Clarkson on Cars (31 page)

I’m not saying the new Range Rover is disastrous because it isn’t. Technically, it’s better than the old one but in terms of style and price – things that really matter – it just isn’t.

When Audi launched a convertible version of the mid-sized 80 saloon a couple of years ago, I drove one and thought it nice; like shortbread with the vicar.

It wasn’t especially fast and, though it was handsome, there was no glint in its eye. Small boys did not clutch their private parts as it slithered past.

I seem to recall that it was quite pricey too and as a result, I figured that anyone with a bit of nous would opt instead for the Rover or the Golf and that anyone with no common sense at all would continue to buy the BMW cabriolet.

But I was counting without Princess Diana’s social conscience. How was I to know that she’d swap that most conspicuous of things, the Mercedes SL – for the equally German but far less obvious Audi?

And how was I to know that she’d be photographed with the infernal thing every two hours, and that the shots would appear on the front of every national newspaper, every day?

Her clothes may change – from a leotard at the Harbour Club to a baseball cap for her liaisons with strange men in Chelsea – but the car is constant. And this association with the most glamorous royal of them all has done nothing at all to harm its sales.

So far this year, Audi has sold 931 80 cabriolets whereas in the same period last year, before Diana bought one, the figure was 508.

Ever since BMW came to stand for Black Man’s Wheels, Haslemere’s Vyella and Valium brigade have been looking for a replacement and now Diana has served it up to them, gift wrapped, and on a plate. She alone has turned what might have been just another nice car into by far and away the coolest and most-sought-after four-wheeled status symbol of them all.

And it didn’t cost Audi a penny.

This product-placement business normally costs rather more than that. When Cliff Barnes arrived at the Oil Baron’s Ball in Dallas in a new Range Rover some years back, it was rumoured at the time that Land Rover had forked out upward of £10,000 for the privilege. And Barnes, remember, was the loser, the no-hoper, the wally who was forever outwitted by the Ewing boys, both of whom had Mercs. As did their wives, their parents, their children, their mistresses and, though it was never made public, their dogs.

Nevertheless, Land Rover’s US operation must have figured it was worth it. I guess it was the same deal in Britain with Lady Jane in the
Lovejoy
series.

In this country, Ford is the biggest player on the product-placement scene, ensuring that all the right people are seen in their cars. Ever since
Z Cars
, the televisual boys in blue have had a matching oval badge on their wheels – it gives the whole range a nice ’n’ cosy feel.

Even today, Ford is always ready with a Mondeo should the producers of
The Bill
need some wheels. And do you remember
The Fourth Protocol
, the Freddie Forsyth flop? Ever think it was strange that everyone in the whole film was running around in Fords, clean ones too, with all the extras?

Ford supplies the royals with cars too, though like all manufacturers, it’s tight lipped about the association. But a spokesman was willing to admit that free loan cars are currently out with David Bellamy and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Oddly, Dave only gets a Mondeo while the Dame has a Scorpio; the old one I presume. The new one would scare all her audiences away.

Ford also ensures that Britain’s top players on the motor-racing scene drive their cars. Jackie Stewart has one, as does his son, Paul. The entire Benetton team has used them all this season, as does the Andy Rouse racing stable. Even Michael Schumacher has one. And so, until recently, did Jeremy Clarkson.

The man at Ford says that before despatching a car into the hands of the rich and famous, a number of things have to be taken into account, like: is this the sort of person we want to see in one of our cars? Timmy Mallett, for instance, would struggle to prise an XJS out of Ford’s luxury division at Jaguar.

Surprisingly though, when asked if they’d give Rod Stewart a Fiesta, the man ummed and ahhed. ‘Well, we’d have to look into it.’ Sorry Rod, I tried.

Mr Stewart, of course, is well known for his long association with Lamborghini. Open the trade pages of any secondhand-car newspaper and anyone selling a Countach or Diablo will claim that Rod used to own it.

At least Chris Eubank has the decency to make sure his used Range Rovers never get into the secondhand columns. Though, worryingly, his current car, a 6.3-litre Aston Martin Virage, is still up and running.

This is the trouble. When a celebrity actually hands over a wad of their own Melvins for a car, there’s not a whole heap that a manufacturer can do.

And that can lead to all sorts of trouble. BMW desperately tries to cultivate that clinical, sharp, efficient image and doesn’t mind one bit when George Michael is spotted outside the River Café with the top-of-the-range 850.

The man’s albums are produced with the same sort of clinical efficiency.
Listen Without Prejudice
is exactly what BMW would expect their customer base to slide into the CD player before they go for a drive.

Derek Hatton, on the other hand, is very probably the sort of person BMW would not want to be seen in their car. Yet we all know that at one time Degsy did indeed waft from council meeting to property deal in a 635.

Jaguar too is in the same boat. I’m sure they’re absolutely delighted when senior government figures are seen on the news, whizzing down Whitehall in an XJ6, but how happy were they, I wonder, when the Duchess of York bought a soft-top XJS?

Reliant is another case in point. When Princess Anne used to rush from horse race to magistrates’ court in her old Scimitar GT/E, it gave the car some street cred that might otherwise not have been forthcoming for what was a Ford engine wrapped in plastic.

When she sold it, the car was doomed and now Reliant is left with its three-wheeler which was quite funny even before Del-Boy Trotter bought one.

And famous people can do a lot more than enhance, or dent, the reputation of a car. They can, in some cases, make or break it.

Since Rowan Atkinson stopped writing in
Car
magazine about his love affair with the Lancia Delta Integrale, the importers have packed up and gone back to Italy!

In all seriousness, Aston Martin might not have survived into the seventies were it not for James Bond. The DB5 was an absolute pig to drive, but 007 gave it class.

Not being a football fan, I’m not sure whether this works or not, but every time another overly coiffeured manager is fired, we’re always treated to shots of him climbing into the very latest, most expensive Mercedes coupe. Is this a rule? Must all football managers have Mercs in the same way that their charges all have Toyota Supras?

Is this a good thing? Certainly, I would never buy a Supra or a Mercedes coupe because of their association with hooliganism. Nor would I buy a Mitsubishi Shogun either. Dave Lee Travis has one.

Bryan Adams has a lot more taste. His chosen four-wheel-drive car is a Land Rover, which appears in every photograph of him as surely as Diana’s Audi.

Chris Rea goes even further. Though a complete Ferrari nut, the man who made goatee beards popular long before Take That were into short trousers has a Caterham Super Seven, which, he says, is the sort of car Ferrari should be making these days.

It’s simple and uncomplicated and liver-crushingly fast and Chris loves it so much, it’s a regular fixture on his album covers.

Finally, there’s Volvo. Now here we have a company that is so desperate to change its image that I fear Penelope Keith would be ordered from one of its showrooms. I’m surprised the new range of adverts – ‘more turbo than diesel’ – and – ‘drives like it’s alive’ – don’t, at some point in the text, order women in head scarves to get lost.

Volvo is spending a million pounds on its racing programme – hell, even I have one now, but this, of course, is not enough.

Randall and Hopkirk
is back on air – and what happened to Humber after one of their Super Snipes killed Hopkirk? So what Volvo needs to do is pay for someone to rerun
The Saint
.

Usually, when a car goes out of production, there are no tears. There are no announcements in the papers and nobody sends flowers because nobody cares. One day you can buy a Ford Sierra. The next, you can’t, and life goes on.

Occasionally, though, a car goes to that great scrapyard in the sky and people do care. One such car is the Alfa Romeo Spider, born in 1966. Died June 1993. Flowers to the crematorium, please.

These days, European cars stay in production for six or seven years, Japanese cars last only four, and so the Alfa has indeed managed something of a feat by lasting, virtually unchanged, for 25 years.

On the face of it, a car designed before anyone had even heard of Sergeant Pepper is going to be technologically challenged in 1993. Compared to the Mazda MX5, the Alfa is slow, rattly, rough, cramped, and blessed with truly awful handling characteristics.

I took one last drive in this relic last week and was horrified to find that the rear tyres always squeal when pulling out of side turnings and that negotiating a roundabout gives you the impression of being involved in some sort of rodeo championship.

Left turns are out of the question too, if you’re tall, because the driving position is so awkward.

In the year when Donald Campbell died, the Spider was probably superb. But today, it is terrible.

Except for one small thing.
The Graduate
is a fondly remembered film for a number of reasons: the sex scene with Anne Bancroft, the Simon and Garfunkel score, the smouldering beauty of Katharine Ross and the birth of a new superstar in the diminutive shape of Dustin Hoffman.

But while a few of the details have become a little hazy, everyone remembers what sort of car he drove. A red Alfa Spider. The impact was enormous. Indeed, today in America, the car is called the Alfa Graduate.

Because of that film, the Spider is by far and away the most loved, cherished and sought-after sports car in the world. Everybody, especially women, turn and stare when it lurches by. Everyone I know wanted to borrow it. Old ladies cooed. Old men went all nostalgic. Young men looked at their Golf GTis and wondered.

They say that image doesn’t sustain an inferior product for long but the Spider shows there is a serious flaw in this argument. You might not like the car very much but the idea of it makes people go all gooey.

When Marianne Faithfull announced that at the age of 37, Lucy Jordan had never been through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair, everyone knew the sports car in question would have to be an Alfa Spider.

She’d smash her teeth to bits as she bounced over the cobbles and yes, it would probably break down, but if you are after stylish motoring, the sort where your hair is held in place with a Hermes headscarf, the Alfa runs rings round a flashy Ferrari or the Mazda MX5 with all the personality of a Sony Walkman.

Of course, the Spider isn’t the only car to have been elevated to deity status by careful product placement in the movies; where, for instance, would the Ford Mustang have been were it not for Steve McQueen, San Francisco and
Bullitt?

Sure, this was the fastest-selling car of all time when it was launched in 1964 – a record that still stands today – but when push came to shove, it was nothing more than an American Ford Capri.

It would probably have fizzled out by 1973 but because Steve McQueen showed us all what it can do, greatness was foisted upon it. Because of
Bullitt
, the Mustang survived long enough for Michael Douglas to use one while chasing a Lotus, again through San Francisco, in
Basic Instinct
.

He had to. Cops, California, car chases and Mustangs are now inexorably linked, like sewers and Mini Coopers.

And quite apart from Mini Coopers,
The Italian Job
promoted both the Lamborghini Miura and the E-Type Jaguar to way above their stations.

Then there was the VW Beetle. Do we remember it as a piece of Nazi war memorabilia? Is it a stupid Woody Allen gag? The Beetle was one of Hitler’s creations like the V2 and the gas chamber but do pensioners stone them when they clatter by? No.

We all go ‘ahh’ because the Beetle is Herbie, as cuddly and as loveable as the family spaniel.

In the 1970s, John Thaw spent his time chasing Mark Two Jaguars with bank robbers in them. In the 1990s, he completely changed our perception of this old car by using one himself in
Morse
.

If you drove an old Jag in the 1970s, everyone assumed the boot was full of baseball bats and loot and that you were on your way to some blag or other. Today, people see you are a learned, stately sort of soul. And drunk.

Reagan forced the value of old Jaguars down but thanks to
Morse
, and despite the downward spiral in classic car prices, the Mark Two is now a rapidly appreciating asset.

The right film and the right character can make a car. It can give it cult status and ensure global sales in greater numbers and for a longer period of time than its designer would have dreamed possible.

Thus, if I was running Proton, I would have made damn sure that the T Rex in
Jurassic Park
drove off at the end in the new 1.5-litre Aeroback.

Hello: this column is coming to you on my new, digital mobile phone whch m usng on the M40 just wr t geeeeks thgh th shored putting.

Hey, this is groovy. No fizzing or crackling, just a digital interpretation of what it thinks I’m trying to say, with blanks for the bits that are too hard.

I don’t understand mobile phones. The first one I bought, about ten years after they first caught on, was bigger than my washing machine and heavier than a photocopier. It had to go when my car’s suspension broke.