Clarkson on Cars (15 page)

Do not, for heaven’s sake, take this as a criticism of the Lexus. There’s just as much new money in this country as old money. There will be just as many people who will like the pop-out plastic drinks holder as there are who’ll hate it. I hate it.

No question that Lexus is a better car than an XJ12. No question that the Jap car’s electric seatbelt-height adjuster is well sighted, no question that its thinking four-speed switchable overdriven auto box is so much smoother than the cast-iron three-speeder of the Jaguar.

But if I had to drive past a shop window, I would ensure that I was in the XJ. Gary Lineker, I’m sure, would prefer to be in the Lexus.

The odd thing is that I quite like being seen in a Sierra 4 × 4 yet I can’t get into a Granada without feeling acutely embarrassed. I’ll happily swan around in a Volvo 740 estate but need a Balaclava helmet before I’ll set foot in a T-series Mercedes.

I’ll pootle about all day long in a Lancia Y10, wearing a smug ‘I know something you don’t know’ expression. Yet in that little funster, the Charade GTti, I have to have a sticker on the back window telling passers-by it’s not my car.

I cannot come to terms with Land Rover Discovery because it has stripes on the side and a blue interior, and I simply will not try a so-called special edition. And could you honestly drive around in a Nissan Bluebird Executive? Of course not. Not unless you had a box on your head.

The point of all this is very simple: people should, and usually do, buy something with which they feel comfortable, irrespective of how clever it may be.

Every single road test report on the Nissan 200SX will tell you just what a great car it is. They will talk of the power and the sophistication of that rear-wheel-drive chassis. They will talk too of the svelte looks and of the great precision in the build quality. But they will not dismiss it out of hand, as I do and you should, because it has brushed nylon seats.

When you are getting on for seven feet tall and you have size nine feet, there are all sorts of things you should not do. Tightrope walking over the Niagara Falls is one of them. Skiing is another.

Manfully, I have been to the mountains twice a year for the past three years in a desperate bid to become good at getting around with planks on my feet. I even bought a primary-coloured anorak.

But until April of this year, I have always failed. In 1988 at La Clusaz, I broke my thumb. In January 1990, at Val d’Isere, I tore the ligaments on the inside of my right knee and buggered up my cartilage for good measure as well.

What makes this chapter of disasters even harder to stomach is that I’m so careful that if I ski on a glacier, it gets to the bottom of the mountain faster than I do.

You cannot begin to imagine how vigorous my snowplough schusses are. You have never seen such fantastically tight step turns. I am capable of getting from an easterly traverse to a westerly one without being on the fall line for more than .003 of a second. I can ski for half an hour and only be three feet further down the hill than when I set off.

And when you remember that I have to stop every fifteen minutes for a cigarette, it doesn’t take a professor of pure mathematics to work out that it takes me 1026 hours to do a mile. That’s 42 days.

All this has changed now, though. On my last trip to the Alps, to the summer resort of Hintertux in Austria, people gawped in awe as I sped by. Two girls offered me their bodies. A child called me Franz and asked for my autograph. Even the Germans, amazed at the sheer length of my skis, parted like the waters of the Red Sea to allow me on to the chairs and T-bars without a wait.

Cubby Broccoli has just telephoned to ask if I will do the stunts for Timothy Dalton in the next Bond extravaganza,
007 Kills Some Arabs Because the Russians are OK These Days
.

So how, you may be wondering, has this extraordinary metamorphosis come about?

What happened was that every company in Europe that begins with the letter ‘S’ got together to organise a late-season skiing trip for members of Her Majesty’s Press Corps. Saab provided the cars. Sealink came up with the boats. Salomon handed out the equipment and Servus, the Austrian Tourist Authority, paid for accommodation expenses.

Also on hand were a brace of chaps who coach the British Olympic ski team. I was allocated to John Sheddon, who said it didn’t matter how I skied, because there are only two types of turn – left and right – and skis are implements to get you from A to B. My kinda guy. There was none of this ‘Benzee knees’ nonsense you get from those peroxide poofs with tight red all-in-one suits and six pairs of socks shoved down their underpants.

Sheddon gave me the confidence I needed to make slightly less dramatic turns by telling me to imagine that I had a steering wheel between the skis. He explained, too, that while skiing, my legs were doing the same job as shock absorbers on a car, keeping the skis on the snow. And he told me to steer the skis like a rally driver steers a car on gravel, setting up the skid prior to the turn and powering through to the next turn in full control. By likening skiing to driving, it all began to make a lot more sense.

But not half as much sense as when the man from Salomon poked his Lancastrian nose in.

Now, I have always laboured under the misapprehension that an amateur skier such as myself could not possibly tell the difference between a pair of Ford Cortinaesque rental skis and a pair used by the cream of downhill racers. In the same way that my mother could not possibly know the difference between her Audi and a BMW 750 iL, I figured that switching to a pair of £375 slalom planks would make bugger all difference. For only the second time in 30 years, I was wrong.

Not only was it possible to tell the difference between my Ford Cortinas and the Salomon jobbies, but it was fairly easy to spot behavioural patterns on the three big-league affairs.

The 1S ski, a gigantic 207, was so stable that it was possible to file your nails while doing 40 mph straight down a mogul field. This is cast very much in the Mercedes 560SEL mould.

The 2S is very much the Golf GTi, being reasonable in a straight line at a cruise but capable of holding its own in the twisty bits.

Then there was the 3S, about which I know very little because I kept falling over. It was dreadfully difficult to handle and quickly became known as the Toyota MR2 of skidom – more so because the Salomon chappie insisted that it was only a handful if it was used ineptly or by cynical journalists.

And even more astonishingly, each one of the three different types is available with a wide range of what Salomon calls power references. An individual calculates his own by scoring a certain amount of points for weight, ability and style.

Howard Lees, the most fearsomely competitive man in history and the deputy editor of this magazine, went for the 8 rating, while I was honest and selected a 7.

The difference was that he spent a day skiing like Killy and I looked smooth and in control. And yet he still won a four-star British alpine ski award, while I could not get past level three. This was only because my right leg was still encased in a RoboClackson-style brace to protect the smashed ligaments. Lees’s legs were fine. Very very thin indeed, but fine.

It was in Belgium, on the way home after Lees announced that I had to average 110 mph if we were to catch the 12.30 a.m. boat back to England, that we both decided that everyday skiing is quite a lot more exciting than everyday driving.

So goodbye. We’ve decided to go to work for
Performance Skiing
.

A few Fridays ago my horoscope said, and I quote, ‘If you think the world is a safe and ordered place, you’re in for a shock.’

For once, it was about right.

9.00 a.m. – I opened the post to find a court summons telling me I had no car tax. Frankly, I didn’t need officialdom to remind me of this.

11.00 a.m. – my grandfather died.

12.30 p.m. – a major television contract that seemed like a safe bet fell through.

5.30 p.m. – my wife announced she had a crush on a friend of mine and left.

The only reason why my hamster didn’t shuffle off the mortal coil that night was because he had done so a couple of weeks earlier.

A lot of people call days like that character building and, do you know, they’re right. There are three things that I now know which I wouldn’t have done had that Friday been vaguely normal.

One: marriage isn’t necessarily for life. When ex-Beloved stood at the top of the aisle promising to love me till death us do part, what she actually meant was that she’d love me until someone with peroxide in his hair, white socks and a crotch the size of a bungalow came along.

Two: Greece isn’t so bad after all. You know how you get all your best ideas at four in the morning when you’ve had two bottles of Australian fizz? Well you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, new Beloved was going on holiday the next day and wondered if I’d like to go too. Seeing as it only meant cancelling two business trips, a dental appointment, a weekend house party and work for the week, I readily agreed.

Twelve hours later, we were on a BA767 to Athens and thenceforth in a rental Fiesta en route to a place called the Peligoni Club on an island called Zakynthos. It’s some place.

You live in one of six cottages in the olive groves and, during the day, congregate at the club which is so close to the sea that if there’s one more inch of coastal erosion, it’ll be in it.

I have never seen such a spectacular bit of Mediterranean coastline either. You can keep northern Majorca and the South of France.

Furthermore, I didn’t see so much as a gram of feta cheese and there were no Union Jack shorts, no discos and best of all, no lilo shops. There weren’t even any CCs, and if you want to know what they are, broaden your mind and send an SAE.

It was at the Peligoni Club, however, that the most astonishing revelation of all unfurled.

Three: you don’t need an internal combustion engine to go bloody quickly on water. I always figured my Fairline Phantom was pretty good fun until I had a go on a Class One offshore powerboat with a boot full of eight-litre Lamborghini engines. And even that was tame compared with a Yamaha 650 Wave-runner. But all three pale into insignificance alongside a Hobie Cat, two of which are available to guests at the Peligoni.

It looks like something those smiley Blue Peter people make out of sticky-backed plastic and two bananas every Monday and Thursday.

What you get are two pencil-thin hulls joined by a piece of canvas and some struts. It is powered by a sail so big that if it were laid on the Isle of Wight, everyone would suffocate.

I shan’t bother going into all the technical details about turning and so on because, truth be told, I don’t really understand them. If you gybe, it turns very fast indeed, so fast in fact that the boom takes your head off and it capsizes. If you go about, it sticks its nose into the wind and stops dead, hurling you into the water about 50 feet in front of it.

Experts seem to know how to circumnavigate these small foibles but I’m buggered if I do. What I do know is that, in a straight line, it is quite simply staggering.

With a force six creaming the wave tops into what we sailors call white horses, it will whistle along at an easy 18 knots. This would unquestionably be frightening were there not such a lot to do.

You stand on one of the hulls, clip yourself onto the trapeze and, holding the rope that controls the front sail – I think it’s called a jib – and a long pole which moves the twin rudders, lean right out with your arse touching the water.

This has two effects: firstly, it stops the whole caboodle from being blown over and, secondly, if you’re into S&M, you’ll make a mess in your harness.

Get it right and the sensation of speed is awesome. I had it right for about a minute but then, with Albania looming large on the horizon, things went rather badly wrong.

Some say I lost my footing and fell forward, thus pushing the nose of the boat down. Some say there was water in one of the hulls and it sloshed forward of its own accord. I like this explanation best.

Either way, the nose of the boat burrowed into a wave and the back end reared up in a prelude to what became a gigantic somersault.

Forward momentum, as far as the boat was concerned, stopped abruptly. But from my point of view, the world was still whizzing by at 18 knots.

Well, it was until the wire which attached me to the trapeze brought me to a halt. The problem was that the wire was fastened to my harness which was a little tight around the old dangly bits.

Now I’m no scholar of physics but I’ll tell you this. You don’t measure the pressure involved in bringing a 15-stone male to a dead stop in the space of one inch in pounds per square inch. It’s tons per square millimetre. And all of it was borne by my crotch.

And do you want to know what my horoscope said that day? Well I’ll tell you anyway.

‘Romantically, you’re finished for the time being.’ Once again, the little sod was about right.

Do please feel free to drool. Last week, as the temperature in Welwyn Garden City reached 102 degrees Fahrenheit, I had at my disposal a Lotus Esprit Turbo SE, a BMW 325i convertible, an Audi Quattro 20-valve turbo mother ****** and a 2-litre Ford Sierra.

In any normal week, you can be assured that the Ford would not have turned a wheel. In fact, it turned all four of them several times.

Yes, I know you can run a Lotus off its 170 mph clock, that you can get a Quattro to generate more than 1.0 g in bends and that, when the sun is shining, there are few better means of transport than a solidly made BMW soft top.

But the sun wasn’t shining. There was a haze made up of all sorts of choice ingredients: cloud, exhaust fumes, power station emissions, deodorant spray and so on. The heat was allowed in, and most of it finished up in my armpits, and it simply wasn’t allowed out again. The smell was terrible.

And the trouble with the sort of heat we had in the first few days of August is that there was no escape. It was not the sort of hot where you could sit in the shade to escape because it was that permeating, all-pervading hot that got everywhere.