Born to Be Riled (36 page)

What else? Oh I know. While screaming down a test track in Wiltshire on Tuesday, I crashed a 215mph, £750,000 Jaguar XJR15. And I suppose that, with a bit of hyperbole here and a small embellishment there, this is quite good column material.

I’d been warned about this remarkable supercar before I ever squeezed my haddock-sized frame into that sardine tin they call a cockpit. Derek Warwick, the former Grand Prix driver, was very unkind about its waywardness and my colleague Tiff Needell called it ‘the worst-handling car ever made’.

It seems that though it was conceived as a road-going Le Mans car and was turned back into a racing car again, the engine is located so far from the ground that it’s a
menace to orbiting satellites. So the car has its centre of gravity in the clouds and, to make matters worse, no downforce at all. And that, in a car of this type, is as bad as having an aeroplane with no lift.

This, I’m sure, was a big concern for the boys who raced them, but I was at Kemble Airfield surrounded by mile upon mile of runway.

I hit the starter and behind a wafer-thin fire wall a 6.0 litre V12 engine exploded into life. It’s so noisy that it kills all known wildlife within a 50 mile radius – even worms – and at full chat it rocks the needles on seismographs in California.

Completely deaf, I started to grapple with the gear lever which, though this is a right-hand drive car, was located by my right knee. Move it a millimetre to the left and you’re in first; 1.1 millimetres and you’re in reverse. This makes changing gear a more exact science than splitting the atom.

And then there’s the clutch. Equipped with the sort of spring that they use on oil rig platforms, there is nothing for the first 9 inches of travel and then, just when you think you’re still in neutral, drive is fired at the back wheels and you’re doing 80mph. Backwards sometimes, if you got the wrong gear.

I was really very scared, even though I knew there was nothing to hit… except the camera car. But you can’t hit a great big blue Mondeo which is always travelling in the same direction as you are, at the same speed.

I did though. After a 15 minute bottom-sniffing, getting-to-know-you period I made sure the XJR15 was pointing in a dead straight line and, in second gear at 50mph, floored the throttle.

On the streaming wet runway the car started to slide, but it was hard, in the cockpit, to detect this loss of traction, this imperceptible drift to the left. So I kept my foot hard down and didn’t really start to dial in some opposite lock until it was far too late. The back flicked the other way and bang, my front corner slammed into the camera car, the only solid object within 40 miles.

Damage to the Jaguar was remarkably light, but its owner pointed out that even a 4 inch crease in a double-skinned piece of honeycombed carbon-fibre cannot be knocked back into shape by an apprentice mechanic. It needed a whole new front end, and guess what – Halfords don’t sell nose sections for the Jaguar XJR15. No one does. Only 30 cars were ever made, and after 11 were crashed in one race alone there are no spare parts left.

Had I been equipped with a tail at this point, I’d have put it between my legs and run off into the bushes, where I would have beaten myself with twigs. But then the owner said he’d use a bit of filler and all would be well. Filler in a £750,000 car – that’s like using Humbrol to touch up the
Haywain
.

Still, I am now officially a bad workman so I’m allowed to blame my tool. The XJR15 may be one of the most beautiful cars ever to see the light of day but it is bloody dangerous. And there’s nothing to stop you taking this automotive psychopath on to the road, for heaven’s sake.

I read recently that the area of contact between the four tyres on a car and the road would fit on a piece of A4 paper. So it isn’t so much skill that you need to handle a car like the XJR15, but temperament. You must be aware that if the road is even slightly greasy, you cannot apply
full power or the tyres will lose traction and you will crash.

In an ordinary car you can mash the throttle into the carpet whenever you like, but in a 200mph hypercar you have to employ the restraint of a saint. You must feed the power in gently, let the clutch in slowly, turn the wheel carefully. Basically, if you have a Jaguar XJR15, or a Ferrari F50 or a McLaren F1, you must drive slowly.

This, I know, is a bit like going to the best restaurant in town and ordering beans on toast, but that’s the way it is. If you want to drive around like your hair’s on fire, rent yourself a diesel-powered Citroen people-carrier. I did and I never crashed once.

So, our fat friend at the Department of Transport has decided there will be no more roads, and the summer’s been terrible, but cheer up. Things could be worse. You could be Dr Ferdinand Piech’s cat.

Last month, the steely-eyed chairman of Volkswagen surveyed the breadth of his domain and realized, like Alexander the Great, that there were no more worlds to conquer.

Volkswagen’s net earnings were up 70 per cent and it owned a raft of other household names – Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Cosworth and Lamborghini. He was a leading German industrialist, one of the richest men in Europe and an heir to the Porsche family fortune.

And on top of all that, he had just paid £470 million
for Rolls-Royce, which meant he not only had the factory in Crewe but Bentley as well. This was the jewel in his crown and, with only the Sudetenland to go, things were looking pretty damn rosy.

He couldn’t have known that within a week he would be ranked alongside that American chappy from Arizona who bought the wrong bridge. He lost Rolls-Royce. One minute he had it, and then it was gone. And worse, he was beaten by a fellow German – Peter Burnt Fish Trousers, the man with the face fungus from pipsqueak BMW.

Can you imagine what it must have felt like when he discovered that he would have to give –
give
– Rolls-Royce to this impudent upstart? The rage. The angst. The cat. I need to kick something. Where is the bloody cat?

The upshot is simple. In exchange for £2.50, BMW now owns the rights to make Rolls-Royce Motor Cars – something they will do at a new purpose-built plant in the UK.

Volkswagen, on the other hand, has a factory where the instruction manual for the boiler is written in Latin. And Bentley, whose new car has a BMW engine, a BMW gearbox, BMW switchgear and BMW power steering.

Piech is now saying he never wanted Rolls-Royce in the first place and that in the fullness of time they will be making 10,000 Bentleys a year. But the only way he can do that is by raiding the corporate parts bin, and I’m not 100 per cent certain that this is such a good idea.

You see, the only suitable donor car in Piech’s armoury is the Audi A8, and I don’t think any of its components would do in a Bentley. It would be like serving up food from your local pub in the Caprice. Audi’s V8 engine is
designed to propel a lightweight, aluminium supersaloon. Put it in a Bentley and the top speed would be 4mph.

I know this because I spent last weekend with the new Arnage, which weighs 2.7 tons. Sure, it has a 4.0 BMW V8 engine but this had to be enlarged to 4.4 litres, and even that wasn’t enough. So they garnished it with a brace of turbochargers. And that did the trick.

But even so, sales of the Arnage have been so pitiful that Bentley won’t say how many have found homes. I do know this though. Potential buyers have been worried by the company’s future, and especially the threat by BMW to cut off the supply of engines.

It’s easy, of course, to be magnanimous in victory, and as a result that threat has gone away. So, the Arnage then? Worth a punt or what?

Well it is stupendously fast. Nought to 60 is dealt with in 6 seconds and the top speed is governed to 150. Put your foot down in the mid-ranges and were it not for the headrest, your neck would snap like a twig.

It handles too and, unlike the old Bentley turbo, the Arnage does not ride down the road like a tea tray. It simply uses its enormous weight to crush road surface irregularities rather than riding over them, and inside all you can hear is the fuel swilling into the cylinders.

This is conspicuous consumption on a biblical scale. When they get round to televising Enid Blyton-Prescott’s Transport White Paper, the baddie will be put in an Arnage. Already, people sneer at you and no one –
no one
– will ever let you out of a side turning.

That’s OK though. The Arnage has gun racks in the boot so that you may carry weapons for dealing with those who won’t get out of your way. Or you could
simply ram them. Or you can just recline the electric seat a tad and savour the atmosphere.

It’s not quite so opulent as the Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph in that the carpet pile is only 2 feet thick. Plus, the dials are finished in a sporty cream colour and my test car had a chunky two-tone wheel – but then the airbag instructions on the back of the sun visor were in Arabic.

Despite this, I truly loved it. It’s not so good to drive as the Ferrari 456 which, in turn, is blown into the weeds by the Aston Martin Vantage, a car that combines the craftsmanship of the Bentley with the power of a Tornado jet. It is now, incidentally, the fastest, most powerful car you can buy.

Yet the Bentley can hold its head high as a stunningly fast, motorized drawing room. Choosing to ignore it because it’s made by Volkswagen would be idiotic. On that basis, the Aston is a Ford and the Ferrari is a Fiat. Piech should leave his cat alone. He’s bought himself a barnstormer.

Every day, 650 Members of Parliament decide what new laws they are going to foist on the country. And they’re not alone. We have parish councils and borough councils and county councils and the House of Lords and the European Parliament – thousands upon thousands of people whose job is very simple. They decide how we live our lives.

They dictate what we eat, what we say, where we go,
how much we’re paid, how we cut our hair and how often we’re allowed to pick our noses. Then, after a while, when we get bored with their proclamations, we have an election and they’re replaced with thousands of new people, all of whom have new ideas. This is democracy at work. And when it comes to democracy there’s only one end product: new laws. I read recently that, last year, the European Parliament passed 27,000 new directives… 27,000, for Christ’s sake. That’s 74 a day. Think what you were allowed to do 50 years ago that you aren’t now. You can’t drive quickly. You can’t sell things on pavements without a licence. You can’t build an extension. You can’t buy more than 200 duty-free cigarettes. And if you want to smoke them, you have to stand outside in the rain like a leper.

You see, even before the government gets round to actually banning something, political correctness steps in. You can’t employ a girl because she’s got big tits. You can’t fire her for not sleeping with you. And in the time it’s taken you to read this, Europe has passed another law. You are no longer allowed to keep a pet badger. And here comes another. Fish must be orange. You are, however, allowed to pop over to France and fill your car to the gunwales with cheap plonk. It’s one of life’s small pleasures, a tiny crumb of comfort to the battered people of this continent-sized nanny state.

But whoah, what’s this? – A press release from Tenneco Automotive which says that so-called booze cruising could be a false economy. It warns drivers that if we overload our cars with wine and beer, we may not only break the law but also wreck our shock absorbers, thus negating the savings we’ve made on the drink. Oh really? Yup, and
they’ve sent me a handy ready-reckoner so that I can work out how many cases of wine is acceptable. And here’s the news. If you have a small car, a Fiesta, say, and there are five adults on board, the safe limit is 10 cases of wine. Well, I reckon five people would pretty much fill a Fiesta, leaving you with just the boot. And I’m pretty certain you would only get four cases in there. So that leaves you able to carry six extra cases, but with nowhere to put them.

And don’t think it gets any better if you leave your passengers at home. Go by yourself and Tenneco says you can carry 30 cases. I’m sorry, but if you can get 30 cases of wine in a Fiesta, you should call Norris McWhirter. It says on my ready-reckoner that the safe limit in a large car with no passengers is 31 cases but then, according to Tenneco (a maker of shock absorbers, by the way), a Mondeo is a ‘large’ car. So what is a Lamborghini LM002? How many cases of wine would I be allowed to put in this V12-powered, 7-foot-high, 3-ton monster? My ready-reckoner is unable to help, but if you are allowed to put 30 cases in a Fiesta, as the Lambo is 10 times bigger I could bring back 300 cases – 3600 bottles. Which is enough to make you very, very drunk.

But there is one small problem. You can’t have a Lamborghini LM002. Well you could, but in the last few minutes the European Parliament has announced that all four-wheel drive cars must be powered by corned beef from a boneless German cow. And Mr Prescott says that if you buy anything larger than a Vespa, it’ll cost you £200 a minute to park it. Tenneco says that if you’re going to France on a booze cruise this year, you should think about the damage you’re doing to your car, the laws you may
foul – and, if on a long drive, you should take frequent breaks.

I say you should get over there, buy as much as you want, in whatever car you want, and if anyone stops you, remind them that we’re living in a free country. And then pull out their liver with a rusty hook. This – and I’ve checked – is still legal.

Book yourself in for an operation and you’ll have no idea who’ll be wielding the knife. But you’ll
know
with absolute certainty that he’ll have a raft of qualifications and no history of muscular spasms.

It’s the same with restaurants. You may have no clue about who is preparing your food, but it’s a fair bet he’ll understand that you can’t put Tabasco sauce on sherry trifle.

And yet, when you want a taxi you’ll summon the services of a minicab which may or may not have brakes. And it will be steered by a man who may or may not have learnt to drive in Peru.