Marcos 3 Litre V6 (1969)

After months of fantasising, I have finally had an opportunity to drive my father's 1969 Marcos. Having spent January through to April editing Making my Marque, I had seen so many Marcos' take the hill at Prescott that I was desperate to experience one for myself. And I have to say, that it really doesn't disappoint! Once one has negotiated getting into the car, it is possibly one of the most comfortable driving positions that I have ever encountered and the same is true once one is actually driving. I had been slightly anxious that the view over the long bonnet would make the car difficult to manoeuvre at low speeds but despite being so low and so far back, the driving position feels incredibly natural. The car isn't easy to move around at low speeds but that results from the very heavy steering, which at speed presents no problems at all. And it is at speed that this car is most effective. With such a powerful engine (heavy but pushing out around 200bhp) in such a light car (the chassis is made of wood and the body is fibreglass) it performs very well. There is a good deal of torque on hand and it accelerates with real gusto. Handling is also superb - this isn't one of those big engined cars that only goes well in a straight line. The car emerges from Marcos' racing heritage and is designed as a GT in the classic mould; however, while covering big miles in it would undoubtedly be great fun, one would need to be wearing earplugs, as the car is more or less completely un-silenced and therefore very loud - as demonstrated by the outraged elderly pedestrian I passed the other day who flicked a series of 'V' signs at me. Unfortunately for him, once I had passed beyond where he was standing, I went under a bridge, which meant that the sound reverberated even more loudly than before! The other piece of touring advice that I have - and it makes some sense given that there is limited space for luggage - is to drive wearing as little as possible! All the heat from that big engine, which runs very hot, heats the cockpit of the car. I seem to recall my father driving up the test hill at Brooklands in swimming trunks during the summer of 1976 but I'm not sure that I would recommend travelling quite that light! Anyway, minor niggles aside - and at the end of the day one doesn't drive a Marcos for practicality - this is a truly great, and for me exceptionally beautiful, car...

Classics on the Common 2010

After last year's downpour I was hoping that we would have sunshine for tomorrow's Classics on the Common, especially after the weeks of sunshine that we have had so far this summer. I will be taking the 'Ulster' as usual but hoping that it stays dry, as the hood while useful doesn't offer a huge amount of protection. Also once erected getting in and out of the car is very difficult!
If you want to read more, see Rod Ker's report in The Telegraph, from the 2008 Classics, which provides something of the flavour of the event. As a local it is something of a relief not to have to travel far (a 5 minute drive!), as the fact that the event takes place on a workday evening can make it difficult to attend. Anyway, here's to a successful gathering once again - we will have wine on hand if you want to join me in the toast...!

Goodwood Festival of Speed

Earlier this month I visited the Goodwood Festival of Speed for the first time. I had resisted for a number of years, despite having been invited to accompany a friend on at least two occasions, imagining that an event on such a grand scale would make any sense of participation difficult and that it would dominated by contemporary cars only. There is no doubt that it is a big meeting and the crowds can feel overwhelming at times - especially in the paddock areas - but I was pleasantly surprised at how much motoring history was on display. There were many familiar cars to view and plenty of interesting machines tackling the 1.16 mile hill climb. Notable amongst these, for me at least, was the 1911 14.2 litre Fiat Grand Prix car and Vauxhall's very rare C-10 'Prince Henry', a car that I have seen many times down the road at Vauxhall Motors in Luton...
Always hugely impressive are the pre-war GP cars - the Bugattis (types 30, 35 and 59), the Alfas, especially the P3 Tipo B, the first successful centre-line single seater GP car, which won the Italian Grand Prix on its first outing, the Mercedes SSK and the Auto Union Type D, driven on this occasion by Pink Floyd drummer and friend of my father, Nick Mason.
It was also great to see a selection of classic endurance racers, cars that had competed in road races such as the Mille Miglia and Le Mans. There was an impressive looking 'Birdcage' Maserati (the nickname comes from its tubular space-frame made up of over 200 pieces), which was rather less pristine once it had hit the hay bales, as its driver lost control coming out of turn two...
It was also really good to see the Marcos XP Mantis of Ned Morris in the 'Grand Touring Greats' section of the event. This is a car that I saw for the first time last year at the Marcos 50th Anniversary celebration at Prescott and I had an opportunity this time to talk with Ned and his father and to discover, with some pleasure, that he has bought a copy of my Making my Marque documentary on the history of Marcos.

My 8 year old son and his best friend, along with his older brother and his best friend were with me for the day and their interests were geared very much towards the more contemporary machinery. The highlight of the day for them was getting close to last year's Formula 1 GP cars as well as seeing them - and more importantly hearing them - race up the hill. For the two older boys the pinnacle of the day came when they had an opportunity to shake Jenson Button by the hand and have him scribble an autograph for them. With a nod to the Dads, they also got Jackie Stewart to sign their yellow dunlop caps.

The Goodwood estate is huge and after 10 hours at the site in glorious but blazingly hot sunshine, I can confirm that I was absolutely shattered; however, it was a great day and I had seen cars dating from 1902 right up to the very latest concepts, including this rather pretty take on the Mazda MX-5 (my daily transport). So having been something of a sceptic, I have been converted and I am already looking forward to next year's event...

Der Untergang/Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel 2004)

Downfall has been sitting on my DVD shelves for a number of years now but at well over two and a half hours long I hadn't found the time to watch it. What I had been watching instead, of course, were the innumerable parodies or 'mashups' that pepper YouTube and that appear whenever an apparently minor issue produces an overblown response in the popular press and media. My first encounter with the form was after the Oasis split and I found myself laughing for the entire three or four minutes of the sequence. The juxtaposition of Bruno Ganz's incredible performance as the ranting Hitler with the banality of the Oasis split made the re-edited subtitles work perfectly. In some cases the text isn't sufficiently carefully crafted to carry off the parody but ultimately it is the incongruity of the subtitled subject matter and the enraged Hitler that make these parodies work. The most recent example - and this demonstrates how this type of parody functions - has Hitler complaining that the Vuvuzela is ruining his experience of the World Cup:



Interestingly, there are now self-referential versions that feature subtitles that complain about the removal of the parodies from YouTube, as a result of Constantin Film AG submitting a copyright claim earlier this year (here):



So what about the actual film itself? Well, there is no doubt that Ganz's performance is incredibly powerful. Despite the melodrama evident in the parodies, he produces a sustained portrait of Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker that keeps the viewer enthralled, horrified and emotionally engaged. Much of the film takes place inside this bunker and the claustrophia and the fear that inhabit it with the personnel effectively trapped within it is almost palpable. The film's account of the capture of Berlin is also carefully managed, revealing the futility of German situation but also the cost of the war in terms of the German people, a people that Hitler is shown to have no concern for other than as an abstract concept. As Peter Bradshaw notes in his review of the film (here), it was criticised for 'humanising' Hitler but while it does indeed do this, it renders him 'in consequence, far more grotesque and sulphurous than any of the dozens of picturesque newsreel documentaries on TV. It restores to him evil's banality, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, and its silliness and cheapness. Any movie which removes the great dictator from the horrors of the camps and places him in a situation which he is history's biggest loser, risks conferring, if not tragedy exactly, then the pathos of a cut-price Götterdämmerung. But Hitler has never looked more noisome, a tatty charlatan' Bradshaw 2005).

So, the film is well worth watching, in all its harrowing grotesqueness but do make sure that you also view at least one of the many parodies that continue to circulate and will no doubt appear for some time to come. I'm waiting for the version that depicts Hitler's reaction to the fact that England are out of the World Cup...

Making my Marque DVD

My documentary on Marcos cars is now available to purchase via Jem Marsh's website (here). Jem founded Marcos with Frank Costin in 1959 and the documentary traces the marque's development, its early racetrack success and the introduction of the iconic Marcos GT. In an extended interview, Jem talks about the various models produced over almost 50 years of production and describes the highs and lows of racing, from his days in the 750 Motor Club to the Le Mans 24 hour... The film contains archive footage, photographs from Jem's personal collection and footage shot at last year's 50th Anniversary celebrations at Sudeley Castle and the Prescott hill climb track in Gloucestershire.

Moon (Duncan Jones 2009)

As always, I'm way behind everyone else with my viewing... Anyway, I've finally had a chance to see Duncan Jones' debut, BAFTA award-winning feature, Moon. And what a debut! A really impressive film with an incredible performance - or should that be performances, plural - from Sam Rockwell. As Sam Bell, Rockwell is the film. Reviewers of the film have made comparisons with Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), though few have mentioned Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), which has similar concerns; however all these films share a desire to explore the effects of prolonged isolation and loneliness on the psyche, with a subtlety that is all too rare in contemporary science fiction. In some ways the universality of the questions that Moon considers enable it to transcend the boundaries that can sometimes limit genre films. Not only does Moon explore what it means to be human, to live and to die but it does so with incredible affective power while simultaneously demonstrating admirable restraint. There is one notable moment in the film where this understatedness is substituted for a brief instance of exuberance that made sense in the context but which jarred somewhat nonetheless. Sam Bell has returned the dying Sam to the lunar rover, struggling to carry him and place him inside the cockpit but as he returns to his own vehicle we see him jump a number of times - almost playfully - in the zero gravity atmosphere of the moon. Of course, he is hurrying because he needs to return to the base before the 'rescue' team arrive but it is a strange moment that seems to express his excitement at the prospect of a possible return to Earth. This is one of those arresting filmic moments, what Christian Keathley called 'cinephiliac moments' or what Roland Barthes, in relation to photography, called the punctum. Standing out from the background of its context, this briefest of sequences resonates backwards and forwards across the entire film, encapsulating all of its concerns in this singular instant... For this and for the entirety of the rest of the film, I would highly recommend Moon...

Marcos: Celebrating 50 Years

I have been working on a documentary, celebrating 50 years of Marcos, since last summer's celebrations at Sudely Castle and Prescott. The film is a no-budget production, shot using equipment borrowed from Roehampton University (the day job). I am now nearing completion and in anticipation of the finished product, I am posting a short trailer that gives a flavour of last August's event, when probably the largest gathering of Marcos cars ever, in a single venue, took place. The film itself contains an extended interview with Jem Marsh, as well as archive footage from the early 1960s... Click here for a higher resolution version.