What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (14 page)

As a general rule, American cities are all exactly the same. There’s a pointy bit in the middle, which is ringed by large shops selling tasteless food in vast quantities. The hotels are all the same, too, and you can forget about finding a charming, family-run restaurant in the back streets. Because it’s not there.

That’s why Miami always comes as a pleasant surprise. It is different. The strip of land known as Miami Beach is home to hundreds of art-deco hotels and apartment blocks, which you will find nowhere else, and if you squint – which you will because it’s impossibly sunny – you can imagine that at any minute you will see Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard prowling past in their Corvettes.

Elsewhere in the world the late 1950s were smoky and awful and full of misery, but in America they were a time of hope and adventure and brave young men drinking and driving and drinking and balling and drinking and dreaming of going into space. It was a time of Cocoa Beach and people with shiny smiles partying. And you still get that flavour in Miami Beach today. I like it there.

Unfortunately, there is a problem. You can’t just turn up with your dowdy English hair and your flabby breasts and your pot belly, because you will look foolish. In Miami you need to make an effort.

So. It’s no good just having a speedboat. It must have three big engines in the back and an enormous pouncing tiger painted down the side. Likewise, you can’t just have a motorcycle. It must be as customized as your girlfriend’s face, with
9 foot-long forks, a saddle made from the foreskin of a whale and exhausts that do absolutely nothing to mute the sound of the 7-litre V8 engine around which you simply cannot get your legs.

You might imagine that all of this would come to a shuddering halt on the golf course; that it would be impossible to stand out in the excess-all-areas environment of a Florida fairway. But you’d be wrong, because in Miami you can buy a customised golf buggy with 20-inch chromed rims and a painting of a snake on the bonnet. Rolls-Royce grille? Certainly, sir.

I went out for dinner at a restaurant called Prime One Twelve. As this is regarded as the hottest place in town, getting in wasn’t easy. ‘Do you have a reservation?’ said the impossibly beautiful, stick-thin girl at the reception desk. Having established that I didn’t, she looked me up and down, saw that I was fat and that my teeth were the colour of a pub ceiling and decided that, contrary to all the evidence, the place was full.

Well, of course it wasn’t, so a few minutes later the waiter was running me through the menu. It was all about the size of the cut and the amount you got on the plate. The tomatoes were bigger than Richard Hammond’s head. My side order of spinach was delivered in a bathtub. And the steak? Holy mother of God. It was as though everything had been sourced in one of those Hollywood B-movie valleys where the ants are the size of men and the grapefruit are bigger than airliners.

However, I didn’t really notice the dead brontosaurus on my plate because I was way too captivated by the spectacle that was unfolding outside.

Prime One Twelve attracts the crème de la crème of show-offs. The cars in which they were arriving were mad. Jacked-up Camaro convertibles with spinners. Bentleys on 24-inch rims. One man arrived in a neon insect. Another in a lowered Rolls-Royce. I can only begin to imagine how terrible these cars must have been to drive – cars always are when you fit wheels that could roll a cricket pitch – but that doesn’t matter. In Miami cars are not for driving. They are for arriving.

I’m not making this next bit up. Couples were appearing in the lobby of the apartment block across the street from the restaurant. They would then wait five or 10 minutes for the porter to fetch their car from the underground car park. And then they’d drive it 50 yards to the valet at the restaurant.

So who cares that the ride of the Roller is ruined? Who cares that you need a step ladder to get out of the Camaro? And who cares that your Porsche’s modified exhaust system could make you deaf after five miles? You will never go that far.

Elsewhere in the world people buy cars for all sorts of reasons. Value. Economy. Speed. Space. Comfort. But in Miami people buy, or rent, cars for showing off; for demonstrating that back home in Philadelphia their shower curtain ring factory is doing pretty well.

The new Lamborghini Aventador would fit into the mix jolly well. Even before you add silly wheels and a custom paint job it’s £250,000, and people will certainly see it coming. It’s 2 inches wider than a Range Rover – or about the same width as a London bus. Plus it has a 6.5-litre V12. I doubt we will ever see a new engine such as this again. Today, thanks to Euro emissions regulations, turbocharging is the only realistic answer.

It’s a shame, because the immediacy of the thrust is intoxicating. The acceleration is as vivid as Miami’s sea front, and the top speed is about 212 mph greater than it would ever go there.

But what about here? In the civilized world of old money and taste?

Lamborghini is keen to stress that the engine is its first all-new V12 since that of the Miura, that the four-wheel-drive system is as advanced as technology allows, that it has carbon ceramic brakes and that Formula One-style pushrod suspension is also part of the recipe. Now the only reason you would fit this is to reduce unsprung weight. But I can’t see how that matters in a car that weighs about the same as the Empire State Building.

I suspect the real reason it’s fitted is so that owners can feel
that behind the vastness and underneath the flamboyant, mad, brilliant show-off styling, there’s some Ferrari-style cred.

Honestly? There isn’t. This is a brute of a car. You don’t drive it. You wrestle with it. It’s more refined than Lambos of old and less inclined to want to kill you. But when you open the taps, you are no longer driving. You are hanging on.

I drove it very extensively across Italy, and although it’s quiet and surprisingly comfortable, and although it has an Audi sat nav and Audi controls, you are never allowed to forget that it’s a raging monster. And for that I absolutely loved it.

I loved the speed. I loved the styling – it’s probably the best-looking car ever made – and I loved the sheer stupidity and silliness of its dash and its face and its insane rear end.

I don’t want one. I’d rather have herpes. That said, I do want to live in a world where I can sit outside a restaurant in Miami and watch some poor girl trying to get out of the passenger seat without flashing her knickers.

20 November 2011

It seems that a few years ago Prince Charles asked scientists to research the concept of alternative medicine to discover why acupuncture, holistic healing, leaves and sitting cross-legged on the floor can be used to cure hay fever, eczema and bowel disorders.

Well, a British science writer did just that and, after exhaustive research, he has published a book saying that alternative medicine mostly doesn’t work and that when it does, the results are ‘dismal’.

Naturally, you would assume that Prince Charles would read the carefully researched points and, with upturned palms, explain that, contrary to what he’s been saying for many years, the best cure for a headache is a couple of Nurofen, rather than a balm made from soil and bits of armpit hair.

However, he appears not to have done this. Despite all the scientific evidence, it seems he continues to believe in the power of humming and peace oils. We see this a lot. People use science when it agrees with their opinion but dismiss it as nonsense when it does not.

This is hardly surprising really since what we know as science fact today is almost always science fiction tomorrow. The earth was flat. And then it wasn’t. Matter cannot travel faster than light. And then it can. Well, maybe. Man is causing global warming … Watch this space.

I’m glad that there are scientists. I’m glad they go to work in their laboratories with their Bunsen burners and their tweezers. It’s important that mankind strives to understand where he came
from and where he’s going. But scientists should not try to explain their findings to Prince Charles. Or me. Or you. Because we’re thick and we won’t understand what they are on about.

However, because we don’t know we are thick, we will listen to a bit of what they have to say, take away a nugget and, if we are a politician, or a prince, try to do something about it.

Not that long ago everyone was worried that particles and gases coming out of exhaust pipes were making people who lived near motorways very stupid. This was a big concern for the residents of Gravelly Hill, north of Birmingham. Ford’s scientists decided the answer was lean burn technology, engines that ran mostly on air, and their view was shared by Mrs Thatcher, then prime minister, who had a chemistry degree.

However, lean burn was a few years away from reality, and people who were thick demanded results immediately. So all car makers had to fit off-the-shelf catalytic converters instead.

Sadly, what catalytic converters do is turn all the gunk that was making people in Birmingham stupid into carbon dioxide, which science now says is turning polar bears into man-eating werewolves. So, to get round that, cars are now being fitted with electric power steering and flappy-paddle gearboxes – anything that cuts the amount of fuel used and therefore the amount of CO2 coming out of the tailpipe.

But it’s all hopeless because catalytic converters are made from platinum, which is fast running out. So then we will be back in 1985, in jerky cars with crappy steering, with people in Birmingham looking like jacket potatoes and Ford saying, ‘I told you so.’

There’s a lot of science in the new BMW M5. Before setting off, you can tweak the engine, the gearbox, the suspension and the seats. And it’s all very impressive. But I much prefer the approach taken by the skunkworks deep inside Merc’s special forces division, AMG. Which is: no science at all.

Recently AMG’s cars have started to become a bit soft. The raw, visceral engines have been muted with turbochargers to
keep the emissions down, and the standard automatic gearboxes have been replaced with flappy-paddle-operated manuals that work just fine on the open road but with an epileptic jerkiness in town.

AMG says that the new C 63 Black Series is softer, too. It says it’s listened to criticism – from me mostly – that the old CLK Black was too hard for the real world and that the new model is kinder to your spine.

Well, you could have fooled me. It’s like being inside a fridge-freezer that’s tumbling end over end down the side of a rocky escarpment. Is it softer than the old car? Perhaps, but not in a way that the human bottom could ever detect.

It even looks more racy. Like the old car it has flared wheelarches to accommodate the wide track, but in addition there are now nostrils in the bonnet and, if you tick the right option boxes, all sorts of carbon-fibre winglets designed to show other traffic that you are in agony.

Of course, you may think that all of this is necessary and important at the track. You can even specify the new car with timers that measure your performance not only against previous laps, but also against professional racers. However, it’s all a complete waste of time because on a track this car is not an M5. It is not designed to post the best possible lap time. It is designed purely and simply to eat its own tyres. I got through one set in just fifteen minutes.

This hunger for rubber is caused by the engine. It hasn’t been softened, which means you get 6.2 litres of basic, unturbocharged power and torque. The diff may come from the sort of engineering that’s used to open lock gates and the chassis from a book called
How Victorians Did Things
, but none of it can cope with that V8 firepower.

Drive with the traction control on and you won’t go anywhere at all. Drive with it off and you will go everywhere sideways. This, then, is my sort of car. It’s almost childlike in its honesty.

And here’s the best bit. Despite the madness, it is not a
stripped-out racing car. Unlike Porsche, which removes even the satnav and the radio from its track cars and replaces the back seats with scaffolding, Mercedes has left pretty much everything you could reasonably expect in place. It will even, if you ask nicely and cross its palms with silver, put the rear seats back.

If you learn, as I have with my Black, to steer round manhole covers and potholes, you can use the car on a day-to-day basis. It has iPod connectivity. It has air-conditioning. It has a boot. You just have to remember that at no point, on the road, can you ever use full throttle. Unless you’ve just found your wife in bed with your mother, you’ve lost your job and your kids have been arrested.

This car is unique. It’s something that’s not made any more and will probably – because of the world’s poor grasp of science – never be made again. On the face of it, it’s a German DTM racer, a road rocket from the country that invented such things. But, deep down, it’s on Telegraph Road, eight miles north of Detroit, on a Saturday night, with its cap on back to front and a bottle of Coors in its big, working-class paw. Deep down, it’s a muscle car.

And Prince Charles will like this. Sometimes it can also be a muscle relaxant.

27 November 2011

Last weekend AA Gill wrote about New York in such glowing terms that I wanted to drop what I was doing and go there immediately. He admitted, of course, that in summer the humidity makes the sky feel as thick as wallpaper paste and in winter it turns slate grey and comes right down to the ground, blotting out the city’s raison d’être. But he talked of an autumn day when there’s a crimson tide in Central Park and the sky appears to have been bleached, perhaps sucked of its richness by the vibrancy of the people below.

I would agree with Adrian that New York is one of the world’s greatest cities. Along with, in no particular order, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo and Cape Town. But last weekend, after much quiet contemplation, I decided that none of them can hold a candle to what is unquestionably the best of them all: London.

I came to this conclusion because I was working at the ExCeL exhibition centre, which is located about 6,000 miles to the east of the City, near where they are holding the running and jumping competitions next year.

Boris Johnson will tell you that the best way of getting there is by the Sustainable Light Railway. But he’s wrong. The best way of getting there is via the Thames, on a Fairline Targa 47 luxury yacht.

I should make it plain from the outset that it is extremely difficult to drive a boat through the middle of London. The civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette made sure of that, separating what at the time was an open sewer from the City with the Thames Embankment. And today the authorities keep his spirit alive
with an astonishingly well thought-out plan to make absolutely certain that no private individual can park their boat even for a moment, at any point, anywhere at all. You can come, but you must go away again straight away.

Two years ago the Port of London Authority introduced a 12-knot speed limit on parts of the river and I’m not surprised, really, because out there in the chop, among the pleasure boats and the barges, which are operated by men who live by rules laid down in the 19th century, you feel completely at sea. Taking a pleasure boat into this alien world full of people who make a living there is like riding a tricycle along the Central Line. It’s going to end up with a crash. Despite all this, you must try it. It is No 1 in the things you have to do before you die. Wait for a crisp autumn day when there isn’t a cloud in the sky and go through the middle of London on a boat. And then you will realize why nowhere else gets close.

It’s the variety, really. New York is a monoculture. It does one thing. So is San Francisco. And so is Rome. London, though, is different. You have the Tower, which is almost a thousand years old, right next to the brand new glass-and-steel cathedrals to capitalism. You peep past converted 19th-century warehouses to catch a glimpse of a 17th-century cathedral. And then it’s eyes left for the Palace of Westminster and eyes right for the London Eye. Pretty soon your head is rotating like that little girl’s in
The Exorcist
and you’re wishing you had compound vision like a fly.

One minute you are gliding past
HMS Belfast
, a second world war battle cruiser, and no sooner have you taken stock of its rear end than it’s time to swivel round and gawp at London’s signature dish – Tower Bridge. It’s not a river cruise, really; it’s time travel.

And I’m willing to bet that there’s no other city in the world where anyone would point excitedly at a power station. But that’s what you do in Battersea.

However, it’s the return journey, at night, that leaves you breathless. Many cities tart themselves up for one-off events.
London looks like it’s New Year’s Eve all the time. It is lit absolutely beautifully. From the laser marking the meridian at Greenwich, up past Canary Wharf and under the blue-white lighting at Tower Bridge, you arrive once more at Westminster, where the clock tower is a warm blend of vivid green and sodium orange, and, opposite, the London Eye appears to be a portal into space. There was even a gorgeous new moon to top the scene off.

Then there’s Albert Bridge. It’s lit so vividly, and the reflection is so strong, you feel as if you’re steaming along in a vast river of custard. And to the left and right are the new blocks of executive flats, each with its floor-to-ceiling windows. No point closing the curtains. Who’s looking? We were. And that was great, too.

There is no one-hour trip in the world in which you see so much, and so much of what you see is so wildly different. Every day I’d spot something else. Another frilly Victorian detail. Another elegant way of converting the warehouses that served the industry that built them into flats for the industry that fuels Britain today. A hundred years ago they were full of cotton and tobacco. Today they house bankers who’ve come over from New York for six months and can be seen on their balconies, gawping and not quite believing their eyes. Fifth Avenue is a modern-day wonder. But the canyon carved by Old Father Thames – that’s on a different plane altogether.

Sadly, because the boat was so sublime and the view so moving, I used it every day to commute to the ExCeL. Which meant the new version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee I am supposed to be writing about this morning spent most of its time sitting in a lock-up garage.

It had a difficult birth, this car. Conceived when its parent firm Chrysler was married to Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, it shares many of its underpinnings with the Mercedes ML. But before it was born, its parents divorced and its mum ran off with a man from Fiat. As a result of her new liaison it has a 3-litre Italian diesel engine. No other option is available.

The figures look quite good, and off road there is enough engineering – both electrical and mechanical – to ensure progress will be maintained long after most of today’s high-riding urban-crossover sports-utility offerings have sunk without trace into the mud. But one brief drive was enough to confirm that while the Jeep may be fine in the big outdoors, it’s a very old-fashioned Hector everywhere else. The automatic gearbox operates on geological time and the engine is about as refined as a scaffolding company’s tearoom.

And while the interior is festooned with all manner of luxury items and electrically operated toys, there is a very real sense – as is the way with all American cars – that a million pounds has been spent at Woolworths.

The exterior is different. It looks quite good, and, unlike Land Rover, Jeep offers a tasteful range of colours. Mostly, though, this car is big and it’s cheap and it’s simple. Which, of course, makes it absolutely ideal for someone who for some reason doesn’t want a Toyota Land Cruiser.

4 December 2011