Chasing 100mph | Thank Frankel it's Friday

As a speed limit it is more abstract in nature, but no less real for that, and there was a time when it became one of the most important things in my life. The speed was 100mph and the limit was the fact I’d never driven anything fast enough to get there. I had brothers who talked about ‘ton up’ as if it were this mystical place, a rite of passage which, until endured, disallowed you from calling yourself a proper grown-up. It seems pathetic now, but this was the early 1980s and, at the time, I lived on an island nine miles by five, with a maximum speed limit of 40mph.

Actually, even on Jersey, there was somewhere you could do 100mph. It’s called the Five Mile Road, though it actually measures closer to 3.5, and runs fairly straight down the west coast of the island. And if you got up early enough and drove up and down a few times to make sure there were no police lurking, you could have a go. I remember seeing some film taken on board a Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer, of the speedo nudging past 130mph on this road. I don’t think I’d ever been more impressed by anything.

You’ll perhaps not be surprised to learn that the 17-year-old me didn’t have a Boxer. I’d had a Fiat 126 (top speed 62mph) and a 2CV (71mph) until I’d written them off so was now lumbering around in the family Series III Land Rover which would no more do 100mph than the lambada. Lacking both the car and the environment, I despaired at my chances of ever realising my dream.

But then, from nowhere, a chance. My father had sold my step-mother’s Alfasud to someone in England and as he was going over anyway said he’d take it with him. Then the romance of spending a dozen hours secreted in the bowels of a rusting cast iron bucket while it tried to invert his insides wore curiously thin. In short, he couldn’t go, but the car still had to. With the same sense of doomed inevitability that saw Edmund Blackadder asks Lord Percy to be his best man, he turned to me and said, ‘Andrew, would you like to take the car to London?’. I’m sure I’d had happier moments in my life, but right then I just couldn’t think of any.

At the time two Sealink ferries plied the routes from Jersey to the mainland, each with noble names at significant variance to the formica fittings and all-pervading stench of vomit that greeted you once aboard. I can’t remember whether it was the Caledonian Princess or Earl Godwin I boarded, but I do recall a near sleepless night in a chair and a growing sense of anticipation as Portsmouth drew near.

I thought it would be a breeze: off the boat, onto the A3, foot down, 100mph, pull over, park up, light cigarette and luxuriate in the moment of passing from boy to man.

But I had overestimated my charge. This wasn’t some kind of fancy pants Ti or Veloce Alfasud, but a bog basic, single headlight, single carb Super with 85bhp in a good day. But this wasn’t a good day as the car had spent its life to date on a tiny island being driven by my stepmother who, in all kindness, was not known as the Craig Breedlove of Jersey housewives.

Who knows what carbon deposits had built up on its valves in then interim? All I knew was that it wouldn’t do 100mph. It would struggle up to 90, then stagger onto 95 but that, emphatically, was its lot. But just as I was about to give up, I noticed I could no longer see the road running dead ahead of me which could mean only one thing: a hill, and I was on top of it. It was all the little ‘Sud needed, and down the other side we screamed, needle pointing directly at 100mph. Three figures. Ton up. I had done it.

I’m not sure what I expected; the heavens to open and for me to be serenaded by some celestial choir perhaps but no one appeared to appreciate the magnitude of my experience. The people in cars around me just got on with listening to Terry Wogan or whatever else they might have been doing at the time.

But still, I could not wait to get to the London flat my brothers shared, for they were even more car-mad than I. They would understand.

‘Glad to see you made it,’ said one. ‘We were taking bets.’

So I gabbled out my news, about how I strove so valiantly to realise my dream, about how, against all possible odds I’d pulled through and got the job done. Beaming with pride, I awaited their reaction.

‘Oh I wouldn’t take that too seriously,’ said the other. ‘Alfa speedometers always over-read. Probably weren’t doing much more than 90mph.’ And with that they went back to eating their breakfast.