Passione Engadina

“Fasten your seatbelts…wait a minute, where are they?”

This is what you might think, if you join Passione Engadina, a rally for Italian cars only, which is held every year in the beautiful nature of the Swiss mountains, in the region around St.Moritz.

Yes, the event is for vintage cars, and if you are like me (a beginner), you can’t help noticing, when you step into one of them and go, how driving has changed. This is the real thing, baby!

Mindful, indeed

You don’t need to be a guru and concentrate about mindfulness, if you drive an old timer. My husband and I drove a 1955 Lancia Aurelia (or better, I was the co-pilot, which means he did almost everything himself), obviously with no belts, no GPS, no radio, no music, no technology.

At breakfast, at Kulm Hotel, I heard a song by Ornella Vanoni. The whole day I had the same song in my head, and I wondered why. Then I realised: 50 years ago, there was no music in cars, no music in shops or at malls, no AirPods, no devices, no nothing, and you only had one thing in your head: the one you had heard right before leaving your house. Talk about mindfulness. Sitting in the Lancia and watching my road book, I started to notice the cows, the mountain passes, the dirty spots on the window, everything. No need for meditation, when things are low tech.

Buttons and the Paradox of Choice

Another very interesting thing of the Passione Engadina event are the talks and masterclasses one can attend before or after driving.

We had a talk with three Michelin starred chef Andreas Caminada (che bell’uomo! I.e.what a good looking man, on top of being a world class chef), that included some data about longevity.

Then there was a presentation with Klaus Busse, head designer of Maserati. The event founder and organiser, Paolo Spalluto, asked Klaus why today’s cars have no buttons, and only screens that get easily dirty and are quite complicated to operate. Buttons used to be beautiful, and rather easy to use. But Busse – rightly, too – answered that a car dashboard featuring all the operational options we have nowadays would look like an airplane cockpit.

When he said that, I thought about a best selling book I read a while ago: The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less, by an American Professor of social theory and social action, Barry Schwartz (he also gave a TED talk about it, that has more than 18 million views)

His point: today’s choices are too many, and give us a headache. Yes, we have better cars, better jeans coming in hundreds of versions in each shop, better choice of everything. But this is stressing us out, completely, because we get paralysed by not being able to understand everything, and always suspecting there might be a better option we haven’t seen, out there.

In my opinion, it’s like the Tinder effect: if you have a partner, you more or less stick to it. If you are on Tinder, you swipe endlessly, thinking that maybe the next one is better, and of course who wants to miss the best?

Paolo was right in missing the dear old car buttons: when you have just those, you know what to do, and what to stick to.

 

 

Regularity

But let’s go back to the driving and racing weekend.

How can a 1955 car race together with, say, a Ferrari? That wouldn’t be fair.

The answer is: it’s not a matter of speed, but of regularity and precision. Elegance is judged too.

In practical terms, your road book is telling you where to go with a lot of drawings and explanations. And from time to time, in some little  roads which are traffic free, your instructions will explain to you in how many seconds and at which speed you have to drive what.

Judges wait for you with chronometers and flags, that indicate you where to start and where to stop. Off you go. The winner will be the one who drives more accurately, and in the given time.

We ended up second in our category!

La famiglia

The driving was amazing. The cars absolutely gorgeous. The Swiss mountains, lakes, and villages with wooden chalets, were picture perfect. The breathtaking roads and curves leading to the mountain passes, the bright colours, the trees, the animals were absolutely fabulous.

But what I liked most was the family atmosphere (siamo una famiglia, said Paolo more than once), which means that kids were called on stage, adolescents were working as mechanics, female pilots rocked the race and answered questions, young adults with disability were active part of the weekend. Forget about the usual old timer race, where all you see is old, white, rich men. This was much more informal, and more fun.

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Mamma Rossella and other highlights

The final lunch was prepared by mamma Rossella, the Ferrari Team chef. She is one of the few people who is allowed to visit Michael Schumacher, for example.

She arrived the day before, and started making her own home-made pasta, with the help of a colleague. The staff of the Kulm hotel asked if she needed help, She looked at them like they were crazy, and answered: “for what?”

Where is the problem in cooking for 150 people…”they’ve been racing all morning, they need mangiare!” , she said, while she kept working.

In such an atmosphere, we could all be relaxed, savour every minute, and pay attention to every detail. Something we can rarely do, if overloaded with tasks, and at the fast speed we have today. We were lost in the joy of the past, but also of the present, and, watching the kids happily roaming around, of the future.

Grazie mille, Passione Engadina, for the love for cars, for racing, and for life!