HOW TO SPEND AN AFTERNOON

by Jamie Brown

The experience I recently had in Vancouver is something I thought you'd like to hear about. It would probably be comparable to a person's who, having eaten mostly porridge all of his life, is suddenly offered a meal at the TOUR d'ARGENT; or maybe to a person's who having played sand-lot, pickup baseball all of his life and is unexpectedly offered a chance to hit a few balls with Babe Ruth. I have just had a wonderful run in a very special automobile. The car was a 1927 6.5 litre Le Mans racing Bentley.

A Vancouver friend who is a collector and a very good racing driver owns the car and he offered me a ride from Whistler back to Vancouver, through the mountains and along the sea. The car is a massive thing, almost like a locomotive, painted that true dark British racing green that is almost black. It looks mean and unpolished and hard driven. A welter of leather straps, leathercoachwork, louvers, and huge tyres labelled "Dunlop Racing". David squinted down into the 45 gallon fuel tank, then pulled on a leather flying helmet and goggles and announced that we were ready to go.
Quickly, I turned my Cleveland Indians baseball cap around backwards so it would'nt catch in the airstream, and followed him. I stepped up once onto a step on the passenger side of the car, and up once more onto the toolbox, and then I vaulted into the passenger seat.

It was only then that I realised that people were streaming out of nearby restaurants and bars, bearing video cameras or taking snapshots, until the car was surrounded by perhaps a hundred onlookers. I felt like a king. Meanwhile, David pumped up the fuel pressure with the hand pump on the dash, and then he turned the big black ignition switch in front of me, engraved Bentley Motors, London. The car does'nt have a key. Who would dare to steal it?
"Off. - Ignition: Right - Ignition: Left - Ignition: Both - Start". The car thundered to life, barking through its huge Brooklands exhaust, and all the onlookers stepped back a foot or two. And then, we were off!

The cockpit was very spacious, big enough for me to stretch my legs out straight. The car rode very comfortably, very confidently. It has massive brakes which pull it easily down from any speed. It corners so hard that I was glad the leather seats were bucket-shaped and therefore able to hold me firmly in place under hard cornering. You might wonder about cornering hard in such a massive car, on seventy-year old wire wheels, at over seventy miles per hour; but the car is utterly implacable. I soon realised that the racing aeroscreen in front of me was protection enough to keep my cap from blowing off, so I turned it back around to keep from being dazzled by the sun.

As we rode along, I remembered a story I had read in public school about an English Crusader who was invited to dine with an Arab and each of them ended up comparing weapons and their respective attributes. The Arab had a dager. Steathly, subtle. It could slice a silk cushion in two. The Crusader had a traditional English broadsword: so massive that it took two hands and a lot of strength to wield it. To the astonishment of the Arab, it could slice a steel bar in two. Different cultural solutions to the same sort of problem. Our Bentley was a part of a tradition running back to the English broadsword, St. Pauls Cathedral, Bank of England, British bulldog.

Ahead, the sign on the Highway said, "Slow-moving vehicles keep right". We simply galloped up the mountainsides, gobbling up the odd Porsche or Ford Mustang or even Ferrari. Straight in front of me was a huge speedometer reading to 140 miles per hour. At one point, I looked down and we were touching 110 miles per hour - going uphill!!
"The mountains don't seem to affect it much", David shouted over the wind noise. Uphill, downhill, its all the same. We thundered up through a narrow canyon, the road snaking this way and that ahead of us; and I saw an enormous raven ahead, a Bentley-like raven, flying along with us about twenty-five feet above the road. But when we caught it up, I leaned back in the cockpit and looked up and could make out every feather on its belly as it flew along just above my head.

What a marvellous way to spend an afternoon!