DREAM DRIVE
A compact, sporty Italian sportscar on a drive along the Amalfi coast
AS YOU LIE ON THE BEACH YOU close your eyes and feel the Italian sun warming your skin like heat soak from a transmission tunnel. Listening to the waves breaking on the shoreline you reflect how each one sounds just like a Veyron or McLaren P1 dumping boost. And lift off the throttle… And lift off the throttle… And lift off the throttle…
As you open your eyes you realise you’re still on the coast but some way above the sparkling azure sea. A low wall offers scant protection from the drop, and on the other side of the road pale, slightly overhanging rock rises out of sight. There’s not what you’d call a lot of run-off.
It’s a narrow strip of tarmac, too, but looking across a large bay at the craggy green coastline you can see that it goes on for miles. Then it hits you: this is the road that you drove to get to the beach, but it seems unfamiliar, as before you couldn’t take your eyes off the road for Puntos and Piaggios flirting perilously with either the precipice or your rental’s body panels. Now the road is empty. Not a soul around.
At first glance the car parked in the lay-by a short distance away still appears to be the holiday-hire grey Fiat 500. But as you walk up to it you realise it’s sitting more purposefully, wheelarches fuller. Get inside and things take a turn for the van-like with no back seats. There is also a tall, spindly looking gearlever protruding from the floor instead of the dash. ‘Biposto’ reads the plaque beneath the supplementary race display…
The lever slots into first gear with a surprisingly light but positive action, and because the mechanism is exposed you can’t help but take it back to neutral and then slot first again to watch it at work and hear the click-clack of metal on metal. Then you’re off and chucking the little hot hatch along the Amalfi Coast, sticky tyres bonding with the warm tarmac. The road never seems to rest in its wriggling route, and although the post-apocalyptic lack of traffic means you can straight-line some of the squiggles, it is a relentless test of concentration.
For some long stretches the road has a white line down the middle, but the really fun bits come as you head further east and it becomes single-track. There is a wild feeling to the road and yet you also never seem to be that far from some sort of building, with small towns and individual settlements scattered along the route.
Initially you use the clutch, but as confidence grows so you flash through each change of the dog ’box without troubling your left leg. The little turbocharged four-cylinder engine sounds rorty and feels very boosty, but while you can’t hear any wastegate exhalations initially, as you drive further and further so the engine changes in note, a clear
accompanying each lift of the Abarth 695’s throttle. Then your feet start to feel damp. And you open your eyes and you realise the tide is coming in. Solo un sogno.L