As we did. First, though, refreshment. After a frantic few days in and around Paris we drove an hour or so up the A4 AutoRoute to Reims and aimed for the Franken Pommery champagne house where Mumm is made.
The Maserati was made for roadtrips like this. Mumm Champagne has been awarded to the winners of F1 racing for many years. Locked behind ancient iron gates were the actual bottles destined for the winners of and races, unlabelled, racks marked simply with chalk. We would like to have bought a few bottles but our budget had been blown on fuelling our hard-drinking Quattroporte. I love historic motorsport.
The more I delve, the more thrilling it seems, a world away from the colourless, tyre-saving, fuel-managing, energy drink flogging drivel of today. There is no French GP today, yet France was the cradle of so much early racing. Azerbaijan, anyone? So many circuits were and still are public roads so with a tatty print-out of the Reims circuit from Wikipedia taped to the dash we aimed to benchmark our performance against Fangio, the lap-record holder here.
The start line is obvious, the circuit is a rough triangle laid out to encourage high speeds. The first corner after a roundabout is a right kink that now runs past a Police station. Originally it went behind the Police station, now a rough grass verge along a corn field, so we did the same, cameraman Matt bouncing about in the back of the car. As we dwelled on that thought, thumping along with BHP shouting at us, the road stops.
The original corner is now cornfield and a few tantalising metres ahead is the N31 AutoRoute, which formed another long straight. We executed a twelve-point turn and rejoined the circuit. This car makes you feel like Fangio in the front and Berlusconi in the back. The tower and surrounding buildings here are beautiful. The French Ford S-Max owners club had stickered one of the walls, though.
