I was loitering around the pits at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last July trying to bum a ride – unsuccessfully, as it happened – from the owner of the Beast of Turin, that YouTube-famous 1911 Fiat with the flame-spitting 28.4-litre engine, when I met Les and Dee Searle. A prolonged chitchat about the collection of steam engines and prewar cars that they keep in barns south of London led to the revelation that they were soon to visit America for their first time. However, unlike the army of Brits who annually tromp to Florida or do the classic LA–San Francisco–Las Vegas triangle in rented Mustang convertibles, Les and Dee were shipping over their own ride. The plan was to take a meandering 32-day, 5200-mile drive from New York to California to not just see a few highlights of the USA but to take in as much as possible of our spacious skies, amber waves of grain, and purple mountain majesties.
And the mode of transport was no less unusual than the mission: a 1937 Lagonda V12. Students of Britain’s equally glorious and tragic automotive history will recall that Lagonda was a luxury boutique in the prewar period before it became part of Aston Martin. Started in 1904 by Wilbur Gunn and named for the Shawnee village in central Ohio where Gunn was born, Lagonda is famous for hiring W.O. Bentley away from Rolls-Royce after Bentley’s own firm was absorbed by the double-R in 1931. Bentley designed the 4.5-litre, 180bhp V12 for Lagonda’s large touring cars, and the company campaigned a few at Le Mans with cigar-shaped bodies notable for their flaring fenders and tiny cockpits. Many touring chassis have been re-bodied as racer replicas ever since.
The Searles picked up theirs a few years ago at auction and have been elbowing each other in long-distance rallies around Europe ever since. Playing wingman was their friend John Brigden, who organises such rallies and publishes a magazine called Auto Addicts for the fanatics who do them. He mailed over his own more spacious 1972 Citroën DS21 for the trip. The ultimate goal: arrive in sunbaked, bug-splattered style to Monterey Car Week, where they would no doubt embarrass a few who trucked in their classics from comparatively shorter distances.
I left Les and Dee at Goodwood with promises to host them royally in Los Angeles should their itinerary allow it (and should they make it that far), and to perhaps introduce them to our man Jay Leno. And in late July, after their cars had cleared customs, the trio set out from the docklands in Newark, New Jersey, weaving through upstate New York on visits to friends and car museums, keeping the folks back home informed with updates to their trip Facebook page, NY2PB. They drove the Lagonda and Citroën on gravel roads, over covered bridges, around country dirt ovals at the invitation of the bemused flat-trackers, and on to Indianapolis for the requisite pilgrimage. A fuel leak was the 87-year-old Lagonda’s only significant problem, fixed at a welding shop in Indiana.
They mushed toward the West through stifling summer heat and torrents of pelting rain, taking in a rodeo in Dodge City, Kansas, and climbing all the way up to the 14,000-foot summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. They plied the red-rock canyons of Utah and the glittering neon canyons of Vegas before rolling into LA, where, as promised, I introduced them to Jay, who was very happy to meet them. Being like-minded about the wonders of both Lagondas and steam power, Jay and the Searles had much to connect on, though Jay did whisper to me at one point, “OK, I can see driving New York to maybe Binghamton, but that would be enough for me.”
In Monterey, almost at the journey’s triumphant end, Brigden and the Searles were rightly feted for demonstrating the unalloyed spirit of classic-car ownership. They also got to meet and thank McKeel Hagerty personally, for it was a Hagerty rep who saved the whole trip by coming through with insurance after their previous underwriter dropped them at the last minute. And while you yourself may be despairing the state of America and its seemingly toxic divisions, take heart from this fact: Asked what the best part of the trip was, Les replied without hesitating, “It’s been the people we’ve met. They have been so incredibly nice.”
