What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (24 page)

When you buy a Nissan Micra or a Volkswagen Golf or a Ford Focus, you expect it to be perfect. The mainstream car makers know this, which is why, before a car is put on sale, it is rigorously tested to make sure the starter motor works when it’s below freezing and the air-conditioning can cope even if you drive to the surface of the sun. Every little detail is thought about. Every component tested, and then tested again. And then changed. And then tested again.

However, in the world of very expensive supercars, things have always been rather different. Lamborghini put the Miura on sale knowing full well that if it were driven above 80 mph, it would take off. Then it came up with the Countach, a car with a cockpit so small it could only be driven by either an ant or a foetus. Neither of which would have the strength to move the gear lever, which is seemingly set in concrete, or the steering wheel, which was mostly a piece of decoration. Not that it mattered, anyway, because most days the Countach would not start.

As time went by, the makers of supercars started to think more seriously about longevity and convenience. But even in the 1990s they were still not really there. The Ferrari 355 GTS I once owned was plagued with seatbelts that strummed like guitar strings if you had the roof off, an engine that had to be taken out of the car to be serviced and a two-stage throttle that made only two speeds available: 2 mph and 175 mph.

Later I bought a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder. This was developed under the watchful gaze of people in sensible shoes
from Audi. It would, I figured, be as easy to live with as a Toyota Corolla.

It wasn’t. The cupholder was a £600 option and the company simply hadn’t thought about the positioning of the pedals in right-hand-drive cars. Which meant that if you bought a manual – as I did – there was nowhere to put your left foot. You had to amputate it.

The problem is this. If you are a small-volume car maker, you simply don’t have the funds to design a feature and then redesign it if it doesn’t work. So you end up hoping that customers will be so consumed by the speed and the beauty, they won’t notice that the door doesn’t shut properly and that there is a hippopotamus in the passenger seat.

Happily, today most supercar makers are owned by large-volume manufacturers, which means they have the funds to address little foibles before the machine goes on sale.

Well, that’s what you’d think. But after a couple of days with the new Ferrari 458 Spider you realize that things haven’t really changed at all.

If the wipers are on full speed they become so hysterical that they bash into the window frame on every sweep. The radio is incapable of finding a signal. When there’s no passenger, the unused seatbelt buckle rattles against the back of the seat, and to fill up, you need to hold the nozzle of the pump upside down, or no fuel will be delivered at all.

There’s more. If you want to change radio stations – and you will, because whatever you’re listening to is mostly hiss – you need to go into the menu, twiddle a knob, push another button, select the station and then repeat the process to get back to the satnav screen.

It gets worse. Because there are no stalks to operate the wipers and indicators, all the main controls – and the starter button, and the horn, and the six-way traction control, and the suspension control, and the radio controls – are on the wheel. My daughter was amazed by this. She said driving the car was like playing Bop It.

We’re told by Ferrari that you get used to this after a while, and I don’t doubt that’s true. In the same way that you can get used to having arthritis.

Make no mistake. The 458 Spider is the most usable and modern of all the supercars. But it’s still plagued by the sort of faults that would not be acceptable in a Nissan hatchback.

And it’s not cheap. The base car is £198,936, but if you want the steering wheel stitched in cotton the colours of the Italian flag – well, that’s an extra £720. That’s £720 for some cotton. You want the wheels painted gold? That’s £1,238. A premium hi-fi system is £3,411. Titanium wheel bolts are £1,919. Red brake callipers? They’re £880. Racing seats? They’re £4,961. The end result is that the car I tested would actually cost you £262,266. And that’s what an economist would call ‘a lot’. But it’s worth every single penny. Because this car is simply sublime.

And at this point some of you may accuse me of inconsistency because just recently I said that the new Porsche 911 Carrera S cabriolet does not work as a convertible because the strengthening beams and the structural compromises ruin what was designed to be a pure sports car. Taking the roof off a car such as this is like adding HP Sauce to a quail’s egg. It adds to the tang but you lose the delicacy, and with a 911, delicacy is everything.

With a Ferrari, things are different. A 458 is not a purebred sports car. Oh God, it drives like one, but it’s also a singer and a model and an athlete. It’s a heptathlete with the lungs of Pavarotti and the face of an angel. So you can buy the convertible version because driving this car with the top down adds to the theatre and the pantomime. Who cares that you’re going 0.1 mph slower? You’re getting a tan.

Made from aluminium, the foldaway top weighs less than the normal roof on the standard car. It even weighs less than it would had it been fashioned from canvas. And it folds away, electrically, in fourteen seconds. You can even drive with the
roof up and the back window lowered so you can hear the V8 soundtrack when it’s raining. I did that a lot.

Is there a drawback to the new convertible? Well, yes. If you lower the roof at the lights, everyone within 150 yards will tell you that you are a tosser. Plus, in extreme conditions it will be less rewarding than the hard top, and the windscreen is now arched, which looks a bit odd. But what the Lord taketh away at the front, the Lord handeth back at the rear. From behind, it looks like the old Ferrari 250 LM. From behind, it’s one of the best-looking cars I’ve ever seen. It is also extremely comfortable.

As I write now, there are shivers – and I’m not kidding – running up and down my spine as I recall the way it felt on roads near my home. The lightness. The savagery. The noise. The beauty. The trees rushing by, sheltering me from 93 million miles of sky. Then you have the gearbox that changes down not in a few milliseconds but instantly. Bang. Stand on the brakes – bang again. And again. Turn. And POWEEEERRRR. A modern Ferrari feels like no other car on the road. It feels miles better. And this one? Oh, this is the best of the lot.

Sure, you can find rivals that are more technical and even a tiny bit faster. The McLaren MP4-12C (which will soon be available as a convertible, too) is one, and the Bentley Continental Supersports is another. But neither has anything like the lust for life that you find in a 458. They are tools.

I grew out of supercars many years ago. I vowed after the Ford GT that I’d never buy another. And I will stand by that. But if I were to waver, this would be the one. As a car, it would get two stars, for being silly and too expensive. But as a thing. As a celebration of man’s ability to be happy. It’s in a seven-star class of one.

15 July 2012

Eleven years ago I had the most brilliant idea for a new car-related television programme. It would be based in a hangar, it would be presented by four people, including a racing driver who would never speak, and – this was the clincher – it would show only real-world family cars, driving around on the roads of Britain. No silly Ferraris. No expensive foreign travel. No blue skies. I was most insistent on all of that.

And so it was that in the very first feature on the very first show on what would be called
Top Gear
, I drove a Citroën van under leaden skies through Kent. I was very pleased with the results, and so were the commissioning editors of the BBC, because figures showed that more than 3 million people had tuned in.

Later, other people suggested that we should perhaps ease up on my strict rules about foreign travel and Ferraris. And with a heavy heart I acquiesced. Mainly to demonstrate, on television, that their ideas would never work. So we started driving over the Andes and racing light aircraft across the Alps, and now up to 380 million people tune in every week, making it the most-watched television show in the world.

Very often people write to me saying we should revert to the days when we reviewed the sorts of car that people actually buy, but, armed with the power of hindsight, I can now see exactly why this doesn’t work.

Because in any given week a hundred people might be interested in the new Volkswagen Golf diesel, meaning that 379,999,900 aren’t. Whereas a Ferrari power-sliding through a
volcano? Pretty much everyone wants to see that, pretty much all the time. Plus, of course, it means I get to live your dreams.

This morning, however, I’m living your reality, because I’ve gone full circle and arrived back at the aforementioned Citroën van.

It was called the Berlingo, and I said at the time that it was pretty damn good.

The idea was simple. The manufacturer had taken a van and then fitted back windows and seating in the rear to create what was a very practical, supremely comfortable and extraordinarily cheap family car.

Yes, it looked a bit ungainly, but if memory serves, it was about £9,000 – way, way less than VW was asking for a more cramped, less versatile Golf.

Since then I’ve been jolly busy drifting Bugattis and driving to the North Pole and hurtling across Botswana under clear blue skies, and I’m afraid I’d rather forgotten about everyone back at home trundling to the shops and back every weekend in a Berlingo. Until now.

Because I’ve spent the past week with the latest version and, ooh, it’s grown up. To mask the fact that it was born to transport French plumbing equipment, the new car has chunky-looking body armour and chrome around the grille. ‘
Je suis un Range Rover
,’ it seems to be saying. Yeah, right.

‘
Mais oui, parce que regardez-là. J’ai un knob pour beaucoup de fonctions de traction control et donc je suis sérieux
.’ You aren’t. You’re a van.

Now. If we apply the modern-day
Top Gear
rules to this road test, I’m afraid this van-ness is going to be a problem. Because the Berlingo understeers as though it has no steering wheel at all, and there is a great deal of driveline shunt.

However, I have a sneaking feeling that if you are interested in a car of this type, you will have no idea what understeer is and you will imagine that driveline shunt is something that is only ever encountered in
Fifty Shades of Grey
. You will also not be the
slightest bit bothered to hear that there’s no red line on the rev counter.

‘So what? I have ears. And they will tell me when it’s time to change up.’ They sure will, because when you approach 4000 rpm the noise is so loud, it causes all dogs within 30 miles to faint.

Criticizing this car for its lack of ability to thrill, though, is like criticizing soup-kitchen sandwiches for lacking lemon grass.

This is emphatically not a car for enthusiasts. It would not be capable of getting around the Nürburgring, mainly because by the time you reached the Carousel corner, you’d have died from old age – 0 to 62 mph takes 12.1 seconds, for crying out loud.

However, I’m talking now to the 99.9 per cent of people who are not heading out to the Eifel mountains next weekend, and who do not have to leave half their tyres smeared all over the road to feel as though they’ve circumnavigated a roundabout properly.

And still, the Berlingo appears to make sense. Its styling may be writing cheques its underpinnings can’t cash, but in several important areas it is superb. First of all, it is easily the most comfortable car any money can buy this side of a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Precisely because Citroën has made no attempt to make it sporty, it simply glides over potholes and speed humps.

There’s more. As I’m sure you know, children tend to open the door when the car stops without bothering to see if a cyclist is coming. Well, the Berlingo has sliding side doors, which means our wizened chum in his Lycra romper suit is not inconvenienced at all.

Around the back, the massive but light boot lid opens to reveal enough space for a whole pack of hounds, though if you want, you can simply open the rear window instead.

In the cockpit there is a mass of bins and trays in which you can put all the stuff that accumulates in a family car, and lots of real-world clever thinking that makes the Berlingo more in tune with the needs of more people than just about any other car out there. It was always thus.

Yet there are one or two small problems that matter. The pillars are so thick that it’s hard to see at junctions. Of course, this isn’t an issue when you’re in a van, because it’s not yours and there’s nothing of any value inside should you pull into the path of a bus. But when the van is a car, it is yours and there are children in the back.

Equally annoying is its susceptibility to crosswinds. You don’t just have to hold on to the wheel on a blustery day. You have to wrestle with it, as if it’s a bear and you’ve just trodden on one of its cubs.

And now we get to the vexed question of price. Citroën obviously knows it’s vexed, which is why the actual cost of the car – the single most important fact – is not listed in the press pack. But I’ve managed to find it. And for the top-of-the-range 1.6-litre HDi 115 XTR that I tested, it’s £16,795. You can have a normal car for that.

It gets worse, because satnav is an extra £750, air-conditioning is an extra £650 and a ‘family pack’ with a third row of seats is £845. And so it goes on.

I’m afraid, then, that the principal appeal of the original Berlingo is gone. This new version is soup-kitchen food at four-star restaurant prices. Yes, it’s extremely practical and extremely comfortable. But that simply isn’t enough.

22 July 2012

It’s known that people first moved to the Blackbird Leys region of what became known as Oxford about 5,300 years ago. Nothing much happened until 2,000 years later, when it’s thought that someone built a circular eco-house there and someone else made a loom.

Then nothing happened again until 1991, when the younger male residents invented a new sport. They would go into wealthier areas of the region, steal a car and use it to whizz about their own estates, doing skids.

Soon news crews from all over the world were turning up to film these young men bouncing off postboxes and lampposts in front of a cheering crowd. And if the police tried to stop the mayhem, the crowd would express its displeasure by throwing stones and making cow-like lowing noises. This would cause even more film crews to turn up. Which would cause even more attention-seeking young men to steal even more cars.

The craze soon spread, and within months young men from council estates all over the land began to spend their evenings driving other people’s cars around branches of Dixons and Woolworths. For a while, doing a handbrake turn in an Arndale centre was more popular than football.

Eventually, of course, the craze died down and the young men of Blackbird Leys went back to doing what they’d done for thousands of years: sitting in bus shelters chewing gum, mostly.

But they did leave two legacies. No 1: cars could no longer be stolen using a lollipop stick and a bent coathanger. And No 2: they killed off the hot hatchback.

Devised in the mid-Seventies, the recipe was very simple. You took a normal, easy-to-park, easy-to-mend family hatchback, and under the bonnet you fitted a biggish engine. It proved to be immensely popular, to the point that in the mid-Eighties 15 per cent of all Ford Escorts sold in Britain were hotted-up XR3is and 20 per cent of all Volkswagen Golfs were GTIs.

Cars such as this were classless. They were driven by Hoorays in Fulham and school-run mums in Castle Bromwich. I know someone who traded his Gordon-Keeble for a Golf GTI. They were ageless, too, and were just as popular with teenagers as they were with the elderly.

But after the ram raiders and the Twockers and that newsreel footage of Gary hooning around Blackbird Leys in someone else’s turbocharged MG Maestro, the hot hatch became a byword for yobbery. A Burberry-badged back-to-front baseball cap with windscreen wipers and an out-of-date tax disc.

Now. If I were running a car firm, I’d want people back in hot hatchbacks as soon as possible because they are extremely profitable. I’d therefore be doing everything in my power to shake off the yob tag, in the same way that Stella Artois tries to shake off its wife-beater image by banging on about how it uses only hops that can speak Latin and zesty mountain spring water.

But no. Every hot Ford is festooned with trinketry that would not look out of place on Wayne and Coleen’s mantelpiece. And each is painted in lime green or vivid blue or matt black. They’re as subtle as being attacked by a shark while off your head on acid.

Renault is equally childish. Hot versions of the Mégane and the Clio look as if they’ve been lifted straight from a school playground. ‘Look at me,’ they seem to be saying. ‘I have a mental age of nine.’

And then we get to the subject of this morning’s review. The new Vauxhall Astra VXR, which was sent around to my house sporting an optional rear wing that would be dismissed by an Asian drifting champion as being a bit over the top and massive Fisher-Price 20-inch wheels.

Even if you don’t specify these extras, it still has more jewellery and more tinsel than P Diddy at a rap convention. It’s a car that conveys one simple message to other road users. And the message is this: ‘I am extremely unintelligent.’

It’s annoying, because, beneath the flotsam and jetsam, this is not just a very pretty car but also quite a clever one.

Because the turbocharged 2-litre engine develops a whopping 276 brake horsepower, making this by some margin the most powerful car in its class, much out-of-sight work has been done to ensure the front wheels don’t just fall off every time you put your foot down.

Up front, it’s fitted with what Vauxhall calls HiPerStrut suspension, which is designed to optimize camber during cornering and cut torque steer, and, as a further measure, a proper mechanical differential is added. Ford used pretty much the same setup on its most recent Focus RS.

But Vauxhall goes even further because the VXR comes with an adaptive ride and ‘floating’ front brake discs designed to reduce unsprung weight. Make no mistake: the underside of this car has been created by someone who was concentrating, and funded by a company that plainly wants to lay the ghost of the Vectra to rest and be taken seriously.

I shall oblige. The VXR is very, very good. It goes like a scalded cock, stops with an almost cartoonish suddenness and corners with absolutely no drama at all. It isn’t quite as thrilling as a hot Mégane – it’s much heavier – but what you lose in Stowe Corner, you gain on all the other days of the year because the ride comfort is exceptional. Even though the tyres have the profile of paint, this is a car that just glides over bumps.

There is a Sport button that firms up the suspension, and a so-called VXR button that adjusts the throttle response, adds weight to the hydraulic power steering, gives even harder suspension and makes all the dials glow red. But I don’t recommend you ever use either. Because mainly what they do is add 10 per cent to the dynamism and take away 100 per cent of the comfort.

There are a few little niggles. Despite Vauxhall’s best efforts, the wheel does still writhe about under harsh acceleration, and there is rather more turbo lag than I’d like.

Inside, it was the driving position that annoyed me most of all. After a while, I got cramp. And who thought it would be a good idea to fit a centre armrest that prevents the taller driver from selecting second, fourth and sixth? Also the front wheels weren’t balanced properly. Grrrr.

Oh, and then there was the boot lid that wouldn’t open. I’m sure there’s a clever button hidden away somewhere, but finding it would have meant reading the handbook. And I can’t do that because I’m a man.

None of these things, however, should prevent you from buying what is a well-engineered and well-executed car. But what might cause you to think twice is the bovine trinketry, the high price and the fact you have to tell people at parties that you’ve bought a Vauxhall Astra.

If these things are too much of a cross to bear, it’s not the end of the world. Because, happily, Volkswagen can still sell you a hot hatch that doesn’t make you look a gormless plonker. It’s not as stupendous as the Astra. But it’s not as stupid. It’s called the Golf GTI.

29 July 2012