If you find yourself walking past Brown’s, the luxury Mayfair hotel, you might catch Sir Rocco Forte, the owner, nipping out to be chauffeured across London in his Jaguar XJ8. Nice choice of car but it isn’t his favourite — the hotelier says he longs for the weekend when he can escape to his country retreat in his Ferrari 456 GT.
“It’s eight years old now but I love driving the Ferrari,” says the 61-year-old hotelier. “It’s a special car, as good as anything of its kind and probably better. People like to try and find fault with a Ferrari but I think it’s quite difficult.”
Dressed in a perfectly tailored suit and with only a hint of grey in his hair, the still matinee-idol-handsome Forte barely looks his age. The son of Lord Charles Forte, the Italian immigrant who built the Forte hotel group, he has inherited a passion for Italian cars. “The 456 GT is an unusual car and you don’t get a lot of them so people notice it on the road,” he says. “I sometimes find another driver might draw up at the lights in an old banger with a pretty girl in their car and jokingly ask me whether I want to swap. I usually reply, ‘I’ll take the girl — you can have the car’.”
Forte bought his Ferrari after Granada infamously forced him out of the Forte group in a hostile takeover bid 10 years ago. He received £30m from his share of the family stake in the company and splashed out on the car as a treat to himself, buying an ex-demonstration model at a discount of £20,000 from the list price of £168,000.
It may not be an obvious choice of family vehicle, but he says he had in mind his wife Aliai, 40, and three children (Lydia, 19, Irene, 17, and Charles, 14). “I have always liked having cars with more than two seats and the 456 has a boot as well. I had the armrest taken out so I could have my three kids in the back, my golf clubs in the boot and my wife in front — perfect.”
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He loves the performance and admits to occasionally breaking the speed limit. “It’s got a lot of torque and can do 0-60 in 4.8sec, and people certainly move out of the way on a motorway.”
Forte’s father emigrated from Italy at the age of five and later opened a milk bar in Regent Street which he slowly expanded, branching out into mid and budget-range hotels. By the time Forte was 14 he was working in his father’s hotels during holidays, and after his education he joined the business.
He did his first driving test without formal lessons because, he says, he thought he had “a natural gift”. He had learnt to drive with the help of the family chauffeur but he hadn’t got the habit of checking the rear mirror, on which point he was failed.
After a couple of lessons Forte passed on the second attempt and his father, who wouldn’t buy him a car until he was a proven safe driver, allowed him to use an old Ford shooting rig, believing the robust construction would protect his son. Forte wrote the car off in a collision with a cement lorry and emerged without a scratch (praising his father’s decision).
He bought an Alfa Romeo GTV in the late 1960s but his father didn’t like it, believing that if Forte hit something he wouldn’t survive. So he relented on his policy and added his own money to the trade-in value of the Alfa Romeo to buy a Maserati Mexico. “That’s what got me into Maseratis and for a while afterwards they were all I drove,” says Forte. “But they were completely impossible cars — the gasket was always filling up with water and there was inevitably something wrong with the wiring. I was once doing 120mph on a French motorway and all of a sudden everything went dead. The electrics just switched off and I slowed to a complete halt.”
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His motoring and hotel career almost ended in 1984 when he was driving a Porsche on the Kingston bypass, southwest London. He lost control and went backwards off the road, striking his head on the steering wheel and falling unconscious. It was a year before the medical effects of the blow to the head had fully diminished.
In 1992 he took over the Forte group as chairman after his father retired through ill health, and then four years later suffered the ignominy of the hostile takeover from Granada. Lesser mortals would have retired on the money he received, but Rocco decided instead to start up his own chain of 12 luxury hotels across Europe.
“I was too young and had too much energy to sit around and twiddle my thumbs,” he says.
Energy is right — a workaholic, he also competes in triathlons and likes to go shooting in the country. For that he has a Range Rover, often driven by his wife.
“She invariably knocks it about,” he says. “I use a series of body repair shops and I’m sure I’m their favourite person because every car my wife drives gets sent to them for repair on a regular basis. I’m a better driver than she is and I think she would agree.”
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He says he feels the Jaguar, which is five years old, needs replacing but he’s not sure what to buy. He has an extended wheelbase edition but the new model is too bulky for his taste. “I had a look at the four-door Bentley Continental, which is nice and hugely powerful but I’m not quite sure about it,” he says.
“The Maserati Quattroporte is nice, but not as practical for being driven around in. I’ve tried the [Ferrari] Scaglietti, which is a nice car but so wide it won’t go into my garage. I’ll have to make my mind up soon.”
ON HIS CD CHANGER
I listen to Radio 4 more than anything else. I have some CDs of mainly classical music, which tends to be Pavarotti or some of the great singers performing arias — Andreas Scholl, right, and people like that