Round the Bend Read online

  Then there’s the steering wheel. It’s made from the cheapest plastic in the world and has a diameter exactly an eighth of an inch bigger than the outer ring round Saturn. You don’t steer this car. You flail.

  And finally there’s the noise. Oh. My. God. There has never been a car that sounds like this. Not ever. Obviously the V8, lifted straight from the latest generation of Corvette, is quite a noisy thing, but when you accelerate you don’t hear it at all. What you hear is the supercharger. It’s not a whine or a whistle, as you might expect. It’s as though someone is feeding a million squirrels into an industrial wood chipper.

  It is a deafening sound and it’s at a pitch that could shatter Katherine Jenkins’ hair. So after a while you can take no more and you lift off, whereupon you are treated to the sound of distant artillery fire as traces of unburnt fuel ignite in the exhaust’s tailpipe. It is the most glorious noise in the world.

  So you find yourself gritting your teeth through the squirrel-mincing phase and then sitting there, with your foot off the throttle, waiting for the revs to drop to 1800, when the sound of far-off warfare comes.

  There are other good things too. For something that produces an almost insane 564 horsepower, it is surprisingly easy to drive. You put your foot down, the squirrels die, and you expect you’re going to spend the next five minutes wrestling with the ship’s wheel, trying to keep in a straight line.

  But no. It just squats and goes. And it’s not like it’s being held in check by all sorts of clever stability controls. All you get is traction control that is on, or off. And that’s it.

  Of course, it is a very big car. So massive, in fact, that very often those on the left-hand side are going through quite different weather from those on the right. And the people in the back are still in bed. But as a result of this vastness, there is room to lounge, and space in the boot for several grandfather clocks. It’s got a good ride too.

  Equipment? Yes, it’s got some but not much, and the little there was didn’t work.

  And you know what? I didn’t care. I’m ashamed to admit I loved this car. Yes, it’s vulgar and terrible but it’s almost ridiculously exciting and there is no other car that offers this much space and this much power for less.

  So you go ahead. You buy yourself a BMW M3 instead. In the meantime, I’m going to join the Ray Winstone Appreciation Society. And go to its meetings, in Spain, in what can only be described as the real sexy beast. Ghastly but utterly, utterly lovable.

  31 May 2009

  Oh please, angel, Daddy wants a go now

  Toyota Urban Cruiser 1.33 VVT-i

  My daughter has just bought her first car. Ordinarily this would be no big deal. All daughters buy a first car at some point. But the daughter I’m talking about is only ten years old.

  She did the right thing: saved her pocket money, pretended to believe in the tooth fairy and hoarded cheques from her grandmother until she had £50. Enough to buy an M-registered Ford Fiesta 1.3 with a radio that doesn’t work, no MoT, wind-down windows and the ultimate 1980s luxury – a lift-out sunshine roof.

  Of course, when the time comes, she’ll be able to part-exchange it and get £2,000 from Cash Gordon but until then she’ll be using it in our paddock. Getting all the ‘need for speed’ out of her system so that when she’s old enough to go on the roads, she won’t end up in a tree or, like her dad, on television, endlessly going round corners, shouting.

  Obviously, the job of teaching her how to drive it fell to me, but before we could actually set off, we had to have a lesson in how to get an M-registered Ford Fiesta going. This involves a lot of looking under the stairs and in all the kitchen cabinets, shouting, ‘Where are the bloody jump leads?’

  Soon, though, as the poor child’s enthusiasm waned, we had the bonnet up and the leads connected and we were treated to the unmistakable sound of a starter motor clicking uselessly. ‘This is your first lesson, darling. All jump leads, no matter how much you spend, don’t work.’

  We were therefore faced with the prospect of a bump start. And there’s a dilemma if ever you’ve seen one. Do you put a ten-year-old child, who has never driven a car, in the driving seat and do the pushing yourself? Or do you get behind the wheel and expect her to push a ton of metal?

  In fact, what you do is go back to shouting at the jump leads and making sparks until eventually, usually after about three hours, the little Ford’s rusty old 1.3 will cough into life.

  And so it begins. ‘Right, sweetheart. I want you to let your foot off the clutch pedal very smoothly and very slowly while keeping the revs up with the throttle pedal. Okay. Okay. That’s good. Oh, never mind. You’ve stalled. Doesn’t matter, darling. Don’t cry. Everyone stalls when they first learn. Just turn the key and let’s start again …’

  But, of course, we couldn’t start again because the battery was still flat. Which meant I had to charge it up, which is why I spent an hour last Bank Holiday Monday driving round and round our paddock in a £50 Ford Fiesta.

  God, it was fun. I pounded my way round so often that soon a circuit began to form in the long grass, and then, as I pounded some more, I started to experiment with the handbrake and the apexes … and the stopwatch.

  My daughter, I’m afraid, learnt nothing at all during this time. She just sat in the passenger seat, bouncing. But I learnt, once again, that anything with an internal combustion engine gives you just the biggest adrenaline rush when you remove it from the clutches of the authorities. Behaving yourself in a Ferrari simply cannot be as much of a laugh as running wild in a small half-broken Ford in a field full of buttercups.

  Once, I spent two weeks in an upmarket hotel, dining three times a day on exotic seafood in unusual sauces. It was great. But by the time the holiday ended, I wanted a cauliflower. I wanted a chicken leg, cold, with some sandwich spread. I would have torn out my own eyes for a poached egg on toast.

  What’s more, exotic cars, with their flappy paddles and their five-way traction control systems and their switchable throttle responses, have a habit of masking the purity of the simple internal combustion that lies within. I feel this with the 6-series BMW and the Mercedes CL, especially. The basic ingredients might be fresh and superb but all you ever taste is the electronic sauce.

  That old Ford Fiesta and the freedom of a paddock rekindled the love I have for cars and the need to get back to basics. So let me introduce you to the subject of this morning’s missive: the Toyota Urban Cruiser.

  Obviously, this is a very stupid name. Urban Cruiser makes it sound like a predatory homosexual, stalking inner-city lavatories at night in search of some George Michaelism. The test car I drove reinforced this by being purple.

  Whatever, it is designed for the city – and that’s stupid too. Because, in my experience, urbanites go to work on a bus or the Tube and then use their car to go somewhere far away at the weekend. And, trust me on this, the Urban Cruiser is not going to get you very far at all before you are overcome by a need to step outside and commit suicide.

  The problem is the 1.3-litre engine, which develops such a small amount of power that by the time you reach the end of the motorway slip road you are doing only 56mph – the same speed as all the trucks on the inside lane. Which means you are faced with a choice: pull out and be crushed, or brake and spend the rest of your life sitting there waiting for the 200-mile gap this car needs to pull out safely. It’s idiotically slow. Dangerously slow.

  It also suffers from the same problems that afflicted the Citroën C3 Picasso that I didn’t like on these pages a few weeks ago. In short, it’s a normal little hatchback with a boxy body dumped on top. What’s the point? Unless you have a job delivering hat stands.

  You end up with something that has the same number of seats but is worse to drive, more thirsty and slower than the small car on which it’s based. The Yaris, in this case.

  And here’s the clincher. The Urban Cruiser, with no sat nav and pleblon seats, costs £14,500. That makes it more expensive – much more expensi
ve – than a Mini or the normal Yaris, which isn’t exactly bargain basement in the first place.

  And yet, perhaps because I was in the mood for some broad beans in a parsley sauce, rather than a boned pigeon in a reduction of some kind, I rather enjoyed my time with the Cruiser.

  The optional satellite navigation system was easy to use, the trim felt durable and there were seven airbags to help out if I hit a bus shelter. What’s more, the bonnet is designed to be soft and comfy if it crashes into a person, and even the wiper bracket is designed to disintegrate if it comes into contact with the skull of someone who had been a pedestrian until he was launched into the air by the duvet draped over the engine.

  Mind you, a better and even more comfortable way of not being hurt by this car is simply to stroll out of its way.

  From behind the wheel, things are better still. If you join motorways at their source rather than via a slip road and if you avoid built-up areas, where people laugh openly at the name, it is possible to enjoy this car. It steers nicely and bounces like a small dog when pushed.

  And in a paddock, it’s a hoot. It even has air-conditioning to prevent you from getting hay fever in the long grass.

  But is it better, really, than my daughter’s Fiesta? The short answer is no. Because when it comes to small cars, what you really want is small bills. And truth be told, they don’t come much smaller than fifty quid.

  7 June 2009

  You’ll really stand out – for paying too much

  Mini Cooper S Convertible

  If you are a television detective, then it makes sense to have a classic car of some sort because you never actually need to drive it anywhere. A production team runner does that, and then you simply drop into the driving seat to pull up stylishly outside the murderer’s house.

  If you were a real detective, your chief constable would want a word in your ear if you insisted on using a MkII Jaguar or a Triumph with running boards. ‘Look, Bergerorse. This is the third murder on the trot where you failed to catch the baddie because your car broke down. Now stop being so stupid and use one of the Astra diesels like everyone else.’

  While doing the school run this morning, I saw a chap in a mustard yellow Volvo P1800. Presumably, he was on his way to work. Definitely, he wouldn’t get there.

  All of the things you take for granted in your Renault or your Ford – brakes that slow the car down, heating that works, electric windows, power steering – none of it is fitted to the Volvo. Plus, you know what happens when a cliff has been exposed to the wind for long enough. So can you imagine what a piston will be like after it’s spent twenty-five years headbutting a hundred billion explosions. It’ll be like a pebble.

  This means there will be no compression, which means you will have a top speed of one. You’d go faster if you got out and pushed. And you’ll be doing that a lot with your Volvo because the alternator won’t work.

  The only good news about this is that by modern standards the P1800 is extremely light. And that’s because it has virtually no safety features. A point that will become blindingly obvious should you ever reach two and hit a tree.

  Classic cars are all rubbish. My Mercedes Grosser is rubbish. The Ferrari 250 GTO is rubbish. Even a Lancia Stratos is rubbish. They are typewriters in a computerized world. So why would anyone choose to buy such a thing?

  Simple. Anyone who has a classic car hates his wife.

  Our friend in the Volvo P1800 is almost certainly a branch secretary of the owners’ club. He will have written to his old school magazine about the appointment and he will spend many hours at night trawling the internet for interesting Volvo titbits. This means he doesn’t have to sit anywhere near his wife of an evening.

  When the club meets, he gets to go away for a whole weekend. With a bit of luck, he will break down on the way home and be forced to spend the night in a Travelodge. And that’s excellent, too, because it means he doesn’t have to sleep with her either.

  Furthermore, by driving a 1972 mustard yellow car, he will be seen by other road users as someone a bit unusual. Perhaps someone who writes poetry for a living or is Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs. Consequently, women will give him their telephone numbers at the traffic lights. Or stop to help when he is sitting at the side of the road, exhausted from all the pushing, and looking a bit like Mr Darcy as a result.

  Well that’s what he thinks. But, of course, being a classic car enthusiast, he will be wearing shoes like Cornish pasties and Rohan trousers and he will have trouble with his adenoids. Which means he won’t look like Mr Darcy. He’ll look like Man at Millets. And as a result no women will give him their numbers and soon he will stop typing ‘volvo’ into his search engine at night and start typing ‘vulva’ instead.

  This is the sad truth. Show me a man with a classic car, and I’ll show you a hard drive that the police would confiscate in a heartbeat.

  The trouble is that all of us quite like the idea of owning a classic. We fancy the idea of having something unusual in our lives. We just don’t want to be tarred with the Millets brush and we don’t want to break down every morning.

  That’s why I like the idea of limited-edition modern cars. They used to be ten a penny, especially when dealers would add some stripes, paint the door mirrors pink and call the end result – which came with a £1,000 premium – the ‘Carnival’.

  Driving a car like this makes you all gooey because you know you won’t see another; but unlike a classic, it won’t arrive everywhere on the back of a lorry and you won’t feel compelled to join an owners’ club.

  I wonder sometimes why car makers don’t do more limited specials. The Prius ‘Berk’, with bark doors and seats made from moss. The Audi ‘Cheshire’, with clamshell leatherette upholstery and an onyx gearknob. The GM ‘Bust’, which has no bodywork at all.

  In the days of homologation, any manufacturer wishing to enter rallying or saloon-car racing would be forced by the rules to sell a small but finite number of that car to the public. As a result we got the Mitsubishi Evo, the Lancia Delta Integrale and the Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500.

  Even the Golf GTI was intended to be a limited edition car when it first came out. But these days? Er … Renault occasionally fits a hatchback with polythene windows and sells it as a special but that’s about it. Which means that if you want something different, you are forced into the steamy bri-nylon world of old Volvo P1800s.

  And that brings us on to a small batch of Minis that were made to commemorate the car’s fiftieth birthday.

  I can’t see that there was much to celebrate, frankly. Yes, it was a brilliant little car back in 1959, but it should have been updated in 1964. And because it wasn’t, because they were still making the same damn thing – usually at a loss, in a factory with a picket line – into the twenty-first century, the company was eventually bought by BMW, who brought out a new car, which, because it had almost the same wheelbase as a Land Rover Discovery, was about as much of a Mini as Julie Andrews’ nun frock.

  No matter, they’ve now launched some limited-run specials …

  There is the Mini 50 Mayfair, which, I presume, comes with gold teeth, a dishdasha and, instead of a radiator grille, a nice beard. There’s the Mini 50 Camden, which runs on grass and only goes left, and there’s the John Cooper Works World Championship 50, which has some stripes.

  I haven’t driven any of those. What I’ve done is driven the Mini Cooper S Convertible, which is now available with the same turbocharged 1.6-litre engine that you get in a Peugeot 207 GTi and, soon, the Ford Fiesta.

  It’s a fine engine that produces not many carbon dioxides, absolutely no turbo lag at all, unusually, and 172bhp. It doesn’t feel like that much. It certainly doesn’t zing.

  And then there’s the hood. When it’s up, you can detect a bit of wobble, but when it’s down, so the front and the back are only connected by the floor, there’s only one way to describe the feel. It’s floppy.

  Other problems? Well, visibility when the roof is up is woeful. I
t’s like sitting in a postbox. The only people who can get in the back are those who have stepped on a bomb and the boot is miserable.

  And yet, despite all this, it remains a great little car to own. Because the style – and there’s tons of it – buries the substance, it doesn’t feel, or look, like anything else on the road. You therefore get to stand out without actually being in a lay-by trying to make a fan belt from plaits of pubic hair. The only trouble is that the new Cooper S rag top costs £19,000. The car I tested with something called the Chili pack was £21,205. And I’m sorry, but if all you want to do is stand out while driving something new, it’d be impossible to ignore – or resist – the £13,605 Fiat 500 Abarth.

  14 June 2009

  The ultimate driving machine, or so I thought

  BMW Z4 sDrive35i

  As we know, stag nights are terrible things that cause perfectly normal men to be sick and push root vegetables up one another’s bottoms. So imagine my delight when a friend announced recently that his stag do would be alcohol-free. ‘Yippee,’ I thought. ‘I shall be able to come home with a full complement of pubic hair.’ Then I discovered why there would be no drinking. Because it was a ‘driving day’.

  One of the other guests, a public-relations man of some repute, couldn’t understand why I was so harrumphy. ‘Well, dear boy. It would be a bit like inviting you to spend your day off pretending to like journalists. You’d be a bit harrumphy too.’

  I’d heard all about these track days, of course, and none of what I’d heard was very encouraging. Rubbish cars on their last legs. Lots of cones. Two hours of safety lectures. Four hours of hanging around. Ten minutes of driving. Undrinkable tea. Wilting biscuits. And a million rules about overtaking, none of which says, ‘And if the bastard doesn’t move over, ram him.’

  Happily, however, we went to Jonathan Palmer’s gaff on an old airbase near Bedford, which is about six days away from everywhere else in the British Isles. Jonathan seems to know that people don’t like waiting four hours to drive a Maestro. Which is why, five seconds after arriving, I was behind the wheel of a Caterham.