Dodgy Business

January. If you're a self-employed motor racing journalist it means two things. First, you're knee deep (not so high in my case) in receipts. No longer can you ignore the Inland Revenue's January 31 self-assessment deadline. Second, it's booking time. With the new season fast approaching you've got to make sure you've got flights and beds.

In the interests of economy, as well as the fact that they're bloody good blokes, I tend to travel/room with Autosport colleague Mark Hughes and Motorsport News's Simon Arron.

If you think a bunch of fortysomething guys sharing hotel rooms is all a bit sad, you're probably right. But it does help offset the cretinous hotel charges levied around a Grand Prix. And you can be sure that if you do find yourself in deep doggy doo at any time, 'Tabs' and 'Tubber' are sure to... laugh.

Mark and I are north-west based Geordies - a bit sacrilegious, I know, but blame 'er indoors in both cases - while Simon, although from Cheshire, has kids at school in the south and is still stuck down in the Smoke. It was all pretty straightforward until a couple of years ago. Having looked at all the frequent flyer programmes we opted for KLM's Flying Dutchman programme and tended to hook up at Schipol in Amsterdam before flying on to wherever.

You got to gold/platinum/mega hero status pretty rapidly and, obviously, by going to places like Australia, Malaysia, China and Japan, you racked up the air miles just as quickly. And they let you convert your miles into upgrades so that a couple or three times a year, you could actually travel in relative comfort.

But then the Frogs got involved - KLM and Air France amalgamated. Suddenly you didn't get any miles unless you bought more expensive flexible tickets. And if you know when you are going and coming back, why would you? Second, they don't let you use your miles to upgrade anymore, unless you have an expensive economy ticket.

Like us, the Dutch contingent we regularly bumped into won't be using their national airline anymore. Flying Dutchman was officially re-named Flying Blue, which seemed pretty apposite. Our cloggy mates call it Flying Poo. Emirates looks pretty good. We might be seeing quite a lot of Dubai...

That's the flyaways. Last year, for the European season, we took the rather radical step of investing in a motorhome. If it's good enough for the drivers, it's good enough for us!

To be honest, I'm to blame. For years I stayed with a mate, Dean, in a 37ft Winnebago at Silverstone. It was fantastic. You got up 10 minutes before you needed to be in the paddock and you had satellite TV, so you even got Silverstone TV with all the interviews and didn't miss a thing. There was no time wasted toing and froing from hotels/guest houses and, for working in, it was great.

Dean said he didn't understand why, if we were going to all the European races, a group of us didn't invest in a motorhome, save money and enjoy the convenience. He's right, and it occurred to me that if any readers, as F1 fans, are in the fortunate positions of being able to travel around a few of the summer races, it might make sense for you, too. I'm by no means the oracle but if you've got any questions e-mail tonydodgins@compuserve.com and I'll help if I can.

I first took the plunge back in 1998. Obviously, you can go to one of the UK American motorhome dealers, who will furnish you with a plethora of reasons why you should, but you will pay through the nose. The alternative is to go to the US and import one yourself. Always one for saving a buck and giving myself a load of hassle, I chose the latter.

It's a bit daunting if, like me, you're mechanically clueless, but Dean is one of those blokes who could fix the starship Enterprise and with him as expert/bullshit filter, we headed for Lazy Days in Tampa.

Most people in the UK call motorhomes Winnebagos. It's the only brand they've heard of, just like a vacuum cleaner is a Hoover. But there are literally hundreds of different makes in the US. And they're very different. In fact, it's a bit of a minefield. America being the litigious place that it is, you'd think that the RV business, like the auto and truck industry, would be well regulated. But you'd be wrong.

Quality varies enormously. Lazy Days has over 150 acres full of motorhomes, new and second hand. You can walk from one into another. In the Florida sun it's easy to tell which ones are properly built. Walk into a decent one and it will be cool despite the heat. A cheapie with poor insulation, same time, same place, will feel like an oven. You'll roast in summer, freeze in winter.

So, having done the research at Lazy Days and shortlisted a few models, we bought RV Trader, the US motorhome equivalent of Auto Trader, and started schlepping all over Florida for a couple of days until we found what we wanted.

A few months later I had a very nice four-year-old 34ft Holiday Rambler with less than 20,000 miles on the road in the UK for less than 28k sterling. Equivalent pieces of kit at UK dealers were going for 40-45,000.

The problem, of course, is that with a 7.4-litre Ford V8 up front it did 6mpg. The big diesel pushers - engines in the back - are much more expensive to buy and although they'll do half a million miles, they still won't return decent mpg figures.

To the great amusement of my mates, in '99 I was forced to head off to Monaco/Spain - 2200 miles round trip - before my lpg gas conversion was done.

"You tosser!" one hooted. "You could have hired a Challenger from Ron and Mansour and stayed in the Hotel de Paris for your fuel bill." He probably wasn't far off. But it was fun.

In the paddock I got talking motorhomes with Eddie Irvine's Mum and Dad. Despite the fact that Eddie could have put them in a five star hotel anywhere in the world, they preferred motorhoming. They enjoyed the independence and they liked the people they met.

It amused me to imagine the conversations they must have had at F1 camp sites around Europe.

"Do you have family?"

"Oh yes. Our Johnny has a nice job with Barclays and is doing very well. What about you?"

"Yes, we've two - Edmund and Sonia."

"What do they do?"

"Well, actually, Edmund is driving the second Ferrari..."

Big Ed reckoned that I'd find a 34ft motorhome a bit too big for Europe. He thought that 26ft was about optimum and I've got to say that experience proved him pretty much right. But still, I ended up using it for races/holidays, making a bit of money renting it to a sportscar team and still came out with a slight profit when I sold it almost three years later.

Buying for the three of us last year was a different proposition. We're good mates but not that good. It had to have three separate sleeping areas as well as three working areas. And it had to have internet connectivity.

We could have gone for something smaller, European and diesel but to get anything a decent size to a decent spec costs an arm and a leg. The big sexy A-class American stuff looks the business but, over time, the Americans were going ever bigger. They want slide out sections and more space but most of the cab space is wasted in terms of sleeping accommodation. Most are now too wide/heavy to fit with European legalities. Technically anyway.

Getting anal about all this, I joined an American organisation - the RV Consumers Group - which provides a disc rating over 16,000 motorhomes in terms of build quality, safety and value. It was the best few quid I've ever spent.

C-class (cab-over) motorhomes might not have quite the kudos of their A-class cousins but there are two things going for them. First they are built on standard truck chassis, so you get ABS, air bags, crash protection, etc. Second, there's an extra sleeping area without needing something the size of a coach.

From the RVCG discs, it quickly became apparent that I should be looking for either a 'Born Free' or a 'Lazy Daze.' The latter are built in California and tend to be found there, whereas Born Frees are more ubiquitous across the States.

Logging onto RVTraderonline.com, I found a 26ft Born Free, professionally maintained, in Florida, and managed to persuade my other half that the kids really should go to Disneyland.

Buying second hand, obviously you can end up with a shed if you're not careful. But motorhomes are like houses - you get teething troubles with brand new ones. So, as long as you're careful, used is not a bad route as well as being significantly cheaper.

We flew to Florida and met the owner - named by Fortune Magazine as one of six 'heroes of US manufacturing' and a nominee for the Noble prize in economics as it turned out! The Born Free was at a huge storage facility which was a veritable Aladdin's cave of boys' toys - Ferraris, Lamborghinis, motorhomes, yachts, you name it. It was parked next to his latest acquisition - a 45ft Beaver Marquis which had set him back $480,000 dollars.

Lost in awe as he showed us around this thing, which was more in tune with what a Grand Prix driver turns up in, we took our eyes off our two-year-old daughter, who climbed into the driver's seat and started to press all the buttons. Inevitably, she set off the alarm. In a corrugated building, the din had to be heard to be believed. Twenty minutes and 10 security guards later, peace was restored. We had to do the decent thing and buy the Born Free.

Not to bore you with too much technicality, what you want for stability, especially in gusty weather, is a long wheelbase/shortish overhang. Some of these things can be so skittish that you're in the hedge if someone breaks wind. And you want something that is not right at its load capacity when it leaves the factory, before fuel/water/lpg/people/clobber are added. You'd be amazed at the number that are.

Born Frees, built in Humboldt, Iowa, might have a crap name and may not be the trendiest things on four wheels, but they are hand-built by teams of four on Ford's respected E450 Super Duty chassis, they are beautifully screwed together, they don't leak and they are the only C-class motorhome to come with steel rollover protection. Some A-class kit approaching half a million can't boast that - and if you survive the shunt you're just as likely to be taken out by a flying fridge.

Born Free claim they haven't had a fatality since they started in the late sixties. They are also easily inside the allowable weight limit (16,500lbs) to drive on a car licence. Nine years ago I didn't care too much about all that but now that all three of us have a couple of kids we're supposed to be more mature/responsible/environmentally friendly/socially aware (delete as applicable).

Anyway, the Born Free impressed me. The clincher was that it was already fitted with a Datastorm satellite system that, for sixty quid a month, automatically finds the right satellite and gives you broadband speed internet. Scandalously, we are charged more than that in the average F1 press room. A fellow called Barry Liebermann's Ethnet company in Hertfordshire quickly adapted it for European compatibility, at the same time adding an arm that picked up Sky TV using the same dish. Eureka! It's bloody good, too.

Next, the lpg conversion. Simon used to race Mazda MX5s in competition with Ingram Legge, who works with the Greenfuel Company, over near Bath. They did us an excellent conversion, with three tanks, that effectively means we now get the equivalent of around 24mpg - very acceptable for something weighing over 12,000lbs - and still the benefits of a 265bhp Triton V10!

The Born Free made its debut at Monaco last year. It was a long haul from Cheshire to Villeneuve-Loubet, near Nice, where we based it, but there were no problems. Well, almost none.

Having filled up with lpg in Dover, we stopped at the first gas station on the other side of the Channel to check the lpg adaptor worked. In different countries you need different adaptors and I'd bought what I was told was a French one. It wasn't. So we were looking at 10mpg on fuel unless we could borrow one. Happily we did better than that and managed to buy one for 8 Euros.

'Tabs' (Geordie for cigarettes, in case you're wondering) loves anything remotely technical. Talk tyre compounds and he's like a pig in muck. After an overnight just south of Paris, he couldn't wait to try the new adaptor and was out of the cab practically before the wheels had stopped. You're supposed to attach the adaptor to the lpg inlet on the motorhome and then insert the hose coupling. In his enthusiasm though, Tabs screwed it onto the fuel hose itself.

By the time I got around from the drivers' side, the alarmed long wheelbase John Lennon-lookalike Geordie was standing there blasting high pressure lpg all over the forecourt with not a clue how to shut it off. The look on the face of the Frenchman filling his Renault Scenic with fuel, not two yards away, had to seen... Presently, a forecourt attendant arrived, gave an 'Ah, les Anglais...' type shrug and buggered off again. Thanks a lot...

Pressured lpg is very, very cold. It took Mark an awful long time to get the adaptor off but, finally, we were on our way again with full tanks and France still intact.

Mr Arron had deigned not to travel with us even though we practically passed his door on the way down - in fairness to the lad, he was working in London the day we set off. He was on the Eurostar and had been tasked with arranging the hire car to get us to the Principality. He'd done it months ago through some mega cheap organisation. It seemed too good to be true and was. They didn't actually have any cars and rang to tell him while he was drawing level with us on the Eurostar. With no internet there wasn't much he could do about it, he said, a bit sheepishly.

So we pulled off, put the dish up, logged on and got a few car hire numbers in the Nice/Cannes area. What with the GP, the film festival and a public holiday, you couldn't get a car for love nor money. We took a detour off to the airport Mrs Hughes was scheduled to come into the Monday after the race, with the children, but still no dice.

It all meant we were a couple of hours late arriving at the camp site which, by that time, had been drained of Bandol rose by Mr Arron, who rapidly fell asleep. But not before we'd hooked up to the site electric - which apparently has different polarity - and blown it up. Everyone else's lights had gone out. We, of course, had an on board generator but, on reflection, at 11pm, decided it would not be politic to noisily crank it up while everyone else was in the dark or asleep.

Just before we got there, Mr Hughes had endeavoured to end the 1,000 mile trip by cramming our 3.1m high motorhome under a 2.5m bridge, but a desperate yell from yours truly brought us to a halt in the nick of time. The schadenfreude from certain sections of the press room could only be imagined.

Next, and with a bottle of wine finally open, he put on a CD.

"How soundproof are these things?" he said.

"No problem," I replied, forgetting that we'd opened the fan vent in the roof. So, having blacked everyone out, we were now deafening them as well. Unsurprisingly by 6am there were already two complaints about those late arrivals on pitch number three. Oh, and he'd left the ignition on so that, by morning, we had a flat battery as well as no hire car. The first 30 minutes of Monaco untimed practice went unseen.

Magny Cours was great. A Grand Prix and a Pink Floyd concert, although I have to admit that what I know about music would not adorn the back of a Penny Black. But that didn't stop me joining in with the beer and trying to take a shortcut back to the motorhome through what we thought was a toilet block but actually turned out to be the Magny Cours Gendarmerie. They were very surprised when three Englishmen clambered over their stable-style back door and landed in their office. There were signs on the wall saying 'silence.' Sportingly they saw the funny side as we crept through their workplace with our fingers pressed to our lips and out of their front door.

We were parked up on the top of a bank close to an enclosure which contained the fabulous motorhomes of Jacques Villeneuve, Jenson Button, Nico Rosberg and Rubens Barrichello. The paddock Mr Fixit had arranged for us to have a lead run out from Jenson's bus so that we had electric. But we were warned not to use too much current in case we melted the lead and blew Jenson's supply. The security guys didn't want irate calls at 11pm.

Given our track record in Cannes and our general cluelessness, every time we turned on something a bit gutsier than a light - such as the toaster, microwave or air con - we were jumping out to check how hot the lead was and to make sure that Jenson's lights were still on. It all got quite amusing after a few beers. He was blissfully unaware.

And we weren't quite sure what Jacques must have made of it when the British press arrived in his back garden. His bus was a Newell, a fantastic bit of kit with four slide-outs, plasmas all over the place and marble steps. It was like the Beaver Marquis with brass knobs on and if you haven't got a million dollars, forget it.

When we got back from the Floyd concert on Friday night, someone had sprayed 'Kubica' in shaving foam on the back window of a road car parked next to Jacques' bus. Considering hardly anyone knew he was there, we figured he'd probably think it was us. Happily though, by morning it had morphed into something indecipherable. Just another F1 prank.

Incredibly perspicacious though, considering that in a couple of races the Pole was in the car. You wondered about poor Jacques sitting on the psychiatrist's couch.

"Are you suffering from paranoia, Mr Villeneuve?"

"No, it's just that there are all these rumours about a bloke called Kubica replacing me and, during the night, someone has sprayed his name on my car! I'm sure it was the British press."

"Hmmm. Are you sure it's not about time you did something else..."

Wonder what '07 will bring?

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