And before you know it you’re within the M25 and ready for the cut and thrust of London, where it goes all wrong. Because it looks the same as the old car, nobody knows you’ve bought a serious flying machine and, as a result, everyone gobs at you.
Really. In a BMW, people won’t let you out of side turnings, and rightly so, but in a Porsche, people deliberately get in your way and, if you ask them, politely, if you could squeeze by, most indulge in the most fabulous hawking before letting fly with a docker’s oyster the size of a cabbage. If this is something you find undesirable, then don’t buy a Porsche.
Or if you must, make it the S and stick to the countryside. Out here, you’ll be going too quickly for anyone to realize what you were in. And you’ll be having far too much fun to care, even if they do.
My favourite cars
With the possible exception of the Vauxhall Vectra, every single new car that comes along is better, faster, safer and more reliable than the model it replaces. So, on that basis, the best car ever made must be in production right now.
Obviously, it’s something compact and fuel-efficient, like the Volkswagen Lupo. And yet somehow the Lupo misses the point completely. It’s a tool, a device, a white good that happens to be blue or yellow. It is bought with the head, rather than the ill-gotten gains of some rash moment when you stood bolt upright and said: ‘I have just got to have one of those.’
If cars were like Black and Decker workbenches, people wouldn’t talk about them in the pub, drool over them at motor shows, yearn to own them so much that it actually starts to hurt. And that’s why the Lupo, excellent though it may be in the Co-op car park, actually comes pretty close to the bottom whenever I’m asked to name the three best cars ever made.
Number one on that list is the Ferrari 355, and I really don’t think I can be bothered to explain why. Not again. So let me put it this way. Until quite recently I didn’t actually own a car. There seemed little point when, every Monday morning, a raft of new models would be delivered to my door, fully fuelled, insured and ready to go. Obviously, I enjoyed driving them, but not once did I ever think of actually buying one. Some were good, but none was ever that good.
Until one day I climbed into a 355 and, within an hour or so, I knew my standard of living was about to fall dramatically. I bought one a month later and, really, that says it all. Actions, you know, speak so much louder than words.
Not that you can hear either in my next choice, the Aston Martin Vantage.
Now I know there’s a new DB7 Vantage, and I know that, dynamically speaking, it eats the big old bruiser, bones and all, for breakfast. It’s prettier, easier to handle, nicer to drive, more reliable, and all those other things that just don’t matter.
I’d love to own a DB7, but I fear I’d spend my entire time beating the steering wheel in a silent rage, angry that I didn’t buy the real thing. The most powerful car on the market. Its big brother. The old V8.
Aston likes to say the DB7 Vantage is made by hand, but in reality the 6.0-litre V12 engine comes in a box from Ford – well, Cosworth to be precise, but let’s not split hairs. My point is that the 5.4-litre V8 that goes in the old car is beaten into shape on site by men in brown store coats.
And there’s more. The old engine delivers 600bhp, which might sound like overkill, but remember the car into which it’s fitted weighs more than two tons. That’s really why I like it so much: it’s all so excessive, bigger than it should be, heavier, faster, more brutal. You just know that, if it were a person, it would have gout.
Choosing a third car was hard. Every fibre in my body said it should be the new BMW M5, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. I went back to the reference books, kicked some twigs round the garden and racked my brains for something less… less German.
The car I’ve come up with is a Datsun. Well, actually, it’s a Nissan, which is nearly as bad, but then it’s also a Skyline GT-R, and that’s not bad at all. What I love about this car is that it’s so completely Japanese. It’s as though the designers just gave up and said: ‘Look, we’ve tried for 50 years now to copy European style, and we’re hopeless.’ So the roof is there simply to keep the rain out, the doors exist only to facilitate entry, and the bonnet is a device for providing access to the engine. This car has absolutely no style at all. And it’s even worse on the inside, where you’re treated to acres of grey interspersed with lots of shiny black. Horrid is too small a word.
However, what the Japanese can do is technology. So the Skyline wades into battle sporting every gizmo known to man. It has four-wheel steering, variable four-wheel drive, a g-meter, ceramic turbos, the lot.
And it all works. I spoke last week to a chap whose last Skyline did 160,000 miles before it blew up. And that was only because he drove all the way from London to Val d’Isère with no oil in the engine.
In the real world the Skyline is faster than an Aston Vantage and a match for the 355. Mainly because the Nissan’s arsenal of driver aids allows you to take diabolical liberties and get away with them. Seriously, you can turn this car into a corner at a preposterous speed, then alarm your passengers by undoing your seatbelt and getting in the back, safe in the knowledge that the unseen silicon will save the day.
Some say that Subaru’s Impreza and Mitsubishi’s Evo VI can match the Skyline for less than half the price, but then there are those who say marzipan is a foodstuff and that anchovies make an ideal topping for your pizza. They’re wrong. As a driver’s car, the Nissan is about as good as it gets.
And would I buy one? No. Not a chance.
Need a winter sun break? Buy a Bora
All is not as it seems. In this month’s edition of the Geneva airport in-house magazine, they talk of a city where the people ‘add a friendly note to the litany of pretty valleys, castles, cathedrals, abbeys and, of course, the old traditional pubs. A region of unforgettable splendour.’
Would you like to guess what they’re talking about? Nope, you’re quite wrong. In fact, they’re describing Birmingham, which to my knowledge has no pretty valleys, no castles, no abbeys and no unforgettable splendour. Just a lot of cars on bricks.
And this brings me to the television advertisement for the Volkswagen Bora. ‘Any excuse’ is what it says, and to hammer the point home we see a Dutch architect driving all the way back to an Alpine research institute because he’s forgotten his pen.
Well, when I was faced with a trip to Blackpool last weekend, I did indeed choose to use a Bora, rather than any of the other cars lying around in my drive. And why? Because of the new V5 engine? The blue dash or the discreet styling? Because it would offer unflappable reliability and silent running? No, not really. I used it because it was the only car out there that had a full tank of petrol.
And then there was the business of coming home. I was faced with a simple choice. Take the car or take up the offer of a lift in a helicopter. Ooh, that’s a hard one. I’ll have to ask the audience.
Obviously, I should have said: ‘Look, I know I’m tired after marching round all day with a cannon on my back and a ton of lead shot in each pocket, but what I want now is four hours on the M6. I don’t want to fly over Birmingham’s pretty valleys and unforgettable splendour. I want to see it all from ground zero. I’m going home in my Bora.’
But, strangely, I was more tempted by the notion of getting home in 50 minutes and leapt into the Squirrel as though it was Saigon in 1975 and Charlie was swarming through the embassy gates. I even thought about filling the seatbelt fastening with Superglue in case someone tried to drag me out again.
So off we went at 113mph in a straight line from Clitheroe to my garden, where we’d touch down in a furious flurry of spinning blades and strobing lamps. My children are going to love this, I thought. Nearly as much as I will.
But with just 13 minutes left to run, snow began to fall, the pilot dived for the deck and dropped me on an industrial estate in Banbury. Naturally, I carry the phone numbers of all Banbury’s cab companies in my head. And take it f
rom me: absolutely nobody laughs at you as you tramp around a provincial town on a Saturday evening dressed in tweed plus-fours.
Then we have the children. Be assured that they weren’t the slightest bit disappointed that Daddy didn’t drop into the garden from a helicopter but came up the drive instead in a Ford Mondeo with a Mr Whippy aerial.
I’m afraid that while helicopters may be man’s greatest achievement thus far, they have one big drawback. If the weather goes wrong, you end up miles from home, on an industrial estate, trying to pacify the guard dogs with the pheasants you’ve shot.
The Bora, on the other hand, can cope with any weather you care to throw at it, even the British winter sun that can’t really be arsed to haul itself more than six inches above the horizon. You know what I’m talking about here. It doesn’t matter if your car has sun visors the size of barn doors, if they swivel or if they come with illuminated mirrors on the back, the sun will always be in that tiny gap just above the rear-view mirror.
I bet that’s what got Q. Over the years he’s come up with ejector seats and machine guns in the sidelights, but I bet he was finally and tragically nailed because he never thought to fit his own car with a central sun visor.
The Bora’s got one; a bit of plastic six inches wide and an inch deep which, all on its own, justifies the £19,000 price tag. It means you can see where you’re going but, unfortunately, you will not necessarily know where you are.
To make the satellite navigation work, you need to slot a CD-ROM into the CD player and, if you want to listen to ‘The Best of the Pretenders’, you must take it out again. This means you could end up on an industrial estate in Banbury or, worse, one of Birmingham’s pretty valleys.
So what of the car itself? Well, bearing in mind that I need to say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, there’s only enough space left to say that all is not as it seems. This is not, as we’ve been told, a driver’s car for the thirty-something architect with a lost pen. It’s a Golf with a boot, and claims to the contrary are nothing more than 15 feet of warm wind.
Driving fast on borrowed time
Satellite navigation will soon become a standard feature in all new cars, and some of you may be very happy with that. Me? Well, I’m not so sure.
Here’s why. Your car will be receiving information from satellites, so how long will it be before it starts to receive instructions? How long before it’s restrained from doing more than 70 on a motorway or 40 in the suburbs?
You might think that this is all some kind of pie-in-the-sky dream that could become available, one day, perhaps some time in the new millennium. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it squeak into reality before this one is over, 13 months from now.
The impact would be colossal. Think. If you were suddenly unable to break speed limits, there would be absolutely no point, at all, in buying a car with a large engine. And please don’t talk to me about track days or big torque making for relaxed driving, because that’s nonsense. If you could never go faster than 70, you wouldn’t even think about a 1.6, leave alone a supercharged 12. You’d buy a bloody Yaris.
No, worse; you’d buy a hybrid, a half-petrol/half-battery-powered obscenity with smooth rear wheel arches and an electronic Prescott under the rear parcel shelf, charging you £4000 for moving and £4000 every time you stop.
That’s coming, too, you know. It doesn’t matter how many times the RAC says motorists are up in arms, and it certainly doesn’t matter how many pages I manage to fill with pro-car news, Phoney Tony has a 170-seat majority, so he can do whatever he damned well wants. And what he wants is to hang you up and bleed you dry.
He wants empty streets for his new baby to play in, and to get them he’s going to impose legislation that’ll make the tax disc of today seem about as costly as a penny chew. The technology already exists. Each car will be fitted with a black box, and every time you drive on to a motorway or into a town centre, your credit card will be debited.
There will be automatic debits for lawbreakers too. Obviously, you won’t be able to speed, but anyone who jumps a red light will have £50 deducted from their pay at source. We already have this for absentee fathers, and forget the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty. You’re a motorist, and that makes you as guilty as hell.
A few classic car magazines will survive, but Top Gear will be an early casualty. Along with all the lads’ mags. These promote a lifestyle not in accord with the teachings of the Blair Witch Project and, bit by bit, their editors will be made to see the error of their ways.
This is already happening. A government think-tank, made up of no-hoper housewives in ill-fitting trouser suits, decided this month that the time has come to nail some sense into motoring programmes that promote speed. Pretty soon now, James Bond will be on the sparkling mineral water. And she’ll not be allowed a car, either.
You probably think that if this were to come to pass, there would be riots in the streets and burning effigies of Prescott lighting the night sky. But look what’s happened already. They’ve put speed mountains on every back street in the land and no one has done a thing about it. And every time they slide a bus lane down an already congested street, there’s a chorus of silence.
They do nothing to bring down car prices, which has only managed to inflame the Consumers’ Association – a body with as many teeth as the Padstow Tufty Club. Performance motoring is doomed, and we’re all remaining silent.
This is because we don’t have a single leg to stand on. They need only to wheel out the bereaved parents of a four-year-old girl who’s been killed by someone doing 50 in a 30, and there’s not a damned thing you can say. Not a thing. You may say that we’ll behave in built-up areas if they leave us alone on derestricted normal roads, but this time, they wheel out the kids of a man who was killed when two nutcases in a brace of 911s ran out of talent at a critical moment. And again, you’re stumped.
They have a way of dealing with us, even now. When we turn up in a bespoilered GTR or Evo VI, they smile the smile of someone who has the moral high ground and one day will win.
This is a promise. In 15 years you won’t be able to buy a performance car in Britain. Ferrari will survive, making art forms for people’s garages, but the days of fire-spitting Subarus and hot Pugs are numbered. Mr Blair is going to win the next election and, with or without European help, he’ll make fast driving about as acceptable as rape.
And there is nothing you or I can do to stop it, so I suggest that very early tomorrow morning you head for the Buttertubs Pass in Yorkshire. Drive it hard and fast, concentrating until your back and armpits are flowing like Niagara. Scare yourself, because that thrill, that sense of being over the edge, that moment when you’ve never felt so alive: soon, it will be a thing of the past.
Welcome to the world of Johnny Cabs. No need to fasten your seatbelts. We’ll never be going fast enough.
I’ve seen the future and it looks a mess
Let me guess. This morning, you did not get dressed in a Bacofoil suit, you did not eat a pill for breakfast and you did not use a robot dog with aerials coming out of its ears to fetch the papers. I’m sure you were given a gadget for Christmas but, let’s be honest, it was a lava lamp, and that’s about as now as Slade.
I think it’s fair to say that pretty well every single prediction about life in the year 2000 was wrong. We weren’t hit by a giant meteorite on New Year’s Eve. There was no second coming in Bethlehem, and the only millennium bug out there is the one that’s making your wife’s nose run.
But one thing did change. Over the Christmas holidays, a new type of car crept on to the market and, at a stroke, changed things for ever. Oh, sure, it still uses a series of small explosions to move about, rather than dylithium crystals, but it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Rarely do I lament the absence of a picture with this column, but today I could really do with one because using old-fashioned words to describe the new Fiat Multipla seems almost philistine. We should
be tele-pathizing.
The whole back end is square and slopes inwards, like the rear window on a Ford Anglia. The roof is perforated by two sunshine roofs and has a dip in the middle so that, after a rainstorm, you have a lake above your head.
Then there’s the front, and that’s just insane. It’s as though Fiat used two designers. One made a bus, the top half of which has been lowered on to the bottom half of the other’s low-slung sports car. Aesthetically, it’s a shambles, a jumble of shapes and angles that have no place in the same country, leave alone the same car. It is roast beef and gooseberry fool, served up in a bowl that’s part sherry schooner, part fish.
I could tell you that the Multipla is now the car in St-Tropez, but it won’t make any difference. The first time you see one, your jaw muscles will turn to uncontrollable mush. ‘Why,’ you will wail, ‘does it have eyes in its forehead? And why does it have a duck pond on the roof?’
You’ll be sucked in for a closer look and then you will be converted because, inside, there are six seats: three in the front and three in the back, each of which does the triple salchow at the touch of a button or the tug of a lever.
So what we have here is a car that’s a bit shorter than a hatchback but, because it’s wider, can take six people and still leave room for a boot. So who cares if it looks strange?
And we haven’t got to the dashboard yet. Obviously, it’s carpeted, but, less obviously, all the instruments are in the middle except the satellite navigation screen, which slides out of its box right behind the wheel. This is logical. Who cares how many revs you’re doing or what track is on the CD? You want a talking road map in your line of sight because you’re in Birmingham and you want to get out.
Born to Be Riled Page 45