Motorworld (14 page)

‘I found a nigger trying to break in here once. He got an overdose of lead that night.’

‘You killed him?’ I asked.

‘Sure did,’ came the reply. ‘Ain’t no loss to society.’

The man was a social time bomb, a point that was proved as we interviewed him on camera. It took ten takes before we got a sentence without the words ‘nigger’ or ‘fuck’ in it.

My word, we thought, as we left. What an unusual person. Oh, how wrong we were. In Texas, Bill’s a korma in a sea of vindaloo.

Take Stanley Marsh. Stanley is the boss of a TV station and, despite the sartorial elegance of a tramp, a respected figure in the local community.

He drives a pink Cadillac and spends his time dreaming up curious slogans for a series of road signs that you’ll find all over his home town. You arrive at a crossroads and there, instead of a ‘give way’ sign, will be the familiar, authentic-looking diamond shape bearing the legend, ‘Two-headed Baby’ or ‘Hear the Fat Lady Sing’. Odd, but not much use if you want to know the way somewhere.

Stanley’s house was full of university drop-out types,
one of whom had modelled himself on Bob from Lubbock. He wore his trousers so low down that you could see the top of his penis. I don’t know why but I kept wondering if Douglas Hurd would ever do that.

I was still wondering when Dennis, our rather thoughtful director, summoned up every ounce of energy from his politeness genes and said to Stanley, ‘Sir, I think it would probably be a good idea if you were to drive…’

Dennis was shut down by a huge shriek from Stanley. ‘WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, “PROBABLY”? IF YOU WANT ME TO DO SOMETHING, COME OUT WITH IT STRAIGHT, BOY.’

No one has ever talked to Dennis like this, and at 51 years old, it’s a long time since anyone called him ‘boy’.

It seems that Stanley likes straight talking. He doesn’t mind being told to do something so long as it’s in plain English.

Plain English is a Stanley speciality. When I asked him if there were more eccentrics in Texas than anywhere else, he was off. ‘No. I’d say there were a higher percentage of dull people living around fish, living on islands.’

Was he, perchance, talking here about Britain?

‘I sure am boy. I don’t know how you can live on that stupid little island. It smells of fish and is covered with scales.’

Turns out that Stanley’s no great limey fan, and he can prove our uselessness when you get him onto the subject of Stonehenge.

You see, up by the interstate near his house – called Toad
Hall – he has partially buried ten Cadillacs, nose-down, in a field. Why, I asked him, did you do such a thing?

‘I wanted to build something better than Stonehenge,’ came the reply. ‘Took about a week.’

He now has a thing for burying cars so that on his immaculate lawn at home a bright orange VW Beetle is buried up to its windscreen. Crazy guy. No he really was. He’s the only Texan we met who didn’t have a pickup truck.

I was in a state of despair about Texas until we arrived in Austin, which is the state capital. You know that because the government buildings are an exact replica of the White House, only in true Texas style the dome is slightly larger.

I knew I would like this place when we were told that the only statue in town was there to honour Stevie Ray Vaughn, the local boy who became a guitar legend.

Music is the thing here. Walk down 6th, any time of day or night, and you will hear everything from the blues to C and W to old time rock and roll. Every building is a bar and every bar has a live band. Forget Duval in Key West. This is it.

Strangely, for America, the road is pedestrianised and the only vehicles allowed are horse-drawn. People have to park elsewhere and walk – a word you don’t hear too much anywhere in the US.

I did a lot of ‘walking’ around the back streets and couldn’t believe what I was seeing – no pickups. Well, there were a few round the back of Country bars, but everywhere else the parking zones were filled with Hondas and Toyotas and little Dodges.

It turns out that Austin has the largest university in America with more than 50,000 pupils from all over the States. That gives it a cosmopolitan feel. I liked it because for two glorious days I forgot I was in Texas.

Eventually though, it was time to leave because back in Houston we had our biggest-ever
Motorworld
interview. We had been granted an audience with all three members of ZZ Top.

This had taken months of preparatory work, even down to a discussion with their manager about Dusty’s perspiration problem. It was explained to us that he sweats freely and that we would need to break from filming every few minutes so that the make-up girl – who we would provide incidentally – could powder his brow.

Odd, then, that the venue for this interview should be a non-air-conditioned Tex-Mex joint in one of Houston’s rougher zones, on one of the hottest evenings of the year. It was 114 degrees outside, and about twice that under our lights. Dusty had a big problem.

We tried tightening the shot on Frank and Billy while the make-up girl mopped Dusty down, but by the time we’d swung round to film his answer to a particular question it was Niagara time all over again.

Then someone produced a hand-held Pifco fan and suggested Dusty used it to stay cool until the camera was on him. Then he could lower it, answer the question, and all would be well. Great idea. Dusty liked it too, and even Murray, our sound man, said its gentle hum was no big deal.

I was busy talking to Billy when the inevitable happened.
The fan somehow wound up in the beard and it took an hour to get it out again.

This was a testing point. If these guys were arsehole rock stars, they’d be out of the place like a shot. But they stayed. Billy couldn’t do much else. He was laughing the laugh of someone who was about to burst.

They are car nuts. In their early days, they found a big, wire-mesh ball with a seat inside. God knows what it had been built for originally but they invented a game where someone would climb inside, shut the mesh door and then be pushed off the back of a speeding truck.

After Frank survived an 80-mph roll-off, they wrote the song ‘Master of Sparks’.

Today, their interest in cars is diverse. Frank has a collection of Ferraris, including a 250 GTO which he’s turned into a convertible.

Dusty has a big, fat, chopped 1950s cruiser.

It’s Billy’s collection everyone knows best. Every day, he uses an old Mercedes SL but he owns the Eliminator, the red hot-rod from those astonishing videos.

At nine o’clock the interview finished, and then the acid test began. A year earlier, after talking to Bob Seger, he’d joined us for dinner, so what would ZZ Top do?

Dusty was out of there but Billy and Frank hung around telling tales and bumming fags. They may be the rock star’s ultimate rock stars but they’re OK. Ordinary. Funny. They particularly liked it when we asked if they’d written ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ after seeing our sound man somewhere. Murray has a habit of tucking his shirt into his underpants.

Murray felt right at home at a Texas race meeting. All motorsport fans have no idea how to dress properly but you should see the lengths they go to to look daft in Texas.

The cars aren’t much better, because they aren’t cars at all. Inevitably, they’re pickup trucks, and what you do is line up in front of a big puddle. The lights go green and you try to get to the other side, 200 yards away, as fast as possible.

Some of the modified trucks were quite impressive, spewing up plumes of mud in their wakes, but most people were using stock Toyotas or Fords and honestly, basket-weaving would make a better spectator sport.

Then I found out why the grandstands were full.

The Big Foot truck is an awe-inspiring machine. It weighs five tons and sits on tyres which are six feet tall. To get into the plastic pickup truck body, you climb through the chassis and emerge through a hole in the Perspex floor.

Inside, there’s a racing seat, a five-point harness and a dash straight out of
Thunderbirds
.

You turn on all the pumps and hit a big red button which fires up the 9700cc V8. One blip of the throttle to get it running evenly and a gallon of fuel is gone. Think, Wow, this is loud, and another gallon has been spurted through the injectors. On the move, it uses one gallon of alcohol to do 300 yards.

They’d told me that it had an automatic gearbox but that I’d have to shift the cogs manually by pulling the lever backwards. The trouble is, they said ‘pull’ and not ‘wrench’.

At 6000 rpm I tugged on the lever and nothing happened. The revs continued to climb up past 7000, then 8000, until in desperation, I nearly yanked the lever out of its socket. It worked. I had second and we were going ballistic.

This monster accelerates from 0 to 60 in less than five seconds which is enough, but what truly surprised me was how those big fat tyres gripped on the wet grass.

A little flick on the tiny racing wheel and I was hurled sideways as the car canted over and simply changed direction. What made it all especially bizarre is that you could see the action through the Perspex floor.

They didn’t let me turn on the rear-wheel steering because they said it makes the truck a bit of a handful. And, I discovered later, they were beginning to wish they’d never let me go out in it at all.

Even after ten minutes, I was still having trouble with the gearbox and the telltale rev counter was stuck at 9200 rpm. This had, apparently, been accompanied by some spectacular backfiring, which had had the crowd on their feet and the owners on their knees.

I was blissfully unaware of the drama and having practised leaping some hay bales, was lining up for a real run, which involved leaping over a line of six cars.

It cut out. What I hadn’t realised is that to ensure the crowd would be safe if the driver had a fit, the owners have a remote control shut-down facility, which they’d operated. As I climbed out, one called me a crazy son-of-a-bitch.

Which, from a Texan, was quite a compliment. I’ve
driven all manner of fast, large and expensive cars but my absolute favourite is that Big Foot. In an interesting country, it would stand out. In Texas, it was breathtaking.

Hunting is one of the very few controversial issues on which I have two opinions. On the one hand, I can see it keeps Britain in touch with its glorious past. What sight stirs the loins quite so vigorously as a bunch of hoorays in tight trouserwear coming at you through the mist on a winter morning?

And let’s face it, the only reason every fox in the land hasn’t been shot, gassed and mangled already is because they’re needed for hunting purposes. So, if you like those cheeky little ears and that big bushy tail, you’d better get down to the meet on Boxing Day to cheer the chaps on. These people will hunt come what may, and isn’t it better they choose to go after foxes rather than cows or your hamster?

On the other hand, fox-hunting is a barbaric sport which has been taken over these days by ghastly people from neo-Georgian houses in Surrey. What’s the big deal about being ‘blooded’ anyway, a ceremony that should have died when we stopped burning witches. And poor little foxy-woxy being torn apart by those snarling dogs. I’m going to get a Parka and get out there in the woods with my aerosol.

I have the same problem with Monaco. There are two arguments and I subscribe to both of them.

On the one hand, it’s a lavatory and someone should pull the chain. It’s a police state, where pickpockets are shot but fraudsters are welcome to tea and buns at the palace. Plus it rains all the bloody time.

On the other hand, Monaco is the epicentre of jetsetdom, a playground where you need feel no guilt if you have a hundred mill in the bank because everyone else has more. Plus, it’s a sun-kissed paradise.

First, let’s get Monaco sorted out. It was a palace and a few ramshackle cottages right up to the middle of the nineteenth century when the casino was built. But even this exquisite building failed to put the little principality on the map. That didn’t happen until 1956 when the dashing Prince married Grace Kelly, a deal that brought big-time American investment and the European jet set. Monaco exploded so that, today, it’s a high-rise eyesore, a collection of sixties’ tower blocks and ageing face-lifts.

But more than all that, Monaco is a Grand Prix. It is
the
Grand Prix. Back in the twenties, the casino was being hit by the Depression and it was decided to organise a motor race through the streets, quite simply to lure the squillionaires back.

There was something awe-inspiring about the result. Street circuits were not new, but to watch the drivers sliding their cars past lampposts, under the Mediterranean sun and round the harbour was really rather special.

The first race, in 1929, was won by a Francophile Englishman called William Grover-Williams. Later, he was shot by the Germans. Perhaps that’s why Damon is so unwilling to overtake Michael Schumacher.

Or maybe he can’t. The trouble is that it’s pretty bloody hard to overtake anyone there. It was designed for a different time and very different cars so that today’s carbon-braked monsters are virtually unpassable.

The teams hate it but all the sponsors treat it as their annual bun fight, rolling up in droves aboard ever-larger yachts. They like to bring along their clients who stay in wondrous, glittering hotels and gorge themselves on food which looks like art.

The drivers don’t mind it either, mainly because so many of them live there. On any night of the week in the Stars and Bars you’ll find Schumacher, Häkkinen, Coulthard, Rosberg, Berger, Boutsen, Patrese, Moreno – even Colin McRae. Monaco is to motor racing what Hollywood is to the cinema. Only Monaco is weirder.

It’s governed by an elected assembly that answers to Prince Rainier, so it’s kind of like Britain in this respect, except Mrs Queen doesn’t interfere, and Rainier does.

Though it measures just three miles by as little as 300 yards in places, there are several districts, of which Monte Carlo is best known. Monte Carlo is where you’ll find the big hotels and the casino. Monte Carlo is the jewel in the crown or, if you like, the carbuncle on the arsehole.