumps of aluminium, frosted glass and Steinway-grade black lacquer – that £195,840 before ‘personalization’ starts to feel like good value.

Rolls-Royce has somehow managed to make its monstrous 563bhp, twin-turbocharged, 6.6-litre V12 as refined as a Tesla at cruising speeds. And of course, the low-speed ride is magnificent. So we sigh from light to light as we set out from Palm Springs. Soon shops like ‘Diamonds of Splendor’ give way to Ray’s Towing and Frank’s Auto Body, and then to fields of dates being picked by long rows of sweltering migrant workers, and then just flat scrub as we head south to the Salton Sea.

What a dump. If it wasn’t for places like this balancing out the absurd wealth of Palm Springs, California would be way higher on that rich list. Early, optimistic attempts to market it as the Californian Riviera were scuppered by the intense heat, the water’s heavy saltiness and the stink caused by pollution and resulting mass die-offs of the fish. The sea is ringed with abandoned beach-front buildings and its few remaining settlements look more like the slums of Mexico City. This ain’t the OC. Many of the homes have an ancient Airstream caravan at their centre, to which various ramshackle lean-tos have been added: it’s as if those dustbowl migrants driving to the coast just gave up and stopped.

From here, the plan is to drive due north, over the Cottonwood Mountains into the Joshua Tree national park, through Twentynine Palms and north again across the Mojave to hit Route 66 and the ghost towns. Twentynine Palms is another weird place. Its 15,000 residents - lots of hippies, lots of artists – co-exist uneasily with the 10,000 marines who occupy and regularly blow up a patch of desert the size of LA directly to the north of the town. There are only three kinds of business around the base; ‘massage parlours’, tattoo artists, and barbers providing the haircuts the grunts are required to have once a week.

The road out to the north is deserted, because it doesn’t lead anywhere normal people would want to go. It skirts the back of the marine base, climbs over the Sheep Hole mountains, then drops down towards the vast, flat valley floor and runs, mostly laser-straight, to meet what’s left of what the world’s most famous road. It is beautiful, but arid and bleak and terrifying at the same time.

But for us it’s road-trip-perfect. I finally get that power-reserve gauge to show that the Ghost’s motor has nothing left to give. It’s very fast, the Ghost. It settles naturally at 130mph; enough for California’s famously unimaginative state troopers to put us in a cell for the night, but necessary if we’re going to race and overhaul the mile and half-long freight trains that rumble alongside the road. Their drivers blow their horns in appreciation as we run alongside them before we drop a couple of cogs and surge off towards the vanishing point.

The ghost towns, when you reach them, can be easy to miss. The ironically named Bagdad is shown on the Ghost’s very modern sat-nav but literally nothing remains, other than a faint track that leads away into the desert. In Chambless, a glorious but faded fifties sign for the Roadrunner’s Retreat and Restaurant still stands, along with a boarded-up diner and a gas station whose pumps have long-since toppled over, the numerals on their rotating counters melted into Daliesque distortions. The tarmac parking lot has been all but reclaimed by the desert, but like Ellis Island in New York, it’s impossible not to feel the presence of the millions of poor but hopeful who passed through here. It was maybe the greatest motoring migration in history.

We head back to Jacob’s for a cold Coke and a fill-up; run out of gas out here and you might end up ghostly yourself, for any of a number of reasons. Jacob still won’t let us take his picture; he claims to be one-eighth Native American and worries about the effect on his soul. But he is delighted we came back, and even happier that the same, slightly out-of-place German cabaret singer and model duo who’d attached themselves to us the night before in Twentynine Palms had stopped at his gas station and flirted with him too. “Three hot chicks a week, but I get two in one day!” Big country. Small place.