Round the Bend Read online

  It’s not a car you can just get into and drive, either, because hydraulics also operate the suspension. So after starting the engine you must do a crossword while the body rises to the correct height.

  Still, you can then make up lost time because it has a 6.3-litre engine. The first production V8 Mercedes ever made, it develops 300bhp, thanks to fuel injection. In other words, in terms of luxury and power this was quite literally forty years ahead of its time. In terms of style, however, it was bang-on, pure, 100 per cent 1963. This was a time when designers were allowed to fit a car with ornaments, and the Grosser is fitted with so many it could almost be twinned with Elton John’s head.

  The double bumpers, the enormous grille, the chromed wheel arches: it is a festival of brightwork and I’m only surprised it isn’t followed everywhere by a flock of magpies.

  It’s the same story inside, where it’s fitted with nothing so vulgar as tinted glass. Instead you get curtains, along with interior glass wind deflectors should you feel the need to drive along with the windows down, waving serenely at the Untermenschen.

  The only thing that it didn’t come with as standard – but that I shall be adding as soon as I’ve designed them – are two flags on the front wings. This is the only sound you want to hear as you cruise along. The fluttering of two pennants.

  Or, rather, this is the sound I imagine you’d like to hear. I can’t say for sure because I’ve had the car for a week now and so far I haven’t actually driven it. This is because most of the time it won’t start.

  Sometimes it turns over with a decreasing level of enthusiasm for ten minutes before the titanic battery gives up the ghost. And sometimes it doesn’t turn over at all. Occasionally it coughs a little burp of hope and I prod the throttle, trying like a man marooned on a desert island to breathe a little life into the sliver of flame. But never quite succeeding.

  So then I plug it into a trickle charger, and after two hours have been spent pumping some fresh enthusiasm into the battery, the engine bursts into an uneven V8 strum. The sound of joy. Followed by the groan of despair as I realize that, this being Christmastime, I’ve passed the time as the battery charged with my face in a bucket of red wine. And now I’m too drunk to go anywhere.

  And so we must now leave the olden days when cars worked only if there was some warmth in the month, and look at the complete opposite of the 600 Grosser. The Mazda MX-5.

  When I first encountered the new version of this modern classic, I reported that it was a better-looking, more practical version of something we all loved anyway and that you should all have one. And you all responded by buying something else.

  No, really. The new MX-5 is like the new Ford Mondeo and the Subaru Legacy Outback. It is one of those cars that’s absolutely brilliant … and nobody buys it. You never see one on the road.

  Fearful, therefore, that I’d missed some crucial aspect of the car – a spike in the driver’s seat, perhaps, or a snake in the glove box – I decided to have another look. And there’s nothing; not even a preposterous price tag. The new soft-top Mazda starts at just £15,730.

  So what’s the problem? I’ve given the matter some serious thought and I’ve decided what the car missed most of all was the mark. I liked the way the old car had few luxuries, because that made it light. For the same reason it had a canvas roof you raised and lowered by hand, and I liked that too. But actually, the fact is most of us would prefer some creature comforts and a roof that moved about using electricity. We may have been drawn to the idea of an MX-5 but actually we all went out and bought a convertible Vauxhall Astra instead.

  Well, Mazda has obviously realized this too because the new 2-litre Roadster Coupé I tried has a superfast electric metal roof, a surround sound Bose stereo, and a button on the dash that says ‘Media’. God knows what it did.

  All of this must be terribly galling for the engineers who struggled to make the new car only 22lb heavier than the old one. To find the marketing department adding stuff is probably enough to have them all disembowelling themselves but the fact is this: it doesn’t make a jot of difference.

  The engine still feels unsullied by cotton wool damping and active exhaust tuning. The gearbox still snicks. The handling is still deliciously front-engined and rear-drive. You still feel hemmed in behind the wheel and the plastics appear, correctly in a car of this type, to have been fitted to shroud various wires and rough edges. Not as a surface you feel inspired to lick and caress.

  The MX-5, then, still feels simple and sprightly and lively. It still feels basic and honest and wonderful. It’s still a bacon sandwich made with good bread, good butter and good meat. Only now it has a splash of HP sauce.

  It is an epic car, this. A car for fatboys who are still thin.

  13 January 2008

  Tailor-made for the hard of thinking

  Subaru Impreza WRX STi

  There are many ways to tell if someone is a bit thick. You can sit them in a room and ask them to push various bits of plastic into a wooden box. Or you can ask them to describe a cloud. Or you can carefully measure the distance between their eyes, the height of their forehead or the length of their arms.

  But there’s another, easier way of establishing whether someone is two spanners short of a tool box. Just ask them this simple question, ‘Are you wearing a Subaru rally jacket?’ Because if they are, you will need to speak more slowly.

  I’ll let you into a little secret. Each week, when Top Gear is on air, we prepare two scripts. One is a polysyllabic orgy of complex thoughts on the meaning of human happiness. And the other is full of words such as ‘tits’ and ‘arse’. Choosing which one eventually gets used depends on how many audience members turn up in Subaru Imprezas.

  No, really. If the audience is largely in tweed and Viyella, you can make them laugh with oblique references to Dickens and the iniquities of colonialism in nineteenth-century Calcutta. If it’s a forest of Subaru baseball caps out there, we stick to genitals and spend the day skidding around the studio on banana skins.

  Of course, there are intelligent Subaru drivers, but for the majority of them, there are only eight letters in the alphabet. WRX STIR and B.

  I think the problem may be this. A Subaru Impreza is seen by the rallying fraternity as the golden-wheeled wonder boy. It was a Subaru that took Richard Burns to his world championship, and a Subaru with which Colin McRae became synonymous. Subarus are to rallying, then, what Ferrari is to Formula One.

  And rallying, I’m afraid, is a sport for the terminally gormless. You stand there, on a frozen Welsh hillside, not knowing whether to drink the soup you’ve made or pour it into your wellingtons. And the evening is enlivened only when a pair of extremely noisy headlights whiz by, hurling a million bits of gravel into your face. The only good news about this is that your face is so chuffing cold you can’t feel the blood tricking out of all the open wounds.

  What’s more, you do not know what sort of car the headlights were attached to. You do not know who was driving. And you do not know whether they were travelling faster than the previous set of headlights that spewed stones into your iced-up cheeks.

  Rallying is the only sport on God’s earth where you watch the event live but do not know who’s won until long after you’ve got home and had a bath to remove all the mud that became stuck to you when you fell over in a Welsh wood at three in the morning.

  The only possible reason for being there is to see someone called Stig Stigsson crash. Except you won’t, of course, because the rally is thousands of miles long and the chance of there being a prang right where you’re standing is remote. And even if you are lucky, you won’t actually see the impact because you’ll have been blinded by grit thrown into your eyes by Stig Magnesstig’s Citroën.

  Of course, there is another way of going rallying, and that’s to take part. This is very simple. You buy a car that costs thousands of pounds. You then have that car tweaked and prepared, which costs even more. And then you drive it at incredibly high speed into a tr
ee.

  Show me someone who has a Subaru, then, and I’ll show you someone who thinks rallying is fun. And that means we’re almost certainly talking about a person who breathes through his mouth and has short legs, no forehead and one, possibly lacerated, eye.

  Strangely, however, Subaru Imprezas have always been rather intelligent cars. They were so much quieter and more refined than alternatives from Ford and Mitsubishi. You got the impression that an Impreza would know how to hold a knife and fork. And whether to have its cheese before its pudding.

  Whereas an Evo, you suspected, would goose your wife, eat with its mouth open and vomit into the sugar bowl during the coffee and mints. A Ford Escort Cosworth, meanwhile, would stab you just to get an electric ankle bracelet and an Asbo.

  And now into the mix comes the new Subaru Impreza. I drove the WRX model recently and was terribly underwhelmed. It was too ugly, too soft, equipped like an Eskimo’s khazi and about as exciting as Tuesday. The car you see in the picture this morning, however, is what we’ve really all been waiting for. The STi version. The one with the flared wheel arches, four exhausts and almost 300 horsepowers.

  First things first. The looks. And I’m sorry but I’m still not sold. The standard car looks like a lightly melted Rover 25. With its flared aches, this looks like a lightly melted Rover 25 with bingo wings.

  Then there’s the interior. As is customary, the STi badge on the dash is pink and I’m afraid it really doesn’t go with the orange dials or the green indicator lights. It’s like a four-year-old has been let loose in there with a box of felt-tip pens.

  Still, the vibrant colouring does at least take your mind off the fact that this is a £25,000 car that comes with fewer toys than an Ethiopian birthday boy. You know if a car maker is in trouble when, in its own brochure, it says the car is fitted as standard with locking wheel nuts and pneumatic bonnet struts. This is code for saying, ‘Sat nav’s extra.’

  But of course the most important question is how the STi drives. And the answer is: provided you are the sort of person who can set the timer on a 1989 video recorder … it depends.

  You see, down by your left elbow there’s a small panel featuring a number of buttons and acronyms that you won’t find in any other car. First of all, you choose what sort of throttle response you’d like. Then you choose from six settings how much power you’d like to go to the front wheels and how much to the back.

  Or you can go for the auto setting, which unlocks the centre differential, sending most of the torque to the rear, or the Auto +, which sends it to the front. And now we get to the three-way vehicle dynamics control system, which turns the traction control system on, off or very off.

  I have no doubt that on a track, when nothing is coming the other way and you can go beyond the limits, you will be able to spend many happy hours fiddling about, choosing exactly how you’d like to hit a tree. But you know what? On the road, even if you drive quite quickly, you can do whatever you like with any of these settings and it makes not a blind bit of difference.

  I suspect the control panel is primarily designed as a talking point at Subaru owners’ club meetings. In the same way that the button that turns the traction control off in your car is something you mention to colleagues when giving them a lift. But you’d never actually use it.

  Honestly? The only time I ever deactivate a car’s traction control is when I’m driving past a camera on Top Gear. On the road? Never. And so it goes with the STi. I pushed and prodded all the various buttons and, having realized they weren’t making much difference, put everything in auto and left them alone.

  In this mode, the STi is demonstrably better than the WRX. Harder, more taut and noticeably faster. There’s still understeer, in any setting, which was always a tiresome characteristic of the old car. But there is something new. The flat-four strum is gone. The new 2.5-litre engine just sounds boring and I must therefore recommend you opt for the Prodrive sports exhaust to liven it up a bit.

  So even though Subarus are probably the most reliable cars made – they make Hondas look like South American dictatorships – the new STi doesn’t look or sound good, it isn’t equipped very well and it doesn’t excite like its bingo wings and four tailpipes suggest it will. Put simply, I did not enjoy driving it.

  I think, therefore, you may have to be a bit dim to buy one. If you’re a Subaru fan with a full range of Subaru clothing in your wardrobe, you’ll probably love it.

  20 January 2008

  Clarkson on road safety

  Jeremy’s wit and wisdom

  I’m criticized by some Scottish chief constable one day for encouraging people to drive fast and then lambasted by Welsh assembly members for saying public transport is for poor people. Which it is. My crime is simple. I like cars.

  As I drove down the M20 into Kent last Monday, I noticed that most of the speed cameras had been burnt out by vandals. This is disgusting. It is ridiculous, criminal and stupid that the person who savaged these life-saving devices should target the M20 … and then stop. Why did you not keep right on going? I can think of six cameras on my way home that would be immeasurably improved with a spot of petrol and a match.

  With 6,000 speed cameras nestling in every bush and parked van, they will not stop until they’ve got the accident rate down to zero. Which will be never.

  Lycra Nazis have already taken over a third of the roads with their green tarmac cycle lanes, now they want to take over the whole lot.

  A third of all those injured and killed on the roads are young men, aged in a startlingly narrow band from seventeen to nineteen. Drowning in testosterone, and filled with a youthful sense of immortality, being seventeen is dangerous. It always has been. The fact is, you simply can’t make a seventeen-year-old see sense.

  In London, drivers do 42 million kilometres each year while lost, and that’s the same as driving from New York to Los Angeles 9,200 times. Needlessly.

  There are many rules for the elderly in the Highway Code. I have one, too. And here it is. Get a bloody move on.

  It’s this obsession everyone has got with speed now that speed kills – it doesn’t. Suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you.

  A general rule of thumb. If a car has less than 100 horsepower, it is never safe to pull into the outside lane if there is a car in sight … even if it’s three miles away. If a car has less than 60 horsepower, it is never safe to pull into the outside lane at all.

  27 January 2008

  The rubbish, brilliant saviour of Jaguar

  Jaguar XF SV8

  There are so many questions about the new Jaguar XF. How much is it? Who will own the company tomorrow? And how did Tony Blair manage to get one before it goes on sale? But the biggest question of the lot is this: how in the name of all that’s holy is Jaguar still with us?

  The problems began in the mid-1970s, when Jaguar was part of the Communist party. Back then, everyone at British Leyland was so enamoured of the Soviets, they came within an ace of renaming it the Large Car Division. I’m surprised they didn’t settle on Zil.

  Eventually Jaguar was sold off to Ford, which never really understood what Jaguar was all about. The people at Ford managed Aston Martin well, and Land Rover too, but Jaguar stumped them. They couldn’t even say it properly.

  And so, in the past few years, we got the new XJ, which looks like a fatter version of the old XJ. We got the X-type, which was an expensive way of buying a Mondeo, and we got the S-type. Which was a Lincoln dressed in Mallory’s tweed suit. And fitted with Danniella Westbrook’s idiotic nose.

  Of course we also got the new XK, which is a brilliant car. However, buying one is the same as standing on top of a very tall building with a megaphone, telling everyone that you can’t afford an Aston Martin.

  Then, of course, Ford lost all its money. And then it lost all of everyone else’s money, and so, while the boffins and the stylists were beavering away on the new XF, Jaguar was put up for sale. ‘Wanted: someone to buy a car company that no one unde
rstands. Has made little or no profit for twenty years or more. Offers in excess of £1 billion. Willing to p/ex Land Rover as well.’

  Weirdly, it seems an Indian company called Tata, which makes horrid cars for people who are fed up with falling off their motor scooters, is said to be interested. God, I bet Gandhi is laughing his socks off. And I bet you’re very sad that this once great British manufacturer has been allowed to sink to such depths. The thing is, though: should you be sad? Was Jaguar ever really that great?

  Oh I’m sure people in chunky jumpers will be choking on their pipes at this outrageous proposition. They’ll point out that in 1948 the XK 120 was the fastest production car in the world and that the D-type married monocoque thinking with aeronautical design. And that with Lofty England at the helm it won Le Mans in 1956.

  This is all true. But claiming that Jaguar is great today because of something it did in the 1950s is like claiming Egypt is a world power because of the pharaohs. The fact is that in my lifetime Jaguar’s forages into the realm of brilliance have been few and far between.

  Oh sure, people go all dewy-eyed about the Mk 2, but as we know from the historical document that is The Sweeney, if it were ever chased by a Granada Ghia, it would immediately crash into a pile of cardboard boxes.

  Then along came Arthur Daley, whose comic genius overshadowed anything achieved at Le Mans by Lofty England. As a result, Jaguars became vodka-and-tonic cars for the sheepskin classes. A car you drove when your taxi was at the menders.

  There was an attempt to get back on track with the XJ220 but that all went horribly wrong. Customers put down a deposit on what they’d been told was a four-wheel-drive V12 supercar and were understandably miffed when they found the actual car was two-wheel drive and had the engine from a Metro. Some resorted to the law to try to get their money back.