James Martin - Driven

There were moments when I wasn’t convinced I was ever going to make it to the start line. At one point my car, a bright red 1948 Maserati A6GCS, one of only three made that year by the legendary Italian car manufacturer, looked worryingly like a two-year-old’s Lego set, i.e. in pieces, and lots of them. The bills for repair were adding up and the loan I took out in the first place to cover buying the car and getting it into the race was already bigger than the mortgage on my house. At one point the loan repayments alone were more than I used to earn in a year at Hotel Du Vin, when I first read about the race. But if it’s your dream, you’ve got to do it, right? For once, I actually agree with my dad, who always used to say that anything in life is possible, it just depends whether you’re prepared to work hard enough for it. And I’d worked hard for this. I’d spent my whole life working towards this point, absorbing everything there was to know about cars, hurtling through my life on four wheels and using all my hard-earned cash to fuel my passion. And now I can truly say that nothing comes close to the noise of thousands of over-excited Italians screaming and cheering as the cars throttle down the famous start ramp and charge off into the night, down the narrowest of cobbled streets, made narrower by the devoted crowds that line the way from start to finish – and this being Italy, there are no barriers separating cars and spectators; they don’t even close the roads for it. It’s the biggest collection of classic cars you’ll ever see, not sitting in a museum gathering dust but out on the road doing what they were built for. This three-day test of skill, stamina and decades-old metalwork is the ultimate adventure for any car fanatic. And I’m utterly proud that I’ve been a part of it.

Cars and food might not be an obvious combination to most people, but to me it all makes perfect sense. One just always seems to lead to the other and, as you’ll see, I’ve gone to ridiculous lengths for both. So while it may come as a surprise to hear me raving on about vintage cars and Italian rallies, rather than celeriac mash and spun sugar, you should know that every memory of every job, pay packet, place and person I can think of comes with a make and model number attached. Looking back, it’s easy to see how everything I’ve ever done has been leading me unswervingly to the start line of the world’s most famous road race. I hope the stories that follow will show you why entering the Mille Miglia has meant so much to me, and that you’ll enjoy reading about some of the best moments of my life.

It all started when I was seven years old. I was skateboarding around the kitchen table. I remember going round and round. I couldn’t get enough of the speed, the challenge, the skill, the going round and round.

We lived in an old farmhouse with a big kitchen which was always at the centre of everything. The kitchen was the hub of the family as well as the house. It was all pine inside, with a huge dresser, a big old butler’s sink and a big round pine table with pine chairs. The table sat ten and was always busy. People didn’t knock on the door of our house, they just walked straight into the kitchen and made themselves at home. It was a lovely place to be. That’s where my love of food started. If my mum wasn’t cooking, my dad was. Mealtimes were a big deal in our house, and Sunday lunch was the most important. The table would be packed for it. My grandparents would be there, my mum, my dad, my sister, my aunty, and me, on my skateboard.

As well as the big pine table, the other important feature of the kitchen was a big old Aga with a metal towel rail on the front of it. If you pulled on the towel rail quickly enough while stood on a skateboard, you could launch yourself with enough force to ride almost all the way round the kitchen table. What made the kitchen particularly suitable for skateboarding, though, was the floor. It had these cork tiles which with hindsight were horrible but at the time were perfect for skateboarding on. Ceramic tiles or lino would have been lethal: one pull on the Aga towel rail and you’d have been off with a broken neck. But the cork tiles, designed to stop nasty slips while holding a boiling pan, gave all the grip you needed for a successful run around the kitchen table.

Skateboarding was the ‘in’ thing at the time. Me and my mates were all into it, but me being me I couldn’t just have a normal skateboard. Firstly, I was very particular about which one I had. If I asked for a skateboard for Christmas I was very specific. Normal kids would write in their letter, ‘Dear Santa, please bring me a skateboard’; I would write, ‘Dear Santa, please bring me a skateboard, model XT47, blue, available from Halfords, priced £14.99.’ That way I’d be sure I was getting the right one. And it had to be the right one. I didn’t want a red one or a black one or a yellow one, I wanted a blue one. I didn’t want an XT20 or an XT40, it had to be the XT47. And if my granny asked my mum what I wanted, there was always the outfit to go with it. I had the full gear – the knee pads, the arm pads, the helmet.

Our little farming village had never seen anything like it. I looked a right pillock going down the road, slowly, on my skateboard dressed head to toe in all the get-up. I don’t think any of the other kids in the village had seen anything like it either. Me and my best mate David Coates used to skateboard together, but his wasn’t as good as mine because he would just write ‘skateboard’ on his list for Santa. David used to be way better than me at almost everything we did, but he never quite had the right gear. He may have been better at sport than me, but he never looked quite as good doing it. Yes, there was intense competition to have the best skateboard, the coolest BMX. It was like real life Top Trumps back then. It still is now, only with Ferraris.

Getting the right board and outfit was only the start of it though. I could never leave it as the standard board everyone else had, I had to ‘trick’ mine. It’s always been the way, no matter what I’ve owned: I’ve got to modify it, make it better. So every penny of the pocket money I used to earn mowing the lawns, doing a bit of gardening or helping out on the farm mucking out the pigs went on ‘improvements’.

We weren’t proper farmers, of course. With my dad’s catering manager post at Castle Howard came a house and some land which was pretty much useless for anything other than farming, so at various times we had pigs, cattle and chickens which me and my sister Charlotte, who’s a year younger than me, used to help out with. It wasn’t highly paid work – we were only seven and six – so when you spent you had to spend wisely. At the corner shop my 50p pay would buy me a Coke and a Mars bar (twice) and a handful of Floral gums. I hated Floral gums. They were, and still are, disgusting. They tasted like soap, but they were the only sweets my sister didn’t like, which made them good value. She’d have all the good sweets, which I’d nick off her; I’d have all the crap ones, which she wouldn’t come near. They might not have been pleasant, but they made the most of the money.

With only limited funds and a standard skateboard in need of ‘improvement’, some particularly creative thinking was required. I could work all year and I still wouldn’t be able to afford the proper (and eye-wateringly expensive) foot grips they sold in Halfords, so I cut two feet-shaped pieces out of some sandpaper in my dad’s shed and glued them to the top of my board with UHU. Careful saving of my hard-earned fifties meant I could just about afford the four new wheels I wanted – one red, two white, one blue – and, most important of all, the special tricked-out ball bearings required to do all the proper stunts. The only problem was, I couldn’t ride the bloody thing. I could barely stand up on it, never mind do stunts. I used to have to sit on it on my bum to go down hills. Which is why I did most of my skateboarding in the kitchen.