Oh, and then there’s the diesel engine. Two years ago eco-loonies were telling everyone diesel was the fuel to use. But then they woke up one day and decided that, no, diesel was not the fuel to use. Because it will cause global warming that will cool the planet. Or something.
It’s hard to be sure with these nutters who say they can predict what the weather will be in 1,000 years, even though the Met Office’s giant computers can’t even work out what it will be doing tomorrow afternoon. So I shall ignore them and tell you that BMW’s diesel engine is fine. It sounds rather good, it has immense torque and it settles down to a muted hum on the motorway.
Plus, you’ll be doing many more miles to the gallon than you would be with a petrol-powered alternative. Which, as we established at the beginning, matters a great deal more than how many nitrogens are being left in your wake.
4 October 2015
And on this bombshell, I can officially declare: we’re back
McLaren P1
On Wednesday morning I climbed behind the wheel of a McLaren P1, fired up its massive engine, eased it into Drive and set off in a blizzard of noise and wheelspin to start filming Amazon Prime’s new motoring show.
On one side of me was James May in a Ferrari. On the other was Richard Hammond in a Porsche 918 Spyder. And in front, hanging from the back of a Land Rover Discovery, was the big, bushy beard of Ben the cameraman. The band was back together and I was very excited. But, ooh, getting it to this point had not been easy.
When the BBC bigwig Alan Yentob called back in April to say my contract would not be renewed as a result of the ‘fracas’, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. A large part of me considered the appealing option of ‘nothing at all’. A smaller part thought I should change tack and do a programme on farming.
I had no idea what James and Richard were planning. When we spoke, they made supportive noises but, unlike the US marines, the three of us have always operated under the rule that we do leave a man behind. Put simply, they had themselves to look after and the BBC was making all sorts of coo-coo noises while dribbling warm honey into their heads.
Of course, you all now know that they decided to leave Auntie and come with me to look for a new home. To find one, we decided to get an American agent, which meant doing conference calls with people who dressed up like the Borg and communicated by barking. ‘Woof, woof,’ they all went, into their face-mounted microphones. James May in particular looked very distressed.
Eventually, though, we found a chap who said that the three of us and our executive producer, Andy Wilman, suddenly becoming available was a huge opportunity for any broadcaster. Or at least that’s what we thought he said – it came across as a series of dog sounds.
He was true to his word, however, and soon the offers started pouring in. All of a sudden we were up to our scrotums in the dizzying world of modern narrowcasting, in which you can upload a programme when it’s ready, not necessarily at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday.
And you can say what you want, because out there, in the free world, there’s no Ofsted. There’s no finger-wagging. Kevin Spacey spat on Jesus and no one batted an eyelid. Because the internet, let’s face it, is also showing a gentleman and a lady making sweet love in extreme detail.
The problem was that standing between us and all this freedom was an impenetrable layer of legal gobbledygook. James May gave up and disappeared. And I wanted to do the same because, while I could tell that the words being used in meetings were English, they made no sense at all.
And then, riding over the horizon on a white charger, in a brown cardboard envelope, came Amazon. It took us to its London headquarters and showed us the tech it had lined up for the very near future, made us an offer in English – well, it was in American, actually, but that’s close enough – and that was that. We had a new home.
All we needed to do, then, was come up with the new show. All of the previous ingredients – the Stig, the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car and the Cool Wall – belonged to the BBC, so we’d have to start from scratch.
It forced us to get creative. To do what we’d never dared to do in the past: to change what we knew worked. We have, though. It’s going to be all new. New name. New segments. New ideas. Everything is different. Apart from James May, obviously, who is still in 1953. And Richard Hammond, who still doesn’t quite understand anything. And me, who thinks everything can be solved with a hammer.
Oh, and we will still be testing cars. And once we’d decided to keep on doing that rather than switching to icebreakers or handbags, it was pretty obvious where we’d begin.
Which is why, last week, I arrived in a part of Portugal that smells faintly of sewage and is full of people I meet at drinks parties in Oxfordshire and friends of Prince Andrew enjoying the last of the summer sunshine.
Why Portugal? Well, because it’s home to the extremely brilliant International Racetrack of the Algarve. A racetrack Ferrari, Porsche and McLaren, all agreed would be ideal to sort out the question that has vexed the world’s motoring enthusiasts for nearly a year: which is best, the Ferrari, the Porsche 918 or the McLaren P1?
We knew before we set off that other people from the internet have now tested these cars to see which is the fastest, and so on. And we wondered whether we should start our new show by gorging on sloppy seconds, but then we thought: ‘People will hopefully want to know what we think.’ And so we got on the plane and came.
I’m here now, and I’ve spent the day in the McLaren and I still can’t quite believe that the thing’s for real. I’ll admit the Ferrari is extremely pretty and that the Porsche grips like an especially clingy and nervous barnacle, but for sheer ‘Oh my God’, sweaty-pawed, heart-racing, wide-eyed, hair-on-end, ball-shrinking terror, you simply can’t beat the P1.
It doesn’t accelerate in the conventional sense. The throttle pedal is more a sort of portal to a wormhole. You press it and instantly 903 brake horsepower of electricity and petrol working together puts you somewhere else.
I am still slightly amazed – and thrilled – that we live in a world where a car as fast as this can be made. And that if someone has the money, they can drive it on any road they like. Even if they are only seventeen years old.
It’s not the best-looking car in the world, but it has a sinister presence. Like the fold-away stock on an AK-47, it’s functional, and its function is to terrify.
But the looks and the speed are nothing compared with the noises it makes. Because it’s a hybrid, there’s a little bit of everything in there. You have the whirrings of a milk float, the chirps of the wastegates, the bellow of the V8 and the roar of the exhaust, all of which come together to make the sort of sound you would normally associate only with a dramatic and sudden movement of tectonic plates.
Inside, there are many dials and read-outs and there are buttons that make it go even faster. But you have no time for any of this because you are going so bloody fast and your eyes are full of sweat and you’re getting to a corner and you’re doing a million miles an hour and you have to trust that the invisible elephant sitting on the rear spoiler is still there, pressing the back tyres into the road, and that it hasn’t wandered off to eat some bark.
I have no idea at this stage whether it will be faster than the Ferrari or the Porsche around the spaghetti-shaped racetrack here in southern Portugal. That test doesn’t happen until after this newspaper has gone to bed.
But whatever the outcome, we are now in the future. It certainly feels that way from where I’ve been sitting all day.
11 October 2015
Yabba-dabba-doo! T Rex is snarling in evolution’s face
Lamborghini Aventador
One day, many years ago, a penguin must have landed in the frozen wastelands of Antarctica and thought: ‘Hmm. It’s a bit cold but there are no polar bears trying to eat me and the sea is full of fish, so I reckon I’ll stick around.’
Now if we are to believe the teachings of the baby Jesus, he’d have lasted about five minutes before f
reezing to death. Or he’d have jumped into the sea, where he’d have immediately become a tasty frozen snack for a hungry leopard seal.
Luckily, however, there’s such a thing as evolution, which arrived in the snowy wilderness and with a heavy but loving, parental sigh took charge of the situation, giving Mr Penguin bigger lungs and a fat tummy and turning his wings into flippers.
We see this kindly benevolence everywhere. When people started to live below sea level in what we now know as the Netherlands, evolution arrived and quietly made sure they grew to be very tall so they’d be OK when the place flooded.
Then there’s Australia. It was designed to be a faraway dustbin for all the animals that were really too dangerous to live anywhere else, so evolution had to make sure that when people decided to live there, too, they’d become hardy souls with a belief that anyone who has tear ducts must be a Pom.
I like to think that evolution lives on something a bit like Tracy Island, waiting to drop everything and help out when a tortoise decides it wants to live in the sea, or when people decide they want to keep dogs as pets. Secretly, it thinks: ‘Why would you want to do that, you imbeciles? Dogs are dangerous carnivores.’ But it rocks up anyway and turns what’s basically a wolf into a spaniel with floppy ears and a cute, waggly tail.
We see evolution at work in the world of cars too. When we were all called Terry and June, we were happy to drive around in four-door saloons, but one day we woke up, started naming ourselves after various white wines and decided we would only be happy if our car was 15 feet off the ground and called an SUV.
One day, everyone wanted a hot hatchback. We liked them. We thought they made a great deal of sense. And then we decided for no reason at all that we didn’t want to go quickly any more. We wanted to save fuel. We are worse than otters, which, of course, started out as fish, then decided they liked the land and then decided, just after evolution had turned their scales into fur, that actually they wanted to be fish again.
But despite our otterishness, the car industry has kept up, giving us what we want with remarkable speed.
However, occasionally evolution is caught out. Thanks to the teachings of the great American scientist Michael Bay, we now know the dinosaurs were wiped out by a giant meteorite, which means that one day they were walking through the woods thinking: ‘These plants are awfully dusty today.’ And the next they were sitting there thinking: ‘Why am I so dead?’
Evolution didn’t even have a chance to put down the crossword and slip into its Thunderbird suit before the whole planet was carpeted with decaying carcasses. And we are seeing a similar sort of thing today in the world of supercars.
Back in the mid-1960s, Lamborghini decided to put an enormous engine in the middle of a car that was about the same height as a piece of paper. It called its creation the Miura and the supercar was born.
There have been many imitations over the years, but they’ve all adhered to the same basic recipe: dramatic looks, enormous power and, er, that’s it.
Now, however, Porsche, Ferrari and McLaren have taken the unusual step of using hybrid technology to get even more power from their road rockets. The combination of electricity and petrol is as potent as it sounds. These new cars are phenomenally fast and have therefore arrived in the supercar arena like three extinction-event meteorites.
Honda is next with a hybrid all-wheel-drive NSX, which I hope will be more successful than its efforts in Formula One. And BMW is said to have an improved i8 in the wings. And that takes us back to where the whole genre began: Lamborghini.
Lamborghini is a division of Volkswagen, which because of this ludicrous emissions saga will not be spraying much cash around in the foreseeable future. Which means Lambo will have no funds to develop a hybrid supercar of its own. Which means it will be stuck with what it’s got now for quite a while.
Which in many ways is no bad thing, because what it has got now is the best car it has yet made: the Aventador.
Oh sure, even by dinosaur standards, it’s not the best supercar to drive. It feels big and heavy. And if you go for a hot lap of a racetrack, you’d better not even think about doing another, because the brakes will fade and then fail. It’s all very well saying that this cannot happen because they are carbon ceramic, but I know it does.
There’s more. Inside, an Aventador is very dramatic, with a starter button that hides under the sort of red flap that you normally find over the Fire Missile button in the cockpit of a fighter jet. But if you actually look at all the stuff carefully, you’ll notice it’s been lifted straight from an Audi TT.
And who cares? Because – let’s be honest, shall we? – nobody has ever bought a supercar because they want to get round the Nürburgring in four seconds. Supercars are capable of going at 200mph, but they’re bought mainly for doing 1 per cent of that speed in Knightsbridge. And when it comes to prowling, nothing looks quite as good as the big Lambo. It’s a masterpiece.
And why are you bothered about the ‘I started wi’ nowt’ Audi underpinnings? What would you prefer? Italian electrics?
Yes, it’s soundly beaten both in a straight line and round a corner by the new breed of hybrid hypercars, but, while they make a range of unusual noises, they can’t compete with the raw, visceral bellow of the T Rex that lives under the Aventador’s engine cover. Ungodly. That’s how it sounds.
And another thing. The new McLaren P1 is very difficult to drive fast. If you make even a tiny mistake, it will kill you. The Lamborghini isn’t like that. Thanks to its four-wheel-drive system and the fact that it’s more for show than go, it’s on your side when the outside world gets blurry.
I love this car. I love its clunky, old-school manners and its honest-to-God, shepherd’s-pie approach to the business of getting down low and going quickly.
Will it die in the face of the modern competition? Well, look at it this way. When steam power came along, horses were no longer necessary. But instead of melting them down – which is what I’d have done – we turned them into pets.
And that’s what I hope happens with the big old Lambo: that after the meteorite of hybrid power has struck, people will continue to want it precisely because it suddenly appears to be lumbering and old-fashioned.
Certainly, if I were given the choice of any supercar, this is the one I’d buy. I respect and admire the P1. But which would you rather have as a pet: a clever and sophisticated electronic robot? Or a bloody great brontosaurus?
My case rests.
25 October 2015
Fetch Fiona Bruce: I’ve found the world’s fastest antique
Ford Focus ST Estate
Back in 2010 the Conservatives announced that there would be no more idiotic bus lanes on the M4 and that speed cameras would be switched off. New Labour’s thirteen-year war on the motorist, they declared, was over.
Sadly, they were lying. Because today, if you have to get from, let’s say, west London to Luton airport, you are monitored by hidden speed cameras on the motorways and average-speed cameras everywhere else. You cannot stray over the limit even once. Compared with Tony Blair’s puny war on the motorist, this is nuclear.
Smug speed-camera enthusiasts will argue through their muesli-stained teeth that the new blanket coverage means that no one can ever break the law. But I have a couple of points on that.
No. 1. In a modern car with good brakes and airbags on a good, well-designed road where pedestrians and traffic are kept apart by railings, it is absurd to impose a 40mph limit. Forty is just a number plucked from the sky by a fool who knows nothing. There’s no science or sense to it at all.
If you want total safety, make the speed limit 1mph. But if you accept that casualties are inevitable, then balance the need for safety with the need for speed. And on a dual carriageway that means a limit of 70mph. As it always used to be when the country was run by sensible people, not ill-informed morons.
No. 2. And this is more important. Just because we now have the ability to prevent speeding of any kind everywhere,
that does not mean we should use it. Hey, why not implant everyone in the country with a tracking device so the police can keep an eye on their movements until the day they die? Why not take a DNA sample from every newborn baby? We could do that easily, and if fighting crime were our priority we would. But it isn’t.
No. 3. Speed cameras do not cut accident numbers. In fact, when they were switched off in Oxfordshire recently – they’re back on again now, by the way – the number of casualties showed no noticeable increase. We all know they are a tool for raising money. So why can’t the government admit it? Why can’t it say: ‘They are a tax on people who want to go quickly.’ I wouldn’t mind that because, if I were late for a flight, I could make the choice: do I pay the speed tax and catch it, or do 40mph and get the next one?
The only thing ministers would have to do to make this work is drop the penalty-point system. Because that’s the real problem. The fact is that on one journey from London to Luton it is now possible to amass enough points to mean that you arrive without a driving licence.
Of course, that’s not going to happen. So I guarantee that we will reach a stage very soon where it will be impossible to get away with speeding on any road anywhere. And there will be no point hiding from the law in a bothy in Scotland because there will be a tracking device in your head and Plod will send attack choppers to hunt you down.
This is something you should bear in mind when choosing your next car. Because what’s the point of having a 500 brake horsepower engine when all you need to reach 40mph is just one actual horse? Certainly that would make more sense than the car I am writing about today.
Really? Page 10
