Learner drivers are always taught that, when a car starts to skid, you take your feet off all the pedals and steer in the direction of the slide. Yeah, right. And when you’re learning to ski, you just nail a couple of planks to your shoes and whiz down the mountain.
Believe me on this one. When a car starts to slide, you can do whatever you damn well want. You can tear the steering wheel from its mountings or stamp on the pedals like you’re playing the organ and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference. You may as well eat your own nose because, in just a few seconds’ time, you’re going to be upside down in a ditch.
I should know. I’ve been test-driving cars for 15 years and that means finding out what happens when traction is lost. It means going to the outside of the envelope and then taking one more tiny shuffle into the great never-never land where you’re ripped from the driving seat and replaced by the laws of physics.
I know the theory of handling as well as anyone. I know about weight transfer and tread shuffle. I know precisely what you should do in any skid, on any surface, but when I go out there and actually do it I always end up in a ditch, on my head.
I know, for instance, that it is theoretically possible to steer a car using the throttle. You open it up a touch and the back starts to slide. You keep it there to maintain the slide and then, when the road straightens, you ease off the power to bring everything back in line. For 15 years I’ve talked in the pub about cars that can be steered on the throttle and cars that can’t. And it’s all been nonsense because I’m not Michael Schumacher. Using the throttle in an attempt to steer a car simply determines how fast I go into the ditch.
But this week it all became clear. I was struck by a blinding flash of light and now there is no limit to my power. I am super-driver, a man who’s no longer in harmony with his wheels. I am their master.
I was at Kemble airfield in Gloucestershire with the new BMW M5 and a photographer who was keen to capture some sideways action for a magazine feature. No problem, even for me. Anyone can get a car to go sideways. It’s what happens when you’ve gone past the camera that’s hard and uncomfortable.
But not this time. I got the car sideways, and it just stayed there. And then, when I’d had enough, I eased off the power and it settled back in line. Happy? No, no, no. I was wearing a grin so wide it shattered both the side windows.
There’s more, too, because the M5 comes with a little button on the dash that sharpens both the steering and the throttle response. Press this and even Thora Hird could become Mistress Power Slide, a warrior princess in petrolhead heaven.
For hour after delicious hour I hurled that car round the perimeter road, its back end never quite in line with the front, and… blimey! What’s that funny noise? Oh, no, the rear tyres have fallen apart.
No, really, in the space of a morning I managed to wreck two 18-inch Dunlops that cost £387 each. Oh, and there’s no spare. BMW gives you a can of sealant and a pump, but this is of limited use when you’re down to the canvas.
So let’s think a little bit about the implications. Without any doubt, the M5 is the most flattering car a man can drive. It turns a ham fist into a sirloin of pork and handles, quite simply, like a dream. But if you peel away the handling prowess, like the handling prowess peels away the tyre tread, what are you left with?
You’ve got Sebastian Faulks with no writing skills. You’ve got George Clooney with a face like a horse’s arse. You’ve got a £60,000 BMW 5-series made at a factory in Dachau, on the site of a former concentration camp. Sure, an incredible leviathan lives under the bonnet – a V8 that develops 400bhp – but you need to keep the nanny-state traction control on to preserve those tyres. You’ve got a fabulous interior, but you can have something identical in a 528i for half the price.
Certainly, your neighbours won’t be terribly impressed by the M5, partly because the satin-finish wheels are vulgar and partly because it makes a deep, Brian Blessed booming noise that kills dogs and breaks all your finest Czechoslovakian glass.
It is demonstrably better than the 540, but the only place where you could possibly demonstrate its ‘betterness’ is on a track or an airfield. And when your friends are all driving home afterwards, you’ll be on the phone trying to find a tyre that no one stocks.
So obviously the M5 is a stupid car? Well, no, not really. Because you’re never going to take it to an airfield, and you’re never going to slide it round the corners, and who gives a damn if your neighbour’s dog explodes? It pains me to say this, given my history of baiting BMW, but the M5 is magbleedingnificent.
Trendy cars? They’re not really my bag
So there I was in the back of a cab with Rodney Bickerstaffe, general secretary of some union or other, on the way to Bond Street to buy my wife a handbag. Pretty surreal, huh? And then the nightmare began. There are two criteria that must be met by a handbag, each of which is mutually exclusive: it must be fashionable and it must be practical.
While I was driving along with my wife the other day, she asked me to find her sunglasses. This meant diving into her bag, where I discovered she had a normal pair of spectacles, a spare pair, a normal pair of shades and a pair she got on prescription. And none of them were right, so the search continued, down past the make-up bag, the mobile phone, enough keys to baffle a warder at Brixton jail, two wallets and a foldout photograph frame. Further down, below the plasma, there was a medicine chest, another mobile phone, more keys and then the sanitary area. And at this point I gave up and said: ‘Look, darling, I really can’t find them. Can’t you just squint?’
This is a woman who doesn’t need a handbag so much as a binliner. But that would never do, because in Vogue I see the modern woman sports something no bigger than a tea bag. Well, she does today, but I know enough about fashion to know that, by the time I’d got to the till with a microscopic blue Versace, it would have become as up-to-date as an ox cart. And by the time I got back to the shelf to change it for something in grey, there’d have been a punk revival and I could get a binliner after all.
I began to understand how Prince Philip might have felt when he discovered that two homosexual priests had been playing tonsil hockey at one of his garden parties. Bewildered, in a what’s-the-world-coming-to sort of way.
I finally settled on something with studs and then stood back in horror as I watched my wife transferring the contents of her old bag into the new one. It was like watching the Queen Mother move all her furniture into a two-bedroomed terraced house.
And within a month it’ll be out of date. But what the hell? Staying fashionable, on the handbag front, is not that expensive. The big problem is staying fashionable in cars. Cars never used to strike much of a chord with the terminally trendy because everyone had a Ford Cortina and you’d have to wait maybe six years for a new model to come along. That and the sheer expense of a car meant there was never a sense of here today, gone tomorrow. But now car makers have reinvented the idea of fitting a wide variety of different bodies to the same basic platform. So a whole raft of supposedly new models can be made, economically, in small numbers. It’s called niche marketing.
When Volkswagen launched the new Golf-based Beetle back in January 1998, people with black clothes and tiny handbags ordered one straight away. It was the car of the moment, but American demand was so massive that British deliveries are only just beginning now. And I’m afraid the moment is past. To review the Beetle as a car would be as pointless as reviewing the latest La Perla knickers on the quality of the stitching. It was designed solely to be a fashion statement, to be a bandwagon on to which the 1960s revivalists could jump.
Thanks to the Abba thing, we’re now in a 1970s time warp that should have been good news for Rover. Only they got muddled and thought it was the 1470s. Really, I’m surprised their new 75 isn’t offered with a thatched roof.
Today, you’re far better off with the Mercedes Smart, which is positively de rigueur in St-Tropez. But when the next registration prefix comes along, you should be t
hinking very carefully about Fiat’s six-seater Multipla.
It’s a long, long way from being the best-looking car in the world, but handsomeness rarely has anything to do with making a fashion statement. I saw a girl in the Style section of this paper last week wearing what appeared to be a wastepaper basket.
Even in the countryside, where the Hermès headscarf has been the crowned head of state for 2000 years, people are starting to get the idea that cars can be fashionable. So it’s off to Cheshire with the Range Rover and into the courtyard with Toyota’s Landcruiser.
Flares may be out in the Voodoo Lounge but, believe me, flared wheel arches are in on the range. And don’t worry about the Made in Japan sticker because so is sushi.
This is complicated, I know, but things could be worse. With the trendification process now enveloping everything from music and cars to clothes, food and entire postal districts, it can’t be long before houses are swept up in the style tidal wave.
‘Oh, my dear, Georgian is so last year. You’ve got to pull it down and build something in yellow.’
Why life on the open road is a real stinker
Have you any idea what life is like for a travelling salesman? The traffic jams. The endless parking tickets that eat into your commission. And all the while sweat is pouring down your back because the fleet manager was too mean to put air-conditioning in your hateful, diesel-powered Vauxhall Vectra. On Wednesday you drove all the way to Carlisle only to find the chief buyer had gone out for lunch with his secretary and – snigger, snigger – they weren’t expecting him back.
I know a bloke who used to sell franking machines for Pitney Bowes. And to win over secretaries, he’d ask to see their tongues, pull a face and say they’d been licking too many stamps. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine having to chat up a fat temp just so you can flog her boss a crummy franking machine?
We like to dream the American dream of life on the road, sailing across Montana with the warm wind in our hair, but the reality is somewhat different. Because life on the road in Britain means you’re a rep, and you have a Vauxhall and you’re stuck in a jam watching prime ministers flash past in the bus lane.
You bought a Lion bar when you last filled up with petrol and bits of it have landed on your shirt; you failed to close that last deal and now, at 6 p.m., you’re hunting for somewhere to spend the night. You’re on a budget of £50, it’s pouring with rain, and you’re in Cardiff.
I know exactly what it’s like because I’ve done it. You crawl round the one-way system, wipers smearing the neon, in a desperate search for that elusive grail, a two-star hotel where the sheets are made from natural fibres.
That’s my abiding memory of life on the road. Nylon sheets, waking up every morning with my hair on end, and spending all day pumping 4000 volts into anyone with whom I shook hands. That, and being laughed at in Indian restaurants for eating on my own. ‘Look at that bloke with the funny hair. He’s got no mates.’
Other reps used to eat in the hotel, with waitresses called Stacey tottering about in micro-skirts. But I’m allergic to patterned carpets and, when you’ve heard ‘Stairway to Heaven’ being murdered for the thousandth time by the Mike Twat Singers on the piped Muzak system, you have to get out.
Then, when it’s two in the morning and you can’t sleep because of the sodium streaming through the curtainless window, you’re awoken by a drunken bloke called Dave who’s been given a key to your room by mistake.
I’d lay there all night, listening to the Doors on my Walkman and doing my best Kurtz impression. The horror. The horror.
However, this week I found myself staying at a Travelodge hotel and, oh, how times have changed. A plaque outside said it was ‘the 100th Travelodge to be opened at Hickstead’ and that the ribbon had been cut by Judith Chalmers. All Travelodges are opened by a top celeb. They got Annabel Croft in Hemel Hempstead and Torvill and Dean for Nottingham. But the hotels, so far as I can tell, are all the same. For a flat rate you get a room that, I’m told, can sleep up to six people. Well, that kept me busy for a while. I found beds for only four and, after an hour, gave up looking for the others and turned on the television, hoping to find some German pornography. But there was none, and I was rapidly running out of distractions.
Bored out of my mind, I played hunt the telephone, but there wasn’t one, so I went in search of a bar, but there wasn’t one of those either; just a cold drinks machine in the unmanned reception area. Yup, you pay when you get there and, by ten, the hotel is bereft of staff.
There wasn’t even a restaurant but, according to the booklet in my room, I was welcome to traipse across the car park and eat in the Little Chef. Eat. In a Little Chef. Interesting concept.
The following morning I watched my fellow inmates trooping out of their cells, climbing into their superheated Vectras and setting off for another day of sweat and disappointment. They looked relaxed, but then they would. I mean, there was nothing in their rooms to have distracted them from the business of sleep, that’s for sure.
I don’t doubt that the Travelodge idea is a good one. By not providing the guest with anything at all, staff costs are kept down, and this can be passed to the customer: £49.95 is good value for a clean room with cotton sheets.
But what if you had to spend every night on the road, in the same featureless room? Eventually you’d find those other two beds, but then what?
And all you have to look forward to is another day on the pleblon upholstery in your Vectra. I stink, therefore I am a rep.
Cotswold villages and baby seals
We have the builders in at the moment, so time is tight. Just when you think you have spare minutes for some coffee and a cigarette, the headman wanders over to say that the walls are all out of kilter. Or that the water pressure isn’t good enough for a new bathroom and that we must dig what amounts to the Suez Canal. ‘It can be rushed through in about 11 years and it’ll cost £4000 million.’
However, while I don’t particularly like having a boiler that runs on peat and blows up every time there’s a cold snap, I would much rather live somewhere with a bit of history than somewhere new, somewhere faultless, somewhere Barrattish. And that, I suppose, sums up all that’s wrong with the new BMW M5, a car that you can read about elsewhere in this issue. It’s just too perfect, too well sorted, too damned smug for its own good. Had we been at school together, it would have played in the first XI and been excellent at physics. And I would have stolen its milk at playtime.
I will happily admit that it beats the XJR on pretty well every front in the same way that, dynamically speaking, a brand-new house beats an old one. Perhaps this is why new estates are littered with BMWs just 10 minutes after the last of the JCBs trundles home. And all the old cottages with leaky taps and ancient wisteria have Jags outside.
That said, I have noticed a growing trend in petroldom which is to be welcomed. Car makers are building new cars that have the ‘Oh, I must have one’ appeal of Daisy Cottage.
I’m thinking primarily about the Smart. This little car is riddled with the sort of faults that simply would not be acceptable to Mr and Mrs G-Plan. In a World of Leather it’s DFS – Downright Frigging Stupid. You can’t take it out of town because a passing bread van will blow it straight into the hedge. The six-speed semiautomatic gearbox takes an age to shift, and the car corners like Bambi.
There are upsides, though, like it’s just about the best inner-city car I’ve ever found. You can park it nose-on to the pavement, prices start at only £6000, the panels are indestructible and it does 60mpg. Great stuff, but immaterial.
What matters is that it’s just so damned cute. If you crossed a Cotswold village with a baby seal, you’d be only halfway there. You’d need to garnish the mix with a teddy bear and a primary-school ballet class to match it for aaah-ness.
Then you’ve got the Fiat Multiplex Cinema. I have it on good authority that even Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli thinks this clever six-seater is ‘absolutely hideous’, and he’s right –
it is. But then so was the Elephant Man, and that didn’t stop us crying when he croaked.
There’s more too. I have never been able to watch Michael Elphick in anything – Boon, chat shows, whatever – since he broke the Elephant Man’s matchstick cathedral, and I will not be able to speak to anyone who criticizes the Fiat. It may be new and modern, but I want to own one even more than I want to own Blenheim Palace.
At car industry press conferences five years ago, all we would ever ask was whether the four-door saloon that we’d just been shown would be available with a diesel engine, or four-wheel drive, or as an estate. And that was all we wanted to know. But now we could say: ‘Will it be painted pink and have the engine mounted in one of the wheels?’ And they’d probably say yes.
I suppose that Renault must take the credit for having started this trend by introducing the Twingo, but now there are characterful cars on virtually every street corner. The Mercedes-Benz A-class. The Rover 75. The Honda S2000. The Jaguar S-type. The Evo sisters from Mitsubishi. And, yes, even the Daihatsu Move. Alfa Romeo is back in business, and Ford – the most conservative of all car manufacturers – has recently caught the bug, too, so now, instead of giving its designers pencils and tracing paper, they all break at five for a cup of tea and an E. And have you seen that new Vauxhall sports car? Well, like, wow.
But this wave seems somehow to have bypassed Munich, where the Teutons are still struggling with their track rod ends and their camshaft technology. BMW seems to be struck on the idea that a car is just a device for moving people around. Look at those television ads that pick on one tiny engineering detail and hammer it home. Great. We know that BMW pays great attention to the tiniest nut and bolt, and that the cooling system in the M5 is to be admired.
But loved? I rather think not.
It’s just like the Financial Times. What great insight. Not only do the people who produce this paper understand the City but they can write about it all in a clear and concise fashion. They do the job entrusted to them quite brilliantly… but that’s all they do.
Born to Be Riled Page 37