You join me on the Swiss Alps’ Furka Pass, a road routinely cited by enthusiasts on four wheels and two as one of the finest sections of winding blacktop in the world. It was up here, above the little Alpine town of Andermatt, that James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 first stirred cinemagoers in 1964. In tribute, I’m at the wheel of an Aston too; a brand new V12-engined Vanquish Volante.
Welcome to the Supercar Owners Circle, a highly exclusive car club for those who have whole portfolios of seven-figure limited-edition performance cars. But it’s not about values or the number of valves. You can enter a car from 2026 or 1926; cost and horsepower are less important than style and individuality. Rather, it’s a celebration of analogue motoring at its most pure. The SOC was established in 2014 by Swiss brothers Florian and Stefan Lemberger to encourage collectors to put their cars on the road and drive them as they were designed to be driven, not just kept in garages and polished. Membership is capped at 150. One can join a waiting list, but you will be judged on the contents of your garage and only a handful of people qualify.
In any other situation, my Aston Martin Vanquish would cause much rubbernecking. Here in Andermatt it might as well be a Mondeo, because the cars that emerge from the hotel’s underground car park are unicorns. For a start, my Aston credentials are outclassed by a silver birch DB5 identical to Bond’s, a green Valour, which is a limited-run retro-inspired Aston built three years ago to mark its maker’s 110th anniversary, and two 220mph Valkyries that need to be driven with ear defenders.
There are more Bugattis than I’ve ever seen in one place. The Veyron’s 20th birthday is being celebrated and half-a-dozen have turned up, along with a dozen £3 million Chirons, a £4.2m Mistral, and some 1990s Giorgetto Giugiaro-drawn concept cars. There are classic racing Porsches and a Carrera GT, Bizzarrinis, Koenigseggs and Paganis, and the Lamborghini LM002 from the eighties, better known as the ‘Rambo Lambo’ because Stallone had one. In this company, the assembled Ferraris (275 GTB/4, Daytona, F40, F50, 599 GTO, LaFerrari, even the latest F80) look staid and prêt-à-porter.
Outside the hotel and along our whole route are hundreds of young men with cameras recording the action for their social media feeds. We line up and are waved off at intervals to screech around a roundabout and catapult ourselves up the Oberalp Pass, which has been privatised for the event. This means you can use both sides of the road which is useful when entering blind bends at 90mph with a four-wheel drift. The cars all assemble again atop the 400ft Santa Maria dam, where guests peer into engine bays and obsess over exhaust piping that should rightfully be in art galleries.
Drivers peer into engine bays and obsess over exhaust piping that should rightfully be in art galleries
Just who is driving these cars? At dinner I sit next to a Polish gentleman who owns the F40. He also has an F50. How many cars does he have in total, I ask. ‘Er… some’ is as much as I’m able to extract. How did he make his fortune? ‘Packaging’. Packaging seems to explain quite a lot of the wealth here, because the next chap I sidle up to – it’s almost all chaps – made his money, he tells me, from wooden pallets. I chat to a Bulgarian who can’t be more than 23, and he owns three Bugattis – as well as the £1m Jacob & Co. x Bugatti watch on his wrist. I’m going to assume that the enormous and heavily-tattooed man sat next to him is a bodyguard. I didn’t wish to pry as to how a 23-year-old Bulgarian comes about three Bugattis and a million quid watch, as it seems likely his father’s a gangster.
The spirited driving continues across the valley on the Furka Pass. I’m able to corral all 824 of my Aston’s turbocharged horses, frightening the cows into a chorus of bellringing, but thrilling the hundreds of spectators perched on the rocks. Perhaps surprisingly, not every SOC attendee wishes to go the full Stirling Moss, such as the Mercedes-AMG One – essentially a Mercedes F1 car with a numberplate. But there is a place the AMG One lets rip – zero to 186mph in 15.6 seconds! – and that’s at Ambri Airport in the canton of Ticino, with a section of its runway open for acceleration tests. I only got the Aston up to 145mph before having to brake to avoid a concrete barrier. The AMG One, the F80, the Bugattis and a glorious long-tailed Maserati MC12 were able to go much faster.
Beneath the display of wealth lies something unexpectedly avuncular and old-fashioned: an appreciation for artful design, mechanical excellence and the intoxicating romance of the open road. For a few days each year, Andermatt becomes the world’s most improbable village fête. Instead of vintage tractors, there are hypercars. Instead of homemade jam, there are glittering one-of-a-kind watches. Switzerland, with its usual discretion, simply hosts the proceedings, keeps the roads immaculate and allows everyone else to marvel at mankind’s continuing determination to build machines that are faster and more beautiful than anyone strictly needs. Here, in Andermatt, the animals are let out of the zoo and into the wild.
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