Then it rang. It actually rang. So I took a guess at where on the screen the Answer button might be and took the call. It was the editor. Wondering in a tone that was polite and pleading but also laced with a hint of menace where my column might be. ‘I’m doing it. I’m doing it,’ I replied impatiently, before going back to the telephone issue.
They say a Dutch bargee can swear without hesitation, repetition or deviation for two minutes and that no other language offers such a rich vein of opportunity for fans of the expletive. Well, that’s rubbish. When the iTunes program shut down for, I think, the twelfth time, I swore constantly for thirty-six minutes and at such a volume that the walls of my office were bulging.
Fearing I might be on the verge of a sizeable coronary – I’d love to know how many heart attacks have been caused by malfunctioning mobile phones – the office staff broke off from their important work to call for assistance. And half an hour later a man arrived to make everything better.
I felt for him. Because, as a mobile phone consultant, he never in his working life meets anyone who’s calm and rational. Nobody thinks: ‘Hmm. It’s a lovely day. I think I’ll call Gary at Ezee iPhone Solutions to see how he is.’ The only people he meets are bright red and shouting.
Anyway, he’s in a nearby office now, sorting everything out, which means finally I can get on with my review of the Astra.
It had a 4G wi-fi hotspot facility, which would have been useful if my phone had been working. But, as I may have mentioned, it wasn’t.
Other than that, it was red and turbocharged and would be fine for anyone who needs four wheels and a place to sit down when moving about. And now I’m out of space, which is probably a good thing, because I have nothing else to say about it, really.
19 June 2016
Raving in slippers with General Franco
Seat Ibiza Cupra
Most of the world’s car companies were started by someone who had a vision. Sir Henry Royce, Sir William Lyons, Louis Chevrolet, Nicola Romeo, Soichiro Honda, Enzo Ferrari, Brian Hyundai. I may have made that last one up.
All these men saw what everyone else was doing and decided they could do something different, something better. They had a dream and they decided to live it. Seat, however, is different.
Shortly after the Spanish Civil War had reduced Spain to a smouldering ruin, a committee of serious-faced bankers and industrialists was formed, and after a couple of meetings these men decided that if their country was to be hauled out of the mire, the population would need cars. And to stop people spending what little money they had on imports, they reckoned the country should make its own. Siat was born.
At the time, the Spanish were extremely good at shooting one another and throwing donkeys off tower blocks but extremely not good at making anything as complicated as a car. They would therefore need a foreign partner, and they set off into Europe to find one.
Sadly it was 1942, and the rest of Europe was a bit too busy with other things to worry about how the Spanish might make a small and inexpensive family saloon. So they had to wait until 1948, when Fiat came along, explaining that no one in the world was quite so good at making sub-12bhp cars for the downtrodden masses. The Italian company was given the gig and just five years later produced a Barcelona-made family saloon that was very luxurious and expensive. It flopped.
What’s more, General Franco had decided that the ‘i’ in the company name, which stood for Iberica, should really be an ‘e’, for Española. Which meant the firm wasn’t thinking about exporting to any English-speaking country. Because who in their right mind would buy a car called a Seat?
Actually, strike that. In Britain we had the Humber, which was named after a sludgy brown river of turd and effluent. And in America they had the Oldsmobile. And in Russia they had the Pantry. So, in the grand scheme of things, driving around in a chair wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
The new Spanish operation had bigger problems anyway. Many years of strikes, floods and industrial shenanigans followed, during which no cars of any note were made. Seriously, can you picture a Seat from the 1970s? Nope. Me neither.
At the beginning of the 1980s, though, there was a disaster. Fiat pulled out. Seat was thus forced to go it alone, and in 1982 there was a great deal of trumpetry when it announced it had made a car, all by itself. With no help from Fiat at all. None, d’you hear? None.
Yeah, right. Even people with terrible conjunctivitis could see the Seat Ronda was nothing more than a Fiat Ritmo with a new nose. Happily, however, the people at the arbitration court in Paris plainly did have terrible conjunctivitis, because when Fiat sued, they sided with Seat. Which, to celebrate this important legal victory, started making Volkswagens.
On the face of it, this didn’t sound a good idea. When you buy a Jaguar today, you like to feel it’s shot through with the DNA of Sir William Lyons. It’s the same story when you buy a Honda or a Ferrari. Each of these cars, even today, reflects the passion and dreams of the person who founded the company. But when you bought a Seat, you’d be getting a Volkswagen garnished with a bit of Franco, a layer of social engineering and some tiresome lawsuits.
And, anyway, who in their right mind would wake up one day and say, ‘Yes. I’d like a Volkswagen, but I’d rather it weren’t built by those efficient Germans. I’d like it to have been made by a Spaniard’?
Lots of people, as it turned out, because Seat later hit on the clever idea of naming its Volkswagens after pretty Mediterranean holiday hotspots. You might not get many takers for a Spanish Polo. But call it an Ibiza and every drug-loving twentysomething from Arbroath to Zurich is going to be queuing round the block.
Which brings me shuddering this morning to the door of the Seat Ibiza Cupra, a racy-looking little three-door hatchback with fat tyres, black wheels and a turbocharged 1.8-litre engine. That’s quite a lump in a car that’s not much bigger than an insect.
I was expecting all sorts of dawn-on-the-beach histrionics. As it has 189 brake horsepower under the bonnet, I reckoned there’d be a pulsating beat and a Eurotrash DJ endlessly inviting the party people to spray one another with foam. But no. It was more chillout than house. It was quiet and restrained and surprisingly grown up.
It’s the same story with the ride. This is a hot hatch built to draw your attention to Seat’s effortsin various touring car championships. It has a manual gearbox and is aimed at people who enjoy discomfort so much, they walk around with their trousers done up under their bottoms. And yet it simply glides over potholes and speed humps.
A chintzy interior, then? Something as colourful as the cocktails in Pacha? Nope. It’s grey with added grey. I’ve seen snazzier slippers.
It is up to date, though. When you accelerate hard out of a bend, it will brake the inside wheel to stop it whirring round pointlessly, and there are adjustable dampers. More important in this day and age, it comes as standard with the ability to connect to just about every interface known to man. There’s Apple CarPlay on offer and something called Android Auto. I think this means it’s capable of sending pictures of your private parts to the ether, possibly through voice command.
It’s a strange car, this. Make no mistake: it’s very fast and it looks good in a tight, iPoddy sort of way – white paint and black wheels is a combination that works well.
Yet it’s like climbing into a pair of gardening trousers. The Volkswagen Polo GTI – its identical twin mechanically – is far more lively to behold and sit in. And that’s odd, because you’d expect to find that the VW was dour and sensible and the Seat was the hallucinatory alternative.
I’m not sure which I prefer, and I can’t be bothered to work it out, because while both are fine, neither is anything like as good as Ford’s Fiesta ST. That car is a gem. You sense Henry Ford’s pile-’em-high-and-sell-’em-cheap mass production, but you can feel Ford’s racing pedigree as well.
The Seat, by comparison, is just somewhere to sit down and relax while it moves you about.
3 July 201
6
Merci, Bono, it’s just what I’m looking for
Vauxhall Zafira Tourer
Even by my own slightly weird view of what’s normal, last Sunday was a bit odd. I was on a boat – a big one – and we’d anchored off the south of France when half the people on board suddenly took leave of their senses and decided they’d like to walk up the Nietzsche path to the village of Eze for a drink.
The Nietzsche path, I should explain, is a walk the philosopher liked to do when he needed to think, but all anyone else can think when they’re on it is: ‘Christ, my thighs hurt.’ And: ‘Oh no, one of my lungs has just come out.’ Steep doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s bloody nearly vertical and it goes on and on, up to 85,000ft, and every one of the gravelly, ankle-breaking hairpins is festooned with one of the old man’s pearls of wisdom about how there was nothing he couldn’t teach ya about the raising of the wrist.
As you can imagine, I thought this was very stupid but I quite liked the idea of having a drink in the Golden Goat on top of the mountain. So I said I’d use a car.
Happily, one of the people on the boat – and you need to be awake for this bit – said he knew someone who lived on the beach and that I could probably borrow a car from him. And the person he knew? Well, of course, it was Bono out of U2. Someone I met only briefly at a small dinner with the King of Jordan.
Anyway, I was taken to the shore in a little speedboat and after a lengthy and tricky walk along a slippery shingle beach, I arrived at Mr Bono’s house with a bright red face and noticeably sweaty moobs. He wasn’t at home so I was greeted by a shabby-looking individual who I thought must be the gardener. But he turned out to be John F. Kennedy’s nephew. Only Adrian Gill can drop more names before he’s started talking about what he had for supper. But that’s the last, I promise.
JFK’s nephew was a bit stand-offish. He’d had a garbled call from someone saying that someone else was maybe coming round to pick up some wheels but he was nervous about letting the sweaty tramp who’d arrived drive off into the evening in Bono’s car. Especially as I was accompanied by a woman who looked like she’d arrived, in a time warp, from a 1967 surfing party in California.
Tentatively, he handed over a set of keys, and with a stern face, said: ‘I just want to make this clear: if you bend it, you mend it.’ And with that I was in the driveway, with surfer woman, clutching the keys to a car that belongs to, let’s be honest, one of the coolest people on the planet.
There’s no flowery way of putting this so I’ll just come straight out with it. Bono drives a Vauxhall Zafira diesel.
I was quite impressed with this little seven-seater when it first came out, but then the old model tarnished its reputation somewhat by bursting into flames for no obvious reason pretty much constantly. Google ‘Zafira’ and ‘fire’ and you’ll see what I mean.
I wasn’t thinking about those things, though. It’s quite a tricky drive and it was even trickier that night. Partly because I knew that if I had a crash, the embarrassment and the shame would live with me for ever but also because my head was spinning. Bono. Has. A. Vauxhall. Zafira. With. A. Diesel. Engine.
In my mind he’d have had something fast and expensive but not showy or vulgar. A Maserati Quattroporte. Or a BMW M6 Gran Coupé perhaps. Once, I was in a military helicopter flying over southern Iraq when someone fired a heat-seeking missile at it. I was listening to Vertigo by U2 at the time, and as we ducked and weaved in a shower of our own flares, I remember thinking how the music and the moment were so well matched. If only I’d known then that the man who actually co-wrote Vertigo has a diesel Vauxhall. I’d have had a trouser accident, that’s for sure.
As we climbed up the mountain, the Zafira was very roly-poly but I found it surprisingly easy to moderate the pitching by turning the wheel gently and braking as though the pedal were made of an egg. Then I noticed how brilliant the engine was. It’s an all-aluminium, turbocharged 1.6-litre unit that can apparently do more than 60mpg on a cruise and 120mph when you’re in a hurry.
And then I went over a speed hump and I simply didn’t feel a thing. Never in all my years in this business have I encountered any car – including the Rolls-Royce Phantom – that’s quite so good at refusing to transmit road surface irregularities into the cabin. Which makes it the most comfortable car – pause – in the world.
That night, after I’d safely returned the Vauxhall to Bono’s house, I looked it up online and found that Autocar magazine disagreed with my findings. It said that the Renault Grand Scénic rides more smoothly.
Fearful that Bono had bought a special Zafira with marshmallow shock absorbers and suspension units made from eiderdown, I came back to England, hired a Zafira and went for a drive. And I’m sorry, Autocar, but I’m right about this. The car’s extraordinary.
If you have a bad back or you just want to be comfortable as you move about, you need look no further. But don’t worry, because it’s also very good-looking and it has a windscreen that is bigger than the one you get on a National Express coach. It’s so big that from behind the wheel you can’t see any pillars or a roofline, so it feels as if you are floating along, powered only by magic.
The interior’s top-notch as well; nicely styled, well put-together and festooned with all sorts of stuff you wouldn’t expect for this kind of money. I drove a Ford S-Max later, which I’ve always thought was pretty good, and it felt like something from fifty years ago. Diesely. Lacklustre. Old.
It seems that after my visit, Bono telephoned JFK’s nephew who explained that a tramp had come round to the house and borrowed the Zafira. Bono was apparently a bit surprised by this: ‘You gave Jeremy Clarkson the Vauxhall!’ It turns out I was supposed to have borrowed his BMW 6-series convertible.
But I’m glad I didn’t because I would never have experienced something that’s unique. A miserable diesel seven-seater Vauxhall that you would actually want to buy. And not only so you could tell your mates: ‘Bono’s got one, you know.’
10 July 2016
Joie de vivre? Not in this Brexit poster boy
Wolseley 1500 Mk 1
I feel such an idiot. For twenty-odd years I have been coming here and – foolishly, as it’s turned out – talking about cars from exotic places such as Germany and Japan. I’ve spoken breathlessly about turbocharging and exciting new lightweight materials. And I’ve tried to bring to life what it’s like to drive a 700bhp Ferrari on the Transfagarasan Highway in Romania.
Stupidly, I believed that you might be interested. I thought that, thanks to social media and easyJet and exotic new takeaway restaurants that can deliver exciting dishes to your door in a matter of moments, I was speaking to an audience that was sophisticated and international. Broad-minded. Global.
But it seems I was wrong. The Brexit vote has shown me and everyone else in the sneering metropolitan elite that, actually, you want to live in a black-and-white world with Terry and June on the television, pints in glasses with handles on the side, prawn cocktail crisps, powdered coffee, pineapple juice for a starter, ruddy-faced police constables, red phone boxes and no one speaking bloody Polish on the bus.
You weren’t remotely interested in torque-vectoring differentials or satnav systems, because you only go to Bridlington once a year and you know the way already. So you don’t need some electronic German barking orders at every roundabout and T-junction. You want it to be the 1950s all over again, because Britain was great then, apart from the lung diseases.
You certainly weren’t interested in buying a Renault, because it’s bloody French. And you were never going to buy a Fiat, because you need at least one of the gears in the box to not be reverse. What you’ve always wanted is the car I’ve been driving recently. The post-Brexit poster boy. The Wolseley 1500.
Compared with the modern-day equivalents from abroad, it’s not very fast. It goes from 0 to 60mph in a leisurely 24.4 seconds, but the top speed is 78mph, and that’s plenty because 70mph is as fast as you need to go here on this, our fair and sceptred i
sle.
Obviously, this kind of performance means the Wolseley would be a bit out of its depth on the German autobahn, but you don’t care about that because you aren’t going to Germany any time soon. Because you can’t stand the buggers. The Blitz. Hitler. Battle of Britain. Best film ever made. And so on.
It must also be said that by modern standards the handling is extremely poor. The steering wheel is connected to the front wheels by what feels like a bucket full of rapidly setting cement, and there are some alarming levels of lean in the bends.
Of course, if you are bothered by such things – and why would you be, because having fun in a car is flamboyant and therefore almost certainly foreign? – you could buy the Riley One Point Five, which is basically the same car but with sportier suspension and two carburettors. Which are French, and therefore disgusting.
I began my journey with the Wolseley in Wales, which is just about all right. Certainly it’s better than Scotland, which is full of people who are possibly communist. I stayed in a hotel that served British poached eggs on toast that had been made from proper bread, which is like a wet vest and not all full of fancy bits.
Opposite, there was a dress shop selling some rather fetching one-piece bathing suits. Seeing them on the mannequins in the window made me a bit aroused, I’m sorry to say.
So I hurried to the car, which was painted in a fetching shade of grey, and climbed aboard. The seats were made from leather and the dashboard from wood, which is entirely right and proper. Around the doors were strips of red velvet, which gave a very regal feel, and that’s what you want, of course, not some plastic, which is republican and therefore untrustworthy.
The car smelt of home. By which I mean it had the aroma of a headmaster’s wood-panelled study. There was that familiar fustiness, caused possibly by the carpets gently rotting after they’d soaked up the tears of all those abused pupils. Those were the days. Damp days. Dismal days. Wonderful days.
Really? Page 21
