Get onto license bureau and trace that car,” Roger Moore—as British secret agent James Bond in the 1974 film The Man with the Golden Gun—commands Mary Goodnight (played by Britt Ekland), a comely young associate from MI6, who has inadvertently blocked Bond’s taxi with her car. “AU 603, a green Rolls.” Hotel a San Giovanni Rotondo Hotel immagine si trova vicino l'ospedale e il convento di Padre Pio a San Giovanni Rotondo.
GREEN MACHINES: The Peninsula's colorful cars compose the world's largest collection of custom Phantoms. “A green Rolls?” Goodnight asks.
“A green Rolls-Royce,” says Bond, repeating the description of the car he had been pursuing. “There can’t be that many in Hong Kong.”
Goodnight responds with a laugh, then she nonchalantly chauffeurs the apparently naive spy to the grand front entrance of the most renowned hotel in Hong Kong, if not all of Asia. “Courtesy cars,” she explains. “All green Rolls-Royces belong to the Peninsula hotel.”
That cinematic moment—which could be viewed as an early example of product placement by the 007 film franchise—is exactly the sort of thing Sir Michael Kadoorie, chairman of the Peninsula’s parent company, Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd., had in mind more than three decades ago when he first commissioned a fleet of seven Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows in Brewster Green (a color that Kadoorie calls “Peninsula Green”). Or at least it is what his father, the late Lord Lawrence Kadoorie, had in mind.
The Peninsula’s relationship with Rolls-Royce began, Kadoorie explains, in 1970, when the hotel decided to improve the quality of its courtesy cars, with which the hotel chauffeurs guests around the city and to and from Hong Kong International Airport. The distance between the airport and the Peninsula’s Kowloon district address, on the shore of Victoria Harbor, is 22 miles, and with traffic, the trip can take 45 minutes. (The term “courtesy car” actually is a misnomer, because the hotel does charge fees to passengers.)
“We used Ford Fairlanes before that—right-hand drive, very usable cars with large luggage racks—but they weren’t the most elegant,” says Kadoorie. He was prepared to upgrade to the best of Ford’s transport vehicles, the big Lincoln sedans, until his father, formerly an executive in the family business that owned the hotel, asked him why he would select Lincolns instead of Rolls-Royces for the new fleet. “I told him I suspected that Rollses were far too costly,” Sir Michael says. “To which my father responded, ‘Have you enquired?’ ”
Kadoorie learned that it never hurts to ask, or to consult with a tax attorney. Because Hong Kong was a British territory at the time, those who purchased Rolls-Royces received sizable sales tax breaks as incentives to support England’s auto industry. That, coupled with the costly procedure of converting the American-made Lincolns from left-hand- to right-hand-drive vehicles, shrank the price difference between a Lincoln and a Rolls-Royce to just 20 percent. “And at 20 percent,” Kadoorie says, “the board felt it was worth going for Rolls, simply for the prestige.”
Today, to answer agent Bond’s question, there are 14 green Rolls-Royces in Hong Kong, all belonging to the Peninsula’s new fleet of custom-made, extended-wheelbase Phantoms, which the carmaker delivered in December. No hotel in the world has ever served its guests with a larger collection of Rolls-Royces.If any automotive brand embodies prestige as well as the Pen (as the hotel is affectionately known) does, it is Rolls-Royce. “Today, our fleet of dark green Rolls-Royces is synonymous with the Peninsula hotel,” Kadoorie says. “The image of one is inextricably linked with the other.” It is true that, when viewed from the front, the car and the hotel do have similarly blocky appearances. But Kadoorie is referring to their images in a less literal context. “The Rolls-Royces,” he says, “have become a tradition that could be likened to afternoon tea in the lobby.”
As the final stop on the Trans-Siberian railway that connected Asia to Europe, Kowloon, in the early 1920s, was a popular point of arrival from and departure to North America, an important gateway between East and West. Situated as it was, the Peninsula began providing lodging for VIPs, and it quickly became adept at catering to them. “We were the first in Asia to offer central air-conditioning, and we’re probably the only hotel in the world with twin helicopter pads on the roof,” says Sir Michael, a helicopter pilot himself. In fact, any guest in a sufficient hurry can upgrade from a green Rolls-Royce and travel to the airport by air in just eight minutes.
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The cars, which the Peninsula introduced last December, feature details such as door-mounted climate controls and custom tread plates.
During a visit to the Peninsula, the on-site world-class restaurants, spa, and shopping arcade could keep you from ever having to hazard the crowded streets of Kowloon. The establishment’s premier accommodation is the $6,000-a-night Peninsula Suite, a 4,100-square-foot space on the 26th floor of the tower that offers lofty views of the harbor and lights of Hong Kong Island. Its amenities include a small gym, five bathrooms, and a full kitchen with a butler’s pantry.
Other five-star hotels throughout the world can boast of similar features, but few if any make as good a first impression. “Our goal is to make our guests comfortable, to make them feel at home,” Kadoorie says, “and it is our belief that the hotel experience begins the minute the guests enter our motorcars.”
Since the early 1970s, with the exception of a short period in the early ’80s when Lincolns composed the Peninsula fleet, the hotel has employed Rolls-Royces to transport guests to and from the airport, Hong Kong’s many shopping districts, and anywhere else a guest cares to venture. (A round-trip ride to the airport costs approximately $190, and the hotel rents the chauffeured Phantoms to its guests at a rate of $140 per hour.)
Over the past 37 years, the Peninsula has commissioned eight separate fleets of Rolls-Royces, totaling 69 cars, not including a 1934 Phantom II, which also is available for hire, and which was named Most Desirable Car at last year’s Hong Kong Classic Car Show. Silver Shadows, Silver Spirits, Silver Spurs—Peninsula guests have ridden in all of these, and, their model names notwithstanding, all of the automobiles have been green. The Peninsula’s 14 new Phantoms, each of which will log about 700 miles a week over its seven-year service, represent the largest single purchase of Rolls-Royces in the marque’s 103-year history. More significantly, the cars feature 39 unique modifications—in addition to the paint jobs—which required altering 269 of the standard model’s parts, according to Clive Woolmer, who manages Rolls-Royce’s bespoke program. “For us,” says Woolmer, “that’s comparable to a model year change.”
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The bespoke interiors include white bins for holding cool towels. The cars’ 14 identical electronic key fobs came in a burr walnut box.
The modifications represented a tall order that was completed in a relatively short time. A year ago, Kadoorie and Martin Oxley, a former general manager of the Rolls-Royce factory in Goodwood, England, who has managed the Peninsula’s courtesy cars since 1996, determined that the Phantom could stand some improvement before the hotel ordered the ones that would replace its fleet of Silver Spurs. “Sir Michael and I spent over two hours at night, in the pitch dark in the backseat of a Phantom, making a whole list of everything we weren’t happy with,” recalls Oxley.
After Kadoorie and Oxley delivered their requirements to Rolls-Royce, the carmaker’s designers and engineers—25 in all—went to work, completing the cars last August and September, barely four months after receiving the order. “It went from conversation to requirements to engineering to build in about 12 weeks,” says Ian Robertson, the CEO and chairman of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. “We began designing the cars in April and building them in June.”
Then Oxley’s team of chauffeurs traveled to Goodwood, to the Sir Henry Royce Training School, where they became acquainted with a car that is in every way larger than the Silver Spur, which already was a challenge to steer through Hong Kong’s narrow streets and through the even narrower passages in the Peninsula’s underground parking garage.
The box beneath the rear seat that chills wet towels is one of the Peninsula-specified features that might be a bit exotic for Westerners. And the four fixed grab handles that have replaced flexible leather straps may be seen as a step in the wrong direction for anyone with large hands. However, several of Oxley and Kadoorie’s niftier options soon will be available to all Phantom buyers, including additional trunk space.
The added cargo room was the most difficult alteration to achieve, because it required some rewiring and the relocation of both the battery and the air suspension’s compressor. Another tricky customization involved replicating the hill-hold function from the 7 Series sedan from BMW, Rolls-Royce’s parent company. On a Peninsula Phantom’s steering wheel, where one normally would find a navigation control, there is a button labeled “Auto P.” Once activated, this system automatically applies the brakes whenever the car is stationary. “Just touch the accelerator, and away she goes,” Oxley says. The driver can take his foot off the gas while climbing an incline, and the car will not roll backward. It is a handy feature when negotiating Hong Kong’s hills or parking garage exits.
Two of the Peninsula’s 14 Phantoms, including the one shown here, have electronically operated rear and side window curtains for privacy. The hotel also had Rolls-Royce relocate the Phantom’s rear heater and air-conditioning controls from the center console to an infinitely more convenient position in the rear arm rests. And, perhaps because Oxley and Kadoorie compiled their list of the Phantom’s shortcomings during a nighttime meeting, the Peninsula cars have backlighting for the door handles and various switches so that they are easier to find in the dark. Peninsula guests not interested in taking in the sounds and sights of Hong Kong will appreciate the 420-watt, 15-speaker Lexicon audio system and the 12-inch television monitors that are mounted behind the front seats. On the ride from the airport, you can view a documentary provided by the hotel that details the life and times of the Peninsula. By watching it, you can learn the meaning of the joke, “Are you married or do you live in Kowloon?” (Kowloon once was populated by brothels.)
Rolls-Royce CEO Robertson traveled to Hong Kong from Goodwood when the Peninsula’s new Phantom fleet arrived at the end of last year and presented Kadoorie with a burr walnut box containing 14 identical electronic key fobs. The first handing-over-of-the-wooden-box ceremony took place in a midday rain in front of a gathering of mostly local media. The second is held at a party later that night, with Kadoorie presiding over a lobby crowded with hundreds of hotel guests and visiting dignitaries, many of whom Robertson regards as potential customers.
“See that guy?” a partygoer and regular guest of the Peninsula whispers, nodding to a nearby gray-haired Chinese man in a tux. “He owns the McDonald’s franchise in China, or at least he did, before he sold it for about a billion dollars.”
With a population of more than a billion and a rapidly growing economy, China represents a potentially robust market for Rolls-Royce, and Robertson’s speech to the assembly nearly belabors the point. “We are heading,” he says, “at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, for another record in sales. [Last year, Rolls-Royce achieved its highest sales total in decades, selling approximately 800 Phantoms worldwide.] I am delighted to say that the fastest-growing region in the world is Asia, and in China—as the most significant player—sales are up at least 60 percent as we approach year’s end.”
A common refrain among the party guests centers on the elephant in the room: the undisclosed transaction price for the 14 green Phantoms. Presumably, the largest purchase of superluxury cars in the history of the hotel business must have hinged upon some ruthless negotiation, but lips on both sides are sealed. Kadoorie says only, “It was done to the mutual benefit of both companies.” Robertson denies any “buy 13, get one free” sort of arrangement, but he does concede that the terms included Rolls-Royce’s buying back the Pen’s previous fleet of road-weary Silver Spurs.
Robertson also does not miss the chance to cast the sales question in the best light for his company, noting Hong Kong’s 100 percent vehicle tax. “So if the car retails for $400,000, then it costs the hotel $800,000 each,” he says. That would put the total price somewhere in the range of $11 million, give or take a few hundred thousand American dollars. “It makes you appreciate living in America,” Robertson adds, “where a $400,000 Phantom is a comparative bargain.”
The Peninsula Hong Kong, +852.2920.2888, www.peninsula.com
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars , www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com
(From the April 2007 issue of Robb Report.)
Superhero Worship
December 20, 2008 by Greg
Filed under Automobiles, Features, Hotels & Travel
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Children shout as I pass through their villages; “Suuuuuu-per-maaaaan!” they scream at me. In Italy, where Ascari, Fangio, Moss, Nuvolari, and other legendary racecar drivers still are revered for their Mille Miglia exploits, a first-time participant would not expect such adulatory reactions from the young spectators lining the route for this, the 80th-anniversary running of the thousand-mile race from Brescia to Rome and back.
However, the children’s shouts are in response to my attire, not the prowess with which I am driving a 1957 BMW 507. It is a sunny, hot, late-spring day in Tuscany, and I have unzipped the top half of my blue Nomex driving suit, revealing the red-and-yellow S shield emblazoned across the front of my T-shirt. The symbol obviously transcends continents and languages. For auto enthusiasts, the appeal of the Mille Miglia is equally universal. The 375 drivers participating in the 2007 edition of the historic car rally come from 26 different countries.
In Italy, the Mille Miglia is a three-day national celebration that, each May, draws more than 3 million spectators. In dozens of cities and villages and throughout the Italian countryside, fans line the streets and the cobblestoned pathways. Some of the spectators are seated in grandstands erected on sidewalks and roundabouts.
While I steer through the narrow streets of one picturesque Italian town, Rob Mitchell, a communications manager for BMW North America and my Mille Miglia codriver, tosses to smiling youngsters autographed photo cards depicting our red convertible. “Bella mà cchina!” a boy cheers as his mother grasps his hand, restraining the tyke from jumping into the car with us. We had signed the photo cards earlier in the day, because, frequent traffic jams notwithstanding, we have little time to stop. “Buona fortuna!” the woman shouts as her son waves his prize. Our fame proves fleeting, however, for just behind us, in another BMW 507, are Italian film and television personalities Luca Bizzarri and Paolo Kessisoglu, who apparently merit more adulation than do a mere superhero and his sidekick.
Major and minor celebrities are among the Mille Miglia’s participants each year. They are joined by several former Formula One racers, a smattering of European aristocracy, and a few journalists. But most of the drivers are motoring enthusiasts and car collectors piloting their prized vintage automobiles.
“When you drive in the Mille Miglia, you see the real Italy, the way it looked 400 or 500 years ago,” said Bavarian prince Leopold von Bayern. Poldi, as friends and acquaintances call the prince, is a perennial contestant who, as a retired BMW factory team driver and the great-great-grandson of King Ludwig I, fits into both the ex-racer and the aristocracy categories of participants. Four or five centuries ago, you would not have heard the constant din of carbureted engines or smelled the odors of rubber, oil, and leaded gasoline, but nowadays you do traverse roads in the Mille Miglia that normally are closed to motorized traffic. Try driving right in front of the Duomo in Florence at any other time of year without being arrested, and buona fortuna, indeed.
I met the prince on the day of “scrutineering,” the process during which each car’s authenticity is confirmed (a rubber-stamp procedure) and drivers and codrivers register for the race. Here in downtown Brescia—located between Milan and Verona in northern Italy—among countless vendors hawking officially licensed Mille Miglia merchandise to tens of thousands of spectators, the participants receive their official keepsakes: shirts, jackets, baseball caps—even showerheads—branded with the race’s trademark freccia rossa (red arrow), and the Mille Miglia–edition Chopard wristwatch.
Chopard has sponsored the race since 1988, and company president Karl-Friedrich Scheufele has driven in each of those Mille Miglias. This year, he has partnered with ex-racer Jacky Ickx in a 1938 Auto Union Wanderer W25 K. “Our watch collection grew with the popularity of the event. In 1988, a lot of our clients didn’t know anything about the Mille Miglia. It was really an insider thing,” Scheufele explained before the race. “Only the real car enthusiasts had any idea what was going on.”
What went on this day could be described as slightly organized chaos. Following the scrutineering, the participants took a leisurely, late-afternoon drive to the Museo della Mille Miglia, a converted 11th-century monastery that hosts the celebratory kickoff buffet before the rally’s official start. “It is like visiting a living museum,” Scheufele said. Here, the cars lined up older to newer; car number one this year was a 1929 Officine Meccaniche (OM) 665, and the last car, number 375, was a 1957 Ferrari 250 TDF. Alfa Romeos, Fiats, Lancias, Maseratis, and other Italian cars slowly filled the museum’s gravel parking lot, along with dozens of entries from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche. Fifty-five marques were represented in the parking lot, but not all of the entrants were supercars. This year’s field included a sprinkling of Erminis, MGs, Rileys, and Stanguellinis. The cars’ performance capabilities ran the gamut from anemic (1953 Fiat 500) to dynamic (1954 Ferrari 500 Mondial).
After the cars rolled into place, food was served, the sun began to set, and new acquaintances and old friends struck up conversations. I met up with Mark Gillies, executive editor of Car and Driver, who was participating in his sixth Mille Miglia, behind the wheel of a 1953 Jaguar C-Type. “The organizers do a good job of selecting cars that are representative of the event, not just all the exotics they can possibly get,” Gillies said. “So if you’ve got a BMW Isetta—something very unusual that took part in the original event—you might get in.”
I solicited Gillies for any advice he might impart to a rookie hoping to make a competitive showing. “The first rule to winning is simple: You must be Italian,” he said. “But if you finish in the top 30, and you aren’t Italian, you can consider that sort of a victory.”
Being Italian seemingly always has been a prerequisite to winning the Mille Miglia, even when the event was a pure speed contest. It began in 1927 as a road race open only to series production cars. Seventy-seven drivers took part in the first Mille Miglia, and about one-third of them failed to finish. The winner was Ferdinando Minoia, an Italian. In the ensuing 24 runnings of the Mille Miglia, Italian drivers won 20 times.
The current Mille Miglia is essentially a procession interspersed with low-speed time trials in which contestants attempt to roll over a series of rubber strips placed across the road at randomly spaced intervals. Since neither I nor Mitchell, my driving partner, is Italian, and therefore, according to Gillies at least, we had no chance of winning, I was not overly concerned with the Mille Miglia’s complicated scoring system. Your final tally depends on how much your times deviate from the predetermined, ideal interval times, and it requires practice and precision to post a top score. Ultimately, we finished in the top half of the field, taking 163rd place, which is not a bad showing for two unseasoned Americans.
While it may not be the oldest vintage automobile event, the Mille Miglia is the most storied. Sir Stirling Moss, one of the rare non-Italian victors, achieved the record best time in 1955, driving a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR with journalist Denis “Jenks” Jenkinson as navigator. They completed the circuit in just over 10 hours, traveling at an average speed of nearly 98 mph. Despite his triumph, Moss considered the Mille Miglia his least favorite race. “I never cared for it,” he has said. “It’s impossible to memorize a 1,000-mile route, so driving [the Mille Miglia] was quite dangerous.”
The events of the 1957 race, the last running of the original Mille Miglia, underscored Moss’ sentiment. Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Carvajal y Are, the 17th Marquis de Portago and 13th Conde de la Mejorada, is a long name to live in infamy, so the Spaniard is more commonly remembered as Alfonso de Portago. Forty miles from the finish line, the 28-year-old gentleman driver’s Ferrari 355 S lost a wheel and crashed into a crowd of spectators, killing him, his navigator, Edmund Nelson, and 10 bystanders, five of whom were children. The race was discontinued, and charges of manslaughter and lawsuits were brought against the car’s builder, Enzo Ferrari, who eventually was exonerated of any crimes.
Reincarnated as a classic car rally in 1977—and renamed the Mille Miglia Storica—the event now is essentially a three-day sightseeing tour of Italy, though not one completely devoid of danger. I share my birthday with Alfonso de Portago. That coincidence, combined with the fact that the vintage of the car I am driving is also the year of his death, provides an unsettling reminder that piloting old cars on public roads can be a risky activity.
“There are only three true sports: bullfighting, mountain climbing, and motor racing; the rest are merely games,” is a quotation often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway, likely because of his fascination with potentially deadly activities. The Mille Miglia could be considered a combination of the three sports. While driving vintage racecars, you traverse potentially harrowing mountain passes and face the near-constant threat of a run-in with wayward livestock. “The Mille Miglia is long, difficult, and tiring,” longtime organizer Costantino Franchi has said. “The most important thing is to leave Brescia and to return to Brescia.”
After the late-afternoon lunch at the museum, Mitchell and I waited patiently to leave Brescia as the cars ahead of us departed in 20-second intervals. We did not leave until 9:30 pm. In the race’s original incarnation, our car would have borne the number 930, reflecting our starting time. Today, car numbers are based on the age of the automobile, more or less. Our names—R. Mitchell and G. Anderson—were stenciled onto the sides of the arbitrarily numbered car 273, along with American flags representing our country of origin.
On the first night of the Mille Miglia, each car rolled across an old, wooden platform in Brescia to begin the roughly four-hour drive to Ferrara via Verona. When we reached the platform, our names were announced over the public address system, and then the start flag was raised from the hood of our car. People formed walls on both sides of the streets; most were standing behind hay bales and wooden barricades, but others ventured closer and leaned into the street to try to touch us as we passed. “I once heard a story about a spectator who reached in and punched a driver in the face,” Mitchell warned. Overcome by the moment, I reached out and slapped someone a high-five, which, the sharp pain in my hand indicated, is not a wise thing to do while driving at a 30-mph clip.
The second day’s drive begins early in Ferrara and ends late, but spectacularly, in Rome, where the Mille Miglia menagerie gathers in front of Castel Sant’Angelo for perhaps the highlight of the event. When the last participant finally arrives, the carabinieri cordon off Rome’s busiest intersections and we depart en masse to enjoy a relatively high-speed, police-escorted sightseeing tour through the heart of the Eternal City.
I snap blurry photos of the Colosseum and the Vatican while flying through red traffic signals, and when the drive ends and we arrive at our hotel, a woman asks me if I am a racecar driver. “At first I thought you were the pope,” she says, noting the police escorts. “You know, he gets traffic control, too.”
No, I am not the pope; I am not even Superman. But for today, at least, I tell her, yes, I am a racecar driver.
