Born to Be Riled (41 page)

There have been other shocks too. Eddie Irvine arrived in Australia with a car that was 1.5 seconds a lap slower than the McLarens and a clause in his contract that forbids him to win. But he came home first.

And here’s a good one. I learnt that pretty soon Alfa Romeo is to launch a car with – and you should really sit down for this – a diesel engine. The girl I spoke to at Alfa’s import operation said I’d like it and I didn’t want to sound patronizing at the time, but I promise you this, dear, I won’t. I will hate it. Putting a diesel engine in an Alfa Romeo is like putting chocolate biscuits in your breasts. It is mint sauce with beef, horseradish with pork. It’s all wrong.

People who buy Alfa Romeos are enthusiasts. They’ve looked at the humdrum alternatives and decided that what they want, above all else, is design flair and engineering panache. They want steering that fizzes and a bark from the exhaust, and they’re prepared to ignore the possibility that the car will take a mechanical siesta every afternoon. And I’m sorry, but anyone who is enthusiastic about their driving does not want to be dragged along by a diesel engine. Diesel is automotive soya, and Alfa Romeos are born to run on Aberdeen Angus. Alfa Romeos don’t want to roam the countryside pointing out rare birds. They want to tear about, pulling them.

I can see why Alfa sells a diesel version on the Continent where the fuel is so much cheaper, but here there’s no reason for buying derv unless you want to give
your children something special for Christmas – cancer.

So what about an Alfa Romeo with an automatic gearbox, then? Surely this is also anathema: a catwalk model’s double chin, an actor’s stutter? Such a thing could never possibly exist. But it does, and it’s sitting outside right now.

With the clear thinking we’ve come to expect from the Italians, there are two types, neither of which is conventional. Buy a 156 with a 2.0 litre engine and you get what’s called the selespeed – a five-speed, push-button manual with auto override. Or if you go, as I did, for the 2.5 litre V6, you get the Q system – a four-speed automatic with a conventional gear lever for those moments when you want some manual control. Now I may not like diesels under any circumstances, but I’m not quite so rabid when it comes to auto boxes. In town, they are essential, and on the motorway it doesn’t matter.

That leaves the 42 miles you do each year on open-mountain B-roads when a manual would be nice. So I have no problem with the idea of an automatic Alfa… in theory. But in practice the Q, I think, stands for questionable.

For a kick-off, the performance isn’t simply affected. It’s decimated. In the manual car you can get from 0 to 60 in 7.5 seconds, but in auto mode the Q car takes a second more. That’s a light year. Even if you press the sports button, there’s still precious little get-up-and-go, making overtaking time-consuming and precarious. Eventually I gave up and shifted the lever over to its manual setting, thinking that maybe there I’d get some zing. But I didn’t. There are only four gears, and that’s not enough. Whenever you change up, you drop off the wave of torque and
power to find yourself in a slow-motion, soya bean sea of calm. And you? You’re sitting shouting ‘Come on, come on’ as the Nissan Serena people carrier in front pulls steadily away.

So Alfa has tried to marry the ease of an auto with the tactile pleasure of a manual and, like everyone else, has failed. But don’t worry. It takes more than a wonky gear lever to spoil the car to which it’s fitted. I’ve raved before about the Alfa 156, but I see no harm in raving again. No car made costs so little, looks so good, handles so nicely and still finds space in the back for three baby seats. The 156 made my week bearable, and now I must devote some time to thinking of an excuse for borrowing it again. Even with a gammy leg, the 156 has to be the choice of the genuine enthusiast. I love it.

Without wishing to sound too
Newsnighty
, I’d like to take you back to 5 February 1999. We’re in Munich at a supervisory board meeting of BMW. And there’s a bit of a row going on. The boss, Burnt Fish Trousers, is hugely supportive of Rover and wants to keep the Long-bridge factory open. But his No. 2, engineering director Dr Wolfgang Reitzle, wants to pull the plug and shut it down. For taking this stance, Reitzle is not popular among British trade unions, but then he doesn’t seem to be popular anywhere. One BMW insider I spoke to described him as a ‘complete bastard’. We first saw him in the BBC2 series
When Rover Met BMW
, marching around
the Rover factory, ignoring the sandwiches so lovingly prepared by the canteen women. They’d even got some German pickles to make him feel at home, but he decided that instead of feeling at home he’d rather be there, and left. I met him some months later at the launch of the new 3-series in Spain, and frankly we got along rather badly. It seems he still hasn’t forgiven me for saying in this column that he looks ‘a bit like Hitler’, and he was very peeved when I plonked myself down next to him at dinner in a seat reserved for his girlfriend. Still, we had a full and frank exchange of views, which ended with him banging the table and shouting something about Germany being made to pay for 100 years for what it did in the war.

Anyway, I digress. Back at the meeting in Munich, Fish Trousers has resigned and Reitzle has been asked to take over as head honcho. But when he doesn’t get the support of the workers’ council, he walks out too. The Long-bridge trade unions were delighted. And they weren’t alone. I was so happy I broke into a case of Château Margaux and had a few friends round to celebrate.

But now, just six weeks later, he’s back. And it really couldn’t be worse, because he’s been appointed by Ford to run Lincoln, Volvo and, most important, Jaguar and Aston Martin. A collection that Ford is now calling its Premier Automotives Group. This is a big worry. I have been driving a new Jaguar S-type this week, and to be perfectly honest it doesn’t really feel as a Jaguar should. But then you can’t make a chocolate mousse when the only ingredients you have are two sardines and some HP sauce.

Inside, the radio and air-conditioning readouts are bright green LEDs, such as you would find in any
American car, and despite all the wood and leather the switches feel as if they’ve come from a Fiesta, which isn’t odd at all. Because they have.

Jaguar is trying like crazy to say it’s all its own work, but I’m sorry: even the V6 engine has been lifted from a Ford Mondeo. And now they’ve been told they’re part of the Premier Automotive Group, which means that in future the Jaguar distinctiveness will be eroded still further. I must say, though, that viewed simply as a car the S-type isn’t bad at all. Mine came with Jag’s own Welsh-made four-litre V8, which meant I could get from 0 to 60 in 6.6 seconds. And that, for a heavyweight four-door saloon with a (Ford) automatic gearbox, is pretty damned fast. I liked the view from the driver’s seat too. The bonnet rises and falls like a kid’s drawing of distant hills, and this somehow conveys a Volvo-ey feeling of strength and solidity to those inside.

However, there’s nothing even remotely Volvo-ey about the handling. Although the steering is too light, you don’t get a constant pitter-patter from the tyres that enables you to judge what’s going on at the sharp end. And you have rear-wheel drive, which makes the handling balance just so.

But all things considered it’s no match for the sharper, more handsome, more spacious and even better-handling BMW 5-series, a car that was designed by…

Why, step forward, Dr Reitzle. He may have the most stupid moustache in the entire world, but there can be no doubt that he is probably the cleverest automotive engineer working today. The trouble is that he’s now being asked to put four completely different companies under one umbrella, and that’s like saying to Brunel: ‘Yes,
Izzy, it’s a great ship, brilliant for floating around on the ocean and everything, but how about giving it some wings so it can fly as well?’ A ship is a ship. And a Jag is not a Volvo.

Now we know from his dealings with Rover what Reitzle thinks of tradition and the plight of the British worker, Johnny. So when he realizes that he need make only one car with four badges, how long will it take him to open a factory somewhere cheap, like Namibia?

At best, I suppose, he’ll simply close the Jag plant down, but if anyone dares to resist, who knows what might happen? Certainly, if I lived in Coventry I’d listen carefully at night for the sound of approaching Stukas.

Pretty well everyone on
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
would guess that the Ford Fiesta is Britain’s best-selling car. But it isn’t, you know; not by a long way. The accolade rests with a car that has one door, one seat, no windscreen and a steering wheel that isn’t actually connected to the wheels. You know it well. It’s that red and yellow shin-destroyer, the Little Tyke’s Cosy Coupé, which in the past 20 years has annihilated the skirting boards in a staggering five million homes. Including ours.

I don’t know how this happened, but our boy child has become something of a petrolhead. He can even tell the difference between a Mazda Demio and a Suzuki Baleno, which is useful. Because I’m buggered if I can. Each night he goes to bed with a copy of
Autocar
, and yesterday, on
his third birthday, he was given a car that crashes into the wall, flicks on to its back and sets off in another direction. Well, that’s the theory. In reality it bashes into your ankle, flicks over and then bashes into your other ankle, something it will do, nonstop, for up to 16 hours. Happily I was safe, because I spent the best part of his birthday in a faraway attic trying to assemble a radio-controlled car that quite clearly said on the box ‘Ready to Go’. Foolishly I assumed that ‘Ready to Go’ meant we could get it out of the box, put it on the drive and spend a happy hour or so running over Mummy’s new shrubs.

But it’s only ‘Ready to Go’ once you’ve spent two hours hammering the batteries into the controller and a further three hours charging up the power pack for the car itself. Then you have to thread the aerial through a straw that goes through a hole in the bodywork and into a socket on the chassis.

Oh, no it bloody well doesn’t. Well, not until you’ve shaved it with a razor blade, which will slip and take most of your left index finger off. Oh, how the kids all laughed! We’d got them a bouncy castle and a magician, but neither could hope to compete with the birthday boy’s Daddy, who was running around in the garden with a toy bashing into his ankles and a big red fountain coming out of his finger.

Eventually, though, the radio-controlled car burst into life and for eight glorious minutes made the boy child squeal with delight. Then he remembered the Eddie Stobart truck he’d left in the dog bowl and was gone. This is normal. He is allowed to play with toy cars because he’s three. I’ll only worry if he’s still doing it when he’s 47.

We need to think very carefully about grown men
who buy toy cars for themselves. They may say they’re impressed with the detailing on the engine, but it isn’t an engine at all, you know. It doesn’t work. They may say, too, that in years to come it will be a valuable heirloom, but come on. Show me a man who has a perfectly preserved James Bond DB5, with the little blue man still
in situ
, and I’ll show you someone who, quite rightly, was bullied at school. We’ve all seen men on the Jerry Springer show who like to be dressed up in nappies. Well, that’s what we’re dealing with here: weirdos and oddballs. And, really, they shouldn’t be allowed to roam the streets.

The name and address of any grown man who buys a toy car for himself should be fed into a police computer so that if there’s an outbreak of child molestation in the town PC Plod knows who to visit. Don’t get me wrong here. Spending £14.99 on a mass-produced Vietnamese toy car is insane, but I see nothing wrong at all with the man who actually gets out there with the Bostick and makes one. I once met a chap who has spent 20 years building a model Ferrari that was an exact, though smaller, replica of the real thing. He’d made not only every single part himself but also the mould for every single part. It even had a working 100-cc flat-12 engine, so that if he’d been nine inches tall he could have driven it. It was exquisite, and my respect for the man was boundless.

I admire, too, the man I once saw on television who had made a model submarine that would fire three-inch torpedoes. Obviously I wouldn’t go round to his house in case he made me listen to James Last and told me ‘dirty jokes’, but remember: model-makers have gingivitis and a couple of nasty skin disorders, so instead of going out
with girls they choose to spend all day in a shed gluing things together.

And let’s be honest, this doesn’t really affect the rest of us, does it? Then there are people who make model aeroplanes. Sometimes, as I sit in my garden on a summer day listening to their creations buzz and whine around the sky, I’m even tempted to take up modelling myself. In fact, I’ve already begun work on the plans for my first project. It’s going to be a Little Tyke’s Cosy Surface-to-Air Missile Battery.

Last month, the road-test team on this magazine produced an advert-free supplement that listed the best and worst cars you can buy. Now the guys who wrote the supplement may spend all day talking about motorcycles, but they do drive every single new car that comes on to the market. They take them home at night. They take them away for cosy weekends. They take them to test tracks. In other words, these guys know what they’re talking about.

Strange, then, that I read the supplement with a purple face and little bits of spittle at the corners of my mouth – a mouth that was gaping in disbelief.

It wasn’t so bad to start with. They said Peugeot’s 206 is the best small car, which is fair enough. Second slot was given to the Clio, which shows that even motorcyclists have some common sense. The Clio may not be as much fun to drive as a Fiesta, but it is cheap.

I had no real argument with the family car section
either, where they gave awards to the Focus and the Passat. And sure, I can see why the Jaguar XJ8 had to play second fiddle to the BMW 5-series in the executive car roundup.