RICHARD MEADEN
Meaden recalls some of the hair-raising road trips from early evo
EVO UK’S IMMINENT 25TH ANNIVERSARY has got me reminiscing about the magazine’s formative years. Between 1998 and 2001 we spent much of our time heading south through Europe, aiming for the Côte d’Azur, or crossing the Alps and dropping down through the lakes and into Italy for various launches, factory visits and drive stories. These were happy, innocent days, free from the pressures of feeding a website and social media. Better still, traffic policing was far more analogue than digital, which fostered the unshakeable belief that, once on foreign soil, speed limits were very much open to interpretation.
Issue 001 saw us start as we meant to go on — myself, Stuart Gallagher (then a fresh-faced staff writer) and photographer Gus Gregory embarking on a mission to take our recently purchased Ur-Quattro 20V to Umbria for the launch of the Mk1 Audi TT. Looking back, it was quite a flex for an unpublished magazine, rocking up at one of Audi’s most important product launches in a classic Quattro we’d bought just a week previously.
Once the comparison had been completed, Stu flew home, leaving Gus and me to drive back in the warbling warhorse. Stu mistakenly took Gus’s passport along with his own, but we only discovered this midway through Italy. Gus didn’t take it well. Worse, our homeward trip was on the last Friday in July, when all of Italy knocked-off for its summer holidays. It took us ten hours just to reach Mont Blanc.
We emerged from the tunnel like a bullet, smashing the length of France in suitably spirited fashion. Progress was briefly interrupted somewhere north of Dijon when an electrical fire broke out in the Quattro’s glovebox, but having extinguished it at the side of the autoroute we ploughed on. I finally fell into bed 24 hours after leaving Umbria.
Two other Italian jobs stand out. The silliest was when Gus, myself and John ‘Gnasher’ Hayman all squeezed into a Jaguar XKR coupe and drove to the Maserati factory, where a 3200GT awaited us. Just days from deadline, this was a true smash-and-grab cover story, the three of us plus all of Gus’s camera kit and, as I recall, an aluminium stepladder shoehorned into the Jag for a non-stop blast to Modena. We arrived at the Viale Ciro Menotti plant at an ungodly hour on Saturday morning and, after grabbing some low-quality shuteye, shuffled zombie-like to the security office
to collect the Maser’s keys, immediately heading into the hills for a full day of driving and photography before returning the Maser that evening and heading straight back home.
Not wishing to hog the driving, I selflessly volunteered to crawl into the back of the XKR, leaving Gus and Gnasher to battle torrential rain as we aquaplaned towards Calais. Some hours later I was rudely awoken as if from some feverish cheese dream. It was the dead of night and Gus was by the car, roaring like a wounded bear, kicking the crap out of a fuel pump that had just swallowed his bank card. Meanwhile, a clearly relieved Gnasher was simultaneously drawing heavily on a cigarette and peeing exuberantly into the shrubbery fringing the deserted Swiss service station. It was then that I spotted a bemused and understandably sheepish cashier huddled in his small glass-fronted booth, hoping not to be noticed.
The second was when photographer Andy Morgan and I took a Chrysler Viper GTS from the UK to Modena to meet up with the rest of the evo gang for the now-legendary issue 022 cover story, ‘The Test’. Andy hadn’t got much experience of unwieldy left-hand-drive kit, so I handled the drive to Folkestone. It also made sense for me to do the first stint in France. Come our fuel stop I was still feeling okay, so I committed to a third stint. By the time we reached Switzerland it was the early hours of the morning and had been pissing with rain for the last hundred miles. I was shot but Andy was understandably reluctant to make his Viper debut in a deluge, so after brimming the tank and slugging back some gruesome truckstop coffee, I resumed driving.
I was still driving when the sun came up and we crossed the border into Italy at somewhere approaching the Viper’s V-max. Hours later, having got hopelessly lost almost within sight of the hotel, we arrived looking like we’d been subjected to a Special Forces hazing. By contrast, having flown out the day before, the rest of the gang had finished a leisurely breakfast and were raring to collect the Zonda C12, Diablo 6.0 and a pair of Ferraris. Next day, while arranging the cars for the cover static, a bleary-eyed Andy reversed the 996 Turbo into a ditch. With its nose pointing skywards we all piled on the stricken Porsche like feral rally fans, mercilessly cheering the chronically fatigued Morgan’s misfortune while see-sawing the 911 free. The car was fine but I’m not sure Andy ever fully recovered. Luckily for him, we rarely mention it. ⌧
Progress was interrupted when an electrical fire broke out in the Quattro’s glovebox