Round the Bend Read online

  This is a good thing, of course, because it means my life is varied and interesting. I never do the same thing twice, whereas someone who has a hobby does exactly the same thing day after interminable day. James May, for instance, enjoys taking old motorcycle engines to pieces and then putting them back together again, as slowly as possible. Consequently, this is all he does.

  Chris Tarrant, meanwhile, likes to spend all his free time standing up to his testicles in dirty water trying to outwit a fish; a creature with less brain capacity than a washing machine.

  This brings us on to the Porsche 911, a car aimed at people for whom the drive to work every morning is not a chore or a pleasure. It is a pastime, a hobby. Something that can be improved and finessed with practice. Sometimes, I imagine that 911 people go to work, turn round and then go to work again.

  People buy Ferraris and Lamborghinis because cars like this effervesce. They fizz and crackle and they’re as much about style and panache as they are about generating G in the bends. A 911, on the other hand, is not about style at all. It’s fishing, with a steering wheel.

  When you buy a normal car, you choose the model, choose the engine size you’d like and then add as many extras as you think you can afford. Then a few you can’t.

  It is not so simple with a 911. The range is mind boggling. It starts with the simple Carrera, which has no frills, no spoiler on which the RAF could land a jet, no wide wheel arches, no turbocharging. You get a simple 3.6-litre flat six that drives the rear wheels. This, then, is the starting point. My little pony.

  If you go for the 3.8-litre S model, it is the best of the 911s. It offers all of the design’s best features with none of the drawbacks, at a reasonable price. But sadly, once you’ve stuck your toe into the world of the 911, pretty soon you are going to be as hooked as a golfer; believing that if you spend more and more on better equipment, your game will improve.

  Pretty soon, then, you’re going to be back at the dealership wondering out loud if perhaps you could take the roundabout outside TGI Fridays a little bit faster if you had four-wheel drive. (You can’t.)

  Then you’ll start to wonder about the GT3, which is like the simple Carrera S but with scaffolding in the back and a thin back window. Around a track, this is an incredible car. You’ll like that. You’ll start doing track days. And there you’ll be overtaken by people in turbos, so you’ll think that maybe you should have one of those. Pretty soon, you’ll be subscribing to the 911 magazine for enthusiasts. And then all you’ll be able to do, day in and day out, is dream of the day when you can have a GT2. The £131,070 GT2 is Everest. It has the engine from the turbo but with more power and only two-wheel drive. It has scaffolding in the back. It is light. It is, to Mr Porsche-Man, what the very best woods are to the world of pro-am golf.

  It is also immensely fast. The 530 horsepowers feel as though they’re coming from a gigantic muscle rather than an engine. So if ever you feel the need to mash that throttle into the carpet, you’d better be ready …

  Just yesterday, I pulled out to overtake four cars on a normal A road and by the time the manoeuvre was complete, I was doing 165mph. That is not a boast. That is a fact. And if anyone asks, I shall say I was on the Isle of Man.

  I then went to the track, where I discovered that the GT2 can lap more quickly than a Ferrari Scuderia. This is astonishing. A Ferrari has no carpets, an electronic differential, sophisticated traction control, adjustable suspension and a flappy paddle box that can shift gears in 60 milliseconds. The Porsche has none of these things. Just its big muscle and a basic six-speed manual. And yet it was faster.

  This alone would be enough to get the hobby-boys chortling into their G and Ts. And there’s more.

  The GT2 handles like an old-school 911. Push it hard into a corner with the traction control turned off and you have yards of nasty understeer which, no matter what you do to correct the problem, results in a violent lurch from the rear: 911 fans love this. They reckon that being able to tame this problem makes them men among men. But for me, as a man who can’t do anything properly, it’s a bloody nightmare.

  The grip from a GT2 is biblical. In a bend, you can feel the G-forces peeling your muscles from their mountings. But when you exceed the limits – and what’s the point of a car like this if you don’t at least try – you are almost certainly going to spin.

  On a road, the problems are even worse – principally it’s all far too firm. Anyone who knows where the A40 blends, in a nice right-hander, onto the M40 just outside Oxford, knows about the bump at the apex of the corner. In most cars it’s nothing to worry about. In a GT2, however, you take off and don’t land till you’re in Hillingdon. Good for the fuel consumption, I guess. But bad for your nerves.

  It was much the same story last night. There’s a crest on a B road near where I live, and in most cars the traction control light flickers as you go over it. The GT2, however, slewed sideways. Suddenly. It was extremely alarming. I may even have wet myself a bit.

  And then there’s the tyre roar. The GT2 has giant 325/30 rear tyres and, boy, do they make a racket. Even on a smooth modern motorway you cannot hear yourself think.

  I hated this car. Yes, the speed is mesmerizing. Epic. But the price is too high. It’s too difficult, too much like hard work, and the only rewards if you push it are a series of terrifying and unpredictable lurches.

  Think of it as a carbon fibre fishing rod. It will make you look serious and keen among your peers. But one day, you’re going to snag it on an overhead power line. And as you lie in hospital afterwards, with no face and melted feet, you’re going to wish you’d stuck with a bamboo cane and a piece of string.

  6 July 2008

  The Devil’s done a fruity one

  Mercedes SLR McLaren Roadster

  Fortunately, my economics teacher at school never really shook himself properly after a trip to the urinals. This meant that instead of listening to his endless droning lectures on Smith and Keynes, I sat there, transfixed by the growing splotch of darkness on the front of his trousers.

  This meant I was never tempted to leave school and get a dreary job in a bank. And better still, because I learnt about the importance of taking care while in the lavatory, I have never once been caught by the paparazzi with an embarrassing trouser stain.

  What’s more, it means that, today, I do not concern myself with Dickensian theories and Victorian idealism when it comes to the question of business. I rely instead on common sense. For instance: if you have a product that people want to buy, you will do well. If it is too expensive, or ugly, then you will not. The end.

  I have some sound theories on investment, too. When times are good, put your savings in property, and when times are bad, put them in a high-interest account at the bank.

  Unfortunately, in the wake of Northern Rock, entrusting your money to the men in braces is more dangerous than using it to fund coups in Equatorial Guinea. And here’s the thing. It is impossible to predict which bank will fold next, which means it’s not safe to give your money to any of them. And because the police are too busy filling in health and safety forms to investigate burglaries, it is not safe to put it under the mattress either.

  Gold has been the traditional recourse of the terminally scared but that’s expensive at the moment. So’s art. Someone recently paid £17m for a painting of a fat jobcentre supervisor on a sofa, so we aren’t really going to get much more than a Hallmark greetings card with our life savings.

  Land’s a no-no too. Clever people whose economics teachers did not routinely wet themselves have already noticed that just 8 per cent of the world’s landmass is suitable for growing crops, and with the food crisis in full swing, much can be made from this.

  So, farm land in Britain has gone from less than £2,000 an acre a couple of years ago to nearly £9,000 an acre today. By the time you have found someone willing to sell, you’re going to end up spending all your life savings on an allotment.

  I have, therefore, been thinking about what
can be done, and I’m delighted to say, the answer is very enjoyable. If we are about to enter a period of great economic turmoil with bankers hurling themselves out of the Empire State Building and stockbrokers selling their children for medical experiments, money will become worthless. So you may as well spend it now on things that will make you happy. A Fairline Targa 52, for instance. Or a villa adjacent to Lake Como. Or a nice car.

  This, for once, really does bring me neatly to the semi-gullwing door of the Mercedes SLR McLaren Roadster.

  I am more familiar than most with the original coupé version, having driven one nonstop – apart from a health-and-safety-enforced break in Copenhagen (which wasn’t as long as the TV pictures suggested) – all the way from London to Oslo. It took twenty-four hours.

  Apart from the woeful brakes, I liked it very much. Unlike most hypercars, this one was not built by an enthusiast, in a shed, on an industrial estate, and as a result it never gave even the tiniest hint that it was about to break down or disintegrate or explode.

  It was also very, very fast. At one point, in Germany obviously, I hit 200mph. And there was more to come. This was, and remains, the fastest automatic car in the world.

  And that brings me on to its strongest suit. Because the engine was at the front, and it had an auto box, and because the dashboard was pretty much the same as it is in all Mercs, you never felt overwhelmed by the simple experience of getting in and doing up the seatbelt. In a Koenigsegg or a Zonda, your heart is thrashing about in your ribcage like a coked-up and cornered dog before you’ve even started the engine. But because the SLR felt so normal, you were relaxed, which made it easier to exploit the immense power from that 5.5-litre supercharged V8.

  Unfortunately, for McLaren anyway, the world’s super-rich heard what I had to say and promptly bought something else. Maybe because the McLaren race team outfits are so terrible, or perhaps because the SLR didn’t capture the heart in the way that a Ferrari can. Who knows. But the SLR was not a sales success and as it failed to achieve its targets we now have the Roadster.

  My God, it’s got presence. People suggest that if the devil were ever to pay us a visit, he’d have small horns and maybe some numbers in his barnet. But there is some evidence to suggest that he’s here now, with an SLR badge and no roof. And terrible, terrible brakes.

  Other car makers have got carbon ceramic discs to work properly, but McLaren, which I think was the first to put them on a road car, has not. They operate like a switch, doing nothing at all when you first press the pedal and then smashing your nose into the steering wheel when you press it a bit more.

  This is fine in a Formula One car when you never want to slow down ‘a bit’, but when parking, you do. And in the SLR McLaren, you can’t.

  In time, you do get used to them, in the same way that you can get used to having no arms. And when you do, the rest of the car is a big slice of bonkers joy.

  Some say that you can achieve much the same from a normal Mercedes SL. They say that the standard car comes with a folding metal roof, rather than a strip of canvas, and that it’s a third of the price and that it has more toys. But this is like saying, ‘Why buy a private jet when for so much less you could have a washing machine?’

  The McMerc feels so much more exciting, so much more like a racer, albeit a heavy and enormous one. Lumber is not a word you normally associate with a car like this, but that’s what it does. Lumber quickly. A Ferrari feels light and technical. A Koenigsegg feels like it isn’t finished. A Zonda feels like you’re on acid and you’ve fallen down some stairs. The SLR feels like Jonah Lomu. And the noise is extraordinary. No car sounds like this. It’s a big, dirty, bassy rumble. My daughter said it sounded like a big fart. She’s right. A massive, amplified fart from hell.

  It is unique. Nothing else combines genuine blitzkrieg power with such everyday normality. Seriously. As you are carried by the Devil’s Wind, you have the leather seats, the sat nav and all the usual Mercedes bits and pieces. My only real gripe in this department is the roof, which is only partly electric. ‘That’s to save weight,’ said the man from McLaren. Yeah, right.

  I liked this car even more than I liked the coupé; but normally, of course, I would never dream of urging anyone to actually buy one. And not just because of the penny-pinching roof mechanism and the braking system. I wouldn’t recommend it because if I had £350,000 sitting about, I’d use it to buy a bond of some sort.

  Now, though? Would you rather give your money to a banker so he can go bust with it or would you rather drive through the recession at 200mph in a big black Mercedes SLR McLaren?

  13 July 2008

  Eat my dust, Little England

  Jaguar XKR-S Coupé

  It’s hard to find a point in history when a man sound in mind and body could have bought a Jaguar. Certainly it wasn’t possible in the 1970s, when they were made either badly or not at all by a bunch of Trotskyites who spent most of the working day at the factory gates round a brazier, popping inside occasionally to leave their lunch in an inlet manifold and then going on strike again when a foreman asked them to take it out.

  There was even a time when the weak and stupid British Leyland management thought seriously about renaming Jaguar the Large Car Division. Hmm. I can see that someone might buy a piece of farm equipment from the People’s Tractor Factory, but that’s mostly because they’d starve or be shot if they bought something else. I cannot see, however, why anyone would want to drive round in a Large Car Division XJ12 when they could have a, er, Bavarian Motor Works 735i instead.

  Eventually, though, Jaguar’s management was sent off to live on plastic inconti-armchairs on the south coast, the workforce was given a clip round the ear by Mrs T and the company was rescued by Ford.

  And then, briefly, there was a time – it was 3.15pm on October 12 – when a sensible chap might have thought, ‘No. I won’t buy a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi or a wheelbarrow. I’m going to get one of those supercharged Jaguar XJRs.’

  Right up until tea time the next day, Jaguar even managed to do well in the JD Power customer satisfaction surveys. Although this result, you have to suspect, was born of amazement rather than solid build quality. ‘Jesus. I’ve bought a Jag and it’s got all the way home without exploding or turning inside out. And there isn’t a single sandwich in the inlet manifold.’ It’s for much the same reason that, at the same time, Skoda was doing well too.

  Sadly, the honeymoon didn’t last. Jaguar launched the S-type, which was about as relevant as Terry and June. And then the X-type, which was very nice. As well it should have been because it was a Ford Mondeo with a fancy radiator grille and a bigger price.

  To make matters worse, Jaguar had decided to shake off its wood’n’leather image by going into Formula One. Brilliant, except its cars, which were also Fords behind the green paint, either came last or crashed into one another. Then Ford ran out of money.

  The result is that, apart from at 3.15pm on October 12, the only people who have bought a Jaguar since about 1970 did so because they were buying something British. That’s not a good enough reason. That would be like someone from Ankara buying a car ‘because it’s Turkish’.

  Given the choice of two similar products, I’ll always buy the one with a Union Jack on the label. But who says, ‘No. I will not buy a Riva Aquarama speedboat. I shall buy this lump of dog dirt instead. Because it was made in Pontefract’?

  Of course, we know exactly who says that sort of thing. Golfers. The ruddy-faced little Englanders who refer to everyone by their initials and become aroused whenever anyone mentions Enoch Powell.

  Now, though, since Jaguar was offloaded to the Indians, it is very obvious that the little Englanders have had enough. They could just about stomach Jag being American-owned. But with Mr Patel in the hot seat? ‘Better have another G and T, Maurice. I think I’m going to have a coronary.’

  You must have noticed the result. In the past few months the whiff of the nineteenth hole has been lifted from the Jag range. No
longer do you open the door to be knocked senseless by a nauseating cloud of Eau de Belfry.

  The smell of Nick Faldo’s trousers has now settled on the Lexus range, and Jags, for the first time since the E-type was given a V12, are being bought by people you’d have round for dinner. And so, with a spring in our step and hope in our hearts, we arrive at the door of the Jaguar XKR.

  When it was launched, our heads told us that it was a very fine car. Faster, more practical and cheaper than the Aston Martin V8 Vantage. And not exactly a minger, either. Of course, the power of the badge is strong in us all, so while our heads said Jag our hearts said Aston and off we all toddled to buy the Vantage.

  Why not? Astons were all glamour and James Bond, and Jaguars were full of Jim Davidson.

  That, though, has now changed. Astons are bought largely by people who can’t even park properly, and the XKR is an extremely good way of saying, ‘I know I’m not James Bond. I’m not having a midlife crisis. I just wanted a good-looking two-seater and I bought this one because it’s the best.’

  It is. I recently said that 15 per cent of me wants an XKR convertible, but as each day goes by, that climbs. It’s up to 36 per cent now and that’s the point when you go on the website to see what colours are available. Green, I’m thinking. With a fawn hood.

  The only problem is the engine. When it was designed in 1435, 400bhp was lots. But since then the Germans have been engaged in a power war and now we have the Audi RS6 wading into the fray with 572bhp. That makes the Jag’s 416bhp look weedy and vegetarian.

  I know that, as we speak, a 500bhp 5-litre Jag V8 is being tested, but it won’t be here for a year. So you either have to buy a Merc or a BMW. Or you have to think, ‘Actually, with fuel costing more than lobster, maybe 416bhp isn’t so bad …’