Round the Bend Read online

  That said, with the Fiat expected to cost £13,500 when it goes on sale, the Renault is cheaper to buy. In theory. The list price is £11,550 but if you want any luxuries at all – and you will if you are downsizing from a Range Rover – you’d better break out the Treasury bonds because just about everything is an optional extra. You even have to pay extra if you want it to drive well.

  The standard car comes with a relatively soft chassis, which is fine if you want a shopping trolley. But if that’s what you want, why bother with the Twingosport? Why not just go down to Asda one night with some bolt-cutters?

  To make the car really fly, you need the £650 Cup chassis, which is lower and firmer. With this, the little Renault is tremendous. Better, in fact, than the Fiat. But the price you pay, apart from the £650, is a ride that would drive you absolutely mad.

  It’s hard, then, to recommend the Renault. It’s got clever rear seats that move about and the dashboard is deliciously mad. But then the Fiat is a joyous place to sit as well. And you can buy it with an SS pack that takes it up to 160bhp.

  It’s a bit of a one-horse race, if I’m honest. The Renault might be in tune with the times. But the Fiat sings the same song more loudly and better. And, of course, being Italian it’ll have become a household appliance by the time the economy is back to normal. So you can get back to your Range Rover.

  26 October 2008

  Don’t go breaking my bones, baby

  Alfa Romeo Brera S 3.2 JTS V6

  Obviously, you can’t buy a Toyota Prius. Quite apart from the acid rain caused by mining the nickel for its battery, and the fact it uses an enormous amount of fuel to cover incredibly short distances, it looks absolutely stupid.

  And, interestingly, it looks absolutely stupid on purpose. You see, car makers have got it into their heads that cars that run on holistic, fair-trade technology should not look like normal cars. We saw this first of all with the silly Honda Insight and we see it now with the Prius.

  There is, of course, a very good reason for this. It’s because the people who are interested in bear-friendly motoring tend to look like you and I. There is no way of knowing as we walk past them in the street that they have bought a wood-burning stove that runs on melted-down bankers and limbs hacked from McDonald’s executives.

  However, if they have a weird-looking Prius, they stand out. So we can tell they care about the world. It is part of their uniform, worn in much the same way that murderers always have face hair of some sort. So that other murderers can nod, knowingly, when they pass in a crowd.

  We see this in all walks of life. Enthusiastic homosexuals, for instance, favour the white vest. People who holiday in Cornwall sport Boden swimming trunks. Golfers enjoy dressing as Rupert Bear. And green people have their odd-looking cars.

  The funny thing is that by demanding they stand out, they will actually hurt the world. This is because normal people like you and me don’t particularly want to drive about in something that appears to have been designed by the Northampton branch of the Society for the Mad. So we buy a normal car instead.

  Take the G-Wiz as another example. I am sure there are lots of people who’d love a silent urban runabout that’s easy to park and uses no fuel. Who wouldn’t? But you’d have to have the sartorial ambitions of an American tourist to sit in a Wiz and think, ‘Yes! I look good.’ Because you don’t. You look ridiculous.

  The fact is that you would not wilfully buy a horrible garden ornament for your front lawn. You would not deliberately select an ugly sofa, and it is the act of a madman, or more usually a nervous wife, to look at all the available au pairs from Finland and think, ‘Hmmm. I’ll take the moose.’ Looks, in everything, are key.

  Take my wife’s Aston Martin Vantage. This is an extraordinarily beautiful car but, that said, when viewed head-on it appears to have no wheels and as a result it looks a little bit awkward. Therefore, and this I know makes me sound slightly strange, I ensure it’s always parked at an angle in the yard so that whenever I see it from a window it pleases me.

  Other really good-looking cars on the market today are the Lamborghini Gallardo, which is one of the best-looking cars ever made in fact, the Jaguar XKR convertible – especially in dark grey – the Alfa Romeo 8C, the Citroën C5 estate, the Lexus IS 200, the drophead Chevrolet Corvette C6, the Dodge Challenger and the Maserati Quattroporte.

  I’ve half a mind to include the Volkswagen Scirocco in this list but two things stop me. First, there is rather too much strangeness about its proportions, and second, I have got it into my head that it will be bought exclusively by people who like wife-swapping. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it will appeal to those who live in executive housing estates, and in my mind everyone who lives in such places spends all of their time sleeping with their next-door neighbour.

  Whatever, before you all reach for the Basildon Bond to say ‘it’s all right for some’ and you don’t have a millionty pounds to spend on a set of wheels, I should point out that cars do not have to be expensive to be handsome. The Smart is a fine example. So is the Mini, if you avoid the terrible Clubman. And both these will be much kinder to the environment, and your wallet, than a stupid Prius.

  And, finally, we arrive at the subject of this morning’s missive from the hills – the Alfa Romeo Brera.

  Oooh, it’s a looker. Yes, it sits in Alfa’s history like a goat would sit in a tank of tropical fish, but while it may not have many traditional Alfa details, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s the sort of car that makes you have to bite the back of your hand to stop you crying out.

  Unfortunately, there has always been one rather enormous problem with the Brera. How can I put this? It isn’t very fast. In fact, it is very slow. Slower than a dog with no legs. You don’t need a stopwatch to measure its 0 to 60mph time, or even a calendar. You need a geologist. Someone who thinks the speed of Everest’s drift westwards is impressive.

  This car, then, is the perfect candidate for a spot of tweaking’n’tuning. And that’s exactly what’s happened with the limited edition Brera S.

  Alfa Romeo took the basic car to Prodrive, the company behind just about all the world’s race and rally programmes since Harold got an arrow in his eye, and said, ‘Can you make this thing go as well as it looks?’ And what Prodrive did was ignore the engine and set to work on the suspension. Quite why, I have no idea. It’s a bit like going to the doctor with a stye in your eye and having your left leg put in plaster.

  Describing the end result is difficult, partly because I’m friendly with the chap who runs Prodrive. And partly because our children are friendly too. I’ll try to be tactful, then. It’s awful.

  A normal Brera may not be fast but the ride comfort is lovely. Sitting on tall tyres, it absorbs bumps and potholes with an elegance to match the style. Prodrive, however, ditched the tall tyres, increased the spring rates by 50 per cent, lowered the ride height and ended up with something it says is perfectly tuned for British roads.

  What British roads is it talking about? The British roads I know are bumpy, and in the Brera S you feel every single ripple. The ride is not just bad. It is intolerable. And when you couple this to shockingly lumpy seats, you will get out after even the shortest journey in great pain. I certainly did.

  The idea, I suppose, was to make the Brera handle more aggressively. And it does. But even here there are problems. The steering is now so direct, you can get yourself into a bit of a muddle when driving quickly, and I’m afraid that despite the best efforts of Prodrive, the chassis it had to work with is a bit of a bender. You can still feel the flex. Not that you worry about it unduly because your back is hurting so much.

  And you can’t get the journey over quickly because the engine is unchanged. Yes, 100kg has been shaved from the overall weight but the 3.2-litre version still takes seven seconds to get from 0 to 62mph. The 2.2-litre version? God knows. No one would have the patience to find out.

  The only nice thing I can find to say about the whole job
is that I liked the red stitching on the dashboard.

  This car, then, is a bit like having a very beautiful but bonkers girlfriend. You’ll know exactly why you got involved, but equally you’ll know that the relationship can never last.

  2 November 2008

  Well, I did ask for a growlier exhaust

  Racing Green Jaguar XKR 475

  I don’t like speed cameras very much so you’d probably expect me to laud the decision taken by Swindon council to remove them from the town’s streets. Hmmm. The council says that it currently spends £320,000 a year on cameras and that this money could be better spent on other road safety schemes.

  What, exactly? Because in the extraordinary world of government finance £320,000 may be enough, just, to buy a hammer, but it certainly isn’t enough to pay for the safety courses people must attend before they’re allowed to use one.

  One of those solar-powered ‘Slow down’ signs is £10,000, and by law, in case there hasn’t been enough global warming and the eco-sign stops working, there has to be another, conventional sign right next to it, saying exactly the same thing. So quite how many lives Swindon council hopes to save with £320,000 I really don’t know.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t agree with the communists who say speed cameras have the life-saving properties of penicillin, but who knows what the truth is? I always drive quite slowly through the village of Woodstock because there are two cameras. If they weren’t there, would I do 180 and hit a bus queue? Or would I do 180 and not hit a bus queue? Nobody knows.

  Except of course for the communists. They take the accident figures every year and claim every single tiny drop is entirely down to speed cameras. They say that were it not for this brilliant enforcement measure, everyone in the land would now be a drooling vegetable or dead.

  Really? The fact is that since cameras were introduced, the number of deaths has remained pretty much constant at about 3,000 a year. However, it’s also a fact that the number of serious injuries has been steadily falling. ‘You see,’ say the communists squeakily. ‘If everyone is made to drive at the same speed, irrespective of wealth or power, the number of people losing arms and spleens is slashed.’

  Unfortunately, they are talking rubbish. The problem is the term ‘serious injury’. According to the government, this means fractures, concussion, internal injuries, crushing, severe cuts, lacerations or shock. Technically, then, a broken finger is a serious injury, and some policemen might well record it on their forms that way. Others might not. And there is some evidence that officers are being ‘encouraged’ to downgrade their assessments near speed camera sites. So it looks as though the so-called safety measures are working.

  And no one ever says, ‘Hang on a minute. Can’t some of the improvements be down to the way cars are designed these days?’

  The only accurate way of assessing how we are doing as a nation of drivers is to look at the number of people being killed, because that isn’t open to interpretation by a traffic officer. Someone is either dead or they are not. The figures cannot be manipulated. Not even the government can hide a dead body in the bushes for long. Someone’s going to find it.

  So if we concentrate on deaths, the whole picture becomes extraordinarily blurred. I mean, you’d expect, now that cars have airbags, and bluff fronts to make them almost comfortable when they run you down, that the number of deaths on the road would be falling dramatically. But it isn’t. It’s constant.

  It’s not as though the airbags and the antisubmarine seats have been offset because we are driving faster. Department for Transport figures show that in 1997 70 per cent of cars regularly exceeded the 30mph limit. In 2007 it was less than half. Average speeds are coming down, too, by nearly 1 per cent between 2005 and 2007. In the rush hours the average speed in many built-up areas is less than 15mph.

  So we’re going slowly. Cars are safer. There are speed cameras on every street corner. Pavements are fenced off from the roads. There are more underpasses and foot bridges. Motorways are safer. Road surfaces are more grippy. Tyres are better. Antilock brakes have been introduced. And none of this is making the slightest bit of difference to the number of people being killed.

  Why? Well, I racked my brains. Smoked a pack of cigarettes. Walked round the garden twice. And still I could not come up with a plausible explanation. But then along came the Green Party, which seems to have hit on an interesting theory.

  It may be woolly on the issue of climate change – it keeps claiming the world is warming up when every single figure shows it’s actually cooling down – but on road safety the Green Party seems to be bang on the money. It says casualty figures aren’t dropping because the roads are full of gormless morons.

  Of course, the Greens don’t put it quite like this. Instead, they say that the number of pedestrians being killed on the roads in the least deprived areas (where intelligent people live) is three times smaller than the number in areas of greatest deprivation (where thick people live).

  Naturally, they think the problem can be solved with a nationwide 20mph speed limit, but this seems to punish the bright unfairly. I mean, why should a solicitor have to drive his Audi A6 through Godalming at twenty simply because a fat, one-eyed oaf in Pontefract can’t get to work in the morning without hitting a hundred prams? Much better, surely, to base the speed we’re allowed to drive on our IQ. This way, Stephen Fry would be allowed to travel at 160 while Kerry Katona would be limited to 2mph. I thank the Green Party for its research on this matter and hope the solution I’ve come up with is implemented as soon as humanly possible. Because we’ve tried everything else and nothing has worked.

  And that in no way brings me on to the car you see pictured this morning. It is a supercharged Jaguar XKR convertible that has been fettled by a company called Racing Green.

  The whole thing stems from a review I wrote some months back suggesting that the standard XKR needed a growlier exhaust and a bit more bile in its sac. Well, the Racing Green version has water methanol injection, which costs £905 and means that water and alcohol are added to the fuel and air going into the cylinders. Water keeps the temperature down. Methanol increases the octane rating of the fuel. Yum, yum.

  In addition, my test car had lowered suspension, which costs £830, enormous 20 inch wheels (£3,830), a new exhaust system (£1,735) and revised engine mapping (£3,175). Some of these things work quite well. Some don’t. The exhaust is tremendous under load but at a cruise it can be a bit irritating because it never stops making the sort of low-frequency drone that can kill dogs. And the massive wheels serve mainly to make the standard brakes look like milk-bottle tops. And you like a purveyor of cocaine.

  That said, I did enjoy the extra power. It’s nice to know the car is going more quickly because it’s drinking and driving. And the lowered suspension doesn’t seem to have spoilt the ride at all. It hasn’t improved the handling noticeably either, but there’s no doubt a lower car looks better than one that’s on stilts.

  Unfortunately, the effect of this is somewhat overshadowed by a horrible Arden body kit. Adding this kit, which costs £10,850, is a bit like nailing a plank of wood to Keira Knightley’s face. They couldn’t have done a worse job if they’d fitted the car with a selection of garden gnomes.

  Happily, all the modifications are options, so you can pick and choose which ones you want. And, better still, Racing Green will make the alterations to a used XKR, which can be part-exchanged these days for a tin of boiled sweets and a handful of loose change. In short, then, you can have a car like this, without the body kit, for £55,000. That’s pretty good.

  If you had the body kit, it would be around £65,000, but because you would have demonstrated a serious lack of intelligence, I’m afraid, under the new Jeremy Clarkson/Green Party rules, you’d be limited by law to a top speed of 7mph.

  9 November 2008

  Just take your big antlers and rut off

  Audi RS6 Avant

  Sometimes, I think life would be a lot less complicated if
we were deer. Because then, all we’d need do to establish ourselves, as the superior being in a group, is to stand tall and wave our antlers around.

  Unfortunately, men cannot do this, partly because we don’t have horns and partly because the human equivalent is the penis. And if you start waving that around over a game of darts in the pub, no good will come of it.

  All men will claim they don’t jostle for the high ground in a group of other men, but this is nonsense. We all do. Some by using wit, some with the enormity of their wad and some by demonstrating their cleverness. And then you have those who think it’s all down to the size of the engine in their car.

  I met one such chap last week. To begin with, I thought he was genuinely interested in my new car, but it quickly became obvious that he saw it as a threat to his dominant position in the assembled herd. ‘How many horsepower does it produce?’ he asked, sweatily. I genuinely didn’t know. When you’re 6 feet 5 inches, you tend not to worry about that sort of thing.

  But he wasn’t 6 feet 5 inches so off he scuttled, only to return the next day with information from the Mercedes website, backed, he said, by a call to the local Mercedes dealership. ‘Your car,’ he told me loudly, so everyone could hear, ‘develops 507 horsepower. Whereas my AMG E-class’ – there was a pause – ‘trumps that with 518.’ The unspoken ending was clear. He was eleven better than me.

  I’d like to say at this point that I’d met a weirdo, a desperately sad and lonely man, the sort of chap who buys an enormous underwater laptop despite the inconvenience, simply so he can appear to have the biggest penis in the airport departure lounge. But I fear he may not be alone. I fear there are many others just like him all over the world.