 |
| "I
am pretty emotional about my car. Even a scratch upsets me no
end." |
|
He suddenly
stopped flipping through the issue of Autocar India, which we had taken
along; his eyes focussed on the new Porsche Carrera GT. “Wow,”
he mumbled, and we knew we were face-to-face with a like-minded car-lover.
So is this how actor-cum-model-cum-cricketer Salil Ankola wants his car
to be?
“I’d like my car to be well-packaged,” says the lanky ex-cricketer
whose sports career was cut short by a niggling knee injury. “Performance,
comfort, easy to maintain . . . and not to forget, good-looking.”
In short, an all-rounder. Maybe that’s the reason he prefers to move
around in his three-year-old Daewoo Cielo.
“The Cielo was the car I always wanted to own,” explains Salil.
Probably, he too was among those to be smitten by the Cielo’s looks
when it was still a novelty.
“I
like big cars, cars which are long and flat, like this one.” Interestingly,
the six-feet-plus Salil does not like them tall. “Never fancied them,”
he shrugs. In fact the closest he ever got to own one was when he borrowed
a friend’s Tata Sierra. “After few weeks of driving around in
it, I was dead sure I didn’t want one.”
So it is the sporty types for him. In fact, Salil has driven a host of them.
The impressive list that he has memorised like dialogues from his latest
TV flick, includes a Lamborghini Diablo! “But I liked the McLaren sports
car the most. It looks big but in reality is pretty compact. The driving
position is perfect. Got into one during a visit to England.”
Of
course, Salil is not the only cricketer to share this passion. One of his
best ‘car-buddies’ happens to be none other than Sachin Tendulkar.
“We are always talking cars,” says Salil who is among the few
to have driven Sachin’s Merc CLK. “Of course Sachin is cool about
it, but I’m a little nervous while driving his Merc. It’s damn
precious to him and that’s always on my mind.”
In fact, Salil is extra careful, when it comes to cars. “I can’t
help but be emotional about my car,” he almost laments. “Being
a car lover that’s normal, but it’s not a good thing. There is
no dearth of careless drivers around. Even a hairline scratch, and it is
reason enough to upset me.”
Salil’s first memories of a car goes back to his father’s Hindustan
Landmaster. Of course he was just a toddler then so never got down to driving
it. The first car that he drove was an Ambassador and that too, a police
car. “My dad was a cop,” reveals Salil. “I used to convince
his driver and take the car for a spin. So when I first asked my dad for
the car keys, he was taken aback. ‘How did you learn to drive?’,
he questioned me,” chuckles Salil.
Late teens were restricted more to two-wheels. “My first bike was an
Ind-Suzuki AX 100R. I switched to a Yamaha RD350 for some time. But that
was the turning point. I must’ve fallen thrice the same day. I couldn’t
understand what was going wrong. So I decided to stick to cars.”
So the only time you’ll now see Salil astride a bike is on the silver
screen. By the way his TV tryst has given him some perks. Like a chance
to ride a Harley-Davidson.
“It was for one TV series where I play a detective. The script demanded
me to have a big bike. But there was some hassle and the production guy
could only manage to get a puny 100cc bike. As luck would have it, one of
the guys spotted a Harley parked at a nearby building. The owner agreed
to rent it to us for a couple of hours and that’s how we got it. The
bike was tremendous. I’ve never rode anything like it, ever.”
For a man so fascinated by wheels, one would probably wonder why he is still
sticking to a ‘utilitarian’ Cielo. Wouldn’t a swankier car
be better? Well, a little philosophy here.
Some need a car to make an impression. Then there are those who manage to
do it on their own. Salil Ankola is a classic case of the latter!
|
March 2001
