Clarkson on Cars

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Take the new Honda Prelude. This is a stunning-looking car, and I will pat the back of anyone who says they were even slightly involved with its styling, but for heaven’s sake, did it need a new engine, a new floor, a new interior and a new four-wheel steering system too?

  If you are going to change everything you run the risk, as Russia did in 1917, or as God did in the Garden of Eden, of getting something horribly wrong.

  The Rover SDI was unreliable but, instead of concentrating their efforts on quality, the designers came up with the all-new 800, which had a hole the size of France in its torque curve.

  The original Toyota MR2 was beginning to look a little dated but, instead of a mild facelift, we got an all-new MR2 which, by all accounts, had the handling prowess of Bambi. Then there was the Celica. A few tweaks would have kept the eighties version as fresh as lavatory cleaner but no – in came something that looked like an extra in a Vincent Price movie.

  And Subaru. For years it’s made solid, dependable farm vehicles, but does it stick to its specialist subject? No, it invents the SVX, which is to the world of coupes what vomiting on the Queen’s corgi is to your chances of getting a knighthood.

  Now compare these revolutionary cars to those which have been gently evolved: the glorious Jaguar XJS, the characteristic Porsche 911, the Rolls, the Morgan.

  And best of all, when it comes to illustrating the point, the Range Rover. Though the silhouette remains the same as it was in 1972, it has been evolved gradually, taking on four doors when it was deemed necessary, adopting a 3.9-litre engine when a 3.5 was no longer enough, sprouting anti-lock brakes, leather upholstery and various other toys, as market forces dictated.

  The end result is a contemporary machine with the familiar cosiness of tradition. And because Land Rover has limited itself to a few choice alterations every year or so, not only have the development costs been pared to the bone but the chances of making a mistake have been virtually eliminated. Actually, the Range Rover is very probably the most developed car you can buy.

  Now at this point the engineer with the errant Biro will point out that production techniques have changed considerably over the past twenty years and that, comparatively speaking, it costs a fortune to make a Range Rover. To which punk rock had an answer: ‘We Don’t Care Grandad.’

  Sex on Wheels

  Judging by the wall of anoraks down at my local newsagent’s, there are a great many people out there who absolutely cannot wait to introduce their trouser snakes to the Viper.

  Ever since the first sneak photographs of this new Dodge began to appear in British magazines, sales of Club International, Razzle and Fiesta have plummeted. Apparently.

  They’re calling it the horniest beast ever to emerge from the world’s motor manufacturers and, although I personally find it extremely difficult to become aroused by a car, I do sort of know what everyone means. Indeed, just the other day I was to be found explaining to a young boy who works on one of the other motoring magazines that Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone are sexy, but the Dodge Viper is not. He couldn’t grasp it at all but, then again, he wears Rohan trouserwear.

  What the Dodge Viper is, is exciting. Not since yesterday tea-time have I looked forward to driving a car quite so much. Now, why should this be so? Why am I not bothered about the Ferrari 512 or the Maserati Shamal? Why am I able to sit here, with the keys to a Syclone on my desk, wondering which taxi firm to call when I go out tonight? What makes the Viper any different?

  Well, first things first; it is not a sports car. Sports cars need to be small and nimble, and I’d like to bet a wadge the size of Devon that the Viper is neither. In a sports car, handling is everything. In a Viper, handling is the addendum.

  It is not a supercar either. In order for a car to graduate to supercar status it has to be mid-engined, but as I always say, if God had meant us to put engines in the middle, he wouldn’t have given us bonnets. Also, a supercar needs to look exactly like a Ferrari, and the only thing that looks less like a Ferrari than the Viper is my left lung.

  No, I’ll tell you what the Viper is. It’s a muscle car. As curvy as a curvy thing, it has a huge engine in the front and rear-wheel drive, and that’s it. Doubtless we’ll all be reading soon about how a Carrera 4 will out-corner it, and how a Delta Integrale is faster point-to-point, but would you like to know something, I couldn’t give a toss.

  I’m fairly certain that, in a 100-metre sprint, Colin Moynihan could beat Arnold Schwarzenegger, but who would queue to see a film with Col the Doll in it? If Sylvester Stallone had been equipped with a body like mine – which, by the way, is terrible – no one would have been to see Rocky. And he would have no money, and neither would Brigitte Nielson, and there’s another case in point(s).

  People like powerful things. We like the majesty of a 747 taking off. We like the Destriero because it has 60,000 horsepower. We like crash, bang and wallop. We like finesse in the kennel and brute force on the kitchen table. Well, I do anyway, and if you don’t your sexuality must be seriously open to question.

  Now, I hope you’re starting to understand why the Viper holds such appeal. What makes it so special is that it’s unique. There are no other big-engined, rear-wheel-drive muscle cars on offer in this country. And no, the Griffith, in comparison, is about as muscular as the Princess of Wales, who is, incidentally, the world’s prettiest person.

  The trouble is that the European and Japanese manufacturers that follow this timeless and classic design philosophy tune the end product for comfort, creating a GT car in the process.

  The Jaguar XJS has a huge 5.3-litre engine and rear-wheel drive. It has a bonnet so big you could play baseball on it, and more curves than the Pompidou Centre. Also, has anyone else noticed that, from the driver’s seat, those front wings look just like the legs on the lions in Trafalgar Square? No? Well I did.

  The trouble is that Jaguar decided to go for the Darby and Joan brigade, so in came sound deadening and the automatic gearbox and the silken ride, and out went the wide-eyed ‘oh-my-god-we’re-going-to-crash’ excitement. Fine if you’re 50 – annoying if you’re not. And I’m 32.

  However, it does not take much – about £15,000 actually – to turn a five-grand XJS into the British answer to Viper. From a distance, the Hands Hyper XJS looks like the sort of car that delivers escorts to your door, day or night. The rental kind.

  But, if you actually get down on your hands and knees, you begin to understand that it only looks like a tartmobile because it looks like a customised XJS. Forget you ever clapped eyes on an XJS in the first place, and it looks absolutely bloody marvellous.

  The front wings are flared outwards by one inch and the rears by two. The resultant gaps are filled with giant 16-inch pepperpot wheels, and then the whole car is lowered by two inches. To bring it even nearer the ground, a spoiler and skirts kit is added. This little lot turns the rather svelte, gentlemanly standard item into a car that looks as aggressive as a gorilla forced to wear evening dress for the first time.

  Mechanically, the engine is bog-standard, but the gearbox is not. Designer Paul Hands explained it all to me time and time again, but I still can’t get it. He’s taken something called the torque converter out, I think, which means you get some more horsepower, but you have to move the stick if you want to change gear.

  The bits underneath are finished off with some stainless-steel exhausts and new manifolds, which help up the output to 340 bhp. Nice.

  What you’re left with is a truly splendid car to drive. Yes, it handles and yes, the steering is quite superb. The interior’s not bad and the gearbox is probably clever. The looks are what you’d call horny, and what I’d call angry, and the fuel consumption is strictly for Mr Rolex.

  But the best bit is that when you put your foot down on the accelerator, it goes whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooarrrrrrrrrrh. A lot.

  Yours from the funny farm.

  In a Car Crash

  The sun was out, the roof was off, the revs were ri
ght up against the red line and Northumberland had never looked, sounded or felt better. The road, a sinewy grey ribbon, darted this way and that in a frantic attempt to run alongside the babbling brook.

  The car was Honda’s latest CRX. With its new soft suspension, that clever roof and the extraordinary 158-bhp VTEC engine, this was a seriously good machine.

  The driver was me, and I was having the sort of fun I didn’t think you could have in a car any more. I’ve argued time and time again that no driving experience could ever get close to sex, but this was close. Damn close.

  But then, like the husband coming home or the headboard snapping, as I rounded the bend, there was a car parked, broadside, right across the middle of the road, blocking it, ruining my fun.

  Now this is not a story about the advantages of anti-lock brakes. I am not going to tell you in great depth how I hit the middle pedal, hard, and was still able to steer round the car, because this did not happen.

  Nor is it the story about how rural interbreeding has rendered the average country bumpkin so stupid that he will park sideways on the blind side of a bend when I am coming the other way.

  You see, it didn’t take a great deal of time or intelligence to work out that the offending car was, in fact, upside down.

  Initially, I imagined that, after a pissy lunch, someone had had a bit of a whoopsy with the hedge and had walked home, where they were now sleeping it off, unconcerned with the consequences of their accident.

  So I was angry. Angry enough not to have noticed that the thing reeked of petrol and that trying to pivot it round, single-handed, would result in either a broken back or a bloody big explosion.

  In fact, neither of these things happened because, after a deal of pushing and shoving, the car had moved exactly no inches. By this time I was really angry and had set about the hedge on the basis that privet is more manoeuvrable than Ford.

  While attempting to uproot a particularly stubborn bit, I had to get on my hands and knees, which enabled me, through the wonders of peripheral vision, actually to see into the car. Where there was a young girl.

  Only two days earlier I had harangued a friend who said he was going to first-aid classes in case someone next to him had a heart attack. This, I argued, was the sort of thing a bearded person would do, and that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. ‘If someone next to you has a heart attack,’ I said, ‘nick his wallet.’

  It was a joke with a cruel twist in the tail, because here I was in the middle of bloody nowhere, peering at a girl who was either unconscious or dead. And I had absolutely no idea what to do.

  Somewhere, deep inside the furthest reaches of my memory bank, I recall someone once saying that you should not attempt to move them but, as I did not wish to stand in a coroner’s court explaining that I had been at her side for a full five minutes before the car blew up, I decided to get her out. Now even I could work out that, the instant I released the seatbelt, she would drop on her head and that, if her back wasn’t already broken, it sure as hell would be then.

  But I managed, and once she was far enough from the car, I decided to see if she was alive or not. And that, believe me, is not as easy as it might sound.

  I did not want her to come round to find me fiddling with her chest, something you have to do in order to test for a heartbeat if, like me, you can’t even find you own wrist pulse. And for the same reason, I did not want to stick her lips to my ear to listen for breathing.

  Eventually, of course, I threw caution to the four winds, went for a quick grope and determined that she was indeed alive. Happily, there was no sign of blood, otherwise I too would have been out cold.

  But then what do you do? Drive off and leave her? And anyway, we’re talking Cheviots here, not the Marylebone High Street, and for all I knew the nearest phone might have been 30 miles away. The next time someone calls my mobile (yes, the one I’d left at home) a pose, I shall insert it in them.

  Thankfully, while deliberating, a brace of locals emerged from the undergrowth and, between us, we decided that one should go for the phone, one should stay with the girl and I should go and get her parents, who lived nearby.

  It’s a laugh, let me tell you, knocking on someone’s door in the middle of the afternoon to explain that their daughter has crashed her car and is lying unconscious in the middle of the road.

  It’s even more of a laugh when you are wearing a biker’s jacket and ripped jeans, because you know that they think you caused the crash in the first place.

  And boy, did I split my sides when they said it was her nineteenth birthday. The punchline was still to come though, because both Mum and Dad wanted to come with me in the CRX. In those few short moments, there was enough material for an entire ITV sitcom starring Richard Briers as the fast-talking father, Adam Faith as the yob and June Whitfield as the tearful mum with tea towel. Not.

  By the time we made it back to the scene of the crash, the ambulance, the entire Northumberland police department (Eric and Reg) and lots of people with straw in the mouth were there.

  But the best bit was that the girl was whimpering and moving her feet, suggesting that if anything was broken, it wasn’t too serious. She was carted off into the sunset for what I sincerely hope was a happy ending.

  Except for one thing. This time I was lucky, but next time I find a car crash, the person may die because of my hopelessness. So, since all this happened a couple of weeks ago, I have been feverishly studying human anatomy down at the library.

  And I’ve been doing some practice as well. Last night I amputated my next door neighbour’s leg and sewed his wife’s spleen on to their daughter’s left ventricle.

  Today, when they arrested me, I was wearing my underpants on the outside of my trousers.

  Speed Kills

  I have made no secret in the past that I do not like the Guardian which, I’ve always reckoned, is a paper for hirsute vegetarians and Christians who care.

  It is a paper written for those who like to think they can make a difference. It is a paper for fools, except on Mondays when it is a paper for people who choose to wear bigger spectacles than is actually necessary.

  Now, I do not buy it and nor do I speak to anyone who does, but every so often people fax me extracts. Normally, they create a little mirth in the office and then they go in the bin. But now this has all changed because an article appeared recently that is not at all funny, not even if your sense of humour is as warped as Windsor Castle. It was entitled ‘Live Fast, Kill Young’ and not since Julian single-handedly foiled a massive smuggling operation in Five Go Picnicking have I ever read such drivel. Believe ‘Live Fast, Kill Young’ and you’d be down at the bottom of the garden, looking for fairies.

  It begins with the tale of Shaun Gooch, who lost control of his Ford Escort while pursuing a friend round the streets of Swindon at speeds of up to 90 mph. He killed four children outright and another died later.

  Almost immediately, it quotes the editor of Fast Lane magazine, Andrew English, claiming that ‘speed is fun’, and that there is ‘an enormous amount of prudism about the whole thing’.

  So now every bearded Christian in the land has English pegged as a stupid person who gladly condones the behaviour of those who drive around Swindon at 90 mph, killing people. I know him, and I can tell you he isn’t like that at all. He, like just about every other right-thinking person in the land, would like to see killer joyriders hung up by their dangly bits.

  Anyway, the message the Guardian is trying to get across is that speed kills. Specifically, it says that ‘excessive speed is a principal cause of fatal accidents’. Unfortunately, a caption on the next page says that the English police do not compile any speed and accident statistics. Without data, it is damned hard to work out how anyone can make the link, and it’s even harder when the small piece of information you do have is wrong. Another caption says that road deaths in Germany increased by 18 per cent when the country abolished speed limits on the motorway. This is not true because there have never been
speed limits on German autobahns.

  OK, so the facts are either wrong or based on incorrect data, but does this interrupt the flow? No, it does not.

  Gavin Green, sometime editor of Car magazine, is quoted as saying that the Escort Cosworth cocks a snook at pleasure haters who are trying to take the fun out of motoring, and that Ford must be admired for making it.

  The Guardian asks whether we really should admire a company that makes a car so hugely capable of breaking the speed limit. It says it knows that people who buy the Cosworth will break the law. I know that people who buy Astramax vans will break the speed limit too, but do I hear calls for the Astramax to be banned? No, I do not. Sure, I’ve got a Cossie and I drive at 80 mph on motorways, which is illegal. However, the point is that I like driving Ford’s winged wonder not because I like to drive fast, but because people who know it can go fast stare at me.

  ‘Live Fast, Kill Young’ calls the Cosworth ‘pointlessly’ overpowered, but if someone who buys one gets his or her leg over as a result of its gutsy motor and exec jet looks, then that makes the purchase pointful, surely?

  Anyway, with the Cosworth well and truly dealt with, we are told all about the people who will buy it. Me. Apparently, we are suited bullies who test our cars alongside poorer, but equally menacing drivers in ex-post-office vans. This, it seems, makes driving a problem for everyone else. Well, in the last two weeks three of my friends have been involved in city-centre accidents, and on each occasion the blame lay fairly and squarely at the door of the dithering gits who pull out of junctions without looking and stutter round roundabouts.

  Fine, I might be doing 80 mph on a motorway in my pointless Cosworth when a woman, distracted by two screaming kids in the back, pulls out unexpectedly. Sure, if I had been doing 70 the crash might not have had such dire consequences, but similarly, if she had been paying attention it wouldn’t have happened. Same goes with caravanists. If I encounter a queue of cars behind a caravan which is dawdling along at 20 mph and I crash whilst attempting to overtake, is that only my fault?