Clarkson on Cars

by Jeremy Clarkson

  This, I’m sure a hi-fi expert would tell me, is only a big empty box with a light on the front but I don’t care because it looks good. As do all those screens in a 3000GT.

  Two trip switches don’t on the other hand, and nor do the fold-away head restraints in a Mercedes. These are the people who brought you a double-glazed car and illuminated vanity mirrors in the back. These are the people who devised an arm which delivers your seatbelt when you shut the door and now they’ve gone further. Hit a button on the dash and the rear headrests drop down to make reversing easier, but short of getting into the back and pulling them up again, they stay down, flat and flaccid.

  And talking of things that move, what about the spoiler on the back of a VW Corrado. At 40 mph, it raises to provide questionable extra downforce – fair enough, at a pinch, but why is there a manual-override button?

  Apart from trying to fool the guy in the car behind into thinking that you are bigger in the trouser department than you really are, there is no benefit at all in driving around town with your spoiler up.

  Talking trip computers, happily, have gone to that great gimmick scrapyard in the sky but when they were in vogue, my colleague on Top Gear, Chris Goffey, turned a speaking Maestro on its roof. And as he dangled there, upside down, the silicon back-seat driver announced: ‘Oil pressure low.’

  Today, we have multi-faceted automatic gearboxes. Now call me an old hasbeen but I thought the whole point of automatic transmission was to save effort. You put the stick in D and off you go.

  Not any more. The gear lever in the Vauxhall Omega I drove last week was festooned with more buttons than a nineteenth-century bodice.

  There was one for economy driving, one for sporty moments and one for when it snows. Then there was the overdrive facility.

  But there are more stupid things. Audi fits stereos which have buttons that can only be operated by micro-physicists. If you use a finger to adjust the volume, you’ll inadvertently nudge nine other controls which, if you’re very unlucky, means you could finish up with Terry Wogan shouting at you.

  For a true button frenzy, you just can’t beat Saab. The topflight 9000 model comes as standard with no fewer than 104 switches at a driver’s disposal.

  And none of them operates what I consider to be the most significant gimmick yet invented.

  Both the Ford Escort Cosworth and the Jaguar XJ6 that I have run in the past two years had a heated front windscreen and I can’t tell you how much I miss it on the new Jaguar, which does not.

  Cars do steam up and being impatient, most people will set off before the fan has strutted its stuff. Well, with a heated screen, you just touch a button and before you’ve put your seatbelt on, the glass is pine fresh and as clear as morning dew.

  Nissan, I hear, are working on a car with two heated windscreens.

  Formula One Racing – as Dull as Ever

  They don’t televise inter-county basket weaving. They don’t charge spectators £70 for the privilege of watching sheep-dog trials. And when someone wins a beetle drive, the results aren’t disputed by laboratory technicians.

  But in Formula One, they do all of these things even though it has become, with the exception of cricket and golf, by far and away the most tedious spectacle in the world.

  I’ve made half-hearted declarations before, about not watching F1 any more, but Brazil was the final straw.

  Damon Hill promised, just before the start, that we were in for one of the most exciting championships in years. Then, a couple of hours later, Murray Walker admitted that the only thing keeping the race alive was the fuel stops.

  Well, now look Murray, you are the best sports commentator I’ve ever heard, but you must admit that there are more exciting things to do on a Sunday than watching cars being filled up with petrol, some of which wasn’t really petrol at all, we later discovered.

  If I want to watch people refuelling, I can pop down to the local Texaco station. Hell, I can even do it myself, but as I screech up to the pump and stand there watching the numbers click round, there are no crowds, and BBC Sport doesn’t pay my agent billions for the exclusive rights. This is because filling up with petrol falls into the category of things labelled ‘Not Interesting’.

  Indeed, it’s hard to think of anything that is less interesting. Ironing springs to mind but even duller than that is what happens in a Formula One race between the fuel stops.

  Nothing happens, that’s what. In the televised highlights from Brazil, there wasn’t a single overtaking manoeuvre, except when the car in front broke down. And mechanical failure isn’t interesting either. I ran out of petrol the other day and for damn sure, no one gave a toss.

  The tabloid newspapers have realised that the only interest in Formula One is the Damon Hill versus Michael Shoemaker battle, which is a thinly disguised rerun of World War Two. Only we won that.

  And anyway, if I want to watch Britain giving the Germans a good pasting, I’ll go down to the video shop and rent The Dambusters.

  So look; if you want to see good car racing, forget F1. Switch off in droves and turn your attention instead to the British Touring Car Championship where the lead will change more times in one lap than it does in a whole year of Grand Prix.

  You can bang door handles in the BTCC and push the car in front round a corner, in the fairly certain knowledge that the result won’t be a black flag, a spin, or death and manglement.

  In Brazil, Mr Shoemaker was so much faster than everyone else, he very nearly lapped himself. In the BTCC, you win by inches, not light years.

  And another thing. I’ve been going to Grand Prix for years and I never, ever see a driver. They hang around in their motorhomes nibbling a little light pasta and sipping an isotonic drink until just before the off.

  And then at the end, they’re on a helicopter halfway back to Monaco before you’re out of the car park.

  BTCC drivers are forced by the rules to mingle with the paying punters in the paddock on race day. They must sign autographs and they must do a parade lap, and if they refuse, they’re fined.

  This means everyone has a chance to meet the stars and form opinions. If Patrick Watts or Paul Radisch says something nice to your wide-eyed son, you can cheer the guy on in the race.

  Or you can form opinions based solely on the cars they drive. My wife has a Volvo and desperately wants them to win this year. I’m not that bothered just so long as the BMWs lose.

  All around Europe, other countries are copying the BTCC and all around the world, television companies are buying the rights to broadcast it. And that gives the car companies, who’ve only paid a paltry 5 million to be on the grid, a nice warm feeling in their underpants.

  And on top of all this, the major tittle-tattle dominating the run up to the F1 season was the size of Nigel Mansell’s arse. In the BTCC, people have had a weightier problem – like who’s going to win.

  Can You Really Own a Lotus?

  In Britain, Lotus is a bit of a joke.

  To those who have actually owned one, it stands for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious, while to those who pay little attention, it’s a Formula One racing team that doesn’t win very often.

  And then there’s the corporate side of things. Founded by Colin Chapman in 1948 with a tarted-up Austin Seven, it struggled along for 40 years, becoming embroiled in the De Lorean fiasco and emerging as a corporate plaything for General Motors.

  But last month, faced with a need to do something about its huge losses, GM paid off Lotus’s debts and sold the whole shooting match, except the race team, which is now independent, to Bugatti.

  This, in itself, is odd because though Bugatti has a huge and ultra-modern factory, along with grand and ambitious plans, it has, so far, not made very many cars: perfume, head scarves and models, yes, but cars? No.

  Geographically, Lotus has always been disadvantaged too. We can understand that cars are made in Detroit because this is Motown and we know about Essex and Coventry and Birmingham but it is hard to equate Norfol
k with motor-car manufacturing.

  Lotus has become world famous for its technology, its work on anti-sound and active ride suspension is well documented and state of the art, yet this seems at odds with Norfolk, just about the only county in England with no motorways in it.

  You expect to see a lot of agriculture in Norfolk, a lot of turkeys too, but for heaven’s sake, the garages don’t even take credit cards. No, in Britain, Lotus is a bit of a joke.

  And, in recent years, the cars haven’t helped either. There was the Elan, lovely to drive but blessed with the reliability of British Rail. Then there was the Elite, lovely to drive but odd-looking. The Excel was lovely to drive too but it was unreliable and over bumps, it had a habit of banging the driver’s head into the roof.

  Then there was the best Lotus of them all, the Seven, as driven by Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. But Lotus sold this design to Caterham Cars who last year sold 550 of them, earned a Queen’s Award and can now boast that they make more cars than the company to which they owe their existence.

  In 1990, it looked like Lotus would make a decent car in the new Elan, but it proved too expensive and unreliable, so GM pulled the plug on it. There’s talk now that Bugatti wants to start making it again, but don’t hold your breath.

  Small wonder then that Lotus has never quite managed to shake off its image as a kit car manufacturer, a place to go for plastic cars that break down a lot.

  So why then did James Bond use a Lotus, twice? In The Spy Who Loved Me, he tooled around under water – where the plastic wouldn’t rust, of course – and in For Your Eyes Only, he went to Cortina in one for some skiing and spying.

  And why is Lotus such an obvious hit in America? Richard Gere wooed Julia Roberts with one in Pretty Woman and then both Sharon Stone and her girlfriend used Lotuses in Basic Instinct. A new soap, set in the Caribbean and due for launch next year, also sees the hero behind the wheel of a Lotus every week.

  Well, here’s the deal. All these people have used the Esprit, a mid-engined two-seater which was designed by the master of Italian style, Guigaro.

  He was responsible for the first Golf and the mark one Scirocco. He did the Alfasud and the Maserati Merak. He is a genius but his finest hour came when he finished his coffee, sharpened his pencil, and did the Esprit.

  And even the seventeen years which have elapsed since then, and the countless design changes by Lotus themselves, have failed to remove the sheen. Indeed, today’s Esprit, the S4, is the best looking of the lot and must rank as one of the most beautiful cars in the world.

  Perhaps that’s why it is now the only car Lotus make, at the rate of one a week.

  But that’s more because, though it is a pretty car, and a fast one, and a car chosen by the stars, it is not desperately expensive. £46,995 is not much for a car that should, given enough road, be capable of 165 mph.

  In a straight race away from the lights, up to say 100 mph, it will hang on, gallantly, to the tails of far more expensive machinery, like the £80,449 Porsche Turbo and the £144,000 Lamborghini Diablo. It is actually faster than the £78,000 Ferrari 348GTB.

  And this is quite an achievement for a car whose engine looks like something out of a Moulinex Magimix. It is a mere 2.2-litre, four-cylinder unit, making it about the same as the engine in your Ford Mondeo, but because it has a sophisticated turbocharger, it develops 264 bhp which is enough to make the plastic, and thus light, car very, very fast indeed.

  And because it is so small, there’s room behind it for that rarest of rare things in a supercar; a boot.

  Now that’s the on-paper stuff, the kind of material you can find in a brochure; but two questions will be at the forefront of any potential customer’s mind. What is it really like to drive, and how far will it go before I need to telephone the RAC?

  Well, I managed 1500 miles in a week before I needed to call someone out. But it was Autoglass, and not the RAC, and it was because a mutant had broken in and not because the engine had gone bang. In fact, nothing went bang and nothing dropped off. Nothing looked like it was going to drop off either.

  I have telephoned Norris McWhirter to see if 1500 miles is some kind of record for a Lotus, and he’s checking.

  It must be said that I hadn’t really looked forward to my stint with this car because the last model, the S3, was a dog. The brakes were useless, the steering was unassisted and furiously heavy as a result, and it wasn’t big enough inside for anyone other than Colin Moynihan.

  But as the miles rolled by in the S4, my mind changed. New seats, in black leather with yellow piping, mean the interior is big enough for big people, and a new instrument panel means you can see all the dials except the clock but this is no problem because you WILL get there on time.

  It really is every bit as fast as it looks and more, it feels every bit as fast as the figures say it is. The noise isn’t desperately exciting – it sounds like a Cortina – but it goes from o to 60 in less than five seconds and that can, and does, hurt your neck.

  It corners beautifully but on a private test track, it proved the point that mid-engined cars can be tricky if you have only average driving ability. When you step over the mark, they bite.

  So, they pulled me out of the field and I was off again, enjoying the decent ride, the positive power steering, the chunky gear change, the prodigious power, the stares of other road users and a cockpit that’s every bit as user friendly as a telephone, only more stylish.

  But the Lotus didn’t play its trump card until its last evening in my tenure. There were a whole load of cars at home that night – the Escort Cosworth, a big Mercedes, a Honda Prelude VTEC and a Porsche 968. My wife, staring at this metallic playground, said, ‘Let’s take the Lotus.’

  Soft Tops

  Sports cars are coming back. Strangely.

  Amidst all the brouhaha which accompanied the launch of the new MG last week, it was easy to miss a startling new trend.

  For the last twenty years, car firms have been run by bean counters in suits whose only concern has been the figure at the bottom of the profit and loss accounts.

  The designers and engineers have been as clever as ever but the suits in charge have systematically erased all free thinking. Any daring new idea was presented to a bunch of ordinary people in so-called ‘customer clinics’ and if the invited guests, in their anoraks and cardigans, raised so much as an eyebrow, the car was scrapped and the designer beaten.

  The result has been plain to see. Cars have been getting duller and duller to the point where the only reason why you would buy a Ford Mondeo rather than a Renault Laguna was the proximity of your nearest dealer or the advertising. Did you want a car with inner strength or a car you can believe in? Me? I wanted neither.

  What made the whole scenario even more depressing was the public apathy to cars that were in any way radical. Take the Mazda MX5. Here was a simple sports car that blended old-fashioned, rear-wheel drive, roof-down motoring with sixties style and modern-day, Japanese reliability.

  To begin with, it sold well enough but once the fashion victims had bought one, sales began to slump. The trendies moved on to something else after a year and there was no one to take their place. In 1994 only 1000 MX5s were sold in Britain.

  BMW had the same problem with the Z1 – the best car they ever made just didn’t sell. And we all know how long the Lotus Elan lasted. Things were so bad last year that the best-selling convertible in Europe was the hugely expensive Mercedes SL.

  Now, bearing this in mind, you might imagine that the suits at the top of all the car companies would be even more adamant than usual that they wanted aeroblob styling, chintzy seats and five doors.

  But no. Quite apart from the MG which is radical enough from Auntie Rover, there’s a new Renault Speeder which has to be seen to be believed. Not even Gerry Anderson could have conceived of this car! If the producers of Space 1999 had suggested this design for Martin Landau’s personal wheels, they’d have been sacked.

  For Christ’s sake, it does
n’t have a roof of any description and one version of it doesn’t even have a windscreen.

  But despite the truly wild styling, which can only have been done after a heavy, heavy night on LSD, it is hurried along by the 150 bhp engine from the Renault Clio Williams. That keeps the price down to ‘less than £20,000’.

  Then there’s the Fiat Barchetta. Renault’s people had used up Europe’s entire supply of drugs while doing the wonderful Speeder so the Fiat is a little more normal, but then so is the price – just fourteen grand.

  Nevertheless, here is a little two-seater sports car which sounds and looks wonderful. And who cares that the steering wheel is on the wrong side? This is a car with a ‘must have’ factor. I simply adored it.

  And the list doesn’t stop there. BMW might have felt that the sports-car market could be left to the MG division of its Rover arm, but no. Next year, there’ll be a Z3 which, guess what, is a little two-seater sports car which should sell for less than £20,000.

  And the story doesn’t end there either. Mazda, who can claim that they started this particular ball rolling, are said to be close to a replacement for the MX5, and we can therefore be assured that Toyota and Nissan are on the case too.

  Had enough? Good, because there’s more. For some time, Porsche has been touting a little, mid-engined sports car around the world’s motor shows, and now, we hear, it too is destined to become a production reality.

  Called the Boxer, it is going to be a little more expensive than the MG, the Speeder and the Z3 but the figure of £25,000 has been mentioned. And that, for what is a startling car with a Porsche badge, is cheap.

  But if we’re talking value for money, then you are well advised to reach for your Yellow Pages right now. Ring your Mercedes dealership and tell him that you want an SLK.