Round the Bend Read online

  Honestly, I took the Cayenne to Wandsworth the other night and it was the most miserable drive of my life. Frankly, I’d rather have gone there on my hands and knees.

  The streets, with cars parked on either side, are just about wide enough for two small cars to pass. But there are no small cars in Wandsworth. For reasons that are unclear, everyone has a Volvo XC90. This meant I spent half the evening backing up, looking for a parking space in which I could wait while the lady with lovely hair coming the other way squeezed by.

  But there are no parking spaces. You hear stories of people not using their cars because they know that when they come home again, they will be unable to park. I can believe it.

  Fifteen years ago, I lived in Wandsworth, very briefly, and things were bad. Sometimes I’d have to park in the next street. But now that even more of the already titchy houses have been converted into flats, bringing more people and more cars, and even more people have turned their front lawns into car lots and everyone has an SUV, the situation is simply impossible. Often the nearest parking space is in Oslo.

  Eventually, after an hour of reversing out of everyone’s way and being jolted out of my seat by an endless series of speed humps that are completely pointless when nobody ever exceeds 2mph, I did find a spot that was handily located just 16 miles from the party I was attending. But unfortunately, it was exactly 4 inches smaller than the Cayenne. This meant I had to phone my hosts and explain that I’d try to get there for the coffee and mints.

  This must happen to Wandsworthites all the time. And I’m sorry, but anyone who buys a huge car knowing it will never fit into a space is certifiably mad. Think how much life you’re wasting by driving round and round the block. Think of all the other things you could be doing instead. And while you’re doing that, we’ll have a think about what can be done.

  I’ve always argued that market forces dictate behaviour. That there’s no need for congestion charges and so on because people will take only so much hassle before they’ll leave the car at home and use an alternative. Not the bus obviously; that would be ridiculous. But a scooter, perhaps, or a sedan chair carried by four greased Egyptians.

  Strangely, however, it seems I’m wrong. Wandsworth went past bursting point years ago but the people there are still buying idiotic cars that won’t fit. I guess image down there is important and that if you don’t have the right hair and the right accent you will be sent to Coventry. Or Tooting, as it’s known in those parts.

  You can be a convicted fraudster in Wandsworth and still engage with your social group. But you cannot have a Ford Fiesta.

  Some might suggest the government should act, but really it is not the job of a state to decide who drives what sort of car. That’s just meddlesome nonsense. I therefore propose that Wandsworth and Clapham Commons should be paved and turned into car parks.

  One of two things will happen as a result. Either the plan will go ahead and in a stroke the parking problem will be solved. Or there will be such an outcry that everyone will switch to a smaller car, which will make the scheme unnecessary.

  If it works there, it could be extended to Hyde and Regent’s Parks and then, in the fullness of time, to every green space in every town and city in the land. You tell the people of Harrogate that the Stray is to be turned into a car park and see how long it takes for everyone to change their Volvo XC90 into a Toyota Aygo.

  But anyway, back to the GTS. We’ve established that it works on the Nürburgring and on a tank proving ground. We also know that it’s useless in a big and busy city. But what about elsewhere?

  In many ways, this car is a bit odd. I mean, the Cayenne was built to be a big, tall off-road car. You pay a premium for that height. And now along comes a version which is £17,000 more than the base model, precisely because it’s not quite so tall.

  The one I drove sat on air suspension rather than conventional steel springs. This is an option and not necessarily a good one, because air is simply not as good at the job as metal. Try this simple experiment if you don’t believe me.

  First of all, jump out of your bedroom window onto a well-sprung mattress. Okay? Good. And now try jumping out of the same window with no mattress at all. Will the air cushion your fall? No. Exactly.

  Nevertheless, I massively enjoyed pushing this heavyweight hard. The heaviness of the controls makes you feel like a man, like you could take on the England front row and win. It is a car you drive with your chest pushed out and your tummy sucked in.

  What’s more, it doesn’t handle well for an off-roader. It handles well full stop. And it shifts, too. The 4.8-litre V8, especially with the sport mode engaged, goes like stink and sounds much as I would imagine Brian Blessed might sound if he fell into a vat of boiling oil. It is the sound of glorious, unabated, wanton consumption. It is the sound of pure, unbridled hedonism. Some have said they can’t see the point of such a car. Why have an off-roader that handles this well, they say. It’s like buying an iron in the hope it can make toast as well. Hmmm. I suspect they might change their minds if they had to make a sudden swerve on the motorway at 70mph.

  I’m afraid, however, that while I respect the engineering of the GTS – it’s by far the best of the Cayennes – and I loved driving it, I could never actually buy one because of the way it looks. This really is a car that drowned in Lake Ugly. And to make it even worse, my test car was finished in exactly the same colour as a diseased placenta.

  So I still think the Range Rover is a better bet. It doesn’t work half so well on the Nürburgring, it’s just as hopeless in London and I bet it wouldn’t last half as long on a tank proving ground. But at least it doesn’t make you feel sick every time you see it.

  23 March 2008

  The aristo ruined by the devil’s brew

  Subaru Legacy Outback TD RE

  Each of the summer’s social occasions has its own code of conduct and everyone makes much effort to ensure they turn up in the correct clothes. At Royal Ascot, for instance, it is important to demonstrate that you started with nothing and have become very rich. And so you must go to www.russianbrides.com and rent yourself a 6-foot hooker whom you then make taller still by kitting her out in a hat made from tinsel and old tractor tyres.

  At Wimbledon you must develop phlebitis and a set of bingo wings bigger than most hang-gliders. At the Goodwood Revival you will need David Niven’s moustache. And at Glyndebourne your black tie should be aubergine.

  At Silverstone it’s a gold-buttoned blazer teamed with pleated-front chinos and topped off with the branded-badge-and-tie combo. Henley requires that your Russian ‘wife’ wears some clothes for once, and at the Chelsea Flower Show, for reasons that are entirely unclear, you must wear a suit and a straw hat.

  Of course, all of this requires a wardrobe that stretches from here to the Philippines, but at least a century of tradition means you won’t ever commit the mortal English sin of turning up at the wrong place in the wrong clobber. I mean, can you imagine going to Glyndebourne with bingo wings? It’d be social suicide.

  Unfortunately, while the sartorial rules are clear, first impressions are actually made in the car park. And here, because there are no rules at all, it is desperately easy to make a complete tit of yourself.

  A couple of years ago someone arrived at my local prep school’s sports day in a pink stretch Hummer. At first, I thought they were being ironic. But the gazebo they then built in the car park suggested they weren’t. Honestly, they couldn’t have got it more wrong if they’d turned up in split-crotch scuba suits.

  The first thing you have to remember is that at any of the summer events you will be parking in a field, which means you can forget any dreams you may have had of arriving in a Ferrari Scaglietti. You absolutely have to have four-wheel drive.

  Once there, you will be having a picnic, which means the boot must be big enough to serve as a hole for the dogs, a kitchen, a pantry and a boot store. A drop-down flap on which aged guests can perch is also a good idea. And the car should be grey or sil
ver. Not red. Never red. Red cars are for Lebanese teenagers on Park Lane at two in the morning.

  Above all this, though – above every other consideration – your car should be good in a traffic jam. Because that, no matter where you’re going, is how you’ll spend most of the day.

  A social event in what Tatler calls ‘the season’ is invariably held in a part of the world that was designed for the ox, not half a million people in hats the size of the moon, with a boot full of vodka and bouillon.

  Obviously, the Range Rover is your best bet. It is the little black dress of cars, a one-size-fits-all solution to every social and practical requirement. It works in fields, there’s enough headroom for the most preposterous of hats, the tailgate splits in two and it’s just as happy in a field as it is when the B4746 is jammed up all the way from Nethercombe Bottom to Piddlecomb End. But it is very expensive: filling it with fuel costs £111, the road tax will soon cost more than a beachfront villa in Miami and few cars made today depreciate with such vim.

  That’s why, when I was invited for lunch at the Cheltenham Festival recently, I chose to go in the smart man’s Range Rover. The Subaru Legacy Outback.

  Now, I have written about this excellent car before, twice actually, but I have an excuse for reviewing it again because it’s now available with the world’s first flat four diesel engine.

  In a flat four, there are two cylinders on each side of a central crankcase, and the pistons move towards one another. Imagine two men boxing and you’ll see why these engines are known as boxers.

  Petrol-fuelled boxers have been used before, in quirky cars such as the Citroën GS, the Alfasud, the Beetle and several Porsches. There are some notable advantages. A boxer engine is well balanced, it is easy to cool, it takes up little space in the engine bay and, because it’s flat, it can be mounted low down, giving a lower centre of gravity.

  The disadvantage is that it’s expensive to make. It was for this reason that Sir Alec Issigonis abandoned his plans for a flat four in the Morris Minor and it is why most car makers today have followed suit. But not Subaru. It continues to use a boxer in the Impreza and has now built one that runs on the fuel of Lucifer.

  Quite why, I don’t know, because the flat four’s main advantages – you can have a sleek front end and good handling – are largely irrelevant in a car that sounds like a canal boat and goes with the vigour of a Norfolk Broad. And they are especially irrelevant in an estate car that was designed for muddy car parks.

  No matter. I set off for Cheltenham in convoy with some friends in a Range Rover. And possibly because of the fuel they’d use if they spent all morning sitting with half of Ireland in a jam, the route they chose seemed, as far as I could tell, to be made up of roads that were ‘unsuitable for motorists’.

  We went through villages that were lost to a strange mist 400 years ago. We saw signs telling us that ‘there be witches’. We saw people in smocks. We went through Henry Dent-Brocklehurst’s kitchen. We drove over twigs, logs and a field full of turnips and we forded rivers that don’t even feature on Royal Geographical Society surveys. And the Subaru laughed at it all, clinging onto the Range Rover’s tail like an eager puppy out for the first time with its mum.

  Of course, the Range Rover has more ground clearance and a computer program that allows it to cross the Sahara, and do a rainforest before lunch. The Subaru has no such wizardry. Just a straightforward four-wheel-drive system, and that, trust me, could take everything that Gloucestershire placed in its way.

  Inside, it has five seats, a dashboard, some leather and a sat nav screen that works well. Except at night, when it stares out of the dash like a second-world-war searchlight. Oh yes, and either I’ve grown or the car’s shrunk since I last tried it out, because I can report that life for the taller driver is cramped.

  Outside, it’s just very good-looking in a Chelsea Flower Show suit sort of way.

  In the car park at Cheltenham, it looked like it belonged. And not only because there must have been a thousand others, all slightly bent, dirty and blue-blooded. This is the car of the aristocrat. The person who uses money to buy time. Not things. It really should come as standard with a black lab in the boot.

  And … I’m repeating myself. You probably already know that I am a huge fan of the Legacy. And what you want to know is: the new engine. Any good?

  No. It’s crap. Normally, diesels are happiest at low revs in a high gear. Not the Legacy. It has the torque of a pencil sharpener, the life and soul of a corpse. You need to be in first until the whole engine has revved itself clean off its mountings, and even then when you go for second it judders and shivers in protest.

  I don’t care if it uses only a gallon of fuel every 6 million miles; it is just not worth the bother. And to make matters worse it’s not available with an automatic gearbox.

  The Legacy with a petrol engine? Yes. Definitely. It has bingo wings, a great suit, the right moustache and a silly hat in the shape of a mad sunroof. If it could talk, you know it would sound like Edward Fox. It’s a brilliant all-rounder. But the diesel? Not in a million years.

  30 March 2008

  A beauty cursed by travel sickness

  Callaway Corvette C6

  Today, if you want something to be a commercial success, it must be designed from day one with a passport and legs. Whether a beefburger, a plastic Doctor Who toy, a strawberry, an internet people-searching site or a sport, it must be as relevant in Alice Springs as it is in the Colombian jungle.

  Funnily enough, however, the biggest problem is America – the only country in the world that calls football ‘soccer’ and insists on playing rounders and netball instead. So, if you have developed, say, a pillow that absorbs dribble, you stand a better chance of selling it to a pygmy with a dinner plate sewn into his bottom lip, than you do to Wilbur and Myrtle from Sacramento.

  It’s a bit like the ‘special relationship’ Tony Blair always talked about so much. The Americans can build a nuclear-missile warning station in Britain to protect them, but it makes us the ideal first-strike target. They can extradite people from Britain, but we can’t do the same from them. They can get our immediate help in the Gulf, but we had to beg for assistance against the Nazis and the Argies. With America, the world is a one-way street.

  We must have their computers, their jeans and their eating habits, yet there are more Made-in-Britain labels on the moons of Jupiter than there are in South Dakota. To the average American, ‘abroad’ is Canada or Mexico. Any further than that and you need Nasa. Over there, a Brit is simply someone to shoot by mistake. So it’s certain that Hank J Dieselburger isn’t going to be buying a jar of Bovril any time soon.

  Nor will he be watching a British-made car show. Top Gear is screened all over the world, from remote Himalayan villages to the bullet-ridden boulevards of Lebanon. It is a genuine, bona fide export success. But in the US it is watched only by half a handful of expats who diligently follow BBC America, and a few torrentists on the interweb.

  This is partly because, when it comes to motoring, the English language makes more sense in Albania than it does in Alabama. Almost every word in the Americans’ automotive lexicon is different from ours, so when we talk about motorways, pavements, bonnets, boots, roofs, bumper bars, petrol, coupés, saloons, people carriers, cubic centimetres and corners, they have no idea what we’re on about.

  Our forward commanders can call in a tactical airstrike in southern Afghanistan and their pilots will know precisely what’s needed. But review a Fiat Punto ‘hatchback’ on the ‘bypass’ and you may as well be speaking in dog. Even their gallons are as odd as their spelling of ‘centre’.

  Then there’s the pronunciation issue. Jagwarr, Teeyoda, Neesarn, Hundy, Mitsuboosi, BM Dubya, V Dubya – it’s all completely mangled.

  However, while they don’t understand our car show, when it comes to the cars themselves, the one-way street works in the opposite direction. Just six months ago, and for the first time ever, foreign car makers sold more vehicl
es in America than those made by Brad, Todd and Bud.

  And what of American cars over here? Well, if we exclude Cheshire from the equation, most people in Europe would rather have syphilis than a Buick. We’ll buy their Coca-Cola, their iPods and their Motown sound, but the cars that gave Motown its name? No, thanks. Driving an American car would be like making love to Jade Goody when you had a choice.

  It’s odd. Why can Bill Gates sell his binary numbers to the world when General Motors can’t sell its cars? I wish I had the answer, because then I might understand why I don’t want to own the Callaway Corvette I used on a recent trip to Los Angeles.

  Callaway is an engineering company that has been tuning and fiddling with Corvettes since the year dot, sometimes without much success. The first example I tried, way back in the sixteenth century, was owned by a murderer and had two turbochargers. This made the engine extremely powerful. So powerful, in fact, that when I tried to set off, it turned the clutch into a thin veneer of powder and shot it like talcum powder into the wind. The murderer was extremely displeased with me …

  Since then, however, Callaway has continued to beaver away, helped along by the average American’s deep-seated belief that all cars can be improved by a man in a shed – understandable when the cars in question were made in Detroit. So, today it makes the Corvettes that race at Le Mans (which they can’t say properly either). Furthermore, Callaway has sheds all across America, and even in Germany.

  It has become a big business. And I’m delighted to say it has stopped upping the power without uprating any of the other components.

  The car I drove, a one-off demonstration vehicle, was garnished with an Eaton supercharger – chromed, of course – that was about the same size as Antigua. It’s so big that a special bonnet with a huge hump in the middle has had to be fitted. In the past it would have got the car from 0 to 60mph … just once, before the chassis snapped in half and the wheels fell off.