Born to Be Riled Read online

And these people don’t park their cars neatly outside the school gates. They simply abandon them nearby and stand around with the other mothers, who’ve abandoned their space shuttles and coaches, arranging bloody coffee mornings. ‘Actually I can’t make it today. I’m having sex with the gardener.’

  That, of course, is after the gardener in question has helped the ranger to chop down a few more trees. Trees need to be murdered here because, to convince themselves that Surrey is not simply London SW37, the locals demand that the open spaces be kept as such. They call them beauty spots, and that’s exactly what they are – spots, tiny little pinpricks of manicured green in a sea of fake marble pillars and Mitsubishi Shoguns.

  When the rush hour has subsided and Surrey Woman is at home watching the gardener pant over her panties, old people come out of their houses and climb into their Chevettes and Rover 600s and head for the hills – where the ranger has ripped up some more trees to make car parks.

  I spent two days in such a car park this week, and have rarely felt so depressed. The view was undoubtedly pretty, but you know that it’s stage-managed and that just over the next hill lies Esher, which isn’t pretty at all.

  And you know that you must not let your dog off its lead or pick a flower. This is countryside in the same way that the Spice Girls is a rock band, that is, it isn’t countryside at all. If it were cheese, it would be Primula.

  And the visitors know it. They sit in their cars, not daring to get out in case they break one of the ranger’s rules, and they stare at that pitiful facsimile of nature for hours on end. They don’t talk. They don’t eat. They don’t read.

  They’re sitting in a bloody car park, surrounded by hundreds of other people in cars, listening to lorries lumbering up the A25, watching a tree being chopped down by nature conservationists.

  One man turned up in a brand-new Bentley Turbo R and sat in his car facing, not the view, but the café which sells chips.

  And the staff there explained that Paul Weller is a regular visitor. Small wonder the poor bloke has such a strange view of the world when he’s forced to sit in a traffic jam for two hours just to get one.

  Surrey is more awful, I suspect, than hell. If that’s the future for commuting then, my God, you can have my keys right now.

  A frightening discovery

  I’ve been sitting at my computer now for two hours, unsure about how this week’s column should begin. You see, after years of Biro-sucking, I’ve finally decided the Land Rover Discovery is absolute rubbish.

  But we’re talking here about a national institution – an automotive Prince Philip – and you can’t just launch into attack mode saying it’s a completely useless waste of everyone’s afternoon.

  But it is, that’s the trouble. It’s ugly; really, really ugly and I have no idea why this has never occurred to me before. It’s been around for years but only this morning did I start to ask the important questions.

  Why does it have that raised bit at the back? No dog I’ve ever seen is 15 feet tall and not once, ever, have I heard of someone keeping a pet giraffe. The Discovery doesn’t need that rear end lump.

  And why’s the back window cockeyed? And have you seen the panel gaps, for God’s sake? I reckon you could get into a Discovery without opening the door. And the windscreen’s too flat, and the wheels are lost in those huge arches. They’re like Polo mints mounted at the entrance to Fingal’s Cave.

  Seriously, next time you’re down in Guildford have a look. You’ll see that the Discovery is even uglier than a Ford Scorpio.

  It is also dangerous. Now that’s contentious stuff. You can say a car manufacturer’s new product is a waste of the world’s resources and they’ll do nothing. You can liken it to a cup of cold sick and refuse to test it, saying it’s more boring than dying, and still they won’t react. But call a car dangerous and whoa, what’s this? A writ? Blimey.

  Well, here’s the defence. I’ve always felt that all cars are capable of stopping in roughly the same distance but this, it turns out, is just not true. I tested a handful of cars last week and was simply amazed by the results.

  A Lexus GS300 took just 139.8 feet to haul itself from 70mph to a standstill whereas the aforementioned Land Rover Discovery came to a halt in an almost unbelievable 224.1 feet. And that, to save you the bother of working it out, is a difference of 84 feet. I’ll say it again: 84 feet, 28 yards, five car lengths.

  Think about that. You crest a brow on the motorway to discover the traffic ahead is stopped. If you’re in a Lexus you’ll pull up just in time, but if you’re in a Discovery you’ll still be going at a fair old lick when you have the smash.

  Now I want to make it plain that the Discovery is not the only car to perform badly in this test. The Toyota Rav4 is awful and the Ford Explorer is horrific, but whereas the other two have many strings to their bow, the Disco does not.

  Yes, it is a fine off-road car, as well it should be with those Range Rover underpinnings and a lusty V8. There’s a diesel too, but quite frankly, I’d rather take my own appendix out.

  The only good thing about the diesel is that it’s not terribly powerful. Thus, you’ll never get up enough speed to turn it over, which is something that I suspect could happen very easily indeed in a V8. A top-heavy, 2 ton car simply cannot be as wieldy as a low-slung saloon.

  Of course, the big safety device fitted to all Discoveries is the build quality. As they spend most of their time on the back of low loaders, all the braking and cornering problems are cured at a stroke.

  Now, I’m machine-gunning the Discovery because I’ve recently spent some more time with the new Freelander, whose praises, you may recall, I sang a few weeks ago in a deep and lusty baritone.

  Well, after several thousand miles I can report those initial findings were just about right. On the road, the Freelander stops and corners like a normal car, even if it is perhaps a little slow. On a long uphill motorway gradient, you sometimes need fourth gear to maintain a 70mph cruise.

  Off-road, however, it’s even better than I first thought. On one shoot, mud that stopped both a normal Land Rover and a Toyota Landcruiser proved no problem at all for the Freelander’s traction control. I simply adore this little car which, in every way, knocks spots off its bigger brother.

  What Rover must do, and now, is stop making the Discovery. It is so far past its sell-by date it should really only be sold in one colour – mould.

  But even if they do, there is still the problem of used Discoveries, sitting on the secondhand market looking all innocent and tempting. Pop down to the auctions and you’ll find J-registered diesels going for less than £8000. And more worrying still, a P-registered 25,000 miler is available now for just £19,000, making it seem like a large and sensible alternative to the Freelander.

  It isn’t. It’s a huge, salivating dog that, at best, will sit around in your drive wetting itself. Worst case scenario? It’ll tear your leg off and beat you to death with the soggy end.

  The choice is easy. Buy the puppy instead, the dog that you know has been bred properly by a registered member of the BMW kennel club. Buy the Freelander.

  Hannibal Hector the Vector

  Atlanta is one of the world’s most peculiar cities. It has the requisite pointy skyscrapers and if you ask for a small Coke in a Taco Bell, it still comes in a bucket. This is America.

  And yet somehow, it isn’t. The people, largely, are slim, and regularly you’ll see a well-dressed, pretty girl in an Alfa Romeo Spider.

  And then you’ve got the valet parkists at the Ritz Carlton. They’re efficient for sure, but they don’t crawl across the driveway on their stomachs, clutching at your legs like you’re the only person in the world who shares the same type of bone marrow.

  I read recently that America’s business travellers had voted Atlanta the rudest city in the world… and that’s it. That’s why I like the place so much. Ask for a pail of Sprite in a restaurant and you’ll be ignored. Summon a man to fix the television in your bedroom and he’ll stomp a
round, prodding the remote control and swearing at you for breaking it. It’s fantastic. It’s just like Britain.

  And it’s very like Britain if you head north to the town of Braselton, which was recently bought by Kim Basinger. Here you will find Road Atlanta, which isn’t a road at all. It’s a swooping, Spa-like race track where the girl on reception greets you with the distinctly un-American ‘Hello love.’

  Men drift around in the background, being English, and then you’re introduced to the boss who, it turns out, lives in Field Assarts – a small village just outside Chipping Norton.

  I was there to drive the Vector, an American supercar about which I had serious doubts. When I first heard of it, 20 years ago, it was being made in California by a man whose mouth was so big you could park a lorry in it.

  He used to claim that his car, which had a twin-turbocharged Corvette V8, could do more than 200mph, but I saw no test results to back this up. Indeed, the only time I ever even saw a Vector was in the film Rising Sun.

  Anyway, he went bust and the company was relocated to Florida by the same Malaysians who own Lamborghini. But not long afterwards, they simply locked the factory doors and walked away.

  However, despite this chequered past, there, at Road Atlanta, was an enormous American lorry which housed a brand-new Vector, and alongside it there was a huge black limo which had been driven overnight from Jacksonville, six hours to the south.

  In the back was Vector’s new boss. Now I was expecting a ten-gallon hat to stumble from the back door, followed several hours later by a stomach. But no, a cheeky chappie in a two-piece pinstripe bounded over and introduced himself in a Thames Estuary accent as Tim.

  Turns out, he served his time at Lotus, where there is only one mantra. The car must be light.

  But the £100,000 monster being poured from the back of that gigantic truck appeared to have been fashioned from a cocktail of lead and mercury. It was huge: 6 inches wider than a Diablo and 10 times more striking.

  As is the way with supercars, getting in is like potholing. You crawl under the Kevlar gull-wing door and burrow over the sill to find an interior which is shockingly cramped. Put a veal in there and Dover docks would be closed down for a month.

  Still, you turn the key and behind your head a 5.7 litre, 500bhp Lamborghini V12 explodes into life. This is what supercars are all about. Deep discomfort, allied to unspeakable noise and fear. If you feel like a veal with a rocket strapped to its back, you’re in a supercar where Nessun Dorma. If it’s all comfy and quiet, you’re in a Nissan Dormobile.

  It was odd then, to discover that when I shoved the throttle into the carpet the car merely went a little faster. Only when the revs crawled past 4000 did it really wake up, but by then I was already tired. The steering is power-assisted, but only a little bit. And you don’t press the brake pedal to slow down; you have to climb in the footwell and use a jack hammer on the damn thing. It absolutely will not oversteer either.

  Now at this point, I’d like to say that the first man ever to buy one of these cars had the right idea. He took down the wall of his house, put the car in his sitting room and built the wall again.

  And yet I suspect that somewhere in the package there is a good car. It reminded me in many ways of an early ’80s TVR which we could, so easily, have written off as kit-car junk. With a bit of careful development, mainly to make the engine work at low revs, the Vector could pick up the baton that Lamborghini, I understand, is soon to drop. Rumours coming from the factory in Bologna talk of an empty order book and even emptier pockets.

  It is, of course, pretty damn hard to take on Ferrari and Porsche but there’s no doubt in my mind that Vector is using the right recipe – a British chassis, Italian power, American prices and Buck Rogers styling. They just want to make sure they don’t get that all the wrong way round.

  If they succeed, they’ll be selling the nicest American surprise since Atlanta. If they don’t, they’ll be selling a crap car.

  F1 running rings round the viewers

  Every year, I predict who will win the Formula One world championship. And every year I am completely and utterly wrong. This year, I said it would be Jacques Villeneuve… but don’t worry, I’m not losing my touch. Martin Brundle’s job is safe, because I was wrong again.

  I may have been right with the outcome but, as with examinations, you must be able to show how you worked it out. And on that front, I was all over the place. You see, I said Jacques would win every single race, have it wrapped up by Silverstone, and that we were in for the dullest year of racing since the drivers’ strike.

  And I wasn’t alone. Everyone who knows which way up a helmet goes agreed with me. So what went wrong? Well I’m not big on conspiracy theories. I don’t, for instance, believe that Princess Diana was murdered by one of the Queen’s corgis. My hair was not cut this morning by Elvis Presley. And I think Neil Armstrong did make his giant leap on the moon, not on a soundstage in Nevada. But at the end of qualifying for the European Grand Prix last month, one of my eyebrows was raised just a little higher than normal. And at the end of the race, the other one had joined it. With hindsight, you can see things starting to go awry in Austria. Schumacher was romping away with the title when he was hit with a 10 second penalty after passing Heinz-Harald Hopeless under a yellow flag. Result: Villeneuve closed the gap.

  Then there was Japan, when Jacques could have sewn it all up. But no. He didn’t slow down for a waved flag while qualifying, he was under a one-race suspended ban and that was it. He was out. Result: Schumacher closed the gap.

  And just in case Jacques thought about appealing, he was warned that Eddie Irvine had done this before and had seen his ban extended from one to three races. Result: a bunch of promoters with Blair-style grins. These penalties had been imposed for clear misdemeanours, but I find it odd that the only two drivers to have fallen foul of the law this year were the two fighting for the title, and that both did so in the championship’s dying hours. Anyway, when the circus arrived in Spain for the big showdown, Villeneuve and Schumacher were one point apart, and I had buttocks you couldn’t have prised apart with a blow torch. However, during qualifying we were asked to believe that Michael and Jacques on this, the greatest day in motor racing, had driven round the circuit at exactly the same speed – something that had never, ever happened before. Far-fetched? Not if you think Star Wars is a true story.

  Then came the race. Over the year I’ve come to respect Schumacher, who seemed to be genuinely pleased when he won. He undoubtedly had an inferior car – one of my beloved Ferraris. He had proved himself a truly great driver, and after his praise for Eddie Irvine in Japan, a gentleman. But in Spain he proved that, when all is said and done, he is still a German. So he was out and Villeneuve was on his way to victory, not only in the race but in the championship too. Hip hip hooray and so on.

  But wait. What’s this? Team managers dash about in the pits, and look what’s happening. Hakkinen has overtaken Coulthard. On the straight. Fisichella has been blue-flagged, and Villeneuve’s car seems to be suffering some damage after all. Now, obviously it would be improper for me to suggest even for one moment that there had been some behind-the-scenes jiggery-pokery going on, but did you see Coulthard on the podium? He looked like a man whose dog had just died. Even Hakkinen, who I expected to burst with pride when he finally won a race, looked like he’d just failed all his A-levels.

  There’s talk that Sylvester Stallone is working on a Hollywood blockbuster about Formula One, but if someone presented him with a script based on the 1997 championship, he’d dismiss it as completely implausible.

  Bernie Ecclestone has done a magnificent job with Formula One and he needs these last-minute showdowns. But we, the keen viewers, need to be assured that it is still motorsport, with young men going wheel-to-wheel in a life-or-death struggle for glory. And not panto.

  Big cat needs its tummy tickled

  I’d only been driving the new Jaguar for 20 minutes when, inevitably, it happened. O
n a rain-streaked M42 my rear-view mirror filled to overflowing with the menacing sight of a steel-wheeled BMW 316. Inside, the driver was barking into a mobile phone, his face contorted with rage that I should be in his way.

  Now there was a time when I’d have eased the Jag into a lower gear and floored the throttle, but next weekend I shall be 38 and I just can’t be bothered any more. So, as soon as a space appeared, I moved politely into the middle lane and smiled as Mr Neo-Georgian screamed past, on his way, no doubt, to yet another crisis at the photocopier shop.

  It was, I’m afraid, a rather patronizing smile because matey could have brought any BMW to the battle and he’d have lost. I was driving the new supercharged XK8 you see, and no German production car can even get close. Not even the new Porsche 911.

  The standard XK8 has already been voted the most beautiful two-seater sports car in the world by a bunch of Italian designers, but now Jaguar has added some teeth to create what’s called the XKR. Basically, it’s propelled along by a supercharged 4.0 litre V8 engine which produces a simply staggering 370bhp – roughly the same as a Ferrari 355.

  This is a natural successor to the old Jaguar XK120 which, 50 years ago, was also voted the most beautiful car in the world. And then, on a deserted stretch of Belgian motorway, it achieved 139mph, making it the fastest too.

  The new XKR goes further. Even though it is burdened by various pieces of Prescottery in the exhaust and an automatic gearbox, it will get from 0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds and onwards to a top speed in excess of 175mph. Well it would, but an electronic referee blows the whistle at 155mph.

  These are impressive statistics but it is the quality and the relentlessness of the power delivery that leaves a more lasting impression – that and the top-end clout. From 140 to 155mph, when the supercharger is eating steroids by the handful, it is an almost unbelievable 50 seconds faster than a standard, unsupercharged XK8.