‘A smiling individual with oily hair slid around the door of our editorial office, showing a row of not-very-white teeth’
People like to complain about air travel, donʼt they? The delayed flights, the lost bags, the large sweaty person in the next seat. But these days I find it works, more or less. You get there, and you get back.
When I started as a journalist tumty-tum years ago, I worked for a struggling little magazine that had no travel budget. I spent my weekends at Brands Hatch and Thruxton or, if I could afford to fill my 850 Miniʼs tank, Rufforth. Then one day a smiling individual with oily hair slid around the door of our editorial office, which was a second-floor room over a sinister shop in Paddington. Showing an uneven row of not-very-white teeth, he said he could get me to the Daytona 500 NASCAR race for free if I plugged the package tour he was promoting.
It sounded like the trip of a lifetime. A chartered Boeing 707 would take us to Miami; thence a bus to Daytona, to watch two-ton, seven-litre sedans lapping at 190mph driven by good olʼ boys with names like Elmo, Cale and Butch. That wasnʼt all: we would fly on to a beach paradise in South America for a week in the sun. Hastily I wrote the plug and got my passport up to date.
The problems began at Gatwick – a smaller, shabbier airport then. We were due to take off at 6pm: but the smiling man hadnʼt sold enough places to fill a 707, so we were downgraded to a Britannia. It took until 6am to find one. The other passengers were mainly noisy used-car dealers in check jackets who treated it all like a dirty weekend in Runcorn. After propping up the bar all night they were even noisier.
The Britannia, in case you donʼt know, was a propellor aeroplane, and it didnʼt look as though it had the range to get us to America. We got to Florida in a series of hops, landing every time there was a bit of terra firma to top up the tanks. We flew from Gatwick to Shannon, lumbered on northwards to Gander Airport in Newfoundland, and then made our way down the USA to Miami. It took 22 hours.
But the race made it all worthwhile. This was 1968, but its spirit is unchanged today, so if youʼve never seen a NASCAR race put Daytona on your bucket list. After parades, marching bands and beauty queens, the Star-Spangled Banner rang out and 100,000 spectators took off their Stetsons
