Trying To Enjoy the Cotswolds.(Column)

Byline: Matt Davis

A lion's share of British sports car racing heritage can trace its roots back to the Cotswold Hills right smack in the middle of England.

I remember at the end of the 1970s-as an excitable American teenager in the United Kingdom for a first lengthy visit-how my fast London friends and I drove, well, like teenagers into lush Gloucestershire every weekend to test our skills with big grins over the perfect B-roads. The only place that comes close on public roads these days is my adopted Italy.

I would return every five or so years, and I increasingly realized that the pastoral Cotswolds were being taken away from us estate by estate, road by road. Londoners started migrating to the countryside in the 1980s. Today it's a flood. The pubs now all serve gourmet foods from a continental menu and close at 10 o'clock sharp. Speed bumps are installed everywhere you enter and leave each village. The villages are owned by rich urbanites who want to hermetically seal off the entire municipal area against the risk of fun. There was nearly none of this in 1979, and I don't recall any significant trouble. (Of course, I was a teenager, and teenagers generally notice nothing of significance.)

It had been a few years since my last chance to race over hill and dale, but I recently had a 5250-pound Bentley Continental GT at my disposal for three days. It was not the ideal ride for slaloming the apexes between tall hedges-I would've taken a WRX STi S203 or the Evo VIII MR-but I am definitely not complaining.

The fun was frequent and plentiful, but it was never long-lived as in my salad days of reckless youth. The trouble is that at the entrance to every village there is an eager Gatso speeder-hunting camera just waiting to snap your picture and get your license plate number. Some ...