Born to Be Riled (48 page)

The commentator was trying to tell us we should all buy Golfs as a result. But me? I was jumping up and down
on the sofa shouting: ‘I have got to get me one of those.’ I wanted the biggest off-roader that money could buy. You can keep your Land Rover Uzis and your Shogun AK47s. It’s a war zone out there and I wanted the Toyota Howitzer.

New, a Landcruiser costs £44,000, but I got round that by buying a P-registered model with 30,000 miles on the clock. It cost £22,000 and, no, I didn’t spend extra on a warranty. As it was designed to go from Adelaide to Darwin, it should be able to manage the school run without exploding in a maelstrom of cogs and wire.

So, short of buying a tank we now have the safest, most reliable car in which to move our children around. Which makes me all warm and gooey and new-mannish. I may even bake a cake this afternoon and do the hoovering.

But there are drawbacks, chief among which is the sheer cost of keeping it going. The school is 18 miles away, which equates to 72 miles a day, and that adds up to £150 a week in petrol. I worked out yesterday that if I drive one mile into town for papers, it costs 50p for the papers, 60p for the fuel and £400 for the remedial dental work.

I’m sure you need hard suspension for trips across the Nullarbor Plain, but it doesn’t half get wearing on the A44. The Landcruiser’s like a suit that’s been lined with sandpaper. With its air-conditioning and leather seats, it’s outwardly smooth, but the slightest bump and you’ll be needing a Band Aid.

It is so uncomfortable and thirsty, in fact, that I tend to avoid driving it, and, to make matters worse, so does my wife, who says it’s a big, ugly grey box and refuses to go anywhere near it. Last week she hammered the point
home by taking our four-year-old to school in her BMW Z1 that offers all the protection of a Kleenex. It doesn’t even have proper doors, for crying out loud. And yesterday, when a near neighbour called round and offered to do the school run on our behalf, we agreed with the sort of vigour that dogs display when you offer them a quick snack.

And guess what she was driving? Yup, a Chrysler Voyager.

At the British Grand Prix last Sunday, 150 helicopters ferried 11,000 photocopier salesmen into the circuit, making Silverstone, officially and for one day only, the busiest airport in the world. But after the race finished, there was a lengthy and unexpected pause in the incessant takeoffs and landings. I sat in our Twin Squirrel listening over the headset intercom to our pilot endlessly telling the tower that ‘Brown Pants One’ was loaded with passengers and ready to go.

But the clearance just wouldn’t come because away to our left, in the takeoff zone, a chopper was straining at its leash, swivelling this way and that as its pilot turned to the wind for help. The engines were screaming and the blades seemed set to break free from their mountings, but it was obviously too heavy to get out of everyone’s way. Because there in the back was Jabba the Hutt himself. Man of the People 1999: his fatness, John ‘Chopper’ Prescott.

Yes, having messed up the roads with his traffic-calming flowerpots and bus lanes, Taffy Two-Jags was now doing his level best to screw up the airways as well.

Of course, he may well have been supported in this quest by the vast hordes of ordinary grand prix fans who faced a four-hour wait to get out of the car parks. But as he’d gone on television before the race to say he was secretly hoping the event would be won by someone called Damien, I rather doubt it.

Most people at Silverstone, I suspect, would quite like to see Chopper replaced by the sinister Mr Spock, who this week outlined the Conservative Party’s proposals for getting Britain moving again.

They may have taken the greyness out of the leader, but now they want to put it back – on the M4. And that’s good enough for me. I don’t care that William Hague seems to be growing cress on his head; I’d vote for anyone who promised to tear up that stupid pinko bus lane.

They also say they will freeze petrol prices, abandon plans for a workplace parking tax and ban local authorities from building scaled-up models of K2 on every suburban back street.

It’s all good news, but there are no proposals to paint speed cameras yellow and relocate them outside schools, where speeding matters, rather than hiding them in bushes in the middle of nowhere. And this motorway business is absurd. They want a minimum speed limit of 50mph, which is unenforceable because everyone will claim the traffic was heavy, and a maximum of 80, which means everyone will do 95. And that’s way too fast. Quite apart from the speed differential between caravans, which will be exempt from the minimum restriction, and the faster
traffic, there will be no time to react when a pensioner drives the wrong way down your carriageway.

There would be carnage, and we’d face the horrifying spectre of Chopper boarding his Huey and riding back to power to the strains of Jim Morrison singing ‘The End’. Which it would be.

He’d want to replace cat’s-eyes with tubs of luminous flowers, put petrol up to £7 a gallon and use Apache gun-ships to police the bus lanes on Silverstone’s Hangar Straight. And where would that leave the new BMW Z8?

I know I say that everything is the best-looking car in the world, but this new two-seater convertible really is. Honestly, I mean it this time.

It’s part Austin Healey, part 507, and all man, with its chromed door mirrors, its aggressive air intakes in the front wings and its cat-like haunches at the back. When you see Pierce Brosnan use one in the next 007 film,
The World Is Not As Big As My Hair
, you will want this car so badly that it aches, and you’ll keep on wanting one right up to the moment when you hear it’s likely to cost between eighty and one hundred thousand of your pounds. That puts it in direct competition with Aston’s new DB7 Vantage and Ferrari’s 360 – two cars I’ll be comparing next week, incidentally.

Now I know the BMW badge cuts ice at the lodge and makes golfers churn up the tee, or whatever it’s called when you miss. But in the real world, BMW is in Division Two, an easyJet in a squadron of F-15s.

You might but struggle therefore to think of the Z8 as a rival for the 360, but under the aluminium body is the same 400-brake V8 you get in an M5. And the same electronic whizbangs to keep the driven rear wheels in check.

So, it will be just as fast as the Ferrari. And yet it looks even better. Which means it’s hard to find a reason for saying no. Yes, the steering wheel’s on the wrong side, but that’s less of an issue than you might think. And yes, it’s German, but so what if it just sits there in the Fast Show, not laughing.

I can think of only one reason for steering clear. The only way you could enjoy it is by voting Conservative.

Let’s be honest: the Ferrari 355 is not a comfortable car. The headroom is tight and the driving position awkward. And you can’t have lightning without some thunder, so it shrieks and creaks and bellows and rumbles. Certainly, you can’t hear the radio.

I’ve had a 355 for three years and in all that time I’ve done just 5000 miles. Which is a problem for Ferrari, because when it’s sitting under a dustsheet for 355 days a year, it won’t go wrong, it rarely needs servicing and it’s unlikely to crash.

To make more money out of its customers, Ferrari needed to make its cars more usable. Dealers can’t survive when they see the cars they sell coming back for a paltry service only once a year. They want things to go wrong. They want us to go out and crash into a wall. They want to sell us spare parts.

So the 355 has gone, and in its place stands the bigger, softer, more user-friendly 360 Modena, which even comes with space behind the front seats for golf clubs. It’s a car for
commuting, for trips to the shops. It’s dipping its toes in the real world… and that’s unfortunate, because they will be bitten off by Aston Martin’s new DB7 Vantage.

The DB7 has always been a looker, but its 3.2-litre Jaguar engine was never quite good enough. Well, the Vantage comes with a monstrous 6-litre V12, which churns out 420bhp. In a straight drag race with the 360 there’s almost nothing in it, and flat out both will exceed 180mph. Only when you turn the nanny state traction control systems off and get to a corner will the Aston pull ahead. Sure, it’s a big soft old Hector but, when you reach the limits of adhesion, it’s so damned easy to control that even someone with the anatomical properties of Kali could manage.

The Ferrari has more grip, for sure, along with less roll and a more precise steering setup, but when it reaches its higher limits all hell breaks loose. It is almost impossible to handle and, as you fight the wheel, you will knock the paddle-operated gear shifters, making matters worse.

People go round corners, not at the speed the car will go, but at a speed at which they feel comfortable. And the Aston feels comfortable at a higher speed. It’s as simple as that.

Then there’s the question of price, and again it’s a victory for the Brit. The Vantage costs £92,500, while a 360 is £101,000. And you have to add another £6000 if you want the stupid, jerky, F1 semiautomatic gear change.

So what about comfort? Well, amazingly the Ferrari is more spacious, but it’s bloody noisy and, no matter what you do with the adaptive suspension, it’s always more vicious over the bumps. For a trip to Bulgaria, I’d prise myself in with a shoehorn and take the Aston.

The Vantage is a spectacularly good grand tourer. You ride around on a wave of torque waiting for the road to open up, and then you drop a cog on the six-speed gearbox and let the awesome power strut its stuff. It is Dr Jekyll with Mr Hyde seats. It’s like drinking ultra-hot Bloody Marys in a gentleman’s club. It’s just great.

So what of the 360? As an everyday car it is birched, to within an inch of its life, not only by the Aston but also the Porsche 911 and the six-speed Alfa GTV. For the drive to work, you’d be better off with a Nissan Micra.

However, despite Ferrari’s silly attempts to take it into the comfort zone, the 360 would still be my choice for a two-hour blast on a sunny Sunday morning. Its new 3.6-litre V8 isn’t heavy metal, but it’s not soft rock either. In fact, as the revs soar towards the stratospheric red line, you’re left wondering how on earth something this loud can possibly be legal in softly softly Euroland.

As you pull on the left-hand paddle to change down, the engine management system double-declutches on your behalf and the exhausts bark like amplified dogs. Then you turn the wheel and find Ferrari’s party piece. The steering may be light, but the diamond-sharp precision enables you to put the car exactly where you want it on the road.

As a toy for high days and holidays, the 360 is beaten only by one other car: its predecessor, the 355. The older car is what a mid-engined Ferrari V8 should be: harder, with a more aggressive bite. It’s less tail-happy, easier to control
in extremis
and, to my mind, a thousand times better looking. Sure, the 360 has 400bhp to the 355’s 380, but when you look at the power-to-weight ratio it’s a dead heat. The new boy, I’m afraid, is fat.

So the conclusion is simple. If you want just one car,
buy a Vantage. But if you have a normal car already and want something for the weekend, the 355 is still ‘the best car in the world’.

Unless something is done, and soon, the motoring journalist will line up in the history books alongside the thatcher and the dry-stone wallist. We’ll become national tourist attractions; put on display in farm parks and expected to entertain tourists with our red faces and our witty anecdotes about the brake drums on an MG.

In the good olden days, it was the motoring journalist’s job to smoke a pipe. And then afterwards he’d don a patched tweed jacket and head for the hills in a new car, determined to ascertain whether it was good or bad. Back then, even the axle on every car was different. There were swing axles, beam axles, seesaw axles and slide axles. It was a veritable children’s playground under there, with cart springs trying, and usually failing, to isolate occupants from the bumps.

Not even the doors were uniform. We had the Rover 90 with hinges in the wrong place, and the Renault 14 with a door at the back! So much to talk about. So much fun to be had.

And now we’ve got this platform-sharing business. Why try to whip up enthusiasm for the VW Lupo when the readers all know it’s nothing more than a mad-looking version of the Arosa?

No car maker will take a chance with a radical piece of
design because the financial risk of failure is too great. So the only advances we get these days are new engine management systemzzzzzz.

As the millennium draws to a close, I’m running out of bad cars to savage. No, really, in the last month I’ve driven a Ford Mondeo ST200 which was brilliant, a Smart car which was brilliant, an M5 which was brilliant, an Evo VI which was brilliant, and a Lexus IS200 which was dull (but brilliant). Desperate to find something to maul, I booked a Vauxhall Zafira, which turned up at Telly Towers sporting a brown paint job. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘Perfect – a brown Vauxhall people carrier. I’m going to rip it apart, bit by bit.’ And I would have done, but it turned out to be brilliant.

No, honestly. Even if you forget all about the patented Flex-7 seating system, which is inspired, you’re still left with a car that’s just really nice to drive. Smooth, fast, economical and with a deftness of touch that belies its family-man aspirations.

Seething, I turned my attention to Volvo, who did everything in their power to make me hate their new C70 convertible. They flew me in a no-smoking aeroplane to Rome, where we loaded into a no-smoking bus that took us on an hour-long trip to Italy’s only no-smoking restaurant, where I had to sit outside to enjoy a Marlboro. Just to pay my hosts back, I was pretty much determined to feed the C70 to a literary shredder, but I can’t do it. If you want a soft, vaguely luxurious four-seater convertible at an affordable price, it is truly brilliant.

I suppose if I gathered together the equivalent BMW convertible and the soft-top Mercedes CLK, I might be able to dig up some microscopic differences, causing me
to declare one of them a resounding winner, but, honestly, it would be like comparing fish fingers with baked beans. They both taste nice and they both fill you up, so eat whatever you damned well want. Unless you’re having drinks with the Queen afterwards, in which case best stick to the fish.