Driving Mille Miglia was a dream come true
Racing through Italy is as fun as it sounds like
This is the first instalment of Jay Leno’s columns for Driving. Jay Leno, former late-night TV show host, is one of the most famous car collectors and hardcore gear heads in the world. He writes a column for Driving about the many amazing cars he comes across or gets to drive.
Jaguar’s XK120 is the car that got me into cars. In the 1950s, as a kid, I was cycling through my hometown near Boston, when something caught my eye. In a driveway was a man polishing what, to a nine-yearold boy in small-town America, was an apparition. It was an XK120, Jaguar’s 120-mph (193 km/h) sports car that turned heads on roads all over the world and raced in iconic events such as Le Mans and Mille Miglia.
This being a time when not all strange men were pedophiles, it seemed OK to go sit in the car when the man polishing it beckoned me over. It is good he did because that was the defining moment when I fell in love with sports cars and, when I could afford it, the first sports car I bought was an XK120.
One of the bonuses of not doing a nightly TV show anymore is I could finally say yes to an invitation I have been lucky to get — to compete in the modern Mille Miglia. It ran as a proper race until 1957. Stirling Moss did it in 10 hours. It is still a punishing 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometre) event from Brescia to Rome and back but any chance to re-enact the 10-hour record for the race, set by Stirling at an average of around 100 mph, was never going to be a reality.
Jaguar enters a team every year and they offered me a 1951 XK120 to share with their design director, Ian Callum, whose latest, the F-Type is one of the most stunning sports cars of the past few years and, to my mind, is the best-looking Jaguar since the E-Type. My mum was from Greenock and Ian is Scottish so we called ourselves the Scottish Team.
Jaguar assembled an all-star lineup. On the plane to Milan, I was with Jeremy Irons and I looked over and saw him reading a script. I was reading Octane magazine. He looked very actor-y and I didn’t want to bother him. But when we started hanging out around the cars (he had an XK120, too) he just couldn’t have been nicer. A real regular guy. He was very funny and there was a lot of joking around and being silly.
I think Brian Johnson, the singer with AC/DC, could have been a great comic. He tells hilarious stories. He is a classic rock-and-roller, all-around good guy. He can drive, too. Brian had a C-Type for the race.
Martin Brundle is one of those guys I remember watching, back in the day. Jag had not won Le Mans for a long time. When he won, that was terrific. Of course, he is a very skilled driver and a nice guy. Martin is like Stirling Moss, like Fangio. They have that killer look in the eye when they get behind the wheel.
As a novice, it was a hell of a start. I couldn’t get to the starting line because of traffic and we flag- ged down a policeman so I could hop on the back of his motorcycle. He scared the hell out of me, going through traffic, but he got me to the starting line in time.
The baptism of driving was something else. Jaguar says, here’s the car you’ll be driving. This is a Le Mans car, ran in ’51 so has a lot of heritage. It’s worth $3 million. Oh, and you’ll be driving in the dark. With Ian, who’s an excellent navigator, but neither of us know each other at all.
I’m not a race-car driver, he’s not a race-car driver, but we both like cars and enjoy driving cars. I’ve found that the guys who tend to get in trouble on this type of event are the ones who think they’re Stirling Moss. They’re not.
You go out there for the first time and you have fun. Maybe for the first time in your life you drive the car as fast as you can on a public road.
My favourite part was when I asked the policeman what to do at a red light. He told me not to slow down, “just go right through.” “Whoa — what?!” “It’s the Mille Miglia — just go through the red light.”
“What happens with people who have a green light?” “Oh, they stop.” “Why?” “Because they know nobody stops for the red light.”
“OK, so what you’re saying is you go through the red and stop for the green, because nobody stops for the red.”
And when you’re out there, it makes perfect sense.
You really have to keep your wits about you. The cars are 60 years old. They’ve all been updated, but a lot of these other cars have private owners, and who knows? You don’t know if someone is going to lose it and slide into the crowd. There are no barriers, and then there are kids running across the road. It’s fun, but you have to remember that it’s not a race course, it’s a public road.
What you want to do is not embarrass yourself. I saw a couple of guys, hot-shoe guys with some very impressive cars. They were going awfully fast and I thought maybe they were professional race-car drivers. Well, there were about four or five crashes and some of those cars got damaged very badly. You have to remember what you’re doing here. It’s a race on public roads, and it’s not always race cars around you. People pull out in front of you, not realizing you’re travelling at 120 miles an hour. And you just miss them. I had a couple of near-misses like that.
Sometimes there would be someone waving from a balcony or a piece of laundry flapping. Just some distraction and obviously, at 100 mph, you turn your head and ….
I felt great having finished the Mille Miglia. It’s 1,000 miles and you’re running not flat-out all the time but certainly a good portion of the time. It’s exhausting.
It’s exactly what I thought it would be. The people couldn’t be friendlier, couldn’t be nicer, and the weather was perfect.
Every place needs one “thing.” In Germany, you can go on the autobahn; in America you’re stuck at 55. This is one of those things Italy has always had, and hopefully always will have.