[CAR ENGINE]
CHRIS HARRIS: Welcome to the 2013 Mille Miglia.
This isn't really my world, the world of old cars.
So I'm looking at a load of amazing metal, much of which,
I don't know what it is, but it's all stunning.
I suppose I have to just admit that I'm thrilled to be here.
And I'm driving a C-type with Al Buncombe.
As you can see, I'm a bit befuddled, just because of the
sheer amount of machinery on display.
There are apparently 422 cars entered into this event, 1,000
miles driving them from Breacia to Rome and back.
Or is it the other way around?
I can't remember.
It's a very special event.
And I really can't believe the cars on display.
So let's have a look at some of these cars before we go out
and do some driving.
Can you see this according to scale?
I'm not a very big man.
That's not a very big car.
Can you imagine or even contemplate driving this for
1,000 miles?
The great thing about the Mille Miglia is it encourages
car companies that have a great wealth of historical
cars in their archives to get them out and use them, and
have them seen.
Mercedes Benz is here with a load of SLs.
Porsche is here with a few cars.
Jaguar, the team we're with, got about four or five cars
entered, I think.
There's just so much on display.
This is the car we'll be driving, one of 55 C-type
Jaguars ever made.
First registered keeper--
a Mr. Juan Manuel Fangio.
It has around 290 horsepower, weighs 900 kilograms, has drum
brakes all around, and uses skinny Dunlop rubber.
It's a spin waiting to happen.
Hey, I'm joking.
Al regularly races it, winning pretty much
everything he enters.
For me, this is crucial.
It's not a 60-year-old car being rolled out for a jolly,
it's used hard and maintained well.
This will pay dividends over the next 1,000 miles.
That is the event--
1,000 miles from Breacia in the north to Rome in the
south, and back up to Breacia again.
Immortalized by Stirling Moss with his seminal 10 hours and
7 minutes time, it was the ultimate road race.
But it was stopped in 1957 after two fatal crashes.
Since then it's taken many forms.
But from 1982 it's been run as a road rally
with regularity stages.
These are effectively time trials, where drive and
co-driver have to average very precise speeds.
Sadly, they are slow speeds.
And, as you'll see, Al and I will struggle to understand
going slowly.
[CAR ENGINE]
So it's not a race.
But the thing with the Millie Miglia is it couldn't happen
anywhere other than Italy.
I thought I knew a bit about making time on public roads,
but I was about to learn a whole lot more.
The Jaguar team is basically a load of celebs and, hm, me.
Model David Gandy has every woman in the
two-mile radius, giggling.
Yasmin Le Bon loves her driving.
Andy Wallace won them all in a Jag and is a complete legend.
Sir Chris Hoy is a hopeless petrol-head.
And I'm told that Daniel Day Lewis is quite handy at
something called acting.
Strangely, myself and Al aren't asked for many
interviews.
Now, as many of you have been very keen to point out in the
past year and a half, I don't really understand the
sartorial side of life.
What clothes to me are means of staying warm, staying dry,
and not exposing your bits to the rest of the public.
I'm supposed to wear this.
Really.
And no sense of irony at all, I'm supposed to drive around
Italy with this on my noggin.
I'm sure this is being done to keep everyone
else around me amused.
As have these.
These are my goggles.
Do I look ridiculous?
Or do I just look like I'm driving an old racing car?
I certainly feel ridiculous.
The pre-start in Breacia is in the afternoon, before the
actual start in the evening.
It buckets down with rain, but several thousand people still
mob Daniel Day Lewis, who is driving a Jaguar XK120.
That evening, we all line up on a street running into the
town and wait.
People casually mill and among hundreds of millions of pounds
of machinery and enjoy a little sunshine.
[CAR ENGINE]
The start is intense.
For the first quarter of a mile, Al giving
it plenty of beans.
But then it becomes a slower
procession through the streets.
We have two problems though.
One, the trip meter isn't calibrated properly.
Two, another C-type overtakes us less than five
miles out of town.
It won't happen again.
Then it begins to rain and rain.
The first regularity stage is a total shambles.
We have no idea what we're doing and we're
placed 400th overall.
We are officially bad at going slowly.
And we are very proud.
Later in Verona we have a massive dice with a Porsche
550 Spider, a few million quids worth itself, brushing
the table clothes of the bars in places.
Let's have a little recap of how we feel
we've fared so far.
So we now are sitting in Verona and--
ALEX BUNCOMBE: We think.
CHRIS HARRIS: We think.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Yeah.
CHRIS HARRIS: We just had a wonderful dice with a 550
Spider, which got us told off.
A bit naughty, but we now know where the line lines.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Absolutely.
CHRIS HARRIS: I've been driving beautifully.
Within five minutes of leaving Breacia, we had [INAUDIBLE].
[CAR ENGINE REVVS]
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Yeah, absolutely, we unfortunately
somehow the calibration on our trip was wrong, so we were
actually, and thought we were traveling
further than we were.
So it was a nightmare.
So we had to speak to the team, and they told
us how to sort it.
CHRIS HARRIS: We think.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: But now we're on the right track.
CHRIS HARRIS: So we've got the trip meter calibrated, but
then we had to sort of reset the total distance.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Yeah, to find out where we were, et cetera.
And yeah, a bit of a nightmare, but--
CHRIS HARRIS: A man is a lot talking about at our first
regularity bit.
I didn't have a clue what we were doing.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Time travel is just a nightmare.
That was our first one honestly, but I'm sure we'll
get used to it.
CHRIS HARRIS: No, I didn't get that at all.
But it's an adventure.
The weather has been better, but that doesn't mean it's not
going to get worse.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: We've got a little rain shower--
CHRIS HARRIS: I think we need to just get on and get to
where we're going.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Yeah.
CHRIS HARRIS: There you go.
That's the summary.
[CAR ENGINE]
We also learned not to forget your time card at the time
check, because you'll need to reverse back into town to
retrieve it.
[CAR ENGINES]
[CAR ENGINE]
CHRIS HARRIS: The rain is heavier now, and the
organizers abandoned a load of the route, sending us down the
autostrada and into Ferrara.
We're an hour early for the finish, but they let us just
check in and head off to some kip.
We'll have to be up again in five hours.
That's the thing about the Mille Miglia--
it's essentially for old money and wonderful cars.
But it's also pretty physically demanding.
We're knackered, but this will be the easiest day by far.
[CAR ENGINE]
It rains again in the morning.
It this actually Wales?
Heavy grey clouds and zillion-pound racing
Jaguars don't mix.
My goggles steam up and I have several other excuses for
driving pretty cautiously.
It rained so hard, we can't even run a camera on the car.
Everyone backs off, except the Mercedes gull-wings.
They just overtake everything.
Either they are rich enough not to care or they have
specially designed testicles.
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
After squeezing through Sanremo,
the sun peeps through.
And I think it's the first time that Al and I realized
how truly special this event is.
A nation of car lovers lining the streets, endless gifts
from small villages, gorgeous scenery, and a car that just
loves being thrashed.
I sit so low in the seat that I have to crank my neck back
to peer over the wheel.
It goes like stink on its short axle, call it six
seconds to 60 and 120 flat out.
The drum brakes aren't anything like
as bad as I'd feared.
And the old shaped Dunlops are made from rather snazzy modern
compound so they grip.
In the dry, that is.
The steering is compelling, the four-speed box perfect and
mechanical, and the exhaust nice.
Well, I can think of no better way of getting tinnitus.
A four-hour stint in the jump seat give
you a proper headache.
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
The place names draw more romantic as we pile south--
San Sepolcro, Assisi, Spoleto.
And then Al put some serious manners on one of the faster
gull-wings before we sprint into Rome.
Turns out, he was one of the main event sponsors.
Next day, he says we're both animals.
Gr.
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
We arrive an hour and a half before our check-in time,
thinking that, like the previous night, they'll just
let us through.
They don't.
We sit in the dark car park after a 14-hour drive in a car
with no exhaust silencers and no windscreen for an hour.
I thought the Mille Miglia was about driving, not waiting.
Four hours of sleep later, and the unruly sun drags us from
the underground car park into the start of
day three in Rome.
Neither of us will forget this in a hurry.
[CAR ENGINE]
CHRIS HARRIS: We have the best car in all of Rome.
It's unbelievable.
300 horsepower, 900 kilograms.
How can you not enjoy it?
The only bit we don't enjoy is when you get there having to
wait around for an hour.
[CAR ENGINE]
We jostle our way through some stragglers in the crisp
morning air, take a wrong turn, almost immediately
rejoined behind all the car we'd just overtaken, rather
embarrassingly.
And then end up in one of those dream situations,
following three other Jaguars in a police escort striking
out of Rome.
Losing twos, running red lights.
Only in Italy.
First stop is a regularity at Vallelunga circuit.
Now, neither Al or me can comprehend averaging 28 miles
an hour around a track, so I pull a little drift.
And then stop at the next corner to get the time back.
The spectators erupt with applause.
[CAR ENGINE]
Then we begin the long drag north, over 500 miles on minor
roads, running behind police bikes scuffling with other
horrendously invaluably machines, and generally living
in a dream world we will never reenter.
And then to bring us back to reality, we overtook David
Coulthard in an SLR.
I mean, what is this?
And then we really do come down with a bump.
Another stuffing regularity stage.
And then we have to sit and wait another 45 minutes at
some crappy time check.
At which point, I think we both realized that we need to
make a decision.
You cannot sit stationary in a C-type.
It is morally wrong.
It is now halfway through roughly--
a little bit before halfway through-- the final day of the
Mille Miglia.
We're sitting outside of random trattoria
somewhere in Italy.
I couldn't tell you where we are.
Al and I have reached a realization.
I call it a Eureka moment.
This even is amazing.
[A CAR GOING BY HONKS]
Like that.
We've experienced things I feel I'd never experienced.
Being led out of Rome, flat chat in a convoy of
million-pound cars, following a policeman who's behaving
more irresponsibly in town than I've ever
seen in another driver.
It's not something I want to forget.
It's amazing.
It's bucket-list stuff.
The car's amazing, the country's
amazing, the route's amazing.
There is but one problem, isn't there?
ALEX BUNCOMBE: That blue thing?
Red thing.
CHRIS HARRIS: Yeah, this is called a road book.
And this dominates us.
This is today's route, OK?
There's lost and lots of it.
And you know what?
It kind of gets in the way of the driving.
You've got to meet checkpoints and timings, and--
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Yeah.
CHRIS HARRIS: There comes a point, where you think
yourself, I don't want to get somewhere and wait an
hour to finish it.
Now, maybe I'm being a bad sport.
But what do you think we do that from now on?
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Get rid of that.
CHRIS HARRIS: We're just going to drive to Breacia, which is
about 500 kilometers away, really fast, getting involved
in a lot if dices without a very, very valuable cause.
And have ourselves a wicked time.
Now we're in business.
We need to make time.
We don't care about the timing.
And we're about to enjoy a full police
escort through Bologna.
We slice through its gridlock center and onto a place called
Maranello, through a factory called Ferrari, and onto a
circuit called Fiorano.
I'm banned from being here, so Al drives.
I lower the peak of my cap.
And he executes a large skid on the final corner.
The marshalls clap.
The run back into Breacia is perhaps the best
road drive of my life.
We follow a Ferrari 250NM as fast as I can drive in the
conditions after 15 hours behind the wheel.
The car feels stronger than ever.
But it's dark, so we have no video footage at all.
But a bit of me likes that.
It's a memory Al and I will share for ever.
{SPECTATORS CHEER]
When we roll across the finish line, we are
toast, ruined and ecstatic.
[ANNOUNCER SPEAKING IN ITALIAN]
[PEOPLE CHEER]
CHRIS HARRIS: Hey.
INTERVIEWER: How was that?
CHRIS HARRIS: The last hour was absolutely [BEEP]
superb.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: We had [INAUDIBLE].
CHRIS HARRIS: That little [INAUDIBLE] the 250NM, we
stayed with it for an hour.
And we were--
ALEX BUNCOMBE: I was dying for a piss, so I wanted to stop,
but he would get pissy, so I didn't [INAUDIBLE].
CHRIS HARRIS: [INAUDIBLE] honestly, when you left us, I
was [BEEP]
that is absolutely on the money.
INTERVIEWER: Stay there.
You beat me to it, but--
CHRIS HARRIS: Oh.
[INAUDIBLE]
[CROWD CHEERING]
I want to just--
before we leave this car.
It's amazing when you drive something for 15 hours-- we've
been in this car 15 hours--
get, we had an hour's lunch, you do generate something of a
bond with it.
And it's impossible to describe the amount of
detritus in here, but we're so snug.
We've got everything we need, and a few
things that we don't.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: Yeah.
CHRIS HARRIS: And tomorrow morning, I think we best do it
tomorrow morning is we're not going to get the car washed.
We're going to get up, that downstairs to the garage and
talk you around how we used it, where everything went, and
why it's so [BEEP]
special.
Now I'm going to go and drink so much beer though I suspect
I might wet the bed.
ALEX BUNCOMBE: [LAUGHS]
CHRIS HARRIS: And this was the morning
after the night before.
What a machine.
1,000 miles flat out.
And all we broke was a spoke.
The Mille Miglia isn't a race.
It's an experience.
[CAR ENGINES REVVING]