Drivers and skiers speak the same language. Semantically or physically, there’s no difference in how they face the slope they’re about to cover. They smile, imitating the curve’s movement: in the end, skis and engine are just different ways to access speed, to expand the thrill of feeling alive.
Driver and skier stop talking and the sound of air alone fills the landscape. Like the quiet before a war, or a courtship. A duel under the high sun.
Now follow me to the side, let’s let Giorgio Rocca latch on his ski boots and the driver buckle himself in the car. Follow me to the side where a snowcat is waiting: you’re about to witness the dance from the very heart of the movement.
The engine roars, Rocca shuts his helmet: hang on tight and forget about my voice.
A skier’s trigger is gravity, that of a Levante is a V8 engine with 580 horsepower. But the way they use energy and unleash beauty is made of the same things: the right trajectory, the perfection of forces that tame inertia and change the course of things. After the starting line, the valley floor appears to be moving towards you at a growing speed, but while Rocca increases his speed and the Levante its engine revolutions, you feel the breeze through your hair become wind and that wind becomes a blizzard. The landscape so white and the sky so clear you can see the world tilt.
Man and car descend the mountain one next to the other as if it were a poem written in snow, a poem that speaks about ligaments and steering, quadriceps and valves, life and technology talking to one another, imitating and seducing one another. You’re there, in the middle of that poem, like an explorer who will go down in history for having witnessed a once in a lifetime show: a man on snow and a car that can play like a man, a dialogue between illegitimate gods, made of blood and gasoline, of iron and flesh, of vents and breath. The snowcat chases the fireworks of crystals shot in the sky at every turn, and the balance you feel comes from the synchrony of perfect movements.
Everything lasts less than a minute, but whoever said perfection is by nature brief was right: it’s intense and man cannot bear such power for long. Not even a World Champion can, nor you, with your eyes filled with such beauty. A car could, but a car without a man is like a heart without beat.
When you get off the snowcat, you turn and look up to where your trip started. You read the poem you just wrote, you feel it’s complete.
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