An Excellent Road Adventure

The brutal endurance events are dead, buried by their fatalities and green thinkers who saw only criminal insanity in cars racing 1,000 miles over public roads.

Mille Miglia: A demented dash from Rome to Brescia and back, with funerals for 13 drivers and spectators as its 1957 finale. Carrera Panamericana: A 2,000-mile run across Mexico that terminated in 1955 after spilling more blood than bullfights.

Targa Florio. Tour de France. The Ferraris and Porsches and Astons have gone away; their withering back roads struck silent and left to sheep.

Well, not quite.

Because politics don’t always prevail, and fine cars and passionate drivers make for much sturdier bedfellows.

So, after decades beneath dust covers, the Mille Miglia is back--albeit a calmer rally for amateurs in elderly cars of the original eras.

The Carrera Panamericana has fired up once more with a macho class for the fearless, and a timido division for drivers choosing to run the route but none of its risks.

And there’s the California Mille, a paradigm of America’s contribution to this retrospective subculture--a circuit of elegant enduros emulating Italy’s Mille Miglia and including Arizona’s Copper State 1000, the Colorado Grand, Las Millas Encantadas in New Mexico and the New England 1000.

“See them as events for old crocks driving old crocks,” explains Martin Swig, the San Francisco Chrysler dealer who won Italy’s blessing to duplicate its Mille Miglia. “We tried timed events, but nobody really cared about that. We tried the country club drive with fine wines and good scenery, and that was boring.”

But between phrasings, he heard demands for an event with a harder edge for car lovers and mild adventurers.

Hence last month’s 6th annual California Mille where 150 drivers in 65 classics and collectibles of pre-1957 vintages, paid $3,000 per car for hotel room and board, plus wine and the debatable excitement of driving 1,300 miles in four days.

The route shoved through pounding rain and late snows messing up the Gold Country. It climbed from sea level to borderline breathing difficulties. And in old British sports cars and retired Italian racers on remote, high, narrow roads where farmers flipped fingers at these unmuffled nuisances spooking milk cows.

Swig, 62, with a wife who says she’ll leave him if he ever turns 10, drove a crotchety 65-year-old Chrysler CD8 Roadster known to shed headlights on rough roads. But breaking your treasure is an accepted risk; and ad-libbing roadside repairs part of the challenge.

“And it is fun to hurtle down a back road and lather up a semi-old car where 75 mph feels like 175,” Swig adds. Yet speed is not the issue, nor the habit. To reduce recklessness, the Mille travels with a California Highway Patrol chaperon. And there is no trophy silver, no timed legs to tease entrants into fast passages.

So implied illegality is part of it. The rest is exercising precious artifacts and being part of a population that pats its cars for a run well done.

So what if the entry is a rare, 1933 Alfa Romeo Corto Spider bought at auction last year for $1.8 million? Nicks from running public roads don’t really matter on a car wearing scuffed, un-restored paint and chrome, says Frank Pritt of Costa Mesa, keeper of the Spider.

“I enjoy the originality of the car,” says Pritt, slowly phasing himself out of his software company and easing deeper into the business of collecting interesting cars. “And we won’t be restoring the Alfa because half the fun of car collecting is finding ones with authenticity and patina.”

At $1.8 million a priceless pop, shouldn’t this particular patina be behind silk ropes in a museum?

“If cars could talk, they’d rather be driven,” adds his wife, Melanie. She clearly talks to their car. “In a museum, this car would be like a pretty girl without a date.”

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And so they airlifted and flatbedded their precious ones to San Francisco, converting the Fairmont Hotel’s portico and frontage into a piazza.

“In truth,” says Swig, “what we have here, the cars, the roads, are better than the mother event in every single way. Except they have Italy. And we don’t have a population that generally appreciates what we’re doing.

“But we both agree . . . the highest form of this car hobby is to drive these damned things.”

Even if it is a pristine white, 1929 Mercedes SSK, crown prince of a collection owned and driven by Arturo Keller of Monterrey, Mexico. Fair market value: $4 million.

Or a Bugatti coddled by Jacques Harguindeguy of Walnut Creek. The black and burgundy coupe was built for the widow of Ettore Bugatti. Estimated worth: $400,000.

Also, an expensive flock of Ferraris, bathtub Porsches and more Alfas and Maseratis than Melrose Avenue has trattorias.

As cosmopolitan as the cars is the citizenry of their pilots. Developer Ray Jones came from Australia to drive a 1955 Chrysler loaner from friend Swig. Dr. and Mrs. Katsutoshi Yamaguchi, flew from Japan to enter a 1957 Lancia Aurelia they leave in San Francisco just for the California Mille.

And from Colorado, Arizona, Texas and Michigan, came the doctors, lawyers, architects and Harguindeguy, a former shepherd from the Basque region of Southwest France.

Bruce Male, 54, of Boston, bloomed late as a car hobbyist.

He misspent the first 44 years of his life on a Tufts University education, marriage, two sons, and financial security as founder-owner of a national nurses service.

Then he saw a Porsche 356 and an addiction hit. Now Male’s menagerie includes a Rolls-Royce that chauffeured the owner of Harrods, and a Bentley that belonged to William Holden.

Mostly, his joy pivots around Maserati sports-racers. Such as his Mille mount, a Pompeian-red, disc-herniating, Zagato-bodied, 1956 Maserati A6G2000.

Although anxious about sharing his treasure with another competitive, Type-A personality, Male did agree to co-driving with a complete stranger. Me. In exchange for one half the gas bill, no shared motel rooms, and no road kills unless our own skins were at risk.

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Day One: It began raining as the Maserati made healthy noises crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It elevated itself to mountain monsoon as we climbed rural roads to Sutter Creek and slid across the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe.

The Bad News: The windshield was temporary, cut from Plexiglass. That meant peering through puddles and blobs for 300 miles because to use the wiper would scratch the plastic and reduce fair-weather vision to legal blindness.

The Good News: The rain melted a lot of the snow and we didn’t hit anything furry.

Back in the pack, the Pritts were rehearsing synchronized swimming in their venerable Alfa, where the canvas top joined antique bodywork about as closely as Wyoming meets Kansas.

“I was cold, wet and began asking myself: ‘This is supposed to be fun?’ ” reports Melanie Pritt. “Know what? It was a lot of fun.”

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Day Two: My turn to drive, Male’s turn to writhe. For operating a middle-aged Maserati con brio is to realize how motoring skills are atrophied by power steering, disc brakes, fuel injection and synchromesh transmissions.

The Maserati has none of these cushions. The gearbox is a clanking, four-speed brute that must be double-clutched for every shift. The reward for perfect coordination is less expensive grinding.

Steering is by a wood-rimmed wheel the size of a satellite dish. Directions are dictated not by wrist, but upper-body strength. Palms sweat. Hands slip. Chamois driving gloves are no longer a Smarter Image affectation.

All of which creates an awe for Mille Miglias of yore, and the strength and reflexes of Nuvolari, Chinetti and Moss, whose drives were a constant wrestle with primitive machines of coarser days.

Among us poseurs on the California Mille, it also produced appreciation for technology of our times: For around mountains and twists, yesterday’s Maseratis and Jaguars would be humiliated by any well-driven Honda Prelude.

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Day Three: Earlier words from Swig dealt with the Mille’s mild risk; breaking a car 80 miles from the nearest tow-truck or skidding into a snowbank on something desolate enough to be named Emigrant Trail.

“It introduces,” he said, “an issue of shared adversity. And risk resolved produces a certain satisfaction.”

Randi and Berni Cowherd of Los Gatos must have been enormously satisfied. Their 1937 BMW 328 Spider, the same car that won its class in the 1938 Nurburgring GP, blew a rocker arm in the opening hours. A Ferrari died with a broken rear axle and a Maserati lunched on its own magneto.

Our brush came 128 miles north of Tahoe at Taylorsville, a mountain spot ignored by even detailed road maps. The Maserati’s right front tire was wearing unevenly, one edge a whisper from showing canvas. And Taylorsville has made it through its first century without a garage, let alone equipment to align wheels.

But at Chester, ah, there was Plumas Tire and a guy named Paul with a rig that looked capable of aligning every wheel from covered wagons to shopping carts.

Paul had never seen a Maserati. But he spent an hour tweaking tie rods and squinting at camber readings before declaring the Maserati whole. The bill was $30.

Next, alongside a final resting place called Westport Cemetery, our distributor died.

No trouble. The Mille’s rear guard--ex-racing mechanic Phil Basson, car restorer Conrad Stevenson and Ivan Zarimba, who owned and loved this very Maserati until selling it to Male--autopsied the distributor.

They reset points and re-timed the cam and in 35 minutes the roadside fix had the Maserati sounding showroom fresh.

Security lasted about an hour. Until Male changed fast into second gear to punch through a sharp hairpin and the shifter snapped in his hand.

Basson, Stevenson and Zarimba to the rescue again. A socket wrench and extension slipped neatly over the remaining inch of shifter. A piece of rubber hose was jammed over the socket handle. And 12-inch length of steel pipe was forced over the rubber collar.

The repair held, and we made it all the way with a redone distributor, makeshift shifter and shade-tree wheel alignment.

And it did give us a sense of adversity shared.

Also ammunition to trot out the next time some big city mechanic says it will take at least three days and $500 to replace a water pump.

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Day Four: Heading to the finish, the Mille becomes a thousand harmless memories.

Of keeping a car mud-streaked and bug-spattered because grime is its 1,300-mile badge of honor. Of a favorite line spoken at the opening of this celebration of ancient motoring: “Gentleman, try to start your engines.”

Of hobby motoring and its odd, often inexplicable essence.

To one it’s the drama of a rumbling engine, to another it’s the streak of vivid colors at speed.

Whatever stimulus, it stirred something in a man standing lonely on a San Francisco curb, his face showing the emptiness of inner damage.

He heard the unusual noises of a procession from the past. He turned to face a scarlet car, then an open car with people wearing leather helmets and goggles. They waved.

And he jumped up and down, waved back with his blue plastic lunch box, became a smiling part of something exciting and, for a few moments, was a child again.