Ferrari to the Sahara: Part 2 (CAR archive, May 1995)

Ferrari to Sahara

By Richard Bremner

17 July 2012 11:30

Ferrari F512M to the Sahara continued... Click here to read Ferrari F512M to the Sahara Part 1. CAR scribbler Richard Bremner is deep into Morocco in his remarkable adventure in the Testarossa successor

When we get to Zagora, Goodwin and Wren have established that Mohamed speaks good English, that he really hasn’t much else to do today and if we like, he can take us to some dunes beyond Zagora. So he comes with us. The dunes are unimpressive, despite the Tuareg encampment nearby, so we press on to M’Hamid.
We climb from a plain to another ridge of mountains, only to be confronted by another dish of land. In the middle of it I stop and get out of the car, to take it in. The silence is near absolute. I hear a fly, and the ticking metal of the hot Ferrari, but nothing else. The sky is enormous, the plain completely bounded by mountains whose purples, reds and greys can be made out through the haze.
Stepping back into the car, I push hard to catch the others. The road is single track, but you can see for miles. It crests another ridge, from where it ribbons across the next valley, and arrow-straight path broken by three or four bends. Within minutes, the Ferrari has howled its way to the other side in an unfettered blaze of consumptive excess.

There’s no-one about, nothing to hit but the gravel at the road’s edge and the rev limiter. There’s no radar, no police and no stopping. This is how to use a Ferrari.
M’Hamid is an uninteresting town notable for kids extremely interested in relieving tourists of pens, money and anything else they can proffer. We negotiate a sandy back alley, a couple of kids riding shotgun on the 512’s rear wings, and reach the end of the road, the desert’s edge.

The surface is flat, a baked crust littered with black shards of rock. It may be winter, but you can almost see the heat. It is actually only 26deg C, but it can reach 54. Beyond here lie thousands of miles of desolation.

Click 'Next' to continue reading CAR's original Ferrari to the desert story from 1995

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