Hell on Wheels: A Beginner at 50

“Hell on Wheels: A Beginner at 50,” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the August 2013 issue of Vogue.

I have been toying for some time now with the idea of Learning to Drive. Actually, I have been toying with the idea for two decades. Make that three: How time flies. But I am reaching a milestone birthday this year, and this conceptual plaything became more tangible when I saw a glint in Anna’s eye that suggested the formulation of a new Vogue challenge for yours truly. Truth to tell, I’ve always had a funny relationship with cars.

On my first day at nursery school, having chosen the butterfly coat hanger on which to hang my infant duffle coat, I disdained the model garage that all the other little boys were playing with and instead made a beeline for the suburban dollhouse that the girls were clustered around. Don’t get me wrong: In later life I’ve always enjoyed being driven, the getting from A to B deliciously unruffled and perfectly combobulated. But for years it didn’t occur to me to actually drive. And why on earth would it? Missing all the visual stimulation as I focused on the dreary tarmac’ed aspect ahead, ever alert to careless pedestrians or bounding deer. Oh, dear me, no. No, indeed. My inability to transfer a backseat mind-set to a driving-seat one was proven when I availed myself of the civic bicycle-rental plan in Paris a few years ago, and found myself so busy craning to look through tantalizingly half-drawn apartment curtains in pretty eighteenth-century buildings and the crowded windows of fascinating antiquaires that I shot up the middle of one-way streets and once smacked painfully into the back of a stationary garbage truck. But there are happy memories, too.

When I was a child we had a dear little Morris Minor, and a stalwart VW camper van equipped with a Bunsen-burner stove on which my mother miraculously concocted culinary triumphs and my father heated up instant Vesta chicken curries (I salivate at their memory). This behemoth also had a roof that punched up with concertina sides so that you could swing a brace of cots between it and pitch tent for the night. When I was six, this beloved vehicle transported us all on a memorable summer holiday through the Pyrenees, on through Franco’s Spain (where I was served a heaped plate of roasted nightingales in a village of barefoot children) to Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Sicily, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland—doubtless the source and fount of my subsequent wanderlust.

On my first trip to Manhattan in the eighties my interest in cars turned frankly nefarious when sundry club-kid friends taught me the art of appearing to loll nonchalantly against the bonnet of a Mercedes or similarly hardware-embellished vehicle while simultaneously wrenching off its hood ornament, later to be transformed into a hip-hop pendant suitable for an ensemble d’apparat at the Pyramid Club or Area. Even though I’m not entirely convinced I ever managed to successfully detach one of these trophies, the memories nevertheless skulked out of my guilty conscience several years later when I met a serious beau who was very proud of his 1972 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE with its beige seats of butter-soft leather and its handsome burled-walnut dashboard. His pride in this vehicle was matched only by his exasperation when he would find me, time after time, waiting expectantly for him to open the door of a grisly Ford Cortina or an equally naff car whose hue and dimensions, to my undiscriminating (or disinterested) eye, vaguely evoked his own chic motor. In a bid to liberate myself from the yoke of automotive dependency I decided, in my early 20s, to take lessons, and surrendered to the ministrations of a rather sharp, pukka woman who might have been just as effectively employed train-ing an errant spaniel to heel. She took me to the lonely cobbled backstreets of Notting Hill, and I struggled with the baffling gear stick and tried to avoid the odd perambulator (yes, it was that long ago). I felt that I might have been getting somewhere. But after several lessons a job at American Vogue spirited me to New York, and I decided that there was no way I was going to continue the experiment in the pitted thoroughfares of Manhattan, thronged with crazily zigzagging yellow cabs.

A decade later, however, a friend my age had taken it upon herself to learn to drive, and even ended up writing a book about the experience. Amy would regale me with stories of lessons with Attila, her Turkish instructor, whom I swiftly dubbed Attila the Hunk, at which the tips of her earlobes were inclined to rouge. But Attila worked his magic, and sometime later his star alum took me for a ride up Sixth Avenue in a Bentley Continental GT. I was bedazzled by the elegance of her gestures—the wheel and controls handled as artfully as the cigarette at the end of Marlene Dietrich’s manicured hand. For half a dozen years and more I toyed with the idea of calling Attila up, and with the editorial cat-o’-nine-tails poised above me, I was finally persuaded to do so. Now running a driving school of his own, he came to meet me at my front door. I stumbled at the first hurdle when I truly had no idea how to turn the automatic car on, but Attila’s was the voice of absolute reason and gentle authority. Still, it took me about a quarter of an hour to pull away from the curb—somehow there was always another vehicle in the distant depth of my rearview, and why would I want to hurtle into a street with a car in it?

Finally I did pull away, frantically trying to remember which pedal was which. Absently texting West Village pedestrians ambled into my path from every side, for all the world like extras in a Living Dead movie. Delivery bicycles sped toward my windshield in acts of brazen provocation as yellow cabs impertinently nuzzled my rear end. “Be in control,” said Attila firmly. “The car has no brain.” He kept up a steady calming monologue, and I soon realized that I had actually circled through the West Village and back into the East and round again. It was wildly exciting, and rather a marvelous novelty sitting in the driver’s seat with that great wide window like a CinemaScope scene projecting Koyaanisqatsi.

By the time Attila dropped me at my door, my shirt was drenched but my spirit was high. Attila, however, was soon summoned away on jury duty (although I suspected this might have been a ruse to avoid further interaction between me, his car, and the mean streets of Manhattan). He proffered up his colleague Ibo, who met me, perhaps unwisely, in Times Square, which took things to a whole new level of buttock-clenching terror.

Also a Turk, Ibo spoke of evenings on the Bosporus and filled me with visions of Topkapi and shisha pipes as we swiftly gravitated to parallel parking and three-point turns in the nosebleed heights of the Upper West Side. But following the spooky pattern, he too was spirited away—returning to Istanbul for an extended holiday. And then, don’t ask me how it happened, but Shanti came into my life. Her telephone manner was far from lulling. “Do you know how to drive?” she barked down the phone, a question I thought surprising under the circumstances. “No,” I told her, “that’s why I want to take lessons.” “Jeee-eez,” whistled Shanti. No more balmy visions of yalis and Topkapi here, thought I. She met me on the Upper East Side in a Honda Accord no longer in the first bloom of youth. Guyanese Shanti was all elfin grin and “Don’t mess with me, Mister” attitude, and her whimsical attempts to master my name helped the lessons fly by. “Hammeesh!” she would chide, playfully slapping the hand that was gripped to the wheel as though rigor mortis had set in. “You’ll make me beat you up now!” “Maheesh! You’re focusing more on the landmarks than the light.” “Ma-hesh! Don’t pay no mind to the big, ginormous bus.” “Ma-hash! That was a Kodak moment right there.” (A Brobdingnagian juggernaut had just cut across my path.) “You should have seen your face.”

Shanti’s colorful monologues, meanwhile, took me to a whole new world. She was enamored of Tyler Perry’s Madea movies, parsed the juiciest celebrity-gossip magazines, and regaled me with tales of her extraordinary success at a Yonkers casino: “I’m born lucky, Hammesh, I can’t help it. But you gotta play big to win big.” When she wasn’t fleecing the casinos, Shanti seemed to have cornered the market in teaching the teenage children of the great and the good of the city. Her reach was extraordinary—Broadway, television, media, politics, finance—and her knowledge of the city’s elite educational establishments as finely honed as the most ambitious parent’s.

Meanwhile I was coming along in leaps and bounds. During lesson two we hit the West Side Highway and merged with traffic (a giddy moment), and soon after drove up to the Cloisters. I felt I knew the upper reaches of Manhattan like the back of my hand, marveling at Harlem’s architectural treasures and magnificent parks, as well as a restaurant in Washington Heights appetizingly called Refried Beans. With Shanti’s foot hovering over the dual brake, we crossed the river and drove to the Bronx, the site of my future driving test, moments from Jennifer Lopez’s birthplace (“She don’t know the people from the Bronx anymore,” opined Shanti), and chugged all the way back down Fifth Avenue in fiendish traffic (I forgot I was driving for a moment, screeching to a halt to admire Linda Fargo’s new Bergdorf windows; Shanti was far from amused). For the first time, the prospect of the test loomed real. But first there was another hurdle. Because Vogue was thinking big. Formula One big, to be precise.

The concept was for me to augment my lessons with one from Jenson Button, the glamorous sport’s English-born golden boy, the 2009 F1 world champion, and since 2010 a McLaren team driver. Jenson lives large in Monte Carlo with his model girlfriend, Jessica Michibata, who accompanies him when she can on the nine-month F1 World Championship circuit—a 3,000-strong caravansary of drivers, mechanics, technicians, et alia—through a map that reflects the changing global centers of wealth, as classic Old World venues are replaced with places like South Korea, Russia, Bahrain, and Abu Dhabi.

And so I find myself, one crisp February morning, at the Circuit de Catalunya, so near and yet so far from the siren lure of Gaudí’ Sagrada Familia and the delicious tapas bars and labyrinthine medieval streets of Barcelona. But I am not here for sightseeing; this is the last moment for the drivers and their army of engineers, mechanics, technicians, trainers, and assistants to assess the performance of their vehicles and make the relevant adjustments before the racing season itself begins in Melbourne in a month’s time. THE McLAREN’S DOORS FLY UPWARD LIKE A PTERODACTYL’S WINGS. “THIS CAR IS QUITE POWERFUL,” JENSON SAYS IN A MASTERPIECE OF UNDERSTATEMENT

In the immaculate McLaren staging area—more surgery than garage—eight highly skilled technicians hover around the Kevlar-and-carbon fiber “tub” of Jenson’s car (its innards like a brass band’s gleaming tuba), and a further group of performance engineers assesses information that its sensors have sent back to a bank of screens. The process is remarkably scientific and analytical, as the aerodynamic properties and pressure of the new Pirelli tires, the engine pressure and temperature, and fuel consumption are monitored with absolute precision. It is all very, very far from a three-point turn in a dead-end street in Spanish Harlem. When the tires (wrapped in blankets so that they don’t need time to heat up on the track) are affixed, the car’s torso hovers an inch above the paved surface.

The driver’s seat is custom-molded to Jenson’s shape—and needs to be rebuilt accordingly if his weight fluctuates. He sits with his legs fully extended into the hollowed front of his car at a slightly uptilted angle; he’s practically lying down. (The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, which rules the sport, does random safety tests to make sure that the driver can be extracted from this seat in three seconds.) When he’s driving in a humid country like Malaysia or Singapore, Jenson—who is in bedazzling physical condition (his triathlon-honed form carries only 6 percent body fat)—can lose up to three kilos of liquid in a race, and his heartbeat may race to 170 a minute. It’s not unusual for a driver to faint when he climbs out of his car. (I suspect I would faint simply getting into it.) So Jenson drinks a lot—pressing a water symbol on the wheel, piping it through the tube in his helmet—but not enough to unbalance the car’s fragile equilibrium of weight to speed. The steering wheel seems to have more functions than a 747; the gearshifts and the clutch are controlled from the wheel.

When Jenson swoops in for a pit stop, eighteen engineers crowd around; they can change all four wheels in 2.3 seconds—an astonishing sight. But so is the driving itself: This Barcelona track’s long straightaway allows the drivers to reach speeds of almost 264 mph; through trial and error I realize that in order to catch Jenson’s car in a bleary iPhone snap I need to click the camera symbol when I first hear the roar and before the car is even in plain view.

A month later, Jenson and I are clambering into fetching McLaren jumpsuits on a blistering California day. An inky McLaren MP4-12C Spider waits menacingly on a deserted runway. Jenson owns one of these high-performance street cars in white—but he also drives his girlfriend’s Smart car. “I’m Miss Daisy on the road,” he assures me. The McLaren’s doors fly upward like a pterodactyl’s wings. “This car is quite powerful,” he adds in a masterpiece of understatement. “It’s got the full ammo—four times the power that you’d be used to. So apply the throttle gently. The throttle pedal’s on the right, the brake pedal’s on the left. Let’s do it, teammate!” He’s upbeat—but double-checks that I have a license. Actually, not quite. I do have a learner’s permit, having miraculously aced my written test, against all odds, in the dreary Department of Motor Vehicles across from Macy’s. Surreally, this will suffice.

Jenson, by contrast, began his journey at the age of eight in the karting circuits of rural Yeovil, in his native Somerset. “It’s so much easier to learn, isn’t it, at an early age?” he asks. Amen to that. “Do you have any adult friends who can’t drive?” I ask him, hopefully. “Well, a few say they can drive,” he tells me, “but they definitely can’t!” There isn’t even a key, just a push button that reads start engine and seven gears, but Jenson doesn’t think we’ll be using them all quite yet. “It does naught to 60 in, I think, 2.9 seconds,” he says unreassuringly. “It’s easier than the car you learned in. It’s straightforward.” “What am I looking at? Which is the brake?” I ask, blind panic nudging in. He shows me where the pedal is, and then, once the car is started, tells me to lift my foot off it. I do so, and the car moves forward of its own volition; I am not applying gas. “It’s all right; the car’s not worth a lot. It’s, like, $350,000,” Jenson says, chuckling.

“I like this speed! This speed’s good. I can get out and run!” Truth to tell, I really don’t mind our speed—the wind is in my hair, and the seat is just about the most comfortable thing you could imagine, like being cradled by a giant marshmallow. I venture the daintiest little tip-tap on the gas and the car shoots off like a bat out of hell. I am genuinely concerned that we might end up ramming a low concrete wall on the far horizon. “I’ll show you what fast is in a minute,” he says ominously.

Jenson, I am rapidly coming to realize, is not just one of the most attractive people on the planet but also one of the nicest. “Doing something when you’re out of your comfort zone is great,” he says. “It’s good for the soul. I spend my whole life doing this, and you’ve just started. It’s amazing!” I am clinging to the wheel for dear life. Shanti would not be amused. (“Ha- meesh, behave!”) “Listen to her!” says Jenson. “She’s growling at you.” The sound is indeed very sexy—and deliberately so, I’m told. It was reengineered to give it a more convincingly James Bond-ian timbre. For Jenson, that seductive engine’s purr is an essential tool. “You know exactly how much power to give it from the engine’s sound,” he tells me. “But you also feel the car through your ass, so you can feel if it’s sliding. You are like a ballerina. You have to be on tiptoe, so gentle with everything.”

Now it is Jenson’s turn to take the wheel, for a jaunt on the bucolic local lanes, happily deserted but for a few solitary joggers. It starts well enough and then, with a twinkle in his eye, he applies the gas. Then slows, then races again. Jenson’s control is dazzling, and profoundly reassuring. I am frightened in the way a little child is frightened when his father swings him in a windmill rotation, wrist and ankle—scary, but you just know he will never, ever drop you. We go back to the airplane runway where we had had our tentative practice run and an area that seemed somewhat smaller than a football field is cordoned off. Jenson is now in serious Formula One mode, accelerating from zero to 100 mph and back to zero in six seconds. I have never known anything like it in my life. I am screaming blue murder.

Just for fun, Jenson zigzags at top speed, stopping on a dime and starting again, turning imaginary hairpin bends—it is terrifying, but his control of the car is as precisely calibrated as the movements of a dressage pony, and disquietingly reassuring. I can almost sit back and enjoy it—almost. When we finally stop, you can smell the burning of the tires, and my heart is threatening to burst forth through my clammy jumpsuit like John Hurt’s Alien. But frankly it has been the most exciting roller-coaster ride of my life. Incomparable. “It’s freedom,” says Jenson simply. Finally, four decades after my first day at nursery school, I had come to comprehend why boys like these toys. I call Shanti to book my driving test.