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  Clarkson on Cars

  Book Jacket

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CLARKSON ON CARS

  Jeremy Clarkson made his name presenting a poky motoring programme on BBC2 called Top Gear. He left to forge a career in other directions but made a complete hash of everything and ended up back on Top Gear again. He lives with his wife, Francie, and three children in Oxfordshire. Despite this, he has a clean driving licence.

  Clarkson on Cars

  JEREMY CLARKSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  To Jesse Crosse –

  who started the ball rolling

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

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  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  All articles in Part 1 first appeared in Performance Car between 1985 and 1993

  All articles in Part 2 first appeared in the Sunday Times between 1993 and 1995

  This collection first published by Virgin Books 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 2004

  25

  Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 1996

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-01788-4

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Part 1

  Dear Diary

  Golf GTi Loses Its Crown

  Dishing It Out

  Cars in Review

  Big Boys’ Toys

  Mobile Phones

  Last Year’s Model

  Watch It

  JMC NO

  Big Bikes

  Invaders from Can

  The Revenger

  Charades

  Pedal Pusher

  Girls and Rubber

  Rat Boy

  In a Flap

  Sweet White Wine

  Auto Football

  The Best Man

  Racing Jaguars

  Non-Sleeker Celica

  Green Machine

  Democratic Party

  Cat Lover

  Goodbye to All That

  Down, Rover

  History Lesson

  Ski’s the Limit

  The One That I Want

  Global Warming

  People’s Limousine

  Radio Daze

  Horse Power

  Non-Passive Smoking

  S-Classy

  Would You Buy a Used Alfa from This Man?

  A Question of Sports

  Volvo Shock

  No Free Lunch

  Are Cars Electric?

  Cruel to be Kind

  An Able Ford

  Train Strain

  Cruising Soundtrack

  Big

  What to Buy?

  All Change

  Sex on Wheels

  In a Car Crash

  Speed Kills

  What’s That Then?

  I Had That Geezer from Top Gear in the Back Once

  Part 2

  Acceleration Times are a Bit Nonsensical

  Adverts Versus the Truth

  Politicians and Style Motors

  Do the British Love Cars?

  Lancia Out of the UK

  So What’s the Big Deal with the Beetle Then?

  Just What is It about the BMW?

  Where’s all the Style Gone?

  Hondas are Bought by Old People

  Why Do People Drive Differently All Over the UK?

  You Can Tell What People Drive by the Shoes They Wear

  The New Ferrari 355

  Sitting on a Porsche

  Clarkson’s Highway Code

  Why aren’t Car Ads Aimed at Old People?

  The New Range Rover Looks Like a Taxi

  Princess Diana Drives Audi Sales Up

  Star Car – Alfa Romeo Spider

  Routefinder Satellite Technology

  The Pickup Truck Phenomenon

  Safety Measures – Who Needs Them?

  Speed

  Nasty Nissans

  Road Rage

  The New Jaguar

  Stop Thief; Not Me

  Go West, Young Man

  Who Gives a Damn about the Countryside?

  Are Fast Cars a Problem?

  Car Pools won’t Work

  The Mondeo V6 is Very Good – Really

  Name That Car

  Bull Bars Should be Banned

  Buttons are Not Just for Christmas

  Don’t Get Noticed

  Gadgets

  Formula One Racing – as Dull as Ever

  Can You Really Own a Lotus?

  Soft Tops

  Ugly Cars Got No Reason

  Why are Van Drivers Mad?

  A Christmas Tale

  Greenslade – Music and Cars

  20 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Jeremy Clarkson

  Acknowledgements

  As I have no ambition, I have to be spurred on by others. It was Jesse Crosse, the first editor of Performance Car, who said I should write a column, and I shall forever be in his debt. And it is my wife, Francie, who makes sure these days that I’m always in the right place at roughly the right time. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without her.

  There are people in the motor industry too who gave me a leg up in those early days: Barry Reynolds at Ford, Chris Willows at BMW, John Evans at Mercedes and Peter Frater at Chrysler are four notable examples.

  And then there are friends like Jonathan Gill, Andy Wilman, Anthony ffrench Constant and Tom Stewart whose wit and wisdom I’ve plagiarised shamelessly for years.

  Part 1

  Dear Diary

  I do not wish to regale you with tales of my movements towards the end of this month, for two reasons. Firstly, you would be unutterably bored; and secondly, I will miss most of the engagements involved anyway.

  I will miss them because I have not written them down anywhere. People have rung to invite me for a weekend’s skiing, for a two-day trip to Scandinavia, for dinner, for whatever.

  Not being used to such popularity, I have said yes to everything, without really knowing whether anything clashes or, to be honest, when anything is.

  It is a minor miracle if I ever manage to get anywhere in the right decade, let alone on the right day.

  The reason for this shortfall is that I have never kept a diary. Oh to be sure, I’ve started many a year with every good intention, filling in my blood group in the personal section and entering things that happened a week ago so that if anyone peeps, they’ll be gobsmacked at what appears to be a gay social life.

  By February the entries are getting pretty sparse. By March I’ve lost it or Beloved, in a flurry of domesticity, has fed it, along with the odd airline ticket and several cufflinks, to the washing m
achine. You may be interested to hear that I have the cleanest cheque book in Christendom.

  Most of my time on New Year’s Eve was spent dreaming up all sorts of resolutions. This year, in among things like a four-weeks-and-already-broken ban on alcohol, and a fairytale promise to get fitter, I vowed to keep a diary.

  The question was, which one? In the run up to Christmas, any number of motor manufacturers sent such things. And, as they say in Scunthorpe, very nice too.

  Slimline and quite capable of fitting in a jacket pocket without making me look like an FBI agent, they do however face some stiff competition.

  First, there’s the Peugeot 405 Fil-o-fax-u-like. Now, these things are of enormous benefit to the likes of Beloved, who has simply millions of absolutely lovely friends and needs to remind herself when my Visa card needs a wash. But to unpopular people like my good self, they’re rather less use than a trawlerman in Warwick.

  With just five friends and, on average, two party invites a year, there’s no real justification for me to be strolling around the place with something the size of a house brick under my arm.

  Besides, it has a section for goals, which I presume refers to ambition rather than football. I have several ambitions but writing them down won’t get me any nearer to achieving them. I want to be king, for instance, and being able to see tomorrow’s racing results today would be pretty useful too.

  Then there’s my Psion Organiser. It’s advertised on television as a sort of portable computer that fits neatly in a briefcase and acts out the role of diary, alarm clock, address book and calculator all rolled into one.

  As far as I’m concerned, though, it is of no use whatsoever, because I can’t be bothered to learn how it works. The instruction booklet is bigger and even more boring than the Iliad and anyway I think I’ve broken it by getting into edit mode and telling it to bugger off.

  Casio do the Data Bank which is disguised as a calculator. It can even be used as one but beware, those who even think about entering an address or an appointment will screw up the innards good and proper. Well I did anyway.

  These electronic gizmos are all very well but I want to know what is wrong with a good old pencil and a piece of paper?

  I mean, if someone rings up (chance’d be a fine thing) and asks me to a party next week, I could have it written down in what; two, three seconds? I would need a team of advisers and a fortnight’s free time even to turn the Psion on.

  The advantage is that it does have an ability to remind me audibly when I’m supposed to be going somewhere. This is where Pepys’s little tool falls fait on its face.

  It’s all very well remembering to write something down but this is about as much good as cleaning your shoes with manure if you don’t look at the diary on the day in question.

  Even so, I’m a man of my word and, consequently, I’m keeping a diary like a good little boy.

  Choosing which book to use was not easy. I have the sex maniac’s diary, which tells me where in the world I can have safe sex, how to apply a condom and on what day of the week I can indulge in what they call the Strathclyde muff dive.

  I also have the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Who’s Who diary but it is full to bursting with bad photographs of people in brown suits.

  The International Motors’ diary – they’re the people who import Subarus, Isuzus and High and Dries – is a convenient size and has all the usual Letts schoolboy stuff in it about temperature and time zones and Intercity services.

  But I do not urgently need to know when the main Jewish festivals are. Nor, frankly, am I terribly bothered about when Ramadan begins.

  Toyota’s diary begins with a lovely shot of their Carina car in front of the Pont du Gard in the Ardèche, skips blissfully over the Letts schoolboy behaviour and gets straight on to page after page of slots for the parties.

  But far and away the most tasteful offering for 1989 comes from those Italian chappies at Fiat. Largely, the editorial section at the front of their book is taken up with a list of decent restaurants.

  It doesn’t say they’re decent though, which should make for some fireworks when a trainee Fiat mechanic from a dealer in Bolton comes to the capital on an Awayday and gets presented with a £60 bill at Poons.

  You can tell Fiat have aimed their diary at men near the top. But this one is no good to me either, because the allergies section on the personal page is far too small. I am allergic to cats, penicillin, pollen, house dust, nylon, trade union leaders and that man with the Tefal forehead who masquerades as Labour’s health spokesman.

  Ford’s gives no space at all to allergies and is full of all sorts of stuff I never knew I didn’t need to know – but this is the one I’ve selected. Instead of giving each week a page of its own, Ford have crammed an entire month on one double-page spread.

  This means I can do my shoelaces up on 4 April and feed the hamster on 16 May, and those who peek into the book will think I’m as busy as hell.

  Golf GTi Loses Its Crown

  At this rate, the weightlifting gold at the 1992 Olympics will be won by a paperboy from Basildon. And apart from having arms like the hind legs of a rhino, he will believe the world is full of cars that can go faster than 300 mph.

  Since the advent of what the publishing industry calls new technology, it has become a great deal cheaper to produce the printed word. This is why one now needs the anatomical properties of Kali to read the Sunday Times, and why the shelves at your local newsagent’s are groaning under the weight of perfect-bound, laminated forestry.

  You may have wondered how the producers of Successful Cauliflower magazine make any money. The answer is, they don’t, but seeing as it costs naff all to make it in the first place, nobody’s complaining!

  Not so long ago, people bought their favourite magazine for a decent read on the bus. It would be stitched together from shoddy paper and when it was finished, it could be hung on a clip by the lavatory. Not any more.

  Take Country Life. Full of ads for houses that no one can afford and no one wants; you don’t rad it, you arrange it on the coffee table as you would arrange a bunch of flowers. You may even feel the need to iron it occasionally.

  It is not a magazine. It is a statement. It says that while you may live in a neo-Georgian semi with a purple up ’n’ over garage door, you are fully conversant with the delights of hopelessly expensive manaor houses in Oxfordshire.

  Or Horse and Hound, with its nonsensical line, ‘I freely admit that the best of my fun, I owe it to Horse and Hound.’

  Nowadays, there are a million country-house and interior-design glossies full of curtains which cost £8000 and would look stupid anywhere but Castle Howard.

  Two luminaries in this domain are Tatler and Harpers and Queen, which are read a bit, but only by the middle classes scouring ‘Bystander’ or ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ for photographs of their horrid, frilly-dress-shirted friends.

  But the best of all are the car magazines.

  There was a time when they treated the car for what it was – a device which used a series of small explosions to move people around. But now, it is an artform. The days when you could get away with a front three-quarters shot taken in the office car park are gone.

  Then there are the front covers. How many times has the Golf GTi lost its crown? To my certain knowledge, the Escort XR3 was the first to steal it, yet when the Peugeot 205 GTI came along a couple of years later, somehow, the Golf had got it back again.

  And therefore we read in 72-point bold that the Golf GTi had lost its crown again, this time to the 205 GTI.

  So the Vauxhall Astra, you might imagine, would have to pinch it from the 205; but no, at some point Peugeot had given it back to VW – who reluctantly had to hand it over again, this time to Vauxhall.

  Then in no particular order it has been worn by the Peugeot 309 GTI, the Astra GTE 16v, the Escort RS Turbo, the Delta Integrale and the Corolla GTi. But for some extraordinary reason, the prized headgear never gets handed directly from one winner to the
next. It always goes back to VW in between times.

  For now, it is being worn by the 16-valve Astra but you can bet your bottom dollar that VW will have it back in time to lose it to the new 16-valve Integrale.

  The Quattro has been through a similar series of machinations. The Delta Integrale pinched its number one slot but had to give the crown back to Audi shortly afterwards because it was wearing the Golf’s at the time.

  Audi held on to it for a bit but only a couple of months ago, relinquished it to Porsche’s 911 Carrera 4.

  And aside from dispensing crowns on a weekly basis, headline writers have become obsessed with speed.

  ‘WE DRIVE THE 220-MPH JAG THEY DARE NOT BUILD’ is the latest game. Not to be outdone, a rival publication, you can be assured, will drive a 230-mph Jag that can’t be built the very next week. And so on towards infinity perhaps.

  We smirk when we read that Freddie Starr ate someone’s hamster, yet we are expected to believe that some scribbler has driven a Jaguar that no one has built at a speed that current tyre technology won’t allow anyway.

  I have driven a BMW 750iL at an indicated 156 mph on the autobahn and believe me, it is a bowel-loosening experience I do not wish to relive. Sure, I enjoy going quickly, but the notion of driving something like a Porsche 911, which has been tuned by a foreign grease monkey, at the speed of sound in a Welsh valley, appals as much as it amuses.

  The thing is that if you have a magazine on your coffee table that talks on its front cover about a car that hasn’t been built doing 300 mph on the Milton Keynes ring road, visitors to your home will be impressed.

  If you leave motoring publications lying around which talk about how seatbelts save lives, those same visitors will drink their coffee very quickly and leave.

  Business-speak impresses too. Honda have smashed Porsche 48 times and Toyota have bludgeoned BMW to death on a weekly basis for two years. And all this smashing and bludgeoning has resulted in every move a manufacturer makes being seen as utterly crucial.

  As in, ‘ON THE LIMIT IN ROVER’S LIFE-OR-DEATH MAESTRO’; or how about this recent gem: ‘LOTUS’S MAKE-OR-BREAK ELAN.’