Don't Stop Me Now (7 page)

The secret to all this oomph is a 6-litre W12 engine which, for that little extra something, has been garnished with two turbochargers. The result is a set of figures that looks more like Swiss bank account numbers. And the result of that is a top speed of 198 mph. This is a very, very, very fast car.

It is also very, very heavy. In fact, it weighs very nearly the same as a Range Rover. So if your right foot fancies a workout, you’d better stand by for a wallet-shrivelling experience at the pumps. How does 10 mpg sound? Well, forget it. You’ll only get that if you hop out and push.

The reasons it’s so heavy are twofold. First of all, it is immensely well engineered. Shutting the door requires teamwork, and it comes with the biggest brakes ever fitted to a road car. And secondly, it has what appears to be a couple of oak chests and 16 dead cows lining the interior. It looks like Lord Kitchener’s library in there.

Sort of. Instead of making its own dials out of ivory and fitting a nice Alan Turing-style computer with valves and ticker tape, Bentley has simply raided Volkswagen’s parts bin. There’s barely a knob or a read-out in there that hasn’t been lifted straight from the Phaeton.

And there’s more VW stuff behind the skin, too. The engine, for instance, and most of the floor and, worst of all, the layout.

As is the way with Volkswagens and Audis, the engine is mounted as far forward as possible without bits of it actually sticking out through the radiator grille, and the power is fed to all four wheels. It sounds like a recipe for terminal and dreary understeer.

But no. You arrive at the corner in complete silence, doing about 5,000 mph, dab the brakes, but not too hard because they’re powerful enough to pull your head off, and then turn in. Every fibre of your body expects the nose to run wide and the peace to be shattered by the sound of a road-going Second World War bomber hitting a tree, but it just grips and grips.

If you go really fast – and I’m talking now about ‘tired of living’ fast – the back loses traction and you are presented with an easy-to-control power slide. How they have achieved this when the layout is so obviously wrong I simply do not understand.

But there’s no doubt about it. This is not just a luxury barge, designed to whisk you and your third wife off to St Tropez for a weekend’s bloating. It is a truly wonderful, jaw-slackeningly awesome driver’s car. You could take it to a track day and spend the whole time punting Ferraris and 911s into the Armco. For a laugh.

Now shall we get to the bits that aren’t so good. For something that’s about the size of a football pitch, it is cramped in the front to the point of claustrophobia. And if the salesman tells you there’s space in the back for any human life form, laugh openly in his face.

Also, I must say that while it has presence, it’s not handsome or pretty or attractive. From the front it looks
like a Rover 75, and from the back it looks like a car. But then it was designed by a Belgian.

Then there’s the rear spoiler, which pops up at 70 mph – that should make the job of the traffic cops a little easier – and the satellite navigation, which, I think, was on a work-to-rule. It was still working out a route to Budleigh Salterton when it was already there and going no further.

In addition, the glovebox lid didn’t shut properly, the armrests squeaked and the endless succession of warning bongs and beeps drove me mad before I was even out of Knightsbridge.

These, though, are niggles, and I’ll find just as many in any car. Overall, there is no single reason why you should not buy or dream about buying this car. Unfortunately, there is also no single reason why you should.

With the new Phantom, BMW seems to have captured the essence of Rolls-Royce, but I have to say that VW has failed to pull off a similar trick with the Continental. Put simply, it feels like a big, fabulous, fast, well-engineered Volkswagen.

I couldn’t help thinking, as it hauled me down the A303, that I’d have enjoyed the drive more in an Arnage. Oh, it would have been noisier and less fast and it would have fallen apart on the twisting lanes of Devon, if it had got that far without breaking in some way.

But the old Brit Bruiser has a grandeur that the Continental lacks somehow. There’s no sense of occasion when you step inside. It’s a car you can respect, but not love.

Let me put it this way: as I drove away from that beach
the other night, in a rented Nissan Primera, I wasn’t saddened that I’d had to leave the Bentley behind. It had been, when all is said and done, just another car.

Sunday 26 October 2003

Last week it was disclosed that a company which once held shares in a firm that made the cyanide gas for the concentration camps is helping to build Germany’s Holocaust memorial. And of course, there was much brouhaha.

I wonder how much longer this sort of thing will go on. Am I to be prevented from drinking Red Stripe because my great-great grandfather was bosun on one of the slave ships? Should you be ejected from your local curry house because your great-uncle’s second cousin fired some of the shots at Amritsar?

If so, then it will be awfully difficult to buy a new car. Obviously a Volkswagen, BMW or Mercedes are right out because they powered the U-boats and built the tanks and made the planes that dropped the bombs.

So how about a Subaru Impreza, or a Mitsubishi of some kind. I’m sorry. Have you forgotten about the bridge over the River Kwai? Do you not recall Alec Guinness in that box?

And you can forget about a new Fiat. First, it comes from the country that gave the world Mussolini, and second, it will break down.

I’d like to say that you can have a Saab. But we can’t pretend the story of Reeve Beaduheard didn’t happen.
He met what he supposed was a fleet of Norse trading ships and directed the sailors to the nearby royal estate. For his troubles he was rewarded with an axe in the face. It’s hard to forgive and forget that sort of thing.

And that’s before we get to the muddy wartime history of Porsche. Although the founder of the company, Ferry Porsche, was cleared of any wrongdoings by everyone except the French, he was undoubtedly involved in the Nazi apparatus.

Having served as Archduke Ferdinand’s chauffeur, a job with no future, Porsche met Hitler at a race meeting in the 1920s and the two became friends. His company made military vehicles, tanks and parts for V-1 rockets. And Porsche was an honorary SS officer. But if you’re looking for a good reason not to buy one of the new Cayennes, you can do better.

It has been on the market for some time now and, to be honest, I haven’t bothered reviewing it. I didn’t see the point. People, I figured, will not dream about owning a car as ugly as this, and even if they are immune to its aesthetic forcefield they will be stumped by the
£
70,000 price tag.

What was Porsche thinking of? An SUV off-roader? That’s like the board of directors at Lurpak deciding to branch out into video recorders. What’s more, I keep reading stories in the specialist press about the problems Porsche is having. Demand, apparently, was massively overestimated, and now smaller-engined, cheaper alternatives are being rushed into production to take up the slack.

However, there’s no getting away from the fact that the damn things are everywhere. They’re jamming the back streets of London and littering the rugby club here in Chipping Norton. They’re out-Ranging the Rover on the school run and doing a Ronin on the Shoguns on partridge drives from Inverness to Totnes.

So I swallowed my prejudice, called Porsche, and days later a twin-turbocharged V8 gargoyle was sitting on my drive.

It really is absolutely hideous. They’ve obviously spent much time and effort giving it the Porsche family nose, but this is like fitting Meg Ryan’s conk on the front of a buffalo. And having completely messed up the sharp end, they didn’t bother with the back at all.

You are not, ever, going to buy this car as an art form. And nor will you buy it for practical reasons. There is, for instance, no split folding tailgate, nor does a pair of seats rise up from the boot floor. What you get is space for five, just like you get in a Ford Mondeo.

I decided, then, that I had been right to ignore this big, ugly, impractical, overpriced piece of marketing origami from the company that brought you the V-1 rocket. And there was no point going for a drive because I’d already tested its sister, the Volkswagen Touareg, and that’s about as bad as cars get.

Still, because it was sitting there with a full tank, there’d be no harm popping to the shops… and whoa… bloody hell, it’s quick.

I don’t mean quick for an off-roader, or quick for a car of this size and weight. It’s quick by any standard you
care to lay in its path. From 0 to 62, for instance, is dealt with in 5.6 seconds, and flat out you’ll be going at 165 mph. To get some idea of what this feels like, imagine doing nearly 170 mph in a City Hoppa bus.

And it isn’t just the straight-line speed that leaves your liver in the back seat. This is a high-riding, off-road car that corners like a normal, well-sorted sports saloon. And to get some idea of how hard this must have been to achieve in engineering terms, imagine skiing down a slalom on stilts.

Whenever I drive an off-road car down the motorway I’m always mildly terrified that I might have to swerve for something. This, I know for a fact, would result in many deaths because big, tall off-roaders don’t slide. They roll over.

The Cayenne, however, does not. And as a result it is no more dangerous or unwieldy than, say, an Audi RS6.

Now you might argue at this point that a BMW X5 is similarly nimble and I would agree. But that is one of the most monumentally stupid cars ever to turn a wheel because it doesn’t work off road. You pay all that extra money, and suffer at the pumps, too, for what’s basically a slightly taller 5-series.

Unbelievably, the Cayenne manages to perform well on the road and still work properly when you decide to follow the crows home.

On one of the country’s toughest off-road courses, I pointed it at a hill that, moments earlier, had defeated a Land Rover. And to make things more interesting I didn’t bother reading the instruction manual first, choosing
instead to prod away at some buttons until a selection of red warning lights illuminated.

Halfway up the slope, on mud and loose gravel, it stopped, and that’s always a sign that you need to back down and start again. Not in the Cayenne it isn’t. I simply kept my foot hard down and allowed the computer to work out which wheel wanted how much power at any given moment. Bit by bit and inch by inch it clawed its way to the top.

And once there I turned off the traction control and for a half an hour or so behaved like a contender in the World Rally Championship. I have never treated a car so roughly, not ever; and yet, despite this, all that fell off was one of the wheel weights.

Then, half an hour later, I was back on the motorway, flashing my lights at BMW M5s and AMG Mercs, trying to get past.

This might have had something to do with the Porsche’s surfeit of power, but could also be down to its satellite navigation system. While Merc and BMW men are waiting for their sat navs to decide if there are any roads which go to London, the Porsche’s has a route, and several back-ups, already figured out.

This, then, is a simply staggering engineering achievement, a car with the build quality of a volcano that will match anything from Land Rover on the rough and go home as though it’s being fuelled with extra-hot horseradish sauce. How it can be a sister to that godawful Touareg I just don’t understand.

If ever a car could be said to suffer from ugly-bird
syndrome, this is it. It really does try harder. It gobbles up the miles and isn’t all out of ideas once it’s past 69.

But could you have one? Having found out just how good it was, I tried to look at it in a variety of new ways. Through a thin film of tracing paper. While wearing my wife’s spectacles. Through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. But it was hopeless.

For aesthetic reasons alone I’d plump for second best and buy a Range Rover. And ignore the fact that it’s now made by Ford, whose founder thought Hitler was a pretty good bloke.

Sunday 2 November 2003

In a normal year we can expect two or maybe three exceptionally good cars to come along. But 2003 has been extraordinary. The Rolls-Royce Phantom has not been much of a sales success, but then you don’t find too many bottles of 1945 Château Petrus being served at your local Harvester. As a piece of engineering, though, it is undoubtedly exquisite. Put simply, the Phantom is the best car the world has ever seen. By miles.

Then we saw the Volvo XC90, which is a seven-seat people-carrier that isn’t too mumsy and a chunky 4×4 that isn’t too butch. It’s also relatively inexpensive, without being cheap. It’s small wonder, then, that the dealers have already sold their entire allocation for 2004.

There were big advances on the safety front, too, with Renault leading the charge: its Mégane became the first small family hatchback to get the full five stars in the respected Ecro NCAP safety performance test.

And just the other day Mercedes announced that it had finally produced an A-class that runs on hydrogen. It looks completely normal, can do 87 mph, and yet produces nothing but water from its exhaust pipe. The only drawback is the price:
£
300,000.

Of course, none of these cars offers much in the way of driving fun. Earlier this year I drove the new Rolls
round a race track, and to understand what it felt like you must try to imagine Queen Victoria doing the 100-metre hurdles. Or, better still, A. A. Gill on a jet ski. In one corner, the traction control didn’t just intervene, it blew a silent whistle on proceedings – and that was that.

With no fuss and no drama, and with my foot hard down on the throttle, the three-ton car just ground to a halt in a cloud of palpable incredulity. ‘What in the name of all that’s holy,’ it seemed to be saying, ‘do you think you’re doing?’

You might think this to be a fair question. You look at all the speed humps and the cameras and the traffic and the price of petrol… and you think, well, what’s the point of a razor-sharp, ice-cool, four-wheeled bullet like this one?