Apart from the lack of a cup-holder, this is a car you could and would use every day. It’s not so big that it’s hopeless in town, the dashboard is wonderful to behold, and it’s comforting to know that behind the scenes everything is made by Audi. The next R8, in fact, will be a Huracán with Lamborghini crossed out and the word Audi written on, in crayon.
There is, however, one problem that drove me mad. Italy’s motor industry finally mastered the art of making a decent driving position a few years ago, yet now Lamborghini has forgotten and mounted the seat far too high.
This means you sort of look down on the interior rather than across it, but worse, because the windscreen is a long way away and there’s a lot of roof between you and it, it’s as if you’re driving round in a preposterous peaked cap. And that means when you are waiting at a set of lights, you can’t see when they go green. You only know you have to set off when the chap behind starts beeping.
Oh, and I have to mention the steering-wheel-mounted switches for the indicators and wipers. No, Lamborghini. Just no. I know Ferrari did it first, but as my teachers used to say when I’d been caught copying, ‘If Wilkins jumped off a cliff, would you jump off one too?’
Niggles aside, though, this is an interesting car because it’s an other-way-round Lamborghini. It doesn’t look very exciting, but it’s tremendous to drive. Really tremendous, actually. Around something called ‘the Top Gear test track’ it was faster, apparently, than its big brother, the Aventador.
3 May 2015
Hold the high fives, Hank, till someone figures out how to drive it
Chevrolet Corvette Z06
In the past few weeks, as you might imagine, I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the telephone to various people in California, and I must admit it’s been rather enjoyable. Talking to an American about stuff is like talking to a child who’s going to the zoo. There’s no irony, no self-deprecation and none of the barely fathomable subtlety you get when talking to a Britisher. It’s a non-stop rollercoaster of primary-coloured enthusiasm.
We see exactly the same sort of thing in the online blurb Chevrolet has created for its new Corvette Z06. It’s billed as a ‘world-class supercar’ and a ‘triumph of design and engineering’. There’s even a quote from Tadge Juechter, the chief engineer who worked on the car: ‘Its aerodynamic downforce performance is massive and unlike anything we’ve ever tested in any street car.’
Here in Europe we scoff at this sort of thing. We read it and think, ‘Yeah, well, you would say that. You designed it, so you’re hardly likely to say it’s a bit crap.’ Whereas an American would read the quote and think, ‘Wow. The new Z06’s aerodynamic downforce performance is massive and unlike anything Chevrolet has ever tested in any street car.’
There’s more. Chevrolet tells us the Z06 sits ‘at the intersection of Le Mans and the autobahn’, which to me means it sits in the French village of Bar-sur-Seine, just to the southeast of Troyes. But it wasn’t sitting there at all. It was sitting in the pits at the Thruxton racing circuit, in Hampshire, on a very windy and extremely cold May day last week.
There is nothing on God’s green earth that is quite as depressing as a second-division British racing circuit: the metal window frames on the mildewy portable buildings, the boarded-up burger vans, the cock-eyed signs saying, ‘Marshal camping’. And there in the middle of it all was what appeared to be a child’s toy, an egg-yellow Corvette. It cheered the place up in the way a pair of bright curtains can make a squat feel like home.
Before we begin, I should explain that I like the 2015 Corvette a very lot. Only recently, I told you that the Stingray convertible version was good-looking, fast, adroit in the corners and excellent value for money. If it weren’t for the scrap-metal-dealer image and the fact the steering wheel is on the left whether you like it or not, the new Corvette is a car I would very much like to own.
Or would I? Because the latest incarnation of the new ’Vette, the Z06, a car that sits at the intersection of Le Mans and the autobahn and has better downforce performance than any other street car ever made by anyone ever.
It certainly has plenty of grunt because the company has added a supercharger to the 6.2-litre V8 engine. And in round numbers this means 650bhp and 650 torques. Which in turn means that in a drag race – and I know this because I tested it – it has the same performance as a Porsche 911 Turbo.
In the olden days this would have been enough. Hank and Bud and Tadge would have looked at the straight-line speed and, after a bout of high-fiving, put the car on sale. But that is not the way in Kentucky these days. So the Corvette has a carbon-fibre bonnet for a lower centre of gravity, along with titanium intake valves and composite floor panels, plus the option of carbon ceramic brakes.
And you get a dial on the centre console that can turn your relatively benign road car into a screaming track monster. Although when I say ‘screaming’, I mean ‘bellowing’. And even that doesn’t quite cover it. When the Z06 leaves the line in a full-bore racing start, the noise from its four centrally mounted tailpipes is painful. Ever heard a Harrier hover? Well, it’s like that.
Except it’s louder. Once, I was taken to watch NASA test a 37-million-plus-horsepower Space Shuttle rocket engine in a place called Stennis, in Mississippi. I told the man I didn’t need ear defenders because I’d seen The Who, but it turned out I did. It was a genuinely awesome and awful experience, that sound. And even that wasn’t as loud as the ’Vette. It’s a sound that has a mass. It has gravity. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that it can kill.
Of course, inside the car, you are several yards in front of the noise and, anyway, you’ve got more important things on your mind, such as: ‘I’m going to crash soon.’ It’s hard in the cockpit to work out what’s wrong, there’s just so much going on, but having given the matter some thought since I came home and lay in the bath shaking, I think I have found the problem. Chevrolet has fitted titanium this and ceramic that because these words look good in a brochure. And they give an owner good boasting rights at the golf club and the shooting range. But don’t be fooled into thinking they make the car easier to drive and easier to manage. Because they don’t.
This car is evil. You turn into a corner and there’s some quite pronounced understeer. You give it a dab of power to solve the problem but, because there’s so much torque, the back end doesn’t start to come loose. It lets go completely.
So now you’re sideways and in real trouble. Because Hank and Bud and Tadge have heard that a racing car needs quick steering, they’ve gone mad and given the Z06 a rack that would be deemed twitchy on a PlayStation. And semi-slick tyres. And nowhere near enough lock. So now you’ve spun.
On the next lap you know not to exceed the levels of grip, but because the steering is so twitchy and because the power is so grunty, it’s hard to stay below the point of no return. The only solution is to drive very slowly indeed.
Let me put it this way. If this car is supposed to sit at the intersection of Le Mans and the autobahn, and if all that titanium and carbon-fibre stuff is there for a reason other than marketing, why is it available only with a manual gearbox or the dim-witted automatic that was in my test car? Why would it not have blink-of-an-eye flappy paddles?
That’s the giveaway, really. This car was built to look good in a brochure. The numbers and ingredients are tantalizing, but this car is not a serious player in the European theatre of war. It may be able to out-accelerate just about everything, and on a skid pan the size of Texas, where there’s nothing to hit if you overstep the mark, it can generate some extraordinary lateral G. But it’s not nice to drive.
So if you want a serious car, buy one from the continent that gave the world Shakespeare, Monet and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Europe does serious well. It does substance. It does brilliant. America does Disney. And what we have with the Z06 is Disney trying to do a hard-hitting documentary about Africa’s civil wars.
Naturally, it hasn’t really worked.
10 May 201
5
Lower suspension, faster cornering but still no Italian starlet
Porsche Cayman GTS
Soon almost no one will want to buy a car. You may think the industry is vibrant and full of many exciting things, but the truth is: cars are enjoying their last hurrah, burning brightly, as suns do just before they fizzle out.
The problem is simple. Apart from a few friendless weirdos, today’s young people are simply not interested in cars at all. When I turned seventeen, and this is probably true of you too, I became consumed with the need to get on the road as quickly as possible. I wanted a car, not just for the freedom that such a thing would afford, but for the sheer joy of being able to drive a ton of machinery at 100 miles an hour.
My son is very different. He’s nineteen and has not bothered to take his driving test. His argument is a simple one. There’s a coach that stops right outside his flat in London and it takes him, in a blizzard of wi-fi, to and from Oxford. For £11.
If he wants to go somewhere else, he can use a train or something called ‘a bus’. An Uber cab is never more than a few clicks away, and there’s always a Boris bike for short trips on level ground when it’s not too cold or hot or wet. He can move about without worrying about breath tests or speeding fines or parking tickets or no-claims bonuses. My son therefore thinks he’s free simply because he doesn’t have a car.
And there’s no point going on about the open road and the wind in your hair and the snarl of a straight six because he just doesn’t see cars this way. With good reason. When he was little he spent two hours a day on the school run strapped into a primary-coloured child’s seat, in the back of a Volvo, in an endless jam. There’s no way this was going to engender any motoring-related dreams. He wasn’t sitting there in a goo of expectation, thinking, ‘Hmm, when I’m big I will do this as well.’
There’s more. When I was a boy, we had Grandstand and World of Sport on the television, bringing us all the action from the country’s racetracks. We had rallycross, and we had Minis going wheel to wheel with Ford Cortinas and enormous American muscle cars. And Formula One had no stewards in Pringle jumpers making sure that on the circuit there were no overtaking moves at all.
But look at what we have today. F1 is so boring that the television companies have to show replays of a pit stop. They do. In Barcelona last week they showed us a car having its wheels changed and then they showed it to us again, as though we might be interested. My son certainly wasn’t. So we turned it off and went to watch some football.
In the olden days there was even a car show on the television. There were Lamborghinis whizzing hither and thither and McLarens at full chat in Italian motorway tunnels. But that’s gone, too, now, and when it comes back you can be fairly sure it’ll be full of handy eco-Milibandy hints on how to get more miles to the gallon from your hybrid.
Then we have car advertising. Where are the burning cornfields and the shots of pretty women hanging their fur coats on parking meters? Gone. And in their stead we have £9.99 win free save international zoom-zoom nonsense full of palindromic numberplates with a bouncy Europop beat. They’re selling cars as though they’re fridges.
And if you sell something as a practical proposition, it had better actually be practical. Which, as we’ve established, a car isn’t. Nor is a fridge, for that matter, since you have a supermarket on every street corner now that can keep everything chilled until you need it. Free up the space in your kitchen. Get rid. And free up the space in your garage while you’re at it. Because you don’t need a car. Not really. Not these days.
My generation, we see the car as an Alfa Romeo drophead on the Amalfi coast with a French playboy at the wheel and Claudia Cardinale in a headscarf in the passenger seat. Today’s generation sees the car as a Toyota Prius, in a jam, on a wet Tuesday, with a Syrian accountant at the wheel and a broken TomTom on the passenger seat.
The tragedy is that car-makers don’t seem to have noticed that this is going on. That there’s nothing – absolutely nothing – out there selling the idea of a car as a dream.
Jaguar, for example, makes a sporty car and then two weeks later brings out a new version that is sportier still. But it is chasing an audience that is getting older and dying. Most people just want a bit of peace and quiet and 40 miles to the gallon. And the new generation doesn’t want a car at all. And certainly not a car that can do 180mph.
There’s a similar problem at Porsche. I tested the Cayman S not long ago and thought it was pretty much spot on, an almost perfect sports car for the fiftysomething chap whose automotive love affair began long before the thought police arrived with their Gatsos and their parking-by-phone nonsense.
So what does Porsche do? Well, it brings out a new model called the GTS, which is lower and gruntier and more sporty. Hmm. Does Porsche think the world is full of people saying, ‘Wow. There’s a new Cayman out that is 10 millimetres closer to the ground for better cornering’? Because it isn’t.
Still, that’s its problem. Not mine. Mine is reviewing a car that’s a bit odd because it is not, as you might expect, a follow-up to the 2011 Cayman R. That came with no equipment at all and was designed for track-day enthusiasts. The GTS comes with all the usual appurtenances of gracious living. But is actually more powerful and faster than the R was. Odd.
And it gets odder because, if you buy a normal Cayman S and fit all the stuff that the GTS has as standard, the two cars cost as near as dammit the same.
I’d stick with the S because, while the GTS is a lovely thing to drive on the sort of deserted road that doesn’t exist any more, really, apart from in Wales (where I was, luckily), you’d need a stopwatch to tell it apart from the S. Both are beautiful to hustle through bends, both go well and both ride nicely apart from on bumpy city-centre streets, where they are both a bit crashy. The GTS especially so.
I had only two criticisms of the S. I didn’t like its flappy-paddle box and its seats were deeply uncomfortable. Well, the GTS I tried had a manual, which was sharper, even if it did feel very old-fashioned to be doing so much work, and seats that felt better.
But were they? I only ask because after a week with the car I had to visit a massage person. I’m not saying the two things are connected. But it seems likely.
So I don’t see the point of this car. If Porsche wants to give us a lower ride height and slightly higher cornering speeds, it’s got to start reselling the dream of the car. It’s got to forget G-forces and think about the G-spot.
We need more glamour. We need more Italian starlets in headscarves. We need a new James Dean, because he sold more cars by dying in one than a million engineers will shift in a lifetime.
17 May 2015
Be gone, crazy creature. The ecstasy I feel is not enough
Alfa Romeo 4C Coupé
A number of years ago a writer on the hysterically earnest motoring magazine Autocar wrote in a review of some supercar or other that it caused ‘absolute mayhem’ when he parked it in a supermarket car park.
Hmm. I’m not sure his definition of ‘absolute mayhem’ is quite the same as mine. Because in my quite extensive experience no supercar causes people to run screaming for their lives, or to throw a milk bottle full of petrol at a policeman. And no. Not even the lowest, yellowest, loudest Lamborghini makes people rush into a petrol station kiosk and start helping themselves to the sweets, before killing the cashier and burning it down.
In Italy, a small crowd of admirers may gather, but elsewhere, and especially in Britain, the only reaction you get is from small boys, who clutch excitedly at their tinkles. That’s not absolute mayhem in my book.
But it must be said that the Alfa Romeo 4C coupé did cause something of a stir. In London, where most people wouldn’t even look twice if Harrison Ford bounced down the middle of the road on a space hopper, women from offices would stop halfway across zebra crossings for a better look. Bus passengers would reach for their cameraphones.
Other motorists would applaud. It was a long way from absolute m
ayhem but I can tell you this: I’ve never driven any mainstream road car that generated quite such an outpouring of affection. Not ever. It was like I was whizzing about in a reincarnated blend of Gandhi and Diana, Princess of Wales.
The reason people like it is simple: it’s sporty and interesting and different but it’s not even slightly threatening. Think of it as a Ferrari puppy. Sadly, however, there are a few issues with the actual car. Where do I start? With the steering wheel, which would be dismissed as ‘too plasticky’ by the makers of those penny-in-the-slot cars you find outside suburban chemist shops?
How about the problem of getting out after you’ve parked? Put simply, it’s like being calved. Or maybe I should major on the width. This car is so wide it won’t even fit in a standard parking bay. And even if you do shoehorn it into a space, you will then only be able to open the doors the merest crack, which makes getting out even more difficult. Realistically, you’ll get into this car once, and then that’ll be that.
Other things. Well, the boot lid won’t stay up by itself. There is almost no rear visibility at all. The switchgear is so flimsy it makes the steering wheel look like a Fabergé egg. There’s a draught from the bottom of the doors as you drive along, and it’s as luxuriously appointed as a Presbyterian beach hut.
‘Aha,’ I hear you say, ‘but I bet it’s an absolute joy to drive.’ Nope. It may have a carbon-fibre tub, the sort of thing you find in a Formula One car or a McLaren P1, and it may be so light as a result that it can make do with a tiny turbocharged 1742cc engine, but the steering is inert, and not power assisted, and the brakes lack any feel at all. You have to use muscle memory to decide how quickly you want to stop.
Really? Page 6
