Really? Read online

  You know the Space Shuttle. The pictures would suggest that it lumbered off the launchpad as though it were getting out of bed after a heavy night, but nothing could be further from the truth. When the restraining bolts were released and those 37m-horsepower engines could do their thing, it exploded upwards so vigorously that it was doing 120mph before its tail had cleared the gantry.

  Anyone familiar with the Nissan GT-R would call that ‘a bit pedestrian’. Maybe on a sweeping ribbon of tarmac in the Scottish Highlands on a dry, hot, sticky day the McLaren P1 could just about keep up. But it’s doubtful. And what makes this so extraordinary is that the Nissan has four seats and a big boot and to the casual observer appears to be ‘just a car’.

  I have no idea why Nissan makes it. It costs a little over £78,000, so the margins must be small. So is the volume. Which means the company probably makes more money each year from its factory-floor vending machines. And it’s not as though the GT-R creates any form of meaningful halo for Nissan’s other cars. Nobody in the world has ever said: ‘Ooh, I admire the GT-R’s ability to get round the Nürburgring in four seconds so I shall buy a Juke immediately.’ The GT-R sits in the Nissan line-up in the same way as a Fabergé egg would sit on the shelves of your local Lidl.

  I suspect Nissan makes the GT-R primarily to keep its engineers awake and loyal. Most companies put photographs of their employees of the month on a wall in reception. But at Nissan, if you do good work on the rear-light cluster of the dreary Kumquat SUV, you are allowed to develop a differential for the GT-R.

  That’s great, but how do you reward your brightest and best when there will be no new GT-R for at least five years? Simple. You let them make the existing car even better.

  This recently resulted in the Nismo version. I have not driven it but I gather from speaking to the hollowed-out, mumbling wrecks who have that it’s almost stupid in its ability to bend, break and then eat the laws of physics.

  I’m also told that while it works extremely well on a track, it’s far too raw to work on a road. Think of it, then, as a scuba suit. You need it if you want to look at a turtle, but it doesn’t really work on the Tube or in meetings with clients.

  So now Nissan has come up with the Track Edition, which is supposed to be a halfway house. You get the standard car’s V6 twin-turbo engine and the standard car’s interior fixtures and fittings. But you get the Nismo’s handling tweaks. Which include this: glue to supplement the spot-welds and make the body even stiffer.

  This is the sort of thing that makes an enthusiast of the brand need to repair to the lavatory for a little ‘me time’. To the people who populate GT-R internet forums a car that uses glue as well as spot-welds for added stiffness is way beyond Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson in a bath of warm milk.

  This is all part of the GT-R legend. It’s a car that is built in a hermetically sealed factory and has tyres full of nitrogen because normal air is too unpredictable. It uses an engine that’s built by one man and is mounted out of kilter to the transmission so that when you accelerate and the torque causes it to rock backwards, all is in perfect harmony. No one can tell if any of this stuff actually makes any difference. But knowing the car was built this way makes its fans priapic.

  There’s a problem, though. Because the body is now so stiff and the suspension is so unforgiving, the car is completely undriveable on the road. It’s so bad that after one run from London to Oxford and back I parked it in my garage and have not even looked at it since.

  There is no give. At all. Drive over a manhole cover and you get some idea of what it might be like to be involved in a plane crash. You actually feel the top of your spine bouncing off the inside of your skull.

  Jimmy Carr was in the passenger seat and after less than half a mile he asked if the satnav was programmed only to take the occupants to the nearest chiropractor.

  But I wasn’t really listening because the Track Edition was serving up another unwanted party piece: any minor camber change in the road surface causes it to veer violently left or right. I’m always hesitant to say that a car is dangerous, because it’s a legal minefield, but this one gets bloody close. Twice in just an hour I very nearly had an accident because of the sudden and unexpected changes in direction.

  It wouldn’t have been a big accident because it happens mostly at slow speed but it would have been annoying and embarrassing explaining to the driver whose car I’d hit why I’d suddenly driven into his door for no reason.

  Naturally, you’d expect that on a track there would be some upside to these issues – but I can’t answer that because driving this car to a racing circuit to find out would be too uncomfortable and too fraught with danger.

  One American magazine found that the standard car can generate 0.97g in a corner and the Track Edition 1.02g. That’s not much of an improvement, and when you factor in the fact that the track was stickier when it tested the new car, it’s not really an improvement at all.

  It’s no faster in a straight line either because it has the same engine. In fact, it may even be slower over a quarter of a mile because it will spend most of its time veering left and right. The normal GT-R can and will go from A to B on a drag strip in the shortest possible distance. Which is a straight line.

  Still, you might imagine that because the Track Edition is compromised so badly, it will be cheaper. Not so, I’m afraid. It is in fact about £10,500 more expensive.

  So we are left here with a rather tragic conclusion. The standard GT-R is a five-star car. It is one of the very, very best cars in the world. And yet this track-day abomination gets no stars at all. Because it’s pretty much useless.

  I’ll sign off, then, with a simple message to Nissan. If you feel the need to tinker with your masterpiece again, stick to the styling. Because that’s the one area where a little bit of TLC wouldn’t go amiss. Everything else: leave it alone.

  20 December 2015

  I was ready to wrestle a fire-breathing raver, not an IT geek

  Audi R8 V10 Plus

  In Italy, or Spain, or America, or anywhere but here, really, when you fill an expensive and fast car with petrol you are approached by people who want to tell you how lovely it is. They smile and they purr and then ask if it’d be all right for the children to have their pictures taken in the driving seat.

  Things are rather different in ‘It’s all right for some’ Britain, where some bloke invariably says: ‘I bet you don’t get many miles to the gallon out of that.’ Or ‘I can get more in the boot of my Austin Maestro,’ or – and this is the one I’ve always hated most of all – ‘Where the hell can you ever drive a car like that?’

  The answer is: ‘Well, I’m very rich, obviously, so I can hire a racetrack.’ But instead we smile sweetly and try our hardest not to put the nozzle down his trousers and set him on fire.

  He is quite right, though. You can’t really open up a supercar these days because the bitter and twisted, mealy-mouthed Maestro-driving caravan and cycling enthusiasts have taken over the town halls. I was up in Staffordshire last weekend tootling about in my old stomping ground and, on the A515, which goes from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all via various places that only mean anything to me, there were regular speed cameras in all the villages and average-speed cameras on the bits in between.

  And to make matters worse, this fast and really rather good road is now governed by a 50mph speed limit. A speed that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have designated as pathetic. He’d have been right. It is pathetic: 50mph is for animals.

  This ridiculous attitude to speed is catching on all around the world. Even the French have completely lost their sense of humour about a bit of flat-out screamery on the autoroutes. And I haven’t found a stretch of derestricted autobahn for years.

  Which brings us back to our friend in the cardigan-and-Maestro combination and his question: ‘What’s the point of a 1,000 brake horsepower, mid-engined, fire-breathing rip-snorter when you are forced to travel at the same speed as a dog or a rabb
it?’

  He is completely missing the point because supercars are not supposed to be driven at 5,000 miles an hour round the Nürburgring. That’s what a Subaru or a Volkswagen Golf R is for. Supercars are for doing 3mph round Harrods.

  If you try to go any faster than this, you will crash. Which is why, when you fire up YouTube and ask it to find some amusing supercar crashes, they invariably show a Ferrari or a Lamborghini whizzing into a bus stop or a lamppost or some other bit of urban street furniture.

  You don’t see them crashing into trees and hedges because they’re to be found in the countryside, and in the countryside no one’s looking. And if no one’s looking, what’s the point of putting your foot down in a supercar? Or even driving one in the first place?

  Supercars are tricky little sods. If you put your foot all the way to the floor in a normal hatchback, it will pick up speed. If you put your foot all the way to the floor in a supercar, it will spear into a bus stop. The acceleration these days is very vivid indeed.

  That’s why my current favourite supercar is the Lamborghini Aventador. It may not be the best for going round Stowe Corner and it may not have the best brakes in the world, but for snarling round Knightsbridge at two in the morning it’s fantastic. It’s just so amazing to behold. And that is the whole point.

  The Audi R8 isn’t amazing to behold. It’s an odd one, this. It’s a mid-engined two-seater with 1 million brake horsepower, a V10 and four-wheel drive. It really is a Lamborghini underneath. And yet Audi, which owns Lamborghini, has done everything in its power to make it sober and refined and comfortable.

  Mostly, it’s done a very good job. In the socialist boroughs of London, where the worker johnnies only repair potholes with speed humps, it rides like a Lincoln Town Car from the 1970s. It’s also roomy, for two people, and quiet.

  There are some issues, though. No one looks at it. And if no one is looking at it and you can’t drive it quickly, why put up with the tiny boot? Because it will appreciate in value? No, it won’t. The last R8, albeit with a V8 engine, had the same problem and is now about £40,000.

  The biggest issue, however, is the tech. I commend Audi for trying something new; the instrument binnacle is a computer screen. I commend it also for nearly making it work. But everything else is just too complex. It’s a big problem with cars these days. How do you make all the electronic add-ons intuitive and intelligible? RAF pilots train for years before they are allowed in a Eurofighter and, let me tell you, there’s way more stuff to learn in an R8. Way more.

  I’d learn how to shuffle tracks on my iPod or answer the phone or input a satnav address and then, after I learned some more things, such as how to change the interior lighting, I’d forget the first stuff again. This meant I spent most of my time behind the wheel wearing my reading glasses to peer at the screen and swearing gently when I got it all wrong.

  The satnav is an issue too. It’s set up in a widescreen layout, which means you can see where Wales is, and New York, but not how to get to the street that is half a mile to the north.

  In other words, Audi has tried hard to make the R8 an every-day car – it even has cup-holders – but it hasn’t quite succeeded. The suspension isn’t quite right either. No matter what setting you choose, the car has a curious vertical bouncing gait, which is a bit annoying. Oh, and on the motorway it would sometimes have an electronic burp and make what felt like a botched gear change. If I wanted gremlins, I’d buy a Lamborghini, thank you very much.

  Which is pretty much how I feel about the Audi. If I wanted a supercar, I’d buy its virtually identical brother: the Lamborghini Huracán. In lime green. With orange seats.

  I can see what Audi’s tried to do with the R8 and it’d be a clever trick if it had pulled it off: a car that can corner at 2 million miles an hour, go from 0 to 100,000 in a quarter of a second and then become a Golf for the ride home. But it hasn’t quite managed it.

  And even if it had, I’m not sure anyone would be interested because what we really want from a supercar are lasers and photon torpedoes. Not cup-holders and a Comfort setting on the suspension menu.

  27 December 2015

  Remember the rolling Robins? Well, I’ve a confession to make

  Reliant Robin

  To judge from the letters I get and the remarks in the street, it seems the most memorable thing I did on Top Gear was a short segment about the Reliant Robin. You may remember: I drove it around Sheffield and it kept falling over.

  Well, now’s the time to come clean. A normal Reliant Robin will not roll unless a drunken rugby team is on hand. Or it’s windy. But in a headlong drive to amuse and entertain, I’d asked the backroom boys to play around with the differential so that the poor little thing rolled over every time I turned the steering wheel.

  Naturally, the health-and-safety department was very worried about this and insisted that the car be fitted with a small hammer that I could use, in case I was trapped after the roll, to break what was left of the glass. Not the best idea ever, because I distinctly remember seeing the hammer in question travelling past my face at about 2,000mph during the first roll. After that I invited the health-and-safety man to eff off home, with the hammer in his bottom.

  Since then, I’ve used similarly doctored and similarly hammer-free Reliant Robins in countless games of car football during our live shows. And as a result, there’s probably no one on the planet who’s rolled a car quite as much as I have.

  It makes me sad, if I’m honest, because rolling a Reliant Robin on purpose is a bit like putting a tortoise on its back. It’s an act of wanton cruelty. When you see it lying there with its three little wheels whizzing round helplessly, you are compelled to rush over and put it the right way up.

  I feel similarly aggrieved when people – and everyone does this – calls it a Robin Reliant. That’s like saying you worship Christ Jesus or that you drive an Acclaim Triumph. Or that your favourite Fifa presidential hopeful is Sexwale Tokyo.

  I’ll be honest with you. I really like the Reliant Robin. I know that Del Boy did his best to turn three-wheelers into a national joke. And I know Jasper Carrott went even further – the bastard. But the truth is that the Reliant Robin has a rorty-sounding 848cc engine and the sort of snickety gearbox that makes you lament the passing of the proper manual.

  Plus, it’s an absolute hoot to drive, partly because it’s light and nimble and partly because passers-by are genuinely fond of it. It’s like going about your business in one of the Queen’s corgis. Mostly, though, it’s a hoot to drive because you know, if something goes wrong, you will be killed immediately. There’ll be no lingering and agonizing spell in hospital. No priest with his last rites. One minute you’ll be bouncing up and down wearing a childlike grin and the next you’ll be meat.

  In fact, I like the Reliant Robin so much that when Richard Hammond, James May, Andy Wilman and I formed our new production company, I rushed out immediately and bought one as a company car. Interestingly, the other three did exactly the same thing. So now we have a fleet sitting in the executive car-parking spaces at our offices and we love them very much. Especially the fact that they cost us less than £15,000. That’s £15,000 for four cars.

  Of course, they’ve all been fettled to suit our tastes. May’s is an ivory-white estate model that is standard in every way, right down to the chromed overriders. Hammond’s is a lovely chocolate brown with whitewall tyres. Wilman’s is finished in racing green and inside is fitted with a wooden dashboard and lambswool seat covers – as befits, he says, the chairman of our enterprise. Mine – a coupé, naturally – is finished in winner blue and fitted with an Alcantara dash and quad tailpipes. Minilite wheels complete the vision of sportiness.

  A lot of people think we have bought the cars purely as some kind of weird publicity stunt but, actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Because we really do use them on a daily basis. Or, to be honest, we try to use them …

  My first attempt had to be abandoned, because the engine decided t
hat tickover should be about 5,500rpm. Which meant that in fourth gear I was doing about 80mph without putting my foot on the accelerator. I say ‘about’, because the speedometer wasn’t working. For an accurate reading I’ll have to wait for a letter from the speed-camera people.

  Hammond’s has no functioning fuel gauge and he would therefore like to apologize to everyone on London’s Cromwell Road for running out of petrol the other night while turning right into Earls Court Road. Apparently, the chaos he caused was quite spectacular.

  Wilman’s hasn’t actually gone anywhere at all because, as he tried to put it into reverse, the gear lever came off in his hand. I’m not sure what’s wrong with May’s. He tried to explain but after four hours I nodded off slightly.

  We didn’t give up, though. And the other night I went all the way from our old offices in Notting Hill to our new offices, appropriately enough, in Power Road, in Chiswick, west London, and then – get this – all the way back to a party in Chelsea. Where the car spent the night, because its starter motor had broken.

  Hammond said he’d come to the rescue but, annoyingly, his ignition barrel came out as he turned the key, and Wilman was of no use because the gear lever popped out again when he went for first. So I rang May, who turned up in his Ferrari.

  Anyway, on my trek across London I learned many things about my Reliant Robin. First of all, to get my right shoulder inside, I have to drive with the window down, which makes life a bit chilly. And there’s not much I can do to rectify that issue, because while there is a knob on the dash that says ‘Heater’, it doesn’t seem to do anything. The only other knob says ‘Choke’. Pull that and immediately the whole car fills with petrol fumes.

  But despite the cold and the likelihood of it suddenly becoming very hot, the Reliant Robin is brilliant to drive. The steering is extremely light, possibly because there’s only one front wheel to turn, the acceleration is great, for anyone who’s used to, say, a horse, and in a typical London parking bay it’s so small and looks so lost and lonely you are tempted to give it a carrot or some other treat.