Somehow, though, this thing is idiotically fast. In a straight line it will leave a Ferrari 458 Special Needs for dead. And around the Nürburgring, it’s faster than any of the million-quid hypercars. You won’t believe this – very few test drivers that witnessed it did – but it went round in six minutes and fifty-two seconds.
And it’s not just fast. It’s exciting. It may be making the sound of a universe forming and your head may be pinned back against the headrest but you can still feel it blowing gently on the hairs on your arms. This is a car that roars and purrs at the same time. It’s like an Italian tomato – little and bright and so full of taste sensations it makes your eyes go crossed.
Yes, it’s also annoying. My preproduction test model was easily the most irritating vehicle I’ve driven but that’s part of the charm too. That’s what makes this car feel human. That’s what gives it a soul. And that’s what turns a good car into a great one.
3 December 2017
What you do in the woods is your affair
Land Rover Discovery
I have always hated the Land Rover Discovery. The first model was cobbled together out of some steel girders and bits and bobs from the dying embers of Austin Rover. It had a shorter wheelbase than today’s Mini, looked stupid and was bought mainly by murderers.
They liked it because underneath the unreliable and ugly outer shell it had a Land Rover four-wheel-drive system, which meant it could be used to carry the bodies of those they’d killed far into the woods, where they’d never be found.
Eventually Land Rover decided that it looked too like an elephant on a unicycle to cut much mustard, and in 2004 it came up with a boxy’n’big seven-seater that for some reason had two chassis. I listened patiently to an engineer explaining why Land Rover had done this, but none of it made any sense, because the car weighed about 2½ tons. It didn’t drive over obstacles so much as flatten them.
However, unlike the first incarnation, it was aimed fairly and squarely at the family woman, so while it may have had all the off-road gubbins you’d need to get a severed head up Ben Nevis, the marketing and the packaging stated that this heavyweight was intended to be a school-run car.
It wasn’t any good at that sort of thing, though, because back then Land Rover’s engineers wore camouflage trousers and liked mud. Most, I suspect, didn’t know what children were. Which is presumably why you had to use two hands to lower the middle row of seats. And that was impossible if you were carrying a toddler. ‘What’s a toddler?’ said someone from Land Rover at the time. ‘Is it a kind of machine-gun?’
There were other issues too, such as if you raised the rear row of seats there was no boot at all. Which meant your dog had to be wafer thin and your children’s heads were only a few inches from the back window. I never thought that was ideal, so when the time came for me to get a seven-seat family wagon, I bought the Volvo XC90, and today I’m on my third.
All of this, however, is ancient history, because there’s now a new Discovery and the first thing you need to know is: it looks ridiculous. It’s fine from the front, and if you squint, it looks quite good from the side too, but what were they thinking of at the back? The old model had an offset numberplate because the spare wheel was mounted on the outside of the tailgate. But the new model’s spare is not. So why stick with the off-centre plate?
The other issue is the sheer size of the damn thing. This is one of those cars in which you spend most of your time in suburbia, sitting at one end of a side road waiting for nothing to be coming the other way because it’s just too wide to squeeze by. You’d make faster progress on a cow.
That said, the new Volvo XC90 is also far too big, but at least its size translates to plenty of space on the inside. That’s emphatically not the case with the Disco. I was driven to a party in the back of it, and not since the old Ford Galaxy have I been so uncomfortable in the rear of a car. The seat was too hard, the legroom was tight and the backrest adjustment offered a simple choice: bolt upright, or very nearly bolt upright. This is easyJet economy seating.
To make matters worse, the front-seat headrests look like E.T.’s head after he’s been stung by a wasp. This is because, in my test car, each of them housed a television, but, hang on a minute, has no one told Land Rover these days TVs don’t have to have tubes at the back? They can be thin.
Further back things get quite interesting because when you open the tailgate, you’re presented with a wall of buttons such as you would find in the wi-fi router room on the Starship Enterprise. This means that the seats can be raised and lowered individually, using electricity, and that’s brilliant.
However, before you can do any of this, you must put your toddler in the gutter, climb inside and remove the bar in which the boot’s roller blind is stored. Oh, and you must also be careful not to push the button that makes the back of the car rear up into the sky.
Still, when you’ve removed the internal bar, parachuted back to earth and retrieved your child from the gutter, you do have a seven-seat car. And still, despite the external dimensions, a pathetically small boot. The only advantage to this is that children can say to their teachers: ‘I haven’t brought my homework in. There wasn’t space in the car.’
As a practical everyday proposition, then, the Disco is soundly beaten once more by the big Volvo. And the Range Rover Sport, which is also available with seven seats.
So what’s it like as an actual car? Well, it’s pretty good. The diesel unit is a bit shaky at tickover, but once you’re on the move, it settles down to a gentle hum, and when you put your foot down, it makes a rather endearing growly noise.
There’s a fair turn of speed too, and because it has only one chassis, it doesn’t weigh more than a mountain, meaning it’s reasonably economical. Plus, of course, it has every toy from Land Rover’s extensive off-road box of tricks, which will allow it to get further into the woods than the constabulary’s BMW X5s.
But, apart from the nation’s murderers, who cares about that? Farmers all use Mitsubishi and Nissan pick-ups now, and rightly so. They go anywhere, and you can fill them with sheep and not care.
City boys wouldn’t be seen dead in a Disco. It says they’ve had a bad year and can’t afford a proper Range Rover. And school mums are better off with a Volvo.
If you are a casual off-roader – the odd gymkhana and a bit of light tree-felling at weekends – the old Disco made a bit of sense, but this new one’s too plush and too fragile. And if your heart is set on a Land Rover, there’s the Range Rover Evoque, the incredibly good-looking and very appealing Range Rover Velar and the proper and still brilliant Range Rover.
With all that lot dotted around the showroom, who’s going to say, ‘Mmmm, yes, I’d like the stupid-looking Discovery, please’?
I can think of only one man. Britain’s most famous Discovery owner. Kenneth Noye. Who happens to be in jail for murder.
10 December 2017
The appliance of Travelodge science
McLaren 720S
By and large, it’s a fact that when Ferrari is making excellent road cars, its Formula One racers are slithering about, and then breaking down or coming fourth. And, conversely, when it’s making terrible road cars, its racers are cruising to victory without breaking a sweat.
All through the early Noughties, Ferrari was totally dominant on the track. It won the world championship five years on the trot. And the road cars it was making? Well, there was the 550, which was sort of quite nice, and the 360, which wasn’t even that.
But then in 2009 along came the brilliant 458 Italia and a range of front-engined GT cars that cause grown men to go weak at the knees. And it hasn’t won the F1 title since.
It’s not just Ferrari that suffers from this problem. McLaren was pretty much always a top three team. But then it decided to start making road cars and now its F1 racers drive around at the back for a couple of laps and conk out.
Many commentators blame the Honda engine for this lack of pace and unreliability and I’m
sure it’s partly to blame. But think about it. If you’re trying to get a road-car division up and running, you’re going to put your best people on that. You just are.
And it must be said, they did do a good job. The fresh-out-of-the-box McLaren MP4-12C wasn’t the most exciting-looking car and in some ways it felt as though it had been engineered by someone who cuts his lawn with nail scissors. It was all very obsessive compulsive. But, ooh, it was clever and fast.
And then the range expanded and the excitement started to come and eventually we got the P1, which, I still maintain, is the most bonkers car I’ve yet driven. It was swivel-eyed and mad. An insane bastardization of Elon Musk’s vision, the way it used battery tech to create more speed. It really was, as I said at the time, a weaponized wind farm. I adored it.
Now, with the F1 team still in disarray, it has come up with a new road car that doesn’t have the P1’s hybrid drive system but somehow manages to be, as near as makes no difference, just as fast. Let me put that in figures. A P1 will do the standing quarter-mile in 10.2 seconds. And the 720S? You’ll need 10.4 seconds. That’s not a big gap.
And in the corners you’ll make up for that lost fraction. It took me a long time to master the P1. But when I did, I found that, in extremis, it will understeer. The 720S will too but to nothing like the same degree. Which means that round a track the straightforward dinosaur will be quicker than the rainbow warrior.
There are all sorts of extremely dreary reasons for this, all of which have to do with weight and electronics. Let me put it this way. You can download data from your 720S so that after supper you can analyse how it and you managed on your journey home from work. This is a nerd car.
It may look brilliant – mine was brown and I still thought it was a sensation – but you cannot get round the fact that it simply doesn’t have the soul of a Ferrari. It’ll kick a Fezza’s arse in any race, anywhere, anytime, but you can’t help feeling it’s a car built after a meeting in a Travelodge with a flip chart. And not while casually doodling over a bottle of wine.
And I’m afraid that, from this point on, things get a bit bad. There’s a lot of talk about how it’s 5.548 per cent stiffer than the old 650S and how the engine has 195 more cubic centimetres because of the increased stroke and how there’s been a rethink in the design of the carbon fibre tub. And I don’t doubt all this engineering pays dividends at the limit through Eau Rouge at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium. But the downside is that when you run over a manhole cover on the M40, you’ll wince.
The party piece of all McLarens is the way they combine brilliant handling with a supple ride. Well, the 720S doesn’t. It’s too firm.
And the brake pedal is wrong. When you first push it, nothing happens, which means you have a bit of a panic and push harder, which causes the car to stand on its nose. I found that even when I had my foot on the brake pedal, the car would still creep forwards. You really have to give it a shove.
There’s nothing wrong with the brakes. It’s the pedal. And I’m not the only one to notice this. Autocar did too. And so did James May. It’s an issue that needs resolving.
One that can’t be resolved so easily, though, is the way the interior works. It’s all done on purpose and it’s too complicated. The electric seat adjustment is a case in point. There’s no logic to it, and the same applies with the immensely complex Track, Comfort and Sport settings. Then there’s the satnav, which is way better than it’s been in any McLaren to date and is actually better than the system you get in a Ferrari, but it’s still not as good as the setup you get in a Volkswagen Golf.
This then is a tricky car to sum up. Yes, it is mind-blowingly fast. It’s a direct competitor for the Ferrari 488 but in terms of what they both set out to do, it’s not a competitor at all. They’re in a different league altogether. I even think the Big Mac is better-looking and that’s saying something because the little Ferrari is like a dreamy mix of Alicia Vikander and something I just thought of.
But the ride is too firm, and the controls are too hard to use and that brake pedal is an issue as well. And then there’s the really big problem. You sense this car was designed by really, really clever people who live and breathe yaw, slip angles and various other engineering conundrums. People who really would be more gainfully employed in the company’s race team, where such things matter.
For the 720S to blow my frock up, it needs some P1 fairy dust. It needs a bit of humanity in the mix, a bit of childlike fun.
In short, this car would have been better if it had been designed not in a Travelodge, but in the pub.
17 December 2017
Pistol-packing agent hiding in a hat box
Hyundai i30 N
I was driving along in a dreary, ugly and unnecessary Mini Countryman the other day when an important message flashed up on the dashboard. And, after I’d ferreted about in my pockets to find my spectacles so I could read what it said, I was a bit alarmed.
I don’t recall the exact wording but, in essence, it said there was a fault with the steering system and that as a result, I should drive ‘moderately’.
I wonder what that means. Because Lewis Hamilton’s idea of ‘moderately’ is rather different from James May’s. And anyway, if there’s a fault with the steering, surely it’d be better to say: ‘Stop immediately and flee.’
Losing your ability to steer is worse than losing your ability to stop. I know this because I once drove a brake-free lorry across Burma and I just about managed. But when the steering locked while I was in a Renault A610, I crashed almost immediately.
The problem is, of course, that to save the polar bear, the Mini Countryman has electric power steering. And when something is electrical, you can be certain that one day it will break and you’ll have to turn it off then on again to mend it. That’s not so bad when it’s a wi-fi router but the steering on a car? When you’re driving? Hmmm.
Charles Babbage, the father of the computer, talked once about the unerring certainty of machinery. But we don’t use machinery any more because we’ve got it into our heads that circuit boards and ones and noughts can do the job better.
They can’t. A point proved by the Countryman, and by a feature you’ll see in the current series of The Grand Tour. We took some fun-sized SUVs to Canada, where they failed to do anything very well. And when we asked them to do some actual four-wheel-drive work, they responded by not working at all. The electronics simply couldn’t cope.
And that brings me on to the subject of this morning’s missive, the Hyundai i30 N, which has two speedometers. I don’t know why. One is analogue and one is digital. And at no time could they agree on how fast I was going. There was always a 3mph difference. And if they’d both been connected to the wheels with an actual cable, rather than some nerd’s wet dream, this wouldn’t have happened.
There was another issue I had with this new hot hatch. Its name: i30 N. There are certain letters that work well on the boot lid of a car. G, T, V, R, I and S are fine; B, D, U, J and L are not. But the worst letter of them all is N. I know Hyundai will say it used an N because the car was developed at the Nürburgring but we don’t need reminding. We can tell.
Hyundai – which has never made a hot hatchback before – has bought a book called How to Copy a Golf GTI and stuck rigidly to the recipe. It’s taken its ordinary five-door hatchback – the sort of car that’s bought by people who wear hats – lowered it, given it a 2-litre turbocharged engine and added some red styling details and hey presto. One hot hatch … that no one wants because they’d rather have a VW Golf, thanks very much, or a Renault, or a Ford.
There’s more, I’m afraid, because instead of going to suppliers that know what they’re doing, Hyundai has got everything it needs to make this car – brakes, suspension and so on – from Korean firms no one has heard of. And that’s like having a Korean shotgun or a Korean watch.
The only way you’d be tempted is by a very low price. And on the face of it, you don’t even get that. However, if you l
ook carefully, you will notice it includes all sorts of things that are options with a Golf GTI. Furthermore, this car was developed, in fifteen months incidentally, by one of the men responsible for all BMW’s M models in recent years. He’s a man who knows what he’s doing and that shows because this car, despite its on-paper problems and an inability to work out how fast it’s going, is utterly delightful.
On an ordinary day, on an ordinary road, it’s beautifully understated. It’s quiet and comfortable and there are many toys to keep you amused. My favourite was the button that makes the exhaust go all noisy. Because then you do get people looking. And what they’re thinking is: ‘Why is that hat transportation device making such a rumbly sound? And why is it barking every time it’s asked to change gear?’
It’s like looking at a Secret Service agent. He’s wearing a nice suit and has a neat haircut and he could be a Wall Street functionary. Except, if you look, you can see the earpiece and if you listen hard, you can hear his controller talking about shooty stuff.
The Hyundai is very good at shooty stuff. It’s provided with an electronic system – which will break, obviously – that allows you to choose from a whopping 1,944 setups. There’s Sport and Sport+ and all sorts of individual custom programs that allow the driver to tailor each aspect to his or her personal preference, and it doesn’t matter what you do, this is a car that just works.
Maybe, if I were to pick nits, I’d argue that a hot Renault is a bit more feelsome and that a Golf GTI with a front diff is a bit more sticky in an uphill, tight, first-gear bend but as an overall package, the i30 N is a sweetheart. Even in Nutter Bastard mode, it’s not even remotely bumpy or unpleasant.
Really? Page 37
