I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (22 page)

As a place to be, the 166 has no equal. It’s a combination, really, of the hand-stitched upholstery and the exquisite choice of colours. Black carpets. Tan seats.Why does no one else do that?

The Blackbird was almost completely unshootdownable. I spoke once to one of its pilots, who said that if, by some miracle, he was detected in enemy air space, he still had absolutely nothing to fear. ‘We’d see the MiGs coming up to get us, but when they hit 60,000 feet we’d have gone and they would fall out of the sky.’

On full throttle, two giant blue plumes are left in the Blackbird’s wake, each framing a series of perfect blue balls of equally perfect energy. You watch it and you think,‘God almighty.How did man ever create a sight like that?’

Were there to be a war tomorrow, a big one against a properly tooled-up country, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d buy myself a nice white polo-neck jumper, get on the first train to Scotland and join the submarine service.

The job of the dedicated missile boats is to pootle about, like mice in carpet slippers, with their ballisticmissiles, waiting for the order to destroy an entire continent.

When the Argentine light-cruiser
Belgrano
was hit by two torpedoes from the snout of HMS
Conqueror
,a British hunter-killer, the enemy escort ships immediately gave chase. They were out of ideas after just five miles.The Royal Navy vessel had approached unseen, fired unseen and simply disappeared. After the conflict was over
Conqueror
sailed into Scottish waters flying the Jolly Roger.

The shuttle’s main engines suck fuel through a 17-inch-diameter pipe at such a rate that they’d drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in ten seconds flat.

In space, the crew take just the most astonishing photographs.There they are, fiddling about in their balloon suits, while far below we can see Italy sliding by.

The pilot has got to slow the machine down from 17,000 mph to a safe landing speed of 211 mph.This is tricky, partly because he has no fuel left and therefore no power and partly because the Shuttle has the aerodynamic properties of an Aga. As a result, he has to make a series of sweeping turns,washing off speed with each one, but even then the rate of descent is still seven times greater than in a normal plane.

When, as a boy, I first heard that a Ford was going to take on these exotic alien spaceships from Italy I could sense that David was loading his sling in readiness for the battle with Goliath.

The Ford GT 40 initially had a 4.2-litre V8 that produced 350 bhp and a top speed of 207 mph. But this was deemed too wet so it was increased in size to 4.7 litres.

Some might say that no machine conceived only to kill could ever be called beautiful. Magnificent maybe, and awesome perhaps. But not beautiful.The thing is, though, that in the battleship’s short life of just 90 years it turned out to be a less effective killing machine than almost any other weapon of war. All they did was steam around the oceans, making the people who paid for them feel good. So I do consider them beautiful and I consider the
Yamato
to be the most beautiful of them all.