The Hannibal Run
December 2000
- Brian Byrne.
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“You must all be out of your minds to have come on this,” Alfa Romeo Ireland PR manager Joe Gantly told us when we reached the half-way point of an amazing journey from Naples to London.
And HE was the one who had devised it and invited us to take part!
He termed it ‘The Hannibal Run’, but this time there were no elephants involved in the Alps crossing, just a few cars. And it didn’t take months to do the journey, rather a total of four days’ driving.
Kind of mixed driving, though, both weatherwise and roadwise. For instance, we set out from a Naples happy in early-winter temperatures of 24degsC and the following evening were driving into Geneva in -2degsC. In between we had cloudbursts and snow.
And while we crossed the scenic Fota Pass of Mille Miglia road-racing fame at a fairly leisurely pace because of road works and agricultural traffic, we belted along post-Hannibal autostrada at speeds where the local Italians take the limit as a starting point.
(That last means that if you want to use the motorways, you’ve got to keep up, and that means motoring at THEIR speeds or you become a traffic hazard yourself.)
And, oh yes, their autostrada roads carry REAL traffic loads, and Italian drivers tend to use MILLImetres as a unit of car separation where we’d use many metres.
So, all in all, it was an experience well outside what we get in Ireland, or are ever likely to get.
It was also a fine test of the cars we were driving, the new European Car of the Year winner Alfa Romeo 147.
Joe Gantly had a problem. He needed cars in Ireland for the official launch of the 147 in the last week of November. The cars were in Naples, the first of the right-hand-drive versions to come off the assembly lines at the nearby Alfa Romeo factory. He also had Irish journalists looking to try them out.
In mathematical equations, two halves of a problem brought together make a whole solution: let the Irish journalists bring the cars to Ireland. Well, close to Ireland anyway ... he wasn’t taking any chances on bad weather upsetting long sea-crossing plans from Northern France. So the second leg of the journey actually ended near Gatwick, via the Channel Tunnel.
But that’s the end of the story. It began, as I said, in Naples. Where in our same hotel, Pirelli was launching its 2001 Calendar the following day, and a fellow guest was the famous Fergie who had apparently also been up front beyond the curtain on our plane coming down.
(We couldn’t wait for the Pirelli launch, though we managed to ‘liberate’ a press release in Italian and a CD of four sample ‘Pirelli Girls 2001’. And a couple of us DID bump into Fergie - as we came back from a midnight walk around the Old City, she pulled up in a limo after a night on the town. But these are incidentals to the whole story.)
The real work began after an early breakfast and we were thrown out into Naples commuter traffic to do the first day to Florence. We’d been warned the city traffic was tough, but in fact was not a lot worse than College Green in Dublin on a bad morning. And anyway, everyone was going in more or less the same direction, and with our direct heading for a motorway (which we reached in under 15 minutes from the city centre: try THAT one in Dublin!) it was soon going to be relatively easy moving.
We had a brief chance to see that there are two sides to the city - the wealth of the downtown marina area and a real shabbiness of the industrial parts that are not far from the centre. We’d been told that much had been done in recent years to bridge the gap between mad rich and sheer poverty, but I guess there’s still much to be done.
(Naples is the ‘gateway’ city to the southern half of Italy, and to some extent has always reflected the poor half of the country.)
Anyway, once away from the urban depress we were rapidly travelling through countryside that became ever more beautiful as we drove northwards towards Rome, between steep volcanic hills with terraces of vines, and, as we got nearer the Italian capital, visibly more rich homes. Surprisingly quickly, Rome was a haze to our right as we skirted it on the seaward side and pushed on towards our lunch.
Time to mention the cars. They were RHD, or course, and all were the 1.6-litre versions. We’ll all be doing our respective reviews of the 147 over the coming months, but by the time we made the lunch stop about two-thirds of the way to our destination for the day, we were all, without demur, impressed.
You can see from the pictures that it is a distinctive car. And unmistakably Alfa with that substantial grille that dominates the front end without apology.
Inside, with the strong chroming of the central console area, and the deep-podded instruments (like the 156, but better placed for viewing), the whole feeling was of very high quality materials and strong build characteristics. It is roomy front and rear, and has a decent boot. And under the bonnet is an artist’s rendition of an engine (it couldn’t be REAL, it looks so good).
Actually, it IS the real thing. And when you let it climb through the revs it is both a joy to hear and a pleasure to feel it perform. The mechanical details are for another article. Suffice to say that when we left the autostrada and went into the hills before Florence, there was ample opportunity to sample the roadholding and play with the curves.
Lunch was lunch, long in the Italian manner and too much pasta for this writer, but the wine was very good (I had done my stint and my co-driver was being abstemious in preparation for getting us both safely to the night).
Next morning (the night had been quiet and early, with the prospect of a very long trek to Switzerland before us) began with a somewhat ritual run through the Fota Pass, traditionally the most difficult part of the famous Mille Miglia race in which Alfa had strongly figured for many years. We could sense the excitement of the past, but rapidly deteriorating weather and a series of roadworks by fibre-optics contractors kept us from trying to emulate the legends. Probably just as well, because there WAS scenery to enjoy.
Eventually our Irish convoy reached the autostrada again, the main one from Florence to Milan, and here we encountered that very serious driving I mentioned earlier. Thing about it is, we were very happy that the Italians were very good drivers, and while they might be going like the hammers, and using every lane open to them, they were aware of everything happening around them. Thereby lies a difference from home, maybe because our traffic densities are relatively light and don’t force us to concentrate enough.
Anyway, just after we turned onto the westbound autostrada towards Turin (and a lunch stop that was still a very long way away), the heavens opened. Funny thing was, it didn’t seem to slow things down much, but it certainly made progress through sheets of rain and spraying trucks interesting, to say the least.
We did, eventually, get to Asti for lunch. But this time, as we realised that our route to Geneva, through the Frejus Tunnel and up by Annecy in France, was well stretched out before us, it was a short meal.
The weather had cleared, but was getting appreciably colder. We got to Frejus in the remaining daylight, and emerged the 22 kilometres later in a France that was dark and snowy. It meant the next two hours were relatively uninteresting, with just the passing lights of hamlets and cities to mark our progress, still fast.
Until we reached the Swiss border, and were warned not to exceed speed limits any more - they have radar everywhere.
In some ways, for those of us finishing on this first leg, it was night of anti-climax, probably because we were too tired to make a celebration of it. But we had driven 1,000 miles - our own Mille Miglia - in two days of strenuous work. And there was a feeling of achievement.
Thank you, Joe, and Nicola, and all the other friends at Alfa Romeo Ireland. It was fun, and when we all get time to think a little about it, we’ll find more to savour.
Meanwhile, the car is a honey, and we didn’t need a Mille Miglia to find that out. But I’m glad we did have the opportunity.
