By 1934 they were going very quickly indeed. So quickly, in fact, that one of their 1500cc racers actually set a world speed record on water.
After the war things changed. Old man Riva, the third generation of the family that started it all, was keen to carry on making bash ’n’ crash racers but his son, Carlo, had seen the new boats coming in from America and had other ideas. He wanted to make quality products for the leisure market.
There were furious rows over which direction the company should take. Some were so bad that Mrs Riva would have to step in and physically separate her brawling husband and son. And then one evening Carlo fell to his knees and said, ‘Father, you can take that bottle from the table and hit me over the head with it. You can kill me, but I have to make my boats.’
Dad relented and Carlo was in business. At first he didn’t appear to be very good at it. Fed up with the racing teams who argued that they must have a discount in exchange for all the publicity they brought, he doubled the price and scared them all away. Within weeks, then, he had no customers at all.
He also had no money, so he went to see the Beretta family who had made a fortune from guns. They gave him enough to buy six engines and off to America he went.
The first port of call was Detroit, where he had a meeting with the company that made the boats he so admired: Chris-Craft. They listened politely to the young man from Italy and said they’d be only too happy to supply him with engines providing he bought 50. That was 44 more than he could afford.
The next day he went back to see them and with a lot of shrugging said he’d love to buy 50 but sadly the post-war Italian government would only allow him to import six at a time. Very sorry. Nothing he could do. Hands are tied. The boys at Chris-Craft fell for the story hook, line and sinker and Carlo got his V8s.
Back at home he set about annoying as many customers as he could. Once, a German industrialist came to the factory and placed an order, then made the mistake of laughing when he was given the delivery date. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘There’s no way you Italians could manage that.’ Carlo threw him out.
He was completely obsessive. He colour-coded the staff’s coats so the people in the woodyard wore red and the people in the engine bay wore yellow and so on. This way, if he looked out of his glass office and saw all the coats mingling, he’d know immediately that something was wrong.
Colleagues roll their eyes when they talk about the old days. ‘I remember once,’ said one, ‘we spent all night going through pictures of our boats to see which was best for our publicity material. We didn’t get finished until dawn, and then Carlo messed them all up again to see if we’d pick our original choices a second time around.’
Putting that much care into the pictures shows just how much care he put into the boats. He used the latest varnishes and varnished them again and again. And then again for good measure. The Italian motor industry was using 1.5 microns of chrome on its cars. He was using 30 microns on his boats. He was so pathological about quality that it was taking an age to get anything out of the factory and into the water. He reckoned on spending 1,500 hours to make one boat – a ludicrous amount of time for what was only an open pleasure craft – but pretty soon he was spending 3,000 hours on each one. Sometimes more.
Small wonder they became known as the Rolls-Royce of boats, the Stradivarius of watercraft.
However, while his time and motion was a bit skew-whiff, his timing was impeccable because his crowning achievement, the Aquarama, came along in 1962. Which was pretty much the precise moment when the jet set really got into its stride.
In the olden days the idle rich played a bit of tennis and read a few books and that was about it. The only excitement came when someone decided to have a war. But then, towards the end of the fifties, they suddenly found that thanks to the jet engine and the helicopter they could pretty well go where they wanted, when they wanted. St Tropez for breakfast. St Moritz for lunch. St Albans for dinner even.
The epicentre of all this, the maypole in the playground if you like, was the South of France. And that meant they needed a boat, and because they were very rich they needed the best, and that meant that they all ended up at Carlo Riva’s door.
Over the next few years the list of celebrity customers became a joke. He sold boats to Stewart Granger, John Barry, Rex Harrison, Peter Sellers, Brigitte Bardot, Karl Heineken, Sophia Loren, Joan Collins, President Nasser, Victor Borge, King Hussein, Ferrucio Lamborghini, Prince Rainier, Roger Vadim and Richard Burton. The Aquarama became a mahogany passport to the high life.
Over in the States Chris-Craft were horrified and immediately stopped supplying engines, but this didn’t stop Carlo. By then he was on such a roll he simply made his own. Beautifully, of course.
Eventually the boat-building world turned to glass fibre, which was tough and resilient, but Carlo refused to buckle. ‘Here in Italy,’ he told me once, ‘we won’t take a shit unless the lavatory seat is made from wood.’
His staff were equally vehement. One day, at Portofino, a Riva salesman was to be found berating some poor chap who’d dared to park his plastic gin palace in the harbour. ‘Go away,’ he shouted. ‘Portofino is a beautiful place full of cultural heritage and only beautiful things can come here.’
It was no good though. The plastic boats started to take over and the Aquarama, at £250,000, started to look preposterously expensive. It soldiered on until 1996, by which time 3,760 had been made. But by then Carlo had sold the company to Vickers, who had introduced a glass-fibre cabin cruiser and were concentrating on restorations.
Horrified, he tried to buy the rights to his old boat back. But Vickers said no. Carlo told me it ‘hurt his heart’.
Today you can buy one of his reclaimed Aquaramas for £250,000 – exactly the same as the damn thing cost new. But whatever, you will have one of the best-handling sports boats ever made. There’s no power trim, no adjustable this and active that. You just get the wooden hull and two V8s, but that’s all you need.
Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, once asked to try one out. He was told that if he could turn it over, he could have it. And Gianni, being Gianni, tried. But couldn’t.
I tried too, one still morning on Lake Iseo. All I managed to do in one spectacular turn was hurl half a hundredweight of melted snow water into the cabin of the helicopter that was filming me. Quite what this tells us, I don’t know. That I’m incompetent, or that the pilot was flying far too low – a bit of both probably.
What I do know is that of all the machines I’ve ever driven, flown or ridden the Aquarama remains my favourite, the one I’d most like to own. Yes, an F-15 fighter jet would be a laugh but I couldn’t go anywhere in it, and yes, Leander, the superyacht, was spectacular but a bit of a bugger to run. Carlo’s wooden baby, on the other hand, has a real-world attraction.
It hits all the bases too. It’s fun, it’s fast, it is exquisitely made and when you’ve finished looning around and you’re back on dry land you can look back and think to yourself, ‘That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’
Millennium Falcon
When you’re looking for the greatest spaceship ever made there are many choices, from Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Liberator from Blake’s Seven.
But really, it comes down to a straight fight between the USS Enterprise from Star Trek and the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
So far as speed is concerned, well, that’s a tough one. The Enterprise could tool along at warp nine, which appeared to be pretty fast. But is it faster than the Falcon in hyperdrive? It’d be interesting to ask Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, the men who created these craft, to discuss it over tea and buns, but this isn’t possible due to the fact that Mr Roddenberry is dead.
Obviously, with its photon torpedoes and its transporter room the Enterprise is by far the most sophisticated, but when it was destroyed in Star Trek III no one really shed a tear. They just built another. The Millennium Falcon could never be replaced.
Plus there was always a sense that it was the Enterprise’s captain and crew who won the day, despite the ship rather than because of it. I mean, the lumbering old barge was hopeless against a cloaked Klingon vessel. And even at full speed the Borg cube had no problem keeping up. Victory was only ever possible because of the ingenuity of Kirk and co.
In Star Wars it was the other way round. Han Solo and his trusty sidekick Chewbacca were always out of ideas and at the mercy of yet another death ray when, lo and behold, the Falcon would get them out of trouble. This made it as much of a character as R2-D2 or C-3P0.
But that said, Solo was a bit of a boy. I mean, when Picard encountered an asteroid belt he nosed through on a quarter impulse power. Han, on the other hand, just floored it.
And let’s be honest, the Falcon was well tooled up. It had four turbo-lasers, a bunch of concussion-missile launchers and scanner-proof interior compartments for smuggling contraband. This, after all, is the purpose for which it was built.
It was won, in a game of cards, by Solo from his friend Lando Calrissian and then tweaked, customised and souped-up with a double-power hyperdrive system. Unfortunately, much of the after-market accessories were fitted by Chewbacca, a Wookiee, who was modelled on the director’s dog and speaks a language that’s part walrus, part badger, part bear and part camel. Not the normal qualifications one needs for rocket science.
This probably explained why the Falcon was forever going wrong. Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this too helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality. This is something I look for in all machines…
Once upon a time I was in a country far, far away doing some filming for the television. The story called for us to join a band of ex-pats and Arabs on a motorised fun run through the desert outside Dubai, so obviously we needed some vehicles. Naturally, I went for a Range Rover, leaving the director with a Jeep Wrangler and the crew with a Discovery. The producer took a Mark One Toyota Land Cruiser pickup truck.
As the day progressed it quickly became apparent that a bunch of media types weren’t exactly proficient in the art of desert driving. Those of us who had been ‘off road’ before had been taught to keep the revs as low as possible and use the engine’s torque to pull us out of trouble. Slowly, slowly, gently, gently was the key.
Well, it may be the key in England, where the ground is wet and there are tree roots, but it sure as hell doesn’t unlock any doors in the desert. Here if you let the engine’s low-down grunt dribble you along, you sink into the soft sand and that’s pretty much that.
What you have to do, I learned very quickly, is pretend you’re in a stolen Astra on a housing estate at midnight. Keep it in as low a gear as possible, weld your right foot to the floor and drive like you’re being chased by Darth Vader himself.
This doesn’t work either because if you go too fast, you crest the lip of a dune, find a sheer drop on the other side and can’t stop. So you slither down the slope and get bogged down in your own little avalanche on the other side. Or you rip a tyre off the rim. Or something important breaks. Either way, you end up as immobile as you would if you’d been crawling.
We made a sorry spectacle. The director going slowly because he had a bad back. The crew going slowly because the boot was full of delicate camera equipment and me going like a bat out of hell because it was fun. And all of us, ultimately, going nowhere.
All of us, that is, except the producer. His name is Andy Wilman and he is far from the best driver in the world. And yet, despite his fists of ham and his fingers of butter, he never got stuck once. This, we deduced, must have had something to do with his vehicle – the Land Cruiser pickup truck.
We were right. Even when it was up to its axles in powdery sand, that thing had enough grunt and enough traction to tow a bogged-down Range Rover. Nothing stopped it. No slope was too severe, no terrain too arduous. With its ancient diesel under the bonnet, its ladder chassis and its primitive four-wheel-drive system it was unstoppable.
It was, however, not pretty. I mean, the Mark One Land Cruiser pickup wasn’t beautiful when it was new. After fifteen years of hard labour it was a sorry spectacle, its knobbly tyres bleached grey by the sun and its silver paintwork dulled, scratched and streaked with rust.
Still, it was one of the best, most endearing and most lovable machines I’ve ever encountered.
We called it the Millennium Falcon.
The real Falcon was not beautiful either. When George Lucas was planning Star Wars he envisioned a sleek rocket, but his original design looked startlingly similar to craft being used at the time in the TV show Space 1999. So he went back to the drawing board, or rather the local burger restaurant.
It was here he got his inspiration. Yup, the Millennium Falcon was styled to resemble a burger. And the unusual, protruding control pod was modelled on an olive that Lucas saw peeping out of the bun.
The noise it made? Well, that was a recording of some experimental aircraft at the Oshkosh Air Show in 1976. And the battle scenes? Well, they were modelled on actual moves in the film 633 Squadron. Especially the canyon-running in the final moments of Star Wars IV.
All of this helped create a sense of reality. But the icing on the cake was the model itself. Instead of being a titchy little thing on wires or a computer graphic it was real and it was big: five feet across and perfect in every detail.
That’s the thing though. It was a model. This small detail, however, seems to have bypassed those who still live with their mothers and spend their evenings in the attic, reading magazines about murderers. These people have got it into their heads that the Millennium Falcon was real.
By analysing the film, frame by frame, they’ve worked out that it’s 27 metres in diameter, with a thickness of 6.9 metres and a density of 4,000 cubic metres. Assuming that 95 per cent of this volume is air and the remaining material has the thickness of iron they have come up with the conclusion that it has exactly the same density as the USS Enterprise. Spooky.
One of them has even made this observation about the behaviour of the Falcon when it was hit by a burst of what, to you and me, is green light: ‘The rotational kinetic energy of an object is 0.512 at non-relativistic rotational speeds. Therefore 3.902E8 joules of rotational kinetic energy were added to the Millennium Falcon. However, the physics of collisions involve conservation of linear or angular momentum rather than the conservation of kinetic energy, which only happens in elastic collisions.’
So, the green light has no mass. It is pure light energy. Interesting. And yet somehow not interesting at all.
Normal people didn’t watch Star Wars as an endless series of freeze frames. Certainly I watched it in one lump and I thought it was terrific. All those space fights between creatures from worlds so much more strange than anything Captain Kirk had ever discovered.
This was the joy of Star Wars. It took us on a mind-bending flight of fancy and yet we swallowed all the nonsense because actually the tale itself was as old as the hills. You had the evil lord fighting the princess and her band of knights. And stuck in the middle was Han, the lovable rogue, with his pet monkey/dog and his amazing, beaten-up spaceship.
Small boys everywhere know that in a fight between Superman, James Bond and the Terminator, James Bond would win. Well it’s the same story in Star Wars. In a fight between the Enterprise, Stingray, Thunderbird 2 and the Millennium Falcon, the Falcon would reign supreme. It just would. The end.
Flying Boat
It was 14 March 1939 and the Empire Flying Boat Corsair was already two days into its journey from Durban in South Africa to Southampton Water in England.
Nothing odd about that. This was a five-day journey back then because the plane would drop down several times a day for morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea. Flying was civilised in those days.
But then, on the leg from Uganda to the Sudan, everything went horribly wrong. Pilot John Alcock, brother o
f the more famous Alcock who’d made the first ever flight across the Atlantic, put the plane on automatic pilot and went back to dispense some bonhomie among the passengers.
He returned to the cockpit just as the landing zone should have been coming into view. But it wasn’t there. Assuming he’d overshot, he turned the plane around and retraced his steps but there was nothing below except jungle and swamp. After four hours of flying and with just fifteen minutes of fuel left in the tanks he knew he had to find the straightest piece of water he could and try to get Corsair and its thirteen passengers down safely.
The waterway he found was barely wider than the plane’s wingspan but he made it anyway and had damn nearly brought the machine to a halt when the hull hit a partially submerged rock. With water gushing in, he applied full power and drove Corsair onto the beach.
No one was hurt and everyone was soon rescued and given shelter by a Belgian missionary who was quickly on the scene. Marvellous. End of story.
Except it wasn’t. The Corsair was the most modern flying boat around in 1939, and her owners were determined that they weren’t going to simply write her off and spend £50,000 on a new one. They decided that they would get her out.
The story is told beautifully in Graham Coster’s book Corsairville, but, in summary, she was mended once but crashed on take-off. So they had to mend her again, even though the war was in full swing back at home. This involved damming the river and shipping in so many workers that a town had to be built. It’s called Corsairville and it’s still there today.
I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Page 3