Born to Be Riled (2 page)

And there’s another thing, I can’t remember the name of one town. The other day I had to go to a wedding in one little town in Norfolk. It’s not near anywhere you’ve heard of, there are no motorways that go anywhere near it, and God help you if you run out of petrol.

For 30 miles, the Cosworth ran on fumes until I encountered what would have passed for a garage 40 years ago. The man referred to unleaded petrol as ‘that newfangled stuff’ and then, when I presented him with a credit card, looked like I’d given him a piece of myrrh. Nevertheless, he tottered off into his shed and put it in the till, thus proving that no part of the twentieth century has caught up with Norfolk yet.

This is not surprising because it’s nearly impossible to get there. From London, you have to go through places such as Hornsey and Tottenham before you find the M11, which sets off in the right direction, but then, perhaps
sensibly, veers off to Cambridge. And from everywhere else you need a Camel Trophy Land Rover.

Then, when you get there and you’re sitting around in the hotel lobby waiting for the local man to stop being a window cleaner, gynaecologist and town crier and be a receptionist for a while, you pick up a copy of
Norfolk Life
. It is the world’s smallest magazine.

In the bar that night, when we said we had been to a wedding in Thorndon, everyone stopped talking. A dart hit the ceiling and the man behind the counter dropped a glass. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘has been to Thorndon since it burned down 40 years back.’ Then he went off, muttering about the ‘widow woman’.

Moving about Norfolk, however, can be fun. I am used to having people point as I go by. Most shout, ‘Hey, look, it’s a Cosworth!’ but in Norfolk they shout, ‘Hey, look, it’s a car!’ Everywhere else people want to know how fast it goes, but in Norfolk they asked how good it was at ploughing. The spoiler fascinated them because they reckoned it might be some sort of crop sprayer.

I’m sure witchcraft has something to do with it. The government should stop promoting the Broads as a tourist attraction and they should advise visitors that ‘here be witches’. They spend millions telling us that it is foolish to smoke, but not a penny telling us not to go to Norfolk – unless you like orgies and the ritual slaying of farmyard animals.

The next time some friends get married in Norfolk, I’ll send a telegram. Except it won’t get there because they haven’t heard of the telephone yet. Or paper. Or ink.

Better known as the Motor Show, families will be donning their finest acrylic fibres and braving the Piccadilly Line so that they may gawp at all that’s new and shiny.

However, if you want to see all that’s really new and shiny, you need to stay on the Piccadilly Line until you arrive at Terminal Four. And then you should catch a plane to Japan.

The trouble is that the London Motor Show clashes with the Tokyo Motor Show, and there’s no surprises for guessing which one is rated most highly by the exhibitors.

So, if a car manufacturer has spent all year developing a new concept to wow the crowds at an exhibition, it goes to Japan, leaving London with the mainstream stuff, the kind of cars that are parked in your street anyway.

That said, it will be your first chance to see the Ferrari F50 (which makes the show worthwhile all on its own) and the TVR Cerbera, but as its astonishing engine will be off, onlookers will be deprived of its USP.

Other notable debutantes include the MGF, the Renault Megane, the really rather nice Fiat Bravo and, of course, the fascinating and interesting Vauxhall Vectra which, in case you can’t find it, is the one that looks pretty much the same as a Cavalier.

However, pretty well all the one-off concept cars will be in Tokyo, and in case you’re wondering why we don’t move the dates of our show, I should remind you that we
once did. But because it no longer straddled the half-term break, no one came. And anyway, the new dates meant we were competing with Paris.

And all the manufacturers thought France more important than London anyway. We could, of course, move our event to June but I’ve just checked and there’s a show on then in Pune, a small town 120 miles from Bombay. And I’m pretty damn sure that’s where the car makers would concentrate their resources.

The upshot of all this is that you won’t be able to see the Ford GT90, and that’s a pity because it’s America’s first attempt at a supercar.

At this point, I’m sure, Wilbur and Myrtle will be running around waving their arms in the air and pointing to the Corvette ZR-1 and the Dodge Viper, saying that these are supercars. But they’re not.

And nor is that absurd Vector which is made in agonizingly small numbers in California, and nor was the Pontiac Fiero.

Supercars are what the Europeans do. We are the only ones who know how to make a car go quickly… round corners.

People at Ford in Detroit say the old GT40 was a supercar and that they made it, but again, they’re wrong. It may have had an American engine but the rest of it, the important stuff, was as American as Elgar.

The GT90 is their first attempt and it seems to work rather well, because it is capable of 235mph, making it the fastest road car in the world. It does 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds so it is pretty sprightly on that front too. And because it is mid-engined, light and sits on a modified Jaguar XJ220 chassis, it should be pretty nifty through the bends too.

Under the engine cover, you will find a 6000cc V12 which has four turbos. Total output is a staggering 720bhp, making it not only more powerful than the McLaren F1 but, significantly, more powerful than the McLaren F1 driven by Mika Hakkinen.

It’s a looker too. They say there are hints of the GT40 but I couldn’t find any. For a kick-off, there isn’t a single curve on the car – every line is straight, except the roof which is a glass dome.

And that’s why, when I drove this monster, the turbo’s wastegates were jammed open, limiting me to just 440bhp. They say that if the engine were working at full noise, and the chassis could handle the onslaught, the glass would crack, splinter and break.

They were very, very worried about this $4 million one-off car as I set off for a couple of laps at Le Mans because the very next day it was off to the Tokyo show.

That’s why I went so fast. To punish Ford for sucking up to the Japanese and ignoring just about the only market in the world that truly loves their ordinary cars, I had fun with the GT90.

Until one of its wheels came off. I’d been enjoying the bark of that V12 and experimenting with the radar sensors which ignite a red light in the door mirrors when you’re being overtaken, when it all went horribly wrong.

The tail stepped out of line and even the downforce from its truly huge tail spoiler failed to prevent a spin.

Unfortunately, there was no damage and I didn’t hit anything, which means the fastest car in the world is sitting right now under the rising sun.

At the London Motor Show, Ford is hoping the new Fiesta will be enough to draw the crowds. And though it’s
a nice little car, they’re as muddleheaded as that fine band, REM, who once said, ‘I forget my shirt at the water’s edge. The moon is low tonight.’

I knew it was a hopeless basket case but I’d become smitten by the noise its engine made: a rumble in the jungle at low revs and an almost eerie howl as it neared the red line.

I would put up with the massive bouts of truculence, the deep discomfort and the absurdly heavy steering because no car before, or since, has ever made such a glorious sound. It was music to the enthusiast’s ears, like a cross between ‘Ode to Joy’ and ‘Nessun Dorma’.

However, its title as the best sounding road car of them all is under threat from the wheeled equivalent of Aero-smith. You really could call the new TVR Cerbera heavy metal were it not fashioned from plastic.

The best way to first experience this car is to be about seven miles away. As it comes towards you, it’s like being in a horror movie. The monster is getting closer. The Thing. The Blob. Terror has no shape. But God, what a noise.

Amplify the sound of someone ripping calico a thousandfold and you’re getting near the mark, but you’ll miss out on the gear changes, each one accompanied by a
frantic popping and spitting as unburned fuel crackles and fizzes its way down those two Matrix Church superguns that TVR calls exhaust pipes.

As the car tears past, at its top speed of 160mph or so, your eardrums will burst. There’s no music here, just volume. Woodstock just went by. It was even pink.

Now for 15 years or so, Blackpool-based TVR has used the Land Rover V8 in its cars and they’ve sounded good in a beefy, brutal sort of way, but this Cerbera is on another level altogether. So what’s the story?

Well it would seem that the company’s charismatic boss, Peter Wheeler, was not very pleased when Rover was bought by BMW. It’s reported that he said, ‘I’ll not have anything bloody German in my cars.’

And so he set out to build his own V8. It’s designed to be just like the unit you’ll find in a Formula One car except it has just two valves per cylinder and displaces 4.2 litres instead of 3.5.

It only produces 360bhp but that, in a car which weighs about a ton is enough, believe me. It’s enough to get you from 0 to 60 in four seconds for a kick off. Six seconds after that, with blood pouring from your ears, you’ll be past a hundred.

Now in a normal car, the more responsible motorist can trundle around, knowing the power is there but only using it when necessary. This is not an option in the Cerbera.

If this car was a drug, it would be crack cocaine. Its power is viciously addictive and you find yourself holding the throttle wide open just to hear what the motor will sound like at 6000rpm. You take it to the limiter every time, not caring that there’s a corner coming up and that, really, you should be standing on the brakes.

A lot of people are going to lose their licences with the Cerbera; that much is for sure. Everything else is less clear because I was driving a prototype with wonky brakes and a suspension set-up that was not finished.

I therefore don’t really know how the finished car will handle but if it’s anything like other TVRs, it’ll be average. However, though it might not be fast through the bends, it will be like lightning between them.

And comfortable too. Thanks to the long wheelbase, it rides with a dexterity and suppleness I wasn’t expecting.

It also has film star looks. Though it’s essentially a lengthened, hardtop version of the droptop, two-seater Chimera, it manages to look completely different: like a chopped 1950s Mercury in many ways.

Inside, it’s even more wild. To get there, you hit the remote control plipper once, to unlock the doors, and then again, to open them. There are no handles.

Once inside, there’s a boot and two back seats which could handle anyone up to about 5ft 5in, but you tend not to notice because the dash is straight from the pages of Isaac Asimov. The cream-coloured dials are grouped above and below the steering wheel, which in turn is festooned with buttons.

With all the controls taken care of, the designer has been allowed to let his imagination run wild. And what makes it so good is that unlike Aston Martin and Lotus, TVR doesn’t use switches from Metros and Vauxhalls and Sierras. They make their own.

Despite this, the Cerbera will cost less than £40,000. So does this mean TVR is running a social service, providing cars at a loss?

This is unlikely when you know the boss. A few years
ago, when the Labour Party was holding its conference in Blackpool, Paul Boateng rang to ask if he could borrow a car while he was in town. Peter Wheeler was heard to mutter: ‘If he wins the election, he can have the bloody company.’

It seems TVR can afford to sell its cars cheaply because it makes so few. Instead of having to buy robots to make thousands of parts a year, the designers can wander into the factory and simply ask the line workers to ‘do it this way from now on’.

And that means we have the chance of buying, for half the price of a Ferrari, a hand-built, all British supercar.

That, all on its own, would be enough to swing it for most people but what makes this car so desperately appealing to me is not the power or the speed or even that wonderful dash. Yes, I love the looks too, but they’re not the issue either.

I would buy this car because it’s the living embodiment of counter culture rock and roll. Today, when most cars are packaged like Michael Bolton, or rely on past glories like the Stones, the new TVR gets back to basics. You would not want it to marry your daughter.

Plus, to use a word the Cerbera would undoubtedly choose, it’s as loud as a bastard.