Really? Page 17

  All things considered, I’d say that I prefer the look of the Mustang’s dash to the rather dreary affair Jaguar fits to the F-type. It’s more exciting. Let me give you an example. On the speedo it says, ‘Ground speed’. How delightfully childlike is that?

  And there’s more. On the bonnet are two massive ridges that reflect the glare of the sun directly into the driver’s eyes. Now, Ford’s engineers must have noticed this when they tested the car in the vast, unending blueness of the Arizona Desert. And they must have said afterwards: ‘Hank. We can’t see where we are going because of those ridges.’

  And then there will have been a meeting at which someone must have stood up and said: ‘We take your point, Bud, but those ridges look good, so they’re staying.’

  I like that attitude. Style over practicality. And you see it everywhere. The speeding-horse symbols that are projected by down lighting on to the ground under the door mirrors. It’s as though Ford only employed designers who were ten. Which is as it should be. Ground speed. I love that. I’m only amazed it doesn’t have space lasers.

  So far, then, so American. But now it’s time to fire up the surprisingly quiet V8 and see how it copes with the Hammersmith Bridge width restrictions and the M3 roadworks and doing a three-point turn in Monmouth Road, west London.

  Straight away, there’s an issue. In America, the Mustang is a small car. But in the UK, it is ginormous. And it has the turning circle of Jupiter. Which means that a three-point turn in Monmouth Road is actually a seventy-two-point turn with much swearing.

  It also feels a heavy car. After just a yard you start to understand why the Jag costs so much more: because it’s made of exotic materials. The Mustang is made from steel and iron and, possibly, wood.

  It’s billed as a sports car, but that’s like calling the Flying Scotsman a ‘sports train’. It just isn’t. It’s too heavy. What it is, is a muscle car. And you sense that in the second yard. This is a machine that wants to turn its tyres into smoke and go round every corner sideways. You’ve seen the film Bullitt. Well, it’s that.

  This is emphatically not a criticism, because who wants to go round the Nürburgring in forty seconds when you can go round slowly, sideways and smiling?

  It doesn’t have to be this way, of course, because for more than fifty years the Mustang has been built as a starting point. Only rental companies buy one and then leave it alone. Everyone else buys one and then employs a tuning company to turn it into something else. That’s what I’d do with this model: buy it and then give the money I’d saved by not buying something else to Hennessey or Roush. Those guys can make a Mustang fly.

  Don’t get me wrong. The Mustang as it is can be driven quite normally. It moves around quite a lot on poor surfaces, indicating that it has fairly rudimentary underpinnings, but for the most part it’s quiet, docile and rather unassuming. Too unassuming, perhaps. Because, despite the flamboyant touches, the actual shape is a bit ho-hum. It’s not the worst-looking Mustang – that accolade rests with the post-oil-crisis box – but it’s not the best either. Not by a long way.

  Certainly, it doesn’t turn many heads. But I liked the reaction it caused among those who did notice it: they smiled.

  Which brings me to Ford’s recent advertising campaign. In the meeting at which this was dreamed up, the company will have decided to shake off its Mondeo Man image and tell everyone it now makes exciting cars. So it is showing us pictures that include the new Focus RS, the Mustang and some kind of snazzy SUV and urging us to ‘unlearn’.

  Well, if I ‘unlearn’ what I remember about Ford’s past, I’ll have to forget about the Lotus Cortina, the GT40 and the Escort RS Cosworth. I’ll have to forget about everything that makes people smile when they see the Mustang go by.

  If I were to sum it up as a car, I’d give it four stars, because a big V8 coupé for £36,000 is remarkable. But because it’s a Mustang, because of Steve McQueen: well, that makes people yearn to own one. And now you can. And there’s no earthly reason why you should not.

  20 March 2016

  It’s a blast … until you look for the brakes

  Zenos E10 S

  In the past two weeks I’ve been to Barbados, India, Turkey and Morocco. And having studied these places in some depth, I’m forced to ask an important question: why doesn’t anyone buy sports cars any more?

  By and large, driving is extremely boring. You sit there listening to the engine moaning out its one long song, with your face in neutral and your mind turned off. Just look at the faces of people when they are at the wheel and tell me this: when do you ever see people look like that in normal life? Gormless. Like fish.

  When you are mowing the lawn or buying washing-up powder or having breakfast with the children, you are animated. You are thinking about stuff. But when you are driving a car, the dopamine and the serotonin and all the fun drugs that normally course through your body just dry up. You become the undead. You become a zombie.

  Unless you are driving a sports car. A sports car is exciting when it’s parked in a multistorey and you’re in a meeting. A sports car is even exciting when it’s November and it’s raining and you’re on your way to a funeral. Because in a sports car you are living the dream that gives ‘the car’ all of its appeal.

  Remember ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’? She was sad because she’d realized at the age of thirty-seven that she’d never drive through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair. To me, that’s what cars are all about. Nobody dreams of driving through Paris in a Hyundai with the warm wind in their hair.

  Think of all the hundreds of thousands of people who design cars for a living. Not one of them joined up so they could design a saloon car or an SUV or a pick-up. They signed up so they could design sports cars. Because sports cars are fantastic. They fizz and they pop and they bang and they talk to you and they make you smile. Sports cars make you happy.

  But I’ve noticed on my recent travels that people are giving up. In Barbados, everyone has a Suzuki Swift. In India, they buy whatever has the most amount of legroom in the back. In Italy, it’s nothing but small grey hatchbacks. The car is being bought as a tool, not as a dream.

  Remember the film Battle of Britain, when Christopher Plummer set off from his base to meet Susannah York for a bit of inter-sortie rumpy-pumpy? He had an MG. Of course he did. He was a Spitfire pilot. Whereas, today, I can pretty much guarantee he’d have a Nissan Juke.

  I met an astronaut once. He’d been to Top Gun school. He could handle an F-14 on combat power. And he had been the first man to dock a Space Shuttle that was travelling at 17,500mph. And yet he drove a Toyota Camry. It was tragic.

  And at this point I should explain what I mean by a sports car. It’s not simply something with no roof. A Lamborghini Aventador convertible, for example, is not a sports car. It’s a supercar. And neither is a Mercedes SL. Or a Bentley Continental GT.

  A sports car must be little and light. It should have a small, revvy engine and no more than two seats. The Mazda MX-5 is a sports car – and a bloody good one. It’s fast enough. It handles beautifully. The roof folds in a jiffy. It’s also well made, reliable and prices start at just £18,495. It is the obvious choice and yet, all over Britain, there are people who wake up of a morning and think, ‘If I borrow some money from the bank and get a shed, I could make a sports car that is even better.’

  The latest offering comes from Norfolk. It’s called the Zenos and it’s a sports car unplugged. Its designers have looked at every detail of what isn’t needed and simply thrown it away. Which means it has no doors, no windows, no sun visors, no radio, no carpets and no roof of any kind. I have encountered better-equipped pencils.

  The result is a car that weighs just 725 kilograms. That is ridiculously light. A Triumph Herald weighed about the same and that was made from tinfoil and hope. And a Triumph Herald was not fitted with the 2-litre turbocharged engine from a Ford Focus ST. The Zenos is. Which means it has a Looney Tunes power-to-weight ratio. And that mean
s it’s bloody fast.

  To drive? Well, you climb over the side, hunker down into the unpadded seat, attach the steering wheel and then do up the optional four-point harness, by which time the chap in the Mazda MX-5 – which has a fixed steering wheel and inertia-reel belts – is back from his lap of the track, talking about what fun he’s had.

  You’re going to have more – eventually. Because when you are fastened in place and the wheel is on, the Zenos is a hoot. It’s more than just a track car fitted with indicators and lights to make it road-legal. And yet you know the track is where it belongs, really.

  It’s good when the going is smooth and there’s nothing coming the other way. It feels balanced, as it should with the engine in the middle. And as you jink this way and that, you think that maybe your commands are being sent to the four corners of the car using telepathy.

  However, on the road, where I mostly drove it, the noise was fun for about a minute and then not fun at all thereafter. The exhaust bark is tremendous, but all you can hear really is the wastegate, which sounds like a fat man who’s using Victorian plumbing to flush away the after-effects of a particularly enormous dinner.

  The steering became wearing, too, because it’s unassisted and very fidgety. It’s not as bad as the set-up in an Alfa Romeo 4C, but it’s quite draining nevertheless.

  And then, I’m afraid, we come to what might fairly be described as the turd in the swimming pool. The brakes. In a car with not much weight at the sharp end, the front wheels have a tendency to lock up. See the original Lancia Montecarlo for details.

  To get round this, the Zenos boffins have backed off on the brake force to the point where the pedal feels like it’s connected to not much at all. This causes you to push it more firmly, which causes the fronts to lock up anyway.

  An antilock system would solve all that, but the whole point of the Zenos is that you get no driver aids of any kind. I like that philosophy, when I’m on a sofa and someone else is doing the driving in a race, on the television. But I’ll be honest, I like it a bit less when I’m heading towards a tree in a cloud of my own tyre smoke.

  At a time like that, you tend to think that maybe you would have been better off in one of the other low-volume British sports cars that have the same amount of go as a Zenos. But can stop as well.

  27 March 2016

  For comfort and looks, a camel wins

  Hyundai i800 SE Manual

  The road from Marrakesh to Ouarzazate should be right up there with the best of them. It has everything. You start in the desert and then you climb through pine forests in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains up to the snow line, where it’s hairpin after hairpin and drop after vertical drop.

  After you crest the highest point, which is about 6,000 feet above sea level, the road surface becomes foreign-aid smooth and, as you drop down into the Sahara proper, the corners turn into third- and fourth-gear sweepers.

  This is the section Tom Cruise chose to use for the bike chase in his most recent Mission: Impossible outing, and I can see why. It’s fast and it’s dangerous and I loved every inch of it. Especially because it was 85 degrees Fahrenheit and I was at the wheel of an Alfa Romeo 4C and the roof was off.

  However, the road does come with one or two issues, chief among which is ‘drivers going the other way’, who are never really sure which side of the road they should be on. Or maybe it’s because they are mostly at the wheel of ancient Renault 12s that have never been serviced and are therefore impossible to steer with any accuracy.

  On one long stretch a chap going the other way pulled out to overtake a lorry and I assumed foolishly that he would see me approaching and immediately pull back on to his side of the road. So I didn’t brake. And I should have done, because he kept coming for such a long time that I was able to register the fact that his face was rather gormless.

  Anyway, I reversed back out of the desert and, when the dust had settled and I’d stopped swearing, I got back on the road, and 2 miles later the same thing happened again. I think there must be a rule in Morocco that states overtaking vehicles have the right of way.

  It’s not just the locals who cause a bit of buttock-clenching because, as Morocco is now the only country in all northern Africa that we can visit, it’s become a favourite among Europe’s classic-car clubs. Which means that when you are not swerving round Mr Gormless in his spit-and-Kleenex Renault, you are presented with an out-of-control E-type Jaguar with an enormous Belgian at the wheel.

  I haven’t even got to the biggest hazard of all yet: the roadside vendors who walk out in front of your car, even when you’re doing 90mph, to see if you’d like to buy their rock. That’s all they sell: rocks. I think everyone in this remote place has a rock that has been passed down for generations.

  ‘My grandfather didn’t sell this rock before he was mown down by a German in a big Healey. My father didn’t sell it before he was squashed by someone in a Renault 14. And now it’s my turn not to sell it either.’

  Someone ought to explain to these people that tourists are unlikely to buy rocks, as there are many that can be had free at the side of the road. And indeed in their own gardens back at home. And they should certainly be told that the stopping distance of an Alfa Romeo 4C when it’s travelling at, ahem, 50mph is not ‘1 inch’.

  The fact is, though, that I didn’t crash into an oncoming Renault or a speeding Chevrolet Corvette. And I didn’t run over any roadside vendors and, despite a couple of near-misses, I arrived in Ouarzazate with a burnt face, hair as solid as a breeze block and a smile the size of Cheshire on my face. It had been four hours of unalloyed joy, a reminder of what it was that made me fall in love with cars in the first place.

  But then two days later I had to drive back to Marrakesh on the same road, and the Alfa Romeo was not available. Which meant I had to hitch a ride with my colleagues James May and Richard Hammond in the back of a Hyundai i800 people carrier. This would provide a rather different experience.

  First of all, there was the seating. I was sitting in the middle, on what Hyundai probably bills in the brochure as an airline seat. But ‘church pew’ is nearer the mark. And to make life even less comfortable, the bench in the back wouldn’t anchor properly, so every time our driver touched the brakes, Richard Hammond clattered into my spine.

  Then there was the view. I love a desert. A man can get in touch with himself in the vastness. But when you’re in the back of a Hyundai i800, it feels as though you’re watching the world go by from inside a police van. You don’t even get wind-down windows; just a sliding flap that would be familiar to owners of the original Mini. Which brings me on to the air-conditioning. Or lack of it.

  So I was hot and feeling like a criminal, and Richard Hammond had just clattered into the back of my head again, and then I realized this journey was not going to pass quickly because the engine under the Hyundai’s bonnet was producing what appeared to be no more than 4 brake horsepower.

  It’s not as if it was heavily laden. We were only five up. And since one of the five was Richard Hammond, it was more like four up and a packet of biscuits. But even so, there simply wasn’t enough grunt on even the longest straight to pass even the slowest lorry.

  We tried to tell the driver that it was the job of oncoming drivers to get out of our way, but he didn’t believe us, which meant that we wouldn’t be getting to Marrakesh any time soon. Thank God I don’t get car sick.

  After what felt about a month I began to think that we had accidentally encountered the world’s worst car. But Richard Hammond disagreed. ‘It is not the worst car in the world,’ he said. ‘It is the worst thing in the world.’

  And I think he may have been right. It’s worse than that parasite that burrows into children’s eyes. It’s worse than the cubicle on a hot army base with a D&V outbreak. It’s worse than trying on trousers, even. I would rather apply sun cream to James May’s back than do that journey again in a Hyundai i800. It was, I think, the worst four hours of my life.

  It’
s annoying. Hyundai knows how to make a decent car. But with the i800 it has chosen to make one that is boring and slow and ugly and awful. Because it probably figured there was no point trying with a car that was only going to be bought by African taxi drivers and European Catholics who’d had too many children and were consequently too exhausted to notice that they were going at only 6mph.

  I will never go in one again. Even if it’s three in the morning and it’s raining and I just want to get home and it’s what the taxi driver happens to be driving. Because I’d rather sleep on a bench and catch flu.

  10 April 2016

  Thor’s family chariot can race a Ferrari

  Volvo XC90

  The Range Rover is an excellent car: fast, luxurious, well made and capable of bumping smoothly over a grouse moor. It’s so excellent, in fact, that shortly after you take delivery, it will be stolen.

  The problem has reached such epidemic proportions that whenever the police in London are not investigating former MPs and army officers for no reason at all, they are apparently under orders to pull over every Range Rover they see. Because chances are the man at the wheel is on his way to Albania.

  I suspect this would take the sheen off the ownership experience, coming out of your house in the morning to find your car isn’t there. Or finding it is there and being pulled over every 100 yards by a policeman who will assume you are rich and that therefore you must at some point have done some inappropriate touching.

  So if you are not going to buy a Range Rover, what other choices do you have? Well, only one, I’m afraid. And it’s the new Volvo XC90. And now your shoulders have sagged and you are thinking that, if that’s the only other option, you may as well commit suicide.

  I get that. As a small boy, you didn’t lie in bed at night dreaming of the day you could own a Volvo. It’s something you buy for practical reasons, like a pair of gardening gloves. It’s what you do when you are old and everything stops working down there. It’s just somewhere to sit while you wait for the Grim Reaper to pop his head round the corner and say: ‘Ready?’