Born to Be Riled (50 page)

Seven years ago it seemed the hot hatchback was about to breathe its last. The performance meant they became a must-have accessory on the Blackbird Leys housing estate. And they were getting bigger and fatter, which meant that their engines, strangled by catalytic converters, were not capable of justifying the insurance premiums.

However, engineers overcame the catalytic menace, and clever alarms brought the insurance premiums down again. And I’m delighted, because I reckon the hot hatch is man’s cleverest automotive achievement yet.

The Peugeot costs just £14,000 and for that you get a car that provides as many smiles per mile as a £140,000 Ferrari. It carries as many people as a Jaguar, but fold the rear seats down and you can get a filing cabinet in. It’s small, nippy, easy to park and classy enough to cut ice with a liveried doorman. It’s the little black cocktail dress of cars and, in my opinion, the best label right now is Peugeot.

I’ve just been out for a 100-mile spin in the 206Gti, and I’m still beaming. I’m terribly, terribly fond of it.

At school, a very simple punishment was meted out to anyone suspected of liking Cliff Richard. They were pushed into a plunge pool eight feet deep and eight degrees below zero. And they weren’t allowed out again until they admitted that ‘Devil Woman’ was drivel.

I recall the night when a close friend inadvertently put ‘Carrie’ on the pub jukebox. He was taken outside and stoned. Cliff, we explained, was not only a fully paid-up member of the St George’s Hill godsquad, which made him about as cool as an Indian jet fighter on reheat, but he was musical sediment.

Given one bullet and dispensation from Jim Callaghan to kill one person with no fear of retribution, I’d have gone for Colin Welland. But given two bullets, Cliff would have had a whole new design on the front of his zany blazer.

Yet today Cliff is the only artist to have had a hit record in five separate decades. He’s been knighted for not smoking, and when he plays at the Albert Hall, Kensington just stops. He can enliven a dreary day at Wimbledon, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never walked down the street humming ‘Living Doll’.

It’s 40 years since Cliff’s first No.1 but, as everyone says, he doesn’t look a day over 25. Well, no, on television he doesn’t, but he forbids any camera to be positioned below the height of his nose. If you saw his neck, you’d think he was an iguana.

And so it goes with the Mini, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this weekend. There’s a big party
at Silverstone today, and upwards of 70,000 people are expected to turn up. So let’s just get that straight. A party… for a car. A car that was designed on the back of a napkin, a car that was in production for just six days before strike action shut down the lines.

They say it was the first car to offer a transverse engine, but so what? The Wright brothers’ aeroplane was the first to become airborne, but that doesn’t make it better than an F-15.

At school, anyone found in possession of a Mini was pushed into the plunge pool and made to sing Cliff Richard songs until they drowned. The Mini was a BL thing and, by the time I was old enough to care, even the cute charm had been replaced by an Austin Maxi radiator grille.

What we wanted as the 1970s drew to a close was one of the new Golf GTis, not some relic that Twiggy used to drive. This was the Farrah Fawcett-Majors generation.

The only reason the Mini survived is that BL kept making it. And the only reason they kept making it is that they were too stupid to stop. Even when the superior Metro came along in 1980, they didn’t dare pull the plug. Today the Metro has gone but, incredibly, the Mini lives. And, strangely, I’m glad, in a cosy, nostalgic, changing-the-guard sort of way.

There’s a new ad campaign for this odd little throwback, but the nation’s vicars won’t let us see it. It shows a bunch of naked men being judged by a panel of women in a game show. They work out which one has the Ferrari and which one a Porsche, then say in unison, as they encounter one particular crotch: ‘Aah. This one drives a Mini.’

And that’s the point. The Mini started out in life as a damned clever response to the Suez crisis. Then it was a silly joke, and now, just by hanging around, it’s become a cheeky chappie: a wheeled Terry Wogan, as important to UK plc as the Queen. Today, Clint Eastwood has one, and half are sold in Japan, where they sit on the shelf alongside tins of Harrods shortcake and posters of Michael Caine. It’s a lava lamp, with a chequered flag on its roof and pop socks on its funny little wheels.

Of course, if they were to launch it now, with a price tag of £9300, we’d laugh and want to know where the hatchback was. But we don’t. We turn a deaf ear to the transmission whine, and we even manage to ignore the relationship between the pedals and the steering wheel that forces drivers to adopt a vaguely lavatorial driving position.

Next year, all this will be swept away when the new Mini breezes on to the market wearing what some are saying will be a price tag of £14,000.

Great. But will it be better than the original? Well, lots of cars have tried to beat it and, dynamically, all have succeeded. But if all my motoring were limited to urban roads, where comfort and silence and performance don’t matter, I’d buy a Mini and ‘boing’ down the road with men going ‘aah’ and women thinking I had a big one.

I hope it doesn’t rain today for what is this little car’s last birthday. But if it does, I have no doubt that the 5000 Minis on show will rear up on their hind wheels and belt out a few tunes to keep everyone happy.

Cruise the neo-Georgian executive housing estates of suburban Britain and you’ll find a BMW 3-series on every driveway. While Cheryl is inside, tending to her baggy knicker curtains, Dave is outside with his carriage lamps and his stripy lawn burnishing his 318i.

BMW is so successful that while every other European car plant shut in August, it kept right on going. Three shifts a day, quenching the thirst of photocopier salesmen everywhere.

BMW is Manchester United, a single cohesive force, a perfectly synchronized robotic being that moves around the world destroying everything in its path. And me? Well, some say I’m biased when it comes to BMW, that I’ll support Leeds or Chelsea or anyone who wants to take them on, and it’s all true. But even I’m able to recognize that they do field some truly great players.

The 529i, for instance, is sublime. It embodies the whole mission statement of BMW, combining Teutonic quality with a zestfulness you just don’t expect in this class of car. It is a world-beater, a David Beckham with wheels. It even has a skirt.

Then you have the M5, which is perfect, and the M coupé, which looks like a bread van but goes like a pepperoni pizza. And that’s it. BMW makes three great cars. And the rest?

This week I’ve been driving around in the new BMW 3-series coupé. But it isn’t a coupé. Like its predecessor, it’s more of a two-door saloon that costs more than the four-door. And if you’re not paying a premium for style,
then what, pray, is the point of paying a premium at all?

It looks like a BMW, which, in The Close, is obviously a good thing, but compared with the Peugeot 406 coupé and the knuckle-bitingly gorgeous Alfa Romeo GTV, it looks half-hearted. You do get pillarless doors, though, and therein we find the cause of a gigantic bruise that has now enveloped the entire right side of my face.

Here’s why. You open the door and, with an end-of-the-day sigh, drop into the carefully moulded driver’s seat. But halfway through the drop, the heavy door starts to swing shut and you don’t see it coming because there’s no frame round the window. Scream? I sounded like Jamie Lee Curtis in
Hallowe’en
.

BMW must be aware of this problem because, by pressing the remote buttons on the key twice, the window is lowered out of harm’s way. That’s called retroactive engineering, which means responding to a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

This is a 3-series that is supposed to be sporty. Not only that, it’s a 3-series coupé, which is supposed to be sportier still. And on top of that, it’s called a 323, which harks back to the car that, in 1984, was the holy grail for every estate agent in SW6. After the summer of love and the winter of discontent, we burst into the 1980s with a spring in our step. We were playing hopscotch on the heads of the homeless, and the badge of belonging was a 323i.

The new car, actually, has a 2.5-litre engine, so it should be called a 325, but hey. With property prices again heading for the heavens, BMW’s marketing department wants to milk the mood of the moment, and who cares if the end result makes no sense.

No, really, it doesn’t. The old 323i was light, fast and
agile, whereas the new one is a suet pudding. Sure, the engine is a deal more powerful than the old one, but compare the crucial power-to-weight ratio of both cars and the problem is plain to see. The 1990s 323 coupé offers up just 120 horsepower per ton, whereas the 1980s equivalent delivered 140.

This shortfall is devastatingly obvious on the road, where the new car has about the same get-up-and-go as a boulder. It is not even remotely fast. And there’s no point turning to the 2.8-litre 328i either.

So what about the handling? The 50:50 weight balance? The rear-wheel drive? The years of racing pedigree honed and tamed for the road? Well, I’m sure it’s all there, but I couldn’t find it. I looked hard for an hour or two, and all I found was an airbag in every single nook and cranny. In many ways, this 323 reminded me of an old Volvo. Except, of course, no Volvo ever tried to slash my face off.

The 323 coupé is more than just a disappointment. It is genuinely a poor car, a bad effort from a company that teases us with greatness but, as often as not nowadays, delivers a plateful of offal.

What this car should have to suit the needs of its fan base is bull’s-eye glass and a couple of hanging baskets dangling from the door mirrors. And what you should have if you want a lemon-sharp coupé is the Alfa GTV.

The Road Test Editor of this magazine and I have been friends for more than 20 years. In that time we’ve spent every single New Year’s Eve in one another’s company. We’ve been on holiday together. We’re great friends. But this week I told him to f**k off and slammed the phone down.

So what’s brought this about, then? Has he been sleeping with my nine-month-old daughter? Or have I inadvertently urinated in the petrol tank of his motor-bicycle?

Sadly, not. I’m afraid the row is about a car. The Ferrari 360 Modena. Tom says it’s motoring nirvana, and I say it isn’t. Tom says the F1 paddle shi(f)t gearbox doesn’t jerk, and I say it does. Tom says I can’t drive, then. And that’s when I put the phone down.

Tom thinks I have an agenda and that I’m being controversial simply to make a name for myself. But I’m not. I’ve read what the road-test department has to say, and, while I respect their opinions, mine differ. And now I’m going to explain why.

First of all, the 360’s new 3.6-litre V8 develops 400 brake horsepower and that, I’ll admit, is an achievement. I doubt very much, for instance, whether Cilla Black could design an engine that churns out 111bhp per litre. I know I couldn’t. But if you look at the power-to-weight ratio, you’ll find it’s no better than the 355. So, we can deduce from this that the new boy’s a bit of a fatty.

Certainly, it has a double chin and a dumpiness around the arse which weren’t there in the 355. Dare I suggest that
in Ferrari’s endless quest to keep the signs of age at bay, they’ve gone a face-lift too far and created Zsa Zsa Gabor in aluminium? And what’s that smile all about? Ferraris are supposed to snout down the road like angry bloodhounds, not cruise into town looking like Jack Nicholson’s Joker.

They say they’ve raised the front end so owners don’t graunch it quite so often on pavements and the like, but I don’t want practicalities sticking their nose into the equation. I want my V8 supercars to hunker down and snort the white lines right off the road.

Same goes for the interior. Yes, it’s a good deal more spacious than it was in the 355, and now Tiff has somewhere to put his woods. But I’m not bothered. Just so long as there’s enough room for me, and Radio 2, I couldn’t care less.

Then there’s the question of comfort. Ferrari has tried to make the 360 as user-friendly as a Porsche 911. That way, owners will actually drive the car, rather than putting it in an armour-plated garage under a carefully laid ermine dustsheet. And that way, they’ll need more services and more spare parts, which is good for Ferrari’s bank balance. But look. If you use a car every day, it will cease to become special. In three years I’ve done only 5000 miles in the 355. Each one has been under a blazing sun, on the way to somewhere agreeable and nice.

You’ve read, I’m sure, that despite the new comfort, the 360 makes a bloodcurdling noise as the revs climb round towards the stratospheric red zone. And for sure it does, but the howl you get from a 355 has now gone, and that’s a pity. So’s the razor-edge sharpness. A 360 in its ‘sport’ setting feels exactly the same as the 355 in ‘comfort’. And why, pray, does a 360 have traction control? I thought the
whole point of a Ferrari was that you spent your time not only fighting the road but the machine itself. Wading into battle with a silicone nanny tips the balance too heavily in the driver’s favour. It’s like putting Nato up against the poor old Serbs. They never stood a chance.

Needless to say, I turned the traction control off within six seconds of starting the engine… and unlocked the key to another problem. When you go past the limit in a 355, it is surprisingly easy to control. But the 360 isn’t. You end up sawing away at the wheel, and it’s only a matter of time before you nudge one of the gear shifters, making the problem even worse. I’ll admit the F1 gearbox works well on down-changes, but it is ferociously jerky on the way up, and it’s a nightmare when the rear lets go.

It’s like a Psion Organiser. To input a vital piece of information takes well over a minute, whereas carrying out the same task with a pen and paper, you can have the whole thing jotted down and stuck to your wall in – what? Five seconds. So why not save yourself six grand and stick to a proper gearbox?