Soon we reached a road buried under even more snow than the lane. It was the same story at the next road. But eventually we emerged through a hedge into the village, which was like a scene from The Omega Man, only quieter. Everyone had taken the advice of the Mail Online and stayed at home with their families to await the cold hand of death.
But there was at least no drifting on the easterly route out of the village, so off we set, and soon we made it to the next village, and then – joy of joys – the main road. It was blocked. A BMW – famously the worst snow cars in the world – had tried to climb a moderate hill and failed. This had brought out the off-roading enthusiasts, who were doing manly things with ropes.
It was amusing to watch the shrill women who moan all year about Chelsea tractors begging the drivers of such vehicles for help. Everyone laughed at the Citroën, and said even if the BMW got free, a lorry had got stuck and there was no way past that. We tried another route, but that was blocked by a slithering gritting lorry. The council was doing its best and I commend it. But it was a lost cause, and as the dashboard clock flashed away, so, it seemed, was my holiday. Chipping Norton had been cut off.
There was only one option: to head for even higher ground and a small B-road. I didn’t hold out much hope, and an off-roading enthusiast flagged me down to say it was impassable. But he was reckoning without the little Citroën, which, in conditions that were stopping intercity trains, got through.
There was plenty wrong with it. The wipers made a godawful racket, the indicator ticks were too loud and you can’t shut the stop-start function without going into a sub-menu on the command and control screen. Mind you, by not fitting a button for this, or anything else, Citroën has saved a few quid, which is passed on to the customer. If you want a crappy little urban crossover MPV car, the Aircross is good value.
And while there’s plenty to annoy you 362 days of the year, it’s brilliant on the three days when we have snow. It is far and away the best off-roader I’ve driven. But because I didn’t think it would be, I arrived in the Seychelles still in my tweed shooting coat. The immigration man must have thought I was mad.
18 March 2018
Supersonic, but it won’t fly in Blighty
Kia Stinger GT S
I am glad I don’t run an airline, because if I did, all the planes would be pretty much empty pretty much always, and it would be bankrupt in a week.
For instance, I find it amazing that in early March you can’t fly non-stop from the UK to Corfu. I’d have a meeting about that, and explain to my colleagues that Corfu is a lovely spot that is very popular with the sort of middle-class families who’d pay through the nose for such a flight. And then it would turn out that all the middle-class families I was targeting were in the Alps. And didn’t want to spend early March shivering on a beach, on an island that’s pretty much shut.
Did you know there are thirty flights a day from London to New York? Which means that when there were twenty-nine, someone said: ‘Yes, the market can take another.’ That wouldn’t have been me. I’d have said: ‘Twenty-nine flights a day and you reckon there’s a market for a thirtieth? Pah. Not a chance.’ And I’d have been wrong.
I also wouldn’t operate a service to Paris, because it’s faster on the train. But I’d put a 747 on the London–Pisa route and go every thirty minutes because Tuscany’s lovely and our rail companies don’t provide an alternative.
Then there’s Charlotte. I flew there not that long ago on a Tuesday morning and assumed that I’d have the plane to myself. But it was rammed. And that amazed me, because how can there possibly be 300 people a day who wake up in England and think, ‘I fancy going to North Carolina today’?
Recently, I wanted to go from Bogotá in Colombia to Barbados and not one single airline boss has recognized this as a possibility. Which meant I was faced with a four-hour trip to Miami, a six-hour wait, and a near four-hour trip back to virtually where I’d started.
So I had to get a private jet, which wasn’t easy because the people who operate such things are unwilling to send them to Colombia in case they are used for smuggling.
Mind you, while I’d be a useless airline boss, I think I’d be even worse if I were running a car firm. Because if I were at the helm of, say, Kia, and someone came to me saying, ‘Let’s make a forty grand, rear-drive, four-door coupé with a snarly V6 and many horsepowers,’ I’d have shot him in the front of the head for being crazy.
To us here in Britain, Kia makes a range of hatchbacks and saloons for people who know nothing at all about cars. They are quite good-looking and I’m sure they are well made but they are really for the old and the muddled. And there’s the problem. The old and the muddled don’t want a many-horse-powered sports saloon and those that do don’t want a Kia.
There’s more. In Britain, and the rest of western Europe for that matter, the car is rapidly losing its appeal. There are too many rules and too many cameras and there’s too much congestion. The car is seen as an expensive nuisance. We’ve been there and we’ve done that and now we’re in an Uber waiting for Google to give us something that drives itself.
People who buy a flash car are mocked for being footballists and those who buy something fast are labelled as boy racers. The love affair with the car, here, is dying. So what’s the point of Kia trying to sell a fast car such as the Stinger GT S?
Ah well. As I said, I was in Colombia recently and it’s much the same as any country that’s emerging from decades of strife. With a new entrepreneurial spirit causing the whole place to hum, the roads are awash with people driving about, very carefully, in brand new Kias and Dacias. To us, these cars are horrible crates made from old cassette boxes. But over there they are luxury goods to rival anything made by Fabergé. You mention the word Kia in Bogotá and people take off their hats.
I would hope, because I fell madly in love with Colombia, that its emergence from the dark side continues and that soon people will be able to make money from something other than forest products. And if that happens, the people are going to want the very best car that Kia can sell them. Because Kia to them is the same as Ford was to us back in the late Sixties. And everyone back then wanted a Cortina 1600E.
The Stinger is a very good car. It’s quite hard to climb aboard because the roofline is low but when you’re in, the driving position has that ‘hang on a minute’ feel that lets you know you’re at the helm of something special.
Which it is. Thanks to a twin turbocharged 3.3-litre V6, you get 365 horsepowers and that means 0–60 in less than five seconds. But it’s not the straight-line oomph that impresses most. It’s the way this car feels as you go about your daily business: special.
Maybe this is because the Stinger was developed by Albert Biermann, who was poached from his previous job running things at BMW’s M division. You can sense his DNA in the Stinger. Same as you can in an M3.
The steering is heavy. I don’t mean it’ll cause you to smell while parking. I mean, it has a meatiness and somehow you know it’s guiding wheels that aren’t troubled by the bothersome business of propulsion. Which means it also feels clean and pure and right.
Fearful that I may have just quoted a Meatloaf song, I’m going to move on to the comfort, which is sublime. I was expecting the ride to shake my eyes out but even in Sport+ nutter mode, it just glides. In the Comfort setting, it doesn’t feel like a sports saloon at all. Jaguar should have a careful look at this car to see how it’s done.
The economy is a bit better than you might expect, the equipment levels are higher than you’d imagine, and it’s hard really to find fault. Maybe the interior is a bit grey and maybe the exterior isn’t quite as handsome as all the other Kias. I especially didn’t like the fake bonnet vents. Or how hard it was to see out of the back window.
But that really is about it. Everything else was either delightful or wonderful or better than I was expecting. If you were in the market for a BMW M3, or a fast Audi or a Mercedes-AMG, it’s certain you’d be better off w
ith the Kia. But of course you wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. A Kia? What the hell would the neighbours think?
I get that. I wouldn’t want to buy one either. But our friends in Colombia and Cambodia and Rwanda? They will. I’d never have noticed that if I’d been running Kia. Luckily for the company, however, I’m not.
25 March 2018
Grown-up thrills in a light-speed La-Z-Boy
Alpina B5
If you are my age, you will remember that in the olden days nerdy petrol enthusiasts would explain that the engine in their Ford Capri had been ‘blueprinted’.
The idea was simple: cars were mass-produced and the components made by men who wanted only a pint after work and a decent wage when the week was done. Which meant each engine was only a rough approximation of what its designer had wanted.
Blueprinting meant building an engine to be precisely right. This was fantastically complicated. I remember once speaking to a man who said he had had to order more than 100 pistons that were supposed to be exactly the same before he had eight that actually were. And it was the same story with the rods and the valves and every other damn thing in there.
Building such an engine would take thousands of hours and cost thousands of pounds. And would anyone be able to tell the difference when it was finished? Honestly? No, not really. But if you were a fan of perfect engineering, you’d know every time you turned the ignition key that that’s exactly what you were bringing to life.
Think of it as a beautifully crafted watch. Does it tell the time better than a battery-operated Casio? No. So do you want a battery-operated Casio? No again.
And that brings me nicely to the Alpina B5 I was driving recently. It started in life as a normal BMW 5-series, which means it was built by robots that didn’t want to go to the pub after work. They just did as they were told, precisely, all day long.
You could take apart their work and build it again yourself, using OCD tolerances and a forensic attention to detail. But you’d end up with something that was pretty much exactly the same as it had been before you broke out the spanners. It’d be like trying to tune an iPhone.
And then there’s the design itself. BMW is a business, yes, and it has one eye on the profit-and-loss account for sure. But it’s hard to spot this when you drive a normal 5-series, because it really does feel as close to perfect as any car can be at this moment in automotive time.
I’ve said before that, all things considered, the 5-series estate is the best car in the world right now. And yet Alpina still reckons that with a staff of about a hundred it can do better. Hmm. We’ll get to that later.
There’s another issue. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, BMWs were quite sporty, but there was room for a tuning company to make them faster still. That’s what Alpina used to do very well. So well, it was endorsed by BMW itself. But then BMW started making its M cars. And I’ve never met anyone who’s climbed out of an M5 and said, ‘Yeah. But I wish it was a bit quicker.’
This means Alpina can’t offer its customers a car that is better made or significantly faster than the car BMW will sell them. So what’s the point? There’s a new M5 about to come out, which will cost about the same, and we sort of know it’ll be epic. So why on earth would you want to spend £89,000 on a B5? Or a lot more if you want a few toys?
Good question. Yes, my test car had some snazzy wheels and a discreet little spoiler at the back. But it looked just like a standard 5-series, really. And it was the same story on the inside. We are told the leather is better than the cow skin that BMW will sell you, but it didn’t feel any different to me. I did like the blue dials, though.
To really get to the bottom of it, you need to fiddle about in the suspension menu. Because it’s here you’ll find a new setting. One that BMW doesn’t offer. It’s called Comfort Plus. And that’s what this car is all about. It’s designed to be as fast as anything BMW will sell you but more comfy. And if you’re my age, that has got to have some appeal.
The engine is the 4.4-litre V8 from the 7-series, with two turbochargers of Alpina’s design. The result is a whopping 600 brake horsepower. This is sent through a tweaked gearbox to a four-wheel-drive system tuned by Alpina so that 90 per cent of the power can go to the back.
Four-wheel drive is another key to what this car’s all about. It’s not designed for the racetrack. It wasn’t tested at the Nürburgring. It’s designed for the road; and on the road, in a 600bhp car that can do 205mph, Alpina thinks four-wheel drive is better. Alpina is right.
Its engineers have even changed the camber on the front to such an extent that new wishbones had to be designed. Maybe that’s why this is the first car with four-wheel steering that didn’t make my passengers queasy.
Do not, however, think that this car is all about comfort. Because, God-al-bloody-mighty, it shifts. Put your foot down in Sport Plus mode and the digital speed readout in the head-up display simply can’t keep up. By the time you’ve had a chance to catch your breath, you’re in danger of going at the sort of speed that will put you in prison.
And it’s not just in a straight line either. The steering and the new suspension geometry combine to make this car flow down an A-road like a smoothie being poured into a velvet bag. This was easily the best 5-series I’ve driven.
Issues? Well, if you concentrate hard in slow-moving traffic, you will notice that the throttle response in Eco Pro mode is a bit tardy. And that sometimes there’s a weird tendency to kangaroo. The good thing, though, is that if this is a fault, the car is covered by BMW’s usual three-year warranty.
I don’t for a moment believe the B5 is any faster than the new M5 will be, but, critically, it’s no slower. And it makes the sort of noise that tickles the hairs on the back of your neck. Yes, I know some of this sound is artificially produced. But so was Iron Man, and we all loved that.
What I loved most of all, though, was the sense that every tiny component of this car had been poked and x-rayed and improved by a team of Germans who went home and, to prolong their performance in bed, thought about how perhaps it could be made better still. The whole car is like those blueprinted engines of old. Only people who truly appreciate excellent engineering would want one. The M5 will be fine for everyone else.
Unless you want an estate. BMW can’t sell you a hot one of those, whereas Alpina can. And, with a top speed in excess of 200mph, it’s the fastest car of its type in the world. A lot of me, because I’m my age, is very, very tempted.
8 April 2018
Its screaming abdabs are locked in the boot
Lamborghini Urus
I am not sure quite when or why all the world’s rich people decided they needed four-wheel-drive monsters, but they did, and so in the next eighteen months Aston Martin, Ferrari and Rolls-Royce will launch SUVs to rival the leviathans already on offer from Bentley, Porsche and Maserati.
Needless to say, Lamborghini wasn’t going to be left out of a roll call like that and has come up with the car you see this morning. It’s called the Urus, which I thought was an embarrassing genito-urinary problem. ‘Doctor. I’ve got an itch on my urus.’ Turns out it is some kind of ox.
Unlike the other rap’n’footballer brands, Lamborghini has been here before. In the 1970s it decided for reasons known only to the bottom of a very big bottle of wine that Colonel Gaddafi would like an Italian pick-up for his soldiers. Amazingly, it turned out he didn’t, and neither did any other army, so Lamborghini fitted the V12 engine from a Countach, lined the extremely cramped interior with leather and tried to convince the world that this is what it’d had in mind all along.
I drove one once, and it was hilariously good fun and hilariously terrible all at the same time. The lever that engaged the low-range gearbox was so stiff that it took two of us, one sitting on the dash pulling with his arms, and one on the back seat levering with his legs, to shift it. And when it did finally boing free, the man on the dash shot through the windscreen. Later the engine seized in Oxford Street. And then I took it to a petrol s
tation, where it consumed £147-worth of petrol. Back then that was what I earned in a month.
Times, of course, have changed. Gaddafi has gone, his armed forces are rushing around the desert in Toyota pick-ups and Lamborghini is no longer run by people who get all their best ideas in the pub. It’s just a small cog in the Volkswagen empire.
It’s also the most exciting car maker in the world. Ferrari is so up itself these days, it’s started being actively hostile to even its most loyal customers, it won’t allow the press to conduct proper tests and, when it does finally relent, the car it provides is always weirdly fast.
Lambo is run by nicer people and – whisper this – it makes better cars too. The Huracán Performante is easily the best supercar on the road – it eats the Ferrari 488 for breakfast – and the Aventador remains the world’s greatest head-turner. But what about the Genital Itch?
Well, the first thing you need to understand is that, while it says Lamborghini on the back, it’s no such thing. The platform comes from an Audi Q7, the engine and gearbox from a Porsche Cayenne, the rear axle and suspension from a Bentley Bentayga, the dashboard screens from an Audi A8 and the electric window switches – I bet the press department hoped I wouldn’t spot this – from a Mk 7 Volkswagen Golf.
None of this would matter if it sounded like a proper Lambo, but it doesn’t. Not in road mode, at any rate. It sounds like the mad love-child of W.O. Bentley and Ferdinand Porsche. Only if you put it in track mode does it start to wave its arms about and have the screaming abdabs.
That is what I want from a Lamborghini. I want an eye-swivelling lunatic with an axe in one hand and a chainsaw in the other. Fee Waybill from the Tubes. With windscreen wipers.
Really? Page 39
