Born to Be Riled Page 9

  It likes Elgar and its favourite rock track is Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’, though Led Zep’s ‘Black Dog’ will do. If you treat it like a hard-drinking, hard-playing soul mate, it will reward you with a spine-tingling range of growls, and the power to knock down copper beeches as you fly by. The only trouble is that it costs £140,000 which is an awful lot of money. I have a suggestion though. To raise the funds, rob a bank. It would like that.

  Caravans – A few liberal thoughts

  After much careful thought in the bath this morning, I have decided that we don’t really need an elected parliament.

  These 650 guys are concerned not with what’s good for the country or the environment, but with power. Every decision they make is based on a quest for votes.

  I remain absolutely convinced that the Labour Party’s apparent shift to the right has nothing whatsoever to do with the elected members’ beliefs. They’re just saying what they think the middle classes want them to say.

  And the Conservatives are no better. Here are a bunch of people who’d done all that was necessary by 1989. They could have just sat back and let things tick over, but no: half of them now want to privatize my shoes.

  We should replace them all with a bloke who has a bit of common sense. Every Thursday, he would pop down to Westminster so that civil servants could ask for advice.

  Should the Spanish be allowed to fish in our waters? No.

  Should Peter Blake be allowed to keep his ninety grand? No.

  Should we ban scoutmasters from keeping guns? Yes.

  Should we shoot people who let their dogs crap in the street? Yes.

  It’s all so simple. We don’t need 650 people making noises like farmyard animals five days a week, when most of the burning issues could be settled over a cup of coffee by a bloke in a cardigan.

  Certainly, if we were to introduce this new system, and I really think it’s one of my better ideas, the roads would become free from caravans.

  Should this question ever be brought before the Commons, the member for Devon North would argue forcefully that caravans form part of his constituency’s life blood, and that if they were to be banned so soon after all the cows were burned there’d be anarchy and looting on the streets of Minehead. And then someone else would rise to their feet and point out that some of his voters work in a caravan factory and that they’d be out of work, claiming benefit.

  And that would be it. Caravans would stay.

  Whereas under my system the bloke in a cardy would weigh up the issues over a slurp of Kenco and say, ‘No, they must go.’

  In twelve years of writing about motoring I have only touched on this issue once because it did not seem important. I lived in London, and on the rare days when I sallied forth to the Provinces I was on a motorway.

  But now I live in the Cotswolds and it’s unbelievable. I’ve just taken delivery of a new supercharged Jaguar, and so far I haven’t had it past 20 because round every corner the road is blocked by a Sprite Alpine.

  I was stuck behind one called Sprint the other day. How can you call a caravan a ‘Sprint’?

  And when they’re parked in a field they hardly blend into the environment. As Mark Wallington says in his magnificent book, 500 Mile Walkies, ‘Why can’t they be painted black and white, and given udders?’

  As a child I went on a few caravan holidays and I remember wondering what we were doing there. I mean, we lived in a large farmhouse in the countryside and now, here we were decamped in a small box in the countryside – feet away from a fat family whose daughter, Janet, had woeful diarrhoea.

  This, however, is not the issue. If people want to spend their precious vacation in a metal container, in a field full of other metal containers, eating shabby food and defecating in a bucket, fine.

  The problem with caravans is that you can’t simply beam them to a site, Star Trek style. You must hook them up to the back of your wheezing, asthmatic car and, with absolutely no training whatsoever, tow the damn thing into some of Britain’s greener parts… like here.

  People. As you look in your rear-view mirror and see a trail of cars stretching back to the horizon, do you not feel even the smallest pang of guilt? Do you not feel that it might be a good idea to pull over and let everyone by once in a while?

  Do you not vow that next year you will undertake the journey at night, when you would be less of a bother?

  Or do you secretly relish having the power of being part of a tiny, tiny minority who, for a few hours a year, can control something huge like traffic speed. Did you dream as a child of being a councillor? Or joining the parks police? Go on, admit it, you did.

  You are a mealy-mouthed little twerp with no regard for others. In the last few weeks you’ve made me late for every single appointment, and you don’t give a damn.

  If caravans can’t be outlawed, and without my new system of government they never will be, there should at least be some new rules.

  Anyone wishing to tow one should be forced to take a complicated driving test. They cannot be towed by any car with less than 300 ft/lbs of torque. They can only be taken on the roads between 2 and 6 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. And they should incur road tax of £200 a foot.

  Blind leading the blind: Clarkson feels the heat in Madras

  This is what it said on the first page of my joining pack for the world’s weirdest motorsport event. ‘Rallying has never featured very significantly in the lives of blind people.’ No, and neither will it. Men can’t have babies. Fish can’t design submarines. BBC producers can’t make up their minds. And blind people don’t make very good rally drivers. However, they can navigate. More than that, in the last six years there have been 25 rallies in India where the co-drivers have had more in common with a bat than Tony Mason.

  Now, to be perfectly honest, I’m not talking about the sort of rally where the car’s wheels only ever touch the ground in service halts. No, this sort is best described as a treasure hunt. Even so, disappointingly, there are rules, the worst of which is that all cars must be fitted with seatbelts. This meant that when I took part there were only 66 competitors, which isn’t good enough in a country with nine million blind people. But hey, I’m used to rules, and the best way round them is to indulge in a bit of Boss Hoggery. I figured that if I nicked the notes from the navigator, he’d never know and we’d win. But the organizers had that one covered; all the directions were in Braille, a language which means as much to me as Swahili or German. Like everyone else, we had to use the force. But unlike everyone else, we went wrong at the very first turn.

  Let me explain. The Braille was in English and this was not a language that featured on my co-driver’s CV. So he spelled out each instruction, letter by agonizingly slow letter. Thus we left the base and headed off towards the centre of Madras in our Maruti Gypsy, with Mr Padmanabhan muttering t-y-r-d-i-n-a-k-l-m-t-e-y-r-l-e-f-f. Which, if you have a pen and a piece of paper, and a fortnight, you could work out meant turn left in a kilometre. Trouble was it took me nearly five miles to figure it out, by which time we were completely and hopelessly lost. Not only do I not speak Braille but my Tamil’s not that good either. And there I was, with a blind man, in a city that I’ve never been to before (and never want to go to again, incidentally), on the same land mass, worryingly, as Portugal and Yemen. Things could go wrong here.

  We’d be drifting down a road and, all of a sudden, Mr Padmanabhan would look up from his notes to ask: ‘What is l-k-j-r-i-j-l-s-s-s-a-e-q-j-t?’ And to be honest, there isn’t really much of an answer.

  But somehow, and I guess quite by chance, we did happen upon a checkpoint. Relieved, I wound down the window and asked just how far behind we were. But here’s a funny thing; they said we were the first to come through, which was strange as we’d been the last to leave. However, it all became crystal clear when they told us that we were at checkpoint six and that we had somehow missed one to five. I knew damn well how we’d missed them. We’d been in Tibet. Nevertheless, we ploughed on until sudden
ly I was told to stop. ‘We are now at checkpoint seven,’ Mr Padmanabhan said. But we weren’t. We were in the middle of an industrial estate, and it’s hard to point out to a blind man that he’s gone wrong. Again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but we’re not.’ ‘Yes we are,’ he insisted. And to avoid hurting his feelings, I had to leap out of the car to get my card stamped by a non-existent official at a checkpoint which wasn’t there. ‘Told you so,’ he said when I got back in the car.

  Back at base, the event over, we learned that we’d been scrubbed from the running order altogether, on the basis that we’d only found one of the checkpoints. They all figured we’d given up and gone home. We didn’t even get any lunch, which was no bad thing because it seemed to consist of stillborn blackbirds which had been trodden on then coated with curry powder, bay leaves and ginger.

  Oh how we all laughed as the navigators tried to pick bits of beak out of their teeth. And oh how they all laughed as they reminisced about how hopeless all their drivers were. We must see this sport in Britain. All you Round Table, Rotarian types, stop pushing beds up the high street, jack in the three-legged pub crawls and give the RNIB a call. And then call me to say where and when.

  Norfolk’s finest can’t hit the high notes

  In my early twenties I filled my days by spending money. Then, in the evening I went out and spent even more, often in a casino.

  Inevitably, my bank manager wrote regularly. Now he could have called me all the names under the sun, he could have used language blue enough to make Quentin Tarantino blush. He could have made threats of violence and it would have had no effect.

  Instead, he used the strongest word in the English language: ‘disappointed’.

  ‘I am disappointed to note…’ he would begin and my Adam’s apple would swell to three times its normal size. By saying he was disappointed, he was suggesting that he had had high hopes but that I, personally, had let him down.

  Since those days I’ve been very careful about using the ‘D’ word. When reviewing cars, I’ve said that they were foul, or dull, or that they couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s backside. But I have never used the word ‘disappointing’. Until now.

  The Lotus Esprit V8 is disappointing. The cruellest six words you will ever read. I had high hopes of this car, and it let me down.

  On paper, the car looked good. Here was a machine with OZ racing wheels and Brembo racing brakes. Here was a car with the latest generation of ABS and, to top it all, a twin-turbo V8 with 350 horsepower. Here, in short, was my kinda car.

  When it arrived there was nothing to suggest anything was amiss. The Esprit may have been around since the Bay City Rollers, but with its curvier corners and its eyebrow wheel-arch extensions, it looked really rather good sitting in my yard.

  I wasn’t entirely convinced by the leather and wood interior, which seemed out of place in a mid-engined supercar, but that’s like saying you won’t eat pizza because you don’t like olives.

  I admit it: for a few brief moments, I actually thought about buying one.

  Then I went for a drive and I was reminded of Top Gun, a film that, like the Esprit, promised so much. I’d seen the trailers and noted that there was unprecedented aerial footage of state-of-the-art American fighter planes.

  I’d read reports which spoke of unparalleled access given to the producers by the Pentagon. And there was Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise to boot.

  It all opened well too, with those slow-mo shots on board the aircraft carrier. There was purple haze and yes, from seat H16, a few excitable squeals. This was going to be two hours of kapow, whiz bang action.

  But, in fact, it was two hours of sheer, unadulterated drivel during which time grown men punched one another on the shoulder instead of shaking hands, and talked nonsense. Furthermore, they were all called improbable names like Ice Man and Maverick and Goose.

  When Maverick refused to engage the enemy because he’d killed Goose while trying to show off to Ice Man, I was nearly sick. And when he returned to the ship, and was given a hero’s welcome, I vowed that if I ever met Tom Cruise I’d hit him.

  Then the little pipsqueak went and married Nicole Kidman, making the need to wallop him even more urgent.

  I digress. The point is that the Lotus was as much of a disappointment as that film.

  The reason why its 3.5 litre, blown engine only develops 350 horsepower is because the Renault gearbox would blow up if it were asked to deal with any more.

  As it is, it feels like the lever is set in concrete. To get from third to second requires a two-week course on anabolic steroids. If you want reverse, you need the negotiating skills of an anti-terrorist policeman.

  And when you get the beast rolling, another problem rears its ugly head: vibration.

  The new engine has the same basic design as a Formula One unit, where refinement is not really an issue. In a road car though, the constant buzziness does get to be a bit of a bore.

  When you take the motor past 5000rpm, the gear lever vibrates so much it feels like you’ve just grabbed a high-voltage cable. It’s a brave man who reaches for it, especially when he knows he can’t move it anyway.

  Then there’s the noise. I was expecting one of two things: a V8 bellow or a crackly strum. In fact, you get almost nothing to write home about, a result, say Lotus, of forthcoming noise regulations.

  Well listen here guys. When I hum gently, it’s an awful noise that makes the children cry. When Pavarotti hums quietly, people will pay £200 to listen. You can make a car sound nice and quiet.

  You can see now, I’m sure, why the Esprit was such a terrible letdown. But unlike the Maserati Quattroporte I drove recently, there are at least some up sides.

  First, it handles even better than any Esprit before, which is to say it handles absolutely beautifully. There is real class in the chassis here.

  And second, it is truly fast, not daft like the F50, but quicker than a Ferrari 355, and that’s saying something. At less than £60,000, it is cheaper too.

  But the Esprit has always been good value, fast and blessed with great, supercar handling. Its real problems in the past have been a poor gear change and not much aural excitement.

  Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

  Car interiors in desperate need of some Handy Andy work

  Televisions are grotesquely ugly but I have never even thought, for one minute, of hiding ours away in a reproduction Georgian cabinet.

  We have no Dralon either, and button-backed leather furniture is a bit thin on the ground too.

  Should you drop round at sixish, in need of a drink, it’s in a cupboard in the kitchen. I’m sorry, but we don’t have a globe which opens to reveal the bottles inside.

  So why, then, do I rave about the interior of a Rolls-Royce? Only a footballer would ever dream of fitting inch-thick, royal blue shag pile in his drawing room so why is it acceptable in a car?

  And look at the wood on that dashboard. Perfect. Unblemished. Polished like a guardsman’s shoes. Now look at the wood on your refectory table. Knackered. Riddled with sixteenth-century woodworm. Ill-fitting pieces. And worth ten grand of anybody’s money.

  Then there’s the Roller’s seats. There’s no doubt that the contrasting piping lifts the magnolia trim, but would you buy a chair for your hall which had cream hide and pale blue piping?

  Things get even worse down the automotive scale too because once you’re in Roverland the wood becomes plastic. You wouldn’t dream of having anything made out of plastic fake wood in your house and yet you’ll pay more for it in your car.

  It’s madness and I don’t have an answer. I’m as guilty as the next man. I love the innards of my Jag but there isn’t a single square inch of it that would be allowed over the threshold of my house.

  And as cars go, the Jaguar is good; tasteful, refined and, rarely for a car these days, fitted with a radio that anyone over 50 could operate.

  But there are plenty of cars out there which not only have foul trim but which
have been laid out by idiots as well.

  Take Ford. It’s all very well designing a swooping dashboard which rises and falls like the distant hills in a child’s painting, but what if you want to put a can of Coke down somewhere? You wouldn’t accept curvy worksurfaces in your kitchen, would you? All your Brussels sprouts would roll on to the floor.

  And sticking with the kitchen theme, there’s the Ford Galaxy people carrier. Whoever designed that upholstery had a cauliflower fixation.

  It is a Dralon type fabric, textured like the walls in an Indian restaurant, but instead of fleur-de-lis sculptures, which might have been acceptable, they’ve ended up with something that looks like a fuzzy vegetable basket.

  Renault, though, still holds the title of ‘worst ever fabric design’. Check out the seats on a Clio Williams to see what I mean. You could invite an entire rugby team to be sick on them and the owner would never know. Apart from the smell, perhaps.

  One of the latest trends is to litter the interior with leather that’s not only grey – unacceptable on shoes and worse in a car – but perfect: smooth like Formica, and odourless too. Leather is a natural thing, so kindly leave the blemishes in place. We like them.

  We do not, however, like your passenger-side airbags. These prevent owners from fitting baby seats in the front, and reduce the size of the glove box to a point where its description becomes literal. A glove box. Not a gloves box, you’ll note. And what, pray, is the point of an airbag for the passenger? A driver needs one so that in a frontal impact his head will not hit the steering wheel, but what is the passenger going to hit? Nothing. Two airbags are as unnecessary as two slippers by Douglas Bader’s fire.

  Car interior designers would be better employed finding space for little cubbyholes where we may keep our telephones, cassettes and fags. Thank you for the fuzzy felt coin holders, but as most parking meters take pound coins these days it means leaving a fiver’s-worth of metal in plain view all the time. Which means you need a new side window every day.