Hyperleggera

Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este 2007

An Event Horizon of the Automotive Variety

As our team heads into Italy for this year’s Con­corso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este by Lake Como, it’s time to look at this report—published for the first time in English—on the 2007 event. An occa­sion which, with its Home­ric under­tones, proved life-​changing for a young Dr. Orosz.

Words and pic­tures: Peter Orosz

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Larry cries out loud. “KRRUNCH,” I yell back, my sev­enth cer­vi­cal ver­te­bra to be spe­cific. The miles have added up by number 750, even though Peugeot’s 406 Coupe is one fine tour­ing car. We should totally have come in Larry’s Lam­borgh­ini, accel­er­at­ing out of a bend on the wind­ing road between Cer­nob­bio and Moltra­sio, we’re on the South­west shore of Lake Como and the Jag is a C-XF—or should I say the C-XF as there exists a single exam­ple of the car.

Part One: The Troublemakers

“[…] And yet Odysseus
gazed out mar­vel­ling at the ships and har­bors,
public squares, and ram­parts tow­er­ing up
with pointed pal­isades along the top.”

Larry cracks me up. He has been telling story after hilar­i­ous story for twelve hours straight, most of them a fair sight from being pub­lish­able, so I’ll men­tion just one: if you ever plan on get­ting your­self into a fren­zied car chase where you’ll have to outrun a squad car on pot­holed dirt roads, get a big Lexus. The sus­pen­sion absorbs broken tarmac like gera­ni­ums soak up Miracle-​Gro.

Why the hurry? We’re here to attend the Con­corso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este and it’s past six PM now, the recep­tion is at seven-​thirty, the hotel 45 min­utes away on the twisty Lake Como road, a Fer­rari 121 LM Spider race car is parked by the road on the way there, quick shower (Larry takes 5 min­utes, I take 25), forty-​five min­utes to drive back to Villa d’Este with my camera drawn and ready (the 121 LM is gone), it’s con­sid­er­ably past seven-​thirty now, pecu­liarly disheveled aris­to­crats tram­ple us into the fine stones that cover the lake­side path, we bite into lemon-​sized olives, they’re rich and juicy.

The recep­tion was men­tioned on the Concorso’s web­site, the invi­ta­tions given to Dr. Orosz and Mr. Parker lacked any men­tion of it but then I tell Larry assertive is the word.

If you’ll remem­ber the scene in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar where Esther Green­wood is handed a dish of unrec­og­niz­able ingre­di­ents, how does she react? She reacts by think­ing you’ve got to dig in with self-​confidence to make all your table­mates assume your move­ments are rooted deep in your upbringing.

What you not do is waffle, thou shalt never waffle, so Larry puts on his brand new suit, mine is straight from the clean­ers, the Como wind ruf­fles our hair, then we notice the man in black tie col­lect­ing dinner tick­ets from the people in line.

Dinner tick­ets we do not have, so we sneak into the press room which is offi­cially locked until next morn­ing, I am drenched in cold sweat, Larry grabs a chair, logs on to eBay and shows me the Fer­rari he is about to buy once we get home, then we beat it.

We should totally have come in the Lambo.

Part Two: The Insectile Pietà

“Square in your ship’s path are Seirênês, crying
beauty to bewitch men coast­ing by;”

Stand­ing on the shore of Lake Como in desat­u­rated Sat­ur­day day­light, my eleven-year-old crosstrain­ers are cov­ered in a thin layer of white dust and right in front of me is the Fer­rari P4/5 by Pininfarina.

It is flanked by an entire row of con­cept cars. The same way a per­fectly chilled hon­ey­dew melon is often accom­pa­nied by var­i­ous other summer fruit. The P4/5 is what you would call a jerkoff car. You buy your car mag­a­zine, take it to the bath­room, go for a browse. Turn the pages to and fro, stick your nose in. And so on. It lacks a third dimen­sion, built instead of mag­nif­i­cently lit, fault­lessly polar­ized sur­faces, pho­to­shopped specks of dust, blue-​blooded back­grounds. You know those slightly scary chil­drens’ books which open to pop up care­fully folded wild ani­mals? Tigers, for instance. That is exactly what the P4/5 is like in person.

How­ever, this one’s real.

Not real in the way that other Fer­rari one-​off, the GG50 is real—which Fab­rizio Giu­giaro, designer Giorgetto’s son, has just rolled up in. That one has got wildlife spat­tered on its rearview mir­rots. This one has not. It is a hyper-​real 1:1 mock-​up made of func­tional com­po­nents with owner Jim Glick­en­haus stand­ing by the rear wheels wear­ing sun­glasses, a red base­ball cap and a gray suit, his com­plex­ion fine but occas­sion­ally liquid like a Dalí clock.

“We’ve shaved more than 500 pounds off the donor Enzo and it’s got better aero­dy­nam­ics to boot,” says Jim. “Zero to sixty is faster, top speed’s up to 225 miles an hour. It all makes for the per­fect daily driver, I take it to NYC all the time.” Yeah right. For anni­hi­lat­ing xenomorphs? If you look at the wheels, they’re off the armored per­son­nel car­rier the Space Marines ride into the ter­raform­ing plant at the begin­ning of Aliens. Jim made his for­tune pro­duc­ing B-movies, these days, he is mostly into seri­ous Ferratio.

My father spent a week in Rome in 1988 attend­ing a con­fer­ence in genet­ics. Only when he had arrived was he informed that the con­fer­ence was rather loosely sched­uled and he sud­denly found him­self with most of a week to spend in Rome and the Vat­i­can. He spent one of those days observ­ing the Pietà. He arrived in the morn­ing and left in the after­noon. He spent the hours in between look­ing. Because he was quite unable to do any­thing else.

The same way you are quite unable to not keep star­ing at the P4/5, even though it is not of divine beauty like the Pietà. One could even describe it at first sight as retro, and retro is more revolt­ing than the nema­tode Onchocerca volvu­lus whose larvae hatch in the cornea and cause blind­ness, retro is the the loss of faith in Vor­sprung and with­out progress, we can all go KRRUNCH and bite down on our cap­sules of cyanide at this very moment. But the P4/5 is retro only at first sight. Glick­en­haus had wanted it retro, a replica of a Six­ties Fer­rari pro­to­type racer built on an Enzo chas­sis, then Pininfarina’s prodi­gious designer Jason Castriota—who has given us the Maserati Bird­cage con­cept, the Maserati Gran­Tur­ismo and Ferrari’s bril­liant 599 GTB—tugged him gently into the future.

The P4/5 is futur­is­tic while acknowl­edg­ing that the high point of auto­mo­bile design was indeed the Six­ties. It fixes you with its evil LED eyes, white ceramic exhaust pipes pro­trude from beneath its lay­ered poly­car­bon­ate wing cover like twin ovipos­tors. It’s not futur­is­tic like the Honda NSX, express­ing no desire to become a fighter jet, it is very firmly an auto­mo­bile, but it whis­pers in its mer­ci­less insec­tile voice that the future will always be three steps ahead, a mirage of a future to us nobod­ies in off-the-rack suits, we will not get to expe­ri­ence this future in twenty years, drown­ing instead in Zeno’s sexond paradox.

A siren of a car. Unyield­ing, unfriendly, yet still, ninety min­utes later, I am still gazing at it, even though there are a hun­dred cars sur­round­ing me, every single one a work of finest art. How does it feel to sit beneath a tinted dome, in a light­weight ver­sion of one of the best cars ever made, in a carbon fiber seat mod­elled on your but­tocks, then floor it? Jim knows. I do not.

Part Three: Mono No Aware

“but those who ate this hon­eyed plant, the Lotos,
never cared to report, nor to return:
they longed to stay for­ever, brows­ing on
that native bloom, for­get­ful of their homeland.”

This may sound strange but I’m at work. It cer­tainly is bizarre work, not unlike car­ry­ing sacks of plu­to­nium while lis­ten­ing to Mendelssohn’s Violin Con­certo in E-minor, trying to solve why Vin­cent Van Gogh had chosen to use brown paint to depict the waves on his The Sea at Saintes-​Maries. It beats you down. I am pass­ing in front of Alfa Romeo racers from the Thir­ties, my palms are sweaty, my appear­ance increas­ingly unkempt, my sneak­ers white as chalk from the fine dust (as I write this, ten days later, they are still white as chalk), my camera a block of cement and to my left is Ralph Lauren’s sin­gu­lar, mag­i­cal 1930 Count Trossi Mercedes-​Benz SSK, but a mind turned into vanilla mousse does not have the means to process such input.

Sergio Scagli­etti mean­ders by.

He hap­pens to be a short Ital­ian gen­tle­man. Immac­u­late in appear­ance, but that’s Ital­ian DNA, his hands sinewy, his eyes like the lake.

All around us park Fer­raris which Scagli­etti had designed fifty year ago. Cherry blos­soms cap­tured as they reached the ground, a half cen­tury old yet gleam­ing, all proper use care­fully pol­ished away.

Take the red 121 LM Spider we had passed on our way to the hotel. Euge­nio Castel­lotti led with it the race at Le Mans in 1955 before the world erupted into flam­ing magnesium.

The red 860 Monza. Juan Manuel Fangio drove it to vic­tory in Sebring in 1956.

Or Fer­rari nerd Peter S. Kalikow’s mid­night blue 1961 250 GT Cal­i­for­nia Spider, the most gor­geous soft­top for 45 years and going.

Under the paintjobs, cov­er­ing alu­minum curves, are Sergio Scaglietti’s fin­ger­prints. They’re from an age when the right mate­ri­als, the right tech­nol­ogy and the right people com­bined to create per­fec­tion, time after time after time. Flo­rence under the Medicis was sim­i­lar. Athens under Pericles.

What are we doing here?

Not we as in wind-​blown car nerds with sparkles in our eyes and cargo pock­ets on our pants, press badges dan­gling. We as in every­one. We who were not there back then. We who spend our time read­ing and gawk­ing and con­sum­ing. We who never ham­mered sheets of alu­minum into peer­less curves, who never pol­ished a veloc­ity trum­pet to a fierce shine, who never laughed and drank with racing dri­vers who waltzed with death every single day.

Does a 250 GT require onlook­ers? Does it need people to write about it? To spend mil­lions of dol­lars on it and learn how to cor­rectly pro­nounce its Blu Inverno paintjob?

Scagli­etti sits in a wicker chair. His blue coat fol­lows his neck­line as if he were stand­ing straight. You only get that with bespoke. Lean­ing close to his cars is like look­ing into Van Gogh’s sea. Every stroke is at its right place. But it is impos­si­ble to imag­ine the whole.

Part Four: Hello And Goodbye

“fools, on stores of wine. Sheep after sheep
they butchered by the surf, and sham­bling cattle,
feasting”

“I’ve just spoken with Ian Callum, very straight­for­ward guy, asked him about the next Jaguar, he wouldn’t tell me a thing, of course,” Larry says after tiramisù and espresso, I’m bal­anc­ing a plate of shrimp and moz­zarella di buf­fala. The Con­corso is about to end. A Bugatti 57 C hap­pened to win the Copo d’ Oro, I had meant to vote for Kalikow’s Cal­i­for­nia Spider but missed the dead­line in the noon heat.

For Sunday, the Con­corso has moved to nearby Villa Erba. Anyone can drop by for ten euros. Car col­lec­tors cer­tainly are a dare­devil bunch. Little kids cart­wheel between sparkling creases which pre­cede them by decades and I’m speak­ing with Paul Roesler, a part­ner in a San Fran­cisco hedge fund. He has brought a Lam­borgh­ini 400 GT 2+2, its innate ugly­ness unchanged by the bril­liant restora­tion job.

Paul pro­duces a cer­tifi­cate signed by Ferruccio Lam­borgh­ini him­self, then Kateryna, an incon­ceiv­ably styl­ish Ukrain­ian lifestyle reporter watches as her cam­era­man trips on his tripod to send it careen­ing towards Kalikow’s mid­night blue Cal­i­for­nia Spider, cat­a­stro­phe averted by a mere inch. Kalikow’s face betrays every sign of a mas­sive heart attack as he reels around, then he regains his com­po­sure. Things are a-happenin’. It’s time to leave.

We cram water bot­tles under our seats, turn the GPS on and go WROOM, the car is no Lambo but is def­i­nitely Ital­ian: a Pin­in­fa­rina design. Good­bye, goodbye.

Layers upon layers of people obscure the P4/5.

Part Five: To Avoid Necrophilia

“I pledged these rites, then slashed the lamb and ewe,
let­ting their black blood stream into the well­pit.
Now the souls gath­ered, stir­ring out of Erebos”

We get in the flow as we approach the Bren­ner Pass in the Ital­ian Alps. Doing about 110 miles an hour, the road takes lazy curves into the moun­tains, the coupe grip­ping vehe­mently at every turn. We are grand tour­ing, zigzag­ging past sta­tion­ary vehi­cles; Larry turns the wheel with tiny move­ments then the altime­ter on the GPS tops out at 4200 feet as we watch the sun set over the Dolomites.

Then fol­lowed ten days of idling on the inter­net, Nashi pears, bad dreams and star­ing into space. I am not enlight­ened. All I know is that there was an extended moment in the last cen­tury which serves as a guide­post in the his­tory of human civ­i­liza­tion. A guide­post to a better life.

That moment is gone. The P4/5 is but a toy, Peter Kalikow a super­vi­sor in a museum. The auto­mo­bile is no longer the magic it was, no longer the oxygen-​rich blood of a Europe reborn, but a global case of ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis. The world has moved on.

It’s time for us to move on with it.

Let us build robots, scram­jets, space­ships, neural inter­faces, pulse rifles, what­ever it is that comes close to what the auto­mo­bile was fifty years back. There are other worlds than this.

Sergio Scagli­etti did not dream of horse-​driven carriages.

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Seg­ments quoted are from Homer’s “The Odyssey” as trans­lated by Robert Fitzger­ald. Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Hun­gar­ian by Totalcar.

∞ Published on Friday, April 24th, 2009

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