Born to Be Riled Read online

  When the French government tried to increase tolls on lorry drivers, they blockaded the autoroutes.

  When the Maggon came up with the poll tax, people set fire to Trafalgar Square.

  When the Italians are asked to pay VAT they lose all their books, remind the bloke from the tax office that he’s ‘family’ and pop into town for a coffee.

  I suspect that inner-city America has become so out of control that the only way you can be marked out as a law-abiding citizen is to obey every rule that comes along no matter how daft or ill conceived.

  And if you want the most ill-conceived law of the lot, you need look no further than the new speed limits. This is not some trifling rule about crossing your legs. This is life and death.

  An entire generation of Americans has grown up knowing that it’s entirely possible to die while driving and coast to a halt before you hit anything.

  Roads that are wider than they are long were subject to a blanket 55mph speed limit, meaning that you could get in the back for a snooze or perform complex operations on your passenger’s adenoids without fear of crashing.

  Your car could weave from lane to lane but this was no big deal because the guy behind had all the time in the world to get out his car’s manual, see where the cruise control off button was and take avoiding action.

  But now, most states post a 75mph speed limit, meaning that it all happens so much faster.

  The drivers still allow their hearts to beat once every fifteen minutes or so, but they don’t realize they’re teetering on the edge of a holocaust.

  And the cars don’t help either. In recent years, American automotive design has leapt to a standard only seen before in Italy – the latest Chrysler line-up is staggeringly good-looking – but dynamically, they’re still in the dark ages.

  On my recent trip I rented a number of different cars, which ranged from foul to the Buick Le Sabre.

  This compact sedan is 22 feet long and 14 feet wide and I don’t doubt was easily capable of handling 55mph, while returning four or even five miles to the gallon.

  But now, the dowager is expected to heave itself along at 75 and it just can’t cope. The suspension is way, way softer than marshmallow which means there is no jarring but even the smallest pebble causes the car to rock sickeningly for miles afterwards.

  Ask it to handle a corner – even a gentle one on an interstate – and it just won’t. I’d have more luck getting my two-year-old daughter to speak Greek. Turn the wheel and it adopts a crazy angle but doesn’t really change direction.

  After a mile or so, the tyres start to squeal but it’s still going in a straight line. No kidding, I’ve driven hover-crafts which respond more quickly to messages from the helm. This is a hateful car.

  The only time I felt even remotely safe in it was outside Arizona’s schools, where lollipop ladies erect temporary width restrictions and impose a 15mph speed limit.

  As I gratefully slammed on the anchors and wound the car down to this more sedate pace, I even had time to think that here, at last, was a law that made sense.

  I also thought that if you’re going to America soon, do not allow them to rent you a Buick Le Sabre, and that Montana should be avoided at all costs.

  You see, in Montana, they’ve done away with the speed limits altogether.

  Only tyrants build good cars

  Last week, Michael Aspel jumped out of a cupboard, holding a big red book, and announced that I was to be the subject of This Is Your Life.

  My mind was in a whirl. I have no friends who work in television, so they can’t wheel any celebrities through the sliding doors. I have no war medals. I do nothing for charity. I’m only 36. I haven’t done anything yet.

  I was completely at a loss for words which, as it turned out, was good practice because three days later Suzuki delivered one of their new X-90s to my house.

  Ordinarily, the road test starts to form immediately in my mind. With normal cars, I’m starting to think about who might be tempted by such a machine and what sort of things would interest them. Should I major on performance, or style, or economy or roominess?

  And that’s what bothered me with the Suzuki. Exactly who would be tempted by this weird little car? Me? No. My mother? Absolutely not. The woman in Safeway? Michael Jackson? The Ayatollah? My bank manager?

  It’s taken a couple of days to work out that in fact no one will be tempted by it for the simple reason that it’s the most stupid-looking piece of machinery of all time.

  It is almost as though the designer dreamed up the front to a point half-way down the roof and, to save time, did exactly the same with the back. Were it not for the lights, you could drive this car forwards or backwards and no one would be any the wiser.

  In essence, it’s a two-seat, targa-roofed version of the rather nice Suzuki Vitara. They cost about the same, have the same 1600cc engine and are aimed, I guess, at the same sort of people – hairdressers.

  But no hair cuttist I know would dream of buying the X-90. And that brings me back full circle.

  Now, Suzuki is a large and clever organization so how on earth did this absurd little car ever slip through the net? Simple. They had a meeting.

  If I ran a company, meetings would be banned. Meetings are for people who are under-employed. Have a meeting and you’ll end up with the Child Support Agency. Or an ECU. Or Birmingham city centre.

  I went to a meeting for the first time in years last week, and was staggered at how little we achieved in five hours.

  This was entirely my fault, but then there’s always someone like me in a meeting who has an opinion on everything and wishes to share it.

  Trouble is, there’s always someone with an equally large mouth who disagrees, and that’s it. Everyone else is left to do their fingernails while two people call each other names and consider throwing water at one another.

  When the bar opened we called a halt, decided we were doing a good job, and no conclusions were needed. Had we been running Suzuki, the X-90 project would have sailed through unscathed.

  I remember in my early days as a reporter for the Rotherham Advertiser, covering the local parish council meetings. One, in particular, spent 45 minutes wondering whether they should have a glass or a plastic water jug, and ended up deciding to have both.

  In the early days of motoring, car firms were run by one man with a vision. Colin Chapman founded Lotus so he could make small, light, agile cars. Sir William Lyons knew exactly what a Jaguar should be. Ferdinand Porsche was a proponent of air-cooled engines slung out at the back. Henry Ford wanted to pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap.

  Now look at Japan. With the exception of Honda, all oriental car firms were founded by large corporations whose sole aim is to keep the shareholders happy. Hundreds – if not thousands – of people are involved in every decision, and the management lives in constant fear for its jobs.

  Had Suzuki been a dictatorship, the X-90 would never have happened. Mr Big Cheese would have strolled through his designers’ office, seen the drawings, and fired everyone responsible.

  But in committee culture, it’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes. No one dares speak out and the project gains so much momentum it becomes unstoppable.

  And if even if someone like me does stick his hand up, the people responsible will fight back. Result: deadlock.

  Europe’s car firms are in the same boat today. All the founding figures are dead and committees have taken over. That’s how we got the Scorpio and the Vectra.

  Single ruling figures are out of the equation. No one is prepared to trust gut feeling and instinct any more, because in the meeting the guys from the market research department demonstrated that the Scorpio, or the X-90 or whatever, had clinicked well.

  Then the designer stands up and explains how the push-me-pull-you look will be in for 1998. Or that the wide-mouth frog face is a happening thing in 1996.

  Rubbish. The motor show finishes today and few would disagree that the most exciting car there was TVR�
�s new 7 litre V12 coupé.

  It looks and goes like it does because TVR is run by one man who dreams things up on the back of a fag packet and sets fire to anyone who thinks he’s wrong.

  Democracy. Pah. Never trust anything invented by the Greeks.

  The principality of toilets

  It seems to me that the closed circuit cameras which are sprouting out of every town centre vantage-point these days are pretty much useless.

  Everyone I’ve ever seen on a still from a security camera looks like Cyrano de Bergerac. And he always appears to be standing at the counter in a bank, brandishing a banana. This, I’m fairly sure, is not a crime. Either that or the supposed criminal has had the foresight to wear a parka with a hood – so we can only see his preposterous nose. And the fruit.

  I mean, if you were out robbing, you would be fairly sure that some kind of video recording was being made, so you’d wear a crash helmet or a trilby or anything which would thwart subsequent police enquiries. And if they did come round to your house with some difficult questions, you’d only need say that you were elsewhere at the time but you had seen Gerard Depardieu in town that afternoon, looking a bit shifty. Sure, there are some cameras, way up high, overlooking the most unlikely spots, but the footage from one of these was played the other day on one of the countless new crime programmes and the thieves looked like small mice with enormous conks.

  It was all very dramatic, as they ram-raided their way out of a car park with policemen trying to kick in the windows, but the viewer hadn’t a hope of identifying the baddies. And that makes the cameras pointless.

  Now I’m not one of these weird beard lefties who thinks that Sony is a Luciferian code for some kind of Orwellian police state. If you’re just walking along, picking your nose a bit and scratching your backside, who cares if it’s all caught on Beta?

  The cameras are only there to nail people from the sewers – thieves, murderers and blackguards. But they won’t work unless we take a leaf out of Monaco’s book.

  This tiny principality, just two miles long by as little as 300 yards wide, is watched over by 160 security cameras, not counting the privately run video monitors in car parks and entrance halls.

  Coming out of my hotel every morning, there were two which could watch me all the way to the door of the car park and, once inside, there were cameras on every floor and in each of the three lifts. As A.A. Gill wrote in Tatler last month, you don’t need a holiday camera in Monte Carlo; just stop off at the border on your way out and ask for edited highlights of your visit.

  But onanists beware! If they go to the trouble of fitting cameras in car park lifts, you can be sure your nocturnal habits are being monitored too.

  Now, there is no crime in Monaco. Half the residents may have made their millions through some sort of rule-bending exercise, but there is no petty theft. One lady regularly walks home alone from the casino after nightfall wearing jewellery worth $3 million. And she’s never been touched. People say that this is because of the cameras, but that’s nonsense. And neither is it because there’s one policeman for every 40 residents. Sure, with hardly any crime to solve, they have nothing to do all day except enforce a dress code. Try walking through Monaco with the hood on your parka pulled up and see how far you get. I’ll give you a tenner for every yard you manage before Clouseau interferes. These guys won’t even let you shuffle along head down, with your collar turned up. They’re like stage managers, making sure you look good for the cameras. And if you refuse to look up, they will escort you politely back to France, where you can convalesce.

  Every night, we watched them salute drivers of Porsches and Ferraris and hassle anyone in a dodgy-looking van. Hitchhiking is banned. If you don’t look right you don’t get in.

  And now we’re getting nearer the real reason why there is no crime in Monaco – no riff-raff. Before you go and live there, you have to produce a letter from your bank explaining that you have enough money to live on for the rest of your life. And, let’s face it, people with £20 million in the bank are not big on mugging. Couple that to the police with their anti-shabby laws and the cameras, and then you get a crime-free state. Lovely. And so simple.

  Except for one small thing. Monaco is a lavatory and if I could find the chain… I’d pull it.

  Clarkson the rentboy finally picks up a Ferrari

  Two years ago, I drove a car which made my life hell. The Ferrari 355.

  Oh I’d driven all sorts of supercars before, including a great many Ferraris, and they’d been fun. But I hadn’t actually considered buying one.

  Frankly, even if I could have afforded such a thing, I’d have needed another car to handle the days when it was wet, or when I had to carry more than one person, or when I put my back out. On top of all this, super-cars tend to be as brittle and as vulnerable as baubles on a Christmas tree.

  All these things apply, of course, to the 355 but it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted one. I needed one. It was like meeting the girl who one day will be your wife. Friends may point out that she has spots and a temper and costs a fortune to run but you don’t worry about practicality when you’re in love. And I was completely smitten with the 355.

  The first step was to leave London. People think I gave up 15 years of fun and games in the capital for the sake of the children but that’s not entirely accurate. I did it because I needed a garage.

  But the new house meant that my wife had to ricochet between Peter Jones and Osborne & Little, spending what little money we had on curtains and fridge-freezers.

  Every day I’d come home and there’d be another cardboard box in the yard, another poignant reminder that the day when I could buy a Ferrari had just been pushed back.

  I became desperate. I took my box full of foreign banknotes to the bank and raised £47. I looked down the back of the sofa, and went through old coat pockets. I considered holding up a sub post office. I even started doing advertisements on local radio.

  But it wasn’t until my wife found me watching a documentary on rent boys in King’s Cross that she ordered me to buy the damn car and cheer up.

  Fifty-seven minutes later, I was in a Ferrari dealership matching carpets up to bits of leather and wondering how it would all look when teamed with scarlet paint.

  It seems just about all first-time Ferrari buyers choose a red car, even though you can have blue, green, black or yellow. The choice of interior specification is even more limited though.

  I’d always wanted cream sports seats, which add £2000 to the price and, despite the salesman’s misgivings, that’s what we settled on, along with carpets the colour of claret.

  And so, after an hour of toing and froing, the order form was brought out and I found myself on my knees, putting the shakiest signature of all time to the document.

  And yes, I really was on my knees because there is no chair on the customer’s side of a Ferrari salesman’s desk.

  Rowan Atkinson complained bitterly about being asked to wait until his cheque cleared when he bought a 456 recently but I had no worries as I handed over the £5000 deposit. Now there’d be no going back.

  And there wasn’t, because in the garage right now is a bright red Ferrari 355 GTS – that’s the one with the lift-out roof panel. The GTB is a hardtop, and the Spyder is a full convertible for hairdressers from Altrincham.

  The first month with my 355 was, to be honest, disappointing. First, it had come without a radio. Second, it felt strange to be driving my own car after years in press demonstrators.

  And third, it needed to be run in, which meant keeping the revs below 4000. That’s OK on a motorway, where in sixth gear you can do 90, but on country lanes overtaking was nigh on impossible.

  The 355’s five-valve-per-cylinder V8 revs so quickly that in a full noise take-off I needed to change gear every half a second.

  After I’d covered a thousand miles, the car was taken back to the dealership for its free first service and for a radio to be fitted. It’s an Alpine by the way, and it’s
£800 worth of junk.

  Today, it’s heading towards the 2000 mile mark, which is a bit of a worry because I’ve told the insurers I’ll only do 5000 a year. In exchange, they only charge me £850.

  That’s cheap, but the fuel bills are not – it does 18mpg – and nor will future services be all that Asdaish. In order to change the cam belts, which must be done regularly, they have to take the engine out of the car.

  Nevertheless, to date it hasn’t put a foot wrong. Oh, the carbon fibre seats squeak against the back of the leather-lined cockpit and the roof panel creaks and groans, but when the revs build up past 6000, you really don’t care.

  The point is that this supposedly brittle piece of millimetre-perfect engineering appears to have been hewn from a solid piece of granite.

  And best of all, I still love it. I’ve learnt to keep the suspension in its comfort setting, knowing that it automatically switches to sports mode if I start to go quickly.

  And I now know how easy it is to graze the undersides on speed bumps, but let me tell you this: when the road is empty and the sun is shining, there is no better car on the planet.

  I’ve always said I’d sell it to pay for the boy child’s school fees but I’ve changed my mind. Sorry Fin but you’ll have to go through the state system like everyone else.

  Hate mail and wheeler-deelers

  A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Birmingham city centre is a sort of culinary black hole with few decent restaurants and even fewer hotels.

  Harmless stuff, you’d have thought, especially as it’s true, but the locals went ape. Indeed, I am actually looking forward to the postal strike so the supply of vitriol is halted.

  The leader of the city council, who has extraordinary hair, led the charge, suggesting that I shouldn’t peddle such insulting rubbish in a London-based newspaper. Ooooh. Touchy.

  She went on: ‘So, if you ever do venture north of Watford Mr Clarkson, I would be happy to show you round Birmingham and the error of your ways.’