Clarkson on Cars (35 page)

This is 10 per cent more than you get in a Ferrari 348 and things get even more impressive when you talk about horsepower per ton. No road car on earth even gets close.

It isn’t even a sophisticated engine either. With carburettors instead of fuel injection, you can see sheets of fuel vapour shooting out of huge grilles in the bonnet. Even on a dry day, you need the wipers to clear it from the windscreen. Smoking is not an option here.

Ear defenders should be, though. Lift your foot from the throttle to change gear and the exhaust pops and bangs like the bowl of rice crispies from hell.

And all this is going on with the top of your head and your right elbow in the slipstream. 40 mph feels like 400. Get above a hundred and you begin to believe you’d out-run the
Enterprise
.

Every fibre in your body is begging the car to slow down but your right foot, down at the bottom of that cramped footwell, just won’t obey. I once fired a machine gun and despite the instructor’s advice to use short bursts, I became mesmerised and simply couldn’t take my finger off the trigger.

Well, it’s the same deal in that S8. It gives you everything you could ever want from a wild ride. But you want more. To get a trip like this anywhere else you’d need to sell your house and spend all the money on acid.

The Westfield is cheaper. Fully built, it only costs £25,000 though if you’re in any way mechanically competent, you could buy a kit for a lot less and build it yourself. Either way, on the basis of performance per pound (either sort), you simply can’t do better.

Happily, it’s a neat-handling little car and the rear end does make a half decent fist of transmitting that truly amazing punch to the road. But it’s at this point I begin to wonder about the sanity of the thing.

Obviously, you would never drive it on a wet road – you’d be soaked – but even on dry asphalt, if you apply a tiny bit too much power, the rear tyres wail like wounded hares, the back steps out of line and you have to be awake to catch the slide.

Of course, you will be awake because of the noise and the hurricane but let’s just say you put on a bit too much opposite lock. Or that you don’t wind it off quickly enough. You would crash, and at this point, the Westfield would live up to its reputation as a four-wheeled motorbike. Put simply, I doubt you’d walk away from the accident.

It is therefore absolutely vital that you know how to handle a car like this before you try driving it. It’s a well-known fact that most motorists believe they have better-than-average abilities – a statistical impossibility – but in this case ‘better than average’ simply isn’t good enough.

You have to have the reactions of a supercomputer, the strength of some oxen and eyes that can read a number plate at six miles. And more than that, you need to have been trained, properly, not by some dimwit in a cardigan and a Nissan Micra, but by a proper racing driver at a proper racing school.

Now don’t get me wrong here: I don’t believe there should be government legislation which forces people to take a special test before being allowed to drive a fast car – mainly because this government would probably draw the line at a 2.0-litre Mondeo.

I don’t like nanny states. I hate the idea of being told what to do because I am able to make my own decisions. And I have done just that with the Westfield S8.

I would never buy one because I am nowhere near good enough to drive it properly. At best, I’d kill myself but if lady luck was elsewhere that day, I might kill someone else too.

Every morning, at exactly eight o’clock, my next-door neighbour starts up his Ducatti and sits there, with the throttle opened up, warming the engine before riding to work.

It is a big motorcycle and its equally large engine causes my windows to rattle, the sparrows to fall out of the trees and our baby to wake up.

Being a good Londoner, I haven’t said anything to him because, of course, I try not to speak to anyone.

It is annoying though, mainly because it gives weight to the arguments of friends who visit from the countryside. ‘What was that din this morning? I don’t know how you can live in London. All that noise. Traffic hum blah blah planes blah marauding gangs blah blah burglar alarms.’

Well, apart from Mr Ducatti, I have news for all you Vyella-shirted, ruddy-cheeked country dwellers. Residential London is a damn sight quieter than Nowhere on the Bloody Wold.

It’s eleven o’clock in the morning here and I can hear absolutely nothing. I’ve just stuck my head outside the front door and it is as silent as snow falling on fur.

Now let’s compare this to the countryside, a muddy place full of wasps and murderers.

I film in it regularly and you simply wouldn’t believe what a deafening place rural Britain is. There are crow scarers, tractors, church bells, lawnmowers, children playing in the fields, corn dryers and, because there are few houses to act as sound breaks, you can even hear a Hoover four miles away.

In London, we have no low-level RAF jets and because we’re richer than you lot, we have fewer diesel-powered cars. Half an hour in the Cotswolds or the Yorkshire Dales and my ears start to bleed.

This has nothing to do with the story but I also want to know why country people always say London is dirty. Listen Mr and Mrs Yokel-Smythe, I can walk up and down Jermyn Street all day long and I won’t get any mud on my shoes.

But it’s the noise thing that bothers me most and that’s why I simply can’t understand why so much fuss is being made out of these so-called Green Roads.

At the time of writing, it seems likely that cars will be banned from unmade tracks because various red-socked, brown-beer drinking, walky types say it ruins them.

Well look here weird beard, cars, already, are not allowed on the 250,000 miles of countryside footpaths in Britain and nor can they use the 80,000 miles of bridleways. Surely, that is enough. Why do you want to ban vehicles from the 5000 miles of tracks open to them? That’s like having your cake, eating it and then going back for more.

And besides, I have driven down the Ridgeway in Berkshire – on which cars are allowed – and will tell you that tractors cause the biggest problems, not four-wheel-drive cars. It’s heavyweight farm machinery that chews up the turf and makes ruts.

And you can’t ban this – how else do farmers get their veals from the fields to the airport?

Then there are horses. Four-wheel-drive vehicles have brakes and can stop if your children emerge suddenly from a hedge but a quarter of a ton of muscle, doing 40 mph, cannot. Plus, I’d rather tread in a small rut than a pile of horse excrement.

Now to be honest, I only ever drive on green lanes to test the performance of various four-wheel-drive cars and would never do it for pleasure. I must confess that I don’t understand why anyone would want to drive their car into the countryside just for fun.

But if they want to spend all day bumping around in fields, that’s fine by me. The numbers are infinitesimal, the damage caused is minute – compared to open-cast mining say – and you certainly can’t hear them above the din of the corn dryers and church bells. On top of all this, the only people who mind are a bunch of militant walkers.

Well look, I mind about golf. I don’t like the Freemasons who play it, I can’t abide the way it dominates television air time and those green splodges completely wreck the countryside. But if a bunch of bank managers want to don a pair of stupid strides on a Sunday morning and have a heart attack, so what?

Everybody’s hobby bothers somebody but we must learn tolerance. Fishermen’s lines entangle swans, windsurfers hit fish, parachutists land on frogs and yes, four-wheel-drive cars do rearrange mud, but really, we can’t ban everything. Except neighbours with Ducattis.

However, it is likely that the historical right of passage over green roads will be eroded in some way. Fresh-air freaks have convinced everyone they’re on the moral high ground and it’s a brave government who’ll tell them to get lost.

It will be a sad day for personal freedom but as with all things, there is a speck of light in the darkness.

If cars are banned from tracks in the woods, rallying will be a casualty. The world’s second-dullest sport will be outlawed. There’ll be a price on Tony Mason’s head. People will throw eggs at Gwyndaf Evans, and not only because he’s Welsh.

Oh happy days. Go, beardy, go.

When someone asks me to take them out for a spin in a Ferrari, or a Lamborghini, or a Porsche, I don’t answer until I’ve drained a whole bottle of vodka. By which time, they’ve usually lost interest in the idea.

The trouble is that if you stay sober and say yes, at some point along the way they will ask you to demonstrate what the car can do.

So you weld the pedal to the metal and give them a taste of what 400 horsepower is all about. You let them know what it feels like to do 0 to 60 in four seconds, and how a V12 sounds at 7000 rpm and how you can burn rubber at 80.

And then, you get into trouble. Well, I do anyway, because I am not capable of dealing with a tail slide in what is very probably a mid-engined car. I don’t know when to wind the opposite lock off and when to dip the clutch. I am an ordinary driver, like you and your next-door neighbours.

And the simple fact of the matter is this – 150 mph feels perfectly normal when you’re going along in a straight line, perfectly in control, but you need to be a Berger or a Coulthard to know what to do when you’re out of control at 150 mph.

I’ve had spins at that speed – in a Ferrari, and a Lotus and a Lexus Coupe – and you simply wouldn’t believe how many times they go round. You lose count and you become disorientated so you don’t know where, or even who you are.

Only last week, on the runway at Greenham Common, I spun a Honda NSX, at probably 90 mph, and only when the car came to a standstill did I realise that I hadn’t touched the clutch or even the brake. I’d just been sitting there, looking like a human goldfish.

That’s why I would never, ever agree to take you, your son or even a neighbour who’s just complained to the council about your stereo, out for a spin in a seriously fast car. It would end in tears.

Only this morning, I read of an accident where a salesman, out for a spin in a Porsche 911 with a potential client, somehow hit another car, killing himself, the passenger and the driver of the Renault.

Now I don’t know who was to blame – the bodies were so badly burned that they can’t even tell at this stage who was driving the Porsche – but it did make me think.

Can we really let people who have no natural talent or training drive around in cars that, when out of control, won’t stop until they’re in the next county?

I mean, the temptation is always going to be there to put your foot down and show your passenger why your car cost £100,000 and his Cortina did not. And in the twinkling of an eye, you’ll be doing a hundred or more and you’ll turn to your passenger to see how impressed he is and then when you look back, you’ll be four inches from a red traffic light.

There are courses which most car companies run, to teach people who’ve just bought a very fast car how they should be driven.

But here’s a tip. In my experience, they’re a complete and utter waste of time.

If they’re held on a race track, you spend most of the day learning your way around the various corners and then when you’re geographically aware, the instructor encourages you to go faster and faster, pointing out that, ‘The car will make it, sonny.’

You then drive home with a working knowledge of whatever track you’ve been on, and a belief that your new car can take any corner at any speed. Certainly, most people with Audi Quattros believe that.

And then there are courses held on the road. I went on one of these once and simply could not believe it when the instructor said I indicated too much when pulling on to a motorway.

Then, on a normal A road, he said that when overtaking, you should pull out first, then change down and accelerate past the slower-moving vehicle.

At this point, I rang the police and asked if any lunatics had escaped recently. None had, so I can only assume that this guy had thought up some new and interesting ways of making his fee seem worthwhile.

Now, I’m not saying all courses are like this but before going on one, make it quite plain that you are not in the least bit interested in silly new techniques or on how Coppice is a double-apex right taken in fourth.

Just explain that you want to experience a tail slide at more than 100 mph.

If you get the car back on line, then you have talent, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have and enjoy a fast car. If you fail to get the car back in shape, the experience will be so terrifying, I promise, you’ll go straight down to the auction and buy a Maestro.

And in doing so, you might just save someone’s life.

It’s a disaster. I went to Los Angeles once and after one night, decided it should join Spain, Greece and Germany on the Clark-son list of places that are smelly and horrid.

But there’s no escape. Work calls, so I’ve got to go back to the place where Monday morning DJs say it’s been a quiet weekend if only 22 people have been shot. It’s the phoniest, dirtiest and most dangerous place on earth. When the wobbler comes, I hope it’s bloody huge.

Los Angeles was the first place I ever encountered the car-sharing scheme whereby one lane of the motorway is reserved for cars that are full.

Now I don’t doubt that this works very well in America where you can learn someone’s entire life history as you brush past them in a crowded restaurant.

‘Hey sorry buddy, but I’ve been fat ever since my Daddy left home when I was two. Shacked up with this real lard ass and she kinda abused me ’n’ my little sister. So we, you know, kinda became lovers and…’

Car sharing in America is perfect because the journey is finite. You get time enough to reveal your innermost secrets, time enough to pull the right faces when your passenger is opening his heart, but not so much time that strays past the average American’s attention span. Every morning, you get your own little taste of Oprah on the interstate.