Clarkson on Cars Read online

  Lotus are owned by General Motors, who are one of the world’s biggest companies. Their R&D department is universally revered, with lucrative contracts from such financially secure outfits as the MoD.

  The Elan, successful or otherwise, will neither make nor break the company. It might on the other hand pinch the Golf GTi’s crown. Clarkson Decides.

  Dishing It Out

  It ought to be safe to assume, I thought, that if 60,000 Brits go to France and sit in a field all weekend, BBC news editors would be intrigued. They would, I was sure, despatch their best available crew to find out just what had driven so many people to do such a thing.

  After all, when twelve women with short hair and dubious sexual preferences camped outside an Oxfordshire air base for a few days, they were besieged by TV reporters.

  When a couple of hundred Kentish ruralites wandered down to the village hall to hear a man from British Rail explain why their houses must be pulled down, they emerged two hours later, blinded by camera arc lights.

  When one man set up shop on Rockall, both the BBC and ITV hired helicopters at God-knows-how-much-a-minute to film the weird beard’s flag-waving antics.

  And the South Ken embassy zone is permanently full of film crews, furiously rushing between the two people who have turned up to protest about the treatment of badgers in North Yemen and the half dozen who think the Chilean milk marketing board is overcharging.

  So, how come when 60,000 Brits formed part of the 200,000-strong crowd at the 24 hours of Le Mans, it didn’t even get a mention on the BBC News?

  Rather than turn up for work on the Monday morning and face ridicule for not knowing who had won, I set aside twenty minutes on Sunday evening to find out.

  I noticed with glee that the newsreader chappie hurried through the usual bits on China and the Maggon’s opposition to European monetary union and I fully expected the saved time would be used to show us how bronzed men and true had thrilled the crowds in what is easily the world’s most famous motor race.

  But no. We had an interview with a cricketer who had hurt his cheek and couldn’t play. Lots of people hurt their cheeks and can’t do what they want as a result. I rubbed a chilli in my eye last night and they didn’t send Michael Buerk round to find out how much it hurt. When they beamed us back to the studio, there was the presenter with the Refuge Assurance Sunday League cricket results.

  We heard how Mohammed from Leicester had scored 72, how Gary from Essex had bowled out six people and how Yorkshire were top of something or other.

  I kid you not. They devoted more time to cricket than they did to the slaughter of 2600 people in China. And, of course, there was not one word about Le Mans. In the next day’s newspapers, it was the same story, with page after page about cricket followed by a brief paragraph that said, ‘Merc won Le Mans and Jag didn’t.’

  Now, the argument that cricket fans trot out at times like this, and we can safely assume that the BBC’s news editors are fans, is that cricket has a bigger following in Britain than motor racing.

  Bull. The Test and County Cricket Board tell me that in 1988, 137,583 people turned up to watch Sunday league cricket. That means the seventeen teams each have an average weekly gate of 1074. They get five to ten times that to watch a Formula Three race at Donington.

  A Test match at Lord’s can pull in about 80,000; the British Grand Prix manages almost exactly double that number of spectators.

  The Cricketer magazine has a circulation of 35,000 a month. Motoring News sells 78,000 copies every week. And then there’s Motor Sport and Autosport.

  Those who claim cricket has a bigger following than motor racing are the sort of people who claim that fish are insects and that the Pope is a water buffalo; they should be made to live in rooms with rubber walls, and to wear suits with the arms sewn on sideways.

  You will never convince the old boy network that runs things round here that cricket should be banished from television and replaced with motor sport; but you could buy a HAL 9000 satellite dish. Mine is sculpted into a two-fingered salute and pointed at Broadcasting House. The reception is awful, actually, but it amuses all the neighbours.

  Quite apart from the fact that Sky is prepared to show us breasts and bottoms on a regular basis, it has two sport channels which devote a proper amount of time to the world of motor cars.

  Now, you know about how the satellite dish and the scrambler and the installation will cost you £350, and you probably know that Rupert Murdoch runs the whole show, but you probably don’t know that, at any particular time of day, there will be some sort of motor sport being broadcast on the box. So when you’re bored with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger sweating their way through another game of tonsil hockey, simply hit the force and watch Al Ulcer and Mario Androcles Jr slogging it out Stateside.

  Tonight, you will go home for a diet of cricket, interrupted briefly at 7.00 p.m. for Terry and June and again at 10.30 p.m. for Little and Large. After The Terminator, I will watch some Indycar racing followed by a bit of in-car action from the CRX Challenge.

  If you want to protest about the Beeb’s apathy on the motor-sport front, then for heaven’s sake, do absolutely nothing. Stay at home. Tidy your sock drawer out. Grade your grass clippings according to length. Do anything, but certainly do not form yourselves into a chanting, 60,000-strong mob or else the news crews will choose to ignore you.

  Fear not though because I know exactly how to get coverage. Tomorrow, the six of us who have been converted to USS Enterprise space television will become homosexuals and make camp outside Broadcasting House. We will have our heads shaved and refuse to eat anything except almonds and watercress.

  The day after, if the TV crews start to look bored, we will set fire to David Gatting.

  Cars in Review

  Vauxhall Belmont SRi

  On the basis that children should neither be seen nor heard, it seems absurd that airlines and other people movers do not provide soundproof boxes into which they can be inserted.

  There are even people out there who, when buying a car, actually consider the well-being of their offspring. Manufacturers like Mitsubishi and Volvo use them as active selling aids even.

  But why on earth should you worry about the comfort and safety of something that will do nothing on the entire journey other than fight with its sister, vomit and make loud noises?

  When I produce children, I shall buy a Vauxhall Belmont. In order to fit in the back even half properly they will have to screw themselves up like one of those magician’s foam balls. Even then, they will not be able to see where they’re going because the Vauxhall has headrests like blackboards.

  There are more comfortable fairground rides than the Belmont.

  Eventually, they’ll beg to be put in the really rather commodious boot. Which is where they should have been in the first place.

  Toyota Camry V6

  This time next year, if someone were to ask if I’ve ever driven a Toyota Camry V6, I will look gormless for a minute or two. Then I will say no.

  This will be wrong because I have driven a Toyota Camry V6 – the Bob Harris of motordom.

  Turn on the engine, there is no sound; press the accelerator and still the only noise you can hear is a chaffinch, 50 yards away, rummaging through some discarded fish-and-chip papers.

  In a temper, you engage D on the purrundah gearbox and bury the throttle in the pleblon carpet. The chaffinch looks over to see what the chirp was and goes back to his rummaging.

  You could drive this car round a library and no one would look up. I live twelve miles from Heathrow, yet the sound of jets on their final approach is enough to warrant the evening TV being turned up. When Concorde is bringing Joan Collins’s hairstyle over again, a full-scale Judas Priest concert is unable to compete.

  What I want and want now is for Toyota to buy Rolls-Royce, Pratt and Whitney and that French outfit that doesn’t know its left from its right.

  I want them to show Europe and America that it is entirely poss
ible to build an engine that doesn’t make any noise at all.

  Volkswagen Passat 1.9 Diesel

  If you need to get from A to B in a hurry and the only car at your disposal is a Passat 1.9 diesel, then might I suggest you try jogging.

  We are talking here about a very slow car indeed, o to 60 is possible, but only just.

  At its launch VW talked at some length about how clean the new engine is. They used graphs to show what they were on about but these looked only like Luftwaffe air traffic in the 1940s.

  They were at pains to point out that the new engine has not been designed with speed in mind but glossed over the fact that it’s barely capable of independent movement.

  And to cope with the power it gets two first gears, a third and two very high fifths.

  Mark my words, the trees’ll love it.

  Proton Saga 1.5 SLX

  This is how the steering in a Proton works. You twirl the wheel as quickly as possible and two whisks attached to the end of the column stir up a sort of box full of yoghurt. When the yoghurt is spinning fast enough, centrifugal force rotates the box and the wheels turn.

  Volkswagen Corrado

  The brown-suited wise men of the motoring world have been saying that the new Corrado should have the 200SX’s chassis, the Celica’s equipment, the Piazza’s price, the Prelude’s engine and the 480 turbo’s computer.

  But their opinions go for nought because in the coupe market, it is style that counts.

  Which of the following answers would you like to give if an impressionable young lady were to ask what sort of car you drove? a) a Nissan b) a Toyota c) a Volkswagen d) an Isuzu e) a Honda f) a Volvo?

  She equates VWs with Paula Hamilton and Nissans with zero per cent finance; thus the Corrado is bound to be more sought after than any Japanese competitor, no matter how many horsepower are entrusted to their rear wheels.

  Big Boys’ Toys

  It seems to me, Sir Isaac Newton could have been more gainfully employed. Any man who has the time to sit around in an autumnal orchard wondering why apples don’t float around in space once they part company with the parental bough, ought to be out looking for a proper job.

  Maybe it was in the hobbies section of his c.v. or maybe employers in the seventeenth century were a trifle anti-Semitic, but either way, Isaac never did get a proper job and went on instead to design what was marketed ten years ago as the Ballrace, or Newton’s Cradle.

  It set the scene for a host of so-called executive toys and relied for sales on the premise that the average high flyer doesn’t have anything better to do while at his desk than sit watching a load of chrome balls bash the hell out of each other until it’s coffee time or the phone shrills a cheery message that his wife’s burnt supper again.

  Newton’s thingumijig is, however, confined to page seven of yesterday’s news now – its headline grabbing antics of yesteryear fulfilled, in these days of war, hunger and crisp packets without little blue salt sachets in them, by a veritable myriad of toys all of which are jostling for pole position by the blotter.

  My rare sorties to the world of big business and, rarer still, my visits to the offices of those that control it, have revealed a constant.

  Whether the executive has plumped for red walls, white shag pile and chairs shaped like mattress springs or traditional oak panelling, leather seating and standard-lamp lighting, the centre-piece of his room is always an absolutely massive desk… a desk that’s as uncluttered as a hermit’s address book.

  To the right, there’s the telephone; to the left, an intercom. Dead ahead, beyond the equally uncluttered blotter there are dog-eared photographs of his wife, taken in those salad days when she didn’t burn supper, and his children, taken when they were angelic rather than punk.

  Somewhere, though, there will also be a toy – not an Action Man or a Care Bear. An executive toy has to be more than just fun to play with. It must also be an attractive, decorative item which doesn’t look out of place in a professional setting.

  You have to understand that the street cred of a top businessman would be seriously impaired should anyone bodyswerve his personal secretary, make it into the inner sanctum and catch him playing with a Scalextric set.

  But if you broke in and found him struggling with a Puzzleplex jigsaw, all would be well. These jigsaws are extraordinarily beautiful objets d’art which, almost incidentally, happen to be infernally difficult puzzles.

  Each one of these three-dimensional, wooden jigsaws is handmade, each is completely different from anything that has gone before and, best of all, the manufacturer, an eccentric called Peter Stocken, will create your puzzle in any shape you like – a car, a Welsh dragon, an artificial lung, anything.

  You need an afternoon to complete a simple one and about £50 to buy it. For the more difficult variety, extend the time allowed to a day and start adding the noughts.

  I must confess I was hugely tempted to invest but had I succumbed, I fear you would not be reading this and that my superhuman, week-long struggle to give up smoking would have been thwarted.

  Another great puzzle is the much cheaper Philosopher’s Knot, the idea being that you have to extricate a larger glass ball from a surrounding web of knotted string. It looks even trickier than that Hungarian cube thingy from last year.

  But the interesting thing about it is that were the ball made from shoddy plastic and the string from something of inferior quality, sales to businessmen would be sluggish. It looks good in between the telephone and the blotter on an executive’s desk.

  Similarly, I noticed Fortnum and Mason are selling a twisted length of black and white plastic tubing for £35 in their gift department. I spent many minutes poring over this most unusual creation hoping an assistant would overcome any prejudices my tatty jeans were instilling in him and volunteer an explanation.

  None was forthcoming and because I always feel so foolish when asking such people what various things do, I kept my mouth shut. If I were in their shoes and such a question were fired at me, I should want to know why someone would be considering the purchase of an item without knowing what it was or did.

  Thus, I reserve behaviour of this kind until about 5.25 p.m. on Christmas Eve when, in desperation, I have been known to spend a week’s wages on a device for melting the teeth of dead okapis merely because ‘it looks nice’.

  The upshot of all this nonsense is that my notebook says ‘funny plastic tubing. Fortnum’s. £35’. If it is merely decorative, then it works well but costs rather a lot. If it has a function, then I should enjoy being enlightened.

  I’d actually gone to Fortnum’s in search of a truly great executive toy – an 18-inch-high suede rat in a blue leather coat and a felt hat. It is supposed to be Reckless from the Captain Beaky gang but he seems to have died now the hype has all quietened down as no one seemed to remember the item in question or from whence it came.

  I recall it cost close on £40 but, believe me, as a desk centre-piece, it had no peers.

  Unless, of course, you’re a gadget kinda guy in which case 1986 holds much more in the way of excitement than dear old suede Reckless ever could.

  Take telephones. Quite why an executive needs the 15-memory variety with built-in answerphone, hands-off dial facility, digital read-out, supersonic turbo recall, optic fibre laser and led handset, I know not.

  Especially when I consider all he ever does is pick the damn thing up and say to his secretary, ‘Get me whatsisname of doodah limited.’

  Hands up all those who are familiar with the wide-open secretary who’s all set to transfer you to her boss until she finds out you’ve got something to do with his work when all of a sudden she will announce, ‘He’s in a meeting.’

  Is he hell. He’s playing with his Philosopher’s Knot and wanting to know why his wife has burnt supper for the eighth successive night.

  Or else he’s sitting back, eyes half closed and fingers steepled enjoying the strains of Beethoven on the mini compact disc system with twin cassette auto
play reverse and solar powered volume knob. Oh, and it can play music too.

  This is usually located in the bottom drawer – a space which, in that bygone age before floppy discs (which I will not spell with a ‘k’) and cursors, was taken up with things called files.

  These stereos fascinate me. The smaller they are, the more expensive they are to buy. I don’t see what’s wrong with my simply enormous Rotel, Pioneer, Akai circa 1976 set up but evidently, it is miles too big – and judging by some of the prices these days, it didn’t cost enough either.

  Having said that though, I was staggered to see a Sinclair flat screen telly in a dusty corner of the Design Centre selling for just £99.95. As is the current vogue, the screen was the same size as your average sultana but the wiry bit round the back was encased in a washing machine-sized shell. No wonder old Clive had to sell out.

  Doubtless, he’ll soon come up with a television so small that you won’t be able to see it at all.

  When the days of invisible gadgetry are upon us, I may well take my place on the bandwagon and reap the benefits of being able to cover my desk with everything from a sunbed to a nuclear power station without my work space being pinched.

  At present though I have just three executive toys, not counting my telephone which is a straightforward British Telecom Ambassador and therefore doesn’t count.

  Behind the Citroen press release to my left is the Waterford Crystal aeroplane I was given for Christmas by someone I didn’t like very much until I found out it cost more than £50.

  Lost in the vicinity of a half-eaten packet of McVities dark chocolate biscuits – remember, I’m trying to give up smoking – and the designer-label notebook is a half-inch-high, hand-painted pig. Always have loved that.

  And occupying pride of place is my helicopter – a stunningly good toy made by Mattell in the 1970s and foolishly dropped from the line-up a couple of years back. Tough luck you can’t buy one these days.