PEACE AND LOVE IN CALIFORNIA

Down the USA’s west coast and then across Death Valley to the Grand Canyon

- SIRISH CHANDRAN

AMERICANS ARE ROCKSTARS AT MARKETING. Try to juice up a more sturdy name than Hellephant for a 1000 horsepower engine before charging at me with a counter. Then there’s Hellcat. Charger. Challenger. Demon. Cobra. Raptor. Raptor’s angry uncle, VelociRaptor. Gladiator. Even dreadful diesel engines are called Power Stroke. Not since Norton raced the Commando have such devastatingly cool names been slapped onto cars and trucks. And kids get cool names too.

No parent, I imagine, was in such a tearing hurry as to name his lad A$AP Rocky but you do have Ken Block — hardly The World’s Best Driver but definitely The World’s Greatest Car Entertainer! Only an American could have made those exhaustingly smoky Gymkhana videos, cooked up the Hoonigan brand, mutated a Mustang into the Hoonicorn and then slayed tyres of the Hoonitruck for Climbkhana. All to sell shoes. And more recently a slightly less disgustingly-flavored energy drink.

Americans also have a thing for hyperbole. If Pikes Peak is the world’s most dangerous mountain, I don’t know what the Himalayas are. And America claims to have The World’s Best… well… everything. Pizza. Burger. Hot dog. President. Golf course. Road. Try living off burgers for a week or listening to Fox TV for just a day and you’ll draw very firm conclusions of your own, but at California’s Monterey Peninsula, the latter two are lent strong credence.