Born to Be Riled Read online

  So, if a car manufacturer has spent all year developing a new concept to wow the crowds at an exhibition, it goes to Japan, leaving London with the mainstream stuff, the kind of cars that are parked in your street anyway.

  That said, it will be your first chance to see the Ferrari F50 (which makes the show worthwhile all on its own) and the TVR Cerbera, but as its astonishing engine will be off, onlookers will be deprived of its USP.

  Other notable debutantes include the MGF, the Renault Megane, the really rather nice Fiat Bravo and, of course, the fascinating and interesting Vauxhall Vectra which, in case you can’t find it, is the one that looks pretty much the same as a Cavalier.

  However, pretty well all the one-off concept cars will be in Tokyo, and in case you’re wondering why we don’t move the dates of our show, I should remind you that we once did. But because it no longer straddled the half-term break, no one came. And anyway, the new dates meant we were competing with Paris.

  And all the manufacturers thought France more important than London anyway. We could, of course, move our event to June but I’ve just checked and there’s a show on then in Pune, a small town 120 miles from Bombay. And I’m pretty damn sure that’s where the car makers would concentrate their resources.

  The upshot of all this is that you won’t be able to see the Ford GT90, and that’s a pity because it’s America’s first attempt at a supercar.

  At this point, I’m sure, Wilbur and Myrtle will be running around waving their arms in the air and pointing to the Corvette ZR-1 and the Dodge Viper, saying that these are supercars. But they’re not.

  And nor is that absurd Vector which is made in agonizingly small numbers in California, and nor was the Pontiac Fiero.

  Supercars are what the Europeans do. We are the only ones who know how to make a car go quickly… round corners.

  People at Ford in Detroit say the old GT40 was a supercar and that they made it, but again, they’re wrong. It may have had an American engine but the rest of it, the important stuff, was as American as Elgar.

  The GT90 is their first attempt and it seems to work rather well, because it is capable of 235mph, making it the fastest road car in the world. It does 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds so it is pretty sprightly on that front too. And because it is mid-engined, light and sits on a modified Jaguar XJ220 chassis, it should be pretty nifty through the bends too.

  Under the engine cover, you will find a 6000cc V12 which has four turbos. Total output is a staggering 720bhp, making it not only more powerful than the McLaren F1 but, significantly, more powerful than the McLaren F1 driven by Mika Hakkinen.

  It’s a looker too. They say there are hints of the GT40 but I couldn’t find any. For a kick-off, there isn’t a single curve on the car – every line is straight, except the roof which is a glass dome.

  And that’s why, when I drove this monster, the turbo’s wastegates were jammed open, limiting me to just 440bhp. They say that if the engine were working at full noise, and the chassis could handle the onslaught, the glass would crack, splinter and break.

  They were very, very worried about this $4 million one-off car as I set off for a couple of laps at Le Mans because the very next day it was off to the Tokyo show.

  That’s why I went so fast. To punish Ford for sucking up to the Japanese and ignoring just about the only market in the world that truly loves their ordinary cars, I had fun with the GT90.

  Until one of its wheels came off. I’d been enjoying the bark of that V12 and experimenting with the radar sensors which ignite a red light in the door mirrors when you’re being overtaken, when it all went horribly wrong.

  The tail stepped out of line and even the downforce from its truly huge tail spoiler failed to prevent a spin.

  Unfortunately, there was no damage and I didn’t hit anything, which means the fastest car in the world is sitting right now under the rising sun.

  At the London Motor Show, Ford is hoping the new Fiesta will be enough to draw the crowds. And though it’s a nice little car, they’re as muddleheaded as that fine band, REM, who once said, ‘I forget my shirt at the water’s edge. The moon is low tonight.’

  Blackpool Rock

  The Alfa Romeo GTV6 had the worst gearbox I’ve ever encountered, the worst driving position and the worst record for reliability. Nevertheless, I bought one.

  I knew it was a hopeless basket case but I’d become smitten by the noise its engine made: a rumble in the jungle at low revs and an almost eerie howl as it neared the red line.

  I would put up with the massive bouts of truculence, the deep discomfort and the absurdly heavy steering because no car before, or since, has ever made such a glorious sound. It was music to the enthusiast’s ears, like a cross between ‘Ode to Joy’ and ‘Nessun Dorma’.

  However, its title as the best sounding road car of them all is under threat from the wheeled equivalent of Aero-smith. You really could call the new TVR Cerbera heavy metal were it not fashioned from plastic.

  The best way to first experience this car is to be about seven miles away. As it comes towards you, it’s like being in a horror movie. The monster is getting closer. The Thing. The Blob. Terror has no shape. But God, what a noise.

  Amplify the sound of someone ripping calico a thousandfold and you’re getting near the mark, but you’ll miss out on the gear changes, each one accompanied by a frantic popping and spitting as unburned fuel crackles and fizzes its way down those two Matrix Church superguns that TVR calls exhaust pipes.

  As the car tears past, at its top speed of 160mph or so, your eardrums will burst. There’s no music here, just volume. Woodstock just went by. It was even pink.

  Now for 15 years or so, Blackpool-based TVR has used the Land Rover V8 in its cars and they’ve sounded good in a beefy, brutal sort of way, but this Cerbera is on another level altogether. So what’s the story?

  Well it would seem that the company’s charismatic boss, Peter Wheeler, was not very pleased when Rover was bought by BMW. It’s reported that he said, ‘I’ll not have anything bloody German in my cars.’

  And so he set out to build his own V8. It’s designed to be just like the unit you’ll find in a Formula One car except it has just two valves per cylinder and displaces 4.2 litres instead of 3.5.

  It only produces 360bhp but that, in a car which weighs about a ton is enough, believe me. It’s enough to get you from 0 to 60 in four seconds for a kick off. Six seconds after that, with blood pouring from your ears, you’ll be past a hundred.

  Now in a normal car, the more responsible motorist can trundle around, knowing the power is there but only using it when necessary. This is not an option in the Cerbera.

  If this car was a drug, it would be crack cocaine. Its power is viciously addictive and you find yourself holding the throttle wide open just to hear what the motor will sound like at 6000rpm. You take it to the limiter every time, not caring that there’s a corner coming up and that, really, you should be standing on the brakes.

  A lot of people are going to lose their licences with the Cerbera; that much is for sure. Everything else is less clear because I was driving a prototype with wonky brakes and a suspension set-up that was not finished.

  I therefore don’t really know how the finished car will handle but if it’s anything like other TVRs, it’ll be average. However, though it might not be fast through the bends, it will be like lightning between them.

  And comfortable too. Thanks to the long wheelbase, it rides with a dexterity and suppleness I wasn’t expecting.

  It also has film star looks. Though it’s essentially a lengthened, hardtop version of the droptop, two-seater Chimera, it manages to look completely different: like a chopped 1950s Mercury in many ways.

  Inside, it’s even more wild. To get there, you hit the remote control plipper once, to unlock the doors, and then again, to open them. There are no handles.

  Once inside, there’s a boot and two back seats which could handle anyone up to about 5ft 5in, but you tend not to notice beca
use the dash is straight from the pages of Isaac Asimov. The cream-coloured dials are grouped above and below the steering wheel, which in turn is festooned with buttons.

  With all the controls taken care of, the designer has been allowed to let his imagination run wild. And what makes it so good is that unlike Aston Martin and Lotus, TVR doesn’t use switches from Metros and Vauxhalls and Sierras. They make their own.

  Despite this, the Cerbera will cost less than £40,000. So does this mean TVR is running a social service, providing cars at a loss?

  This is unlikely when you know the boss. A few years ago, when the Labour Party was holding its conference in Blackpool, Paul Boateng rang to ask if he could borrow a car while he was in town. Peter Wheeler was heard to mutter: ‘If he wins the election, he can have the bloody company.’

  It seems TVR can afford to sell its cars cheaply because it makes so few. Instead of having to buy robots to make thousands of parts a year, the designers can wander into the factory and simply ask the line workers to ‘do it this way from now on’.

  And that means we have the chance of buying, for half the price of a Ferrari, a hand-built, all British supercar.

  That, all on its own, would be enough to swing it for most people but what makes this car so desperately appealing to me is not the power or the speed or even that wonderful dash. Yes, I love the looks too, but they’re not the issue either.

  I would buy this car because it’s the living embodiment of counter culture rock and roll. Today, when most cars are packaged like Michael Bolton, or rely on past glories like the Stones, the new TVR gets back to basics. You would not want it to marry your daughter.

  Plus, to use a word the Cerbera would undoubtedly choose, it’s as loud as a bastard.

  Gordon Gekko back in the driving seat

  As the 1980s drew to a close, Britain was gripped by a recession which would see car sales fall from 2.2 million a year to just over 1.5 million. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. Factories closed. House prices plummeted. So did hemlines. It was all horrid. Throughout those dark and gloomy days, gurus told us that the glorious times of easy credit, greed and avarice were over and that in the 1990s we would all be busy gathering wood for pensioners and helping to set up community service projects. Cars would have catalytic converters and airbags. Films where everyone got shot would be replaced by films where women wandered around meadows in beekeeper hats, making daisy chains and falling in love with gallant and good men on eco-friendly white horses. It sounded like the worst nightmare I could possibly imagine and it all looked like coming true when, in Terminator 2, Arnie refused to kill anyone.

  But, thankfully, the British recession has ended and those old values are back on line. Girls who had been forced into long and tedious skirts now insist on huge slits up to their ladies’ areas, estate agents are selling houses in Chelsea for £25 million, the stock market is up above the ionosphere. Greed is good. And greed is back. Phew.

  And nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in cardom. At the Motor Show, I talked with thousands of visitors and not one asked about safety, or economy, or value for money. They wanted to talk power.

  In ten days no one suggested that the new Golf Estate was a good car because of the space in the back for meals-on-wheels deliveries. No one talked about how BMW’s recycling programme might conserve the earth’s resources.

  No one noticed that there wasn’t a single electric car in Earls Court, but the aisles were full to overflowing with people lying on the floor having paddy fits because the McLaren F1 was an absentee. When they came round, they talked about the Aston Martin Vantage, the 7 litre, twin-supercharged Lister Storm, and the Lamborghini Diablo VT. Suggest that we should rip out all the cats, fit six downdraught Webers and prime them with five-star fuel and they wet themselves. And so did I.

  Outside, ladies in Puffas and corduroy trouserwear handed out leaflets demanding that cars be banned from city centres. If they could have had a pound for every time someone told them to get back to Greenham, they could have afforded nicer leaflets, and a Lear jet to drop them from. Inside, you couldn’t get near the TVR stand. All the other manufacturers with their airbags and their safety videos and their girls in ankle-length skirts were watching tumbleweed blow by, while the boys from Blackpool had to fight off the crowds with sticks. Their Cerbera no doubt meets the letter of the environmental law but as regards the spirit it’s a V8-sized joke, a 5 litre two-fingered salute to the world’s whales and all who love them.

  The safety lobby with their meat-free fridges and their green-tinted specs had their 15 minutes of fame in 1991, but they must now realize that Gordon Gekko is back in the driving seat, with his foot flat down in a tyre-squealing slide back to 1986. And even though the insurance companies are doing their best to ensure we can’t afford cars that will squeal tyres, we, like all clever capitalists, still have an answer.

  We are buying more and more off-road cars so that we can drive through the countryside. Literally.

  All aboard the veal calf express

  It is a fact that most people in the major financial institutions go to work by train, which means they harbour a deep-seated hatred of British Rail.

  You can see them all piling out of the station at 11 a.m., six hours after they left home in Kent, clutching their Customer Charter form and muttering to one another about how it was leaves the last time. And the wrong-shaped snow before that.

  This is a big problem for British Rail as it heads towards privatization. Without the support of the City boys – and they’re hardly likely to get it, having wrecked their lives for so long – the flotation will be a disaster.

  So they’ve come up with a cunning plan, which involves demonstrating to their customers that the alternative to rail travel is even worse.

  Ever since I was thrown off a train by the police for arguing with a guard – who should have been drowned at birth – I’ve made it my business to avoid British Rail’s pitifully inadequate, overpriced, badly run, slow, sick-making service, but last weekend I had to go to Harwich.

  And for all sorts of complicated reasons I couldn’t drive, so with bad grace I set off for Liverpool Street station, where the man at the ticket desk said, without looking up, that Aborigines have their fish in the laundry.

  Seriously, this guy had not mastered the art of speech and if he’d been on one of those customer care programmes that BR is always harping on about, I can only deduce that the lecturer was on holiday that week.

  Or Goebbels.

  I explained that I couldn’t understand a word he was on about and that it might be better if he looked up so I could see his lips. This helped a lot and I was able to work out that the train to Harwich had been cancelled. No sorry. No nothing. His head just flopped down again like his neck had suddenly broken.

  Which it would have done had there not been a piece of glass separating us. Why do they have that glass anyway? Who’d want to rob those dunderheads?

  Instead of a train, there was to be a coach and this sent shivers down my spine. A coach. I’d rather have gone to the dentist. I don’t go on coaches. Coaches are for old people on tours of North Wales. Coaches are for students who want to go from Northampton to Sheffield for 10p. Coaches don’t have seatbelts and they roll down embankments, killing everyone on board.

  To make sure we boarded it, there were some small Chinese women marshalling the crowds, shouting at shufflers. It was like a scene from Schindler’s List. Exactly where was the bus’s exhaust outlet?

  Now, British Airways have proved that it is possible to fit a human being into a space 30 per cent smaller than his body but the coach operators have gone much further.

  What you do on a coach is get yourself roughly near the seat and then a Chinese woman comes along with a mallet and hammers you into position. Then some Scandinavians pile rucksacks on your head.

  I began to wonder why on earth anyone needs a seat-belt on a coach. The driver could have driven into a wall at 100mph, and I wo
uldn’t have felt a thing.

  There is no smoking on board but that’s OK because not even Harry Houdini could have got into my pockets. And anyway, the packet had taken a direct hit from the mallet so all the Marlboros were bent and broken.

  Now I’ve just come back from Cuba and I remember staring in open-mouthed wonderment as the buses there, huge 300-seaters, trundled by with 500 dismal faces pressed to the glass. What I hadn’t realized is that I was staring in the face of sheer luxury.

  Bus travel in Britain is far worse, and the pain is doubly bad here because we know what we’re missing. We know that it isn’t beyond the wit of man to fix up a buffet bar or a lavatory or, indeed, to space the seats in such a way that I could breathe properly. They didn’t even have women coming down the aisles offering to empty a pot of coffee into your lap in exchange for £1.20.

  I swear as we went past one field in Essex, a herd of veals were pointing at us and waving placards.

  On a coach, you pay your money and, crashes permitting, it takes you there. That’s it. This is frill-free travel, and at the other end of your journey more people come with spatulas to ease you out of your seat.

  It was, without a doubt, the worst two hours of my entire life and when we emerged at Harwich docks I found myself staring wistfully at the trains there. They looked so big, and so fast, and the staff all looked like angels – a bit fatter perhaps – but with their sandwiches and their teas they were definitely God’s children.

  And they are working for a bunch of people who are, very obviously, brilliant. To have thought up the idea of putting disgruntled rail customers on a coach once in a while to shut them up is inspired.

  And anyone who can think like that gets my vote. When the flotation comes, I’ll take 400 shares please.

  Speedy Swede