The visibility all round was excellent, there was space for two children in the back, which is the number parents should have. Not seventeen, like the bloody Catholics seem to think is sensible. Bloody Pope.
I eased the MG gearbox into first, and off we set into the Brecon Beacons, which are more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. Apart from Bridlington, obviously. And soon, in my wake, there was a lengthy traffic jam, made up of various foreign vehicles such as Fendt tractors and a dustbin lorry or two.
The Wolseley is not even on nodding terms with speedy, as I’ve said, but that’s OK, because why do you need to get anywhere quickly? That’s the language of big business and global activity. Download speeds. Coffee to go. A third runway. That’s not what you want at all.
And, anyway, there’s so much to enjoy from behind the enormous wheel of this fine British motoring car. There’s an indicator stalk with a green blinker light on the end. Not sure that green is the right colour, mind. It’s a bit Muslim.
But the switchgear had that reassuring feel we crave. The wiper knob, you just know, was attached by a man with a Birmingham accent who was wearing a brown store coat and loved Harry Worth. Which is probably why it came off in my hand.
I was going to say that the 1.5-litre engine pulled well in a high gear (fourth), suggesting that it had good torque. But torque sounds French and is therefore not a word that we should be using any more.
After a couple of miles I tried to pull over in a lay-by to admire the view, but the weakness of the brakes – which are basically milk bottle tops – meant I missed it completely and ended up in a Costa Coffee car park several miles further down the road.
There I enjoyed some proper sandwiches and a sausage roll made from proper sausagemeat; none of that foreign muck with la-di-bloody-da herbs in it. And then I finished off with a banana that was bent. Like a proper British banana should be.
I wanted to listen to the Jeremy Vine show, because I agree with all its callers, but, sadly, although the Wolseley had a speaker in the middle of the dash, there was no radio. Nor was there much of a heater, come to that.
This is how life’s going to be now. It’s what more than half the voting public want. The country as it used to be.
And I’m sorry to have to say this, but what I wanted was what the country could have been. Which is why, next week, I shall be reviewing the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio.
If you’re not happy about that, buy the bloody Sunday Express instead. Apparently it’s reviewing the new Hillman.
17 July 2016
Foot down, I’m in clover
Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio Verde
I’ve waited nearly three decades for this car. The Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio Verde. An Alfa Romeo that isn’t just a rebadged Fiat. An Alfa Romeo that has rear-wheel drive and serious power. An Alfa Romeo that you would actually want to buy.
Or would you? Well, for the purposes of this test I’m going to set aside my love of Alfas, which is profound. It’s so profound that I even manage to love the 4C, a car so riddled with faults, it should have been called the San Andreas.
I will even defend the old 75, even though its handbrake cut your fingers off every time you used it, the electric window switches were in the roof and it had been styled by someone who had only a ruler.
Here, however, there will be no misty-eyed ramblings about Dustin Hoffman, or the engine note of the GTV6, or the days when Alfa’s racing cars tore around those hay bales, making their driver’s face all oily. No. I’m going to review the Giulia Quadrifoglio (four-leaf clover) in the same way as I’d review a BMW or a Mercedes. I’m going to review it simply as a car. A tool. A thing.
We shall start with its faults. And that brings us directly to the driver’s door, which is either too small or in the wrong place. I can’t work out which, but, whatever, getting out is like getting out of a postbox. The only way you can do it with any dignity is by pushing the steering wheel as far forward as it will go, and that’s a nuisance.
This brings us on to the steering wheel, which, as is usual these days, is festooned with buttons, none of which is lit at night. So when you want to turn up the volume on the stereo, as often as not you engage the cruise control. Which you then cannot turn off without reaching for your phone and turning on the torch feature.
By which time you’ll have run out of petrol. It’s not an uneconomical car, especially, but it’s fitted with a 58-litre tank. And 58 litres is known in scientific circles as ‘not quite big enough’.
Other things? Well, for a car that’ll cost just shy of £60,000, the quality of the interior fittings is not as good as you might expect. The green and white stitching is wonderful to behold, but the plastics are a bit airline cutlery and the sat-nav screen is about the size of a stamp. Also, the knobs and buttons are a bit cheap. You’d have to say this doesn’t feel the sort of top-quality item you’d get from, say, Audi. The engine, for example, wobbles when you slam the door.
So it’s hard to get out of, it’s poorly finished, it has a smallish range and the engine is mounted to the car with Blu-Tack. Those are the drawbacks. That’s what you’d have to put up with if you bought one. But don’t worry, because there are some upsides as well, most of which are stratospheric.
Let’s start with the headline. This car, this four-door saloon, which is priced to take on BMW’s 155mph M3, has a top speed of 191mph. That’s possible because of the Alfa’s smooth and magnificently sonorous 2.9-litre V6 turbo engine.
Ferrari – which is controlled by the Agnelli family behind Fiat, the owner of Alfa – is adamant that it’s not the same unit it fits to the California, with two cylinders lopped off. The fact that the two engines have the same bore, stroke and V angle is a coincidence, it says. As is the fact that in both the twin-scroll turbo is in the V of the engine, providing instant punch whenever the driver so much as twitches his little toe.
You are perhaps aware that some of the time it’s not the torquiest engine in the world, which means you have to fish around rather more than you’d imagine in the clever eight-speed automatic gearbox. But to compensate, you get 503 horsepowers. This means you need to be careful when you’re fishing, because, God, this car is quick. Laugh-out-loud quick.
And it’s an absolute joy to drive. The steering is fast – there are only two turns lock to lock, which means you need almost no input at all to go round a roundabout. And on a sweeping A-road you can steer, really, by thought.
Then there are the brakes. My car was fitted with £5,000-worth of carbon-ceramic discs, which were tuned perfectly. You can press the pedal much harder than you think is realistic before the antilock system cuts in, and, of course, fade won’t be a problem.
Naturally, there’s a button that makes the car even fizzier and even a setting called Race, which turns the traction control off. I’d leave that alone on the road if I were you. On a track I had a play and was sideways constantly. A feat made ever so easy because the Quadrifogliettore has what amounts to a limited-slip differential.
The man who project-managed the Quattroformaggio cut his teeth on the Ferrari 458 Speciale. And it shows. It’s not just the big flappy paddles that are fixed to the column, as they should be, or the moving spoiler at the front; it’s the whole DNA of the car. If Ferrari made a mid-sized, four-door car, you suspect it would feel and go exactly like this.
Do not think, however, that it’s uncivilized in any way. Even though it sits on tiny wheels and rides close to the ground, and even if you have the suspension in ‘bumpy’ mode, it is remarkably smooth. Its ability to deal with potholes is uncanny. And while it makes a racket, with added gunfire on the upshifts, it is extremely quiet when you’re inside.
Space? Well, the boot is fine, but the back is a squash, chiefly because my car was fitted with optional carbon front seats, which were enormous. That said, they were very comfortable. So comfortable that after a three-hour schlepp to Wales, I got out – after a bit of a struggle, I admit – and felt as though
I’d just popped to the shops.
Then I went for some fun in the Brecon Beacons, and it was sublime. The fast throttle response, the fast steering and the preposterous rate at which the speedometer climbs combine to make this car feel extremely special. Maybe an M3 would last longer, and maybe fewer knobs would fall off. But the M3 has wonky steering and feels heavy compared with the Alfa and … I can’t believe I’ve just written that.
What I’m saying here, in this straight, no-cocking-about road test, is that Alfa Romeo has made a car dynamically better than the BMW. And it has. It really has. This is Iceland beating England. And I couldn’t be more pleased.
24 July 2016
Mr Quirky, I’m here to burst your bubble wrap
Citroën C4 Cactus
I always thought that the letters ‘CV’ used by Citroën for the hateful 2CV stood for Chevaux. But I learnt last week that, actually, CV stands for Chevaux-Vapeur. Which so far as I can tell means ‘vaporized horses’.
And I wonder if the weird-beard vegetablist nutters who made this stupid little car their own knew that. I suspect they didn’t. Because a vaporized horse is not the sort of thing that goes down well at a peace-and-love bong festival. It’d be like turning up in a Ford Mashed Badger.
The 2CV was originally designed, so the story goes, so that the French peasantry could drive across a ploughed field without breaking any eggs that happened to be on the passenger seat. It was cheap and comfortable, and with its folding roof, good fun. It was a French Fiat 500, an onionized Mini, with a stripy jumper.
Until the eco-loonies started using it as a statement to show the world they didn’t believe in oil or beefburgers, I always rather liked it, with its silly gear lever sticking out of the dashboard and its golden-wedding-anniversary-at-the-village-hall seating.
It was typically Citroën, a company that had always looked at what the rest of the world was doing and then did the complete opposite. It was belligerence, really, but often it produced some truly brilliant ideas that everyone else then had to copy. Using the body as the chassis is a pretty good example of this. Swivelling headlights is another.
This sort of thinking made Citroën a uniform for people who were a bit odd. Poets and art historians drove them. The brilliant boy who excelled at school and then became a plumber. He would have one too. Stockbrokers, accountants, bank managers – they didn’t. Citroën was a haven for those who were going through life the same as everyone else, but not quite.
One of my all-time favourite cars is the old Citroën CX Safari. It had a one-spoke steering wheel because every other car had two, three or four, and it had a cassette player mounted vertically between the seats because … why not? Actually, I’ll tell you why not; because after about a month the cassette slot would be jammed up with the bits of Double Decker chocolate bar that hadn’t fallen into a fold of your shirt.
Underneath, the Citroën was very different because it rode on a puddle of magic that meant no road-surface irregularities would be transmitted to the cabin. The downside of this system was a steering setup that had a mind of its own and brakes that worked like a switch. They were either fully off or fully on.
Once you became used to having a cassette player full of chocolate and a bruised nose from bumping your head into the windscreen every time you slowed down – oh, and indicators that didn’t self-cancel, as they weren’t operated from a stalk, because that would be too normal – you could genuinely fall in love with this car. It was just so weird.
At one point Citroën bought Maserati and made the beautiful and beguiling Bora, a supercar that mated a ton and a half of French oddballery with a healthy dollop of Italian unreliability. I’m told that when it worked – which was pretty much never – it was brilliant.
But then, bit by bit, Citroën started to be absorbed into the Peugeot empire. The silliness was phased out and the cars became nothing more than rebadged Pugs. They became boring and normal, and the only way Citroën managed to sell any at all was through the power of breathy and frantic special-offer advertising campaigns. ‘Get 100 per cent off and a chance to sleep with the wife of the boss on a Tuesday.’ That sort of thing.
That’s why I was a little bit pleased to see it had launched a car called the C4 Cactus that had waded into the marketplace with a slab of what appeared to be bubble wrap down each side. ‘Yes,’ I thought. ‘It’s gone belligerent and stupid again.’
The news gets better when you climb inside because this really doesn’t feel like any car you’ve seen before. The glass roof is one thing but the dash is something else. Principally because it doesn’t really have one. There’s a small box that tells you how fast you’re going and then there’s a sort of infotainment satnav arrangement that does everything else. And I do mean everything. If you want to change any aspect of the car, you have to go into a sub-menu first. I’m amazed the company hasn’t put the indicator controls in there. That’d have been a very Citroëny thing to do.
It would also have been Citroëny to design a suspension system made from sewage. But we live in straitened times where the other bottom line is king so the C4 Cactus runs on exactly the same sort of suspension that you find in every other car. However, it is tuned to give a flavour of the past. This is a comfortable car – not as comfortable as the Vauxhall Zafira – but it’s a pretty nice place to be if you have a bad back.
But not if you are tall. If you are tall, you will hit your head a lot. This is because Citroën has fitted a low roof lining to house the passenger airbag. Which means you are forever banging your head into what is essentially a bomb. Not sure about that.
And then you will be infuriated by the glovebox, which is styled to look like a steamer trunk but isn’t as big as a pencil case, and then you will want to turn the temperature up or change the radio channel and that will take you half an hour because you can’t be bothered to read the instruction manual.
I must now moan about the driving position, which is fine if your arms and legs are exactly the same length. But mine aren’t and neither are yours, which means you’ll have to drive with your legs wide apart. This makes the car unsuitable for those who enjoy wearing short skirts.
At some point you will put your foot down – to join a motorway, for example. And you will be extremely surprised by what happens next. Because what happens next is nothing at all. I once drove a supertanker and it took three minutes to increase its speed from 13.8 to 13.9 knots. These are figures the C4 Cactus driver can only dream about.
Which caused me to wonder for a little while what sort of car this actually is. Underneath, it’s a supermini but to look at, it’s more a sort of crossover. So your eyes are telling you it’ll be a snazzy performer with perhaps a soupçon of off-road ability while the rest of your head is saying that it’s just a school-run ’n’ supermarket car.
You can’t even get much of an idea from the price because that’s always 80 per cent less than Citroën says it is, thanks to that week’s ‘everything must go’ sale.
I really was hoping that the C4 Cactus would be quirky and odd and endearing but after a week with it, I’m afraid, it’s nothing more than a hatchback with bubble wrap on the side. Pity.
7 August 2016
Yo, homey, it’s an iDinosaur
Bentley Continental GT Speed
I met someone the other day who uses an old Nokia mobile telephone. ‘I can make and receive calls,’ he said, ‘and I can send texts, and the battery lasts for days. What more could you want?’ I couldn’t be bothered to answer.
Using a phone that can’t receive photographs or dispatch emails or store music is like living in a cave. Yes, it’s dry and it’s warm and it needs very little maintenance, but you’d rather live in a house with central heating and a cooker. No, don’t argue. You just would.
Yes, I admit that whenever there’s a week in the month, Apple drives me mad. I don’t like the way I buy a film from it and then it doesn’t let me watch it unless I find some wi-fi and select a new password – ‘No, that
’s not good enough.’ ‘And that isn’t either.’ – and give my credit card details and accept its terms and conditions, which basically say it owns my soul until the end of time.
I also hate the latest music storage system, which won’t let me put the damn thing on random and have it flip from the Bee Gees to the Clash. And the iCloud makes me fall to my knees and howl at the moon. Because as far as I can tell it’s just an intangible soup full of nothing but poor old Jennifer Lawrence’s breasts.
But despite all this I’d rather lose a lung than lose my iPhone. I’m more likely to remember to take it with me in the morning than my trousers. And every day, someone shows me a new feature or a new app that makes my life even more amazing, easy and enjoyable. If I couldn’t have Snapseed to adjust my photographs, or Instagram to peek into the perfect lives of friends, or a map to show me just how much traffic is on the Oxford ring road, I’d have to commit suicide.
And that brings me neatly to the mildly tweaked Bentley Continental GT Speed I’ve been driving. It’s been mildly tweaked because the design is getting on for fifteen years old. But it still doesn’t have a USB port. My Volkswagen Golf has one. A Fiat 500 has one. But this £168,900 uber-grand tourer does not. Sure, it has Bluetooth, which Bentley probably thinks does the job just as well. But it doesn’t, and, anyway, it didn’t work.
My phone just sat there saying it was searching for devices with me bouncing up and down in the seat, waving it at the dashboard and shouting: ‘How can you not find a Bentley, you stupid piece of junk? It’s huge.’ Until eventually it delivered a photograph of Jennifer Lawrence with no clothes on.
Even more amazingly, while conducting a fingertip search for the hole into which I could plug my cable, I opened the glovebox, and in there was a meaningless flex that would connect to nothing from this century, and a CD autochanger. Which, in terms of technology, is up there with a Garrard SP25 turntable.
Really? Page 22
