Born To Be Riled

Cuddle the cat and battle the Boche

Some time between the seventh and eighth grappa, Tiff climbed back into his chair and announced that he wanted to buy a BMW M5. At first, we thought he was a little more tired and emotional than usual, but his arguments seemed rational. ‘Its engine is so good and I love its looks and it feels so right and you can pick one up for £15,000 or so,’ he said, before falling off his chair again. Mr Editor Blick and I didn’t notice though, because we were deep in conspiratorial mutterings. We’ve got to stop him. We’ve got to demonstrate that the supercharged Jaguar is better.

The next day, Count Quentula was out parking cars for his village fête when I called with the news. ‘Tiff wants a Bee Em,’ I said. ‘Oh Christ,’ said Quentin. ‘The poor deluded fool. I’d better let him have a go in my S Class.’ And therein lies the problem. At this level in the market, people have nailed their colours to the mast and almost nothing will shake them loose. Tiff likes BMWs. Quentin likes Mercs. And I like Jags. When I start banging on about my XJR, Tiff will look up from his 24th grappa and ask if I’d like another gin and tonic. ‘And how are the Masons these days?’ When Tiff is in mid-soliloquy about the smoothness of a BMW 6, Quentin will interrupt to ask if he’s run over any old ladies yet.

And when the Count tells us about the unburstability of a 500, Tiff and I wonder how we managed to miss his 50th birthday. With cars like this it doesn’t matter what they look like, or how fast they go, or whether they do 12 or 200 miles to the gallon. It’s an image thing, pure and simple.

The data is confused, but some figures suggest that up to 90 per cent of Britain’s executives never change marques. If they start out in business with a C Class, they are in Merc’s web and there is no escape. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a great many bosses did the unthinkable and deserted Jaguar’s leaking ship. But the big cat was in their soul, and now the cars are made properly again many are coming back to the fold. This, of course, means that if BMW wants to maintain its healthy market share, the new 5 Series only needs to be as good as the old one. Tiff will want one no matter what. Thus, as one magazine has called the new boy ‘close to perfect’, you could accuse the Hun of overkill.

Certainly, I can’t remember driving any other car which does quite so many things quite so well. The £30,000 528 I tested was truly fast and yet eerily efficient. It has room in the back for a small tennis tournament and yet it handles with an aplomb that leaves you breathless. Then there are the details, the best of which is the interior lighting. You get the usual red instruments, which BMW says provides a restful get-you-home environment, and I’d have to agree. But in the new 5 Series they’ve gone further, because next to the mirror are two tiny red spotlights, providing a stylish red glow around the centre console. It gives the whole dash an exquisite 3D effect and, in addition, you can find your phone and fags.

For the Tiffs of this world, for all BMW drivers, this car is better than close to perfect. It’s a solid 10. If it had been crap you’d have loved it, but it’s brilliant, so I dare say you’ll want to spend your evenings in the garage with it and a bucket of KY jelly. Me? I couldn’t wait to see the back of it. And Quentin is hardly jumping up and down, clutching his privates, as he waits for a go. Dynamically, it is superior to anything for the same sort of money made by Jaguar or Mercedes. But we don’t care. When I overtake someone in the Jag, you can feel the warmth of approval. People point and coo; they’re talking about how good it looks and how quality is better these days. Middle England wants a Jag. Now try the same overtaking manoeuvre in a 528 and feel the hate. There goes another pushy yuppie, hoping to hit a tree before his ticker gives out. Gaps that open for Jag Man are closed when you’re in a BMW. People don’t like them.

I tried this argument on Tiff but got nowhere. ‘Look,’ he said, pouring another grappa. ‘You can go faster in a BMW than you can in a Jag or a Merc.’ And then he fell off his chair again.

Secret crash testing revealed

When you read a road test report in any newspaper or magazine, you will learn how a car handles at its very limits of adhesion.

The reporter will tell you that on a twisting mountain road in the South of France he hurled the new model into a series of fast sweeping bends, and felt the front tyres fighting for grip under acceleration, and the back swaying this way and that under braking.

Amazing. The guy has flown out there, climbed into a car that he’s never even seen before, and within hours he’s taking it right to the outer reaches of its performance envelope… without crashing.

Formula One drivers test their cars week in and week out. They’re on first-name terms with every nut and bolt. They could drive each corner blindfolded. And yet even the great Michael Schumacher is capable of flying off the track backwards from time to time. So what’s going on here?

Well a motoring journalist must try to convince his readers that he is, in fact, a great deal more talented than Michael Schumacher, and that the only reason he isn’t out there in an F1 Ferrari is that he’s too fat – or in my case, tall and fat.

So, if we crash, – and we do, a lot – then it is important to keep the fact hidden from our readers.

Did you, for instance, ever hear about the chap who missed a signpost while driving a £30,000 Mercedes G Wagen alongside a river in Scotland? I was following him at the time and remember well the moment when it stopped bouncing along the bottom and began to move in a serene and graceful way… like it was floating. Which it was.

It bobbed along for some time while the public relations man hopped about on the bank wondering what on earth to do. Either he could get the ghillie to pull it out with his Land Rover, in which case the pictures would appear in every newspaper the next day. Or he could let it sink so no one would have anything to point their cameras at.

He let it sink.

Then there was the guy who stuffed a Ford RS200 into one of Scotland’s more pointy parts. He claims he went off the road in this £50,000, mid-engined supercar to spare the life of a £40 sheep which had wandered into his path.

So what about Quentin Willson, my colleague on Top Gear, who, while going the wrong way round the first corner at Silverstone in a £60,000 De Tomaso Pantera, got two wheels on the grass? He hit the barrier, bounced into the pit wall and would have hit the barrier again but there was nothing left by then.

And surely, no one can have forgotten about the Guardian’s man who changed into first while doing 90 or so in the then new Jaguar XJ220. They had to take the engine back to Coventry in a Hoover bag.

But the only reason we heard about this is because it was reported by the man from the Mail who, just weeks later, quietly crashed a £200,000 Bentley Azure.

I’m in the hall of shame too. A few years ago I rammed a Porsche 928 under an Armco barrier just outside Cwmbran, and then peeled the bonnet off like it was the lid of a sardine tin while reversing it out again.

Now I am a man who, at school, could worm his way out of all kinds of trouble by coming up with preposterous excuses, usually involving tigers, but after crashing the Porsche I had to stand up like a man, and admit to its owners that I’d been a fool. Not in print though. And definitely not on television.

Only this week, I had a minor ‘off’ in a new type of ultra-racy Vauxhall Vectra. I think I may have bent a steering arm, so that it now drives like a crab, but will you see how I did it on Top Gear this Thursday? No chance.

Now here’s my point. Why don’t we report these accidents? They’re big news. I mean, if you have a prang your car is off the road for weeks while the insurance company squirms and wriggles. The subsequent repairs will send your premiums into the stratosphere and badly affect the secondhand value of your vehicle.

And then there’s motor racing. You don’t care about deft overtaking manoeuvres or whiz-bang pit stops. No, you like the crashes and the fireballs. That’s why you all slow down to gawp at mangled metal on the motorway.

So perhaps then, it’s time for us motoring journalists to swallow our pride and understand that the size of a car’s ashtray is maybe not that important. People are more interested in how we managed to leave the road at 100mph, backwards.

The trouble is that when we crash it’s like Barry Norman spilling his popcorn. Or A.A. Gill dropping some butter on the carpet. We just ring the manufacturer and a tow truck comes. We fill in an accident report form and nothing more is said. We don’t think of it as a big deal.

I once tore the front end from a Daihatsu Charade GTti after plonking it in a ditch at 80mph. And the press officer merely shrugged it off saying, ‘Don’t worry. We make one every 23 seconds.’

Well, good for you matey, but when I’m sitting here struggling to think of anything to say about the latest dull car that’s parked outside, I’ve just realized that a good crash can fill several column inches.

That’s is why I’m going out right now to ram a Toyota Corolla into a tree.

Diesel man on the couch

A policeman once told me that if there is room to overtake someone on the inside, then there was room for that person to have pulled over. Wise words, but don’t bother using them in court. Undertake someone, and in the eyes of the law you’re a mugger with a crack habit.

Now in the normal course of events this doesn’t really matter, because all three lanes of every motorway are full and you just drive along at whatever speed the traffic happens to be doing.

The trouble is that this lulls people into a sort of never-never land where your heart is beating and your eyes are open but you are not really awake. A leprechaun could jump on to your bonnet and make a wigwam out of your windscreen wipers but you wouldn’t even blink.

Consequently, you don’t really notice that it’s getting late and that the traffic has thinned out. You are in a deep, deep coma.

But then, suddenly, your rear-view mirror melts as it is assaulted by a 400 gigawatt burst of light. You come to realize that someone is behind and you pull over feeling a bit sheepish… unless you are driving a diesel.

This is the first trend I’ve ever spotted. We’ve had Essex Man and New Man, and only a couple of weeks ago the Freight Transport Association came up with Van Man, a 19-year-old plumber who genuinely believes his Astramax can break the sound barrier.

Well now, I’d like to introduce you to Diesel Man. Diesel Man is less well defined than the others in that he could be 17 or 70, blue-collar or middle management. Strangely, Diesel Man might even be a woman.

He’s not easy to spot in ordinary life because he behaves just like you do. He’s ordinary. He blends… right up to the point when he climbs into his diesel-powered car. And then he is more bitter and twisted than the lemon you put in your gin and tonic last night.

In the past, it was hard for Diesel Man to fall into a catatonic state while driving up the motorway because of the engine noise, but these days diesels are pretty silent at speed, so he nods off as surely as you and I.

However, when he becomes aware that another car is keen to come by, he reacts in an unusual fashion. He drops a cog to get that hideously inefficient engine into the upper echelons of its miserable power band, and floors the throttle.

From behind, it’s hard to tell he’s done this because, obviously, there’s no discernible change in pace. Put your foot down in a diesel at 70mph and it can take ten or twelve minutes for you to be doing 71.

However, there will be a puff of carcinogenic smoke from the exhaust, and that’s the sign. Diesel Man is going to prove that his car is just as fast as yours.

Psychologically, it’s easy to see what’s happening here. His boss has heard that diesel engines are more economical than their petrol-powered counterparts, and that because they tend to be less powerful, accidents happen infrequently. So he decides that his staff, from now on, will have diesels.

Now we all know that you can call a man’s baby ugly and he won’t mind. We know that you can take a man’s wife to bed and it’ll all be forgotten in a week or so. But laugh at a man’s wheels and you’re in serious trouble.

Diesel Man is well aware of his car’s shortfalls. He knows it’s pitifully slow and that it makes the most Godawful din when he starts it up in the morning. He also knows that he doesn’t benefit one jot from the lower running costs. Basically, he knows the car is a worthless pile of junk, but is he going to admit this in public? Hell no.

To admit that his diesel is a step down is tantamount to admitting that he has taken some kind of demotion. So he’s going to prove, no matter what the cost, that his diesel is superior in every way to a petrol-powered car.

And it’s the same story with private buyers who’ve been enticed by the promise of 45mpg only to discover that the downsides easily outweigh the few pence that are saved each week. But are they going to say so? Only after they’ve owned up to being hung like a maggot.

So what’s to be done? How do we get past? Well you might argue that the speed limit is 70mph on the motorway, and it is. You may say that all I’m doing here is encouraging people to break the law, but we all know the score. The speed limit is 70, so we can all do 85.

Except we can’t, because Diesel Man is having an ego crisis right in front of us.

There is, I suspect, only one solution. Car manufacturers must refrain from putting any form of diesel logo on the back of a car. The BMW tds, Citroen 1.9D, the Rover SDi. Diesel man knows we can see this little ‘D’ and suspects we may be laughing at him. That’s why he puts his foot down.

But if the ‘D’ were replaced by an innocuous ‘p’ or ‘z’ or whatever, he could simply get out of our way, happy that we’ll sail by unaware of the aberration under his bonnet.

Or he could, of course, go out there and remove the ‘D’ himself, but I’ve just thought of a much better idea. Grow up.

Stuck on the charisma bypass

The new Maserati Quattroporte is, in many ways, a breath of fresh air. Here, at last, is a car that’s truly, madly bad. Armed with a ridiculous price tag, it wades into battle with a slightly bent peashooter and adaptive suspension that doesn’t work. It is ugly. It has an engine that sounds like it’s trying to mix cement. The leatherwork is shoddy. It is badly equipped and it has a clock shaped like women’s bits. You wouldn’t want to buy it, but at least you can discuss it, with much finger-pointing and shouting, over a beer. That automatically makes it better than some of the dross I drove last week. My God, there are some boring cars out there.

Bring the Hyundai Lantra Estate up in a pub and it would have the same effect as putting a Mogadon in everyone’s drinks. We all know someone like this car – someone who tries to disguise his innate and inbred ability to redefine tedium by wearing a stripy orange and brown tank top. The car is quiet, it will rarely break down and I’m sure it would buy its girlfriend – a librarian – chocolates on her birthday. At work, it would have a sign on its desk saying: ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here – but it helps.’ What a wag. What a git.

Then there’s the Rover 400 Saloon, a Honda Civic with delusions of grandeur. It’s someone who’s made a few bob and thinks that by shopping at Hackett and wearing brogues he’ll be accepted by the county set. Volkswagen has cocked up too, with its new Polo saloon. What a heap of steaming manure this is. The hatchback is a charming and funky little device with cool graphics, a wild range of colours and lots of street cred. But by putting a boot on, the designers have put the boot in.

Could this car really be worse than the old Derby? I think so. Could it be worse than the old Vauxhall Nova saloon, with the elephantine proportions and the unicycle wheels? No, that’s ridiculous. I’d like to tell you about the Daihatsu Charade at this point, but nothing springs to mind. It’s a glass of water on wheels. Hey, what’s this? It’s the new Audi A4 rattling into view. Now this is some car, beautiful to behold and made with the sort of care normally reserved for space shuttles. But wait. What’s that under the bonnet? Oh no. It’s a diesel. Start it up and there’s the familiar clatter which can give old people arthritis. But this one has a turbo, so when you put your foot down, especially at low revs, there’s some serious grunt. The trouble is that the power band is so narrow you only need blink and it’s all over. ‘Dear Deirdre, My car suffers from premature ejaculation. What should I do?’

Deirdre replies: ‘This is a common complaint which is getting worse as more and more people fall for the turbo-diesel sales patter. Leave your car now and go for a real man: one with a petrol engine.’ This is not to say that unleaded is the cure for all our ills. Witness the VW Passat and the Seat Toledo, cars which, if they were ovens, would cook food.

Then there’s the king and queen of horror – the Toyota Corolla and Nissan Almera. Styled by adding machines with interior trim by BHS, this duo leave me so cold hypothermia starts to set in. After a spin in either, even the Vectra starts to look like a Ferrari F512. But it takes more than casual comparisons to enliven the Astra. Like the Escort, this car is barely fit to be a pox doctor’s clerk. It isn’t especially good value for money. It isn’t handsome. It isn’t noteworthy in terms of performance and it doesn’t have microwave reliability either. I could fill up the rest of this magazine with cars that just don’t make the grade. I’d need 44 pages alone for the Nissan Serena Diesel, which takes an almost unbelievable 26 seconds to heave itself from 0 to 60.

The best thing is to list the worthwhile mainstream cars. It won’t take long, so here goes. At the bottom we have the Ford Fiesta and Nissan Micra. In the middle, the Fiat Bravo and Renault Migraine. Up a bit and the Mondeo and Pug 406 dominate. Further up, say hello to the Audi A4 and the Honda Accord. And at the top, the BMW 5 Series makes big sense. Though Jaguar and Mercedes also do something pretty special for 30 grand.

If it isn’t in this list, frankly, it isn’t worth the metal it’s made from.

Travel tips with Jezza Chalmers

If you were to be wrongly charged with murder while in Thailand, I think it fair to assume that you wouldn’t conduct your own defence.

You don’t speak Thai and you don’t understand the nuances of the legal system.

And yet when we go abroad on holiday, we’re all quite happy to pile into a rental car even though we can’t read the signposts, we don’t understand the customs and, more often than not, everyone is on the wrong side of the road.

In Britain, if someone flashes their lights it means they’re waving you through, but elsewhere it means ‘Look out, I’m not going to stop.’ However, you won’t realize this until you’re half-way through your windscreen.

So what I’ve attempted to do in the limited space here is try to offer some advice for those who will be driving abroad this summer.

Let’s start in America, just outside Miami airport, where the slip road joins the Florida turnpike. You’ve been rammed, gently, from behind and you’ve climbed out to inspect the damage.

This was a mistake because the man who ran into your rear end is a Colombian drug dealer who will now shoot you, your wife and your children. Then he’ll help himself to all your belongings.

Locals say that if you’re rammed, you should drive around until you see a policeman… but this is not sensible either. You see, if Plod is confronted with a hysterical Limey babbling away in an accent he doesn’t really understand, he will shoot you so he can get back to his seventh doughnut of the morning.

It is possible, just, to get out of the Miami district without being murdered, but then you face an altogether new problem. The road may be wide and straight, but do not, however tempting it might be, exceed 70mph.

Your American rental car is simply not capable of high-speed travel and will, if you push it, bounce off the road into a swamp. Whereupon you will be eaten by an alligator.

Other tips: you must pay for fuel before filling your tank, which is stupid because you have no idea how much your tank will take. Nevertheless, don’t argue or try to buck the system because most petrol pump attendants in Florida are daft and armed – a lethal combination which will result in you springing a leak.

It’s also worth remembering that in America most establishments have valets with massive teeth and idiotic red waistcoats who will volunteer to park your car. When they return it, they will expect a tip, but you can get round this by pretending to be Icelandic.

Whatever you do, do not claim to be Romanian or Czechoslovakian because the valet will think you’re a commie and may try to shoot you.

The best piece of advice I can give to anyone thinking of driving in America this year is… have you thought about Europe?

Italy is perfect, but be aware that your rental car will be a wreck with a shagged engine. This will make any foray into the autostrada’s overtaking lane tantamount to dancing with the devil.

In Italy, they don’t wait patiently for slower cars to move over, and nor do they flash their lights or attempt to get past on the inside. They just ram you.

Life is a lot more disciplined in Germany, of course, but I can’t think of a single reason why you would want to go on holiday there.

France is much nicer, but whatever happens do not take your own car across the Channel. There is something called ferry psychology which means that as you approach Calais to come home you will definitely be driving too fast.

This is either because you are late for the sailing on which you’re booked or you’re miles too early, in which case you’re hurrying to catch an earlier boat. Either way, you’ll be caught speeding and made to pay a fine so massive that when you get home, your house will have been repossessed.

And don’t try claiming you can’t pay, because then they will take your car, and your wife… out to dinner where she will fall for their Gallic charm and leave you to a life of meths and shop doorways.

The most popular foreign destination for British tourists is Spain, which is one of those strange facts that I can never understand. Like why is the motorway central reservation always littered with shoes?

I really don’t like Spain, but I will admit that their roads, these days, are simply superb – smooth, wide, fast, and free in large chunks from too much in the way of traffic. If you’ve ever wondered where the European Union spends all its money, have a look at Barcelona’s motorway network. And then get out there and enjoy it. You paid for it.

Briefly, because I’m running out of space here, I should warn you that wildlife is a massive problem elsewhere in the world. In Britain, we are unused to rounding a bend to find the road blocked by half a ton of snorting muscle, but in Australia, camels and kangaroos regularly play chicken. In India it’s cows, and in Sweden even more people are killed by errant elks than by razor blades and Mogadon.

In the Caribbean, mercifully, large animals are scarce but then the cars they rent you would lose if they went head-to-head against a breeze. In Barbados be very careful indeed to avoid what is basically a Suzuki Alto with no bodywork at all.

In fact, it’s probably best to avoid going abroad in the first place. Me? I’m off to the Isle of Man for some fresh air, some invigorating scenery and the joy of being able to drive through it without the burden of speed limits.

Capsized in Capri

I’ve spent the last year working on a new television series all about big boys’ toys. This means I’ve shot the rapids in New Zealand in a 100mph jet boat. I’ve flown an F-15 fighter jet. I’ve done the Reno air races in a 1942 Mustang P-51 and in Sweden I lost my liver to a drag snowmobile that could do the standing quarter in 6 seconds… whilst wearing women’s clothes.

But the high spot was to have been my time in the world of Class One offshore power boat racing.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is about as good as sport gets. The 4 ton boats are a subtle blend of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics so they skim along the surface of the sea, with just the bottom half of their propellers in the water.

Each uses a brace of 1000 horsepower, 8.0 litre Lamborghini race engines which make a noise that can curdle blood at 500 paces. Only once have I heard a sound to beat it: Bob Seger at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1976.

In rough water the drivers simply go as fast as they dare, which means that all the expense, all the technical development and all the power is wasted if the guy has nothing in his pants. It’s not like car racing, where you can do a crossword while going down the straights. You’re on water which moves and wobbles, and you are being beaten to death inside that Kevlar cockpit. For days after a rough race the two-man crews pee blood.

To get to the bottom of power boat racing we filmed one of the boats being made, and I went out for its first ever shakedown run on the Solent late one Saturday evening in May. It was good. We hit 148mph which, technically speaking, is pretty fast.

And then I faced the agonizing choice of deciding which race I’d watch – St Petersburg, Beirut, Tunisia, Norway, Dubai or the first round, which was to be held somewhere I’ve wanted to go for 25 years.

Capri: an island in the Mediterranean which was home to the emperor Tiberius. And then nothing much happened there until the 1930s, when Gracie Fields arrived.

Some say it was named after capreae, which, as everyone knows, is the Latin for goat. Others, having found strange skeletons embedded in the limestone, say it’s more likely to be derived from kaprus, the Greek for wild boar. Either way, it seems to have nothing to do with a crummy Ford.

In recent times, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell have been holidaying there so I figured there’d be a jet-set backdrop to just about the most glamorous and dangerous sporting spectacle the world has ever seen.

But getting there is not easy. You have to fly from Gatwick, which is always depressing – all those lard arses in towelling tracksuits and tight perms off to Torremolinos. Then you land in Naples – the only city on the planet where a red traffic light means go.

And then you have to reverse onto a car ferry which only has three tins of beer on board. And when you get to Capri they won’t let you off unless you can prove you live there. This was hard, because I don’t. But if you argue with an Italian in a uniform for long enough, he will eventually tire of the exchange and allow you through.

So we were in Capri at last. Er, not exactly. We were on the harbour wall – which was just wide enough for one car – facing a stream of traffic coming the other way, trying to board the boat we’d just left.

Either I backed into the boat and went back to the mainland again or 30 residents reversed out of my way.

So it was back on the boat, and after a round trip via Naples again I found myself on the most spectacularly beautiful island in the entire world. I’ve been to the Maldives and the Caribbean. I’ve explored Mauritius and Orpheus on the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve seen the north coast of Majorca and once spent a holiday in Sicily, but you can forget all of these, and Sardinia, and Corsica and all those hideous lumps round Greece. Capri is heaven.

Every villa and every bit of cliff is smothered in that purple stuff which isn’t buddleia but looks a bit like it if you squint. Gorgonzola? No, Borden villier. Something like that. Damn pretty anyway.

And I should know because I got very, very close to it while trying to squeeze past traffic on the three-mile drive to my hotel. It was hopeless and eventually I would have to back up to the nearest passing point, which was usually the harbour.

Eventually, I learned to reverse everywhere so that when I encountered traffic coming the other way they’d assume I was backing away from a bus and would begin to reverse as well.

Still, it would all be worthwhile because I was going to see nine face-distortingly fast boats in aquatic combat. I was so excited that I clean forgot Capri is a part of Italy and that therefore nothing should ever be taken for granted.

This may have been the first round in the championship. The drivers may have come from all over the world, and the boats had been brought on trailers on THAT beerless ferry. But, apparently, there was a bit of a mix-up with the coastguard over timing, so the event was cancelled.

It took 14 hours to get home.

Noel’s Le Mans party blows a fuse

Last week I went to Le Mans, where, for the first time, I was introduced formally to the world of big-time motor racing. And I’ve worked something out.

We tend to think of motor racing as being a driver thing, but this, I’m sorry to say, is not really the case. Yes, his hairstyle looks good and his teeth are shiny, but it is the car that matters most of all.

In a Williams, Damon Hill was world champion. In an Arrows, he is an amusing sideshow. Think of it in terms of cooking. Give me the freshest ingredients and I’ll knock up a supper that will cause your taste buds to die of a broken heart. Give Gary Rhodes a tin of pilchards and you’ll get a tin of pilchards.

At Le Mans, I was part of the Panoz team that had been put together by his Noeliness, Mr Edmonds, and for five days I hung around in their pit, wearing a serious expression and pointing at things.

It all began on Wednesday evening when the cars were sent out to qualify – nail-biting stuff because the two slowest entries would not be allowed to race. A year’s work would be bundled onto the back of a lorry and sent home.

On his first lap one of our drivers, Andy Wallace, reported over the ship-to-shore radio that his Panoz was ‘absolutely f****** undriveable’. Under braking it was bouncing all over the track but, worse than that, the 6.0 litre V8 Ford engine had no power coming out of the corners.

The news was bad, but the other car was in even worse shape. Its oil repository had seemingly been modelled on a colander.

So when the session was terminated at 12.30 it seemed likely that neither of our cars would make the grade. We had one more chance on Thursday night to try and make those cars fly.

That morning, I asked by far and away our tweediest driver, James Weaver, to explain the problem, expecting him to lift the bonnet and point at a wonky part. But no. I was taken into a back room where men in spectacles were hunched over a bank of laptops, staring at graphs.

‘There,’ he said. I peered at the read-outs for some time, my face scrunched up like I was trying to read a sign from a long way away, but could make neither head nor tail of them. So he explained that the blue wheel-speed trace did not match the red rev trace; that there was a glitch, and that the men in spectacles were interrogating the engine’s electronic management system to find out why.

I’d noticed this the day before. Whenever the car came back to the pits no one ever went near the engine. They simply plugged computers into it and banged away at keyboards in a Rick Wakemanesque frenzy.

And they kept on banging away all through Thursday and all through the vital evening practice session. And still the engine wouldn’t work properly.

The mechanics had sorted the handling problems and the drivers were giving it their absolute best, but none of this really mattered because somewhere deep in the bowels of that multi-million-dollar carbon-fibre race car there was a morsel of silicone having a genetic tantrum

Right at the end of the second practice session one of our cars had made it – just – but the other faced being eliminated by the number 50 car from Lotus, which was out there on the track doing its stuff.

It’s funny, but for three-and-a-half minutes – one lap of Le Mans – my whole life was focused on the timing screen, waiting for that Lotus to finish its do-or-die run. Every second seemed like an hour… because every second was an hour. Lotus would have been better off with an Orion diesel.

I celebrated by goose-stepping through the Porsche pit, which was considered poor form, but still those men in specs pumped away at their laptops, desperately trying to turn our engine from Aled Jones into Pavarotti.

They were monitoring everything as the race began, but even so, just two hours down the line, one of our cars ran out of juice. The driver got it back to the pits using the starter motor but this technique wore out the battery, which had to be replaced, costing even more time.

The mechanics worked like ants, the drivers gave it their best shot and everyone agreed that the British-designed chassis was superb. But at 3 a.m. the engine on one car blew up and it was out. The other engine gave up the ghost seven hours later.

So, what have I learned? Well, if our cars had been equipped with a bank of Holley carburettors instead of stupid electronic fuel injection, there’s a better than evens chance both would have finished.

When a carburettor goes wrong – and they almost never do – you rip it off and fit a new one. It costs a tenner and takes about five minutes. But when an electronic pulse goes bonkers, even Bill Gates would be flummoxed.

In motor racing you need an engine that can shovel fuel into the cylinders, a hot chassis and a team of mechanics who’ll build the parts properly. A driver whose eyes work is not a bad idea either. We had all that.

But computer geeks have now shambled into this high-octane world and I just don’t know why. They have a place, of course, but it should be in a loft somewhere, searching the Internet for photographs of naked ladies.

The Skyline’s the limit for Gameboys on steroids

The Japanese car makers should take a long hard look at Linford Christie and Barbara Cartland. One does not attempt to win 100 metre races and the other does not try to look like a big, pink crow. They should say to themselves, ‘All the best-looking cars in the world are European or American and if we try to copy them, we end up with hopeless facsimiles like the Supra.’ And they should go further: ‘Boys, we do not understand “soul”, so let’s not try to replicate it.’ ‘Soul’ is what you get when you’ve won the Formula One world championship and Le Mans 99 times. You can’t design ‘soul’ or ‘character’. You can earn it.

Cars are like friends. I have many, many acquaintances, but friends are people whom I’ve known for years and years. ‘Soulful’ friendships are forged when you’ve been drunk together, arrested together. That said, there are short cuts. I’d be pretty matey with someone who gave me a million pounds. And I wouldn’t slam the phone down if Princess Diana rang, feeling a bit horny. The Nissan Skyline GT-R is just such a short cut. Nissan accepted they could never match European finesse and style, so decided to go where Europe can’t follow – into the auto cyber zone where silicone is God and Mr Pininfarina is the doormat. It worked. The Skyline is not a facsimile of something European. It is as Japanese as my Nintendo Gameboy, only more fun. I was smitten by the old model, but now there is a new version which, after a week-long orgy of big numbers and lurid tailslides, has left me in no doubt. Forget the Ferrari 355. Forget the Lotus Elise. For people who want their car to be the last word in ball-breaking ability and to hell with style and comfort, the Skyline is Mr Emperor Penguin. King of the hill. The biggest cheese in Stiltonshire. Whether its ability is down to the four-wheel drive system or the four-wheel steering or the peculiar diffs and electronic whiz-bangs, I don’t know, I don’t care.

The Skyline goes around corners faster than anything else. And when it does get a bit skew-whiff, it’s a doddle to rein in again. Unfortunately, the price tag has gone right above the skyline: from £25,000 for the old model to a stratospheric £50,000 for this one. But the biggest problem is not the price, it’s bloody Nissan GB. As before, they won’t import the Skyline officially, saying it would cost a million quid to make it Euro-legal; they add that if a hundred people show real interest, they may take the plunge. A miserable hundred people. For heaven’s sake, thousands spend a fortune every year on golfing trousers and thousands more spend every surplus penny in their bank account on model aeroplanes. Surely, there are a paltry hundred people out there who would make the very sensible decision to buy a Skyline instead of a Porsche, or an M3 or even a Ferrari.

I fully understand that the Nissan badge is a turn-off, but the Volvo badge wasn’t something you shouted about until the T5 came along. Once a few people have a Skyline and word gets out, you will be seen as a wise and thoughtful person with immense driving skill. Women, almost certainly, will want to spend the night with you. At the same time, your customers will see you as a restrained person with no need for frills. They will double their orders, enabling you to spend even more money with Andy Middlehurst, taking the motor up to perhaps 420bhp. Including the cost of replacement turbos – the ceramic ones can’t cope – this will set you back £3200 – beer money in Porsche land.

As far as reliability is concerned, I understand that there are no real problems. The Marquess of Blandford says that his old model with 390bhp never went wrong in 40,000 miles. He points out that there is no other comparable car that can handle the snow in Verbier, a family and the need to maintain a low profile. All that and a top speed of 180mph.

I know I go on about this car, but every time I drive it I can’t wait to get to a computer to write about it. Wordsworth was moved by flowers, I get all foamy about the Nissan.

Henry Ford in stockings and suspenders

It’s a glorious summer’s evening and what started out as a quick tincture after work now looks set to become a drinking marathon that’ll last until your liver explodes.

I used to be able to cope with this quite well. There’d be a hangover the following morning, of course, and maybe a little chat with God on the great white telephone, but by lunch time the next day, all would be well again.

However, today, hangovers arrive like a tropical storm and for days afterwards send regular 4000 volt lightning bolts to every far-flung outpost of my body.

I have therefore learned to spot the moment when a quick drink after work becomes the start of a rock ’n’ roll frenzy. When one of the party says, ‘Oh dear, I seem to have my drinking trousers on tonight,’ I get up from the table and go in search of a burger.

Fast-food joints exist for this purpose – to let a potential drunk line his stomach with something spongy before the next round is delivered. A fast-food burger is therefore not food as such. It is preventative medicine.

I’m a Big Mac man myself, but I can, at a pinch, wolf down a Whopper. I have, however, always tried to steer clear of a Wimpy. The name ‘Wimpy’ is all wrong – it smacks of nasty little houses with purple up-and-over garage doors. It says Avon Lady. It says you’d be better off eating the carton.

So, of course, I fully understand why middle England chooses a 3 Series BMW or an Audi A4 instead of a Ford Mondeo. The name ‘Ford’ is all wrong. It smacks of DIY superstores and salesmen in cardigans chatting over the garden fence.

But look. I actually had a Wimpy burger the other day and it was jolly nice – well, as nice as medicine can be – and that made me start thinking…

Here’s the deal. Give BMW £20,000 and you get meat and bread. The 318i may have a great badge but it’s drearily slow and equipped by the prison service.

Give Ford £20,000 and you’ll be going home in a top spec Mondeo which comes with electrically adjustable leather sports seats, an electric sun roof, four electric windows, central locking, traction control, a sophisticated stereo and air conditioning.

Under the bonnet of a £20,000 BMW there’s a four-cylinder, 1.8 litre engine while the £20,000 Ford has a 24 valve, 2.5 litre V6 with cheese and pickles. So having gone from 0 to 60 in seven seconds, Mondeo man is at home in front of the television, after a lovely dinner, before Bee Em man is into third.

To ram the message home the Ford is available in Super Touring guise, which means the car is bedecked in a party frock. There are skirts, big fat alloy wheels and the sort of wire mesh grille you might find fronting a rabbit hutch. Or a Bentley.

In fact, it couldn’t look more menacing even if it had turned up carrying a Thomson sub-machine gun, which is why my first trip was something of a disappointment. Oh no, I thought. This is going to be like a Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep film. The ingredients are all there but the end result, somehow, is weapons-grade drivel.

Because this was a Super Touring – named after the Touring Car race series – I was expecting a hard ride and twitchy steering, but what I had was a pinstripe suit and table manners to shame the Queen. It was sensible and civilized… right up to the moment when I decided to go stark staring mad.

Then it ripped off its Saville Row garb to reveal it was wearing stockings, suspenders and, if I’m not very much mistaken, split-crotch panties. And, boy oh boy, did I have fun with it.

I’d driven the old Mondeo V6 before and was impressed, but this one rode more quietly, leaving me free to enjoy the power and the grip – both of which were delivered by the bucketload. The only fly in the ointment was a tendency to pull to the left, which was cured by adopting the time-honoured fashion of keeping my hands on the wheel.

Without any question or shadow of doubt, this car is vastly superior to any similarly priced offering from Germany, but before rushing out there with your hair on fire you must be made aware of the downsides.

I know it looks very good and I know it’s fast and exceptional value for money, but it is a Ford, and the blue oval does not cut much mustard at the golf club. Another reason why I like it.

Furthermore, it isn’t just your colleagues and neighbours who’ll sneer. Whereas BMW and Audi dealerships are quite happy to provide a heart donor should your own ticker give up the ghost, most Ford salesmen think private customers are only one step up the evolutionary ladder from dog dirt.

There are good Ford garages, of course, but I have a catalogue of letters from people saying that the vast majority are a complete and utter waste of everybody’s afternoon.

So, as you wander into the showroom, brandishing a banker’s draft for £20,000, don’t expect the red carpet treatment. Expect a punch in the mouth and an apple-pie bed that night and you won’t be too wide of the mark. But if you can live with that, and further punches in the mouth each time the car goes in for a service, you will have what I consider to be the best mid-range saloon on the market today.

NSX – the invisible supercar

If you want to know whether a car is going to be popular or not, ask Kylie Minogue, who, I feel sure, has more of a clue than me.

In 1992, I described the Ford Escort as a dog and it went on to become Britain’s best-selling car. A year later, I reached out into 95 million homes around the planet and said the Toyota Corolla was so dull it should be supplied with a cardigan, and ever since it’s been the world’s best-selling car.

Undaunted, I went out there again and argued vehemently that the Renault A610 was a masterpiece and that it represented truly unmatched value for money. In its first year in Britain, they sold six.

But the biggest puzzler to date has been the Honda NSX. In 1994, I showered it with literary rose petals saying that Jesus had come among us once more. They sold 19.

Things were a little better in 1995 when 55 found homes in Britain, but in 1996 a new targa-roofed version came along which could be specified with push-button gear changing. The future looked so good for Japan’s first supercar that I took the corporate shilling and sang its praises in a showroom video. Sales fell to 38. And they’re still falling.

These numbers are seriously small, but the picture becomes even more bleak when you remember that some of these cars must have been registered to Honda themselves as demonstrators. If you could peek inside the computer in Swansea you might come up with something startling – in 1996, not one single person in the whole of Britain actually bought a new Honda NSX.

And I bet Honda simply can’t understand what on earth they’ve done wrong. They gave the world an all-aluminium supercar with one of the most technically advanced engines seen outside a sci-fi movie. They made it reliable and no harder to drive than a pram. They kept the price in BMW land and placed one with Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction. And they were rewarded by people staying away in droves.

Well, to try and put some zest into what was already a vindaloo, they’ve beefed up the engine, added electric power steering and garnished the finished product with a six-speed gearbox. And now I’m going to ensure it’s a spectacular failure by telling you that it’s one seriously impressive motor car.

I spent a day with it at the Mallory Park race track in Leicestershire, and can safely say that round the fearsome Gerard’s Corner it is a match for even the Ferrari 550.

This is a truly nasty bend: a long, long 180 degree right-hander that tightens up right at the very end. You need to lift off the power a bit but you can’t, because at the very same point there’s a slight crest which causes the car to go light.

Back off and you’ll go backwards into the crash barrier. Keep going and you’ll go forwards into the crash barrier. Be in an NSX and you’ll make it, sweating a bit and promising you’ll go to church next Sunday, but you’ll make it and that’s all that matters.

The electric steering is a bit of a gimmick but the grip and the ‘feel’ is awesome. And the grunt is capable of making you best mates with the horizon in ten seconds flat.

You still have a V6 with variable valve timing – whatever the hell that means – but it now displaces 3.2 litres so you get from 0 to 60 in a whisker over five seconds, on your way to a maximum of 170mph.

Not that you’ll ever want to get there. What you’ll want to do is go through the gears endlessly, because from inside the snuggy cabin that engine makes a noise that could curdle mud. After five laps my soul was so stirred you could have served it up as soup. I never thought it was possible to be in love with a noise, but take an NSX up to 8000rpm and you’ll be heading for the registry office.

It would be a good partner too, because unlike a Ferrari, it is a perfectly serviceable everyday car. And it is so damn easy to drive. Even my granny could manage it, excepting the fact that she’s dead of course.

My only real worry is the styling. Even Honda would admit in a quiet moment that they copied Ferrari, but that’s like asking a nine-year-old boy to copy the Haywain. It won’t really work, and it especially won’t work if he tries to improve on the original.

Honda thought it would be a good idea to give their supercar a boot, so the rear overhang is rather larger than it should be. And they felt it should have headlamp washers, which means the smooth front end is sullied with plastic protuberances, like Claudia Schiffer with blackheads.

Now I’ve always subscribed to the theory that you should judge a book by its cover. I will, for instance, never buy any novel unless it has a fighter plane or a submarine on the front, but I do urge you to ignore the Honda’s skin and study its meat.

It is not a match for the Ferrari 355, but then it’s £20,000 less expensive. And if you scour the secondhand columns of this paper you’ll probably be able to find one for £40,000, which, for a machine like this, is car-boot sale money.

I bet you’re going to have a look right now, aren’t you? And you’ll keep looking right up to the moment when you buy a Porsche.

Corvette lacks the Right Stuff

So, underachiever, how do you feel today? Let me guess: you got up, went to work, flirted with the secretaries, came home and watched telly. Now, Newsnight is on and you’re reading this, yawning and wondering why you’ve got nipples. It’s OK, I do pretty much the same sort of thing most days and that’s why I know Hoot Gibson will gall you as much as he galled me.

Here is an all-American dude with Paul Newman eyes who learned his art in Vietnam, flying F-4 Phantoms and shooting down MiGs which may, or may not, have been piloted by top-flight Russians. He was so adept at blowing things out of the sky, they sent him to the Top Gun Academy, where he became a better instructor than Kelly McGillis. And after that he found himself stationed at Pax River, flying all the new, experimental fast jets. When his navy flying career was over, instead of a desk, the services gave him a space shuttle – something he’s used to visit space on no fewer than five occasions.

So what then, does Mr All-American Hero choose to drive when he’s back on Texan earth, and restricted to 55mph? A Viper? A Jag? A Bimmer? Er, no. Mr Gibson has a Toyota Camry, finished in aubergine with a matching interior. I pointed out that this was a terrible car, and he agreed but said it was, at least, reliable – ‘something that’s important to me’. OK, I can understand that, but in The Right Stuff – the best book in the world, incidentally – Tom Wolfe says all the early test pilots and astronauts hurtled into town in Corvettes – the first American sports car. Why, I suggested, do you not have one of those? ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it is a piece of junk.’

Whoa there, boy. Mr Pumping Pecs calling his auto equivalent ‘junk’? This needed exploring and so, two days later, in Nevada, I hired myself an egg-yellow convertible with a slushmatic box. I slithered elegantly into the vibrantly shiny cockpit, the 5.7 litre V8 burbled into life and the sleek nose edged its way onto Las Vegas Boulevard. I felt good. The Corvette is dangerously handsome and my views on US V8s are well documented. The steering was quick, the stereo was sound and I began to suspect Hoot should stick to sounding off about planes. But then I ran over a piece of chewing gum. Jesus H. Christ, did you know the ’Vette has no suspension travel at all? The wheels are connected directly to your buttocks. I suspected that there was something wrong with it, and then, that night, it broke down altogether. But the red replacement was just as bad.

OK, I’ll let you in on a secret. The Corvette is a slow motor car which does not handle at all. Because there’s no suspension to absorb the roll the car just slides, which must be why it has traction control. But this comes in so viciously and so early that I decided to turn it off and… whoops eek and wahay, guys and gals, we’re going backwards. It was fun right up to the moment when I saw the guardrail approaching. Here’s another secret. Anti-lock brakes don’t work when you’re going sideways. But it was OK – I ground to a halt with a good 5 inches to spare. I was doing that post-trauma bit where you breathe out and lower your shoulders by five yards when an officer of the law arrived. The guy knew his cars and, pretty quickly, conversation turned to the Corvette that had nearly killed me. ‘You know the big problem with the ’Vette?’ he said. ‘It’s the worst goddamn car in the whole world.’ He hadn’t actually seen my spin but said he wouldn’t even think of writing out a ticket for speeding because he knew just how easy it is to lose control of Detroit’s biggest balls-up. ‘Goddamn ’Vette spins so easy, you can park one outside a store and when you come out, it’ll be facing the other way,’ he added. As he climbed back into his cruiser, he gave me some advice. ‘Tonight, leave the roof down and the keys in. With luck, someone’ll steal it.’

I’ve always liked the Corvette, and once toyed with the idea of buying one. But I’m better now. It’s simple, really. The Americans are good at space shuttles. And we’re good at cars.

Footballers check in to Room 101

Making a living from writing about cars may seem like the Holy Grail to anyone who’s intrigued by the niceties of internal combustion.

But there are downsides, chief among which is a constant need to reassure people that I won’t waste their entire evening by talking about the track rod ends on a Triumph TR5. When I walk into a room, non-car people dive behind the sofa or, if I catch them by surprise, pretend to be deaf and mad. I’m always prejudged to the point where women will jump through the French windows, screaming, rather than talk to me.

Last year, I had to sit and watch Nick Hancock take me to the cleaners on Room 101, a television programme where guests consign life’s little irritations to the flames of eternal hell.

Being assassinated by someone you’ve never even met is terribly disappointing, but rather than sulk I leapt at the opportunity to take part in a new series.

As is the way with programmes like this, you don’t get the chance to meet the host beforehand, which meant I only had the hour-long recording session to convince a man I’ve always liked and admired that my head is not entirely full of acceleration figures and comparative rear-seat legroom dimensions.

It obviously didn’t work because, while promoting the show, Hancock said he was ‘allergic’ to people who like cars, and that my choices had been ‘boringly obvious’.

Fine. I tried to be reasonable, but now it’s payback time because Hancock, I know, is a huge football fan. And I loathe football fans.

I have just finished Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and found the whole sorry saga more sad than Born Free.

While I hero-worship Ian McCullum and Tommy Lee Jones, whose talents are boundless, these people drool over footballers who, almost without exception, are so stupid I’m amazed they can put their shorts on the right way round.

Last week I found myself sharing a hotel with a team that, thanks to the libel laws, shall have to remain nameless. But honestly, the lobby was like Darwin’s waiting room.

They had got it into their tiny, tiny minds that I was Jeremy Beadle and, for two hours, could only say ‘Watch out. Beadle’s about.’ At least, that’s what I think they were saying, because speech was an art form they hadn’t mastered properly.

I noticed that they didn’t have conversations like normal people. One would walk up to a huddle of others and make some kind of farmyard noise. This would prompt the others to cluck or moo and then everyone would disperse.

Now, we’re dealing here with a bunch of young men who, because they can kick an inflated sheep’s pancreas some considerable distance, get paid anything up to £40,000 a week. And if you give young males that sort of money, they will be tempted to spend large chunks of it on a flash set of wheels.

Apparently, this worries Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson, who tries to veto some of the more extreme vehicular demands from his players. It seems that having paid squillions of pounds for a new player, he doesn’t sleep well at night if he thinks the guy is charging around the city centre at 180mph in a Vantage. Driving while under the influence of the Spice Girls is not illegal, but it is dangerous. And so is not being able to read STOP signs.

Obviously no such ban is enforced at Liverpool FC, where a spokesman said the car park is ‘incredible’. Apparently, there are several of those ‘upmarket Land Rover things’ (Range Rovers I presume) and the rest are all ‘sporty Porsches’ – as opposed, I guess, to the much rarer non-sporty variety.

This would indicate that the successful footballer is something of a petrol-head. And further research has proved this to be true. Alan Shearer has a Jaguar XK8, while Les Ferdinand has a sporty Porsche 911.

David Seaman (a rather unfortunate name) and Ryan Giggs (who’s Welsh) have Aston Martin DB7s, and Teddy Sheringham pootles around in a Ferrari 355 Spider. John Barnes has just picked up a Mercedes SL.

David Beckham, a man so bright he’s able to date Posh Spice, is to be found behind the wheel of a BMW M3 convertible, and Jason McAteer has a Porsche Boxster.

Now this lot would bring Hancock out in a rash, so are there any football teams out there whose players are not interested in cars?

It was not easy finding out because I either had to ring up clubs, and speak to people who can’t or I had to graze the Internet, a process that takes so long I’d have been better off using a carrier pigeon.

However, I think I’ve found one – Stoke City. A delightful receptionist there called Lizzie, who speaks coherent English, furnished me with a list of players’ cars and it’s just horrific. Kevin Keen has a VW Polo while Fofi Nyamah has a Vauxhall Astra. Other cars that litter that Potters’ car park include a Ford Escort 1.8 LX, a Citroen, a Mazda 323 and a Mercedes C180 – by far and away the slowest car in the entire world.

Obviously, this disregard for automotive niceties endears the players enormously to their number one fan – a chap called Nick Hancock. And how do I know he supports Stoke? Because he talks about little else.

Big fun at Top Gun

If you’re one of our more level-headed readers, you might think that when it comes to no-go areas of office conversation, cars top the list here at Top Gear magazine. I mean, for 16 hours a day these guys drive cars, and in the remaining eight, write about them. The last thing they want to do over a beer or in sub-zero fag breaks is to discuss the merits of a Proton over an Escort.

Well I’m going to tell you a little secret. They don’t talk about cars very much, but it has nothing to do with overkill. They don’t talk about cars because they are too busy talking about bloody motorbikes. The Editor rides bikes. The Assistant Editor rides bikes. The Art Director rides bikes. So does the Art Editor – and she’s a girl. I’ve just been to Barbados with the Road Test Editor, and he sat on the beach every day reading Bike magazine. I’ve given up calling in because if I do, I always forget the rules and mention the ‘c’ word. I mean, it is a car magazine; maybe the people who work on it would be interested to hear that I’ve just driven a turbocharged Ferrari F50. So I’ll say, ‘Hey everyone, I drove a turbocharged F50 yesterday,’ and, guess what… nothing happens. So I’ll tell them again, and if I’m very lucky, one will stick his head up and mumble something about it not being as fast as the Triumph T595. Then they’re off. ‘Yeah, but the chassis on a ’Blade is better.’ ‘Oh sure, but I prefer the 43mm Showa usd teles on a 916.’ And me, I’m the pork chop in a synagogue. I’ve given up arguing. Yes, yes, yes, bikes are cheaper than cars, more fun and, providing you never encounter a corner, they’re faster too. I’ve tried pointing out that round a track, where there are bends, a car will set faster lap times, but a deathly hush descends over the office as everyone sets to work with slide rules and calculators. Three minutes later, the Managing Editor will announce that, at Thruxton, his calculations have shown a T595 would, in fact, be faster than an F50.

Well, I can now shut them up for good because I’ve just flown an F-15E, and no bike on Earth even gets close. Oh, and you’ll note I said ‘flown’ and not ‘flown in’. Even though I’ve never even held the stick in a Cessna, the US Air Force let me take the controls of a plane which cost $50 million and, in 90 minutes, used $7000-worth of fuel. You might guess that once you’re airborne there is no real sensation of speed – but this is simply not the case, a point the pilot was keen to prove. So, at 1000 feet he hit everything to slow the plane down to something like 150mph. And then, after asking me if I was ready, he lit the afterburners. And let me tell you this, Mr Sheene and Mr Fogarty: you know nothing. I wasn’t timing it, but would guess that in ten seconds we were nudging 700mph. And then, just to show what an F-15 is all about, he stuck the plane on its tail and did a vertical climb from 1000 to 18,000 feet in exactly 11 seconds. You’ve all been in lifts which make you feel funny if they’re fast, but just think what it feels like to do a 17,000-ft vertical climb in the time it takes a Mondeo to get from 0 to 60.

There was no let-up, either, because having shown me how fast an F-15 accelerates, I was then introduced to its manoeuvrability. Put it like this – in a gentle Sunday afternoon turn it’ll dole out 10 g, and I don’t know of any bike which can do that. And nor can a bike post a 1000lb bomb through your letterbox. What’s more, in a battle between a MiG-29 and a Ducati 916, the Italian motorcycle would lose. Whereas no one has ever shot an F-15 down. Ever. But the best bit was when the pilot said, ‘You have the plane.’ I did a roll and a loop, flew in tight formation with another F-15, went for a peek at BMW’s new factory, flew over Kitty Hawk and got within a fraction of going supersonic. The plane can do Mach Two, but only over water, and my ejection training had not covered survival in such conditions.

I really didn’t mind, though. I honestly believe I’ve now experienced the ultimate; from this point on, everything will be a little bit tame.

As I see it, a bike only has one advantage over a fighter-bomber. On a bike, you don’t get sick. In the plane, you do. Twice.

Traction control loses grip on reality

I am a patient man but Vodafone should be advised that it’s run out. Either they build more of those relay towers or I’m coming down to their head office with a pickaxe handle and some friends.

My mobile phone has worked 100 miles from Alice Springs in Australia and on a glacier in Iceland. It was fine on an oil tanker off South Africa, and just last week in Italy – Italy for God’s sake – I used it for an hour while driving down the autostrada and it never fizzled out once.

But it doesn’t work in Fulham, or on the Oxford ring road, or on large chunks of the M40, or near Coventry. Which means Vodafone are charging me for a service that they are simply not providing. And that, I’m afraid, means they’re going to need some new office furniture. And some teeth.

It’s the same story with fax machines. My first simply tore any paper that came near it into very small pieces. And my new one just does alternate sheets until it gets bored. Then it starts screwing them up and throwing them on the floor so the dog can eat them.

It’s all a marketing thing. I have to have a fax machine because the hype says you’re a nobody if you don’t. Having a fax that doesn’t work is fine, but not having one at all is social herpes. And can you imagine going to a meeting and telling someone you don’t have a mobile? It would be worse than not having genitals.

And now this phenomenon is creeping into the world of cars as well, in the shape of traction control.

There are a number of different systems, but each, effectively, does the same job. If you apply too much power, sensors detect the moment when the driven wheels are about to lose traction, and issue warnings to the engine management system. It then reduces the power being despatched to the overloaded wheel, and as a result you don’t crash. The trouble is that, like mobile phones and faxes, traction control doesn’t work.

If I put my foot down on a wet road in the Jag, it senses that something is wrong and does what we all do when we’re in a quandary. It goes for a long walk round the garden, where, after much chin-scratching, it decides that, yes, it ought to warn the bridge.

But way before the central computer pushes the throttle pedal back where it belongs, the car is going backwards through a hedge. Electrons are fast, but once the pendulum effect of a tailslide has gotten its teeth into the equation, the result is a sure-fire certainty.

And anyway, the usual cause of a tailslide has nothing to do with excess power. It’s when the driver realizes he’s turned into a corner too fast and backs off. This causes the weight of the car to pitch forwards, lightening the rear end and causing a spin. No power is involved and, as a result, the traction overlord is about as useful as a picnic basket.

It can only sit there feeling dizzy as the car spins round and round. Unless, of course, the driver is a talented and brave young soul who knows how to react when the rear end makes a break for the border.

He knows he’s going to need power to sort the problem out, but the traction control will have none of it. Any attempt to press the throttle down will be met with a metaphorical slap in the face.

This means that good drivers tend to hurtle around with the traction control turned off. And that’s the biggest problem of them all, because everyone is a good driver. Everyone thinks they can beat the system, so everyone turns it off. Driving around with your traction control on is the same as walking down the High Street telling passers-by that you’re impotent. It is deeply, deeply uncool.

And that’s staggering. We’re all gladly paying for something that doesn’t work, and then we’re turning it off. Why?

Simple. Any car maker knows that traction control sounds good. It implies that the car to which it’s fitted is such an untamed monster that ordinary drivers couldn’t possibly be trusted with all the power.

Wow. The makers themselves admit that the car is too fast. I must have one, and then I shall turn off the device meant for ordinary drivers. Men, remember, are egos covered in skin, and the car makers know this.

But unfortunately, the boffins in the back rooms with the beards and the taped-up spectacles do not. Such has been the demand for traction control in recent months that they’ve started to improve its reaction time, believing this is what we want.

Every time you put your foot down in the new Jag, or the Ferrari 550 for that matter, the electrons go bonkers and it feels like you’re low on petrol. The engine stutters. The ABS system cuts in and even sane people begin to wonder why on earth the damn computer won’t unleash the full potential of the car.

So they turn it off too, and then ring up the dealer to express their concern. But unfortunately, they do so on a mobile, and the dealer is left wondering why his phone keeps ringing but there’s no one on the other end.

This article was first published on August 10th 1997 and refers to levels of service at this time.

Driving at the limit

If you’d followed me around this week, you might have suspected that from time to time I was driving while under the influence of a blindfold.

But it’s OK. I was in a Range Rover, and the damn thing just wouldn’t go in a straight line, unless, of course, I wanted to go round a corner. By normal saloon car standards, it really is absolutely hopeless and so pedestrian that I kept being overtaken by continental drift.

Throughout August, Chipping Norton has been hosting a championship to find the World’s Slowest Driver, which is no big deal when I’m in the Jag – I just press the noisy pedal and surge past – but in the Range Rover I came home with the trophy.

In London, things were even worse. In the cotton-thin residential streets of Fulham, where, for some extraordinary reason, everyone has an off-roader, it felt as wieldy as Pooh after a honey binge.

And you can’t park it anywhere either. I tried to go out for dinner at the Mao Tai on the New Kings Road, but no space within a mile was even nearly big enough so I ended up in the Blue Elephant on Fulham Broadway which, as usual, fielded the rudest waiters I have ever met.

I should have driven the Range Rover through their indoor flowerbeds, instead of a tip, but you can’t really take it off-road in case it gets all dirty.

Strangely, I still love this enormous great brute of a car, and that’s mainly because of the driving position – you really do feel like you’re bouncing along in an automotive penthouse flat, looking down on the riff-raff.

You should be warned, though, that they are not looking up at you. They hate you on a cellular level. They would like to feed you, and everyone you’ve ever met, into a lawnmower. In just one day, two people suggested for absolutely no reason whatsoever, that I worshipped at the altar of Onanism.

They hated me even more than if I’d been drunk, and finally I get to the thrust of this week’s rant – drinking and driving. And specifically, this ludicrous idea of reducing the limit from 80 to 50 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood. In English, that works out at a pint.

Now look. It really isn’t fair to take away someone’s licence and therefore their job just because they had an extra big helping of sherry trifle at lunch time.

I’ve never met anyone who is pissed at the current limit – only relaxed, and surely that’s a good thing. Certainly, I score better times on my Sega Rally Machine after a calming drink than I do after a row, or when I’ve got hay fever.

Baroness Hayman, who is Labour’s minister for road safety, says that the decline in drink-related accident casualties has levelled off – but decreasing the limit to the point where a pipette of ginger beer makes you Myra Hindley will only increase the figures.

Think about it. If every driver who crashes is psychoanalysed to see if they’ve ever had a beer, just about every accident will become ‘drink-related’.

And anyway, the figures have only tailed off because so few people drink and drive these days. In 1996, the police breathalysed more people than ever before – 780,000 – and only 13 per cent were over the limit.

This means that 87 per cent of people who were seen driving in an erratic fashion were stone-cold sober. So, if the baroness wants to do something about road safety, this lot would surely be a better target.

Certainly, there is no point fiddling about with the limit because this won’t give old people better eyesight, and nor will it mend the ways of the so-called ‘hardcore’ drink driver. It won’t temper youthful exuberance either.

And to be perfectly honest, another round of tear-jerking advertisements to ruin the feeling of good cheer as we run up to Christmas will also be a huge waste of money because, frankly, most of us think the drink drive rules are a damn nuisance.

We don’t do it because the punishment is horrific – a year or more on the bus. And on this front, I can see a big problem just around the corner. Buses are getting nicer.

The pro-public-transport people should remember, as they campaign for more trains and comfy, air-conditioned double deckers with Jacuzzis and satellite television, that if buses suddenly become a viable alternative to the car, drink driving will go through the roof.

We need to go the other way. Buses should come with luggage and chickens on the roof. The suspension should be replaced with scaffolding poles, and passengers should be encouraged to cook in the aisles on Primus stoves.

And as for the trains: make them late on purpose. Even if the Fat Controller reckons one is going to reach the station on time, he should order the driver to slow down… as jerkily as possible.

And instead of forcing a drunken driver to use public transport for a year, it should be five years for a first offence and life thereafter. If you want to keep them off the road, hit them with a stick the size of a giant redwood.

And use a cattle prod on anyone caught driving badly while sober, unless of course they have the perfect excuse: ‘Your Honour. I was in a Range Rover at the time.’

Global Posting systems

People say that the world is a smaller place these days. Well, having just been to South Africa via western Canada, I can only assume that it used to be absolutely bloody enormous.

The first leg of the journey, from Heathrow to Calgary, was undertaken in a Boeing 767 which only has two engines. Thus, if one should develop a fault you have to run around the cabin screaming.

But even when both are working, it’s a winged Volkswagen Polo diesel. Point it at a stiff breeze and all attempts to fly forwards are thwarted. You end up landing in reverse, six hours later, in Helsinki.

Happily, we had the wind so nine hours after setting off I was cruising towards the tumbleweedy town of Red Deer in Alberta, which was playing host to a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention.

By pretending to be a blood transfusion specialist, I managed to keep them quiet in the lift on the way to breakfast. And even more amazingly, I managed to win a trophy later in the day for taking part in a combined harvester V. banger race, which put me in good spirits as I boarded an Airbus for the trip home.

Now the Airbus is great. Even though it had four engines, which is about half as many as I like while over the North Atlantic, it was as quiet as a lift full of Jehovah’s Witnesses when a 16 stone man is glowering at them.

Certainly, it was much quieter than Heathrow, which, these days is twinned with Brent Cross. I sat next to Sir John Egan at a dinner the other night and thought he was looking a bit pleased with himself.

No wonder: he’s worked out that as chairman of British Airports Authority, he can get men to do what a billion women can’t – shop. In my six-hour stopover, I went mad.

Burdened with four new pairs of sunglasses, some Pink shirts and a watch I don’t need, I set off for South Africa and my appointment with the Jahre Viking.

This is the world’s biggest supertanker, and could swallow St Paul’s Cathedral – four times over. However, as there’s little demand for ecclesiastical removals in the southern seas it was, in fact, carrying 137 million gallons of crude – enough to power every Jehovah’s Witness in all of Canada to Mars. But not quite enough to bring them back again.

After a day on board, mostly looking for somewhere to smoke, we had a bit of bother with the weather and had to be rescued at four in the morning by a tug which was exactly the same size as an ashtray. This meant that in a raging storm I had to climb down the side of the hull on a rope ladder which had been wrested from the ship’s mascot – a hamster.

There was no sleep that night, and none the next either, because South African Airways models the seats in its 747s on those found in rural Vietnamese buses.

So, in nine days, I’d slept in a bed just three times. I’d done 24,000 miles. I’d crashed a combine and had been through the most dangerous seaway in the world on a floating bomb.

But travel does broaden the mind, which is why I can now impart two nuggets. First, Air Canada’s business class is very good, and second, you shouldn’t buy a Japanese or Korean car.

Here’s why. In America, fuel is cheap and people are fat so American cars tend to be large with a voracious appetite for gas. In Europe, the streets are narrow and fuel costs a bomb, so Renault and Fiat give us little cars with pipettes for petrol tanks.

That leaves the cars that come at us, like a blizzard, from the Far East, cars that are sold in Milton Keynes, Montreal and, because I loathe alliteration, Agadez.

Now look, they can’t have it all ways. They can’t tell a Canadian that it’s a full five-seat sedan, an Italian that it’s a nifty little pocket rocket, an Australian bushman that it’s tough and the American safety lobby that it’s soft.

Cars like the Hyundai Accent must be aimed at someone, and now I know who – African taxi drivers.

In the Third World, people have grown up with an acquired immune deficiency syndrome towards the notion of cars being, in some way, linked to social standing. Alfa Romeo is currently promoting its 146 by saying that ‘everyone in the office will think you’ve been promoted’ – a slogan that wouldn’t work at all well in Angola.

African taxi drivers are not bothered about a car company’s past racing successes, or styling or whether it can generate 4 g while parking. They want total reliability at a nice price, and that’s what Japan and Korea are giving them.

Go to any African state and you won’t find a single new Fiat or Chrysler. It’s just row after row of anonymous saloons.

Now, if this were the business section of the paper, there’d be a temptation to castigate Europe’s car makers for failing to exploit the emerging world, but I find business about as exciting as fish.

I’m really only bothered about cars and, in the same way that you wouldn’t drive a Chevrolet Caprice because it’s unsuitable in pub car parks, you shouldn’t drive a box that was designed for people who put plastic gold crowns on the dashboard.

Europe has a car industry which makes cars for European conditions. You should remember that when deciding what to buy in the run-up to 1 August and the R-plate madness.

Fight for your right to party

Later this summer, Ferrari is celebrating its 50th birthday in Rome with a party that will make Elton’s half-century look like an old people’s whist drive. They say that Rome will be brought to a standstill by 10,000 Ferraris and that even the Pope will be there. The Pope, for Christ’s sake. The Pope is going to a car firm’s birthday party.

Check out Q magazine’s gig guide and I doubt you’ll find a single rock ’n’ roller on stage that night. Eric Clap-ton, Chris Rea, Jay Kay and Rod Stewart have each bought a 550, and the word is they’ll all be in Rome, talking Armani and quad-cam motors. Me though, I’m not going. I have decided that I shall be at the Coventry British Legion that night, where Jaguar is celebrating – not its 50th – but its 75th anniversary. That’s not fair. The ball, in fact, is being held at the Brown Lane factory and 1000 people will be there, including er… David Platt… possibly. The Queen – our equivalent of the Pope – is sadly unavailable because she’s opening a computer park in Telford that day. Or is it a dog food factory in Cwmbran? Honestly, it’s pathetic and it isn’t Jaguar’s fault. In fact, they’ve done bloody well to scrape up 1000 people who are prepared to get out there and celebrate the birth of what we’re told is a bunch of wires, some Zyklon B and a slab or two of metal. It’s amazing. Since British Aerospace handed Rover over to the Germans, I’ve had hundreds of letters from retired majors in Bognor Regis, saying that it’s all deplorable, hardly worth fighting the war… etc….etc…. But people in the UK are told cars are dirty and that we’re no good at making anything, and we shrug and accept it. We accept almost anything.

Some years ago, the European Community, as it was called at the time, decided that all beaches must achieve a certain standard of cleanliness, which was not one of their more idiotic ideas. Naturally, the British delegation dispatched beardy types in parkas to our sandier bits, where, to their horror, none met the new requirements. Cue the Daily Mail with all sorts of headlines deriding Britain as the dirty man of Europe. But, according to my sources, this isn’t an entirely fair picture because the other countries had simply gone home and done… precisely nothing. No beardy types had been sent out to check; they just said, ‘Our beaches are all clean.’ So hey, it turns out that the unspoiled wilderness in northern Scotland is filthy while that turd-infested expanse of litter-strewn shingle called Greece is dew fresh.

Continental types treat rules with exactly the right amount of disdain. Because Italy has had so many rulers this millennium and so many governments since the war, they’ve learned to treat authority as though it’s something they’ve trodden in. What’s the point of obeying one new rule when next week Hannibal is coming over the mountains with an elephant and an entirely new set? Over there, you can run around waving your arms in the air, telling anyone who’ll listen that Ferrari is a symbol of the unacceptable face of capitalism, and that cars are killing children. No one will give a damn. The same happens in France. When the government tried to impose new taxes on truckers they didn’t have a puny strike. No. They blockaded motorways and stood around smoking Gitanes, until sense prevailed. Even the Belgians are out and about throwing rocks as I write because Renault is closing a factory down. But here, apart from a bunch of long-haired ne’er-do-wells with suspicious stains on their trousers, no one ever complains. This is why, in Italy, the whole country will be out on the streets celebrating Ferraris, while in Britain, Jaguar’s birthday will be marked by one person in every 56,000. We shouldn’t expect more really, because if you went into the street and put up bunting, a council official would tell you to take it down again. And if you held a street party, number 54 would ring the police, who’d ask you to turn it down a bit.

The only consolation is that things are worse in America. I’m told that in Los Angeles nowadays, it is illegal to consume alcohol after 2 a.m…. even in your home. I bet General Motors’ big birthday party will be a real wow.

Gravy train hits the old buffers

This week, I had the most fantastic night of my entire life, accompanying A.A. Gill to a restaurant he was reviewing.

Even though he’d booked under a false name, hoping they wouldn’t realize he was from the Sunday Times, the head waiter clocked him immediately and began a bout of Herculean fawning. We could have poured custard down the man’s trousers and he’d have laughed the laugh of a man whose daughter’s life depended on it.

Now Gill is probably used to meeting people who have a degree in advanced grovelling, but it made a refreshing change for someone who’s entrenched in the motor industry.

I dislike being anecdotal in print, but this one bears repeating. Many years ago, the entire public relations staff at Land Rover left very suddenly and were replaced by anyone they could find who knew which end of a telephone to speak into. Not easy in Birmingham.

Anyway, the next day, I rang saying that I was a freelance journalist and that I needed a Range Rover for a story that I was writing. The new girl – and you need to read this in a big, big Birmingham accent – said that she was very sorry but she had ‘specific instructions not to lend any cars to freelancers’.

Puzzled, I asked what would have happened if Stuart Marshall had made the request – Stuart being the motoring writer for the Financial Times. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he could have one.’

‘But he’s freelance,’ I replied. This confused the poor girl, who thought for a moment before the lights came on. ‘Whoops, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I meant we won’t lend our cars to freeloaders.’

This, however, isn’t true. Freeloaders can have as many cars as they like from whichever manufacturer they choose. And when I say freeloaders, I mean you.

What I’m going to do now is explain how, for no outlay whatsoever, you can spend the rest of your life driving a brand-new car every week. They will be delivered to your house, clean, fully insured and with a full tank of fuel, and then collected when the ashtray is full.

The only trouble you’ll have is finding time to drive them, because twice a week you’ll be flown to exotic locations all over the world, and housed in the sort of hotel that would chuck Dodi Fayed out for being poor.

Sounds appealing? Well here’s what you do. Call up the editor of your local freesheet newspaper and ask if you can write a gushing little piece about cars every week. It’s OK, you don’t need to be a terribly good writer – no one expects car buffs to know how to put a story together.

So now you have an outlet which means you can telephone, say, BMW who, once they know you really do have a column, will be duty-bound to lend you a car. And then it’s yours for a whole week and you may go wherever you wish in it.

The next week, another car will be delivered and the week after that, another. Then you’ll start getting clever, ensuring you have the right wheels for the right occasion. You’ve been invited shooting, so you’ll have a Ford Explorer. It’s your daughter’s wedding, so you’ll have a Mercedes S Class.

By this stage, you will have been noticed by the industry’s public relations people, who will start inviting you on their infamous car launches. Now you really are in the big time.

Every new car – and there are about two a week – is introduced to the press at some far-flung ivory tower, which means your life will become a hectic blur as you ricochet round the globe. Nissan launched its new Primera in South Africa. Mercedes let everyone sample their M Class in Alabama. Jaguar takes people to France.

It’s an orgy of champagne from the moment you climb on the plane until you’re sent home again clutching a little gift – a computer, perhaps, or a piece of luggage.

Now remember, all you’ve done to earn your spot on the gravy train is write a couple of hundred words for a local newspaper every week. But quite frankly, this is getting to be a bore. You like the five-star life but you hate the bottom-drawer wages.

You want the free cars and the global travel without having to write the column – no problem.

On the launches, suck up to the public relations people as though they hold your life in their hands. Tell their bosses how good they are at their jobs. Eulogize about the new car, even if it is a Nissan Almera, and ensure you are the life and soul of the party. Over dinner, regale everyone with amusing anecdotes and be prepared to stay up till 4 a.m., drinking the bar dry.

So, when you give up the writing, the public relations people – who need bums on seats to justify their existence – will keep the invites coming. And the cars. They know you. You’re a mate. They will still make sure you have a nice big diesel estate when holiday time comes around.

And therein lies the reason why motor industry people don’t fawn on journalists. They’re in the hot seat, deciding who gets to drive what and who gets to go where. Why should they grovel when they know that without their assistance the motoring journalist is up the creek without a boat, never mind a paddle?

Weird world of Saab Man

By computing the position of various stars on 11 April 1960, an astrologer would be able to deduce that I’m selfish, arrogant and thoughtless.

But this seems like an unnecessarily complicated palaver. I mean why bother with reference books and slide rules and telescopes when you can simply ask what sort of car I drive. See the car. Know the man.

Kind, gentle people do not drive Ferraris in the same way that Sylvester Stallone does not have a Peugeot 306 diesel. Or a Subaru Justy. Or a Skoda Felicia.

Spot a Lada bumbling down the road and there’s no point peering inside to see if Richard Branson is behind the wheel. He won’t be. It’ll be a bloke wearing one of those suits that’s neither green nor grey nor brown, but a curious cocktail of all three. It’s a colour worn only by old people in Ladas. It’s a colour that should be called ‘old’.

Lada Man votes Labour, likes pies and checks the price of things before putting them in his supermarket basket. He is usually called Derek and he’s 53. And you won’t get that kind of detail from his star sign.

I can do this sort of thing with any type of car. Show me someone, in an Audi A4 and I’ll show you someone with a mistress. Show me someone in a BMW 316 and I’ll show you an idiot, a man who would wear Ralph Lauren shirts that had been made in Hillingdon by someone called Singh.

There is, however, one car that’s much harder to pigeonhole. If you drive a Saab, all I know is that you have made one of the oddest buying decisions in the entire history of shopping. You’ve looked at a feast and chosen instead to eat your own shoes. You’ve considered a job as chief polisher to Sandra Bullock’s nipples but decided that you’d rather do a milk round.

I’ve just spent the last few days driving around in Saab’s new 9-5, which is a large four-door saloon that costs, depending on engine and trim levels, between £21,000 and £28,000. It is therefore a direct rival to the BMW 5 series.

Now, the 5 series is nigh on perfect in every way, but the Saab… isn’t. Sure, it has powerful headlights and a remarkably comfy ride, but this simply isn’t enough in a package that also has average styling, average handling, average performance, a poor gear change and a wonky driving position.

Yes, it is well priced and yes, it is generously equipped but overall this car is beaten mercilessly, not only by the BMW but also the Audi A6, the Mercedes E200, the Volvo 850 and, quite frankly, the Ford Mondeo V6. Saab has served up a good car in a world that expects excellence.

Now ordinarily that would be the end of the story, but people are going to buy it. They’re going to notice the jerky gear change, the roly-poly cornering and the way you need to bend your foot back to get it on the throttle. They may even discover it shares a chassis with the Vauxhall Vectra, but they’re still going to reach for the cheque book.

Why? And why for that matter do people buy the Saab 900, which is also beaten by the competition, and the Saab 9000, which isn’t just beaten; it’s bent over the sofa and subjected to cruel and unusual torture by every other car in its class… except the Nissan QX perhaps?

I mean, it isn’t as though the Saab badge stands for anything particularly dramatic. This jet fighter thing seems a bit weak somehow, and anyway it wasn’t that long ago when Saab were selling their cars on the safety ticket. And before that, they were doing rallies. The result of all this haphazard marketing is that, today, the cars are almost completely image-free.

And that, I suspect, is where their appeal lies. They are sold to people who don’t wish to use their car as a style statement, people who simply need four wheels and a comfortable seat so that they may get to work as easily as possible.

I think, therefore, we’re probably talking about fastidious, meticulous people for whom slaphappiness is the eighth deadly sin. It’s the sort of car that would suit an architect, or an astrologer.

We’re getting somewhere here, because if this is true it explains something else – no one has ever been carved up by a Saab. Think about it: has a Saab ever jumped a red light or tailgated you on the motorway? Have you ever seen a Saab being driven in anything other than a considerate and stealthy fashion? No, and neither have I.

This is because the sort of people who are drawn to this image-free environment are the sort of people who don’t use their subconscious to drive. They know that to do it properly they have to concentrate, absolutely, on the job in hand. So they do. And that’s why they never carve us up.

Eureka. We can learn something about Saab Man after all. He is, without doubt, the safest driver on the road today. Insurance companies pay him to have a car. He is never harassed by the police. He has no points on his licence. Without any doubt at all, he is a Virgo.

And I do mean ‘he’ because I can’t recall a single time when I’ve seen a woman at the wheel of a Saab. Weird.

Freemasons need coning off

I’ve just driven from Milan to Avignon via Pisa, Bologna and Monte Carlo and in not one of the 1500 miles did I see a single motorway lane closure. There were no roadworks at all. There were no cones. It was a high-speed highway to heaven. Even though the Lancia Dedra Estate I’d rented was terminally backward, and any assault on the car’s upper rev limit caused my ears to explode, I could do 90 for hour after hour after hour. On one downhill stretch I hit 100, but the doors fell off. Then I came back to England, where on the simple 85 mile journey from Gatwick to Oxford there were three major sets of roadworks.

Now the M25 I can understand. They screwed up and built it too narrow. Fine. God made a mess, remember, when he did the flamingo, which is an idiotic bird with legs that are far too long. Then he did the totally purposeless nettle. We all make mistakes.

So ever since the M25 opened they’ve been widening it. Then there’s the roadworks on the M40, which, again, are understandable. The road has worn out and needs replacing.

Mind you, I don’t understand how they intend to do this by coning off the offending few miles and employing guys in hard hats to stare at it. I’ve driven down the single lane they’ve left a lot recently, and I have yet to see a single person doing anything. Still, they’re experienced roadworks johnnies so we can rest assured they know what they’re doing. But I do not understand what is going on where the M40 meets the M25. The signs say it’s being widened, which is nonsense. It was already wide enough, by miles. The M6 needs widening. The M5 needs widening. The M1 needs widening. But they’ve decided that none of these real problems will be addressed until they’ve had some practice on the under-used M40.

And boy are they going to take their time – two years, to be precise. Now look, a road is some stones covered with sticky stuff that sets. In two years, I could build a road from here to Sofia. In two years, they could close the M40, plant crops, allow them to grow, harvest them and then build a new motorway. And there’d still be time to stand around in hard hats, pointing at things. When an earthquake devastated Los Angeles, I don’t recall signs saying the freeways would be open again in two years. No, I saw teams of worker bees shovelling ruined bridges away and building new ones so the entire network was up and running again in less than 12 months. In Japan once I saw them replace an entire Tokyo highway before sun-up.

Now at this point, some people will be reaching for the notepaper, eager to point out that we don’t pay tolls to use our motorways and that we can’t expect better service as a result. Well, that’s crap. Britain’s motorists pay £25 billion a year through vehicle excise duty and petrol tax and car tax and VAT on tax, etc. etc. etc. That’s a lot of money. In fact, we’re paying so much, the government simply doesn’t know what to do with it all. This can surely be the only reason why they’re spending two years widening an already wide road. Either that or it’s the bloody freemasons again. In the past, I’ve blamed freemasonry for the destruction of our car industry, arguing that a component buyer from British Leyland wouldn’t fire a company for sending dodgy parts if its managing director had a weird handshake. Week in and week out, lorry loads of crappy speedos, or whatever, were delivered and no one did a damn thing about it because of some barbaric ceremony every Tuesday night where a bunch of grown men run around throwing salt at one another. Well now they’re at it in the construction industry, taking ten times too long to do a job that didn’t need doing anyway, in exchange for a new apron and an oddball boater.

Britain stands no chance of becoming a driving force in Europe unless we build roads properly and get urgent repairs done quickly. I suspect things will be better under ‘call me Tony’; he is a village idiot and his backbenchers are teachers with beards, but they haven’t yet been exposed to white-collar Britain.

So when Mr Motorway Builder walks in and shakes hands while doing a handstand, they will ask him to leave or they will call security.

The curse of the Swedish smogasbord

Oh deary me. It seems that every five days air pollution exceeds harmful levels somewhere in Britain, and that as a result we’re all going to be dead by tea time.

That’s if we don’t choke to death first. According to the National Asthma Campaign, Britain’s 3.5 million sufferers are fed up. ‘People should not have to make the choice between their health and being able to go outdoors and live a normal life,’ said a spokesman.

Absolutely. I want to see a ban on the production of bread too. I am sick and tired of being struck down by asthma every time I wander through a cornfield – and I hold the Hovis board entirely responsible.

Grass is nasty too. Ask me to stroll down Jermyn Street on a hot day and I’ll suffer no ill effects whatsoever, but let me loose in our paddocks on a summer’s afternoon, and after a minute or so I’m a dribbling vegetable.

I was therefore impressed by Indonesia’s attempt to help asthma sufferers by burning the countryside, though I see it’s all got a bit out of hand now and that entire villages are being wiped out. You can see the smog from space.

You can also see an equally large and gaseous cloud over Britain, but this time it’s coming from the British Medical Association. It says that traffic levels, diesel emissions and vehicle noise should be reduced, and that to help, we must all hop to work. Or use a bicycle.

Now this is odd. I’m used to vegetarians running around pointing their organic fingers at the car, but now a bunch of doctors has also decided that motoring is bad for your health.

Well now I’m sorry, but I suspect that this is nothing more than sour grapes. I mean, really, can it be a coincidence that the BMA report came out in the same week that Volvo announced it was to terminate production of its horrible 900 series?

This is a bad car with a power delivery that beggared belief. In most cars the throttle is connected to the fuel injection system by a cable or, increasingly, by an electronic fly-by-wire pulse.

But this obviously wasn’t the case in Volvo’s old barge. Put your foot down in a 900 and it simply telegraphed a message to the engine room, where a fat man in an oily vest reluctantly put down his copy of Razzle and, after a bout of anal scratching, chucked a few more lumps of coal on the boiler. Then there was the handling. Or rather, there wasn’t.

It was safe though. I’ve often wondered why Middle Eastern suicide bombers bother to load their cars with difficult and complicated explosives when they could achieve exactly the same level of destruction by driving an old Volvo into the building. The added bonus, of course, is that in the Volvo they’d survive.

The 900 series wasn’t so much a car as a statement. By driving around in this wheeled house-brick you were telling people that you had no interest in motoring – though of course we all knew that simply by looking at the way you drove.

When we saw a Volvo 900 coming the other way or lumbering up a side road we took nothing for granted.

Just because it was in the left-hand lane with the left-hand indicator flashing didn’t necessarily mean it was actually going to turn left. It may have gone right, or straight on, or stopped very suddenly for no obvious reason.

All the country’s bad drivers were in Volvos, and we could therefore prepare ourselves. We would give them a wide berth because we knew the driver’s reaction times could be measured with a calendar.

Now, because the old warhorse is gone, some may worry that these bad drivers will no longer be so easy to identify. Some may disguise themselves and buy sturdy Mercs, while others could go for a Rover 800. There may be a few who stick with Volvo… buying one of the new superfast C70s, for instance.

But I urge you not to be too concerned. This won’t happen. The people who bought the evil-handling, sloth-like 900 – and a lot of them were doctors – will not be scattered to the four winds. They will deduce that there is no alternative and simply replace their car with a bus pass.

And then they’ll insist that we follow suit. That’s why the BMA wants us to hop to work – it’s because Volvo has killed their beloved car.

The solution as I see it is simple. The last of the 900s are being fitted with 2.3 litre light-pressure turbo engines which should make them sing a bit. And remember, they are rear-wheel drive, which is what enthusiasts want.

Inside, you’ll get heated, leather seats, air conditioning, a sophisticated stereo and electric windows all round. There’s a three-year warranty too, and an airbag, all for £18,500.

My advice is to buy one. Other road users will think you’re an idiot and flee from your path, thus ensuring you’re never held up in a jam again. You can drive like a fool and people will expect it, and if you do crash, it won’t hurt. What more could you possibly want?

Well there is one thing I suppose. What I’d really like, even more than a Volvo 900, is for Britain’s doctors to stick to mending people and stop trying to shape the way we live. And anyway, every doctor I’ve ever met does smoke.

Pin-prick for the Welsh windbag

Bad news, I’m afraid. Kinnock’s back. After we decided it was a bad idea to let someone who’s Welsh represent our interests on the world stage, he disappeared into the Euro-abyss, where, it turns out, the Man of Harlech has been biding his time, waiting to wreak his revenge on the people who snubbed both him and his nuclear-free wife.

In his role as European Union Transport Commissioner, he has decided to turn Christmas into an orgy of orange juice and church by harmonizing drink driving laws across the Continent. This will mean bringing the British level down from a couple of pints to one wine gum.

This idea was mooted a couple of months ago, but as is the way with New Labour, all ‘proposals’ become ‘discussion documents’ if there’s the slightest hint of an outcry. And there was – so much so that I thought the monumentally stupid plan had gone away. But now, thanks to Captain Kinnock, it’s almost certain to become reality.

Taffy told a meeting of European transport ministers that there is a fivefold increase in the risk of an accident when a driver’s blood alcohol is 80 mg compared with his proposed limit of 50 mg.

Sadly, he was unable to verify that with actual crash statistics. He just says we’re five times more likely to run into a bus queue if we’ve had two wine gums, rather than one, and we’re supposed to take his word for it.

Well hold on a minute. What if we lower the limit to nothing at all? This would surely remove the risk of an accident altogether. So let’s go the whole hog. And let’s all slow down to 4mph. And let’s ban cars from towns and villages. And while we’re at it, let’s really nail the companies that actually make the damn cars in the first place.

I was horrified to see that Chrysler, the smallest of the US car makers, has been ordered to pay £164 million in damages after a South Carolina jury decided the company had sold its people-carriers with rear-door locks that it apparently knew to be faulty.

It seems that a 12-year-old boy was killed when the back door on his father’s Dodge allegedly flew open. Never mind that the van had jumped a red light and was hit by another car, and never mind also that Chrysler had offered to change all its door locks free of charge.

With this settlement made, and it’s more than twice the size of any previously doled out by a car maker, the floodgates are set to open with 37 other cases being lined up to punch Chrysler on the nose. Experts are saying it could eventually cost the company £5 billion, which would pretty well finish them off.

Now you have to remember that this is America, where there are two types of people: dim ones and lawyers. If a lawyer can ham it up in court, the dim people in the jury will think they’re watching Oprah and vote to finish the big, nasty, child-killing corporation.

Apparently, the jury in Chrysler’s case were peeved that a car maker had seemingly put economy in front of safety, but look: having seen the Mercedes in which Princess Diana was killed, and noted that the front seat passenger survived, I am more convinced than ever that the S Class is about as safe as cars get.

But Mercedes could do more. They could limit the top speed to 10mph and fit a device that would prevent the engine from starting if the driver had eaten some sherry trifle. They could fit airbags in the ashtray. All the technology exists to do this, but it is so expensive that no one would buy the end product.

Even Mercedes could therefore be accused of putting economy before safety, but come on, if money wasn’t important we’d spend all day under the bed, refusing to work in case a tree fell on our heads.

America seems to have forgotten that while life is precious, it isn’t much fun without at least some risk.

So what’s to be done? Well, there’s talk that Clinton is going to limit the awards made by a jury, but this move would be fraught with danger. You must remember that in the bad old days Ford was alleged to have sold the Pinto knowing full well that in a rear-end collision it could catch fire. It was claimed they did nothing because the cost of changing the design outweighed the odd death.

If this had been proved, and it wasn’t, obviously it’s only right and proper that a jury should have been free to beat Ford about the head and neck with a chain saw. If a company wilfully exposes its customers to an early grave, hit them with a fine that would wipe them from the face of the earth. And to hell with the thousands of workers who’ll be thrown out of a job through no fault of their own.

And who cares about the towns and cities that depend on the auto maker for life itself? Close Ford down and in Britain alone you close Coventry, Essex, Newport Pagnell and big bits of Liverpool.

Frankly, big awards aren’t the answer. We must find the individuals – accountants usually – who decided to carry on making a car they knew to be dangerous and sentence them to life, in a cell, with Neil Kinnock.

Showdown at the G6 summit

You know how Greenpeace is prone to charging around the sea in small boats, trying to stop perfectly harmless oil rigs from being sunk. Well once – just once – they came up with a cunning plan. They argued that the earth is 46 million years old, a number that’s hard to handle. So they asked us to think of it as being 46 years old – middle-aged in other words.

A leaflet explained that almost nothing is known about the first 42 years and that dinosaurs didn’t appear until just last year. Mammals came along eight months ago and it wasn’t until the middle of last week that apes began to walk on their hind legs. This was an amazing read, but it was all complete mumbo jumbo because their claim that the earth is 46 million years old is simply not true. It’s actually 4600 million years old, which makes their idea even more mind-boggling. The last Ice Age didn’t happen at the weekend. It happened half an hour ago!

However, I don’t want to get into an environmental debate here. What I want to talk about, in fact, is the puniness of Nelson Mandela. If you divide time by a thousand million, to make the planet 46 years old, it means that 70 years passes in four-hundredths of a second. So, as far as the Earth is concerned, Nelson is simply not relevant at all. And nor was Hitler. And nor was Jimi Hendrix. Truth is, in four-hundredths of a second absolutely nothing that you do or say will make the slightest bit of difference. For 4600 million years you weren’t born, and you’ll be dead for even longer so it is therefore vital that you explode out of the womb like your hair is on fire. In real time, you’ve only got 600,000 hours and then you’ll wind up on the wrong side of the flowerbed.

So what’s the best course of action? Well you could watch Pride and Prejudice which manages to make an hour seem like a day, but prolonging a boring life is worse than not starting it in the first place. That’s why you must also not drive one of the new Toyota Corollas. Certainly, it is not exciting to behold. Yes, it has a bobby-dazzler of a radiator grille and the sort of eyes that only exist deep in the ocean where light is at a premium. But from this point backwards, there is a styling vacuum whether you’re talking about the saloon, the estate, the liftback or the hatch. However, this time round there is a sporty figurehead – the G6. (I always thought it was G7, but perhaps Japan got lobbed out for making dull cars.) Anyway, this has some definite sporting overtones, in the shape of alloy wheels, red instrumentation and a leather steering wheel. There is a nifty little six-speed ’box too, which beeps when you put it into reverse.

Excited? Thinking of getting one? Well whoa there, because it is powered by a 1300cc engine, the smallest of all the new Corolla’s power plants. This means old people in their not-at-all-sporty 1.6 litre liftback will be able to blow you away at the lights. Toyota argue that by putting a small engine in the G6 they’ve kept insurance costs down. But that’s like choosing a mild curry in case your arse hurts in the morning. Life’s too short to be bothered about insurance premiums. Or a fiery ring-piece. The G6 Corolla amazed me, time and again. No matter what I threw in its direction, it behaved like the school swat and refused to join in the fun. The engine is actually quite sweet and the gear change utterly delightful, but to take it through the gears is about as rewarding as eating flour.

One night, I sneaked it into a stubble field, knowing that any form of motorized transport is a laugh when there’s 100 acres and a surface slippery enough to be an East End geezer. I did some handbrake turns and generally looned about and came home suffering from acute stupefaction. Honestly, I’d have been better off reading a book with an orange spine.

The G6 is, far and away, the most idiotic way of blowing £14,000. This is a car for people who see life as a chore to be undertaken, rather than as an experience to be milked. It is for a cardigan-wearing, non-smoking gardening fanatic who thinks ‘E’ is a vowel. It is for people who think that living to be 75, rather than 70, really matters. It is therefore not for you, and it sure as hell is not for me.

Spelling out the danger from Brussels

Last week I had to make the annual trudge to Germany, where I spent two days living on a diet of beer that tastes like chlorine and sausages that get up and walk home if you push them to the side of the plate.

The biggest trouble with Germany though, is that you feel duty-bound when on a derestricted and quiet piece of autobahn to travel as fast as the car will go.

This was a huge worry last week because I was in a 7.3 litre Brabus-tuned V12 Mercedes that had wormed its way into The Guinness Book of Records by doing 206mph and thus becoming the fastest saloon in the world. Incidentally, 206mph is classified by scientists as f****** fast.

Now call me a wetty if you like, but I chickened out when the clock wound its way round to 300kph, which works out, in English, at 186.

At this speed you see a truck and wham, you’re in its cab, bleeding. You’re covering ground at the rate of 272 feet a second, so that if you sneeze you can miss an entire country.

Everyone who reckons the 70mph speed limit in this country is silly and old-fashioned should be made to do 186 because I feel sure most would sing a different song afterwards. ‘Radar Love’ would be replaced with some happy-clappy gospel. 186mph puts you on the next table to God. 186mph is seriously scary.

But in Germany it is also legal. Now that’s interesting in these days of Euro unity, because at the exact moment I was chanting Hail Marys in my supersonic Brabus Benz, a friend of mine was rubbing his rosary in a Norfolk courtroom.

He’d been caught doing 107mph in a county where people still point at aeroplanes. Astonished magistrates who had only read of such speeds in Isaac Asimov books took away his licence for three weeks and fined him £600 plus costs.

They’re right, of course. We can’t have people doing 107mph on dual carriageways, and the punishment needs to be severe. The whole of Western Europe is clear on that, but what would happen, I wonder, if a pan-European speed limit were to be mooted by the European Union? For once, I suspect, Mr Kohl’s Helmut really would turn purple.

The Germans like the idea of ultra-high-speed travel. It means they can get home faster and therefore have more time to eat sausages. They don’t want to be told by a bunch of meddlers that they must slow down, and that’s fair enough too.

There are age-old customs in each European country and we can’t bulldoze them away in a pointless quest for uniformity. That’s why I’m so pathological about this drink driving business. As regular readers of this column know, Kinnock wants our limit brought down from 80 mg in a vat of blood to just 50, so that we stand alongside the French.

Thus, if you are caught driving home after drinking a pint, you will lose your licence for a year and be fined until you’re urinating lemon juice. You will then lose your job and your wife will run off with a fitness instructor who has a Porsche.

But in France things are somewhat different. If you’re over the 50 mg limit, you get three points on your licence and an on-the-spot fine of 900FF. If you break the 80 mg barrier – the current British limit – you get six points and a slightly bigger fine. You need to be hog-whimperingly drunk before they’ll take your licence and, even then, you can get it back if you go on a two-day road safety course.

So, we may end up with the same limit as France but the punishments could not be further apart, and this is just one more example of Britain being kept in the dark and kicked around by the Continental bullies.

The only shred of dignity Britain will have left after Europe becomes an amorphous blob is the English language, which most experts agree should become the official Euro-tongue.

However, a secret document allegedly found in a BMW communiqué to Rover suggests that even this might be tweaked a bit.

It says that English spelling does leave room for improvement and that a five-year plan has been drawn up to develop EuroEnglish. In the first year, ‘s’ will be used instead of the soft ‘c’ and ‘k’ will replace the hard ‘c’.

Not only will this klear up konfusion and make the life of sivil servants easier, but also komputer keyboards will need one less key.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replased with an ‘f’. This will make words like ‘fotograf’ 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to get to a stage where more komp-likated alterations are possible. So double letters will be removed to inkrease the likelihod of akurate speling. And the horrible mess of the silent ‘e’ wil be banished.

By the fourth yar, peopl will be reseptiv to steps like replasing ‘th’ by ‘z’ and ‘w’ by ‘v’.

During ze fifz yar, ze unecesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’, and similar modifikations vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yar, we wil hav a sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

Dog’s dinner from Korea

All week, I’ve been watching newsreel footage from South Korea of International Monetary Fund bankers trying to sort out what economists call a big financial mess.

It seems that most of the banks are technically insolvent, having been forced by the government to finance massive growth in the industrial sector – growth that just didn’t translate into sales.

Now of course, it would be easy for fat Westerners to sit back over a glass of port and laugh, saying they grew too fast and now they’ve fallen over. Filthy little yellow nouveaus. Got what was coming. But when the people of a country are having to fill a van with money every time they want a pound of rice, that country is weak. And sitting right on South Korea’s border is North Korea, a country that spends all its money on plutonium and mad German scientists. If the West does nothing, the Far East could become mushroom city.

And then you’ve got that oriental dignity to deal with. Analysts seem to be saying South Korea really needs a loan of $40 billion yet they’ve only asked for £2.50.

So, all things considered, it can’t have been much fun this week for the IMF Shylocks. All that political and economic turmoil to worry about, and nothing to look forward to at night except another plate of roast dog.

However, every time I saw them arriving at yet another meeting in a blizzard of flashbulbs they seemed to have bemused grins on their faces, like there was something warm and comfortable in their trousers.

It took me a while to figure it out, but now I understand. They were being chauffeured around in Korea’s answer to America’s Cadillac. It’s called the Kia Enterprise.

It’s priced at the equivalent of £40,000, which seems like rather a lot for a car that’s the size of a Scorpio. Certainly, you aren’t paying for much in the way of styling.

What they appear to have done is taken an old Toyota Corolla and blown it up with a bicycle pump. They should have blown it up with Semtex, but never mind.

To ensure, however, that no one is in any doubt that this is a serious player, it comes with a gaudy bonnet mascot fashioned to look like a golden dog turd. Clever stuff this – you eat the animal and use its excrement to enliven the look of your car.

From the back, you’ve got a sign in the rear window which says ‘intelligent control’ and, of course, the word ‘Enterprise’ picked out in gold on the boot lid.

Do not, however, expect much in the way of warp speed. The engine compartment may house a 3.6-litre V6 which is said to be capable of propelling the car to 144mph, but acceleration is not so much Star Trek as Star Stroll.

I blame the gearbox, which inevitably, is an automatic. Now, the whole point of an auto is that you just get in and steer; you don’t have to worry about gears, but in the Enterprise you can think of little else. The lever is festooned with buttons that make it do all sorts of things you don’t need.

And that really sets the tone for the whole car. Switch on the engine, which is commendably quiet, by the way, and the dashboard doesn’t simply come to life. It explodes into a technicolour blaze that can detach retinas at 400 paces.

There’s a digital read-out for every single feature of the car, and this car comes with the lot. Adaptive damping, traction control, mirrors that fold away, a fridge on the rear parcel shelf, parking proximity sensors. I mean it; the lot.

There is a television too, but instead of simply shutting down when you set off, a message flashes on the screen, saying, ‘Attention on Driving’. Well, it’s hard to comply when you’re driving into what looks like a forest of lasers.

It’s in the back though, that things really go bonkers, and this I guess is where the IMF boys have been seated.

First of all, there’s almost no legroom whatsoever, but you can remove the backrest from the passenger seat and use the squab as a leather footrest. Nice.

You can also move your seat around electrically, change television channels and adjust the temperature from a wood-look console in the centre armrest. But I’ve saved the best bit till last. The reason why all those IMF chaps are wearing bemused grins is because the back seat vibrates.

All over the world, car manufacturers spend an absolute fortune making their cars quiet and relaxing. Kia too must have blown millions dealing with what’s called NVH – noise, vibration and harshness. Yet, having eradicated it, they allowed their engineers to put it back.

No wonder they nearly went to the wall last summer. If people want a car that vibrates they’ll spend £100 on a secondhand Morris Marina, not £40,000 on a style-free wasteland with dog dirt on its bonnet.

At present, Kia’s British importers have no plans to import the Enterprise, preferring to stick with whatever it is they are already bringing over. There’s a very cheap hatchback with a warranty, a four-wheel drive thing and a saloon of such enormous tedium I can’t remember its name or what it looks like.

Let’s ensure we keep it that way. Send the people of South Korea food parcels and emails wishing them well. Send money in brown envelopes, but make them promise that the Enterprise boldly stays at home.

New Labour, new Jezza

Well it’s been a lovely, long hot summer and frankly, right now is a good time to be British. The economy is booming. House prices are back where they belong and unemployment is at its lowest levels since 1981. By pulling all the right faces and not actually doing anything, tony@numberten.co.uk seems to be popular, and even when his fat sidekick, John Prescott, made some silly noises about two-car families they were drowned out by reports that half a million people had bought a new set of wheels in August.

The trouble is, of course, that columns like this thrive on bad news. I need to stand on a rake or fall in a vat of sheep excrement for there to be something to write about each month. Good news, frankly, is dull. I haven’t even had the privilege of driving any spectacularly awful cars in recent weeks. There was the Toyota Corolla, of course, which is motorized mud, but it’s not ‘bad’ by any means. And the same goes for Saab’s 9-5, on which you light the blue touch-paper and then hang around – nothing at all exciting will happen. In a world of ceremonial fireworks, this new Swede is a damp sparkler. And anyway, this dreary twosome are more than outweighed by some of the most exciting stuff we’ve seen in years. There’s the Puma, of course, and the new 911. But what can I say about that? It’s very reliable? Whoa Jezza – incisive stuff.

In the spring we were treated to an onslaught of new convertibles like the SLK and the Boxster, and now they’re tickling our erogenous zones again with a welter of coupés. Alfa has announced that it will be importing the 220bhp, six-speed three-litre GTV, but it’ll find life tough out there as it competes with the Mercedes CLK, the Peugeot 406 and, of course, that rocket ship Volvo C70.

The next big deal will be the advent of the serious niche car. There’s the Land Rover Freelander of course – a car that’s making our nanny almost moist with anticipation. Then there’s the BMW Z3 coupé, the VW Beetle and the Audi TT. I’m starting to swell just thinking about them. Obviously, what’s happening here is that platform-sharing is starting to pay dividends. If you can bolt any body onto any chassis, you can make new cars more quickly and cheaply than ever before. In the past Ford could never have given us a Ka, a Fiesta and a Puma, but seeing as they’re basically the same, nowadays they can. And this means more choice for you and I, which makes picking your ideal five-car garage harder than ever before.

Obviously, I’m a fifth of the way there because already I have a 355. But in La-La Land it would be a Berlinetta, and not a GTS. This would leave space for my convertible to be a big fat barge of a car – and that leads me straight to the door of the Mercedes SL. Also, now that I’ve started to shoot anything that moves, I’ll need a four wheel drive and, much as I respect the Land Cruiser and the Grand Cherokee, I’d have to have a Range Rover. It would come in new ‘Autobiography’ trim where you get to select whatever colour and interior appointments take your fancy. I’d demand wood from that 2000-year-old tree in California – just to annoy the Americans – and then I’d fit television screens in the back of the front headrests. These will be visible to following traffic to make for all sorts of fun as I drive up and down the motorway with Debbie Does Dallas on the video. As far as an everyday car is concerned, I’d have the new Jaguar XJR V8 for all the reasons I outlined last month, which leaves me with the need for a family estate car. I’ve considered, obviously, the Volvo V70 T5 and its V8 rival from BMW. The Mercedes 300E is a contender too, but I’ve decided the kids should walk and that dogs don’t really need to go on outings. My final car would be one of the 100 Nissan Skylines. I don’t care that it got trounced in our Nurburgring feature last month or that it failed to do well in this month’s handling test.

We need cars like this because, pretty soon, tony@ numberten.co.uk will stop pulling faces and let Fatty Prescott loose. Time is running out. Winter is almost upon us. For God’s sake, get out there and live.

Sad old Surrey

Careful and studious readers may know that A.A. Gill is being hauled in front of the Commission for Racial Equality after describing the Welsh as being ‘pugnacious little trolls’.

Well, though we write for the same newspaper, I wish to distance myself from these attacks. Wales is a pretty and charming part of the country and the Welsh have a rounded range of abilities – singing and er… setting fire to things.

I think if we’re going to single out a part of Britain for ridicule and hatred, Wales comes a very distant second to that jumped-up lump of suburbia called Surrey. If I may be permitted to liken the British Isles to a beautiful woman, Surrey is her most stubborn dingleberry.

In the past three years I have travelled to many countries and seen traffic to frustrate even the most dedicated petrol-head, but on Monday morning Guildford made Tokyo look like the Brecon Beacons. To get from one side to the other took two hours, at an average speed of 6mph.

All around, people were sitting in their horrid neo-Georgian houses congratulating themselves on having moved out of London to the country, obviously unaware that they have not left London at all. They’re as much a part of the metropolitan sprawl as Tottenham.

Except that in London, if a main thoroughfare is full locals can use any number of rabbit runs whereas in Surrey this is not possible.

Sure, there are a few open spaces and, given Surrey Man’s tendency to drive a large four-wheel drive car, none would present much of a problem, technically speaking. But to drive off-road in Surrey is to invite a confrontation with one of its rangers.

Now, a friend of mine once signed on at the Kensington dole office saying he was a shepherd, and I dare say an investment banker would find life hard in Swaledale, but a ranger? In Surrey? Why?

What they do, apparently, is drive around the much coiffeured heathland in Land Rovers telling other people in Land Rovers not to drive off-road, and to get back to central London where they belong.

So everyone sits on the roads, not moving for hour after hour after hour. Every Laburnum Close and Orchid Drive is full. Every B road is full. Every dual carriageway is full. And there’s no way in hell that Fatty Prescott is going to get this lot onto a bus.

For these people, image is everything. They won’t even admit to living in Surrey, saying instead they live on the Surrey/Hampshire borders or, for those in the know, that they live in GU4 – which, the postman will tell you, is a ritzy suburb called Shalford.

Here, I saw mothers depositing their children at school from cars that were several miles long. One had an American off-roader that was easily bigger than an Intercity 125. Why should she use a train when she’s already got one?

And these people don’t park their cars neatly outside the school gates. They simply abandon them nearby and stand around with the other mothers, who’ve abandoned their space shuttles and coaches, arranging bloody coffee mornings. ‘Actually I can’t make it today. I’m having sex with the gardener.’

That, of course, is after the gardener in question has helped the ranger to chop down a few more trees. Trees need to be murdered here because, to convince themselves that Surrey is not simply London SW37, the locals demand that the open spaces be kept as such. They call them beauty spots, and that’s exactly what they are – spots, tiny little pinpricks of manicured green in a sea of fake marble pillars and Mitsubishi Shoguns.

When the rush hour has subsided and Surrey Woman is at home watching the gardener pant over her panties, old people come out of their houses and climb into their Chevettes and Rover 600s and head for the hills – where the ranger has ripped up some more trees to make car parks.

I spent two days in such a car park this week, and have rarely felt so depressed. The view was undoubtedly pretty, but you know that it’s stage-managed and that just over the next hill lies Esher, which isn’t pretty at all.

And you know that you must not let your dog off its lead or pick a flower. This is countryside in the same way that the Spice Girls is a rock band, that is, it isn’t countryside at all. If it were cheese, it would be Primula.

And the visitors know it. They sit in their cars, not daring to get out in case they break one of the ranger’s rules, and they stare at that pitiful facsimile of nature for hours on end. They don’t talk. They don’t eat. They don’t read.

They’re sitting in a bloody car park, surrounded by hundreds of other people in cars, listening to lorries lumbering up the A25, watching a tree being chopped down by nature conservationists.

One man turned up in a brand-new Bentley Turbo R and sat in his car facing, not the view, but the café which sells chips.

And the staff there explained that Paul Weller is a regular visitor. Small wonder the poor bloke has such a strange view of the world when he’s forced to sit in a traffic jam for two hours just to get one.

Surrey is more awful, I suspect, than hell. If that’s the future for commuting then, my God, you can have my keys right now.

A frightening discovery

I’ve been sitting at my computer now for two hours, unsure about how this week’s column should begin. You see, after years of Biro-sucking, I’ve finally decided the Land Rover Discovery is absolute rubbish.

But we’re talking here about a national institution – an automotive Prince Philip – and you can’t just launch into attack mode saying it’s a completely useless waste of everyone’s afternoon.

But it is, that’s the trouble. It’s ugly; really, really ugly and I have no idea why this has never occurred to me before. It’s been around for years but only this morning did I start to ask the important questions.

Why does it have that raised bit at the back? No dog I’ve ever seen is 15 feet tall and not once, ever, have I heard of someone keeping a pet giraffe. The Discovery doesn’t need that rear end lump.

And why’s the back window cockeyed? And have you seen the panel gaps, for God’s sake? I reckon you could get into a Discovery without opening the door. And the windscreen’s too flat, and the wheels are lost in those huge arches. They’re like Polo mints mounted at the entrance to Fingal’s Cave.

Seriously, next time you’re down in Guildford have a look. You’ll see that the Discovery is even uglier than a Ford Scorpio.

It is also dangerous. Now that’s contentious stuff. You can say a car manufacturer’s new product is a waste of the world’s resources and they’ll do nothing. You can liken it to a cup of cold sick and refuse to test it, saying it’s more boring than dying, and still they won’t react. But call a car dangerous and whoa, what’s this? A writ? Blimey.

Well, here’s the defence. I’ve always felt that all cars are capable of stopping in roughly the same distance but this, it turns out, is just not true. I tested a handful of cars last week and was simply amazed by the results.

A Lexus GS300 took just 139.8 feet to haul itself from 70mph to a standstill whereas the aforementioned Land Rover Discovery came to a halt in an almost unbelievable 224.1 feet. And that, to save you the bother of working it out, is a difference of 84 feet. I’ll say it again: 84 feet, 28 yards, five car lengths.

Think about that. You crest a brow on the motorway to discover the traffic ahead is stopped. If you’re in a Lexus you’ll pull up just in time, but if you’re in a Discovery you’ll still be going at a fair old lick when you have the smash.

Now I want to make it plain that the Discovery is not the only car to perform badly in this test. The Toyota Rav4 is awful and the Ford Explorer is horrific, but whereas the other two have many strings to their bow, the Disco does not.

Yes, it is a fine off-road car, as well it should be with those Range Rover underpinnings and a lusty V8. There’s a diesel too, but quite frankly, I’d rather take my own appendix out.

The only good thing about the diesel is that it’s not terribly powerful. Thus, you’ll never get up enough speed to turn it over, which is something that I suspect could happen very easily indeed in a V8. A top-heavy, 2 ton car simply cannot be as wieldy as a low-slung saloon.

Of course, the big safety device fitted to all Discoveries is the build quality. As they spend most of their time on the back of low loaders, all the braking and cornering problems are cured at a stroke.

Now, I’m machine-gunning the Discovery because I’ve recently spent some more time with the new Freelander, whose praises, you may recall, I sang a few weeks ago in a deep and lusty baritone.

Well, after several thousand miles I can report those initial findings were just about right. On the road, the Freelander stops and corners like a normal car, even if it is perhaps a little slow. On a long uphill motorway gradient, you sometimes need fourth gear to maintain a 70mph cruise.

Off-road, however, it’s even better than I first thought. On one shoot, mud that stopped both a normal Land Rover and a Toyota Landcruiser proved no problem at all for the Freelander’s traction control. I simply adore this little car which, in every way, knocks spots off its bigger brother.

What Rover must do, and now, is stop making the Discovery. It is so far past its sell-by date it should really only be sold in one colour – mould.

But even if they do, there is still the problem of used Discoveries, sitting on the secondhand market looking all innocent and tempting. Pop down to the auctions and you’ll find J-registered diesels going for less than £8000. And more worrying still, a P-registered 25,000 miler is available now for just £19,000, making it seem like a large and sensible alternative to the Freelander.

It isn’t. It’s a huge, salivating dog that, at best, will sit around in your drive wetting itself. Worst case scenario? It’ll tear your leg off and beat you to death with the soggy end.

The choice is easy. Buy the puppy instead, the dog that you know has been bred properly by a registered member of the BMW kennel club. Buy the Freelander.

Hannibal Hector the Vector

Atlanta is one of the world’s most peculiar cities. It has the requisite pointy skyscrapers and if you ask for a small Coke in a Taco Bell, it still comes in a bucket. This is America.

And yet somehow, it isn’t. The people, largely, are slim, and regularly you’ll see a well-dressed, pretty girl in an Alfa Romeo Spider.

And then you’ve got the valet parkists at the Ritz Carlton. They’re efficient for sure, but they don’t crawl across the driveway on their stomachs, clutching at your legs like you’re the only person in the world who shares the same type of bone marrow.

I read recently that America’s business travellers had voted Atlanta the rudest city in the world… and that’s it. That’s why I like the place so much. Ask for a pail of Sprite in a restaurant and you’ll be ignored. Summon a man to fix the television in your bedroom and he’ll stomp around, prodding the remote control and swearing at you for breaking it. It’s fantastic. It’s just like Britain.

And it’s very like Britain if you head north to the town of Braselton, which was recently bought by Kim Basinger. Here you will find Road Atlanta, which isn’t a road at all. It’s a swooping, Spa-like race track where the girl on reception greets you with the distinctly un-American ‘Hello love.’

Men drift around in the background, being English, and then you’re introduced to the boss who, it turns out, lives in Field Assarts – a small village just outside Chipping Norton.

I was there to drive the Vector, an American supercar about which I had serious doubts. When I first heard of it, 20 years ago, it was being made in California by a man whose mouth was so big you could park a lorry in it.

He used to claim that his car, which had a twin-turbocharged Corvette V8, could do more than 200mph, but I saw no test results to back this up. Indeed, the only time I ever even saw a Vector was in the film Rising Sun.

Anyway, he went bust and the company was relocated to Florida by the same Malaysians who own Lamborghini. But not long afterwards, they simply locked the factory doors and walked away.

However, despite this chequered past, there, at Road Atlanta, was an enormous American lorry which housed a brand-new Vector, and alongside it there was a huge black limo which had been driven overnight from Jacksonville, six hours to the south.

In the back was Vector’s new boss. Now I was expecting a ten-gallon hat to stumble from the back door, followed several hours later by a stomach. But no, a cheeky chappie in a two-piece pinstripe bounded over and introduced himself in a Thames Estuary accent as Tim.

Turns out, he served his time at Lotus, where there is only one mantra. The car must be light.

But the £100,000 monster being poured from the back of that gigantic truck appeared to have been fashioned from a cocktail of lead and mercury. It was huge: 6 inches wider than a Diablo and 10 times more striking.

As is the way with supercars, getting in is like potholing. You crawl under the Kevlar gull-wing door and burrow over the sill to find an interior which is shockingly cramped. Put a veal in there and Dover docks would be closed down for a month.

Still, you turn the key and behind your head a 5.7 litre, 500bhp Lamborghini V12 explodes into life. This is what supercars are all about. Deep discomfort, allied to unspeakable noise and fear. If you feel like a veal with a rocket strapped to its back, you’re in a supercar where Nessun Dorma. If it’s all comfy and quiet, you’re in a Nissan Dormobile.

It was odd then, to discover that when I shoved the throttle into the carpet the car merely went a little faster. Only when the revs crawled past 4000 did it really wake up, but by then I was already tired. The steering is power-assisted, but only a little bit. And you don’t press the brake pedal to slow down; you have to climb in the footwell and use a jack hammer on the damn thing. It absolutely will not oversteer either.

Now at this point, I’d like to say that the first man ever to buy one of these cars had the right idea. He took down the wall of his house, put the car in his sitting room and built the wall again.

And yet I suspect that somewhere in the package there is a good car. It reminded me in many ways of an early ’80s TVR which we could, so easily, have written off as kit-car junk. With a bit of careful development, mainly to make the engine work at low revs, the Vector could pick up the baton that Lamborghini, I understand, is soon to drop. Rumours coming from the factory in Bologna talk of an empty order book and even emptier pockets.

It is, of course, pretty damn hard to take on Ferrari and Porsche but there’s no doubt in my mind that Vector is using the right recipe – a British chassis, Italian power, American prices and Buck Rogers styling. They just want to make sure they don’t get that all the wrong way round.

If they succeed, they’ll be selling the nicest American surprise since Atlanta. If they don’t, they’ll be selling a crap car.

F1 running rings round the viewers

Every year, I predict who will win the Formula One world championship. And every year I am completely and utterly wrong. This year, I said it would be Jacques Villeneuve… but don’t worry, I’m not losing my touch. Martin Brundle’s job is safe, because I was wrong again.

I may have been right with the outcome but, as with examinations, you must be able to show how you worked it out. And on that front, I was all over the place. You see, I said Jacques would win every single race, have it wrapped up by Silverstone, and that we were in for the dullest year of racing since the drivers’ strike.

And I wasn’t alone. Everyone who knows which way up a helmet goes agreed with me. So what went wrong? Well I’m not big on conspiracy theories. I don’t, for instance, believe that Princess Diana was murdered by one of the Queen’s corgis. My hair was not cut this morning by Elvis Presley. And I think Neil Armstrong did make his giant leap on the moon, not on a soundstage in Nevada. But at the end of qualifying for the European Grand Prix last month, one of my eyebrows was raised just a little higher than normal. And at the end of the race, the other one had joined it. With hindsight, you can see things starting to go awry in Austria. Schumacher was romping away with the title when he was hit with a 10 second penalty after passing Heinz-Harald Hopeless under a yellow flag. Result: Villeneuve closed the gap.

Then there was Japan, when Jacques could have sewn it all up. But no. He didn’t slow down for a waved flag while qualifying, he was under a one-race suspended ban and that was it. He was out. Result: Schumacher closed the gap.

And just in case Jacques thought about appealing, he was warned that Eddie Irvine had done this before and had seen his ban extended from one to three races. Result: a bunch of promoters with Blair-style grins. These penalties had been imposed for clear misdemeanours, but I find it odd that the only two drivers to have fallen foul of the law this year were the two fighting for the title, and that both did so in the championship’s dying hours. Anyway, when the circus arrived in Spain for the big showdown, Villeneuve and Schumacher were one point apart, and I had buttocks you couldn’t have prised apart with a blow torch. However, during qualifying we were asked to believe that Michael and Jacques on this, the greatest day in motor racing, had driven round the circuit at exactly the same speed – something that had never, ever happened before. Far-fetched? Not if you think Star Wars is a true story.

Then came the race. Over the year I’ve come to respect Schumacher, who seemed to be genuinely pleased when he won. He undoubtedly had an inferior car – one of my beloved Ferraris. He had proved himself a truly great driver, and after his praise for Eddie Irvine in Japan, a gentleman. But in Spain he proved that, when all is said and done, he is still a German. So he was out and Villeneuve was on his way to victory, not only in the race but in the championship too. Hip hip hooray and so on.

But wait. What’s this? Team managers dash about in the pits, and look what’s happening. Hakkinen has overtaken Coulthard. On the straight. Fisichella has been blue-flagged, and Villeneuve’s car seems to be suffering some damage after all. Now, obviously it would be improper for me to suggest even for one moment that there had been some behind-the-scenes jiggery-pokery going on, but did you see Coulthard on the podium? He looked like a man whose dog had just died. Even Hakkinen, who I expected to burst with pride when he finally won a race, looked like he’d just failed all his A-levels.

There’s talk that Sylvester Stallone is working on a Hollywood blockbuster about Formula One, but if someone presented him with a script based on the 1997 championship, he’d dismiss it as completely implausible.

Bernie Ecclestone has done a magnificent job with Formula One and he needs these last-minute showdowns. But we, the keen viewers, need to be assured that it is still motorsport, with young men going wheel-to-wheel in a life-or-death struggle for glory. And not panto.

Big cat needs its tummy tickled

I’d only been driving the new Jaguar for 20 minutes when, inevitably, it happened. On a rain-streaked M42 my rear-view mirror filled to overflowing with the menacing sight of a steel-wheeled BMW 316. Inside, the driver was barking into a mobile phone, his face contorted with rage that I should be in his way.

Now there was a time when I’d have eased the Jag into a lower gear and floored the throttle, but next weekend I shall be 38 and I just can’t be bothered any more. So, as soon as a space appeared, I moved politely into the middle lane and smiled as Mr Neo-Georgian screamed past, on his way, no doubt, to yet another crisis at the photocopier shop.

It was, I’m afraid, a rather patronizing smile because matey could have brought any BMW to the battle and he’d have lost. I was driving the new supercharged XK8 you see, and no German production car can even get close. Not even the new Porsche 911.

The standard XK8 has already been voted the most beautiful two-seater sports car in the world by a bunch of Italian designers, but now Jaguar has added some teeth to create what’s called the XKR. Basically, it’s propelled along by a supercharged 4.0 litre V8 engine which produces a simply staggering 370bhp – roughly the same as a Ferrari 355.

This is a natural successor to the old Jaguar XK120 which, 50 years ago, was also voted the most beautiful car in the world. And then, on a deserted stretch of Belgian motorway, it achieved 139mph, making it the fastest too.

The new XKR goes further. Even though it is burdened by various pieces of Prescottery in the exhaust and an automatic gearbox, it will get from 0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds and onwards to a top speed in excess of 175mph. Well it would, but an electronic referee blows the whistle at 155mph.

These are impressive statistics but it is the quality and the relentlessness of the power delivery that leaves a more lasting impression – that and the top-end clout. From 140 to 155mph, when the supercharger is eating steroids by the handful, it is an almost unbelievable 50 seconds faster than a standard, unsupercharged XK8.

So that passers-by in their weedy BMWs are able to tell what they’re dealing with, the XKR has different wheels, twin bonnet louvres and a microscopic boot-lid spoiler. And that’s it. There isn’t even much of a difference with the price – the coupé is £60,000 and the droptop I tested is £66,000.

So it’s well-priced, pretty and very, very fast. What more could you possibly want?

Well actually, quite a lot. You see, the new car is smooth and wafty and will, I don’t doubt, find a great many friends at golf clubs all over Houston. I can see Los Angeles dentists arriving to buy this car by the bus load. They’re going to just lurrrve that wood and leather interior, and the comfort, and the silence.

However, there are some changes I’d like to see before I’d buy one, and first of all they need to get it down. A real jaguar, the furry Attenborough type, prances about on tiptoe when it’s cruising, but as things get serious it’ll hunker down on its haunches – and the XKR doesn’t.

It sits too high, with a huge gap between the wheels and the wheel arches – you could erect a tent in there. One designer I know described the XKR as an off-road sports car, but he was wrong. It isn’t a sports car at all because the suspension, though beefy, is sadly boneless. My six-cylinder XJR saloon has a much meatier feel, both in terms of the ride and the steering. It feels like it’s in attack mode, which for a car of this type is how things should be.

Then there’s the seats. If you are broad-shouldered – like the chairman of Jaguar, incidentally – you will find them so narrow that driving through high-speed corners, you fall out of them. BMW offer sporty, heavily bolstered alternatives and I really can’t see why Ford’s luxury division does not.

This, I guess, is my point here. BMW make lovely cars for a certain type of person but they know there will always be a small number of people who want bigger better more. So they have the tiny and separate Motorsport ‘M’ division who take the best… and make it better.

Mercedes does the same sort of thing. You can buy a car off the peg, or if you want some snarly, bone-snapping get up and go, you can buy one that’s been tweaked by AMG.

What Jaguar needs is the same sort of thing – a wholly owned, but separate, engineering-based outfit that could take a car designed for everyman and turn it into a road-going rocket for the few.

They wouldn’t even need to touch the engine – it’s easily good enough already – but that said, if by fiddling with camshafts and fuel flow they eked out a few more horses, I wouldn’t complain. Some exhausts that offer a muted V8 beat wouldn’t go amiss either.

The standard XKR is a superb dish that’s been well thought out and beautifully prepared. It is an excellent grand tourer, but with some slightly different seasoning it could be turned into something else. It could be turned into a sports car.

Elk test makes monkeys of us

Imagine the horror. You’re a cameraman with the BBC’s natural history department and you’ve been dispatched to Tierra del Fuego in South America where, once every ten years, a strange frog comes out of the mud, mates, and then dies.

You’ve been sitting there for the best part of a decade when the need for a crap becomes utterly overwhelming. So you scoop up the bog roll, a copy of Viz and disappear behind a rock. And while you’re gone, Froggy comes out of his muddy home and struts his stuff with Mrs Frog.

Well last month, Britain’s motoring journalists were on the bog while all hell was breaking loose all around. Some had driven the Mercedes A Class and glowing reports were appearing in magazines all over the land. Autocar said it could dive through tight bends with agility. Car magazine said much the same thing, while Auto Express praised its responsive chassis. Now I don’t want to sound smug about this, but after half a mile in the new baby Benz it became very obvious that its handling was not agile and it certainly wasn’t responsive. It was utterly and completely crap. Contrary to what many may think, we road testers do get swayed by the opinions of colleagues and I found myself in a quandary. Here was a car from one of the world’s most ruthlessly efficient manufacturers, a car that my colleagues liked very much.

It takes a very special kind of bombastic arrogance to be that little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ – to stand up and say: ‘Actually, its handling is appalling.’ But thank God I did, because just a week later a Swedish magazine found to its cost that, while performing what’s become known as the ‘Elk Test’, the A Class rolled over and put its occupants in hospital. A German magazine then repeated the procedure and subsequent examination of the film showed that what we had here was A Class One Disaster. Experts immediately dismissed the Elk Test as unrepresentative, but I disagree. Swerving one way, then the other, to miss an obstacle is worthwhile in any environment. Sure, we don’t have elks in Britain but we do have children and dogs, and debris in the outside lane of the motorway. And Mercedes agreed because first they said they’d change the tyres, then they said stability control would be fitted as standard, then they stopped the production lines. The fact is, Mercedes screwed up and our journos missed the biggest story since the Ford Pinto.

Well now it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Drive into a roundabout at a sporty, rather than aggressive, pace and understeer is colossal. Switch direction and massive body roll attaches itself like a 2 ton barnacle to a problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It’s impossible to miss. I only feel guilty that I majored on the car’s good points. But at least I spotted the flaw. In the early days of car journalism, it was important to be on the ball because rotten and dangerous cars lumbered onto the market every week. But in recent years, the whole game has shifted. We assume a car is safe and reliable and make our judgements instead on what the badge says about the driver, value for money and so on. Sure, not many magazines can afford to do crash testing like car companies do, but most have forgotten how to do any testing at all other than zooming up and down with stopwatches. Thank God a little Swedish magazine still does things properly.

Everyone else took it for granted that the A Class would be safe and steady, and talked instead about the space inside and the fact you could park a three-pointed star on your driveway for just £14,000. No one actually stopped to think, hold on, this is Mercedes’ first ever attempt at a front-wheel drive car. Let’s assume nothing. Let’s do a lane-change manoeuvre. Let’s wiggle the wheel a bit to see what’s what. It doesn’t matter what Mercedes do with the design of their new car now. The A Class is dead. And with it has gone the reputation of Britain’s motoring journalists.

We should all be sent to Iraq, but I fear that as the F-15s sweep in from Turkey to post bombs through Saddam’s letterbox, we’d all be on the beach, filing copy about fine wines and nice cheese.

At the core of the Cuore

In Britain, the great European debate centres on two issues – tradition and trade.

One group says if the Queen’s head is removed from our banknotes, fire and pestilence will rain down from the heavens and a plague of locusts will infest Gordon Brown’s underpants. The other says this is jingoistic nonsense and concentrates on the implications for business, pensions and immigration. Frankly, it’s all so dull I’d rather eat cardboard.

But over dinner the other night with Wolfgang Reitzler, who is a significant oberlieutenant at BMW, I discovered that in Germany things are rather different. He said, ‘I am in favour of the EU because it would prevent another war,’ and I damn nearly fell off my chair.

I mean, my God, this is something I’d never even thought of. In Britain it is considered inconceivable that any two Western European nations could open hostilities with one another, but obviously the Germans are still looking wistfully at Poland.

So, frankly, I was delighted this week when I heard that BMW has added Rolls-Royce to its portfolio of British investments. The more they own over here, the less likely they are to drop bombs on us.

I was, however, a little upset by the £340 million that Vickers seem to have accepted for what everyone seems to agree is the ultimate British brand. When you consider Rolls-Royce has just spent £200 million developing the new Seraph and its sister car the Bentley Arnage, it could be argued that the actual sale price is just £140 million.

But in fact it’s even less than that because remember, much of the £200 million went to BMW, who are supplying engines and various ancillary parts for the new cars. In real terms, BMW has bought Rolls-Royce for about 18p, which seems rather low.

Still, it’s all irrelevant because who’s going to buy a Rolls-Royce now that Mr Prescott is offering a 50 quid cashback offer on the road tax of a Daihatsu Cuore+?

This is a remarkable offer which I just know will have all of you perched on the edge of your seats. Secretly, I suspect, you’ve always wanted such a car, and now that it comes with New Labour’s seal of approval the temptation is almost too much to bear. So come on Clarkson, tell us. What is it like?

Well, it is 20 inches shorter than a Ford Fiesta and, amazingly, 7.5 inches narrower, which means you don’t ever have to worry about parking. You just put it in your briefcase. If you don’t have a briefcase, don’t worry, it comes with a carrying handle that’s been cunningly disguised as a rear spoiler.

However, despite the diminutive dimensions the + model I tested comes with five doors and enough space, even for 17 stones of me, behind the wheel. Indeed, it needs a big heavy driver or it would simply blow away in the breeze and you’d spend your entire life looking for it up trees.

I, however, tied it to some stones and spent the best part of a day trying to find the engine. With the bonnet raised I climbed into the engine bay, initially dismissing what appeared to be a small matchbox nailed to the inner wing. This, however, was a mistake. This was the engine – all 850cc of it.

It only has three cylinders and produces a catastrophically miserable 42bhp, making it 30 per cent less powerful than a Mini. I suspect it is also 10 per cent less powerful than my Moulinex Magimix.

So, though I could fit inside, there was some question about the car’s ability to actually move me around. But it did. Obviously, I wasn’t going to build up much of a supersonic shock wave, but even though the 0 to 60 time of 16 seconds looks feeble on paper, it felt quite sprightly.

With the missing cylinder causing an imbalance in the matchbox, it sounds almost exactly like an air-cooled Porsche 911 which is rather endearing. But just as Porsche Man is shifting into second, Daihatsu Man is out of puff. I saw 85 on the clock once, but as I was being overtaken by continental drift at the time it’s possible the speedo may have been lying somewhat.

Of course, a car like this isn’t supposed to be fast, and nor is it supposed to go round corners very well. So it doesn’t. What did come as a surprise was the fitment in the luxury Cuore+ of electric windows, a stereo and, particularly, central locking. Why do you need central locking, pray, in a car where you can reach all four doors from the driver’s seat – with your eyelashes? I think I’d prefer the standard three-door Cuore which is £700 less expensive and comes with four wheels and a seat.

But either way, you are in for one very special treat. Even though I drove this little car with verve and aplomb I managed to go 53 miles on one gallon of petrol, making it by far and away the most economical car ever to come under the command of my size nines.

It is also one of the cheapest. The Cuore+ is £7200 while the standard model is just £6500.

The only way you can do better is by fitting wheels to your rabbit hutch and attaching the motor from that juicer you never use. Or jogging.

Last 911 is full of hot air

Reviewing music has to be the hardest, most pointless job since Twinkletoe-Winkletoe Fffiennes walked to the North Pole wearing nothing but a dressing gown and slippers. Or something.

Imagine, please, being instructed to write about the latest All Saints album. You’d listen, hate it and say so. And a week later, all the 14-year-olds who took it to number one would burn your house down.

I could sit my mother in front of the stereo and play her ‘Life Through a Lens’ by Robbie Williams and she’d look like someone was using a staple gun on her nose. Ask me to listen to Joni Mitchell, and I have to put my finger in my ears and sing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ at the top of my voice. Tell me to review one of her albums and I’d say it was like chewing on polystyrene.

Cars are so much simpler. They’re either fast or slow, spacious or cramped, expensive or not so expensive. And reviewing them is a black-and-white science right up to the moment when you surge past, say, 60,000.

At this point, if you’re buying a car you’re not buying it for practical reasons. You’re buying a brand that you’ve dreamed about since you were two. And it really doesn’t matter if the brand in question has, in the meantime, become a joke. For some reason, the name ‘Bristol’ has just sprung to mind. And here comes another one: ‘Maserati’.

And then there’s the Porsche 911, which, of course, is emphatically not a joke. I have just spent a week with the very last of the old air-cooled monsters and it failed to raise a smile even once – a bit like Rory Bremner’s BAFTA presentation last weekend.

Now for some, the passing of the old 911 is right up there with the passing of Princess Diana. I have seen people weeping in the streets and threatening to hurl themselves off a tall building unless Porsche bring it back.

I, however, couldn’t care less because, at two, I dreamt about Ferraris and in the playground I would fight people from Planet Porsche. I would push their heads down lavatories until they admitted the 911 was smelly. Say it. SAY IT or I’ll give you a Chinese burn.

And as a result I now find it rather difficult to review this, the last of a breed, sensibly. I can tell you that it’s got a twin-turbocharged 3.6 litre engine which develops 450bhp. I can tell you that only 33 examples of this so-called Turbo S have been made and all are sold. I can tell you, too, that this car is supposed to be the ultimate 911, that it brings together everything Porsche has learnt from 35 years’ practice.

These are the facts… and now, here come the opinions. It is, without doubt, the scariest, nastiest, ugliest piece of donkey dirt that has ever graced my drive. The only possible way you could have fun with this car is by dropping a lighted match into the petrol tank.

On the motorway, the ride is so firm it blurs your vision and in town, the ground clearance is such that some of the more vigorous speed bumps in the Socialist Republic of Hammersmith and Fulham brought it to a dead halt.

Sure, the technologically sophisticated four-wheel drive system would enable the Porsche to keep going in a ploughed field, but not with that nose – it’s so low it snorts the white lines off the road.

Then you’ve got a mixed bag of turbo lag, fearsome acceleration and brakes which inspire no confidence at all. Hit them gently and nothing happens – hit them hard and your nose slams into the windscreen, which is too close at the best of times. You don’t so much look through it as wear it like a pair of spectacles.

I truly hated this car and am glad it’s no longer in production. Indeed, I believe that the devil himself would drive such a thing.

So I was horrified to hear a man from Porsche say the other day that so long as there is a Ferrari, there will be a Porsche Turbo… which means that in the year 2000 we can expect a blown version of the new 911 – a car I quite like as it is.

Anyhow, that’s then and this is now and I’m still stuck, trying to review a car that’s about as much use as a CB radio in a Vodafone world.

So, in the interests of balanced journalism, I managed to find a five-minute gap in the Marquess of Blandford’s diary when he actually had a driving licence, and asked him to have a go. He is a huge 911 fan and approached the egg-yellow monstrosity as though it were the Turin Shroud. ‘To drive the last of the air-cooled 911s,’ he whispered, ‘is a real privilege.’

One hour later he was back, beaming the smile of a man who’d been taken a little closer to Godhood. ‘You’ve got to understand a 911’s little foibles. If you really understand these cars, you will know that this is just the best of them all,’ he added bouncily.

He’s sitting behind me now, tied to the chair with a bar of soap in his mouth. And I won’t let him go until he stops calling my Ferrari a Fiat, and admits the worst car in the world is not, as we’d suspected, the Vauxhall Vectra.

False economies of scale

For the first time in years you can now buy a brand-new car for less than £5000. It’s from Malaysia and it’s called the Perodua Nippa.

Now I want to make it plain from the outset that I have not driven this car, and there’s a strong possibility that I never will. I mean, if we live to be 70, we only have 600,000 hours to play with and I’m not prepared to spend even a tiny fraction of that in a car that has no radio.

Besides, it’s not that long since I spent a whole day playing with its rivals – a bunch of so-called microcars to delight Crasher Prescott and his team of weird beards.

After the budget in which Golden Brown said he’d provide a £50 cashback offer to those who bought a small, clean car, I thought I’d better wise up on this new breed of city car, to see if £50 was enough of an incentive to entice people out of their BMWs and into a wheeled shoe-box.

Let’s start with a car that’s ghastly – the Suzuki Wagon R. Powered by a 996cc engine, you don’t expect it to be the fastest car in the world, and it doesn’t disappoint. It isn’t. With a top speed of 87mph, it is exactly half as fast as the Porsche turbo I wrote about last week – and, unbelievably, it looks twice as daft.

It’s very narrow, very short and for some extraordinary reason, very tall. I, for instance, enjoyed a good foot of headroom, but why? The only people who could possibly need such an enormous amount of space above their heads are people who wear bearskins, and let’s be honest here – a guardsman spends all day standing in a Wendy house so why should he want to drive home in one?

So, unless you enjoy being laughed at, avoid this stupid Suzuki like you would avoid unprotected sex with an Ethiopian transvestite.

I wouldn’t mind, but it isn’t even desperately economical, which, surely, is the whole point of a small car. The cheapest model costs £7400 and only does 47mpg.

Which is why I was led to the door of the 1-litre SEAT Arosa, which costs £6995 and does, as near as makes no difference, 50mpg. Now this looks like a normal car and goes like one too. With determination and a hill, you could do 100mph.

I still think the Daihatsu Cuore+ is a better bet, for all the reasons I outlined a month ago – four doors, low price, greater economy, etc.

But since then we’ve heard news of a new small Fiat called the Seicento, that Perodua, a Volkswagen version of the Arosa and, at long last, a replacement for the Mini. Having failed to make cars run on electricity, hydrogen, runner beans or any other fuel of the future, car makers have obviously decided to give us half what we’re used to.

And this is bound to have an effect. You’re bound to be impressed with the promise of halved fuel bills, halved insurance and easier parking in a car which can now be had for less than five grand.

But there is one significant drawback to these cars. Basically, if you crash a microcar there’s a greater chance of dying than if you crash something large.

It’s all very well saying that these are city cars, and that you’re only likely to be doing 7mph at the time of impact, but come on; from time to time you will take them on the motorway, where their miserable acceleration will put them in wheel-to-wheel combat with Scania Man.

And while you may marvel in a showroom at how the bodywork of these cars seems to have been moulded to fit your body, consider this. Your feet are no more than 2 feet from the front bumper. Your shoulder is jammed against the B pillar and your children’s heads are perilously close to the rear tailgate.

Last week, the chairman of Jaguar climbed unscathed from a Daimler that had barrel-rolled several times up a motorway embankment. And I feel sure that if he’d been the chairman of Perodua, or Suzuki or any of the others, he’d have been drinking through a straw for several months. Or playing a harp.

America is currently awash with statistics, one of which suggests that you’re four times more likely to die in a small car than a Range Rover. Another says that as downsizing takes hold, up to 3900 more people will be killed on the roads each year.

But statistics can be moulded to say anything you want, so let’s ignore them and concentrate instead on simple laws of physics. I think it was Isaac Newton who said that if you crash a big car, you’ll be better off than if you crash a little one.

Actually, I might have made that up but I’m sure he would have said it, if he’d been good at sound-bites and aware of the car.

So, here’s the deal. Don’t swallow the government’s line on small cars. The whole point of environmentalism is the preservation of life – but what’s the point of helping to save the trees if you wind up dead after running into one?

If you’re limited by budget, don’t buy a new small car. Buy a used big one.

Blowing the whistle on Ford and Vauxhall

Since Rover fitted chrome kickplates to its mid-range saloons, the British fleet market has been left to Ford and Vauxhall. Vauxhall made the early running with all sorts of new and exciting products – the Frontera, the Calibra and the Tigra, which, we were told, went from concept stage to production in 14 minutes. Ford, meanwhile, were fast asleep. They’d hit us with the new Escort in 1992, but it was such a dog people were surprised it didn’t have a tail. Then there was the Probe. A nice enough coupé, but we all knew it cost £28.50 in America and couldn’t see why it was more than 20 grand here. To fight the Frontera, they teamed up with Nissan – always a mistake – and launched the Maverick, which was ugly and hopeless.

But, all of a sudden, things began to change. It turned out the Frontera was built like an Airfix kit and so was less reliable than Israeli politics. And when the launch-time brouhaha around the Calibra and Tigra died down, people began to notice that, as driver’s cars, they fell some way short of the mark. Indeed, the mark was in Latvia and these things were just outside Leamington Spa. Things went really pear-shaped, though, when the Cavalier won the British Touring Car Championship. Great – except it walked off with the laurels at exactly the same time as it went out of production. Its replacement brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. The Vectra was unpleasant to drive, uninspiring to behold, not especially cheap, and took tedium to unprecedented heights. If Vauxhall can be likened to Manchester United, the Vectra was a performance that would have guaranteed a 4–0 defeat at the hands of Doncaster Rovers. Using football analogies, actually, is a highly dangerous game because I know nothing about it, but I’ll give it a go. Just like Vauxhall ‘gave it a go’ with the Vectra. Right now, watching Ford and Vauxhall slug it out is like watching a game of soccer. Both teams field 11 players, with some geared for attack and some for defence.

Ford’s new star of the front row is the Puma, which can run rings round the Tigra – bad news for Vauxhall, whose Calibra has been sent off just as Ford substitute the tolerable Probe with the amazing Cougar.

Out on the wings the Frontera is still falling to pieces while the Maverick spins its wheels in wet grass, so we’ll call that one a draw. But there’s no doubt the Explorer is a damn sight more able than that Japanese player, the Monterey. It’s the same story on the other side of the pitch, where the Sintra is made to look wooden by the Galaxy – even though identical players are on offer for much less money elsewhere. Vauxhall gain a little ground in the midfield because while the Omega and Scorpio are equally talented, there’s no way you could raise additional funds by flogging posters of the Ford to teenagers. It doesn’t matter, though, because in the midfield Ford scores its biggest trump of the lot – the Mondeo. Even if Vauxhall’s front row could break past Ford’s, the Mondeo would stop them dead. The Corsa, too, is no match for the Fiesta, and Ford even provide the ball, in the shape of the Ka.

And now we come to the defence. Ford has the Escort, and Vauxhall has the Astra. And both are utter crap. They just bumble about, earning both teams a poor reputation for shoddy, unimaginative thinking. However, both are about to be pensioned off to run bars in the East End, allowing new, and apparently fresher, players to take over. For Vauxhall, the new Astra is critical. At the moment, their entire team is out of date or useless, or both. Ford’s army of fresh-faced attackers has a clear run of the whole pitch. If the Astra works, however, the blue-and-white team from Essex will be in trouble. They have a great front row and a stronger midfield but they’ll be up against a great defence.

One of these days, Vauxhall is bound to wake up. Two years ago, Man United would have beaten Derby without trying. But today?

Ford has to remember they’re up against General Motors, which has slightly more money than God. And in the end, as Fulham are about to prove, money is what matters.

Hell below decks – Clarkson puts das boot in

As I see it, there are three possibilities after death – heaven, which should be very nice; nothingness, which will be just like sleep; or hell, which no longer concerns me.

I don’t care what foul vat of sewage has been dreamt up by Lucifer because it cannot possibly be any worse than life on board an American aircraft carrier.

As you were heading for work on Monday morning, I was on board what looked like a winged washing machine, outbound from Norfolk, Virginia, to the nuclear-powered, 100,000 ton USS Dwight D Eisenhower, the biggest, fastest warship the world has ever seen.

Now I’ve talked before on these pages about the braking ability of a Porsche turbo, which goes from 70mph to 0 in 2.8 seconds. But that’s nothing. My plane, which was called a ‘cod’ and flew like one, hit the deck at 175mph and was stationary two seconds later.

Picking bits of spleen from the inside of my float-coat, a loud and hectoring sailor ushered me from what he called ‘the most dangerous place on earth’ – the flight deck of a carrier – into what I now know to be the worst place on earth – the bowels of a carrier.

A crew of 5000 live down there, spread over 17 decks which are interconnected by 17 miles of corridor, 66 ladders and a thousand watertight doors on which you bang your head.

There are no open spaces to sit and chill out. You aren’t allowed to have sex with the 500 women. Everything is fashioned from steel. And there are no windows. Then there’s the total lack of privacy, even when you’re on the lavatory, and the constant, deafening noise, 24 hours a day, for month after interminable month.

To get even the slightest idea what life is like for these sailors, imagine being locked into the back of a steel container and driven around on the back of an articulated lorry for six months. For company you have two eight-year-olds, one of whom is learning the recorder, and the other the violin. Then there are 30 young men with spots who shout at one another all day, and night, and for good measure one bloke who follows you around blowing a hairdryer in your face.

On the Eisenhower I was allocated a guide who walked like Herman Munster and talked like Barney Rubble. He was not a bright man. If I asked him a question he would repeat it, very slowly, and then, before answering in navy gobbledegook, say, ‘Now let’s see.’

On the second day, the ship’s tannoy announced that an F-18 had suffered an engine fire and was limping back to the carrier on just one of its General Electric turbofans. Barney, however, couldn’t care less because I’d just given him $10 to settle an $8 bill and this was confusing the hell out of him. ‘Now let’s see,’ he said.

It all ended well though, and a booming voice rose above the violin practice to say the plane had landed safely and that everyone on the ship, including Barney, I presume, had done, ‘an outstanding job’. This happens a lot.

At four in the morning, you will be woken by the booming tannoy: ‘Someone you have never met has done something you don’t care about in a part of the ship that you will never go to. Outstanding job.’

All I wanted was a drink and a cigarette, but there was one small hurdle that stood in the way – my fish/washing machine had to be attached to a steam catapult and hurled over the front of the ship.

Now this catapult is quite a thing. If it could be angled properly it would throw a Volkswagen Beetle 12 miles. But it was not angled and my cod weighed much more than a car. I just knew the plane would flop into the sea and tumble under the ship until it reached the stern, where the four 30 foot propellers would shred it, and me, into bite-sized chunks.

Here’s what happens. They attach the front wheel of your plane to what looks like a half-brick, which is then fired down 100 yards of track by a steam-powered piston. At the far end the wheel detaches itself and, hey presto, you’re airborne.

So in 100 yards, and just 1.5 seconds, I would accelerate from 0 to 175mph, and at long last we have a motoring flavour.

Apparently, there was some discussion at the very highest levels within BMW about the new M5. Burnt Fish Trousers himself was quoted recently, saying that there’s only a small gap between the current 540i and the physical limits of acceleration.

The Bee Em boffins were seriously concerned that they’d expend a great deal of time, energy and money designing an M5 which, in the end, would not be that much faster than a standard 540i.

But I’m delighted to say they went ahead anyway, and really, they needn’t have worried about this acceleration business. Even if the new 400bhp car does 0 to 60 in a single second, which it won’t, it’ll be nothing compared to the power delivered by that steam catapult. Only by stepping into the path of an Intercity train could you have even the vaguest inkling of what it’s like. You’d die, of course, but don’t worry; that’s much better than having to spend time on a carrier, believe me.

Country Life

You’re fast approaching middle age. You have a child. You live in London. All your friends live in London. You love London but those earnest men and women from the BBC’s Newsroom South East have planted the seeds of doubt.

Every night, they tell you that traffic has reached crisis point and that teams of scientists from the World Health Organization have found enough air pollution in Camden alone to kill every man, woman and child within a week. There’s anthrax in the Serpentine and a mugger in your wardrobe.

This has an effect, and you’re starting to wonder if maybe it’s time to move out. And then, one day, you pick up a copy of Country Life – the most dangerous magazine published today – and there, between the story about handkerchief makers and some bird with straw up her backside, you note that for the price of your four-bed-roomed house in Fulham you can buy Oxfordshire.

Instead of a backyard, you can have six buttercuppy acres, an Aga, a barn, a brook and a wide and varied selection of something called reception rooms.

I know how this feels because it happened to me. After 18 unswervingly happy years in Fulham I was exposed, for no more than 10 minutes, to a copy of Country Life, and within a month I was on my way to Hackett for some tweed. I was off to a new life in the Cotswolds.

We’d found a magnificent house and, even after we’d festooned it with satellite dishes to keep us amused on long, dark winter evenings, it was still magnificent as the removal trucks disgorged our entire belongings into a cupboard under the stairs. Understand, please, that furniture which fills a house in London isn’t going to fill a lavatory in the country.

Happily, we only had to watch buggy racing from Finland and the Dubai racing results for six nights before a cousin of someone who once sold a dog to a mild acquaintance in London rang, and we were off to a bottom-sniffing, getting-to-meet-the-locals drinks party.

This was just like the drinks parties we used to throw in our early London days, but it quickly became apparent that one vital ingredient was missing – there was drink, and bonhomie and an inglenook. But no one was flirting. Aged 20, you only want to meet people so that you can get them into bed. Aged 40, you only want to get to bed.

Samuel Johnson, it seems, was right. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. You go to London to live. And then, when you’ve served your biological purpose and had children, you move out. To die.

Children are always the excuse… but permit me to blow away a few myths on that score. My eldest is now nearly four and she hates – and I mean really hates – wind, rain, mud, trees, fields, tractors and snow. Once a wet leaf attached itself to her shoe and she wailed like a stuck pig for two hours.

Even though we have six pastoral acres to play with, she confines her activities largely to the playroom and her colouring set. And you should see the look on her younger brother’s face when I start the ride-on mower. You know how Robert Shaw looked when he was being eaten by that shark in Jaws? Well it’s like that, only the boy majors a little more strongly on the fear and terror.

Most mornings both children ask if we can go to the London flat so that they may swim at the Harbour Club, meet up with friends in Tootsies and take tea at Hurling-ham. Emily is known among friends as Tara Palmer Clarkson.

And don’t for one minute be taken in by this health business. Mothers say that children in London suffer from asthma and streaming eyes, but out here the hay fever is simply appalling and I heard last week of someone with diphtheria. Consumption is commonplace, and all I’ve got to look forward to is gout.

Then there’s the noise. Hear a sound at 4 a.m. in London and you’ll turn over and go back to sleep. Hear a sound out here at 4 a.m. and you’ll jump half-way out of your bloody skin. Twice a month, at least, I’m to be found in the middle of the night stomping round the house in my dressing gown, convinced that the scuffling sound my wife heard is a one-eyed Jethro who has broken in for a spot of under-age rumpy-pumpy. Usually, though, it’s a muntjac, which is a sort of big rat.

It’s nonsense to say the countryside is quiet. No one in London is troubled by wisteria tapping on their bedroom window, or crow-scarers. You get the rhythmic and distant rumble of jets on their final approach into Heathrow – we get the nasal drawl of model aeroplanes. You get the odd burglar alarm or party and you moan like hell. But it could be worse. You don’t, for instance, get combine harvesters working through the night, do you? Or badgers tripping your security lighting. Or campanology every bloody Sunday morning.

Sure, you have a constant background traffic roar, but we have born-again bikers who can be heard from 40 miles away. And if your child runs into the road he’ll be hit by a car doing 10. Out here, it’ll be doing 100.

In London, children can learn to ride their bicycles on Clapham Common in almost perfect safety. Mine will have to take their chances on a road that makes Silverstone’s Hangar Straight look like a farm track.

Mind you, cars are the only things that do move quickly. In London, you can pop to the corner shop for a packet of fags and be home in 30 seconds flat. You ask the shopkeeper to give you 20 Marlboro. He says £3.38. You pay. And that’s it. Me? I have to drive to the shop, and when I get there, it’s like I’ve got the lead in a soap opera. You can be there for hours.

First time I went, the bloke in front was holding a white fiver. The woman in front of him had a purse full of half-crowns. Nice thrupennies though. You can say that round here. No one knows what it means.

In the bank, the cashier always studies the cheques we pay in and exclaims in a loud enough voice to knock down barley, ‘Ooh that’s a lot of money.’ I’m not kidding here. It happens all the time, even when it’s a BBC repeat fee for £18.

I think half the problem is that in the countryside you can’t actually spend money. Go to the pub and people are playing shove ha’penny, so you leave. Go to the cinema and, although you can park outside, it is showing Lethal Weapon and everyone is coming out of the matinée saying they should make a sequel. Out here, Marc Bolan has not yet been supplanted by Mel Gibson as a sex symbol and Leonardo di Caprio has not yet been born.

However, I must confess that a world removed from that Norman Lamont lookalike in short trousers cannot be all bad.

It isn’t, really, and the chief reason is parking. In London, I became used to spending the last half hour of my day roaming the streets looking for somewhere to stop. And I became used to this, like you can become used to white noise or pain, only really noticing it when it goes away.

And believe me, I’ve noticed that nowadays my car is parked right outside the back door every single morning. Think about that. Think about never worrying about looking for a meter ever again.

And think, too, about pulling out of your gate in the morning, knowing that you can be doing 100mph in as long as it takes your car to get there. Oh sure, provincial towns have horrendous rush-hour jams but they’re short-lived, lasting from five-to until five-past nine, and then in the evening from 5.29 until 5.35.

People, after all, are in no hurry to have a drink after work with their new secretary, or that girl they met at a drinks party last night. They have their vegetable gardens to weed and things to shoot.

Seriously, everyone in the countryside shoots everything. I’ve become so caught up in this that last night I went into the kitchen garden and shot all the thistles from their moorings. In London, all I ever wanted to do was meet Kate Moss. Out here, all I want to do is shoot a muntjac. I also talk about moles a lot.

And this is a worry. I do get up to London regularly, and I do meet up for lunch with bright-eyed urbanites, but when it’s my turn to talk I have to pause and gather my thoughts before speaking. When they’ve been on about Mogens Tholstrup for half an hour, it’s important to avoid the mole-hill tangent.

And anyway, all I ever want to do is get lunch over so that I can wander up and down Jermyn Street. I could walk for miles in London, breathing in the abuse from taxi drivers and checking out the hemlines. The shop windows are full of mysteries: motorized pepper grinders and compass cuff links. There’s a bustle. The people have a sense of purpose.

Contrast that to a walk in the countryside. It’s an aimless amble with just one goal – to get back home again, to your Aga and your noisy plumbing. On a walk in the countryside you’ll see trees and brambles, but where’s the fun in that? You’ve seen them before, and you’ll see them again. A bramble is not, and never will be, even remotely interesting. And nor is a fern. And nor is a woodpecker – not that we see too many of those out here. They’ve all been shot.

So why then, really, am I here? Well it’s simple, actually. If you live in London, you can’t have a Ferrari.

Beetle mania

Launching the new Beetle to quite the largest gathering of motoring journalists I’ve ever seen could not have been easy for Dr Ferdinand Piech, head of Volkswagen. Obviously, he had to make reference to the old Beetle – which, rather inconveniently, was inspired by Adolf Hitler. This is not a big selling point. Hitler told his motor industry to design a little car so people could enjoy the new autobahns. It should cost less than 900 Marks and it would be called the ‘Strength Through Joy’. Again, not a big selling point. Only after the war, when a British major got the old Wolfsburg factory up and running again, did the rear-engined tool with its unusual faired-in headlamps come to be known as the Beetle. And who came up with that? Step forward Gordon Wilkins – one of the first Top Gear presenters. Does this mean that in future the Vectra will be called the Dungheap?

None of this war stuff was mentioned in the press conference. Instead, we got Janis Joplin singing, rather cleverly, ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a brand-new Beetle’. And afterwards, in one of the most lavish corporate videos I’ve ever seen, we saw hippies and flower-power people, at Woodstock and in San Francisco, naked and stoned. Earlier, we had been to a huge party in the old Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, where, to the accompaniment of the worst Hendrix tribute artist in the world, waitresses in miniskirts and waiters in tie-dye T-shirts offered us free love and beer. But why, for heaven’s sake? The Beetle has been around for seven decades. Why should it have come to symbolize the ’60s?

The video could have shown SS stormtroopers burning books in Poland, or vast hordes of underpaid Mexican peasants, or my mum using her Beetle to jump-start yet another of my dad’s ailing Fords. And it would have been just as relevant. I mean, the Queen Mother was around in the 1960s too, but she’s hardly an icon of free love is she?

Anyway, when the rather clever video, which had been set to The Who’s ‘My Generation’ and the Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’, finished, the lights in that vast auditorium were turned back on and there on the stage were… seven Germans in suits. They’d been hammering away all evening about what fun the old Beetle had been and how much fun the new one was, and yet… and yet. Fun. German. German. Fun. These two words do not sit well together. Dr Piech, notorious in the car world as easily the least funny man alive, tried to smile, but I suspect there was a public relations man under his desk tickling him. It was more of a grimace.

I suppose that now is a good time to explain that I was never a fan of the old Beetle. I mean the engine was air-cooled – why? And located at the back, behind the rear axle – why? It had a crappy suspension design too, so anyone trying to corner with any verve would end up facing the other way, or dead. The heater didn’t work, the six-volt power supply was disingenuous, and if weathermen even thought it might drizzle later, the sills would oxidize. It was a poor design, badly built and horrid to drive. And that’s exactly why it did so well in the 1960s. It was bought by a bunch of tree-huggers precisely because it was crappy. Ideally, they would like to have driven around in a bush, but as this was not possible they chose the worst car available. Like now. Visit any road protesters’ hide-out and you’ll find the car park awash with 2CVs. Another anti-car car.

At this point, fans of the Beetle will doubtless point out that 21 million have been sold, many to people like my mum, who has never felt tempted to hug a silver birch. Quite right, and nor do the vast army of South American Beetle drivers have much to do with trees – except for chopping a lot of them down, that is. Sure, but, you see, the Beetle’s greatest strength has always been its cheapness. It was designed to be cheap, and in Mexico, where it lives on, it still is. My mum had one because it was cheap. Tree-huggers had them because they were cheap. Students buy them even today because they’re cheap. But they are not, and never have been, fun. Whereas with the new car, it’s the other way round.

Football is an A Class drug

As it’s the British Grand Prix today, you’re probably expecting this column to focus on the battle between the talent of Michael Schumacher and the technical supremacy of McLaren. Well sorry, but I just don’t care any more.

Along with most of the country I’ve recently been introduced to football, and I’ve seen the light. That match between England and Argentina was, without any question or shadow of doubt, the most gut-wrenching two hours of my entire life.

I genuinely do not know how football fans live though this torment every weekend. During the penalty shootout I was, medically speaking, in the throes of a massive coronary. My heart had stopped, and even if a Bengal tiger had started to savage my wife, I’d have been unable to move. Football has introduced me to the true meaning of passion.

If someone overtakes a Ferrari during a motor race, I’ll tut and wander into the kitchen to see if by some miracle there’s a cold sausage in the fridge. But when Argentina were awarded that penalty, I found myself sprawled on the floor demanding that a gunboat be sent immediately to Copenhagen harbour. I wanted to rip the little mermaid to shreds. I sobbed to my wife that we would never, EVER have Danish bacon in the house again. EVER, do you understand? And then David Beckham was sent off.

I thought I hated the referee, but this was something else. My brain concocted a whole new chemical for this one. Had you cut me at that moment, I’d have bled concentrated sulphuric acid. When they showed that slow-motion replay of Beckham’s ill-tempered foul, I really and truly wanted to smash him in the face with a tyre iron. And even now, two weeks later, I still lie awake at night dreaming up new and imaginative ways of making him pay. I’m told he sometimes goes out dressed as a woman. Well good, because when I’m finished with him he will be one.

It wasn’t all hatred though. As the game unfolded I began to fall in love with Tony Adams, fantasizing about moving with him to a little cottage in Devon and rearing geese. And when Michael Owen scored that goal to put England ahead, I experienced a euphoria way beyond the ken of mortal man.

So when England were knocked out I couldn’t simply stop watching. I needed more of these incredible highs and they came in spades when Germany lost 3–0 to a country that didn’t even exist five years ago.

I suspect all of us like to see the Germans fail from time to time, and that’s why I’ve rather enjoyed this whole Mercedes A Class saga. This tiny little hatchback, with its extraordinarily large interior, was going to take over the world. But half-way through Poland it fell over.

A journalist discovered that if you performed a sudden lane-change manoeuvre at anything above 37mph, the A Class would flip onto its roof. On the whole, this was a ‘bad thing’.

So bad, in fact, that Mercedes withdrew their new wonder-car from sale and set about making some changes. Clever traction control was added, the suspension was modified, and now the A Class is back.

So, have the changes worked? Well this week I waved a tearful goodbye to the children, checked my life insurance policy, took the baby Benz to an airfield, and went completely bonkers. I built it up to 90mph and went from full left lock to full right lock. I braked in the middle of corners, I did handbrake turns. I completely wrecked the tyres. And I’m sitting here now, writing this, so all is well…

… nearly. Unfortunately, the changes Mercedes made to the suspension have endowed the A Class with quite the most unforgiving ride you could possibly imagine. You would have David Beckham round for tea before you’d deliberately run over a cat’s-eye in this car.

I was therefore staggered to read that, for £180, you can fit firm, sports suspension. Really, you mustn’t. It’s quite firm enough already, and anyway, this most definitely is not a sports car. Try any sort of speedy driving and in half a nanosecond the traction control comes down on you like a silicone ton of bricks.

I really do believe that what we have here is a bad chassis with a Band-Aid on it. It doesn’t work and, anyway, the A Class is ridiculously expensive. I know it’s a Mercedes but I find it hard to accept that a car which is shorter than a Ford Fiesta should cost, depending on the engine and trim you choose, between £14,490 and £17,890.

This is a great deal of money, especially when I tell you that Renault will sell you a larger, more comfortable and more practical Scenic for less than £13,000.

And yet. To drive a Scenic is to advertise the fact that you’ve had it. You have children and a gut. Your life is ruled, not by a need to be attractive and funny, but by the prices at Ikea. I’ve seen you in the supermarket, buying washing-up bowls.

The Mercedes may be horrid to drive and stupidly expensive, but in St Tropez this year it is the car. It may come with a boot, space inside for five and an engine that, in a head-on crash, slides under your legs. But it is also cool and funky. For years we’ve been eating lettuce and now Mercedes has given us some rocket.

Yank tank flattens Prestbury

I suspect that last year some corporate bigwig at General Motors was given an atlas for Christmas. And I suppose it must have been quite a shock for the poor chap to find that his teachers, the newspapers and the television news had all been lying.

Imagine. For 50 years he had known without any doubt that God was called Hank and that the world stopped at Los Angeles. He knew the Americans had tried without success to find new civilizations – the launch pad at Cape Canaveral was proof of that. But here on his lap was this atlas – a book which spoke of strange and exotic new places where people breathed air and had central heating and Corby trouser presses. And yes, even cars.

Back at work after the Christmas break he would have been treated as something of a lunatic, as he rushed around telling his colleagues that there were life forms outside the USA. ‘What? In the ocean you mean? Fish? Whales? Sea cucumbers?’

‘No no. There are bipeds. In places like Japan and South Africa and The United Britain. And we can sell them cars. All we need do is put the steering wheel on the other side. We’ll be rich.’

And this did it, because now there’s an armada of General motors heading for the UK. There’s the Chevrolet Camaro, the big four-wheel drive Blazer, the Corvette and, most amazingly of all, the £40,000 Cadillac Seville STS.

Oh dear. I appear to have put Prestbury into a state of cataclysmic shock. For years, people in the neo-Georgian suburbs of Manchester have been on the look-out for something a little more vulgar and ostentatious than a Rolls-Royce, and now it’s coming. Not since Parker Knoll brought out their last recliner has Cheshire been in quite such a heightened state of expectation. The people there need to know what this new car is like.

Well now, I drove a Cadillac Seville last year and it was simply incredible. You could stop, get out, go shopping, have dinner and when you got back to the car three hours later it would still be rocking back and forth.

It may have looked a little more restrained than the finned, chromed monsters from the late 1950s but it was still as soft as a puppy, with the directional control of Bambi. In Arizona it was, of course, very comfortable, but for trips into Wilmslow it would have been utterly hopeless.

Cadillac, however, has not only moved the steering wheel but they’ve also changed the suspension. Indeed, I drove one this week and can report it doesn’t really have any.

They’ve noted that while American footballers take to the field in an all-over body tampon, rugby players protect their bones with nothing more than a shirt. So they obviously figure we don’t need springs or dampers – just four bloody great RSJs. And the he-man steering is so macho the wheel has a full beard.

There is, however, terrible disappointment elsewhere in the interior. Cheshire, I’m sure, was hoping for pearlescent vulgalour upholstery, Las Vegas lighting and button-backed, white carpets. But no. You get black leather and exactly the same sort of wood they used on Garrard turntables in 1975. You don’t even get a back-lit gold Cadillac motif in the middle of the steering wheel.

But do not think for one minute that this is a low-key sports saloon like the BMW 5 series. It has front-wheel drive for a start, and the automatic gearbox works in geological time. Put your foot down and several aeons will slide by before it kicks down.

And nor is it an executive cruiser. First of all, it is stupidly noisy thanks to absurd tyre roar and second, the driver’s seat is modelled on an electric chair. It features a device called auto lumbar support, which moves in tandem with your body.

Unfortunately, it was designed to support the average American back, which is a task every bit as difficult as propping up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I suspect that slender, lettuce-fed Prestbury backs will tire very quickly of being asked to rest on what is basically a piece of heavy engineering.

But you will never tire of the engine. This 4.6 litre V8 produces 300 horsepower, and that’s enough, despite the best efforts of the Darwinian gearbox, to get the Seville from 0 to 60 in 6.8 seconds and on to 150. Apparently, 19mpg should also be possible, and it is, if you are towed everywhere.

So what’s the big deal then? Well, not only does it sound utterly wonderful at high revs but it only needs servicing once every 100,000 miles. And, thanks to clever cylinder management, it can even run for 50 miles with no oil and no water. This will be a boon to the mink coat and no-knickers set, who are forever laughing over a lettuce lunch about how, that morning, they filled up the washer bottle with diesel.

An amazing engine, however, isn’t enough. If only they’d sent the Seville here with pleblon seats and Fablon decals down the side, Prestbury would gave gone, to coin a local phrase, ‘mad for it’.

But instead, they’ve toned it down, hoping to pick up a few BMW and Jaguar drivers. And they’ve failed on that one too, because the Seville just isn’t good enough. It was a brave effort from our man with the atlas, but then it was a brave effort too the last time an American picked up a map of the world… and the army got sent to Vietnam.

Supercar suicide

Tiff doesn’t want you to know this, and after telling you I’m probably going to need another boyfriend, but last week, at the Pembury race track in Wales, he stuffed a Honda NSX. When Quentin and I heard, we exchanged glances and immediately guessed what had happened. Tiff, we reckoned, was too vain to wear his glasses on television, but without them he’s something of a mole. He was just trundling along, flashing his boyish smile at the camera and quite simply, never saw the corner.

In fact, the truth is somewhat different. You see, I’ve now seen the footage, and Tiff saw the corner just fine. He was sailing round it with a fair bit of understeer which he tried to correct with a little flick – a little soupçon to upset the back end. It worked too, but the rear just snapped round, lunging Tiff and £70,000-worth of supercar towards the end of the pit wall. Now, if you hit the end of a wall sideways, at 80mph, you’re dead. It would have been Goodnight Tiff. But, amazingly, the car slid into the pit lane and had scrubbed nearly all its speed off when it hit a bank of tyres at 30mph or so. Tiff says the accident happened in slow motion and that he had time to sit there wondering what on earth had gone wrong. I mean, being a racing driver, the accident obviously wasn’t his fault… And much as it pains me to admit this, I think he’s right. It isn’t that he’s old and blind. It’s the NSX. I think there’s something wrong with it.

You see, back in the dim and distant past, Derek Warwick tested one of these cars for us… and spun off. In the Nurburgring story we ran, back in the autumn, the only car to leave the track with Barry ‘Whizzo’ Williams at the helm was the NSX. And now I’m hearing rumours that Mark Hales, another seriously good race driver, recently stuffed one.

So that’s the NSX off the list then. You see, here’s my problem. Last night, while my wife and I snuggled up in front of Kavanagh QC, she leant across and, out of the blue, said: ‘So, are you going to keep the Ferrari then?’ This is the equivalent of a salesman with his foot in the door just before he barges into the living room and spreads brochures all over the rug. Right now, she’s wondering why I keep a car that I hardly ever use. Pretty soon the wondering stops. And the recriminations start. To be honest, I’ve toyed with the idea of changing it, but for what? Certainly not an NSX and, much as I am impressed by the sports-exhausted Diablo, I’m not a has-been rock star. I have to admit I’ve been going through a Lancia Stratos phase, but I fear I’d use that even less than the 355. (He strokes his chin…) I’ve also thought about the Jaguar XJ220.

I’m sure you know by now that the new left-hand drives are up for sale at an Essex dealer for the sum of £150,000 each. You can, however, acquire a lightly used right-hooker, I understand, for a mere £85,000. At 17 feet long and 7 feet wide, you have to admit that the 220 is an awful lot of car for £85,000. I had to admit it too, which is why last week I found myself in Wales driving an XJ220 for the first time, in anger. I’d been told it was heavy and cumbersome but when you bury the throttle, the power is sensational. This is noticeably more accelerative than a Ferrari F50 and, as we all know, much faster at the top end. It’s also a stable high-speed cruiser. You may have noticed in recent years that in race trim the McLarens have sprouted elongated tails – which makes them more steady at 220mph. But the Jag comes with a lengthy back end to start with.

I have to admit, I was falling madly in love with this previously unloved hypercar – until I needed to brake hard, that is. In the nick of time, I heard a little voice in my head. It was Tiff saying the XJ220 would be a lot better if only it had brakes. And so, when I stamped on the pedal, I was half ready for what happened. And what happened was nothing. Honestly, it was amazing. I had both feet on the pedal and I was still doing 100mph or more. I was still doing 100mph when I got home and saw the Ferrari just sitting there. Swap it? You must be joking. I’d rather lend it to Needell.

Bedtime stories with Hans Christian Prescott

I have a dream. I see a world with happy, rosy-cheeked children scrumping apples. When you ring to book a seat at the cinema you will talk, not to a machine, but to Ma Larkin. And there will be an interval in the film where you eat pork pies and fudge.

No one will have a mobile phone that plays ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ and Bernard Cribbins will run your local railway station. Estuary English will be spoken only in the Thames Estuary which, incidentally, will be full of cormorants. And no one will die of anything.

Now I could publish this in a White Paper but you’d all laugh. You’d know that the Thames Estuary children would shoot all the cormorants and that Bernard Cribbins is already dead.

Well it’s much the same deal with the vision of Britain outlined this week by Mr Prescott in his much talked-about White Paper. I’ve read every one of the 160 pages and it is fantastic. No one could possibly argue with any one of the fat man’s dreams but, sadly, that’s what they are – dreams.

Take point 5.10. ‘We need to improve the image of the bus if we are to attract people who are used to the style and comfort of modern cars.’ And it goes on to say that the bus industry must respond to the challenge with a vehicle designed for the twenty-first century.

Right, well if you want me out of the car and in one of your buses by 2000, you’ve got 18 months to come up with a vehicle that can do this…

Yesterday, while making a white sauce, I found I needed some more milk and had to get to and from the shop in less than three minutes. I shall need a service that can handle this.

This afternoon, my mother is coming to Oxfordshire from Peterborough with two small children and their nanny. They don’t want to go via two train stations in London. So, if this new public transport is going to be as convenient as the car, there must be a bus service from Castor to Chipping Norton, 30 times a day.

And on board the bus I want electric Recaro seats finished in the finest hide, I want television, I want air conditioning and I must be able to play whatever music I wish without disturbing any of the other passengers. Also, there must be a screen, such as you find in the first class section of a British Airways 777, so that I can pick my nose without being overlooked. I shall also wish to smoke.

The bus must also be eco-friendly, so obviously a diesel engine is out of the question. Gas might be an answer, but a big V8 is better. Certainly, I shall be looking for 0 to 60 in less than ten seconds and a top speed of 150 or so. And it must be designed by Pininfarina.

OK. Got all that? Well it gets worse because the service, I’m afraid, has to be free. You see, Mr Prescott has said it’s all right for me to have a car but that I must leave it at home more often. Fine, but I’ll have paid for it and road tax is applicable no matter how infrequently I use it. I therefore can’t afford to spend even more money on a bus fare.

To address this, the White Paper says that I will have to pay to use motorways and that I will be charged if I drive into a city centre. I see, and how will this be done then?

Will there be toll booths on every single road into London, all 10,000 of them? Or will I be forced to fit my car with an electronic device that can be read by roadside monitors? And if so, who will pay for this device to be fitted?

Sadly, the White Paper fails to explain this, in the same way that Enid Blyton fails to explain how Noddy, a wooden puppet, manages to converse with an elephant.

Undaunted, Mr Prescott goes on to say that by charging tolls to use roads, and taxing car-parking spaces, super-efficient, dream-world local authorities will be able to raise a billion pounds a year. They won’t lose it. They won’t waste it on twinning ceremonies. They’ll spend it on public transport.

Oh dear. I’m afraid that in Mr Prescott’s world, where everyone drinks Ovaltine and Jenny Agutter is 13, a billion pounds is a lot of money. But in fact a new double-decker costs £130,000, and as a result a billion won’t even buy one for each town in the country.

The chances therefore, of getting a service from Castor to Chipping Norton 30 times a day are somewhat remote.

But that’s not the end of the world. You see, if car travel were as bad as everyone says, no one would do it. And things are going to get better and better.

Already, we have the same number of cars on the roads as we do people with driving licences. So unless we perfect the art of driving two cars at once, the projected 30 per cent increase in traffic volume just can’t happen. In fact, as people start to work at home more often, it’ll probably decrease slightly.

I do, however, think that Mr Prescott’s White Paper has a place. If it were illustrated with attractive drawings, it might even supersede ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ as my daughter’s favourite night-time story.

Clarkson soils his jeans

It was announced this week that the market for jeans has suffered a dramatic fall, and that I am completely responsible.

Marketing experts at the Daily Mail say that because of my fondness for the denim trouser, youngsters now see jeans as old people’s clothing, and as a result, won’t buy them. This has been christened the ‘Jeremy Clarkson Effect’.

Wow. My very own effect. You can forget knighthoods and OBEs. They’re for people. I’m to be talked about with the reverence of a star or a moon. I’m a galactic guiding light and I’m going to be very, very rich.

You see, the British jeans market shrank from £609.5 million in 1996/7 to a paltry £561.2 million in 1997/8. That’s a fall of 14.3 per cent, and I don’t doubt for one minute that the people at Levi’s and Lee are desperate.

Well chaps, I have a solution. Pay me £40 million a year and I’ll stop wearing them.

But what shall I wear instead? I can’t possibly switch to trousers. Trousers are what you needed to wear to get into northern nightclubs, aged 18. Trousers are what you bought at Harry Fenton in the Arndale Centre. My father wore trousers. Jim Callaghan wore trousers.

I wore jeans in 1976 because there was no real choice. Oh sure, Levi’s did a range of corduroys in rebellious, lurid colours and I once sent away to a company that advertised in the back of New Musical Express for a pair of velvet loons. But while bulldozing myself into them they burst, and that was that.

You must understand that I was brought up under the ‘David Dundas Effect’. I told my careers master that I didn’t care what I did after leaving school, so long as I didn’t have to wear a suit. And to this day, I still don’t own one.

My father used to sit at the kitchen table in his slacks telling me that by trying to be different I had ended up looking the same as everyone else. As far as he was concerned Led Zep sounded just the same as Rick Wakeman and jeans were jeans.

But jeans, most emphatically, were not just jeans. You would not, for instance, be seen dead in a pair of Wranglers. Wranglers were too dark and even after two years they still felt and looked too stiff. I once chucked a girlfriend when she came out at night with a brace of Ws on her backside.

Wranglers were for people who liked country-and-western music, so back then I wore Levi’s with the forward tip of the flare hanging exactly a quarter of an inch over the platform sole of my shoe. And then, when I was first introduced to The Clash, I switched to straight-leg C17s from France.

And today, the badge is still important. Today, I see Levi’s as a bit too Toto, a bit too middle-of-the-road American soft rock. I therefore wear British Lee Coopers and I can still spot M & S denim at 1000 paces.

Furthermore, I am not alone. Andy Wilman, my producer and co-presenter on Top Gear Waterworld, once trod in some human excrement while walking through an unlit Calcutta backstreet. As we sat over dinner in the Fairlawn Hotel he examined the splashes of faeces exclaiming, ‘Well this is a bird-puller.’

Back at our hotel he deposited them in the laundry and was horrified, when they came back, to discover that the Indians had ironed a crease down the front. And of course, once a crease has been ironed in, that telltale faded line never goes away. So he threw them in the bin.

So, let’s just sum up here. He was prepared to keep them after they’d been bathed in shit, but once they’d been stained with the indelible mark of a man who lives at home and lets his mother do the ironing they had to be binned. I understand that completely.

And I was therefore horrified to be accused in the Independent this week of wearing ‘nasty, really nasty, stone-washed jeans’. I have never, and will never, wear stone-washed anything. Thank Christ it was the Independent so no one will have read this astonishing and libellous slur.

But the point has been made all week. Jeans are for old men. Ian McShane is 55. Tony Blair is 44 and I’m 38. We wear jeans and we listen to original Doobie Brothers tunes in the car, not the jungle remix versions. And it’s all our fault that denim sales are in freefall. The moon does the tides. The sun does the central heating. And I do for Levi Strauss.

But sadly, this isn’t entirely accurate. The real reason why today’s poulets de printemps are not buying jeans is because they have a choice which extends beyond the impractical loon.

Today, you don’t have to look like Roger Daltrey. You can, if you wish, decide to model yourself on a 19-year-old negro from the east wing of an American jail. Seriously, they’re not allowed to have belts in Yank clink and, as a result, wear their trousers so low on the hip that their underwear is on plain view.

Upon their release they continue to dress in this fashion, to show they’ve been in jail and thus get some respect. And as a result, everyone now shows off the elastic of their underwear as a means of demonstrating some wayward past.

Last year, in Texas, I met a chap who had the low rider strides but no underpants. You could see the top of his penis, and I must confess I found this rather shocking. But that, I suppose, is the point.

At agreeable dinner parties round these parts, we sit around pompously wondering how on earth our children will shock us with their behaviour. We know all about drugs and we’ve all staggered from sweaty dives at four in the morning with perforated eardrums. I’ve even been in the cells. Twice.

But come on. We never had ecstasy or alcopops. My father used to listen to ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ with his fingers in his ears, telling me over and over that it was just tuneless noise. Which is pretty much how I react when Top of the Pops comes on these days. Modern music is supposed to scare the old. Yes it used to scare my Mum in the same way that I’m frightened half to death these days by rap artistes advising their fans to kill a pig.

Then there’s television. We had Tiswas, where people threw custard pies at one another and Sally James wore a tank top. Now we’ve got TFI Friday and stuff on late at night that I really, really don’t understand.

So of course jeans sales are falling. I bet Rick Wakeman doesn’t shift many CDs either. Times move on.

And in terms of fashion, they’ve moved on to combat trousers. The original supply of army surplus clothing dried up years ago, so today the big names in fashion are offering a trouser with baggy side pockets and an infantry cut. If Tony Blair really does want to be seen as a man of the people this is what he needs – a pair of Gap cargo pants, as I believe they’re called.

And the jeans people have to stop worrying. They’ve been at the top for nigh on 30 years and now The Verve and Oasis have kicked them into touch. They need to accept that the denim trouser is no longer at the cutting edge of rebellion and is now acceptable in all but the most stuffy clubs and restaurants.

I’m sorry to bring cars into the equation here but the denim industry would be well advised to talk to Honda, whose cars appeal largely to the older, more mature driver. What’s wrong with that? What’s the point of spending a fortune making something fashionable and cool when it just isn’t. And anyway the old outnumber the young. It’s a bigger market with more spending power.

Jeans, you see, will never go away. On Tuesday night I wore a pair at dinner in some desperately flash German hotel in Baden-Baden and the next day I was scrabbling around in them on an oily conveyor belt at Heathrow. You can’t do both in any other sort of trouser.

Burning rubber with Tara Palmer-Tailslide

If you want to arrive at the Pearly Gates in soggy pants, you don’t need to have died at the hands of a firing squad – just try climbing into a car with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. I’ve been in an F-15 and I’ve done 0 to 60 in one second on a snowmobile. Next week, I shall land on an aircraft carrier and a day later, strapped into an F-14, I shall take off again. I know, understand and can cope with fear.

But I lost control completely after half an hour in a car with Tara. The bladder went, and round the back, I was touching cloth. That woman is easily the maddest driver the world has ever seen. I wasn’t scared to start with; it was the tail end of the rush hour, we were in the middle of London and it was raining. So even though she was using a Honda NSX, which we know to be tail-happy and skittish, I felt we’d spend most of the time doing 3mph. But no. On Chelsea Bridge, she put her foot down hard in first gear and I felt the back starting to weave, the power straining the very upper echelons of the traction control’s restraining bolt. Then we were into second, foot still hard down, heading for what was unquestionably a set of red lights. The next time I opened my eyes we were heading up Sloane Street at Mach one… and then we weren’t. There was a squeal accompanied by a full-bore test of the NSX’s anti-lock braking system. ‘Gucci’s got a new window display,’ she wailed.

During the next 26 minutes we’d stop at red lights and, on each occasion, the driver alongside was scrutinized. If he was good-looking, there was some flirting then a race. If he was ugly, she’d skip straight to the race. And she never lost. Throughout London that night a trail of BMWs and Porsches were left dazed and confused at the side of the road, their drivers emerging from the tangled mess asking passers-by, quietly, for hot sweet tea. They looked like they’d been victims of a tornado, and in a sense, they had. They’d been TP-T-ed.

Now earlier in the day, I’d talked to various girls who have finally realized that there’s no point spending a fortune on clothes and hairstyles if they are going to go out at night in a crappy car. So Katy Hill from Blue Peter has a Porsche Boxster. Emma Noble has an MGF (while boyfriend James Major has a corduroy Rover 200). Dani Behr has a BMW 328 convertible and Julia Bradbury, from something called Channel 5, has a Mercedes SLK. I shot the breeze with all of them about how these new sports cars are very definitely for the girlies, and how men today need to spend more if they want something macho. And all of them said that the biggest problem they faced on the roads was blokes trying to take them on. And that struck me as odd. I mean, I’m a bloke and I never, ever, feel the need to race a girl at the lights just because she’s a girl. I phoned all my male friends and they all said the same – we like a fit bird in a nice car. It looks good. I therefore suspect that it is not men who take on women. It is the other way round.

It’s like Kuwait. After the recent unpleasantness people there walk around with their chests puffed out, telling their neighbours in the north that they have all sorts of new hardware and will take them on any day. Iraq, on the other hand, can afford to sit there doing nothing, and it’s still frightening. Iraq is a past aggressor. Iraq is a man. And Iraq won’t ever attack Kuwait again. Men, in recent months, have also been strangled by sanctions.

Turn on the television and you’ll find Playing the Field, where a bunch of women bully their husbands, have affairs and play football. And then there’s Real Women, where the women are men and the men are hopeless. In both, sex scenes are all-woman affairs.

We’ve now got women jet pilots, women boxers and women like Madeleine Albright and Mo Mowlam sorting out the world’s trouble spots; and in the charts Take That and Boyzone have been replaced by All Saints and the Spice Girls. I’m all for equality, but it does seem at the moment that the pendulum has swung rather too far in the other direction. So, if TP-T ever comes alongside me at the traffic lights she should be aware that I now have a supercharged V8 under the bonnet, that the Jag in question isn’t mine, and that I will win.

Jag sinks its teeth in

So, what’s been happening this week then? Well I’ve been to St Tropez for a little break, but as I rented a diesel-powered Citroen people-carrier it’s hard to think of a motoring angle.

What else? Oh I know. While screaming down a test track in Wiltshire on Tuesday, I crashed a 215mph, £750,000 Jaguar XJR15. And I suppose that, with a bit of hyperbole here and a small embellishment there, this is quite good column material.

I’d been warned about this remarkable supercar before I ever squeezed my haddock-sized frame into that sardine tin they call a cockpit. Derek Warwick, the former Grand Prix driver, was very unkind about its waywardness and my colleague Tiff Needell called it ‘the worst-handling car ever made’.

It seems that though it was conceived as a road-going Le Mans car and was turned back into a racing car again, the engine is located so far from the ground that it’s a menace to orbiting satellites. So the car has its centre of gravity in the clouds and, to make matters worse, no downforce at all. And that, in a car of this type, is as bad as having an aeroplane with no lift.

This, I’m sure, was a big concern for the boys who raced them, but I was at Kemble Airfield surrounded by mile upon mile of runway.

I hit the starter and behind a wafer-thin fire wall a 6.0 litre V12 engine exploded into life. It’s so noisy that it kills all known wildlife within a 50 mile radius – even worms – and at full chat it rocks the needles on seismographs in California.

Completely deaf, I started to grapple with the gear lever which, though this is a right-hand drive car, was located by my right knee. Move it a millimetre to the left and you’re in first; 1.1 millimetres and you’re in reverse. This makes changing gear a more exact science than splitting the atom.

And then there’s the clutch. Equipped with the sort of spring that they use on oil rig platforms, there is nothing for the first 9 inches of travel and then, just when you think you’re still in neutral, drive is fired at the back wheels and you’re doing 80mph. Backwards sometimes, if you got the wrong gear.

I was really very scared, even though I knew there was nothing to hit… except the camera car. But you can’t hit a great big blue Mondeo which is always travelling in the same direction as you are, at the same speed.

I did though. After a 15 minute bottom-sniffing, getting-to-know-you period I made sure the XJR15 was pointing in a dead straight line and, in second gear at 50mph, floored the throttle.

On the streaming wet runway the car started to slide, but it was hard, in the cockpit, to detect this loss of traction, this imperceptible drift to the left. So I kept my foot hard down and didn’t really start to dial in some opposite lock until it was far too late. The back flicked the other way and bang, my front corner slammed into the camera car, the only solid object within 40 miles.

Damage to the Jaguar was remarkably light, but its owner pointed out that even a 4 inch crease in a double-skinned piece of honeycombed carbon-fibre cannot be knocked back into shape by an apprentice mechanic. It needed a whole new front end, and guess what – Halfords don’t sell nose sections for the Jaguar XJR15. No one does. Only 30 cars were ever made, and after 11 were crashed in one race alone there are no spare parts left.

Had I been equipped with a tail at this point, I’d have put it between my legs and run off into the bushes, where I would have beaten myself with twigs. But then the owner said he’d use a bit of filler and all would be well. Filler in a £750,000 car – that’s like using Humbrol to touch up the Haywain.

Still, I am now officially a bad workman so I’m allowed to blame my tool. The XJR15 may be one of the most beautiful cars ever to see the light of day but it is bloody dangerous. And there’s nothing to stop you taking this automotive psychopath on to the road, for heaven’s sake.

I read recently that the area of contact between the four tyres on a car and the road would fit on a piece of A4 paper. So it isn’t so much skill that you need to handle a car like the XJR15, but temperament. You must be aware that if the road is even slightly greasy, you cannot apply full power or the tyres will lose traction and you will crash.

In an ordinary car you can mash the throttle into the carpet whenever you like, but in a 200mph hypercar you have to employ the restraint of a saint. You must feed the power in gently, let the clutch in slowly, turn the wheel carefully. Basically, if you have a Jaguar XJR15, or a Ferrari F50 or a McLaren F1, you must drive slowly.

This, I know, is a bit like going to the best restaurant in town and ordering beans on toast, but that’s the way it is. If you want to drive around like your hair’s on fire, rent yourself a diesel-powered Citroen people-carrier. I did and I never crashed once.

Kraut carnage in an Arnage

So, our fat friend at the Department of Transport has decided there will be no more roads, and the summer’s been terrible, but cheer up. Things could be worse. You could be Dr Ferdinand Piech’s cat.

Last month, the steely-eyed chairman of Volkswagen surveyed the breadth of his domain and realized, like Alexander the Great, that there were no more worlds to conquer.

Volkswagen’s net earnings were up 70 per cent and it owned a raft of other household names – Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Cosworth and Lamborghini. He was a leading German industrialist, one of the richest men in Europe and an heir to the Porsche family fortune.

And on top of all that, he had just paid £470 million for Rolls-Royce, which meant he not only had the factory in Crewe but Bentley as well. This was the jewel in his crown and, with only the Sudetenland to go, things were looking pretty damn rosy.

He couldn’t have known that within a week he would be ranked alongside that American chappy from Arizona who bought the wrong bridge. He lost Rolls-Royce. One minute he had it, and then it was gone. And worse, he was beaten by a fellow German – Peter Burnt Fish Trousers, the man with the face fungus from pipsqueak BMW.

Can you imagine what it must have felt like when he discovered that he would have to give – give – Rolls-Royce to this impudent upstart? The rage. The angst. The cat. I need to kick something. Where is the bloody cat?

The upshot is simple. In exchange for £2.50, BMW now owns the rights to make Rolls-Royce Motor Cars – something they will do at a new purpose-built plant in the UK.

Volkswagen, on the other hand, has a factory where the instruction manual for the boiler is written in Latin. And Bentley, whose new car has a BMW engine, a BMW gearbox, BMW switchgear and BMW power steering.

Piech is now saying he never wanted Rolls-Royce in the first place and that in the fullness of time they will be making 10,000 Bentleys a year. But the only way he can do that is by raiding the corporate parts bin, and I’m not 100 per cent certain that this is such a good idea.

You see, the only suitable donor car in Piech’s armoury is the Audi A8, and I don’t think any of its components would do in a Bentley. It would be like serving up food from your local pub in the Caprice. Audi’s V8 engine is designed to propel a lightweight, aluminium supersaloon. Put it in a Bentley and the top speed would be 4mph.

I know this because I spent last weekend with the new Arnage, which weighs 2.7 tons. Sure, it has a 4.0 BMW V8 engine but this had to be enlarged to 4.4 litres, and even that wasn’t enough. So they garnished it with a brace of turbochargers. And that did the trick.

But even so, sales of the Arnage have been so pitiful that Bentley won’t say how many have found homes. I do know this though. Potential buyers have been worried by the company’s future, and especially the threat by BMW to cut off the supply of engines.

It’s easy, of course, to be magnanimous in victory, and as a result that threat has gone away. So, the Arnage then? Worth a punt or what?

Well it is stupendously fast. Nought to 60 is dealt with in 6 seconds and the top speed is governed to 150. Put your foot down in the mid-ranges and were it not for the headrest, your neck would snap like a twig.

It handles too and, unlike the old Bentley turbo, the Arnage does not ride down the road like a tea tray. It simply uses its enormous weight to crush road surface irregularities rather than riding over them, and inside all you can hear is the fuel swilling into the cylinders.

This is conspicuous consumption on a biblical scale. When they get round to televising Enid Blyton-Prescott’s Transport White Paper, the baddie will be put in an Arnage. Already, people sneer at you and no one – no one – will ever let you out of a side turning.

That’s OK though. The Arnage has gun racks in the boot so that you may carry weapons for dealing with those who won’t get out of your way. Or you could simply ram them. Or you can just recline the electric seat a tad and savour the atmosphere.

It’s not quite so opulent as the Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph in that the carpet pile is only 2 feet thick. Plus, the dials are finished in a sporty cream colour and my test car had a chunky two-tone wheel – but then the airbag instructions on the back of the sun visor were in Arabic.

Despite this, I truly loved it. It’s not so good to drive as the Ferrari 456 which, in turn, is blown into the weeds by the Aston Martin Vantage, a car that combines the craftsmanship of the Bentley with the power of a Tornado jet. It is now, incidentally, the fastest, most powerful car you can buy.

Yet the Bentley can hold its head high as a stunningly fast, motorized drawing room. Choosing to ignore it because it’s made by Volkswagen would be idiotic. On that basis, the Aston is a Ford and the Ferrari is a Fiat. Piech should leave his cat alone. He’s bought himself a barnstormer.

Absorbing the shock of European Union

Every day, 650 Members of Parliament decide what new laws they are going to foist on the country. And they’re not alone. We have parish councils and borough councils and county councils and the House of Lords and the European Parliament – thousands upon thousands of people whose job is very simple. They decide how we live our lives.

They dictate what we eat, what we say, where we go, how much we’re paid, how we cut our hair and how often we’re allowed to pick our noses. Then, after a while, when we get bored with their proclamations, we have an election and they’re replaced with thousands of new people, all of whom have new ideas. This is democracy at work. And when it comes to democracy there’s only one end product: new laws. I read recently that, last year, the European Parliament passed 27,000 new directives… 27,000, for Christ’s sake. That’s 74 a day. Think what you were allowed to do 50 years ago that you aren’t now. You can’t drive quickly. You can’t sell things on pavements without a licence. You can’t build an extension. You can’t buy more than 200 duty-free cigarettes. And if you want to smoke them, you have to stand outside in the rain like a leper.

You see, even before the government gets round to actually banning something, political correctness steps in. You can’t employ a girl because she’s got big tits. You can’t fire her for not sleeping with you. And in the time it’s taken you to read this, Europe has passed another law. You are no longer allowed to keep a pet badger. And here comes another. Fish must be orange. You are, however, allowed to pop over to France and fill your car to the gunwales with cheap plonk. It’s one of life’s small pleasures, a tiny crumb of comfort to the battered people of this continent-sized nanny state.

But whoah, what’s this? – A press release from Tenneco Automotive which says that so-called booze cruising could be a false economy. It warns drivers that if we overload our cars with wine and beer, we may not only break the law but also wreck our shock absorbers, thus negating the savings we’ve made on the drink. Oh really? Yup, and they’ve sent me a handy ready-reckoner so that I can work out how many cases of wine is acceptable. And here’s the news. If you have a small car, a Fiesta, say, and there are five adults on board, the safe limit is 10 cases of wine. Well, I reckon five people would pretty much fill a Fiesta, leaving you with just the boot. And I’m pretty certain you would only get four cases in there. So that leaves you able to carry six extra cases, but with nowhere to put them.

And don’t think it gets any better if you leave your passengers at home. Go by yourself and Tenneco says you can carry 30 cases. I’m sorry, but if you can get 30 cases of wine in a Fiesta, you should call Norris McWhirter. It says on my ready-reckoner that the safe limit in a large car with no passengers is 31 cases but then, according to Tenneco (a maker of shock absorbers, by the way), a Mondeo is a ‘large’ car. So what is a Lamborghini LM002? How many cases of wine would I be allowed to put in this V12-powered, 7-foot-high, 3-ton monster? My ready-reckoner is unable to help, but if you are allowed to put 30 cases in a Fiesta, as the Lambo is 10 times bigger I could bring back 300 cases – 3600 bottles. Which is enough to make you very, very drunk.

But there is one small problem. You can’t have a Lamborghini LM002. Well you could, but in the last few minutes the European Parliament has announced that all four-wheel drive cars must be powered by corned beef from a boneless German cow. And Mr Prescott says that if you buy anything larger than a Vespa, it’ll cost you £200 a minute to park it. Tenneco says that if you’re going to France on a booze cruise this year, you should think about the damage you’re doing to your car, the laws you may foul – and, if on a long drive, you should take frequent breaks.

I say you should get over there, buy as much as you want, in whatever car you want, and if anyone stops you, remind them that we’re living in a free country. And then pull out their liver with a rusty hook. This – and I’ve checked – is still legal.