You can play around with the thinking four-wheel-drive system, you can alter the aerodynamics – and that’s probably why the Skyline has become the car of choice in Formula One. Ask Johnny Herbert what he drives and, like a good Ford boy, he’ll say: ‘A Ford.’ But really he drives a Skyline. They all do.
And the new version? Well, it’s like the old one, only a little bit stiffer, a little more aggressive, a little more fantastic. You can’t compare it to any other car because there’s nothing remotely like it.
So if the alien asks how a Nissan could possibly be worth £54,000, I’d just toss him the keys. And after a mile or two, he’d be trying to part-exchange his spaceship.
It’s Mika Hakkinen in a Marks & Spencer suit
I met a food stylist the other day and wondered, How did that come about, then? How do you start out in life wanting to be an astronaut or a film star and end up with a Davy lamp on your head, using surgical tweezers to arrange sesame seeds on a bun?
And then I wondered some more. What a sham. It is this person who builds up my hopes in hamburger restaurants. I see a photograph of a bulging, steaming snack that bears no relationship whatsoever to the tired old cowpat I’m actually given. Apart, perhaps, from the steam.
And that brings me neatly to the Audi TT. When they first showed me a photograph of this Bauhaus barnstormer, I was positively moist with anticipation. But then I went for a drive and, within half an hour, found myself wearing that detached, middle-distance expression normally reserved for dinner parties when I find myself next to a man who services reservoirs.
The Audi TT looks like a sports car, but it isn’t one. It’s an automotive Ginger Spice, superficially lithe and speedy, but beneath the clothes all droopy and loose. Like a soggy walnut.
Interesting, then, that I’ve fallen madly in love with the new Audi S3, a car that shares the same turbocharged engine as the TT along with the same four-wheel-drive system and the same six-speed gearbox.
This is because the S3 doesn’t try to look like a sports car. Apart from bigger wheels, wider arches and a more crouching stance, it looks like a normal A3, which is an unpretentious hatchback. And because I wasn’t expecting it to garnish the road with Tabasco sauce, I didn’t really mind that the gearbox was vague and that the brake pedal acted like a switch.
And so what if it doesn’t have electric responses when you turn the wheel? Audi, bless them, have never been able to make a car that handles properly but, for the thousands of doctors and solicitors who buy such things, it doesn’t really matter.
If you want a sharp suit, go to Subaru and buy the Armani Impreza. If you want Boss badging, buy a BMW, but if you just want something for work, there’s always good old Audi & Spencer.
But then I pressed the accelerator pedal and thought: Whoa, hold on a minute. The S3 may not be up to much in the bends, but in a straight line it is positively explosive. Even in sixth gear at 70mph, it hurtles off towards the horizon like a rabbit.
I simply wasn’t ready for such vivid performance from what is basically a 1.8-litre, three-door hatchback. And that’s where the S3 really scores. By maintaining low expectations, you’re constantly being delighted – by the epic night-time dashboard that glows like Los Angeles, by the blue-tinted headlamp beam and, most of all, by the Recaro seats. Not since I drove an old Renault Fuego have I ever been quite so comfortable. In a car, that is.
It’s also been a while since I felt so comfortable with a car. While it doesn’t actually turn heads, it has real-world good looks. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t Brad Pitt or David Beckham; it’s just a handsome bloke on the other side of the bar.
And that four-ringed badge comes with no unpleasant baggage. When I see an Audi coming up our drive, I’ll rush to the door to see who it is. When I see a BMW, I close the shutters and pretend to be out.
You buy an Audi because you want a practical, well-made tool to convey you, and some passengers, sensibly and with the minimum of fuss from your agreeable house in the country to, let’s say, Assaggi in Notting Hill. People with Bee Ems go to Quaglino’s, so they can shout.
And finally we get to the price: £27,000. Which is a lot for what, as I said, is basically a hatchback. But it is not a lot for a car that does quite so much, quite so well. For the same money, you could have a Mitsubishi Evo VI, but you’d arrive everywhere looking like Gary Rhodes. Or you could have the BMW 323 coupé. But you’d arrive everywhere late.
For the past year or so I’ve been singing the praises of Alfa Romeo’s GTV6, which is £28,000. In fact, I’ve come awfully close to telling strangers in traffic jams that they’ve bought the wrong car. ‘Oi, you. Why are you driving around in that p.o.s. when you could have had an Alfa? You are a moron, and I hate you on a cellular level.’
Well, now there is an excusable alternative. If you really, really need back seats and you absolutely must have a boot that can take more than one prawn, you may buy an Audi S3. It’s the second-best car in this class, which is like being the second-best racing driver after Michael Schumacher.
There you are. The S3 is Mika Hakkinen. Cool. Detached. Handsome. And much, much faster than you’d think.
Like classic literature, it’s slow and dreary
I don’t like patterned carpets, but I know why people buy them. They may be unrestful on the eye, but turquoise and gold squirls are to be found in smart restaurants like the local Harvester. So they’re seen as posh. And practical too. The Torrey Canyon could crash into your sofa and only the most eagle-eyed visitor would be able to spot the stain.
I know why people buy Agas too. They can’t cook food, choosing instead to heat the kitchen to a point where cutlery melts. And when they go wrong, you have to spend half an hour listening to some gormless customer-care woman who says that all her engineers have personal problems. But Agas bring a certain country goodness to your kitchen, and you get an owners’ club magazine that features other Aga louts like Felicity Kendal.
I know why people live in Wilmslow. I know why people become burglars. I know why the M4 bus lane was built. But I never got to grips with the Vauxhall Vectra.
There’s a new version now and, even though it looks much the same as before, Vauxhall says there have been 2500 alterations, prompting those wags at Viz to suggest the old one must have been a ‘right pile of crap’.
They’re right. It was. When I was asked to review this hateful car for Top Gear, I adopted a philosophy that took Ronan Keating all the way to No. 1: ‘You say it best when you say nothing at all.’
It was shamefully dull, enlivened only by a tool to get the dust caps off the tyre valves. And guess what? The new Vectra is no better. Oh, I’m sure its chassis is more responsive and it’ll break down less often, but this was never the problem. The problem was the shape, the dreariness, the sense that someone else had styled this car while the proper designer was at home waiting for the Aga engineer to call round.
So I don’t care that the new model has one-piece headlamps or a new grille. It’s still boring. We want our cars to be like airport best sellers. We want the cover festooned with swastikas, guns and girls, but instead Vauxhall gives us Thomas Hardy. It’s the Penguin classic of cars. I bet if you peeled away the bodywork you’d find an orange spine.
And I’ve been testing the lavishly equipped V6 GSi, which is supposed to cast a halo of sportiness over the rest of the range. Basically, it’s a normal Vectra that appears to have been magnetized and driven round a motorists’ discount shop. Hundreds of cheap bits have just sort of stuck to it, so you now have Thomas Hardy in a tracksuit.
The problem is money. The GSi costs £21,500, and Vauxhall knows full well that everyone with even a modicum of sanity would buy an Alfa Romeo 156 instead. Or a BMW. Or a wheelbarrow.
So, to make the Vectra more appealing, it is decked out with gizmos. Inside you get satellite navigation, traffic master, which is like ‘ask the audience’. It even has a ‘phone a friend’ button. Press it and you’re connected to an operator who
can tell you whether the male seahorse carries its partner’s eggs. And where the nearest breakdown truck is. This is all very nice, but it means the entire glove box is filled with a machine.
Then there’s the air-conditioning. Looks good in the brochure. Doesn’t work properly. Rather than cooling the whole car, it delivers jets of ice-cold air in narrow corridors so that your nose is fried while the wax in your left ear is turned into an uncomfortable icicle.
And then there’s the steering wheel, which is metal. So, on a hot day it’s like driving with your hands in a toaster. This car has everything, but nothing works properly. Not even the engine. The 2.5-litre V6 develops 170bhp, which means the Vectra goes from 0 to 60 in 7.5 seconds and onwards to a top speed of 143mph. Theoretically. But in my test car, it felt like the fuel was being delivered not as a fine mist but in large lumps. Under hard acceleration, it felt like it was trying to drink minestrone through a straw.
And even if you leave this unsavoury element out of the equation, you’re left with a car that, despite the spoilers and the gravelly exhaust note, is really not very fast at all. It’s merely adequate, like the handling and steering and brakes and interior space and styling and fuel economy and ride comfort. There were only two points that could be classified as good: the Recaro seats and the shape of the door mirrors. And that isn’t enough, not by a long way.
I’d like to say that, despite the 2500 alterations and the V6 power, the new Vectra is still the most horrible car you can buy. But the Chrysler Voyager diesel is nastier, and I suspect the new Kia Clarus is even worse.
So there we are. The new Vauxhall Vectra: not even any good at being bad.
Prescott’s preposterous bus fixation
Earlier this month I wrote a column for The Sunday Times in which I might perhaps have said motorcyclists were a tiny bit gay. Certainly I claimed that they liked to look at photographs of other men’s bottoms.
Well, there’s been an awful lot of fuss and bother, with e-mails flying hither and thither, flicked V-signs in traffic jams and a piece in Motorcycle News which said I was being deliberately controversial. As opposed to what, I wondered? Accidentally controversial?
It also said that I only wrote the column to annoy the Road Test Editor of Top Gear magazine. ‘A tad wasteful’, they suggested, to devote an entire column in a national organ to one man.
Oh, really? Well, they devoted a whole column to me, and now I’m going to devote what’s left of this one to John Prescott, who has a brilliant new wheeze. Basically, if Railtrack don’t get the trains to run on time, they’ll be fined £40 million. Which is more than you get for urinating in a public place. I find myself wondering what good this will possibly do. Certainly it’ll ensure that money, which could be spent making the network better, goes to the government, where it will be spent on a few more focus groups. And big penalties like this will scare away investors. So, the trains will get worse. And then they’ll get fined again.
I wouldn’t mind, but it’s not like the people at Railtrack sit around every morning thinking up new and exciting ways to bugger up the network. I’m sure they’re doing their best, and the last thing they want is Jabba the Hutt and his ginger-haired, rhubarb-shaped sidekick at the Rail Regulator acting like a brace of school bullies.
I should have thought it would have been more helpful if Taffy Two Jags had said: ‘Look, if you can’t do anything to make the trains better, we’ll give you £40 million to spend on new signals or better coffee or something.’ But, oh no. Chopper Prescott has decided to spend all his money on another lunch. And a diving holiday in the Maldives. And a helicopter to get to the Grand Prix, where he cheered wildly for someone called ‘Damien’. And what little there is left over is being spent on turning the road network into a giant f****** bus lane.
Now, look. Trains are a good idea. They help alleviate the pressure on Britain’s roads and work well in tandem with the car and truck. Buses don’t. Buses are stupid.
With the power of hindsight, everyone can see that Beeching was wrong to rip up the railways in 1963. It may have seemed like a wise move at the time, what with the coming of the car, but now we can all see it was madness. And I will bet everything I own that in 30 years’ time we’ll all be sitting around saying: ‘Prescott was an arse when he made all the roads buses-only.’
Actually, I’m saying it now. It’s all very well claiming that each bus is full of 50 smiling motorists who’ve left their cars at home, but that’s simply not the case. If you look at a bus after, say, 10 o’clock in the morning, it is almost always empty. And if there is someone on it, you can just tell they’ve never owned a car in their lives – not with that hairdo. And that coat.
Prescott doesn’t seem to understand that no one will buy a car, tax it, insure it, pay to park it somewhere and then use the bus to go to work. But then we should remember that he failed his 11-plus and was described by his mother as ‘not very bright’. But even he, surely, can see that a car is far more comfortable and far more convenient than a bus. A car goes where you want it to go and comes home when you’re good and ready. A car offers you peace and Terry Wogan. A bus offers you nothing more exciting than the opportunity to sit on someone else’s discarded chewing gum.
And buses are not fast. All the coach operators who use it say the new M4 bus lane has made no discernible difference to their journey times. And one operator, in Reading, even cut services after it was opened because there was ‘insufficient demand’.
Only 50 buses an hour use the M4 between Heathrow and London – that’s less than one a minute – and they now have a lane all to themselves. While the 16,000 cars that use the same stretch are hemmed into the remainder. It’s idiotic. It’s insane. It’s the product of a damaged mind.
And it gets worse because a quick survey of the 50 buses using the new lane reveals a nasty surprise. Most are airline coaches ferrying flight crews into central London for a little light sex.
And then we have the 350 taxis. Well, that’s really helping the road network and its overtaxed users. Sitting there watching American businessmen whiz past you into town at 50mph while you just sit there and sweat.
History, I assure you, will not be kind to Mr Prescott, and I suggest that history starts right now. So drop him a line, explaining exactly why next time round you’ll be voting for… well, anyone, really, just so long as he goes back to serving gins and tonics on the QE2.
Take your filthy, dirty hands off that Alfa
Did you know that there’s such a thing as a summer truffle, and that it’s nowhere near as good or tasty as a winter truffle? No? Well, don’t worry, because neither did I until I tried to order dinner the other night at a restaurant where this sort of thing matters.
I had to sit there, nodding sagely, while the waiter guided me through truffle technology. We’d gone through earth and moisture and pigs when, all of a sudden, he adopted the look of a man who’s just been stabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. His open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression showed he was in deep shock, but analysis showed there was bewilderment too. Maybe a hint of anger. And all because here, in Michelin central, a man on the next table was putting Tabasco sauce on his fish.
I understood this expression well, because I had worn something similar two days earlier, when Alfa Romeo delivered to my house a 156 with a diesel engine.
This is like teaming white socks with your new suit. It’s like playing Mozart at 45rpm. And, yes, I imagine, it’s like spending eight hours preparing the perfect fish only to have someone with an asbestos mouth pour nitroglycerine all over it.
I’ll tell you some things about Alfa Romeo which will outline the preposterousness of such a thing. We think of McLaren as a dominant force in Formula One today, but back in the 1950s Alfa was so far out in front it once pulled in its car on the penultimate lap and polished it. So it would look smart when it crossed the finishing line.
Enzo Ferrari began his career with Alfa, a company that has given the world some of the most e
xquisite cars ever made. Have you ever seen a 2900B? Have you heard one? Henry Ford did, and said later: ‘When I see an eight-cylinder Alfa Romeo, I take off my hat.’
And it’s still going on today. Oh, sure, people who want four wheels and a seat can buy a BMW or a Vectra, but those who know, those who care, those who want the steering to talk and the engine to howl: they buy an Alfa. So what in God’s name were they thinking of when they fitted a diesel engine to their magnificent 156? A filthy, carcinogenic, rattly diesel! In a work of art!
Yes, I know that in Italy diesel fuel costs 3p a ton, and the savings make up for the catastrophic loss of self-worth, but why export it to Britain? Why? Here, diesel engines are for mealy-mouthed, penny-pinching, open-toed beardies in Rohan trousers. They’re for people who absolutely don’t care about cars or motoring, only the need to do it as cheaply as possible.
Diesel Man yearns to be a parish councillor. He fits yellow headlamp covers and a GB plate when driving in France. He studies road maps before he sets off rather than on the motorway, and he always fills up when the tank is still a quarter full.
You can always spot the son of Diesel Man in the playground at school. While all his mates are telling one another how fast their dads’ cars go, he is warbling on in a nasal whine: ‘Yes, but my dad’s car does 50 miles to the gallon.’ And then they steal his milk, and rightly so.
Because despite the wild claims of Diesel Man, diesel cars rarely average more than 35mpg. If he says he’s getting 50 or 60, you can tell him from me that he is a liar. And then punch him in the face.
Alfa Romeo has done its level best to enliven the concept of diesel motoring, droning on and on about its new five-cylinder turbocharged 2.4-litre five-cylinder engine. But the simple fact is this: at 4000rpm, when a normal Alfa would be rolling up its sleeves for an all-out, spine-tingling assault on the upper reaches of its bloodcurdling rev band, the diesel version is out of puff and begging for a gear change.
Born to Be Riled Page 41