Round the Bend Read online

  Because, why else have the world’s car makers spent the past fifteen years churning out cars that develop more and more horsepower? Someone must be buying all these M5s and AMG Mercs. Even though the power their engines make is only any good when worn on the head like an antler.

  I mean it. In a Bugatti Veyron, a car built to smash records and boggle minds, lots of horsepower and torque are absolutely necessary. And it’s much the same story with a Ferrari and a Lamborghini too. These are speed machines.

  But in a saloon car that is limited to 155mph, the only reason why you might be interested in the power output is because you are penistically challenged.

  Most mainstream cars with big engines are limited to 155mph because if they went faster than that, they would need brakes like the rings of Saturn, and so many cooling ducts they’d look like the Pompidou Centre. And this would make them preposterously expensive to make. And, therefore, even more preposterously expensive to buy.

  So why buy a car with seven million horsepower when only 200 of those horsepowers are actually needed to get it to the electronically governed top speed? It makes no sense … unless you are a small man, with no antlers and a tiny willy. Then it makes all the sense in the world, because now you can go down to the Harvester, and quantify your life.

  ‘I am 518, which means I am eleven better than him and a whopping seven better than him. But I’m not at the top of the tree because he, that man over there who runs the Rotary Club and has an orange wife, he is six better than me. Drat.’

  You think I’m being silly. Well, consider this. Why have sales of the supercharged Jaguar XJ languished so badly for such a long time? Because if you buy one, you are 107 worse than someone with a BMW M5. That’s like turning up at the urinals with an acorn and finding the man next to you is winching out a fireman’s hose.

  Worse, you are a massive and humiliating 172 worse than someone with the subject of this morning’s missive, the £77,730 Audi RS6 Avant.

  It’s easy to see what caused this car. Audi looked at the heavyweight horsepower fight between BMW and Mercedes and thought, ‘We can stop this once and for all because we aren’t going to pussyfoot around with the odd extra pony or foal here. We’re going for a whole flock of rampaging mustangs.’ The result is an ordinary five-door estate car that produces 572bhp. That’s 122 more than Jackie Stewart had at his disposal when he won the Formula One world championship in 1973.

  The effect is profound. While this car may be no faster, ultimately, than a hot Golf, it accelerates from 120mph like most cars accelerate from rest. There’s a momentary pause as the gearbox does something electronic and then you are pinned to your seat as though you’ve fallen into a wormhole. This sort of power, I have to admit, is intoxicating.

  And the Audi is similarly impressive around a racetrack. There’s none of the boisterous bellowing enthusiasm you get from an AMG Mercedes as it slithers about in a cloud of its own tyre smoke. And it doesn’t feel as technical or as precise as a BMW M5 either. But ooh, it’s clever.

  You turn into a corner, at speed, and lift off the power, imagining that you’ll be rewarded with the usual Pillsbury Dough trough of traditional Audi understeer. But, no. The back slides round until you apply a dab of throttle and feel the four-wheel-drive system gathering up the mess you’ve made.

  To make a car as big and as heavy as this – it weighs more than two tonnes – fast is not hard. To make it handle so incredibly well on a track is nothing short of astonishing.

  Unfortunately, I suspect that very few people who buy this car will ever actually take it round a track. Or feel that Herculean shove in the ribcage by getting up to 120 on the motorway and burying the throttle in the carpet. Which is a pity because at all other times, and in all other circumstances, the RS6 is fairly terrible.

  Now I should say from the outset that the wheels on my test car were not balanced properly and reviewing a car with a permanent judder is like asking someone to review a play while being tickled. But I pressed on through the vibrations, and these are my findings.

  First, we must talk about the ride. Set the suspension in ‘comfort’ and it’s just about acceptable. But do not, under any circumstances, go for the ‘sport’ setting because then you will be bounced around so much you will not be able to grab hold of the button to put it back again. The man who thought this option to be a good idea should really leave his body to medical science because, plainly, his skeleton is made from steel.

  Then there’s the seat. And God Almighty, this is worse. Every time you go round a corner, the side support digs with increasing ferocity into your kidneys until you are weeping with pain. The only place where this sort of seat might work is on the I50 in America. Here, in Curly-Wurly Britain, it’s a nightmare.

  Not that you want to go round corners all that much because the steering system is so bad. At parking speeds, it is super-light but as you get to a trot it suddenly becomes extremely heavy. This always comes as an unpleasant surprise, and if you are not holding onto the wheel firmly, it’ll slip through your fingers and you will bump into the car you were trying to avoid.

  Things don’t get much better when you’re out of town and just trying to get home. You can sense all that power under the bonnet. You can’t use it, of course, but you can feel it as a weight, something you are having to manhandle. It’s wearing. It’s annoying. And it exists only because men don’t have antlers.

  16 November 2008

  Look, a cow running in the Grand National

  Infiniti FX50S

  I once drove an oil tanker. She was called the Jahre Viking and at 1,504 feet was not only the longest ship in the world but also the biggest man-made movable object. She was so vast, in fact, and drew so much water, that she was unable to get through either the Panama or the Suez canal. Even the English Channel was too shallow.

  To drive, she was not sprightly. To pull up and stop in Texas, for instance, the captain had to start braking off the coast of Namibia. At one point, I grabbed the throttle and slammed it forward, but there was absolutely no difference in the pace of our lonesome plod round the Cape of Good Hope. In fact, it took a full half an hour for the speed to creep up from 12.4 knots to 12.5.

  Certainly, the Somali pirates could catch this enormous ship, but making it stop? That would be rather more difficult.

  In many ways, then, driving the Jahre Viking is a bit like driving the car industry.

  In all other walks of life, disaster can be averted at the last minute. ‘I smell gas, so I won’t light this cigarette.’ ‘That Taliban insurgent is shooting at me so I shall shoot back.’ ‘This girl has obviously been torturing her baby so I’ll put it in care.’ And so on.

  However, when you are running a car company, you are not afforded this luxury. ‘Oh, God. A recession has arrived so I must immediately stop making large off-roaders and make an urban runabout instead.’ This is not something the managing director of Land Rover can do.

  The Queen didn’t see the financial crisis coming. The government didn’t see the financial crisis coming. The banks didn’t see the financial crisis coming – and they caused it. So what possible chance was there for a Rotarian in Birmingham? And what can he do now it’s arrived? He’s in the driver’s seat of the Jahre Viking, he’s doing 12.5 knots, a cliff has appeared off the bow and there is absolutely nothing he can do to prevent a massive crash.

  It takes, if you rush, a minimum of four years to design a new car, to build the tools and the robots on the production line and to make sure the seats don’t squeak if the finished product is driven over rough roads in Arizona or on a frozen lake in northern Norway. It is simply not possible to do all this in a moment. When you run a car firm, you have to anticipate a gas leak in your kitchen before the house has even been built.

  Look at Jaguar, a company that has spent the past thirty years jumping over thin air and crashing through the fences. It started work in the Loadsamoney Eighties on a hypercar called the XJ220, which went on sale in 1992, just as t
he world went into reverse. So then it began work on a small car called the X-type, which came out when everyone was eating cash just to get rid of it. And now it is working on a new 5-litre V8, which will emerge into the marketplace in the middle of next year, when most forecasters are saying the unemployment figures will have enveloped everyone up to and including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Yes, Jaguar could down tools and start on a 1.1-litre ecodiesel. But that wouldn’t be ready until 2012, when who knows what state the economy might be in. Certainly not a businessman from Stourbridge.

  It’s a complete nightmare and I was, therefore, not surprised to see a bunch of car bosses descend on Downing Street the other day with their caps in their hands.

  The bankers have been bailed out. It seems likely the car industry in America will be bailed out. So surely the British government, represented in this instance by Lord Mantelpiece, would be sure to listen, especially as the car industry here still employs 780,000.

  I bet it didn’t, though. Because while an old-fashioned socialist would have put the needs of the workers before the composition of the gas in the upper atmosphere, we are currently being ruled by a bunch of new-age Communists, who almost certainly sat there saying, ‘Yes, I’m sure it’s all very sad, the destruction of the motor industry, but we’ve promised the electorate a cut of 80 per cent in carbon emissions so your death is probably for the best.’

  It makes my hair itch with rage. Because how can a Rotarian from the Midlands possibly develop an all-new means of propulsion to stave off a disaster that most right-thinking people accept isn’t happening while the products he is making now pile up unsold on every disused airfield in the land? It’s like being asked to give someone a new hairstyle while you are drowning.

  And now, as a result, Britain’s car industry will soon join the mines and the steelworks in the chapter headed ‘Something We Used to Do Before It Was Ruined by Communists’.

  Still, there’s always an upside. Other countries have decided the needs of the many are more important than how much carbon dioxide there is in the air and as a result their car industries will expand to fill the gap left by ours. In fact, it’s already happening, because soon something called Infiniti is coming to a dealership near you. Possibly one that used to sell Range Rovers.

  When Toyota decided to start making upmarket cars twenty years ago, it realized, rather brilliantly, that the Toyota badge wouldn’t cut much mustard and came up with the Lexus brand instead. Well, you may not realize that Nissan did exactly the same thing for the American market, creating the Infiniti.

  There was, however, one big difference between the two philosophies. Toyota decided that a Lexus should be built to a standard unparalleled in the world and that the cars should drive and feel better than any Mercedes. Nissan, on the other hand, just wrote Infiniti on the back of a Datsun. In crayon. Hoping the Americans would be fooled. Which they were.

  Since then, though, Infiniti has apparently been catching up and it now says it is ready to come to the cradle of motoring. Europe.

  There will be a selection of models on offer but I began by testing the car that’ll get here first. It’s called the FX50S and it’s a big five-seater, seven-speed, five-litre V8, all-wheel-drive monster. I use that word advisedly. The front, dominated by a radiator full of massive spiky teeth, really does look as if it should be in a cave. It looks like Jabba the Hutt. And from there on, things get worse.

  I don’t deny that it’s quite fast. But it’s only quite fast … for an enormous off-roader. Which is the same as being quite well behaved … for a psychopath. In the big scheme of things, it is not fast at all.

  Oh, they’ve tried to give it a sporty feel. The chassis is lifted from a Nissan 350Z and the suspension is electronic and adjustable, but it doesn’t work. Any more than it would work if you entered the Grand National on a cow. And by trying to make it handle, which it doesn’t, they’ve ruined the ride. It is deeply uncomfortable in sport mode and nasty in the standard setting.

  Worse, still, is the fact that while this car might work off road – though with those massive sport tyres, I doubt it – you’d never think of going there because all the mud might mess up your shiny paint.

  Then there’s the interior, which is sort of all right. I even quite liked the clock. But it’s no more accommodating than a Ford Focus, the boot is tiny and the front seat is not the sort of place you enjoy sitting especially. Unless it’s raining.

  What this car did, most of all, was remind me just how fabulous the Range Rover is. That’s a car that is sporty, comfortable and handsome, whether you’re on the road, off the road or just sitting in the thing, waiting for your children to finish their music lesson.

  I don’t doubt the Have Your Say bit that’s put at the end of this on the internet will be full of Americans saying they’ve got an FX50 and it’s great. But it isn’t.

  The only thing that would possibly convince me to buy one is if Land Rover went out of business. And with Captain Mantelpiece in the hot seat, we have to accept that this is a possibility. Worrying, isn’t it?

  23 November 2008

  Watch out, this nipper’s tooled up

  Ford Fiesta Titanium 1.6

  The anti-car lobby can never win its argument until it begins to understand that here in the West the car is not a tool. It is not a white good. It is not an alternative to the bus or the train. We do not buy cars like we buy dishwashers and toasters. It’s not a decision made on cost or practicality and it certainly has nothing to do with the environment. Otherwise, everyone would have a Hyundai Accent with a three-cylinder diesel engine. Or a bus pass.

  The reason we don’t is that cars, here, are status symbols, they are penis substitutes, they are cherished members of the family, they are heart-starters, they are art, they are sex, they are glamorous, they are cool, they are something you probably don’t need. But, my God, you want one so badly that it hurts. Giving up your car is like giving up an emotion. It’s like giving up love, or happiness. And that’s why people will sell their children before they’ll sell their wheels.

  However, in what we must now call the developing world, it doesn’t work like that. Cars are not substitutes for empty underpants. They are not glamorous. They are white, made in Korea and really nothing more than vinyl oxen with wheels. Offer anyone in India a transport solution that’s cheaper and more convenient and they’ll bite your hand off. All the way up to your shoulder.

  Working out why this is so does not take much time. It’s because here the car was exciting from the get-go. It was about motor racing and Donald Campbell. It was about glamour and sophistication. Every time you stepped into your Austin Seven you were only a tuned carburettor away from hurtling through Casino Square in Monte Carlo. We’ve always felt – and still do – that the car is a little bit decadent, a little bit Princess Grace. That every single one of them has the soul of Wolfgang von Trips in its carpets.

  This is why, for us, looks are important and speed is more important still. A car stands or falls on the time it takes to get from rest to 60mph. Boys are born in Britain knowing instinctively that a car that does this in four seconds is cool and that one that does it in eighteen is rubbish.

  Whereas, in places with earthquakes and mud and flies, zero to 60 is irrelevant. And good looks mean that some of the interior space must have been compromised. A Hyundai van with twelve seats and a diesel engine. That’s what gets them going in Nigeria.

  This is because cars did not drip down into the African psyche from Princess Grace and von Trips. They came in sideways, as nothing more than tools to prop up the economy. That’s why no one in Vietnam wants a Lamborghini. It doesn’t have enough seats. It uses too much petrol. The import taxes are too high. The roads are too rough.

  I watched this in action on my recent trips over there. In the course of several weeks, I was driven around by a selection of young men who, had they been from Bolton, would have treated their government-owned vans as though they were touring
-car racers. This didn’t happen, though.

  There was one chap – we’ll call him Charlie – who was in charge of a Toyota minivan, which is a Saigon supercar, but not once, ever, did he exceed 1500rpm. He would begin in second and switch immediately to fourth, where we would remain, come what may. He even parked in fourth, which meant the engine was turning over at about one rev per hour. For me the pain was excruciating. I would sit gripping my thighs, grinding my teeth, biting my tongue to stop myself turning to him and saying, ‘First. For God’s sake, man. First.’

  On the open road, we plodded along at twenty, each piston moving up and down as though propelled by continental drift, and the whole cabin shaking itself to death. To begin with I asked politely for him to speed up. But after a day I was on my knees in the footwell, begging.

  He looked at me as though I might be mad. Why speed up? That would place undue strain on the engine, chew expensive fuel and simply mean he’d get to wherever he was going more quickly. And since he was being paid whether he was there or on the way, he obviously couldn’t see the point of hurrying. Certainly, he couldn’t see that taking his stupid van to the red line and hanging its tail out in the bends might actually be fun. Spending money on speed is simply not a fun pastime when you earn only £500 a year.

  Charlie, then, would certainly not understand the new Ford Fiesta. ‘Why does the roof taper like that?’ he would ask. ‘Surely this makes the boot smaller than it need be.’

  This is true. The boot on the new Fiesta could be bigger, but then the outside wouldn’t look so good, and that’s what got under my skin so much. Being a western boy with a disposable income and a love of fine watches, I was bowled over by the styling of this little car. For that reason alone I’d buy one. And that’s just the start.