What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (33 page)

When I spend a night at my flat in London, I like to cook myself some supper. And since my culinary skills are a little bit northern, I don’t overreach myself with exotic spices, pestles or mortars. It’s just pasta, some pork and various bits and bobs to liven things up.

Then, the next day, I have to call a skip-hire company and a forklift truck to take away all the packaging. This makes me so angry that my nose swells up and my teeth move about. I mean why, for instance, do spring onions have to be sold with a rubber band?

And it’s not just food, either. If you buy a Gillette razor, it comes in a hardened shell that is impervious to any known form of attack. Scissors, fire and even atomic weapons are useless. And pretty soon there is blood everywhere, which requires a sticking plaster. And therefore another skip to take away the packaging in which that was sold.

Bought a USB dangly thing recently? It occupies less than a square inch but comes in a clear plastic container that could be used by a family of six as a fallout shelter. And that’s before we get to Easter eggs. They come in boxes the size of B-52 bombers and are wrapped in Cellophane and tinfoil and paper and about a million things the world can ill afford to waste. And it makes me seethe.

I’m not, as you probably know, given to environmental thinking. I do not care about the composition of gases in the upper atmosphere, and when it’s chilly outside I will gladly fire up the patio heater. But I have a profound dislike of waste, and there is
nothing on God’s decreasingly green earth as wasteful as packaging. When I come to power, people will be allowed, by law, to murder any shopkeeper who sells them anything that does not need to be in a bag, in a bag.

We shall start with the
Daily Mail
. Because it runs a campaign about the idiocy of plastic bags, but on a Sunday its supplements are delivered in … a plastic bag. Which I have to throw away.

Then we shall move on to the makers of anything that is billed as disposable. Why would you want to throw away a camera, for crying out loud? Or cutlery? Or anything at all?

This nonsense is even spreading these days to the world of cars. You may have noticed recently that Fiat is advertising what it calls the spring/summer collection of 500s. And I know exactly what is going on. It wants people to think of their car as a skirt, something that should be discarded after six months because white is so last year.

I’m afraid, however, that Fiat is by no means the only offender. We all are. Because why do we ever sell the car we have now?

Just the other day my wife said we should change our Range Rover for the new model because it keeps getting punctures. That’s like saying, ‘Oh, no. We need to change the children because they’ve got measles.’ But she is not alone. The world is full of people who get rid of their cars because they imagine they’re about to start costing money, because they appear to be on their last legs. But that ain’t necessarily so.

Top Gear
is often criticized – by people with terrible shoes, usually – for concentrating too vigorously on expensive cars that no one can afford. This, of course, is rubbish. Elton John could easily afford anything and everything we feature. It’s also not true. We put far more effort, money and time into featuring old crocks.

You see, we have a message. When you think a car is done for and washed up, we will demonstrate that, actually, it can still get across Botswana, or India, or Bolivia, or the Middle East. Deep down,
Top Gear
is the most environmentally sound programme
on earth. Or it would be if only more people had got the message. And since they haven’t, I’ve decided this morning to tell you a little bit more about the BMW I recently drove on a 1,000-mile odyssey through Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.

It was a T-registered 528i Touring that had covered 150,000 miles, and there were a number of features that would cause a wary buyer to shy away. It had a manual gearbox, suggesting the original owner had been enthusiastic. It had mismatched tyres, indicating it had been run on a shoestring. And it had a towbar, implying it had been used to haul heavy stuff. It was, in other words, one breath away from the skip. And that’s why we were able to buy it for just shy of £1,500.

Yes, the throttle was calibrated all wrong and, yes, the electronic boot lid was broken, but mechanically it was in fine fettle. The gearbox was sweet, the engine was strong and even the air-conditioning still worked. And so, as I cruised across Uganda on smooth, Chinese-built roads, I found myself thinking: why would you not want this car?

Of course, it came from a time before satellite navigation, but that could be sorted with a TomTom. And, yes, it wasn’t equipped with other modern features such as parking sensors, but I solved that when manoeuvring by simply looking out of the windows.

Anyone who saw the show will have noticed that some of its underfloor wiring became damaged. That’s true. It did. But only because in one edited-out moment I decided to see if doughnuts went in different directions on either side of the equator. And hit a rock. Not the car’s fault. Mine. And it was the same story with the rear window.

When the tarmac ended and the road became a quagmire, logic dictated that I should simply give up. BMWs do not have the best reputation for longevity and I was asking it to climb a track that, half the time, was flummoxing the crew’s Toyota Land Cruisers. But even though that car had been owned by a penniless enthusiast with a trailer, nothing broke. Nothing.

It didn’t even suffer unduly when the going became extremely
rough. Yes, two of the airbags deployed over one nasty jolt, but unlike the estate cars chosen by my colleagues – a Volvo 850 R and a Subaru Impreza WRX – it arrived at the finish line with all its wheels still attached.

For nearly two weeks it had been driven on washboard gravel, through mud and, some of the time, on no kind of track at all. And yet I could quite happily have driven it back to England afterwards. And, despite all the hardships and all the torture, it would have made it.

So bear that in mind if you are looking at your own car now. You may think it’s on its last legs, but I’d like to take a bet that it isn’t.

Jonathon Porritt, George Monbiot, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth will tell you that to save the planet you must dispose of your old car and use the bus or a bicycle instead.

But I’ve got a better idea. If you really want to save the planet, and a fortune too, do not buy a new car. Follow the teachings of
Top Gear
and simply carry on using the one you’ve got now.

17 March 2013

Annoyingly, though, the start of the action was delayed because of rain. And then it was delayed some more, and then a lot more. And then it was abandoned. Various serious-faced men in short-sleeved shirts came on the television to explain that there was standing water on the track, and on Twitter all sorts of people were sympathizing with the decision because it’s dangerous to drive a car into a puddle at 160 mph. They’re right. It is.

But here’s the point that everyone missed. The drivers would not be forced to drive into a puddle at 160 mph. Some would, and of those, a few would spin and crash in an exciting explosion of noise and carbon fibre. Others would choose to slow down. So the puddles would, in fact, be a test of the driver’s bravery. And isn’t that why we watch?

Well, it was in the olden days, when the men who took part wanted to win at all costs because then they’d get more sex. They’d bash wheels and do four-wheel drifts, and as often as not they were still nursing a hangover from the night before. It was all very excellent.

Now, though, the sport is run by people who don’t really think it’s a sport at all. They think it’s a science. And they don’t want to run their aerodynamically honed, electronically measured instruments through a puddle any more than the boffins at Cern would want to study their Higgs boson in a children’s ball pool.

For these people the cars are not cars at all. They are carefully considered probes into the world of advanced maths and the laws of physics. And the drivers? Robots, really, programmed to do as they’re told. Sky Sports interviewed the five rookies who
this year have joined what’s laughably called ‘the circus’. And they were like FIA puppets, saying exactly what they’d been programmed to say by someone in a branded shirt. Dead people would be more interesting.

I like to think that if I’d been one of them, sitting in my pit in Australia, and I’d been told that someone in the health-and-safety vehicle had abandoned the qualifying session, I’d have fired up my car and driven round the track in a roar of barely contained power-sliding fury to show that they were talking nonsense.

Occasionally you hear about a driver insisting a race should be stopped because of bad weather – Alain Prost in Monaco and Niki Lauda in Japan – but for the most part, and in private, they’d be happy to race even if it was snowing. Quite right too. It’s the men in the monogrammed headphones. The geeks with the laptops. And the finger-wagging stewards. They’re the killjoys who are turning F1 into a dreary blend of computer science, corporate public relations and cricket.

When we watch an F1 event, we crave the merest hint of humanity or passion or emotion. But instead it’s Martin Whitmarsh’s hair and those shudderingly awful branded shirts and all the lorries parked exactly in line. It’s a televised obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I wish I ran a team. I’d turn up late and a bit drunk. I’d park my lorry at an angle and send out a car with a giant cock and balls painted on the side. I’d goose the drivers’ girlfriends, over the radio, while they were racing, and if I won, I’d run up and down the pit lane making the loser sign at Christian Horner.

But that’s the trouble. I wouldn’t win. My cars would break down and explode and come last. And I’d be a laughing stock. And that, of course, brings me to the Toyota Corolla.

This has more in common with an F1 racer than any other car on the market because it too was built without emotion or passion. It was built only to be logical and ordered, and as a result it has been humongously successful.

Ford shifted more than 15 million Model Ts. Volkswagen
smashed that record with its original Beetle, which sold more than 21 million. But those are Zager & Evans compared with Toyota, which, to date, has sold about 40 million Corollas. This means there are more of them in the world than there are Canadians.

Except, of course, there aren’t. Toyota makes Corollas that don’t last for ever. After a period of time – let’s say about eight years – they are likely to implode and their owners will have to buy a replacement.

I suppose I should point out that in Britain today the Corolla is actually sold as the Auris. No idea why. Seems to me like Apple changing its name to Pazizzle. But I was interested to find out what it might be like driving around in a car that was deliberately designed to be as uninteresting as possible.

It’s so uninteresting that on the whole of the worldwide web there is not a single review of this car. Not one. You can read about Koenigseggs and Gilbern Invaders and the Peel P50. But not a single journalist has thought, Hmmm. I wonder what the world’s bestselling car is like.

Well, let me tell you here and now that it is extremely uninteresting because you know when you turn the key, the starter motor will whirr and the 1.8-litre engine will fire up. You know that if you turn the wheel, the car will go round the corner, and that if you press the middle pedal, it will slow down.

It handles well. It rides well. It is about as economical as you could reasonably expect and … I’m struggling to stay awake here.

You think a Volkswagen Golf is reliable and predictable? Well, I laugh in your face. A Golf is an offbeat German art-house film featuring laughing clowns and naked women fighting with deranged crows. Whereas an Auris is a glass of tap water.

However, there is one thing. The model I drove had a continuously variable transmission. Baffled? Let’s see if I can help. Imagine the gears on the back wheel of your racing bicycle. There are five cogs, yes? Well, think of CVT as a cone. This
means there’s just one gear with an infinite number of ratios. Sounds great. It isn’t.

Because when you put your foot down to accelerate away from a junction, the revs rise first and then your speed increases to match them. The noise is terrible. It sounds as though there’s a wounded cow under the bonnet.

And on the Auris I drove – which was badged as a Corolla because I was in New Zealand and it’s still 1952 there – a Sport button had been fitted. This meant the cone now had steps, as with a normal gearbox. Which rendered it not just unpleasant and noisy but useless too.

I was very grateful for this feature, though, because on a twelve-hour drive it gave me something to think about, something to hate. And that kept me alive. If I’d been driving a version with a normal manual or a traditional automatic, I’d have done what I do after ten minutes of the lights going out in an F1 race: fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy an Auris. That would be silly. But if you are a driving enthusiast, and you find yourself in such a thing, you will be enraged by the scientific approach. You’ll desperately want it to do something – anything – out of the ordinary. Something excellent or mad or bad.

In the same way as when you watch an F1 race you hanker after the days when the drivers had oil on their faces, wore chinos and didn’t sit in the bloody pits all day because it was a bit rainy.

24 March 2013

Show a man a gun, and if he has anything at all in his underpants, he will start to play with it. He will hold it to his shoulder and look down the barrel. He will want to take the safety catch off, and if it’s loaded, he will want to pull the trigger.

A gun is designed for one purpose: to kill things. We should find it abhorrent. We should shy away and cower. And yet we don’t. Because beneath the cashmere outer layers and the frontal lobes and the ability to make a lovely supper, there is the root of our brain, the old bit. And that is consumed by two things: sex and violence.

It’s the bit that draws us to the gun and makes us want to fire it. Because it knows that when we have an AK-47 in our hands, we are better at hunting and killing than someone who doesn’t. And that makes us more attractive. Which means more sex.

I’m not making any of that up. I once made a television programme about the history of the gun and I was stumped for a conclusion. I simply couldn’t explain why I liked guns and why, on the shoot, the all-male crew liked them, too. So I spoke to some brain experts and they told me.

It’s because, deep down, we are all penises and teeth. It’s fight, flight, eat and shag. And we know that given the choice of an unarmed George Clooney or Nicholas Witchell with an Uzi, every woman in the world is going to ignore the Hollywood superstar and tear off the royal correspondent’s trousers.

But, of course, today you can’t go about your daily business with a machinegun slung casually over your left shoulder. Which means that you need a substitute. Some say it’s regular trips to
the gym. Others say it’s wit, or money, or a kitchen full of cookbooks. But, actually, it’s a manual gearbox.

If you have an automatic, you are telling the world that you are too lazy to change gear yourself. Which means you’ll be hopeless at killing antelopes. You’re the sort of person who watches a lot of television and has warts.

And it’s the same story with the new-fangled flappy-paddle gearboxes. In essence, these are the left and right keys on a laptop. They’re switches. You are just asking a computer to do something, and half the time it will say no. Which means you are a slave to software. A journeyman. An epsilon.

A manual is different because you can’t just sit there while the car drives along. You have to wrestle with it, tame it. You have to take charge, be the boss. Taking a car to the red line and then pulling back on a big metal lever is exactly the same as sprinting across the Serengeti and wrestling a wildebeest to the ground. A manual gearbox makes you a man.

It’s a thing of joy too. Charging up to a corner, braking and downshifting with a smooth double declutch. This is poetry for the petrolhead. And unlike with flappy-paddle systems, you can change down when you feel like it. There are no fail-safe systems on hand to suggest that the shift into second will over-rev the engine. It knows that it’s your engine and they are your valves and if you want to ping them through the bonnet, that’s up to you. In a manual, you are master of your own destiny.

But there are some problems with this, as I discovered over a few days with the Aston Martin V12 Vantage roadster. On cold mornings the big metal lever was jolly chilly. So chilly, in fact, that you needed to think about wearing mittens before setting off. And in the fight-or-flight, hunter-killer world of male pride, you really want to be in a loincloth, not mittens.

There’s more, I’m afraid. Because if you have a can of soft drink in either of the cupholders, it is quite tricky to engage second, fourth, or sixth. Then there’s the bothersome business of traffic. After a while your clutch leg starts to ache. And I’m
sorry, but when the traffic thins, a car with a manual gearbox simply isn’t as fast as a car with flappy paddles.

Last year, on a deserted Romanian motorway and with the blessing of the local constabulary, I raced a manually equipped Aston Martin DBS against a paddle-shift Ferrari California. In terms of acceleration they were almost identical. But each time I changed up, I lost maybe five yards. I was quick. I was smooth. I was very manly. But I lost.

So while the manual gearbox may cause you to have more sex, it makes you a bit hurty, it’s hard to use, it’s not as efficient as flappy paddles and it feels surprisingly old-fashioned. As if you’ve switched from an iPad to a typewriter.

There are other things in the Vantage roadster that feel old-fashioned too. The buttons, for instance, are extremely small, and none of them does what you expect. And behind the wheel you do feel cramped.

Strangely, though, the Vantage roadster is new. Well, newish. Because what we have here is the company’s venerable 6-litre V12 shoehorned into the V8 Vantage’s drop-top body.

You can tell it isn’t the normal V8 version because the bonnet is festooned with many air intakes and vents. Some say that fitting these to an Aston Martin is a bit like fitting a nose stud to the Duke of Edinburgh. But I like them. I think they give what is a very pretty car some edge. They hint at some savagery.

And there is savagery. It isn’t as powerful as the new Vanquish, which has a differently tuned version of the same engine, but somehow it feels way faster. It feels so quick that I became concerned that the chassis wouldn’t be able to cope. Sure, there have been a couple of modifications to the suspension and there’s a restyled rear end designed to keep its backside more firmly glued to the road. But tinkering in the face of such grunt is a bit like trying to direct lava, using hay bales.

Yet, curiously, it’s OK. The ride is compliant and the handling’s fine. At the
Top Gear
test track I ended up going backwards only once. The rest of the time it was all fun and games and
controllability. Until, as is normal in all Astons, the front tyres lost their bite and I was rewarded with yards of game-over juddering understeer.

It’s a hard car to sum up, this, because – let’s be honest, shall we? – an Audi R8 Spyder is a better machine in almost every way. But you’re not interested. You’re going to be happy to put up with the problems and the old-fashioned feel and the ice-cold gearknob because it’s an Aston Martin and because it is one of the best-looking cars ever made.

That’s fine. But I will say one thing. It costs £150,000. And for £39,300 less, you can have the V8 Vantage S roadster, which is also an Aston Martin and which looks pretty much exactly the same.

31 March 2013