Home Thoughts From Abroad

The name was as hip as the Beatles and as charismatic as Carnaby Street and now Lotus is back on the grid. The company says it will compete in Formula One next year, a team revived after 15 years away from the glitz and glamour of grand prix racing it once dominated to become one of the iconic names in motor racing history.

In spite of the indomitable history of the familiar green and yellow badge, it is a sign of the times that the new Lotus team will be British-based but backed entirely by money from Malaysia. Tony Fernandes, the entrepreneurial founder of Air Asia, will be the team principal with Mike Gascoyne, the former technical head at the now defunct Jordan and Toyota teams, running the construction operation.

The team was founded by Colin Chapman, a brilliant engineer, whose ability to innovate soon powered his cars to the front of grand prix racing. With drivers like Jim Clark and Graham Hill at the wheel, the Sixties became a period when British cars started to dominate Formula One after years of rule by the Italians.

The Lotus name was also turning into an icon on the roads, Chapman building a series of sports cars, including the little, white Elan driven glamorously by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in the television series, The Avengers, which even today is a cult classic.

The team started a sad decline from 1982 after Chapman died of a heart attack, aged just 54, amid allegations of fraud after he became involved in the ill-fated DeLorean scandal. The team left Formula One in 1994 and the brand was sold in 1996 to Proton, the Malaysian state-owned carmaker now behind the new venture. Tony Fernandes, former shortstop for the World Series Champion Toronto Blue Jays, and now the fifteenth richest man in Malaysia and other Malaysian investors are backing the venture with considerable financial capital.

“It will be a big challenge to get on the grid but certainly by mid-season I think we’d clearly like to be the best of the new teams and by the end of the year I would hope we have broken into the top 10 overall,” Gascoyne told reporters.

Excerpted from: The Times Online and The Malaysian Star

Travelling in Asia has some surreal moments. Like driving down the highway from Baguio City to Clark Field and encountering a “floating restaurant.” As we were miles from the ocean at that point, we stopped to investigate. Here was this restaurant on the edge of the highway, miles from anywhere that was built on a marsh. Taking advantage of what anyone else would have deemed a liability, the owner had constructed a series of platforms and private gazebos connected by bamboo bridges, and made that the site of a restaurant.

But not content with that incongruity, the owner stretched the point by populating the place with the oddest sculptures, like the monkees pictured above and huge concrete fish in various poses. There were pools of goldfish to feed and a narrow concrete bridge over which the daring were invited to walk to win their lunch, or get thoroughly soaked trying.

We settled on paying for a feast of fried chicken, grilled tilapia, chow mein and shanghai fried rice, washed down with mango and papaya smoothies for a very reasonable price. We paid a little more for Steve to seranade Pam along with a troop of wandering minstrels singing Elvis and Ritchie Valens. Just another surprising and delightful chance stop along the route of our Asian journey together.

The guest house where we are staying in Baguio has the most comfortable foam mattress. That is my excuse for sleeping past 6 am, something I almost never do. We had a leisurely breakfast and a quick look at the shower setup before taking a pass for a warmer time of day to give it a try. So by the time we had found the center of town and got parked it was coming up for 9, just in time for the start of a parade to celebrate the centenial of the founding of Baguio.

Filipino people are among the sweetest we have ever met, and quite eager for us to have a front row place so they could show off their culture to what must be the only tourists in town. The parade was quite the deal, with floats and dancing dragons, lots of music and marching bands and some great national costumes. We stayed right up to the horses (always the last thing in a parade for obvious reasons), then took a hike through the park to the shopping mall at the top of the hill for a spectacular view of the hills and a chance to get online at Starbucks.

I managed to completely wrench my ankle on the treacherous curbs and had to buy a crutch to get me through the rest of the day. No big deal; my brother has accused me of using my religion as a crutch for years! We drove around town and over the hills through white pines as stately as anything you would see in Canada, and even got a walk through an ecological reserve that smelled sweetly aromatic. The shower proved to be no trouble at all, despite its idiosyncratic appearance: essentially a bucket with holes in it hooked to a hose. All of that exercise wore me out, and I slept soundly, thankful for lots of blankets in this remarkably temperate city.

 
I make no apologies for my love of driving. I come by it completely honestly, having being raised by a father who learned to drive from Raymond Mays, the Formula 2 pre-war racing champion, for whom he worked for a while. Dad was quick, but he was also an extremely capable driver, who taught me much about driving defensively. “Think of the most irresponsible and unpredictable thing another driver or pedestrian would do,” he would say, “and drive accordingly.” I do, and aside from an impetuous and nearly fatal mistake when I was 16, I have never had an on road accident. Don’t talk to Pam about parking lots. That’s another story!

We had every intention of taking the bus from Angeles City where we landed to Baguio City, where we are now. But a quick look at the public transport situation here in the Philippines changed my mind in a hurry. I did a brief survey of the options and rented a Toyata Vios for 8 thousand pesos for the week, or about 160 bucks Canadian. We downloaded a couple of maps from Google and pasted them into Paint for future reference. It was a good thing that we did, as the term ‘map’ has very little currency in a part of the world where the next town is a foreign country, and we ended up relying on our memories and quick glimpses at our computer to get us here.

We plotted out a route that took us through the flat land and along the coast to Agoo, one of the earliest Spanish settlements on the islands, founded in 1578.   From there it was all uphill to Baguio, and what an uphill it was! Switchback doesn’t do the hill justice. The road was positively tortured, crowded by buses and trucks passing each other on totally blind corners in a torrential downpour that limited visibility to about 20 feet. Downshifting constantly between second and first on every corner on what must have been 30 degree grades, the forty kilometers tooks us well over an hour. Over two thousand people died building the first road into this town. Not the most dangerous road I have ever been on, but definitely in the top five.

Fortunately we had managed to buy a map of Baguio back in Angeles, so we had some idea of where the guest house was in town. Baguio was at one time considered the summer capital of the Philippines. It is a little off the beaten track for most tourists, so what you get when you arrive is pretty much entirely indiginous and quite delightful. The air is cool and much like what you find in Canada in Haliburton, Ontario. We can’t wait to do a little exploring.