Jeremy Clarkson - Motorworld

One guy watched a bright-blue Camaro launch itself off the line with its front tyres a foot in the air, then turned to me grinning and said, ‘Chevrolets and apple pie, baby, Chevrolets and apple pie.’

It didn’t make sense but I knew exactly what he meant. This was heartland America.

And the cops were not about to make waves, partly because they need the support of the white middle classes. A patrol car sat for an hour in a side street watching the action before moving in.

Over the car’s public address system he announced that the show was over and that ‘anyone on the street in ten minutes is going to jail’. It would have been terribly authoritarian and effective except for one thing. I could see through the tyre smoke and the flashing lights that the guy was grinning.

He knew that he was witnessing what the people of Detroit have been doing for 50 years.

In the sixties, manufacturers used to bring secret new cars down to these meets and race them against the home-tuned opposition. Many remember Ford rolling up one night in the early seventies with some kind of Mustang which blew everyone into the weeds. It became the Mach 1.

It’s stories like this which set Detroit apart. It doesn’t matter where you turn, there is always a reminder that you are in The Motor City.

There’s a comic book sold locally where all the heroes are cars. Take a stroll round the Detroit Institute of Arts which, amazingly, still exists downtown, and you’ll note that every single exhibit was paid for and is funded by the car industry.

The poets in Detroit write about cars and within a twenty-mile radius of the city-centre grand prix track there are five drag strips. Ben Hamper, a local boy and the funniest author I’ve ever read, is a former GM worker.

And downtown, there are the buildings, huge and solid monoliths whose foundations are set in V8 brawn. Pick any one of them and you’ll find it was built with car-industry money. They’re the American equivalent of Britain’s country houses, a solid and lingering reminder of a once-great past.

And an inspiration to strive for a better future. The American car industry has owned up to the fact that the Japanese were an invented enemy dreamed up to disguise its own shortcomings and has now stopped making awful cars.

Sure, there’s still the Buick Skylark and the Chevrolet Caprice, brontosaurial machines which handle like lawnmowers and have all the visual appeal of dog dirt. But at least they’re well made these days.

American cars, from the seventies especially, were not only hideous to behold but they were also prone to catastrophic bouts of unhelpfulness. It was not uncommon to find Coke cans rattling in the doors and a line worker’s tuna sandwiches under the seat.

And GM’s answer to poor morale was to introduce the Quality Cat, a man in a moggy outfit who bounded up and down the lines, inspiring a cynical workforce to greater things. Trouble is, most of them were asleep in boxes at the time, or down at the shop-rat’s bar.

Ben Hamper tells the story of new electronic boards which were erected throughout the factory. One day, the message read ‘Riveting is fun’, which made him ask the question, ‘Well hey, if it’s so good, how come all the management aren’t coming down here in their lunch breaks to have a go?’

Those days though are long gone and even the designers are back on form with cars like the Dodge Viper, the Lincoln Mark VIII and the Saturn range. They’re good-looking, inexpensive, reliable and advanced. The Cadillac STS only needs servicing every 100,000 miles and, thanks to sophisticated electronics, can cross a desert with no water in the radiator.

But if you want to spotlight one car which demonstrates Detroit’s new spirit, you should take a look at the Chrysler LHS.

It’s made by a company which, in the early eighties, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy but which is now posting profits which some say are obscene.

Most American cars are too large, too thirsty and too ugly to have any appeal outside the States but the LHS is different. It looks wonderful, thanks to its cab-forward design whereby the engine is shoved right up to the front of the engine bay.

That lets you have a short bonnet which means more space for passengers and luggage. It’s also quiet, well-equipped and fast, despite the absence of a V8 motor. I’m almost embarrassed to say it but here we have a car which, by global standards, is right up there with the best.

It, along with the new Fords and GM cars, means that in the short term, at least, the big three American car manufacturers are safe. But what about their birth town? What about Detroit?

Well there are some chinks of light. Today, right in the city centre, there is one 300-yard stretch called Greektown where trendy restaurants abound and where you can walk on the pavement at night in relative safety. There are lots of beggars but they only let murderers in in packs of ten.

There is also the appropriately named Renaissance Center, which houses office blocks, a shopping mall and the world’s tallest hotel. You’re fairly safe in there too because armed guards outnumber visitors by 200 to 1.

And there’s the people mover — a monorail which tours the city. Now sure, it’s pretty pointless offering a public transport alternative in a city where the public don’t go and where, even if they did, they’d take a car, but never mind; someone had the confidence to build such a thing.

The trouble is, these are details. Building a shiny new monorail in Detroit is like cutting someone’s toenails when they have lung cancer. And Detroit, to pinch a line from Robocop , does have cancer.

It’s called crime.

The Mayor says Detroit will be the next great international city, and a great place to do business. Yes, and I’m a little teapot.

I’m so mad, in fact, that I always list Detroit as one of my five favourite cities in the world. It is as soulful as the music it once made and, as Gertrude Stein once said, ‘There is a there there’.

Iceland is not of this earth. It is a little piece of Mars stuck away on a barren rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. There are no reference points for the visitor, no little reminders of the civilisation that you’ve left behind, no clues that you’re in a fully paid-up NATO member state. Small wonder they sent Neil Armstrong here to train for his lunar walk.

The countryside is weird. The people are mad. The weather defies belief and the laws and customs leave you gasping. But all of this is overshadowed by one important feature that, quite literally, turns your world upside down. In the summer, it doesn’t go dark.

They can take you for a ride in a nitro-powered Jeep up a sheer cliff face. You can drive a snowmobile across the sea. You can pay £80 for a bottle of house white and you can have dinner with a girl who has completely see-through skin, but you won’t be paying attention because here, night does not necessarily follow day.

Life for the rest of Planet Earth is a mishmash of unpredictability but there’s always one inescapable fact — every single night, without fail, the sun will set.

But up there, from the end of April to the middle of September, night is like easing the dimmer switch down a couple of notches. And in the middle of June, it doesn’t happen at all.

At three or four o’clock in the morning, it’s as light as it was at three or four o’clock in the afternoon, and that is spooky. You can go up to Sneffels Yokul, where Arne Saknussem set off in Journey to the Center of the Earth , to watch the sun kiss the horizon, and then start rising again.