And then there’s Audi, which has just launched the car you see in the photographs this morning. It’s called the RS 5 coupé, it costs £62,900 and it’s borderline sensational.
I was hoping Audi would have fitted it with the 394 brake horsepower five-cylinder engine from the TT RS, because when historians look back at what they’ll call the ‘petrol age’, they will describe that as one of the all-time greats.
But Audi has gone for a twin-turbocharged 2.9-litre V6. Which gives 444 brake horsepowers. And 600 Eurotorques, or 442lb/ft. That’s a lot in a car of this type.
But the bald figures of 0–62mph in 3.9 seconds and a top speed of 155mph – or 174mph with the optional Dynamic package – tell only half the story. To get the other half, you have to go behind the wheel and open it up. And, ooh, you’ll be grinning. Actually, to start with, you won’t be grinning. You’ll be looking as though a lion has just come into your kitchen, because, God, it’s alarmingly quick off the line. I once saw someone put a mustard-covered hot dog up a police horse’s bottom. Well, the Audi sets off like that.
Of course, there have previously been Audis that were fast in a straight line. But that’s all they could do: go in a straight line. You would be sitting there, sawing away at the wheel and shouting, ‘Turn, you bastard, turn’, but they rarely did. A nose-heavy layout and four-wheel drive saw to that.
The RS 5 is different. It has a bitey front and a waggly tail that is just what the enthusiastic driver wants. Oh, and while the ride is definitely firm, it doesn’t pitter-patter like Audis of old. This, rest assured, is a properly sorted, well-engineered and really quite well-priced car.
It’s also good-looking. The wheels are worthy of a spot in Tate Modern, the rear side windows are a nod to the Nissan GT-R – a comparable car, in fact – and the space isn’t bad either for a two-door coupé.
So there we are. Another kick in the teeth for BMW’s M division. A car you can drive, safe in the knowledge that the cognoscenti will give you a discreet nod at the lights – a recognition that you’ve made a wise choice.
And there’s more. I was in Knightsbridge the other night, having dinner on the pavement (not like a homeless person – I was at the Enterprise, which is a pub, not a spaceship. Well, it was a pub. It’s a bar and restaurant now.) Anyway, every third word I tried to say was drowned out by the bangs from wealthy young gentlemen’s anti-lag systems echoing off the walls like a firefight for the centre of Homs.
They went round and round the area in their hotted-up supercars until even I was pissed off. So you can imagine how my fellow diners felt. Which is why they will vote for anyone who makes petrol illegal.
I sense this everywhere these days. People are fed up with owning cars. They use Ubers and trains. And those who maintain their interest in all things automotive are treated with the sort of scorn and disdain that I reserve for golfers and freemasons.
So if you’re going to buy a really quick car that you can enjoy when no one is looking, it needs to be discreet. And the Audi is.
There is, however, a problem. If you’re the sort of keen driver who might be interested in this car, the chances are that the vehicle you currently drive doesn’t have four rings on the grille.
Which means you will have no idea how the Audi’s sat-nav-multimedia-connectivity system works. You will stab away at various buttons and then mutter something under your breath and push a few more, and eventually you’ll get out of your test vehicle, slam the door and buy the new version of the car you drive now.
This is becoming a serious problem. I write on a PC and cannot change to a Mac because I can’t be bothered to waste my life learning my way around its systems. I use an iPhone because it’s familiar, so when someone says Google’s latest effort is better, I don’t care, because I don’t know how it works.
It’s increasingly the same story with cars. I understand how to silence the satnav woman in my Volkswagen Golf and how to make Apple CarPlay work. I know how to reset the trip computer and to engage the self-parking system. But when I get into a BMW, or a Mercedes, I do not know straight away how to do any of that.
The days when a car was three pedals and a steering wheel are over. They’re electronic now, and much of their appeal is their ability to steer round jams and stop before an accident happens and play the music from our phone.
And in the Audi all this stuff is bloody difficult. So you won’t buy one. And that’s a shame.
30 July 2017
Better hold on really tight, queasy rider
Mercedes-AMG GT C roadster
Because I’m extremely middle class, my children’s prep school organized exchange trips with pupils at a school in Tokyo. This meant that my kids got to spend a couple of weeks eating fish that were still alive and later they got to host little Japanese people who had no clue what to do with a spoon.
I picked one of these kids up from Heathrow and it quickly became obvious the poor little thing spoke no English at all. So she wandered into the arrivals hall after an eleven-hour flight, jet-lagged all to hell, and she was met by a man who was bigger and fatter than anyone she’d seen in her whole life. And he communicated in what to her must have sounded like the grunts of a farmyard animal. Bewildering didn’t begin to cover it.
I loaded her luggage into the boot of the family Volvo – I said I was middle class – and she climbed into the back clutching what at the time was a completely amazing translation machine. The idea was that she spoke into it and it then spoke to me in English.
Shortly after we joined the M25 I could see in the rear-view mirror that my microscopic guest was trying to turn the machine on. And by the time we joined the M40 she was starting to get desperate because plainly she was having some difficulty.
Much later, on the twisting and lovely A44, I heard the telltale beep to say she’d been successful and quickly she garbled something in Japanese into the electronic wonder box. She then held it next to my ear while it said with an electronic Stephen Hawking lilt: ‘Car sick.’
During her two-week stay she was sick after eating tinned tuna, mashed potato, ice cream and pretty much everything that was dead.
But I bet that if you ask her now to define the low point of her stay she’d say it was that moment on the A44, being hugged by a 6 foot 5 inch monster as she vomited the contents of her stomach into the roadside undergrowth.
Motion sickness is hideous. You really do want to die. I saw a man once lying on the floor in a cross-Channel ferry’s lavatory. The voyage had been as rough as any I can remember and everyone had been sick so violently it was a lake of vomit in there. And it was swilling over the poor man who, as I entered, opened one eye and said simply: ‘Kill me.’
I felt his pain. I’d been on a boat in the south of France once when the gentle rocking brought about a malaise so intense that I invited my friends to murder me. I meant it. I even told them where the knives were kept and where on my rib cage they should stab.
All of which brings me conveniently to the Mercedes-AMG GT. I thought when I first saw this car that it was a toned-down, more realistic version of the mad old SLS AMG with its bonkers soundtrack and its gullwing doors. I assumed therefore that it too would be a headline-grabbing one-off.
But no. Mercedes has turned it into an entire range that’s now so complex you are able to choose how many brake horsepower you’d like and what shade you’d prefer for the seats. Naturally you can also decide whether you’d like a roof or not. And what colour you’d like that to be.
Well, as I’ve already driven the super-hard and bellowy GT R coupé, which I’m not sure about, I thought – it being summer and all – I should try out the slightly less powerful but still pretty nuts GT C roadster.
Like the ‘I’m a racing car, I am’ GT R, it’s fitted with four-wheel steering. And that, if you are going for a record round the Nürburgring – something the GT R holds for rear-wheel-drive production cars, incidentally – is tremendous. When you drive a car that steers with all four wheels you are a
lways amazed by just how readily it changes direction.
However, I was not on the Nürburgring. I was in Oxfordshire and I was not driving particularly quickly when my passenger invited me to stop. Because she felt car sick. And the last time this happened was when I was driving her in a Porsche 911. Which also had four-wheel steering.
The problem is that when you move the steering wheel even a tiny bit, the car darts. It’s very sudden and if you’re a passenger you have no time to brace or send a signal to your stomach to hold on. You, the driver, may like this sensation a lot. But I think it may be a deal breaker for whoever’s in the passenger seat.
Pity, because there’s a lot to like in this car. It looks like a traditional AMG product. Big, lairy and heavy. But, actually, it’s lighter than you might think, thanks to a chassis that’s made from helium and a boot lid made from witchcraft. There’s even some magnesium in there as well.
All of which means that the big turbocharged V8, which responds as quickly as the steering, has much less to lug around than you might think. Which means this car is properly fast. Knocking-on-the-door-of-200mph fast. It also does a fabulous bonnet-up, squatted-back-end lunge when you stamp on the throttle.
I’d like to say this speed is surprising but you know from the moment you fire up the engine and the exhausts wake everyone in a twelve-mile radius that it’s going to be mental. What is surprising, however, is that you can enjoy quite a lot of the speed with the roof down. It really is calm and unruffled in there.
And it’s a nice place to sit. Sure, the gear lever is mounted nearer to the boot than your hand and, yes, there are a lot of buttons to confuse you. I once turned off what I thought was the stop-start feature and then spent the whole day in third because I’d actually changed the seven-speed automatic box into a manual.
My only real gripe is the bumpiness of the ride. It really is firm – too firm – and that’s unnecessary because this isn’t a track-day car. It’s a handsome, look-at-me boulevard cruiser. Or a devourer of motorways and interstates. It should be softer. And it really could do without that four-wheel steering.
Mercedes shouldn’t try to make sports cars. That’s Porsche’s job. What it should do instead is take this vehicle back to the drawing board and turn what’s very nearly there back into an AMG Mercedes. Then it would be absolutely brilliant.
6 August 2017
My hop to the beach became a cliffhanger
Porsche Panamera Turbo
Jeremy Clarkson is away. That’s what it should say at the bottom of the page this week. Because I am away. I’m in Mallorca, sitting in the darkened confines of the villa’s dining room, looking at the sunshine streaming through the windows and listening to the children playing in the pool, wondering how on earth I came to be writing a column, and hitting the keys on my laptop slightly more viciously than usual.
I love my summer holidays. Sitting at the breakfast table with my children, who’ve been reduced to green-faced wrecks by whatever it was they did the night before. And trying to amuse them by dreaming up new and interesting ways of killing the wasps.
Everyone has their own technique, all of them learnt from some pool boy in Corfu or Crete. ‘They don’t like cigarette smoke.’ ‘Burn coffee grounds; that keeps them away.’ My idea is better. Attract them with a plate of bacon and then squirt them with a jet of fire from a catering-sized tin of wasp killer.
‘Look, children,’ I shriek excitedly. But it’s no good. They’re too green and too right-on to be impressed by animal cruelty, even in Spain. And anyway they’re not paying attention because they’re adhering to standard operating procedure for all teenagers around a dining table: looking at Michael McIntyre clips on YouTube.
Later, when I’ve seen Michael’s take on wasps, which is very funny, and after I’ve smeared myself in cream, except the bit under my stomach which will burn later, I lower myself on to a bed by the pool and immediately the people in the next villa start to play, loudly, whatever’s doing the rounds on the Europop scene this summer. It seems to be something called Despacito. Which is better than Who Let the Dogs Out?, but not much.
Then you have the strimmers. And then the gardener turns up with his leaf blower. Even though it’s August and there are no leaves to blow, just huge clouds of dust.
Later you go for lunch with people you’d never dream of seeing at home, but who are suddenly your besties because they happen to be renting a villa a few miles away. And you smile as they tell you in great detail exactly where it is, as though that makes any difference. In Mallorca, it’s all based on how far you are from the restaurant where they filmed The Night Manager.
This is all standard holiday stuff. The chats with friends about who’s had the worst budget airline experience, and who’s got the best cure for mosquito bites, and endless calls to taxi companies who say their driver is as near to the house as he can get, which turns out to be two miles away in the car park of a tapas restaurant where he’s sitting in the sun, hoping to God we don’t find him.
Transport is always a tricky holiday issue. You rent a car, which means you have to spend the first six days of your holiday at the airport, waiting as the girl at the counter writes War and Peace on her computer. And then you are given the keys to something that you can never drive because you’re always too drunk.
This year I was given a seven-seat, two-wheel-drive Nissan X-Trail, which, fully loaded and then loaded a bit more, simply would not climb the road to the villa. I had a choice from the driver’s seat. I could either spin the front wheels, which made a terrible noise, or spin the clutch, which made a terrible smell.
This explains why I’m stabbing at this laptop and not having a holiday, even though I’m away. The editor of the Sunday Times Driving section had called and he doesn’t take no for an answer. ‘I’m on holiday,’ I said, firmly. ‘Yes,’ he replied, as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘but would you write a column if I got you a car?’
I peered over the hedge at the ruined X-Trail and thought: ‘Oh what the hell.’ So, two days later, a man turned up with a Porsche Panamera Turbo that he’d driven from Stuttgart. It was exactly the same car I drove at home a couple of months ago. Back then, I thought it was tremendous, powerful and smooth and fitted with an interior that’s sublime. It remains a car I would happily use on a day-to-day basis in the UK.
However, it’s not what I’d call a first-choice machine here on the sun-kissed island of Mallorca. First of all, it’s quite wide. It’s so wide in fact that it goes up the road to our villa with, in places, just half an inch of clearance on either side. That requires immense concentration, and that’s hard because its parking sensors and collision warning system are in meltdown and the interior sounds like that nuclear plant in The China Syndrome. All of this stuff can be turned off, of course, but not when one wheel is dangling over a cliff, one door mirror is half an inch from a stone post and you have two teenagers in the back saying they feel sick. I’ve had the car for four days now and the fastest I’ve been is 6mph.
Yesterday, we went to the beach where they filmed The Night Manager, which, and I know this is showing off, is at the bottom of our drive. And it took nearly two hours. I arrived a nervous wreck and couldn’t have a refreshing drink because later in the day I’d have to drive back.
That was even harder because we got stuck behind some Spanish Doobie Brothers in a Ford who, when they met something coming the other way, were consumed with the need for some peace and love and reversed. Which meant I and about 200 other cars had to do the same thing.
After a while, I resorted to the horn and some rude gestures, and they responded in kind, emerging from the smoky interior to let me know that it was hard enough to drive a car on that road at the best of times, but it was especially difficult when all of them thought they were being attacked by a Klingon Bird-of-Prey.
It was at this point that I realized the Porsche was fitted with the single most important thing that could be fitted to any hire car, anywhere in the world: German p
lates. It meant as we finally got past the erratic Ford, using a dribble of smooth turbo power, we could hear the passenger muttering to his mates: ‘Malditos Alemanes!’
13 August 2017
Jeremy Clarkson wrote this article before being admitted to hospital in Mallorca and treated for pneumonia.
From second fiddle to rock guitar god
BMW 5-series Touring
For many years I have argued that, all things considered, the BMW 530d estate is the best car in the world. It’s fast, handsome, astoundingly economical, very comfortable, reliable and genuinely good fun to drive. And now there’s a new version that is supposedly better in every way. But can you, I wondered, get Alex James from Blur into the boot with one of his guitars?
And then could you get the record producer William Orbit into the middle of the back seat, and could they play ‘The Chain’ by Fleetwood Mac as we were driven from one party to the next?
Like any sensible chap who’s looking through some beer-stained goggles at what was obviously going to be a big night, I made sure a driver was on hand to deal with the business of moving me about. The trouble is that these days a driver is a bit like a packet of cigarettes at a party: round about 10 p.m. everyone suddenly decides they’d like to help themselves.
So that’s why, as we left dinner, Alex and his wife asked if they could cadge a lift. That would make four of us plus a driver, and that’s no problem at all in the big Beemer. But then I noticed Mr Orbit looking a bit crestfallen, so he had to come too. And for some reason that isn’t clear, both he and Alex had guitars. ‘It’s OK,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll go in the boot.’
Having wedged himself in, he then decided he’d quite like to play us a tune. But this was tricky since he was upside down and could access only about half of his fretboard. To make matters worse, Mr Orbit was stuck between me, who’s quite long, and my girlfriend, who’s even longer. And yet after just five miles they had it cracked. And so we were whizzing through the lanes of Oxfordshire, with live music to keep us entertained. It was a happy night.
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