Clarkson on Cars

by Jeremy Clarkson

  What makes this chapter of disasters even harder to stomach is that I’m so careful that if I ski on a glacier, it gets to the bottom of the mountain faster than I do.

  You cannot begin to imagine how vigorous my snowplough schusses are. You have never seen such fantastically tight step turns. I am capable of getting from an easterly traverse to a westerly one without being on the fall line for more than .003 of a second. I can ski for half an hour and only be three feet further down the hill than when I set off.

  And when you remember that I have to stop every fifteen minutes for a cigarette, it doesn’t take a professor of pure mathematics to work out that it takes me 1026 hours to do a mile. That’s 42 days.

  All this has changed now, though. On my last trip to the Alps, to the summer resort of Hintertux in Austria, people gawped in awe as I sped by. Two girls offered me their bodies. A child called me Franz and asked for my autograph. Even the Germans, amazed at the sheer length of my skis, parted like the waters of the Red Sea to allow me on to the chairs and T-bars without a wait.

  Cubby Broccoli has just telephoned to ask if I will do the stunts for Timothy Dalton in the next Bond extravaganza, 007 Kills Some Arabs Because the Russians are OK These Days.

  So how, you may be wondering, has this extraordinary metamorphosis come about?

  What happened was that every company in Europe that begins with the letter ‘S’ got together to organise a late-season skiing trip for members of Her Majesty’s Press Corps. Saab provided the cars. Sealink came up with the boats. Salomon handed out the equipment and Servus, the Austrian Tourist Authority, paid for accommodation expenses.

  Also on hand were a brace of chaps who coach the British Olympic ski team. I was allocated to John Sheddon, who said it didn’t matter how I skied, because there are only two types of turn – left and right – and skis are implements to get you from A to B. My kinda guy. There was none of this ‘Benzee knees’ nonsense you get from those peroxide poofs with tight red all-in-one suits and six pairs of socks shoved down their underpants.

  Sheddon gave me the confidence I needed to make slightly less dramatic turns by telling me to imagine that I had a steering wheel between the skis. He explained, too, that while skiing, my legs were doing the same job as shock absorbers on a car, keeping the skis on the snow. And he told me to steer the skis like a rally driver steers a car on gravel, setting up the skid prior to the turn and powering through to the next turn in full control. By likening skiing to driving, it all began to make a lot more sense.

  But not half as much sense as when the man from Salomon poked his Lancastrian nose in.

  Now, I have always laboured under the misapprehension that an amateur skier such as myself could not possibly tell the difference between a pair of Ford Cortinaesque rental skis and a pair used by the cream of downhill racers. In the same way that my mother could not possibly know the difference between her Audi and a BMW 750 iL, I figured that switching to a pair of £375 slalom planks would make bugger all difference. For only the second time in 30 years, I was wrong.

  Not only was it possible to tell the difference between my Ford Cortinas and the Salomon jobbies, but it was fairly easy to spot behavioural patterns on the three big-league affairs.

  The 1S ski, a gigantic 207, was so stable that it was possible to file your nails while doing 40 mph straight down a mogul field. This is cast very much in the Mercedes 560SEL mould.

  The 2S is very much the Golf GTi, being reasonable in a straight line at a cruise but capable of holding its own in the twisty bits.

  Then there was the 3S, about which I know very little because I kept falling over. It was dreadfully difficult to handle and quickly became known as the Toyota MR2 of skidom – more so because the Salomon chappie insisted that it was only a handful if it was used ineptly or by cynical journalists.

  And even more astonishingly, each one of the three different types is available with a wide range of what Salomon calls power references. An individual calculates his own by scoring a certain amount of points for weight, ability and style.

  Howard Lees, the most fearsomely competitive man in history and the deputy editor of this magazine, went for the 8 rating, while I was honest and selected a 7.

  The difference was that he spent a day skiing like Killy and I looked smooth and in control. And yet he still won a four-star British alpine ski award, while I could not get past level three. This was only because my right leg was still encased in a RoboClackson-style brace to protect the smashed ligaments. Lees’s legs were fine. Very very thin indeed, but fine.

  It was in Belgium, on the way home after Lees announced that I had to average 110 mph if we were to catch the 12.30 a.m. boat back to England, that we both decided that everyday skiing is quite a lot more exciting than everyday driving.

  So goodbye. We’ve decided to go to work for Performance Skiing.

  The One That I Want

  A few Fridays ago my horoscope said, and I quote, ‘If you think the world is a safe and ordered place, you’re in for a shock.’

  For once, it was about right.

  9.00 a.m. – I opened the post to find a court summons telling me I had no car tax. Frankly, I didn’t need officialdom to remind me of this.

  11.00 a.m. – my grandfather died.

  12.30 p.m. – a major television contract that seemed like a safe bet fell through.

  5.30 p.m. – my wife announced she had a crush on a friend of mine and left.

  The only reason why my hamster didn’t shuffle off the mortal coil that night was because he had done so a couple of weeks earlier.

  A lot of people call days like that character building and, do you know, they’re right. There are three things that I now know which I wouldn’t have done had that Friday been vaguely normal.

  One: marriage isn’t necessarily for life. When ex-Beloved stood at the top of the aisle promising to love me till death us do part, what she actually meant was that she’d love me until someone with peroxide in his hair, white socks and a crotch the size of a bungalow came along.

  Two: Greece isn’t so bad after all. You know how you get all your best ideas at four in the morning when you’ve had two bottles of Australian fizz? Well you’ll just have to take my word for it.

  Anyway, new Beloved was going on holiday the next day and wondered if I’d like to go too. Seeing as it only meant cancelling two business trips, a dental appointment, a weekend house party and work for the week, I readily agreed.

  Twelve hours later, we were on a BA767 to Athens and thenceforth in a rental Fiesta en route to a place called the Peligoni Club on an island called Zakynthos. It’s some place.

  You live in one of six cottages in the olive groves and, during the day, congregate at the club which is so close to the sea that if there’s one more inch of coastal erosion, it’ll be in it.

  I have never seen such a spectacular bit of Mediterranean coastline either. You can keep northern Majorca and the South of France.

  Furthermore, I didn’t see so much as a gram of feta cheese and there were no Union Jack shorts, no discos and best of all, no lilo shops. There weren’t even any CCs, and if you want to know what they are, broaden your mind and send an SAE.

  It was at the Peligoni Club, however, that the most astonishing revelation of all unfurled.

  Three: you don’t need an internal combustion engine to go bloody quickly on water. I always figured my Fairline Phantom was pretty good fun until I had a go on a Class One offshore powerboat with a boot full of eight-litre Lamborghini engines. And even that was tame compared with a Yamaha 650 Wave-runner. But all three pale into insignificance alongside a Hobie Cat, two of which are available to guests at the Peligoni.

  It looks like something those smiley Blue Peter people make out of sticky-backed plastic and two bananas every Monday and Thursday.

  What you get are two pencil-thin hulls joined by a piece of canvas and some struts. It is powered by a sail so big that if it were laid on the Isle of Wight, everyone would s
uffocate.

  I shan’t bother going into all the technical details about turning and so on because, truth be told, I don’t really understand them. If you gybe, it turns very fast indeed, so fast in fact that the boom takes your head off and it capsizes. If you go about, it sticks its nose into the wind and stops dead, hurling you into the water about 50 feet in front of it.

  Experts seem to know how to circumnavigate these small foibles but I’m buggered if I do. What I do know is that, in a straight line, it is quite simply staggering.

  With a force six creaming the wave tops into what we sailors call white horses, it will whistle along at an easy 18 knots. This would unquestionably be frightening were there not such a lot to do.

  You stand on one of the hulls, clip yourself onto the trapeze and, holding the rope that controls the front sail – I think it’s called a jib – and a long pole which moves the twin rudders, lean right out with your arse touching the water.

  This has two effects: firstly, it stops the whole caboodle from being blown over and, secondly, if you’re into S&M, you’ll make a mess in your harness.

  Get it right and the sensation of speed is awesome. I had it right for about a minute but then, with Albania looming large on the horizon, things went rather badly wrong.

  Some say I lost my footing and fell forward, thus pushing the nose of the boat down. Some say there was water in one of the hulls and it sloshed forward of its own accord. I like this explanation best.

  Either way, the nose of the boat burrowed into a wave and the back end reared up in a prelude to what became a gigantic somersault.

  Forward momentum, as far as the boat was concerned, stopped abruptly. But from my point of view, the world was still whizzing by at 18 knots.

  Well, it was until the wire which attached me to the trapeze brought me to a halt. The problem was that the wire was fastened to my harness which was a little tight around the old dangly bits.

  Now I’m no scholar of physics but I’ll tell you this. You don’t measure the pressure involved in bringing a 15-stone male to a dead stop in the space of one inch in pounds per square inch. It’s tons per square millimetre. And all of it was borne by my crotch.

  And do you want to know what my horoscope said that day? Well I’ll tell you anyway.

  ‘Romantically, you’re finished for the time being.’ Once again, the little sod was about right.

  Global Warming

  Do please feel free to drool. Last week, as the temperature in Welwyn Garden City reached 102 degrees Fahrenheit, I had at my disposal a Lotus Esprit Turbo SE, a BMW 325i convertible, an Audi Quattro 20-valve turbo mother ****** and a 2-litre Ford Sierra.

  In any normal week, you can be assured that the Ford would not have turned a wheel. In fact, it turned all four of them several times.

  Yes, I know you can run a Lotus off its 170 mph clock, that you can get a Quattro to generate more than 1.0 g in bends and that, when the sun is shining, there are few better means of transport than a solidly made BMW soft top.

  But the sun wasn’t shining. There was a haze made up of all sorts of choice ingredients: cloud, exhaust fumes, power station emissions, deodorant spray and so on. The heat was allowed in, and most of it finished up in my armpits, and it simply wasn’t allowed out again. The smell was terrible.

  And the trouble with the sort of heat we had in the first few days of August is that there was no escape. It was not the sort of hot where you could sit in the shade to escape because it was that permeating, all-pervading hot that got everywhere.

  And because Britain can only cope if the weather is 55 degrees and drizzling, the country fell apart. In the same way that every snowplough breaks down just before their drivers go on strike every time it looks like snow, everything designed to keep us cool went west in August.

  The fridge in every corner shop was only able to bring Coca-Cola down to the sort of temperature found in the manufacture of glass. British Rail was forced to slow down its trains to 50 mph because the rails had all gone wonky, petrol pumps packed up, roads melted and old women the length and breadth of the land keeled over and died because they’d spent all their hypothermia allowances on two-bar fires and wouldn’t turn them off.

  And then there was me. The office, so cosy in winter, was a hellhole of fire and damnation and pestilence – mostly as a result of my armpits – and there wasn’t even any fornication to liven it up.

  Regularly we see that it gets above 100 in Luxor, but let me tell you there’s a world of difference between 100 in Africa and 100 here. In Africa you starve. Here you sweat. I prefer starving.

  I needed to get home to a cold bath but I didn’t want to get into any of the cars outside. I had no way of knowing just how hot it was in the Esprit but there was no way of holding the steering wheel without wearing Marigolds. The Audi, all £33,000 worth of it, had a lift-out roof but the metal was simply too hot to touch; although Audi gives you a spare can to cope with a dearth of unleaded fuel stations, it doesn’t provide oven gloves.

  I have described the 20-valve Quattro mother ****** as the greatest all-round car in the world. It isn’t. It has better ventilation than any Audi currently made but it can only blow hot air out of its vents on hot days.

  And the BMW had leather seats which, after three hours in the heat, were capable of melting a pair of Levis at 400 paces.

  The Ford, which let’s face it can’t quite match the competition for outright speed or handling, was provided with a sliding sunroof with a cover for when it’s too hot and a windscreen that isn’t raked so much that it allows the sun to heat up the wheel to a point where it becomes oval shaped.

  It also had air conditioning. Now this was not the best system I’ve ever encountered, but, nevertheless, it was capable of sucking hot smog from the outside and turning it into cold smog for the people inside.

  Rolls-Royce says the air-conditioning plants fitted to its cars have the power of 30 domestic fridges. Ford’s has the power of one, but one is better than none. So, all last week, I was the berk in the blue Sapphire with the windows up and the coat on.

  And I’ve been doing some thinking. If the weathermen are to be believed, Britain is going to get warmer and warmer as each year strolls by. I read a report last week which said that, in twenty years’ time, temperatures of 107 degrees will be entirely normal during the summer months.

  Now, some will say that as the motor car with its infernal catalytic converter is partly to blame, motor-car drivers must be made to sweat. But this is a vegetarian stance.

  As a red-meat eater, I see it the other way round. If motor manufacturers are going to heat up the world on the one hand, it is their duty to cool the people who live in it down again.

  The air conditioning in my Sierra wasn’t standard. After a few minutes’ research, I have found that the cheapest car in Britain to come with it, whether you like it or not, is the £13,000 Hyundai Sonata.

  The only other mass marketeers to include this life-saver as standard on humdrum boxes are Ford, which sticks it on the Sapphire 2000E, and Nissan, with the Bluebird Executive. And let’s face it, these two aren’t that much better than the Sonata.

  Can it be a coincidence that three of the nastiest saloons you can buy get one of the best extras provided as standard? Maybe not.

  What I would like to know is why someone hasn’t fitted it to a cheaper car yet? Why, when the trend is towards smaller, faster, more luxurious cars, is the air con ignored? Why can we have a Metro with leather seats, a Charade with a 100-bhp, intercooled, turbo engine and four valves per cylinder, a Renault 5 with PLIP central locking and a Mazda 121 with an electric sun top when we cannot have a small and convenient car that doesn’t poach its occupants?

  When I asked a Rover spokesman if such a thing might be in the pipeline, he said there was always one rainy day a week in Britain, that there was no demand, and that the standard of living here was about to fall, that two-thirds of Rover production went to the UK and that it was hard to fit air con to the
K-series engine.

  In other words, no.

  People’s Limousine

  Now that Nissan and Rover are making some half-decent cars, the motoring headline writers have turned their big guns on Ford who, it is said, wouldn’t know what a decent car was even if one jumped out of some bracken and ate the chairman’s leg.

  Not unreasonably, car buffs are asking how on earth, after spending the best part of a billion quid on it, Ford managed to get the new Escort so hopelessly wrong.

  This can be answered very simply indeed. It looks like Ford blundered and built a car that people want.

  Instead of getting qualified engineers to sit around a conference table hammering out what is feasible in a family car these days and what is not, they got a whole load of hairy-arsed students to mill about in High Wycombe, doing market research.

  It’s a fairly safe bet that if BMW had used such a technique, the Z1 would be five times faster and ten times less fun. When asked what they would like to see in a car, people are not in the habit of asking for drop-down doors.

  However, Ford felt Mr Average’s opinions were important enough and did ask what features he would like to see on his next Eurobox. They then compounded the mistake by actually designing the car around these findings and now make no secret of the fact that appearance, quality and price were cited as the most important issues.

  Just 14 per cent of those questioned reckoned that performance was important, while handling, according to a spokesman, either wasn’t a consideration or, if it was, didn’t interest anyone enough even to register on the bar chart.

  Irrespective of what may or may not have been technically possible in a car like the Escort, it seems Ford’s besuited marketeers went back to its engineers with these findings and told them to design a new car around the results. This means we now have a reasonably attractive, well-priced and quite nicely built car that doesn’t handle and can’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s arse.