Don't Stop Me Now, page 21
But you know something: they’re not. We have neither the time nor the inclination, frankly, to digitally erase other traffic. We don’t film on Sundays at four in the morning. And nor do we have the power to close roads for our own gratification.
What’s more, I have a test route on which I take all the cars I borrow. And not once in 10 years have I had the run spoiled by traffic. Of course, I encounter other cars trundling along from time to time, but that’s what a 500-bhp engine is for, surging you past the dunderhead in a torrent of g-force and noise.
Last night at 6.30 p.m., just 70 miles from Trafalgar Square, I was able to fully explore the outrageous performance characteristics of a TVR Sagaris, changing down two gears for the corners, feeling the loaded tyre straining for grip, then feeding in the power after I’d kissed the apex just so.
Last week I was in a Mercedes SLK 55 in Norfolk, on that arrow-straight road going past Lakenheath air force base. And had I been so inclined I could have kept my foot buried in the shag pile for about half an hour.
In essence, for every clogged-up road you can show me, I’ll show you ten that provide the driving enthusiast with every conceivable challenge and every conceivable view. I’ll show you roads that still provide the Steppenwolf soundtrack, roads you used to see in the car advertisements, roads that can still tingle the very follicles of your soul. Bikers know what I’m on about here. You ask one.
And then name any county you like, even the ones that snuggle up to London itself, and I’ll find you a damn sight more than 10 consecutive minutes of high-octane red-line thrills. I’ll find you a round trip that’ll pluck the strings of your heart like it’s a harp. These roads are there, I promise you. All you need to bring along is a decent car.
So, not the new Nissan 350Z convertible then.
In many ways this new two-seat drop top, with a V6 engine, many speeds and lots of rear-wheel-drive action for those tricky left/right moorland switchbacks, seems ideally suited to the forgotten dream of a balls-out Sunday afternoon thrash.
You climb into what’s undoubtedly a well-made car, press a button and marvel as the canvas roof is scooped up and electrically folded into a cubbyhole between the seats and the boot.
Then, with the sun making pretty patterns in the pollen, and ‘Born to be Wild’ on the stereo, you stamp on the throttle and marvel as you’re whisked in a blur of light and colour and sound from 0 to 60 in 5.5 seconds, then onwards to 155. Mmmm. A tasty prospect, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Unfortunately there’s quite a lot of marzipan in the mix. I see that it has a carbon-fibre prop shaft and an aluminium bonnet, and I can tell from the scuttle shake that they’ve skimped on underfloor strengthening to replace some of the rigidity lost when the roof was removed. But the weight-saving programme hasn’t worked. This car still feels like it’s made from ebony and lead. It feels as though it’s dragging an anchor.
I wasn’t taken with the driving position either. The seat doesn’t go back far enough. And while the cockpit layout is logical and concise, there’s not much flair. Nor is the gearbox much cop, and the fuel tank’s too small as well.
Then there’s the noise. A car like this should sing or howl or impersonate thunder. Whereas it sounds like… a noise. A drone that just gets louder and louder as the revs begin to wage their war with the weight.
There’s a small red light that comes on in the middle of the centrally mounted rev counter to tell you when it might be a good idea to change up. But I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never see it illuminated, because your ears and your fingertips sense you’re out of revs long before you really are.
The one light you will see, however, is small and yellow and comes on to say the traction control is active. This flickers constantly because the suspension cannot cope at all with mid-corner bumps. It just seems to rattle and then hand over all responsibility to the electronic nanny.
The 350Z, then, feels like a mishmash: like a Japanese car designed by an Indian from Leicester in America and then altered for Europe. Which shouldn’t be a surprise because that’s exactly what it is. And worse, when you’re at a party and someone asks what you’re driving, you have to say: ‘A Datsun with a Renault engine.’
It’s not even what you’d call good-looking. The boot seems to go on for a mile and a half, which might be acceptable if the space inside were large and commodious. But peering into the cavity beneath that huge back end is a bit like peering into the lower decks of an aircraft carrier and finding only a broom cupboard. It’s disappointing.
It wasn’t the road, then, or the traffic that spoiled my drive in this car. It was the car itself.
But then again I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been out of step. I, for instance, didn’t like the hard-top 350Z whereas it made my colleagues in the specialist motoring press all weak at the knees.
What’s more, I think Britain is still able to provide a wonderful driving environment. And I can pretty much guarantee you’re with the chap from the Telegraph on this one.
Sunday 29 May 2005
BMW M5
I worked today with a young naked girl whom we shall call Teri. She wasn’t actually naked, but such was the smallness of her clothing you could tell she wanted to be.
Teri wasn’t a model. She was absolutely adamant about that. ‘I’m not a model,’ she said. ‘I’m a television presenter.’ And proceeded to reel off a list of her shows, all of which are beamed only into homes with satellite dishes the size of New Mexico.
Teri was one of the most annoying people I’ve ever met because at no point in the day did she do or say anything even remotely surprising. From the moment you saw her hair, you could tell where she lived, what her friends looked like and that she almost certainly has the News of the World’s newsdesk on speed dial.
It’s the same deal with those thin-lipped, angry-looking women you see in Caffe Nero reading the Guardian. You know everything about them before even saying hello. And then there was the berk in the Boxster that cruised past me in Docklands last week. I saw the parting in his hair and knew he’d have a plasma television, an appointment to play squash that night with someone called Dom, and no carpets.
Don’t these people realise that it’s much more fun to pick and mix opinions rather than buying a sort of compilation album. It’s why I’m so supportive of the European Union and have donkeys. Because these are the last things anyone would expect.
And it’s also why I have such a downer on BMWs. Sure they’re great cars, but they’re like magnolia paint. It’s warm and practical and goes with anything, but what it says most of all is I Have No Imagination.
The M5, however, has always been a little bit different. The best was the first. Launched in the late 1980s, it looked exactly like my dad’s dreary 525e, but, thanks to its 286 bhp straight-six engine, it went with a ferocity and a panache that had no place in a four-door saloon.
It was, quite simply, the best Q car ever made (it looks ordinary but goes like a rat up your trousers).
That said, the M5s that followed were fairly stupendous as well. Quiet, unassuming cars for people who wanted to get home very quickly without making a song-and-dance about it. And here’s the clincher. These cars lost money like gin palaces, halving in value overnight and then halving again before breakfast was over.
So whenever I see someone in an M5 I’m overcome with a wave of respect, because here is someone who has paid a fortune to hide his light under a bushel. I like that, and as a result I was desperately looking forward to my first go in the new model.
It has a 5-litre V10 engine that churns out 400 bhp. It’ll do 0–60 in 4 seconds and could, if it didn’t have an electronic Bill Oddie under the bonnet, hit 204 mph. And yet, apart from a few fancy air ducts on the front, it looks pretty much identical to your doctor’s normal 5-series. Sounds like quite a recipe.
Unfortunately, however, the recipe has been spoiled somewhat by someone who thinks pure engineering can be improved with a blizzard of technobabble.
So before setting off for a 50-mile journey home on a lovely summer’s evening, I had to choose from 11 different settings on the seven-speed flappy paddle gearbox. Then I had to decide how ferocious I wanted the gearshifts to be: very fierce, quite fierce, moderately fierce, boring or very boring. And then I had to choose from three settings on the electronic differential.
And then, since I didn’t know where I was, I had to set the sat nav, which meant hitting a knob, twiddling it, moving it to the side and then twiddling it again.
It’s a good job this car has so much power because, by the time you’ve set it up for the journey that lies ahead, you’re already very late.
Anyway, off I toddled, cursing the BMW gearbox’s inability to cope with town traffic, no matter what setting you choose. Pretty soon, however, the road opened up, Bob Seger came on the radio, and with a determined shove I put my foot down.
And pushed a knob on the steering wheel that I assumed controlled the volume. It didn’t. It changed the station, so now instead of Hollywood Nights I had some fat opera bint warbling on Radio 3. Damn. So I had to get the screen out of sat nav mode into entertainment mode and then tell it I wanted an FM station, whereupon it presented me with a million local alternatives that nobody who has £61,000 to spend on a car would ever listen to. I just want one button for Radio 2 and one for Radio 4. And that’s it.
Eventually I relocated Bob Seger, but unfortunately I was approaching a roundabout and the sat nav woman had decided I was an idiot. So she told me to go straight over and then repeated herself and then repeated it again. And by the time she’d shut up Bob had been replaced with a miserable-sounding girl called Dildo.
Happily, by this stage I knew where I was, so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll turn the sat nav off.’ Well, you can’t. It doesn’t matter what button you press, she continues to give her instructions over and over again until you want to bludgeon her and her family to death with an axe. Even if you pull over and turn off the engine, she lies in a state of suspended animation, waiting to spew electronic diarrhoea all over the cockpit when you set off again.
To make matters worse, in the desperate search for the right button I’d hit something called ‘power’, which had ruined the ride. And then I’d made the mistake of reaching for the indicator. You can’t turn that off, either. It doesn’t matter what you do with the stalk, it just goes on blinking until it’s decided you’ve made the turn.
By this stage I was properly angry, and now the sat nav cow was not only giving me audible instructions but also flashing them on to a head-up display on the windscreen. And the indicator was still on and I couldn’t find Radio 4. And then I hit another button on the steering wheel called ‘M’.
This brought up a rev counter in the head-up display and caused the seat to start attacking my back. I’m not joking. Every time I went round a corner, some electronic chip decided I needed more support and firmed up the appropriate bolster.
They say a Dutch bargee can swear for two minutes without repetition or hesitation. But in the new M5 I beat that easily. Why, I wailed to myself, can there not just be one big red button in the middle of the steering wheel which turns all this crap off? Why do I have to live in some German geek’s wet dream? And then, to improve my mood still further, I came up behind a Rover that was being driven by someone who was a hundred and seventy twelve. In a temper I put my foot down to get past and couldn’t believe what happened.
It seems that the M button, in addition to electrifying the seat, had told a computer deep in the bowels of the engine that I was in the mood for some fun and games. So now the V10 was no longer developing 400 bhp. It was handing over a massive 507. That’s right, 507. And as a result the M5 just flew.
In the last five miles of my journey I discovered that deep beneath the layers of utter and complete electronic nonsense, and the rather ugly body, there’s one truly amazing car.
Just when I was thinking that BMW had made yet another car for yet another software consultant, it did something I really wasn’t expecting.
It became a full-on M5. And praise doesn’t come higher than that.
Sunday 12 June 2005
Vauxhall Monaro VXR
Last week the Daily Mail broke off momentarily from writing about immigrants, Princess Diana and the value of your house, and published a photograph of my wife and me walking down the road.
Why? Well, I was carrying nothing while my wife was lumbering along beside me weighed down with a heavy suitcase.
‘Look at him!’ it screamed. ‘Making his long-suffering wife carry his bags.’
What this proves, most of all, is the absolute hopelessness of the Daily Mail as a newspaper. My wife was carrying my bags not because I’m a male pig, but because moments earlier an MRI scan had revealed that I’ve slipped two discs. And that carrying heavy suitcases is something I’m not allowed to do any more.
More importantly, and this is the story those blinkered people on the Mail managed to miss, I’m no longer allowed to drive. Yup, for the next few months I’m off the road.
Partly this is because I can’t look left or right, partly it’s because my left arm doesn’t work at all, and partly it’s because I’m on a cocktail of drugs so bright and vivid I spend half the day wondering if I’m a horse and the other half answering only to the name of Stephen.
The only good news is that I’m taking steroids, so by the time I’m fixed I shall have breasts and a handbag, and as a result the Daily Mail will write stories about my brave battle with a spinal injury and how I’m an example to women everywhere.
In the meantime, however, my pain in the neck means I’m not allowed to drive, which will be a pain in the backside. Mostly for my wife, actually, who will have to carry my bags to the car and then drive me to work. She may even have to write this column because, while I have a few cars stockpiled up, the list is not endless.
Maybe I’ll do some features on what life is like in the back of a Rolls-Royce or a Maybach until the steroids have worked and I’m mended. Unless they don’t, in which case I’ll need an operation, and that could turn me into a drooling vegetable. In which case I’ll do some stories about wheelchairs and mashed food.
Whatever. In this world where everything is always someone’s ‘fault’, the most important thing right now is to work out how I, the world’s least active man, managed to slip not one but two discs. I went through all the possibilities with my doctor and we decided that the blame for my condition lies fairly and squarely at the door of Vauxhall.
Apparently, if you spend too long driving round corners much too quickly it will pull all the gooey stuff out of your spine; and last week I spent a very great deal of time going round many, many corners much too quickly in the new Vauxhall Monaro.
It’s been around for a while now, the Monaro, and nobody seems to have paid it much attention. Small wonder, really, when you consider that it’s an Australian car, with an American engine. Sure, we’ll buy colonial wine and we’ll concede that they’re good at sport, but that’s chiefly because they plainly do very little else.
In the past 200 years Australia has only invented the rotary washing line, and America’s sole contribution to global betterment is condensed milk. The notion of these two great nations coming together to make a car doesn’t fill anyone from the world’s fountain of ingenuity with much hope.
Especially when it lumbers into battle sporting a Vauxhall badge.
The thing is, though, that the original Monaro was a little gem. Or, to be more specific, a rough diamond. With a 5.7-litre V8, and nineteenth-century technology feeding all that torque to the road, it was a crude but devastatingly effective mile-muncher.
Think of it as an Aussie from the Outback. Maybe he can’t quote Shakespeare. Maybe he’s never heard of Terence Conran. But he can smash all the teeth clean out of your mouth with a single punch. That was the Monaro.
And now there’s a new version. At first glimpse the prospect is even more exciting because it has a restyled bonnet full of aggressive vents and holes, and because underneath it gets an even bigger engine. A 6-litre V8 from the last Corvette.
Sadly, all is not sweetness and light, because the Monaro is sold in America as a Pontiac GTO and the new version was designed specifically for Uncle Sam. That means it’s all gone a bit soft. And for some extraordinary reason they’ve moved the 60-litre fuel tank to a point directly above the rear axle. This means the car’s handling will change, depending on how much fuel you have on board, and also that the boot is nowhere near as big as it should be.
So, does the extra power from the bigger engine compensate for this? Or is this the automotive equivalent of the American version of The Office: a good idea ruined by the Septics? To find out, I took it to a track and drove round and round until, as we know, my spine disintegrated.
The first thing worth noting is that the power isn’t delivered in a zingy, revvy, European way. It’s more a suet pudding than a champagne sorbet, but there’s certainly no shortage. And as a result you’ll go from 0 to 60 in 5.3 seconds and onwards to 185. That’s pretty quick.
The lazy engine certainly suits the whole feel of the car. It lumbers rather than darts, it feels heavy and lethargic. But then you might have said all this about Martin Johnson. And that really is the point of the big Vauxhall. It’s second row, not a winger.
The gearbox, especially, is worthy of a mention. The lever looks like it’s come from the bridge of a nineteenth-century ocean liner, and the effort needed to move it around is huge. But then this is a muscle car. It’s not for sheilas.
My favourite part, however – and you’ll only really trip over this on a track – is the way it goes round corners. The angles of oversteer it can achieve, thanks mainly to its long wheelbase, are absolutely ludicrous, and, if you keep your foot planted, so too is the volume of smoke from the back wheels. If you have the mental age of a six-year-old, and I have, you would never tire of sliding this massive car from bend to bend.
