Born to Be Riled (58 page)

I wouldn’t mind, but it was an engineer from Saab who once told me that you couldn’t possibly put more than
220bhp through the front wheels of a car. ‘It would be dangerous,’ he said. And it is, matey. It is.

It seems pointless to talk about the rest of the car. I feel like the mother of a murderer, who tells reporters that, apart from his fascination with Nazi memorabilia and axes, Shane was a lovely lad. But it’s true. Apart from its allergy to bends, the Saab is a lovely car, the estate version in particular. First of all, despite GM’s involvement, it manages to look like a Saab. In fact, with the Aero body kit, it looks fantastic.

And inside it’s Saaby too, with a dashboard that seems to have been lifted straight from one of their jets. It even has autopilot in the shape of cruise control and a night panel button that turns everything off except the speedo. And the ignition key is housed in the centre console next to the gear lever. Not better. Just Saaby.

This is key to the appeal of Saab; that and the fact that it’s been a long time since the Vikings came up the Humber for a spot of pillage and rape. When we think of Sweden nowadays we think of pine furniture and mobile phones. We like to think that Saabs are made by teams of topless willowy blondes who spend their tea breaks gently beating one another with twigs. And we like this.

Saab people find BMWs a touch too pushy and Mercs way too flash. Saabs tend to be bought by kindly, New Labour souls who don’t punch you in the face if you’re 0.0001 of a second late leaving the lights. In times of trouble, you’d go to a Saab driver for help because you’d know that Merc-man would draw the curtains and pretend to be out. And that BMW-man would pour boiling oil all over you.

You could have a dinner party for Saab drivers, and it
would be brilliant. They’d be opinionated, interesting and well read. Unless, of course, they’d spent £28,000 on the Aero, in which case they’d be very poor company indeed. Because they’d be dead.

Tiredness can kill, they tell us on motorway warning signs. Well, yes, I’m sure it can, but frankly I’d rather die in a 100mph fireball than pull over for a nap. In fact, nothing is guaranteed to ruin my day quite so effectively as an unplanned pit stop.

I look sometimes at those people mooching around in a motorway service station and I’m overcome with a need to ask them not so much why, but how. How can you have organized your lives so effectively that you have time for lunch in one of Julie’s panties? A motorway is quite literally a means to an end. And judging by some of the prices out there, it can also be an end to your means.

When I set off somewhere, I absolutely will not stop until the petrol gauge has broken off the bump stop at the bottom of its range and the car has what sounds like whooping cough. If I need a pee, I will use my left leg on the throttle and my right leg on the clutch. I won’t be diverted by those brown signs advising me of an American Adventure ahead and, even if my eyes feel like sandpaper, I’ll still keep right on going.

So you can imagine my disappointment this week when, after just 60 miles with Ford’s new Racing Puma,
and with the gauge still showing full, I had to pull into a filling station.

The problem had started just a few miles down the M40 when, in a rage, my wife had turned the radio off saying that she could only hear the trebly cymbals and it was annoying. Then, a few miles further down the road, she asked me to slow down because, really, the noise was just too much.

And it was. So I eased it down to 80, then 70 and then, in desperation, to 50. But still, the balloon that had begun to inflate in my forehead kept on getting bigger until eventually, just outside High Wycombe, it burst. This was not simply a headache. This was cranial meltdown.

So I broke the cardinal rule and pulled over for a packet of Nurofen. This new Puma is like Ibiza at 3 a.m. It’s a Hawaiian barbecue and a plane crash all rolled into a 12-foot package and amplified a thousand times through the Grateful Dead’s speaker system.

And it isn’t even a nice noise. It’s not Supertramp or early Genesis or even the rumble in the jungle that you get from a TVR. It’s just noise.

Then there’s the ride. On a pockmarked road you can’t have a conversation because the ceaseless jiggles add a vibrato warble to your voice. Imagine Lesley Garrett on helium and you’re sort of there.

So what the hell is this car, then? Well, it’s basically a normal Puma that has been pumped up in every way. The 1.7-litre is beefed up so that it develops 153bhp. The gearbox is beefed up so it can be a bit bolshie from time to time. The seats are beefed up so you can’t get in or out easily. And the body is beefed up so that it looks just about as good as any car on the road.

No, really. The wings are flared and filled with massive 17-inch wheels that are smothered in ultra-low-profile 40-section tyres. And in case you were wondering, 40-section means the wheel is painted with nothing more than a thin veneer of rubber. Pull a condom over your head one day and you’ll get the picture.

Just a thousand of these Racing Pumas are being made, and all are to be sold in Britain, at a rather steep £22,000 each. To be honest, I’d rather have an Alfa GTV, or a Subaru Impreza. Hell, for that kind of money I’d rather have a new pair of breasts.

But then I’m nearly 40. I no longer find it a hoot to spend the night after a party on one of those fold-up wooden chairs. I’m puzzled by late-night TV. And if you put me in a nightclub where they play white noise through 8m-watt speakers, I’ll go home and seek solace in the Yes album.

You, however, are probably different. If you can tell the difference between Westlife and 5ive, then you’ll barely notice the Puma’s shortcomings. You’ll revel in the dash it cuts round town, and in the countryside you’ll marvel at its truly electric responses. On the handling front, a normal Puma scores 10. This gets a solid 12.

You won’t worry that the back seats are fit only for amputees, and you’ll actually be quite glad that it’s not really a modern-day Escort Cosworth. With just 153bhp on tap, it takes 8 seconds to get from 0 to 60, and that means cheaper insurance.

Sure, you won’t be able to speak to anyone while on the move, but then you don’t anyway. I mean, how can you with the stereo making those computerized banging noises all the time?

What I’m trying to say is that the Racing Puma is only for people under 25. Like a good night out, it’s deeply uncomfortable and deafeningly loud, but on the way home, when nobody’s looking, it’ll go like a jack rabbit.

It’s just 20 years since Jaguar was renamed the British Leyland Large Car Division, and its workforce celebrated by going on strike again. Back then, Jaguar didn’t have a workforce as such; just a group of men in donkey jackets who stood round a brazier outside the factory gates, throwing things at policemen.

Occasionally, they’d go inside and make a car, in the same way that, occasionally, a dog will go into the bread-bin to make a sandwich, but there was little point, because it wasn’t a car in the strictest sense of the word. Oh, it looked like one, and it had wheels, but if anyone tried to go somewhere in it, they’d arrive somewhat later than anticipated, in the back of a tow truck. Jaguar, like the animal after which it was named, was on the verge of extinction.

So it’s good to report that, after careful nurturing from American conservationists at Ford, Jaguar’s numbers are rising. Indeed, 1999 was its best ever year, with 80 per cent of output going abroad.

Part-time workers have been told they can’t go home and, while new lines are built at the Halewood factory, staff have not simply been laid off. They’ve been told
to go round Liverpool painting schools and helping old ladies across the road.

And then, of course, there’s the new F-type sports car, which was designed to raise eyebrows at the recent Detroit Motor Show but found its way instead into every newspaper, motoring magazine and news bulletin around the world. Jaguar insiders are saying it’s a concept that could, if people like it, perhaps, be put into production. To which I say: ‘Oh, for crying out loud. Just get on with it.’

Of course, I know there are difficulties. The Audi TT, for instance, began life as a concept car but ended up wrapped round a tree. And Peugeot once made a concept car that looked great, but there was no space anywhere for an engine. So if Jaguar ever puts the F-type into full production, it won’t look like that car you saw last week. But it will be similar, and that’s good enough. I mean, you’d sleep with someone who looked similar to Liz Hurley, wouldn’t you? Furthermore, if it’s true Jaguar could put it on the market for £35,000, you can kiss goodbye to Porsche’s Boxster. And the TT. And the miserable Z3.

People have forgotten these days that price was the E-type’s biggest selling point. We remember it now for having that long, long bonnet and for doing 150mph at a time when most cars wouldn’t do 4, but it was the price tag of just £2000 that mattered most.

And that’s what will sell the F-type. Price is what pulls the punters in. Looks, and the promise of up to 300bhp from a supercharged V6 engine, will only serve to pull their trousers down.

I shan’t go into the details of this fabulous car, because
Ray Hutton did that last week, but I will say that there is one fly in the Pimm’s.

On 12 March Jaguar will field two cars at the Australian Grand Prix. This is like David Batty stepping up to take that penalty against Argentina. He’d never done it before and it would be a very public place in which to miss…

I’m desperately glad to see Jaguar moving in on Formula One. I like the idea of a pit crew dressed in tweed helmets and plus-fours. And I’m hoping they’ll take that silly drinks thing from Eddie Irvine and give him a pipe instead.

But as a Jag driver I’ll find it rather disappointing if I get up in the middle of the night to find a Mercedes-powered McLaren on pole, a BMW-powered Williams in second and the Jaguars down in eleventh and twelfth places.

F1 was fine when autocratic teams ran the show. You can’t buy a Minardi, so it didn’t really matter that their cars drove round at the back. The team members could be magnanimous in defeat, say they did it only for the thrill anyway and go home. But now the sport is being taken over by manufacturers, failure will be rather more serious.

It’s funny, but while we are surprised when a Mercedes or a BMW breaks down, most people are still surprised when a Jaguar doesn’t. A large part of F1’s audience will remember the days when the XJ6 exploded on the hard shoulder and will nod sagely when the race cars do much the same sort of thing on the track.

Jaguar has to win. We know it has access to Ford’s $22 billion bank account, and we know the Ford engine is just about the most powerful unit out there, so there are no excuses. If they are beaten by Mercedes and BMW on the track, they will be beaten by Mercedes and BMW on the road – it’s that simple.

F1 isn’t a sport any more. With the car makers running the teams, it has become a mobile showcase. And there’s no point spending millions to show how brilliant you are if the global TV audience can see full well that you’re not.

I know why people who live in the Scampi Belt buy large, unwieldy off-road cars. And I don’t blame them. I have a large, unwieldy off-road car. Lots of my friends have them.

It’s because we like the Norman keep driving position. From way up there, among the ozone, we can see the enemy approaching. Only last week, yet another pensioner drove his car the wrong way down the M40 and was eventually killed when he slammed head-on into a BMW. Wouldn’t have happened if BMW-man had been in a Range Rover; he’d have seen him coming.

We like the security too. Oh, sure, off-roaders are more prone to turning over, and they can clear a motorway crash barrier with feet to spare, but in the Harvester Zone, where traffic rarely gets above 40, a four-wheel-drive can smash and bash its way through the most vigorous accidents, causing nothing more than light bruising to those inside.

So, on the suburban school run, the simple fact of the matter is this: your children are safer in a heavyweight off-roader than in a normal car.

Unfortunately, words like ‘big’ and ‘heavy’ and ‘high’ mean that off-road cars cleave the air like wardrobes.
Which means the fuel injectors on their large engines have to operate with the ferocity of that fountain in Geneva.

Let me put it this way. My daughter faces an 18-mile trip to school each morning, so that’s 36 miles, twice a day… at 12 miles to the gallon. This equates to £93 a week, or nearly £5000 a year. For petrol. To do the school run. And that makes me wonder, for the first time in my life, whether maybe it’s sensible to think a little bit more seriously about switching to Satanism. And that’s why I chose to spend the whole of last week tooling around in a diesel-powered Jeep Grand Cherokee: £31,000-worth of carcinogenic soot and evil.

You may think that this was the wrong place to start, because the Americans don’t understand diesel engines, but the Cherokee is built in Austria and uses a 3.1-litre turbo unit designed in Italy. So it should have been OK. I’d only gone five yards before I knew it wasn’t. My foot was welded to the floor, and there was enough noise to cause an earthquake, but the speedometer was climbing with the verve of continental drift: 0 to 60 takes 14 seconds.

Aware of this shortfall, I planned my overtaking manoeuvres with great care. But time and again I’d pull out and sit on the wrong side of the road, going nowhere, until a flurry of flashing lights coming the other way forced me to get back in line.

So it’s all very well saying I got all the way from Oxfordshire to a shoot in Yorkshire, and back, on one 17-gallon tankful, but you’re bound to do 23mpg if you spend the entire time stuck behind old people in Rovers doing 40.

Obviously, I eased it up a bit on the motorway but, at 7 p.m., Johnnie Walker handed over to Bob Harris, and suddenly the radio fell silent. No, really, at 70mph in a diesel-powered Jeep, Whispering Bob is completely inaudible. With no chitchat to while away the hours, I reached into the back and found a pair of headphones. They say you shouldn’t drive while wearing cans, but in a car of this type it really doesn’t matter. You can’t hear anything anyway, and what does it matter if you’re killed? The damned thing is so slow you’d never get where you were going, so you may as well be dead.