Round the Bend

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Then there was the XJR-15, which crashed a lot, and the much publicized foray into Formula One, which blew up, didn’t start or cruised around quite slowly at the back.

  We like to think, then, that Jaguar’s history is as rich and as lustrous as a maharajah’s bathrobe, but the truth is, it’s a mishmash of strikes, unreliability, sheepskin, failure, vodka, tonic and public humiliation. In fact, I would venture to suggest that the company’s reputation among the vast majority these days hangs solely on one car: the E-type – Jaguar’s 1966 classic.

  That’s why we care where Jags are made. That’s why we care about who owns them. That’s why we care about the new XF. So here goes …

  First, there’s the styling. Jaguar says it looks like the stunning concept car we saw a couple of years ago but I’m not so sure. Some of the exquisite detailing on the concept – the guardsman-sharp creases on the bonnet and razor-thin headlamps – have not made it onto the production car.

  And I’m sorry, but arguing that the two have the same proportions and stance is like saying I have the same proportions and stance as Brad Pitt. I do. But I’m never asked for his autograph.

  Had there been no concept car, I would never have known how good the XF could look. But there was, so I’m sorry, but as a styling exercise the finished product just doesn’t float my boat.

  In fact, when I came home to find it sitting in my drive I thought it was a Mondeo and ignored it for two days. When I finally took it for a drive the disappointments kept on coming. The dipped headlamps are not bright enough, the light switch is on the indicator stalk – a hallmark of cost-cutting – the cruise control wasn’t working, the throttle felt slack, the sat nav screen was unreadable thanks to too many reflections, and the windows don’t work when the ignition is off.

  Then there’s the starting procedure. To earn extra points from the Euro NCAP safety people, Jag, like everyone else, has replaced the traditional ignition key, which can damage your kneecap in a frontal crash, with a starter button. But unlike in everyone else’s cars, sometimes the starter button doesn’t actually start the engine. I don’t know why.

  But I do know that by the time I’d got out, remembered the window was down, got back in and spent God knows how long trying to coax some life back into the ignition system, I was purple with righteous indignation.

  And then there’s the gearbox. It’s a normal auto but you can override it with paddles behind the wheel. Lovely. But if you change down into, say, fourth it won’t, after a while, go back into drive. Not unless you put the circular lever into ‘Sport’ and then back into ‘D’ again. This is wearisome and indicates that the whole car was built on a bit of a shoestring. There isn’t that much rear legroom either.

  Strangely, however, despite all of this, I enjoyed my time with the XF enormously. I’d have one over an equivalent BMW, Audi or Lexus any day. First of all, the interior is such a joyous place to sit. The high centre console makes you feel hemmed in, cocooned, safe. The materials used are modern, such as you would find at Zurich airport. The leather is hand-stitched with contrasting cotton and the blue lighting is brilliant. It doesn’t feel remotely like a Jag in there. And is that a bad thing?

  It doesn’t feel like a Jag to drive either. It’s quite noisy, for a kick-off, and it rides with a firmness that would shake the pile out of Arthur Daley’s car coat. The firmness is never uncomfortable, as it is in an Audi. It’s not a jiggliness that annoys. It’s a feeling that the suspension is sorted and that if you put your foot down, all will be well.

  It is. It may have the same engine as Noah used in his ark but as a car for covering ground, on A roads, my God. You can forget your BMWs. This is fanbleedingtastic. Balanced. Meaty. Pretty soon you’ll not give a damn that the light switch is on the indicator stalk and you won’t worry about the poor dipped-beam lighting either. The beam from your smile will illuminate the road ahead well enough.

  This, then, is a car that’s flawed and fantastic, irritating and rewarding, mad and bad. But when all is said and done – and this is the nonsensical joy of cars – I liked it. I looked forward to driving it. I’m sad it’s not here any more.

  Because of this I have a sneaking suspicion that Jag, after forty years of misery, is about to have the most delightful Indian summer.

  10 February 2008

  David Dimbleby made me wet myself

  Mercedes-Benz CLK Black Series

  I’ve been in a 1950s Russian plane that had spent most of its life with the Angolan air force before some hopeless Cuban drug addict in a soiled baseball cap flew it, and me, into one of the most savage tropical thunderstorms the world has ever seen.

  I’ve also raced a drag snowmobile, rolled an F-15 fighter, spun a Koenigsegg and been in a helicopter gunship, over Basra, when someone stepped into his garden 500 feet below and fired a heat-seeking missile at it. So I understand the concept of fear.

  But there is nothing quite so buttock-clenchingly terrifying as the moment when David Dimbleby turns to you on Question Time and asks for your opinion on something about which you know absolutely nothing.

  There you are, in front of an audience, with the television cameras rolling, and you have to summon up a cohesive thought, immediately. You can’t joke because jokes aren’t allowed in the serious world of political debate. You can’t mumble. You can’t even look at your shoes and, in the best traditions of the school bad boy, mumble, ‘Don’t know, sir.’

  The best person I ever saw on the panel was Enoch Powell. When asked for his thoughts on, oh I can’t remember what it was now, some frightfully important issue that mattered then but doesn’t now – homophobia in the fishing industry, probably – he didn’t bluster and talk about how he has an understanding of the trawlerman’s way of life because he once spent a lovely holiday in Lowestoft, which is the sort of thing Patricia Hewitt or Margaret Beckett might do.

  He didn’t thump his tub either, making platitudinous noises to whip up a frenzy of applause. He said simply, ‘I have no knowledge of this subject.’

  I was reminded of old Enoch’s honesty last year when I telephoned a chap at Mercedes-Benz and asked if I could borrow a quasi-racing, hard-topped version of the AMG SLK. It was called the Black and it all sounded very exciting.

  Now, there are a number of excuses the public relations executive can use when he doesn’t want to lend a demonstrator to someone. He can say, ‘It’s been crashed.’ Or, ‘It’s being used by the motoring correspondent of the Welsh Pig Breeders’ Gazette at the moment.’ Or he can say, ‘I’ll get back to you on that,’ and not do so.

  But the chap at Mercedes said straight away, ‘Ooh, the SLK Black. No. I don’t think you’d like it very much.’ And put the phone down.

  This means, of course, that when he rang the other day and offered me a drive in the Black edition of the CLK, I figured that since he was such an honest chap, I was going to like it. The thing is, though, I had absolutely no idea how much.

  The standard CLK is not the most exciting car in the Mercedes range. It sits in the mix like Peter sits in the Fonda family. Or that other bloke who wasn’t Paul Weller and Bruce Foxton in the Jam.

  It’s based on the old C-class saloon, which means it’s not as nice to drive as the current C-class saloon. And to make it even less appealing, it has fewer doors, less space inside and is considerably more expensive. This wouldn’t be so bad if it were a looker, but it’s a bit like the girl next door’s plump sister.

  On paper, the Black looks like even more of a cock-up. Because they’ve removed most of the luxury trimmings and the rear seats found in the normal 63 AMG version, and this has somehow made the car heavier. And then they’ve added a whopping £34,000 to the standard car’s already eye-watering list price of £66,000.

  So, the car you are looking at in the pictures this morning is priced to take on a Ferrari F430 and the Porsche Turbo. I know, I know. It sounds like a German idea of a joke. But I promise you this: it is not a joke at all. Like everything to come out of the Fa
therland since it was formed in 1871, it is utterly and deadly serious.

  The reason why this car has gained weight over the standard version, despite the absence of electric seats and sat nav and so on, is because, underneath, it has been radically altered with a chunky limited slip differential, a new wider axle and lots of other Brunelian strengthening beams.

  They’ve had a fiddle under the bonnet, too, completely redesigning the intake and exhaust systems and fitting a new management system so that now, the 6.2-litre V8 churns out a thunderous 507bhp. Couple this to the beefed-up undersides and the results are remarkable.

  Imagine drinking a pint of hemlock, setting yourself on fire and then jumping out of a plane when it’s directly overhead a combine harvester. You don’t know what’s going to kill you: only that you are going through the Pearly Gates at great speed very soon.

  That’s what the Black feels like. Exciting beyond words. Terrifyingly exciting. White-knuckle, eyes-on-stalks, sweaty-armpit and tensed-buttocks exciting. David Dimbleby exciting.

  Initially, you don’t drive this car: you just cling on for dear life. For the first few miles, I genuinely thought it was actively trying to kill me. But then I became used to the way the back skips and settles and started to enjoy it. Then the enjoyment turned into sheer, unparalleled joy. Then I started to think that I might have actually wet myself a bit.

  It does not drive like any other car, this one. It doesn’t feel planted like a Porsche Turbo, or alive, like a Ferrari 430. It feels skittish, as though it’s balancing all the time on a knife edge; that razor-thin sliver that separates absolute joy from certain death.

  And what makes it all the more extraordinary is that you don’t feel like you’re in a hunkered-down racer. You have an automatic gearbox. You have a hands-free telephone, and air-conditioning, and a ride that is not exactly soft. But it’s not killer hard either.

  It’s the same story with the noise. When you accelerate, it sounds much like I imagine a burning dinosaur might sound. But on the motorway, you can still hear Terry Wogan, even when he is muttering.

  Sadly, all is not sweetness and light. The front bucket seats are stunning but only Jon Bon Jovi has snaky enough hips to sit in them and do the seatbelt up. And then there’s the back. Because the rear seats have been taken out, you end up with half a square mile of carpeted but inaccessible uselessness.

  Technically, it’s possible to put them back in again – and it’s not like the extra weight will make much of a dint on an engine that produces more than 460 torques – but sadly, the European Union rule makers say that’s not allowed because it would cause the rear axle to snap, and the headlamps to point at Mars.

  And then there’s the styling. All those Mr Universe bulges are absolutely necessary to shroud the wider axles, and cool the carbon brakes. I know this. And I don’t doubt it would look great at Silverstone. But would it look right on a wet Wednesday in Tamworth? Or would you just look like the most terrible show-off?

  You might think, then, that if it’s a look-at-me head turner, you may as well go the whole hog and buy a Ferrari instead.

  I’m not so sure. Quite apart from the fact that the Merc is likely to be more reliable and comes with a proper boot, and all the iPod ’n’ sat nav tinsel that you really need these days, the simple fact of the matter is this: for sheer excitement, the CLK Black is a match for the 430.

  For sheer excitement, the CLK Black is a match for absolutely anything. Since it went back to Mercedes, I have been thinking about it a lot. Because I’m not sure that anyone’s life is quite complete unless they have one.

  24 February 2008

  Look, you traffic wombles, I’ve had enough

  Renaultsport Clio 197 Cup

  Recently, a mother of three appeared in court charged with ‘knowingly causing the deposit of controlled waste on land which did not have a waste management licence’.

  So what do you suppose she’d done? Emptied a sack of polonium into a school playground? Urinated in Alistair Darling’s finger bowl? Secreted 6,000 burning tyres in Bourton-on-the-Water? Nope. The ‘controlled waste’ was an apple core that she had allegedly tossed out of her car window.

  Shortly afterwards, two young men appeared in another court, accused of ‘interfering with a dolphin’. It turns out they’d been hitching a ride on it, in much the same way that tourists do on exotic holidays throughout the world. Then, the following day, the government announced that from now on Gordon Brown would be listening to every single telephone call you make.

  Small wonder the Archbishop of Canterbury announced, just twenty-four hours later, that he wants sharia law in Britain. He was mocked, of course, but come on: Muslimism lets you throw apple cores onto the grass verge and swim with the dolphins and make telephone calls without having a Scottish man grunting and moaning in the background. Plus, we’d have the added benefit of being able to dismember shoplifters.

  Also, though I have only a scant acquaintance with the Koran, I’m fairly certain it contains no call for motorists to be fleeced, hounded, mocked and, worst of all, held up on purpose by a swarm of power-crazed traffic wombles.

  No one seems to have noticed this sinister new development. But think. In the olden days, when policemen had to have two O-levels, a moustache and a burning desire to join the Freemasons, you never really heard of a motorway being closed.

  Then, however, the state introduced a new breed of Diet One-Cal policeman called highway officers. We were told they’d race to the scene of an incident and clear up the mess as quickly as possible, thus allowing the real police to concentrate on more important things, like filling in forms and arresting people for interfering with dolphins.

  It sounded a brilliant idea but, sadly, these new highwaymen have plainly been told that the most important thing, when attending the scene of a crash, is their own safety. Which means that their first reaction, always, no matter how trivial the accident, is to close the road.

  Just listen to the Radio 2 traffic reports. One day last week the M40, the M5, the A34 and the M4 were all shut. Single-handedly, these mollycoddled imbeciles were bringing the whole country to a standstill.

  That night, it got worse. A small hatchback had broken down in the middle lane of the A40, going into London. Now, in the not-too-distant past, other motorists would have got out of their cars and pushed the blockage to the side of the road. Not any more. Now, the traffic wombles come and cone off two lanes. And then they sit in their big 4x4, eating Mars bars, until the government-approved, safety-qualified removal-truck driver arrives.

  When my wife crawled past at 6.30, they were just sitting there. When I drove past an hour later, having been stuck in a five-mile queue, they were still sitting there, and I’m afraid that, for the first time in twelve years, I lost my temper. They say a Dutch bargee can swear for two minutes without repetition or hesitation. I beat that easily.

  I’d had enough. I’d had enough of people being charged for throwing apples out of their car windows, and speed cameras, and bus lanes, and those villages that have plant pots in the middle of the road. I’d had enough of bendy buses and the congestion charge, and sanctimonious beardies in Toyota Priuses getting away with it. I’d had enough of petrol at £1 a litre, and idiots saying that if we build more roads, people will only end up using them. I’d had enough of exhaust emission tables, and Al Gore and being asked to let the bus go first. I’d had enough of mobile CCTV cameras and Gordon Brown’s smile and photographs of polar bears on icebergs. And I took it all out on those fat, power-crazed wombles who’d shut two lanes of one of the busiest roads in the world because they were too obsessed with health and safety to get off their fat arses and push a broken-down hatchback out of the way.

  There is some hope, however, in this broken and useless world and it comes in the shape of Renault’s Clio 197 Cup.

  I’ve always liked hot hatchbacks and they make even more sense now than they did at the peak of their popularity twenty years ago. Back then, when you could smoke
indoors and smack your children and the police were allowed to punch burglars in the face, they were a great way of enjoying what would turn out to be freedom’s last gasp.

  Now, however, they do something even more important. In an over-controlled, deliberately jammed world, they make going slowly fun.

  Sure, a mid-engined car with 600 brake horsepower is always going to be a riot in the Yorkshire Dales, but you don’t live in the Yorkshire Dales. You live in Coalville and on your dismal crawl to work every morning all that power and finesse is, frankly, a complete waste of time and effort. You’d be better off putting your money in the dishwasher.

  This is where the Clio Cup comes in. Its engine produces 197bhp, which is an awful lot from a normal-aspirated 2-litre, but in a world of M5s, it’s a dribble; it’s less than half what AMG thinks is necessary to have a good time.

  AMG is wrong. The people at Renault say the Clio Cup will accelerate from rest to 62mph in 6.9sec and that flat out in sixth it’ll sound and feel like you’re outrunning a Saturn V rocket. They also say it has Formula One-style aerodynamic aids and a compromise-free chassis designed to make every left at the lights feel like the Eau Rouge at Spa at 180.

  If I may be permitted to liken the world of performance cars to Battersea dogs’ home, this is the eager little terrier, an ice-white scamp that whizzes about chasing its tail. Sure, it’s slower than a greyhound but, in theory, it should be a lot more fun.

  The trouble is: it isn’t. While the engine is amazingly powerful for something the size of a toaster, it doesn’t translate into much in the way of fizz. What I want in a car like this is a rev counter that zooms up to the red line if you even so much as breathe on the throttle pedal. But in the Renault it feels like you’re trying to push a piano up a hill.