There’s some genuine sculpture in there. You get the impression in a Q5 that the dash was built with all the care of a kitchen worktop. It’s just a housing for the dials and the switches. Alfa has made its one something worth looking at. I suppose it’s an Italian thing. It’s why Siena is a better place to sit and people-watch than Dortmund.
Setting the satnav, however, was a challenge. This is because every town in Italy has 5,000 letters in its name, and then, when you finally manage to type it in, the satnav asks which Santa Lucia del Menolata di Christoponte you would like to set as the destination. And it turns out there are 5,000 towns with that name.
Eventually, though, as Alan and Melvyn and Polly were returning to the airport from their week of brainstorming, I had the right town and fired up the engine. The diesel engine. Oh, dear Lord. A diesel Alfa Romeo SUV.
The funny thing is, though, that because everyone in Italy has a diesel-powered car, it didn’t feel all that weird to be clattering out of the car park. And then it felt fine, because soon I was on the racetrack known as an autostrada, where it felt very powerful. The figures say it’ll go from 0 to 62mph in 6.6 seconds, which is good, but it’s the mid-range surge that impresses most of all. It’s a surge you just don’t get from Audi’s Q5. And it means you can always break free from the walnut-faced peasant who has affixed his aged Fiat Ritmo to your back bumper at 100mph.
And it’s not as if you’re leaving a trail of death in your wake because, despite the power and the torque, this engine is considerably cleaner than the diesel Porsche puts in its Macan. And Alfa says it’ll do almost 60mpg.
So it’s as fast as the badge would suggest, but does it handle as well as Alfa promises? Well, obviously, as it’s more than 7 inches higher than the saloon and has longer springs, it’s squidgier, which would be fine if Alfa hadn’t given it the same superfast steering setup.
The tiniest movement of the wheel causes a big change of direction, which is great when you are on a track in a low-riding ‘car’, but when you are on the autostrada, on stilts, with a Ritmo up your chuff and a lorry up front that has suddenly decided to wander into your lane because the driver is watching pornography on his phone rather than the road ahead, it can be a bit alarming.
It takes time to learn to think your way round corners, but when you get there, I must say this is a genuinely exciting car to drive. It doesn’t feel as cumbersome as all the other SUVs, and you get the impression it was engineered by people who were involved because they wanted to be. Not because they’d done something wrong.
And because of that – because it’s a big, practical car with a huge boot and folding seats and lots of cubbyholes that’s also an Alfa Romeo – it’s the only SUV that’s quite tempting. It may even be irresistible when Alfa launches the version with the 500-horsepower petrol engine.
18 June 2017
Well, we did tell Richard Hammond to fire it up
Clarkson on the Hamster’s crash … and the new Range Rover
A few years ago Richard Hammond was asked to drive a car down a runway, and somehow he ended up on his head and then in a coma for a few weeks.
And now, having established he can’t drive in a straight line, he has proved he can’t drive round corners either. All he had to do was drive a small electric car up a Swiss hill, which he managed, but then somehow, on a left-hand bend after the finish line, he lost control, rolled down a bank and ended up in a hospital. Again.
At this rate he will get to the point where he forgets how to get undressed at night. He’ll put his clothes on in the morning and then assume they will be cut off by paramedics at some point later in the day.
Seriously, I’m struggling to think of any racetrack in the world that Hammond hasn’t crashed on at some point. At Imola he binned a Noble, at Virginia International Raceway in America it was a Porsche, at Mugello he bent a Jaguar and at Silverstone, in a twenty-four-hour race, he doomed our efforts in the middle of the night by stuffing a BMW into pretty much everything that was solid. Maybe it’s because he can’t see over the steering wheel. Who knows?
What troubles me most of all, now that we know he will be OK, is the charred mess he left at the bottom of the hill in Switzerland. It had started out that morning as something called the Rimac Concept One. And, frankly, it was amazing.
There are a few very rich people in the world who will talk sagely about the work Tesla is doing with electric propulsion, and a handful of fanatics who insist on telling us how their G-Wiz is ideal for the city centre, but most normal people think of electricity as something that powers a toaster or a washing machine. The idea of buying an electrical vehicle, unless you’re a milkman, is just as daft as buying a petrol-powered food blender.
The Rimac could change all that. I had only a brief time behind the wheel and simply could not believe how fast it accelerated. We are not talking here about a car that’s as fast as a Lamborghini Aventador. It’s massively faster than that. It’s faster than anything else I’ve driven, by a huge, huge margin.
It has four electric motors, one at each wheel, which together produce a simply staggering 1,200 horsepower. In the time it takes you to work out how fast it accelerates from 0 to 60, it’s doing 120. And there’s still a hundred miles an hour to go.
You might imagine that, with power like this, its battery pack would go flat every 3½ seconds. But, as Hammond proved on that fateful day in Switzerland, this isn’t the case. Even if you drive as though you are mad, you’ll get 120 miles between charges.
I’ve never been a fan of electric cars. Comparing them to those with a normal engine has always been a bit like comparing microwaved food to stuff that’s been in the Aga for a few hours. But that Rimac changed my mind. It was – there’s no other word – brilliant.
Hammond loved it. He will probably love it even more now he knows you can roll it down a hill at 120mph and still get out before some kind of electrical issue causes it to become an inferno. And doubtless we will hear more when he talks about it in the next series of The Grand Tour. Unless James May and I have kicked him to death by then.
In the meantime I’ve been having a bit of a pen-sucking, leaning-back-in-the-chair moment about what will power our cars in a few years’ time.
As you may remember, the world’s environmentalists declared several years ago that petrol engines were extremely bad for the planet and that we must all buy diesels instead. They scoffed and rolled their eyes at people like me who said this was nonsense. They called us climate change ‘deniers’ and said we could not argue with cold, hard facts.
As a result, the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, changed all the rules to make buying diesel cars cheaper, and millions of people took advantage. Only to be told earlier this year that the cold, hard facts may not have been entirely accurate and that petrol is a much cleaner fuel after all.
So now all of the people who have diesel cars are being told that they must in future pay £700 to refuel them and £9m to park them and £5000m if they wish to drive them into central London. Which means they are all trying to sell. And what they’re getting is 5p. If you’re in that boat, I’d send a bill for the losses to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Maybe it’d make them think twice next time they have some cold, hard facts they’d like to share.
I run a diesel. It’s an old Range Rover. The first of the TDV8s. And it works well. After I’ve filled the tank, the trip computer tells me I have a range of 500 miles before I need to fill up again. Which is good if you like shooting. You can get to Yorkshire and back without having to face the ridicule of walking into Leicester Forest East services in a pair of tweed shorts.
All sensible Range Rover owners have diesels. But, thanks to our friends in the Green Party, you’ll think twice about that next time round. And so, for the first time in years, I spent last week tootling about in a petrol-powered SVAutobiography.
There’s nothing I can say about this car that hasn’t been said a million times already. It’s in a class of its own. It has no rivals. And, with
the SV engine under the bonnet, it’s ludicrously fast. Hilariously fast. It’s like being in the British Museum while falling down a cliff, and yet, incredibly, you still have control over where you’re going. Only Richard Hammond could crash this thing.
The problem was that after 150 miles the petrol gauge was into the red zone. It’s not the money: if you can afford a car like this, the cost of refuelling isn’t important. No, it’s the fact that, unless you are very good at fuel-light bingo, you can’t get from London to Leeds on one tank.
So what’s to be done? Well, there’s now a hybrid Range Rover, but that’s part electrical and part diesel, so it doesn’t really get round the anti-derv nonsense.
The only solution, really, is to use pure electrical power. It’d work too. Near-silent cruising when you’re on the road and immense torque when you aren’t.
I’d like to suggest Land Rover consult the boffins at Rimac about how such technology could be employed. But I fear that, thanks to Hammond, they’re going to be a bit busy for the next few weeks building a replacement car.
25 June 2017
I’ve done fast and silly fast, but this is flaming ridiculous
The Bugatti Chiron
Several years ago I reviewed the Bugatti Veyron in the Sunday Times and was a bit gushing. I talked about the sheer complexity of making a car feel stable and poised when it was travelling at 240mph-plus, and how dangerous and annoying the air can be at such speeds.
A 240mph wind would knock over every building in New York. It would devastate and destroy everything in its path. And yet the Veyron had to be able to deal with wind speeds this high while being driven by someone whose only qualification was an ability to reverse round a corner and recognize a ‘Give way’ sign.
I marvelled at the engineering in that car – it had ten radiators to keep it cool – and reckoned that, because of the relentless war on speed and internal combustion, we would never see its like again. There just wouldn’t be the appetite to make a replacement. It would be just too difficult, not just politically, but also from an engineering standpoint.
And it turned out to be doubly difficult, given that Bugatti’s parent company, Volkswagen, is spending every penny it has on dealing with Dieselgate.
But despite all the odds, Bugatti has come up with a replacement. It costs £2.5m, it’s called the Chiron and somehow it is even faster than the Veyron. It has a top speed of 261mph, which means it’s covering more than 125 yards a second. You know the Apache helicopter gunship? It’s faster than that.
The 8-litre engine is partly the reason for this almost unbelievable pace. It has sixteen cylinders arranged in a ‘W’ formation and it’s force-fed by four turbochargers. The result is a say-that-again 1,479 brake horsepower. Yup, 1,479 brake horsepower.
But equally important is the body and the way it lowers itself and changes its angle of attack the faster you go. You don’t know this is going on from behind the wheel. Because you are too busy watching the road ahead and thinking, with very wide eyes: ‘This is f****** ridiculous.’
Last week I drove the Chiron, not just for a couple of laps round a racetrack under the watchful gaze of a minder, but all the way from St Tropez to the border with Switzerland and then to Turin. I got to know it well and I still haven’t stopped fizzing. The speed is beyond anything you can even possibly imagine.
At one point on the French autoroute I became mixed up in one of those rallies where young men take their Audi R8s and their Aston DB11s and their Oakley wraparound sunglasses on a tour of chateaux and racetracks in the sunshine. They kept drawing alongside and roaring off in the hope I’d put my foot down. So after a while I did. And even from half a mile in front, which is where I ended up after mere seconds, I could feel their penises shrinking in disbelief and embarrassment.
There is nothing made by any mainstream car maker that could hold a candle to the Chiron. A McLaren P1 doesn’t even get close. It’s like comparing me as a drummer with Ginger Baker.
And it’s not just the speed in a straight line that leaves you breathless and scared. It’s the pace coming out of the corners. Plant your foot into the carpet in first gear emerging from a hairpin, and every single one of the horsepowers you’ve engaged and every single pound foot of torque is transferred with no fuss, and no wheelspin, directly into forward motion. It’s acceleration and G-force so vivid, you can actually feel your face coming off. It’s speed that hurts.
There’s a secret button that you really don’t want the police to know about. But if you push it, the digital air-conditioning readouts will quietly inform you what speed you’ve been averaging. Often I’d sneak a look. And often it came up with a figure over 120mph. That’s an average. On a mountain road (which was closed to the public, since you ask). Like I said. It’s ridiculous.
But it’s never difficult. Oh, I’m sure Richard Hammond could roll it down a hill, but for the rest of us it’s a doddle. There are no histrionics. The exhaust system doesn’t pop and bang. The engine doesn’t shriek. There are no aural gimmicks at all. And everything you touch is either leather or metal. Unless it’s the badge. That’s sterling silver.
If Rolls-Royce were to make a mid-engined supercar, it would feel something like this, I suspect. It’s never hard or jarring. It doesn’t pitter-patter even on cobbles. And it has a boot into which you can fit, um, a grapefruit.
The downside of this comfort and luxury is that it doesn’t really behave like a mid-engined supercar. It doesn’t flow. There’s no delicacy. It just launches itself out of a corner, and then immediately you’re braking for the next one. Progress is staccato, not legato. Mainly because in a car this powerful there’s no such thing as a straight. It eats them before you have a chance to notice. Which means there’s no place to sort out your mind. There’s no peace. It’s all action.
Most mid-engined supercars dance. And the Chiron does too, but it’s not a waltz or a tango. It’s as if it’s in a punk club in 1979, listening to Sham 69.
This, then, is not a car for serious drivers. It feels heavy, and that’s because it is. It feels as if it’s volcanic. You could liken a McLaren P1 to a hummingbird and marvel at its ability to dart hither and thither in a blur. Whereas when you’re driving a Chiron, it feels as though you’re coming up through the spout of Vesuvius, propelled by lava, convection and pressure.
It doesn’t even look like a traditional mid-engined supercar. It looks important and statesmanlike. From some angles – the back, especially – it appears ugly.
Then there’s that Brunelian radiator snout at the front. It’s there because Bugatti tradition dictates that it should be there. And you can’t help marvelling at it, because for this car to go so quickly, every tiny aerodynamic detail had to be examined and scrapped and built again.
Look at what happens to a Formula One car when it loses one of its little winglets. It crashes immediately into a barrier. And those things rarely reach 200mph. The Bugatti is way faster than that, which means that snout must have been a nightmare to fit into the mix, but the engineers managed it somehow.
And that’s what this car is all about. It’s not driving pleasure. It’s not aesthetics. It’s just man looking at nature, rolling up his sleeves and saying: ‘Do you want some?’
This car doesn’t challenge the laws of physics. It bludgeons them. It is an engineering marvel, because like all other engineering marvels it’s an affront to God.
It’s also an affront to Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and all the other Jeremy Corbyn enthusiasts who say it’s time to put away our toys and live more responsibly.
We have to love it for that, too, and applaud Volkswagen for saying: ‘Not just yet, beardy.’
9 July 2017
Big roar, waggly tail: that’s my kind of lion
Audi RS 5
Back in the Eighties, BMW came up with the idea of making an innocuous-looking saloon that was very fast and utterly beautiful to drive. It was called the M5 and it earned a reputation for being one of the world�
��s great cars.
All the other manufacturers could see straight away that BMW had created something of a masterpiece, so they decided to not respond in any way at all. And that’s weird. It’s like all the country’s football teams looking at what Chelsea did last year and thinking: ‘We can’t possibly match that, so let’s not bother trying.’
Eventually, after BMW had had the market all to itself for years and years, Mercedes joined forces with the tuning company AMG to create a high-performace range of cars, but these weren’t really direct rivals for the fast Beemers. They were big and smoky and loud and quite soft. They were muscle cars, really, in Hugo Boss suits.
And Audi? Well, it started to fit quite powerful engines to its four-wheel-drive models to create the RS line-up, but, again, they didn’t have the magic of BMW’s M cars – the delicacy.
If you really knew your motoring onions – if you really knew how to trail-brake and feel the limit of adhesion – you were never going to be satisfied with a nose-heavy Audi or a wayward Mercedes. If you were a proper driver, you’d always go for the BMW.
However, in recent months the BMW bandwagon has sort of fallen over. There is no M5 on sale at the moment, and while the M2 is a joy, its bigger and better-known brother the M3 is a bit of a dog. The steering is actually fairly terrible. And an M car with terrible steering? That’s like an omelette made with rancid eggs.
And to make life even more difficult for BMW, other rivals have finally woken up. Alfa Romeo can sell you the Giulia Quadrifoglio, which has three-quarters of a Ferrari engine and an exhaust note to stir the soul. It would be my choice.
Then you have Mercedes, which has just produced something called the E 63 S. Its styling is a bit in-your-face for my taste – and for yours, too, unless you live in Dubai – but it’s not like any AMG we’ve seen before. It has the power, but it’s harnessed into a proper package. That’s a serious car for serious people, make no mistake.
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