Born to Be Riled (54 page)

This means my first car was a Ford, and we have a Mondeo now. But elsewhere in the English-speaking world, it can mean so much more. In Australia, for instance, during the annual motor race at Bathurst, Ford and GM supporters have the sort of full-scale battles that would make British soccer hooliganism of the early 1980s seem restrained. Only once have they reached a peace, when a Nissan won and they all joined forces to jeer at its driver.

Then we have America, where you can buy T-shirts saying ‘I’d rather push a Ford than drive a Chevvy’. But then, I know a chap in Texas who says he would shoot anyone who came on to his premises in a vehicle that bore the blue oval. He hates Fords; says they’re made by communists and long-hairs.

I suspect the reason this kind of thing doesn’t happen here is that Vauxhall has been so catastrophically dreary for 30 years. Whereas Ford has always had a little something to tickle the ticklish bits of the nation’s nine-year-olds.

After the 1600E went west, they were quick out of the blocks with the RS2000, a hot Escort that neither handled nor went quite as well as legend suggested. But it looked good and had wrapround seats and a steering wheel the size of a shirt button. This car softened the blow of failure. ‘Oh, well, I’m a bank manager so I’ll never have a Bell Jet Ranger. But who cares, because if I can just close this deal I could have an RS2000. And that’s not so bad.’

In the 1980s we had the XR3, the RS1600i and latterly the RS Turbo. Even the Fiesta leapt on the bandwagon,
sprouting a wholly unnecessary turbo to match the mood.

Vauxhall tried to keep up, with hot Astras and Novas, but their hopeless attempts were in the end blown away by, first of all, the Sierra Cosworth and then its four-wheel-drive Escort sister. Executive power for middle-management money made it a hit in the real world, while a spoiler the size of Devon made it a must-have for any nine-year-old’s bedroom wall.

Believe me. Anyone who was under 12 when Ford and Cosworth started making babies is a Ford man and always will be.

But since the Escort Cossie was removed from the scene by EU noise regulations, Ford has been strangely quiet. Oh, I know there’s a mildly tweaked Puma coming out this Christmas, but it’s only a chicken korma and, anyway, only 1000 are being made.

I’ve looked into the future and I see no rip-snorting, muscle-bound brute. They came up with a modular 6.0-litre V12 engine that was nice, but that’s been given to Aston Martin. They bought a Formula One team, but they’ve handed that over to Jaguar.

Where’s the next GT40? Where’s the turbo nutter bastard Focus? My three-year-old is entering the phase where his motoring future is about to be mapped out and there is nothing around to stamp a blue oval on his heart. If anything, he’s erring towards Luton. Vauxhall has revealed plans for a two-seater sports car, and he likes the look of it very much, especially the orange paint. Me, I’m more interested to know it will be built by Lotus and will share many components with the spectacular Elise.

It’ll be called the VX220 and is designed to be just as much fun as the Elise but with a little more comfort. At
£23,000 or so, it could be the first car in 10 years that even gets close to Mazda’s MX5.

Ford would, of course, explain that they own Mazda, and that’s true. But what’s the point of buying up other car companies when the mother ship is left out in the cold. If it doesn’t offer up a chicken chilli jalfrezi with extra-hot sauce fairly soon, my boy’s going to end up in a Vectra. And that’s a big worry.

Should I ever be banned from living in England, I’d go to France, partly because the houses are cheap, but mainly because you’re never more than four feet from an ashtray. Italy, sadly, is out of the running, partly because it has been colonized by Mr Blair and his cohorts and partly because the Italian notion of an emergency plumber is someone who can be there in less than seven weeks.

France works. Italy doesn’t. Explain, for instance, to an Italian hotel receptionist that all the lights have fused in your bedroom and she’ll say it’s time you were in bed anyway. Arrange to pick up a hire car in Milan and, when you get there, the man will look at you as if you’re mad. A car! From me? At the car-hire desk?

Then there’s the noise. In rural France, you are woken every morning by a hundred schoolchildren swarming past your bedroom on scooters, and this is annoying. Vespa, remember, means wasp. But they’re soon past. Whereas in rural Italy, the dawn chorus comes early and noisily, not from the birds but from the nation’s dogs, all of whom
think they’re Pavarotti. Then, round about six, you get the two-stroke descant. In Italy you are never more than four feet from that bane of countryside living, a strimmer.

Italy is a nation of extremes: extreme beauty, mood and fashion, tarnished with extreme noise and disarray. That’s why you should always think twice about buying an Italian car.

Of course, I’ve got an Italian car, but then I am mad, and anyway I’m not talking about that sort of Italian car. I’m talking about the urban buzz bomb, the wheeled mule, the metal donkey, the covered wagon with a dashboard. The small Fiat.

Last time I looked, Fiat had a 60 per cent share of the Italian market, which tells us that Italians love them. Which means they are ideally suited for people who train their dogs to sing; people who were born to strim. And that’s not us. Take a look at the new Punto. It looks great, as chic as the changing room at a Milanese fashion house, and it handles with the sort of verve and aplomb Italian drivers demand.

When the plumber takes seven weeks to get to your burst pipe, the delay breaks down like this. Six weeks, six days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes sitting around drinking coffee. And one minute to drive his van the fourteen miles to your house. Italians like to drive quickly, and the Fiat responds to this challenge well.

It makes you lean a little further forward in your seat. You stretch the revs a little more between gear changes. You brake later, steer more vigorously. It makes your heart beat a little faster. So, yes, it has the gut-wrenching, come-back-for-more appeal of the country that makes it.

At £13,000 or thereabouts, the 1.8-litre HGT model
I drove is also good value, compared, that is, with similar cars in Britain. Obviously, it is available in Belgium for 25p.

So you may be tempted to go over there and buy one. Well, yes, and in the showroom it’ll look good. You’ll like the lights, the seats, the dash, the cheekiness. And you’ll keep on liking it until you get to an oblique junction, where you find the rear pillars, so fine and fluted from the outside, mean you can’t see if anything’s coming. They should really provide a rabbit’s foot on the dashboard, or a sprig of heather. Something you can rub before closing your eyes and lunging out into the traffic flow.

And then we have the pedals, designed for someone whose feet have been amputated. You have the same problem with an Alfa 166 in that, when you go for the brake, you will also press the throttle and clutch at the same time.

And what about the gearbox? Well, go for second in a hurry and it’s like you’ve stuck a steel rod and a bag of gravel into your blender.

All things considered, then, I’d love to buy a Punto and drive around watching girls, but all the little day-to-day faults would leave me cross that I hadn’t bought a Fiesta.

Let me put it this way. If the Punto is San Gimignano, the Fiesta is Bolton. It is a department store, not a boutique. It is a supermarket, not a delicatessen. The Fiesta just does everything well and, if you accept the car is not a two-weeks-a-year holiday home but a device for moving around, it’s what you want. And if you don’t, I suggest you turn to Peugeot, because even the 206 is a better everyday bet than the new Punto. It can be Calais when
it’s raining and you just want to go to work, but it can also be Paris chic and a hoot in the Alpes Maritimes. It has a huge ashtray, too, and – who knows? – it may even run on sewage.

To sum up, then. If you want a small car, buy a Fiesta. If you want a small car with style, buy a Peugeot and, if you have no feet, buy the Fiat.

Audi are in all sorts of bother at the moment as they try desperately to fix a handling problem on the TT sports coupé. Two people are dead, and the newspapers are littered with stories from drivers whose £30,000 cars have head-butted beech trees.

Here’s the problem. You’re barrelling along when all of a sudden the road tightens unexpectedly. Worried, you take your foot off the throttle and brake, which causes the nose of the car to dip. This raises the rear, causing the back tyres to lose grip, and now you’re going sideways. This is called oversteer, and, in Ladland, the petrolheads love it more than life itself.

In motoring magazines every car is photographed going sideways, its driver dialling in lots of opposite lock to counter the problem. This is deemed to be fun. When you apply for a job on a car magazine it doesn’t matter if you can’t spell, or even if you have personal hygiene problems, just as long as you can take a ton of metal and noise and make it dance. If you can, you’re man. If you can’t, you’re gay.

This was a big worry in my early days because I simply couldn’t do it properly. I never had big enough balls to drive into a corner faster than was prudent; often, when presented with my puny efforts on film, art directors would pull my hair and call me Mandelson.

Eventually I mastered the art of making a car go slightly sideways for a thousandth of a second, just long enough to get it on film, then I’d undo my seatbelt and get in the back, where I’d lie, whimpering, until I coasted to a halt somewhere. But this didn’t work well on television. With a
Top Gear
camera pointed at me, I was expected to make the car slide and keep it sliding. I just couldn’t do it.

I will admit now, for the first time, that I used to take demonstrator cars to an airfield at night and practise. But it didn’t matter whether they were front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, four-wheel drive or even side-wheel drive: I’d always come home with nothing more than four bald tyres.

I read up on the theory, buried my nose in books about physics, and talked to racing drivers. But it was no good. The years rolled by in a cloud of wasted tyre smoke and pirouetting steel. By the time I left
Top Gear
I had summoned up enough courage to make the car slide, but then I’d run out of talent and it would always spin. Time and time again I needed a tow truck and a bandage for my ego.

But then, while filming the Aston Martin DB7 Vantage for my new video – called
Head to Head
and out now – it all came together. I turned into a corner doing about 110mph and lifted my foot off the throttle. As usual, the back started to swing wide and, as usual, I applied some opposite lock to the steering. But this time the car didn’t
go into a spin, and I had all the time in the world to put my foot back on the accelerator and hold the slide. Finally, I learnt what it was like to ‘steer the car on the throttle’. And it was great.

At 39 I became a man, and to celebrate I got out of the Aston and showered it with big, sloppy kisses. I bought it flowers and am thinking of moving with it to a little house in Devon where we could rear geese.

Of course, the DB7 Vantage has all the right ingredients for stunt driving like this – fast steering and a colossal 6-litre V12 engine that drives the rear wheels – but since that glorious moment I have the confidence, and now I can make anything oversteer. Front-wheel-drive Golfs, no-wheel-drive Hyundai Accents. I bet I could even make my Aga go sideways. All you need is a 600-acre airfield.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s taken nearly 15 years and about 15,000 sets of tyres to reach the point where I could confidently handle an Audi TT. But the question is: could you? You know what it says in the Highway Code. You know you should steer into the skid. But could you be relied on to get it right, at 80mph, in a rainstorm, with a tractor coming the other way? Probably not.

Car makers need to think about this before they make those final tweaks to a new model’s suspension. It’s all very well providing oversteer for the road-test department of a car magazine, but when normal people break free of Mr Prescott’s traffic jam and put their feet down, you really have to offer completely fail-safe handling.

Few cars have it. The Golf GTi is one and the Alfa GTV is another and, er… that’s about it.

In the interests of balance, I should say that the Audi
TT is by no means the most tail-happy car you can buy. You should try a Peugeot 306GTi. If you think you’re man enough.

If I’d designed the new Mercedes S-class, I’d have packed a lot of towels and headed for the beach. I’d have spent a while jet-skiing and barging in queues, safe in the knowledge that it would take the rest of the car industry years to catch up. But then I come from a country whose car industry is now restricted to a wooden sports car from Malvern and a plastic one from Blackpool. The Germans think differently. When they finished work on the new S-class they immediately handed it over to AMG, the in-house tuning division, and ordered them to make it better.

Where do you start? I drove the standard car six months ago and described it in this column as the best car in the world. So being ordered to ‘make it better’ would be like asking a plastic surgeon to make Kristin Scott Thomas prettier. First of all you’d ask how. Then you’d ask why.

Unless you were German, in which case you’d take the engine out and start work. First of all, it was increased from 5.0 to 5.5 litres, then the crankshaft was redesigned. They added forged aluminium pistons with oil injection jets to keep them cool. Then a twin stream intake system was fitted, along with a new intake manifold.

Every single thing under the bonnet was changed, and the results speak for themselves. The new car churns out 360bhp, making it precisely no miles an hour faster than
the standard model. In a dash from 0 to 60, however, the gulf is obvious to anyone with a brace of laser beams and an atomic clock. The standard car does it in 6.5 seconds; the AMG derivative does it in 6 seconds dead. Oh, dear. All that work for half a second.