Round the Bend Read online

Above the racing heart was a body that had been styled by Bertone and garnished with all sorts of beautiful adornments it simply didn’t need. Such as six air vents in each rear pillar and grilles over the headlamps that retracted when the lights were switched on. Or, rather, being Italian, didn’t retract when the lights were switched on.

  Of course, the Montreal was a catastrophic sales failure. Fewer than 4,000 had been made before it was officially discontinued in 1977. But most people believe they stopped making it years before that and had simply spent the time shifting unsold stock.

  This is what makes it stand out today. It’s what made so many of those cars in that Leicestershire field stand out. They were not made to make their makers money. They were made by enthusiasts because making cars, when you’re a car maker, should be fun. They were, in short, Italian.

  Did the world need a Fiat X1/9 or an Abarth version of the 500? Cars such as this and the Montreal, the Montecarlo, the Fulvia and countless more besides were, in the 1970s and 1980s, dream cars. And they remain so. I yearn to own them all because they are beautiful and they are interesting and they were designed by people who truly loved cars.

  And that, rather late in the day, brings me on to the Porsche Boxster RS 60 Spyder. I have a sneaking suspicion that Porsche is now the only car maker left that’s still motivated by the same things that motivated the Italian car companies of yore. There is no Porsche econo-box. The 911 still puts its horsepower at the back. And when the firm did finally follow fashion and build a 4x4, it gave it a sodding great turbo.

  Porsches do not sound like other cars. And they do not drive like other cars. They drive … how can I put this? Better.

  This is not a volte-face. For reasons I don’t understand, I still do not want one, but that is not relevant here. If I put on the hat of an impartial reviewer, ignore the badge and concentrate on the RS 60 as a piece of machinery, I’m forced to conclude it’s wonderful.

  Yes, it looks silly, the driving position is cramped and the interior colour on this limited-edition special is exactly the same colour as a cow’s bottom just after it’s given birth. I must also say I cannot see how it’s worth £5,405 more than a normal S. All you get is bigger wheels, a button to make the exhaust noisier and a dribble of extra power. But those are details. The package is superb. The way it steers, the way it rides, the way it grips. It makes you fizz and shiver in a way other cars do not.

  I drove it on the Fosse Way with the roof down the other evening. There was no other traffic. The sun was out. The countryside looked stunning. And then, as ‘Nessun Dorma’ came on the radio, I started to smile. Because – and this is the highest compliment I can give to any car in these profit-and-loss times – it felt Italian.

  15 June 2008

  Mr Weedy comes up with the goods

  Mercedes-Benz SL 350

  It’s no good. I can’t sit here any more pretending that there’s nothing wrong. Because there is. A man came to my house yesterday to fix the computer and he had a worried look on his face. He lives twenty miles away. The fuel tank in his little van was perilously close to empty and he simply didn’t have enough money to fill it up again.

  In the past I only ever stopped for fuel when the yellow light had been on for a month and the engine was starting to cough. Yesterday, I stopped at a garage simply because its petrol was 4p cheaper than usual. That’s a £2.80 difference per tankful. Which works out at £300 a year. That’s fifty-five free packets of cigarettes.

  Except, of course, these calculations are meaningless because oil, as I write, is $139 a barrel and no one thinks it’s going to stop there. Not with Mr Patel on the economic warpath and Johnny Chinaman part-exchanging his rickshaw for a shiny new Toyota. They say it’ll be $150 a barrel by the end of summer.

  Global warming was never going to get people out of their big cars because we could see it was all a load of left-wing tosh. But when petrol is £3 a litre – and anyone old enough to remember 1973 would not discount that as a possibility – you’d have to be a bit bonkers to drive around like your hair’s on fire in a car that does only eight miles to the gallon.

  Oh, it’s all very well now. You may be a footballer or a Sir Alan. You may see expensive petrol as a jolly good way of getting the poor and the weak off the roads. Soon, though, you will be hit, too.

  Think about it. When you have to have a fist fight with an old lady over the last loaf of bread in the shop, and your electricity bill looks as though it’s been written in liras, you are going to find yourself in the same boat as my computer man: with a nice car on the drive and no wherewithal to make it go.

  Of course, there are lots of things you can do to lessen the impact of spiralling fuel bills – all of which are dreary.

  Weight is one issue. If you remove that rolled-up old carpet from your boot, you’ll be surprised at the impact it’ll have on your bills. You could go further and remove your spare wheel and jack too. Maybe you could even go on that diet you’ve been promising yourself.

  Then there’s all the equipment. If you use a lot of electrical stuff while driving, the alternator will need to work harder, which means more fuel. Even Terry Wogan needs a bit of petrol. Your heated rear window needs an alarming amount. And air-conditioning? Turn that off and your fuel consumption will improve by as much as 12 per cent.

  Making sure that your tyres are inflated properly will save another 5 per cent, and you know the roof bars? If you can manage without, there’s another 3 per cent saving right there. At this rate, you are well on your way to turning your Range Rover Sport Nutter Bastard into something with the thirst of a newborn wren.

  By far the biggest savings will come if you change the way you drive, though. Take the Audi A8 diesel as an example. Officially, it will do 30.1mpg. Realistically, it’ll be nearer 25. With a bit of care, however, you can do 40. Maybe more.

  Audi says that its big V8 oil-burner can go 580 miles between trips to the pumps but I managed to get all the way from London to Edinburgh and then back again on a single tankful. That’s a whopping 800 miles. It wasn’t much fun, at a fairly constant 56mph, with no radio, no air-con and no sat nav. But the savings were massive.

  Things I learnt? On a downhill stretch, ease up on the throttle pedal and work with gravity to build up speed. Similarly, you can ease off the power and use momentum to get you up the next hill. A cruise control system will not do this. It is a sledgehammer when what you need is the scalpel sensitivity of your right foot.

  Look far ahead. If you think you will have to slow down, start the process early. If you use the brakes you are simply wasting the fuel you used to reach a speed that was unnecessary.

  Already I’m bored with this. The notion that you have to drive at 56mph, with sweaty armpits, stopping every five seconds to check your tyre pressures just to save a pound fills me with horror and dread. It would be like being told to lose weight by your doctor – and sawing your arm off. Effective but annoying. Which is why, when it comes to the price of fuel, I want to have my cake and eat it, too. And then I want second helpings.

  This brings me to the Mercedes-Benz SL 350. Ordinarily, I’d dismiss this, the baby of the range, and suggest you bought the mountainous twin-turbo 6-litre V12 version instead. But in these dark and difficult times, I thought I’d give the weedomatic version a chance.

  The fact of the matter is this. Officially, the V12 version will return 18.7mpg, whereas the 350 will do 28.5. That is a colossal difference. And handy too. On my old SL 55, a quarter of a tank would not get me from London to my house in the Cotswolds. A quarter of a tank in the 350 gets me there and back.

  But while the fuel savings are obvious, I wanted to know if the price was too high. Would the SL 350’s performance be just a bit too wet?

  The figures don’t look brilliant. The brand new 3.5-litre V6 engine develops 311bhp, which, officially, is ‘not enough’, and 266lb ft of torque, which is about what you get in a nine-year-old’s forearm. Couple that with the SL’s thunder-thighed weight and you mig
ht imagine you’d be going everywhere at 4mph.

  In fact, it will get from 0 to 60 in six seconds or so. That’s fast. And the top speed is 155. Exactly the same as it is in the SL 65.

  One area in which you might imagine the 350 would be left lacking is when you’re on the outside lane of a motorway. You’re in a long line of cars doing, say, fifty, but despite this a mouth-breather in a Renault Clio is crawling all over your rear end. Then the road clears …

  We’ve all been there. You mash your throttle into the carpet to show that his aggression was pointless. Big-engined SLs are very good at this, humiliating the young and the stupid. And guess what. The 350’s not bad either. You don’t get the Gatling-gun soundtrack, but the pace is there all right. And this is an engine that likes to spin, too. Up at the top of the rev range, it sings, whereas the bigger V8s and V12s lumber.

  Then things get better. Whereas more expensive SLs come with computerized suspension, the 350 has conventional springs and dampers. It is much, much, much, much, much better as a result. It doesn’t crash through potholes and the steering is more accurate too. You would never call a sixteen-ton, two-horsepower car ‘sporty’, but it gets perilously close, this one.

  If you are somehow immune to the SL’s flashy new Wagtastic nose, you’ll find that most of the time the 350 is very nearly as good as the version you were dreaming about. And that some of the time it’s quite a bit better.

  You can, if you want, order the car with no 350 badge on the back. I recommend, however, you leave it in place. Last year it advertized to the world that you were a bit Gola League. Today, it tells everyone you’re actually pretty smart.

  22 June 2008

  Herr Thruster’s gone all limp and lost

  BMW M3 convertible

  It’s my job, each week, to come here and write about flowers, frogs, foxes and fornication and then, towards the end, say a little bit about the car I’ve been driving. It is not my job to tell the motor manufacturers what to do.

  Some of my colleagues in this auto journalism malarkey are an extension of the car industry, shaping its policy and directing future operations. They are clever. They can understand and explain torque. I can’t. I’m just a punter, test-driving cars and saying whether I like them or not.

  Normally, then, I would say that the satellite navigation system used by BMW is rubbish and move on. But with petrol at £400 a litre, we can’t afford to be wasting the stuff by driving to the shops via Dorset every morning. So, today, I shall break with tradition and urge BMW to talk to its sat nav suppliers, with some steely-eyed, Germanic sternness.

  The system in the M3 I had last week did not know about the A43. It has no clue that the M25 is connected to central London by the A40. And it had never heard of the Fosse Way, even though it’s been around for 2,000 years.

  Last Wednesday, I needed to drive from London to Corby, which, in my mind, was just a few miles from the A1. But the madman in the M3’s dashboard had never heard of the Great North Road and was adamant I should use the M1. So I did.

  Big mistake. Back in 1959, the M1 was a wondrous thing; a big grey superhighway for people on the move. It had a point. It had a purpose. Back then, the government took our money in taxes and used it to make our lives better with new roads. Now, it uses those roads as a device for making money to fund the government. The M1 has become nothing more than a cash cow.

  They say that they are widening the carriageways from London to Watford, and they probably are. But when work moves this slowly, it’s hard to be sure that they’re telling the truth. What we do know is that by putting cones on the hard shoulder, they can claim that roadworks are happening and this means, of course, they can impose extra-low speed limits to protect the workforce.

  How this is possible I don’t know, since the workforce is all in Dublin, drinking Guinness. But no matter. To enforce the 50mph limit, they have erected average speed cameras not just over a short stretch but for nearly twenty miles.

  And so, onwards you trudge, at caveman speeds, not daring to look up from your speedometer in case you accidentally do 53 for a while. This would then require some mental maths to work out how far you’d have to travel at 47 to bring your average down again. And since we know we can’t use a mobile phone while driving because it’s a distraction, we can be fairly certain calculators aren’t allowed either.

  It’s absurd. Plainly, the M1 is no longer what the politicians now insist on calling ‘fit for purpose’. Endlessly widening it means it’s endlessly narrower and even more useless than if they’d left it alone in the first place. They should give up and simply build another six-lane highway that runs parallel.

  There is time to think about all this, and exactly where you’d shoot objectors, as you crawl along, in a slow-moving maths exam, with no one looking where they’re going, all the way to Watford, where the limit ends and everyone hits the loud pedal. Scientists say it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light. It isn’t. Not when you’ve just spent half an hour doing 50 and you’re late. Everyone, even people in Nissan people carriers, bursts out of the cones doing 670,616,629.7 miles per hour. And away from Corby.

  Like all sat nav systems, you can choose in a BMW the criteria for your journey. Do you want the fastest route or the shortest? Do you want to avoid motorways or toll roads? All good stuff. But plainly the unit in the M3 was jammed on a setting that took the car past as many forward-facing speed cameras as possible.

  So once I’d turned off the M1 in Northampton, which is officially listed in the AA road map as being ‘nowhere near Corby’, I was faced with mile upon interminable mile of tedium in the face of Big Brother. And the car wasn’t much good either.

  I like the new M3. As a coupé, it is a surprisingly elegant thing of understated charm. It’s fast, too. Really fast. At the Ascari track in southern Spain last year, it was a full five seconds a lap quicker than the ever-so-shouty 6.2-litre Mercedes C-class.

  Best of all, though, you no longer have to be a pushy oik to buy one. Today, people with Take That haircuts, Oakley sunglasses and short-sleeved shirts are to be found in fast Audis, leaving BMWs to people who simply want a fast, practical means of getting from A, via Dorset, Aberdeen and the Kamchatka peninsula, to B.

  The saloon version is even better. It doesn’t have a carbon-fibre roof, which makes no difference at all, but it does have four doors and a bigger boot, which means your children can come too. And it’s a little bit cheaper.

  The new convertible version, however, has a problem. Taking the roof off, say, a Peugeot doesn’t really matter. Who cares if it’s all floppy as a result. It was never built to be the ultimate driving machine in the first place.

  The problem is that BMW’s M cars are built to be the last word in precision, handling, fun, grip and speed. And if you take the roof off, you are sacrificing torsional rigidity, which means you are sacrificing precision, handling, fun, grip and speed. You are therefore removing the whole point of the car. It’s much the same story with the Porsche 911.

  You can feel the floppiness as you drive along. There’s a vibration in the steering wheel and a sense that all is not quite right in the corners. You can feel the weight too. It feels all the time like you’re dragging an anchor.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if BMW had stuck with a canvas roof, but due to perfectly sensible market demand, it’s gone instead for the folding metal option. It really doesn’t work because apart from the extra metalwork this requires, the styling is hopeless. To get the back window to fold into the boot, it doesn’t slope like it should. Instead it rises like a small cliff from the base of the boot. This allows the roof itself to split in two and stack underneath it before folding into the boot. It’s all very clever, but you don’t half feel like a show-off if you press the button in public. And good though the Germans may be, you just know that, five years from now, it’s going to jam.

  Other things? Well, although back seats are fitted, God has not yet made a creature that would fit in them, and with th
e roof stowed, the boot is useful only if you are a naturist.

  So, to conclude. The new 4-litre V8: very good. Lovely. Nice noise. Lots of power and bags of torque, whatever that is. The ride: excellent. Here at last is proof – are you listening, Mercedes? – that a sporty car does not have to shake your eyeballs out of their sockets.

  I also like the system that uses energy from the brakes to power the electrical appliances. This means the alternator has less to do and consequently takes less power from the engine. That’s good for fuel economy, slightly.

  But there’s no getting away from the fact that if you want a convertible, you are better off with an Audi RS4 or a Mercedes. And if you want an M3, you are better off with the coupé or saloon.

  Just be aware. Until BMW sorts out the stupid sat nav system, you will also have to invest in a portable TomTom. Because if you rely on the idiot in the dash, you’re going to spend the rest of your life in Guildford, looking for Edinburgh Castle.

  29 June 2008

  It takes you to the edge … and shoves

  Porsche 911 Carrera GT2

  Golf is not mysterious. I understand absolutely why someone would play it once … and then decide to play it again. It’s not because they have a Rupert Bear fixation or because they dislike the company of women or because they secretly want to be a Freemason. No. It’s because they think that if they keep playing, they might get a bit better.

  Luckily, I was born with a body that renders me quite incapable of doing anything very well. Which means I never suffer from this.

  Chess? I’m rubbish. Tennis? I’m so spectacularly bad, I can only just beat Jimmy Carr. DIY? For me this is simply impossible. Even if I attempt something simple, such as hanging a picture, I end up in casualty, the painting ends up ruined and the wall ends up in the garden.

  So when I played golf for the first time, I knew there would never be a second. There would be no point. Even if I played every day for 1,000 years, the ball would still never travel more than six inches. And in all probability I’d end up with a severed jugular vein. That’s what happened when I tried to help my boy make an Airfix model the other day.