Clarkson on Cars (12 page)

The small but perfectly formed chap at BMW was offering a 750, but as he’d be there on the day I figured it prudent to turn him down.

Jaguar, then. Oh yes, they’d be delighted to help with whatever I wanted but Beloved stamped her size seven down – she’s tall you see – saying she’d rather roll up at church in a Nissan. It was starting to look like she might have to.

I liked the idea of a Countach, especially as it would mean leaving father-in-law at home, but protocol put the mockers on this brainwave.

I also toyed with the notion of asking to borrow Mitsubishi’s hot-air balloon in the hope that the wind was blowing the wrong way and he’d end up in Tunisia. Only joking.

Finally came Range Rover. Yes, Beloved agreed this was a good idea. Yes, said Land Rover, they would be delighted to help.

‘Would a black one do?’

‘No.’

‘How about green?’

‘Yes, that would be super.’

‘It’s an SE.’

‘Ooh good.’

Then Beloved entered the equation again, arguing that green was unlucky.

‘What other colours have you got?’

‘Er… brown.’

‘Nope.’

‘Silver?’

‘Yes, yes, silver would be fine.’

‘It’s not an SE.’

By this stage, I didn’t give a toss so long as it was capable of moving an 18-foot father-in-law, a chauffeur and Beloved in a big dress 200 yards from the house to the church.

Then father-in-law found out and said he wouldn’t go in a Range Rover and why couldn’t we use his Volvo? Using the technique I’d learned from the man at Bentley, I managed to swing him round.

This left me with the problem of finding something to ‘go away in’.

I didn’t particularly want people to smear lipsticked profanities all over the Alfa, even if it does play second fiddle to the porcelain. Nor did I relish making it work with an exhaust full of shaving foam and a kipper on the manifold.

Just in case I had to use it, and it decided to play silly sods at the critical moment, I took the precaution of booking a 75 V6. Just in case.

So, reserves in place, the hard work began.

Various circuses said they were a little reticent about lending me an elephant. And I failed to find anyone who owns a camel, let alone someone who would let my friends tie some balloons to its testicles.

Someone suggested a horse and cart would be a good wheeze, but he is the sort of person who has a velour, button-backed sofa which he calls a settee. So I ignored him. And his advice.

A tractor? What if it’s raining? A steam engine? How does it get there? A good old vintage Rolls-Royce? Naff, very naff.

Then the best man stepped into the fray. He absolutely refuses to tell me what he has fixed up, saying only that it will make everyone laugh.

I am therefore frightened. I just know that it will be a Nissan Sunny ZX with side stripes. If so, his colleagues will wonder why he’s turned up at work with his head on back to front.

The pundits are predicting doom ‘n’ gloom time in Coventry. There is to be an XR3i Sovereign and a Daimler Granada. There will be a medium-sized Jaguar with Ford running gear and a Scorpio chassis. John Egan will be replaced by Donald E. Dieselburger junior, and the XJ-S will get tartan seats.

Quite aside from product juggling and the Americanisation of Jaguar’s board, the economic ramifications must be taken into account as well. Unemployment is to double. Sterling will crash, the stock market will take on bearish dimensions and the government will fall.

I, however, know how to prevent all this. If Ford would appoint me as chairman of Jaguar, I would put Mercedes and BMW out of business in ten minutes. A quarter of an hour after that, Toyota would pull the plug on Lexus and Nissan would scrap Infiniti.

Let’s just say you’re a Gieves-and-Hawkes-suited BZW banker. You live in Barnes, are 40 and have a wife and two children aged six and four. Horrid huh? Anyway, protocol dictates that you must have a sober saloon, though the years haven’t advanced so much that it has to be a Volvo. Of course, you have a BMW.

But it’s time for a change. You’ve heard about Jaguar’s sometimes successful efforts in Group C racing. You know there is a JaguarSport division and you keep reading in financial pages about D- and E-types selling for millions.

Yes, you reckon, Jaguar are making sporty cars once more. So you tool down to Follets in your 735i and you take a test drive. And you are horrified because Jaguar don’t make sporty cars at all. Jaguar are to motordom what Dunlopillo are to bedding. You make a mental note that, when you are 50, you will come back to Jaguar. But for now, those Teuton Futon people at BMW will do just fine.

The first new car to emerge from Coventry under my dictatorship will be a standard, manual, 4-litre XJ6 but it will have big BBS wheels, firmed up and lowered suspension, toughened up and speed-related power steering, sports seats, and ever so slightly flared wheel arches. And all its chrome will be flushed down the lavatory.

It will sell for exactly the same price as the standard 4-litre saloon and it will have an appeal among 40-year-old BZW bankers from Barnes.

The JaguarSport idea is very clever but not clever enough. They should be a wholly owned Jaguar thing. They should not allow automatic cars out of their gates.
And they should not make cars that have cream steering wheels
. Cream steering wheels, like white socks and beards, are for riff-raff. BZW bankers do not wear white socks. BZW bankers do not like cream steering wheels.

And if an American wants a car with a cream steering wheel, he can buy a Lincoln.

BMW obviously don’t know that I am to be chairman of Jaguar because they recently took me around their Motorsport division, and now I have seen their mistakes.

I will not build my JaguarSport factory on an industrial estate next door to an odour-eater factory. And I will not be so stupid as to build it in Daimlerstrasse either. When I am looking for people to work in it, I will not insist they all look exactly like Ian Botham. And I will allow them to spill oil on the floor.

I will also make sure that every car which wears a JaguarSport motif is a proper JaguarSport car. Only the M5 and the M3 convertible are ‘handmade’ in Daimlerstrasse. The M3 saloon and the M635 coupe are ‘line’ cars.

In addition, I will not allow Jaguars to wear JaguarSport badgingjust because they have a spoiler designed by a JaguarSport tea-boy.

Most importantly of all, anyone caught driving around with the equivalent of an ‘M’ badge on the back of their automatic XJ6 2.9 will be visited in the night by my secret service department who will wear leather coats and tall boots.

Believe you me, these rules will ensure that JaguarSport cars are very exclusive indeed.

The tricky bit is making them better than the astonishingly good M5 with which they would have to compete. Even on this point though, I have an answer. You don’t get the best out of a workforce if you promise them sweeties when they get things right. You get the best out of a workforce if you promise to beat them up when they get things wrong. Having Dachau eleven kilometres down the road helps.

When all is said and done, I will have the current range of cars selling to the pensioners for whom they were designed. In addition, I will have a range that appeals to everyone else.

They will make money too; lots of it. Enough to pay for the racing programme, anyway. And they will help back up the pictures being painted by the Group C cars, the current XJ-Rs and the D-Types that are dominating all Jaguar stories in the newspapers.

If Jaguar can stand on their own two (or four) feet, shrugging off competition from Japan, Germany and America like you or I would shrug off a mild itch, Ford will not feel the need to start meddling. If, however, Jaguar plunge along their current course, being so vulnerable that a 0.5 cent shift in the dollar/pound exchange rate can screw the whole thing up, then expect to see Ford Fiesta XJ6s in your local showrooms soon.

If that is too awful to bear, simply buy a share or two and vote for me when the time comes.

Any chance of staying awake evaporated when the man said what sounded like, ‘We have used organic rice to create neutral sexiness.’ Until that point, I had been grappling with waves of boredom, pulling faces like rock guitarists do when they hit the highest note possible on a Gibson Les Paul.

But it was hopeless. I wouldn’t have been all that interested even if it had been presented in a recognisable language. In a version of Engrish where all the ‘l’s are pronounced ‘r’s, sleep was a merciful relief.

This was the pan-European press raunch of the new Toyota Celica, a car I had already decided I was going to hate because of its extreme ugliness.

Toyota had taken over Cannes for the purposes of introducing it to the press. Here, the massed ranks of Britain’s motor scribblers were confronted by several serious-looking German equivalents and a bevy of Danes who seemed to be much, much more concerned with the whereabouts of the nearest bar. Up front there were a bunch of Japanese chappies and an American called Reich. It was his job to act as translator. We shall call him Third.

After a great deal of sycophantic bowing and some blather about how hugely grateful they were to us for sparing some time to spend a couple of days in the south of France at their expense, the slide show began. So too did my war with the land of nod.

There were the usual charts showing how exhaust interference has been reduced, but stuck in the middle of them was a picture of a naked woman. This, Third claimed, is what the new Celica looks like.

No it doesn’t. No one will ever mistake it for a naked woman. And nor, despite Toyota’s protestations, will it be mistaken for a pouncing cheetah either.

The British at this point began to snigger, some at the absurdity of it all, others at the Germans who were still furiously taking notes, and one or two at the Danes who were trying to catch the eye of a barman.

Finally, it was a time for questions and answers. Now, I’ve never understood the point of such an exercise because, if as a journalist you have something you wish to find out, it is always better to do it when no one else is in earshot.

This, however, was different. This was an excuse for some serious smartarsery. I asked what evidence there was that people want to buy cars that look like naked ladies.

Pleased with my eloquence, I turned to lap up the ‘go get ’em boy’ looks from various colleagues. But after much debate in Japanese, the panel crushed my ardour with their answer: ‘It is a rounded car.’

Now, I suppose it would have been sensible to persist, arguing that if they spoke Engrish well enough to deliver a technical press conference like this one, then they should damn well stop pretending they didn’t understand a straightforward question. But the Japanese have perfected the art of humility to such an extent that compassion simply bubbles to the surface in even the most arrogant of cynics.

The next day I was determined to tell whoever was interested that I didn’t like the car one bit; that there are two ways of inducing a bout of vomiting. You can stick a couple of fingers down your throat or you can look at a Celica.

Instead, when confronted by an eager-looking Toyota minion who was keen to hear my thoughts, I said, ‘Oh, it’s quite nice.’

When the Germans or the British, or even the French, ask you what you think of their cars, you tell them straight. When it’s a Japanese man, he manages to park an expression on his face that’s doe-eyed, hangdog and sweet all at once.

Last year, I went to upwards of 60 beautifully organised, well-presented press introductions and I came home, aware that I could hit the word processor afterwards and say what I wanted.

There’s the nagging doubt with the Celica that if I say it’s not very good, and it isn’t, several engineers on the project may be ordered to fall on their pencils. Or more likely, they will scurry around and have a replacement lined up in the time it takes people at Austin Rover to scratch their backsides and organise a meeting to discuss things.

I have a plan, and judging by what the man from the
Daily Mail
said about the Celica, he has it too. This plan will redress the balance of payments, bring down interest rates and ensure that Mr Kinnock is kept out of Number 10 for another five years.

We scribblers must say the Celica is an excellent car and that you should all go out and buy one tomorrow, or even this afternoon if you have time. This will lull the Japanese into a false sense of security and they will not start work on a replacement, thinking all is well.

You, in the meantime, will believe everything we’ve written and will take a test drive. But you won’t buy the car because it is ugly, there is no space inside and you can’t see out of it properly.

It will take months for sales figures to show the Celica has fallen on stony ground, precious months that the Europeans can use to finish scratching their backsides and get on with things.

The Japanese will learn, hopefully when it is too late, that the Dunkirk spirit is alive and well and living in Fulham.

The woman in the hotel was most insistent that the coastal path from Wadebridge to Padstow was absolutely level.

It mattered. It mattered because she had suggested we hire bicycles and go for a ride. She talked about how we’d enjoy the fresh air and how we’d be ready for a pint at the other end. She talked about the herons that we’d see and how the countryside was some of the most beautiful in Britain. And, she maintained, it was as flat as a pancake, as level as a crossing.

She was half right too. We paid our four pounds each for the 18-speed Dirt Fox ‘hogs’ and, after a five-mile ride, arrived in Padstow, surprised at the ease of the journey.

Sure, we all wanted pints badly and sure, I was grateful for the company of the O’Tine family and their son, Nic.

Over a game of dominoes in the London Inn near Padstow’s harbour, we talked in a New Year’s resolution sort of way about how it might be a good idea to have bicycles in London, how they would keep the dreaded DR code from our driving licences and how we could get fit at the same time… fresh air… bulging muscles… reduced congestion… blah… blah.