Top Down
Words Andrea Albertazzi / Photo Severin Demchuk
One morning you wake up and realize that the laziness of the winter season has disappeared, gone, dispersed into thin air together with those last bits of snow that mark the end of the hibernation for our beloved mountain roads. With the wind in your hair and the road ahead mirrored through the lenses of your sunglasses, you let the spring breeze – or even better the gentle summer coolness – caress the skin of your arm comfortably hanging over the window. Just as you don’t feel the need to struggle during morning’s traffic jams separating your garage to today’s happy place, you don’t even have that hunger for speed, for once leaving room to a pace that follows the rhythmic and placid series of curves that serve as a backdrop for something unusually intimate.
The engine enters the cockpit, but does so in a more discreet way because it is dampened by the air that collides on the edge of the windshield. Over your head a blue sky that does not let you see the slightest hint of clouds, probably holed up on the sidelines in order to enjoy a moment so full of emotions. The music you’re able to hear at times is delicate, but at the same time relaxing and direct the mood towards that set of sounds that trace the disconnections of the asphalt, today perceived more than ever and with a constant and soft advance that highlights how a cabriolet body can elevate driving involvement.
And it does not matter if the kilometers I am traveling are not the ones that bring me closer to the sunny curves just outside Santa Monica, but those delimiting Lazzago, since my eyes are focused on that point halfway between the end of the front hood and the beginning of the tarmac carpet, a point of contact that is anything but concrete, yet not abstract, and which allows that sweet instrument called car to kiss one of the most exciting rendez-vous of one’s motoring life. The absence of acoustic filters allows you to get the best out of the mechanical efforts of the car, while a tortuous path leading to an absolute destination takes the shape of the maximum expression of driving according to the driver. Other than an arm that alternates its grip between the crown of the steering wheel and the gear lever, always engaged with total peace of mind, my hair flutter at the mercy of the elements and set a smile directly proportional to the increase in engine revs per minute, once urban centers have been left behind.
Whether you call them cabriolet, convertible, roadster, targa, or in any other way, an open-top car is the closest you can get to the vision of a driving experience between two and four wheels. In this case, even though the sense of protection offered to the passenger compartment and a comfortable seat is maintained, you feel a more vivid contact with the road, with what is around, with the same sky, appreciating a different point of view than usual and which places driver and passengers in a context that puts them as the ultimate fulcrum of the very same experience. With speed and concentration increasing as the curves ask for nothing more than to be taken by the neck, that natural rustle is dominated by the roar of the engine, always ready to redesign the shape of that smile that suggested satisfaction a few moments before and now underlines pure complacency.
The game becomes almost mechanical, precisely for the intention of tickling these emotions so far from the more traditional driving we have become accustomed to with solid roof sheltering our necks, where everything that happens outside passes through a huge mechanical filter, arriving so different from what they really look like. Then, after witnessing the most romantic sunset of your motoring relationship, the silence of the evening peeps out and makes that cockpit an even more magical place. The night, in which the only noise is that of an engine now sated with kilometers, is an indefinite container that allows you to turn the final page of a little big adventure lived in the most total simplicity, at the same time radically transformed by the lack of that comfortable panel that has covered our heads throughout the winter.
Driving en plein air is something that creates addiction, a personal way of understanding your three-way love story with the car and the road that you will share with a selected number of people intending your same vision. Whether you decide to make it an exemplification of your driving nirvana, or the best way to increase your heart rate once attacking a winding road, it will be something that will upset the concept of driving as you never thought. And believe me if I repeat that in this case, more than in any other that I can think of when passing the welcome sign in Cernobbio, power and performance have never been so superfluous. I think I’m gonna leave the roof open tonight. Morning will come early.