Still, all this means I can at least be rational in my conclusion. I don’t like it because it’s not a very good car.
27 February 2011
Damn it, Spock, we can’t shake off Arthur Daley
Jaguar XJ 5.0 Supercharged Supersport LWB 4dr
In the far reaches of your satellite television’s hinterland, way out past Kerry Katona: The Next Chapter and Piers Morgan talking to someone you’ve never heard of about a movie you don’t want to see, it is possible to find a channel that’s showing Minder. I recommend it because it just might be the best television show of all time.
Today, when you watch it on CabSat Freeview 757, it’s like a history lesson. You cannot believe that there were ever that many parking spaces in London or that the traffic was ever that light. They’d go from Terry’s flat in Fulham to the Winchester in Notting Hill in about three minutes. But only after Terry had slept with some ladies and punched a foreigner in the middle of his fez. You could then. It was allowed.
I was such a big fan of Minder, I had my wedding reception at a place called the Winchester. I even hired ‘Dave’ to be the barman. And then got very cross when guests called him Glynn and asked what it was like to have starred in Zulu. He’s not Corporal Allen. He’s Dave and it’s his job to get you a large VAT.
We think of Dad’s Army as a classic, and it was, but Minder was tighter. Minder was written to an even higher standard. And the characters were just perfect. I saw Patrick Malahide the other day pretending to be a hotshot CIA spy and I just kept pointing at the screen and shouting, ‘It’s Detective Sergeant Chisholm.’
It’s the same story with Dennis Waterman. He’s still about, cropping up on TV from time to time, trying to convince us he’s not an ex-boxer with a Ford Capri parked outside. But it’s all hopeless. In my mind, he’s Terry McCann. And he always will be.
It wasn’t just the characters that became etched in our minds, either. It was the props. The hat. The coat. Terry’s bomber jacket. And, of course, the cars. Because of Arthur Daley, I’ve never quite trusted anyone with a Jag. I like people with Jags. They are usually interesting, but I wouldn’t leave them alone with my silver.
In my mind, even today, and purely because of Minder, the Jag driver is always having a ‘spot of bother’ with the taxman. He’s always asking if he can crash at yours because of a ‘misunderstanding’ with the mortgage company. I like to think that most of the people in prison today for crimes such as art forgery have an XJS in a barn somewhere. Robbers have Vauxhalls. Rogues have brogues and a Jag.
That’s why the new XJ worries me, because when you step into that extraordinary cabin, you do not even catch a whiff of Arthur Daley’s ghost. There is blue lighting in the door pockets. The glove box is lined with purple velvet. And when you select Dynamic mode, the dials glow red. It’s like being in one of those bars in central London where visiting businessmen go to meet ladies.
I like it. It’s a fantastic, futuristic place to sit. But there’s no man with pointy ears in the passenger seat, and where you expect to see NCC-1701 on the steering wheel there’s a leaping cat instead. It feels strange. Like taking off a page 3 girl’s clothes and finding that underneath she’s Yootha Joyce.
The exterior is weird, too. Again, I think it’s very bold and brave of Jaguar to make it look so different from anything that’s worn its badge before. I think it’s very striking. But it’s also a bit odd. And you obviously do, too, because since this car was launched six months ago, I have not seen a single one on the road.
Last week, Bertone, the Italian styling house, showed off its designs for a new Jag, and they were right. Its car was sleek. And the new XJ? It’s many things, but sleek isn’t one of them.
Then there’s the question of interior space. Tricky one this. Because, in a Jag, you are supposed to sit low down, with your buttocks kissing the catseyes. You’re supposed to feel cocooned, too, as if you’re in an Elizabethan pub. But that won’t do these days. If Jaguar wants to capture market share from Mercedes, it must convince the chauffeurs who ferry Posh and Ant around London that their car is at least as spacious in the back as an S-class.
So once again, Jaguar has ditched tradition, ditched the beams and the horse brasses and gone for space. In the long-wheelbase version – £3,000 extra – there’s tons of it, to stretch out and watch the world slide by through the big glass roof panel while listening to the 1,200-watt stereo until your ears bleed. You even get climate control in this new car, rather than a wood-burning stove.
But will you want to be in the back? The answer’s yes, if it’s a diesel. That’s built for economy and it does a fine job. But if you have the supercharged V8, the answer is a big emphatic ‘I’d rather get in the back of Brian Blessed’.
On paper, this engine doesn’t look like it will pass muster. You get just 503 horsepower, and these days German cars use that much to operate the automatic parking brake. But you also need to look at how much the XJ weighs. Because, thanks to an all-aluminium construction, it is even lighter than Porsche’s Panamera 4.8 V8 Turbo. In a strong wind, you’d be advised to fit mooring ropes to stop it blowing away.
And you don’t just feel this lack of weight when you accelerate or when you stop or when you look at the petrol gauge. No. You feel it all the time, through the seat of your pants and, more especially, the steering. This is not like a sports car to drive. It is a sports car.
Sadly, to achieve this flickability, the suspension is a little harder than you might expect. It’s a problem that affects all Jags today. A hard ride is the only reason I don’t own an XKR. But that said, at no point would you ever call the XJ uncomfortable. Or noisy. Or nasty in any way. It is absolutely bloody brilliant.
Taken on face value, it is the only car that marries the raw driver appeal of a Maserati Quattroporte with the space and luxury of a Mercedes S-class. By rights, the centre of London should be chock-full of nothing else. But it isn’t …
There’s a very good reason for this. We don’t buy cars by the numbers. Nobody ever test drives all the models that might seem suitable.
We may pore over the options list of whatever model we’ve chosen, kidding ourselves that we really need parking sensors. But it’s all haphazard. We don’t buy with our heads or our hearts. It’s just gut instinct. That looks nice. I can afford it, just. So I’ll have it.
And that’s where the Jag falls down. It meets all the emotional challenges and the numbers stack up, too. However, the bounders and the cads want a Jag, but not a Jag with a purple glove box. And the people who do want a purple glove box don’t want to be tarred with the Arthur Daley label.
It is, then, a magnificent car. A brilliant car. But sadly, Minder means half the world won’t buy it because it’s a Jag. And the other half won’t buy it because it’s not a Jag.
6 March 2011
Bruce’s bonzer duck-billed koala
Ford Falcon FPV Boss 335 GT
On the face of it Australia is much like any other modern, developed nation. But for a number of reasons it isn’t, and chief among those reasons is the koala: you may not know this but it spends almost all of its life off its face on dope and then, whenever it feels frightened, it catches chlamydia. You do not find this sort of thing going on with any other creature in any other part of the world.
Then you have the kangaroo. The red variety can travel at 40 mph, which is fast enough to give a G-Wiz a run for its money. But no kangaroo of any sort can back up. They have no reverse gear at all. Plus, all female kangaroos are permanently pregnant.
Life is very different for the female Sydney funnel-web spider. She has to spend her whole life in the burrow and is not allowed out until she dies of old age. The males, meanwhile, like to roar around Sydney at night, swimming in people’s pools, hiding in children’s shoes and eating anyone who gets too close.
I like Australia, but almost everything you find down under is unique. The duck-billed platypus, for instance. Surely the strangest animal ever to leap from the fu
mes of God’s chemistry set.
On land it is four-wheel drive, but underwater it becomes front-wheel drive and uses its rear legs for steering. So it’s an amphibious fork-lift truck, with a beak.
We see the same sort of thing in sport. Elsewhere in the world, you have American football or proper football. Whereas down under there is Aussie Rules, which is strange, because from what I can gather there aren’t any rules at all. Apart from no poofters, obviously. The game itself is part soccer, part rugby and part basketball, but what sets it aside from all three is that each side consists of about 17,000 players, all of whom wear rather unattractive skin-tight vests.
Another notable thing in Australia is a fanatical approach to health and safety. There are more speed cameras than people, and if you wish to go snorkelling you must dress up in a giant nylon all-in-one. This means no part of your skin, including hands, feet and face, is in contact with the water, and so you cannot get stung by a box jellyfish.
In some ways it is a wise precaution. But I’m sorry – splashing about in an acrylic submarine rather spoils the point of snorkelling. And it’s not as if the box jellyfish is unique to Oz. The little critters are everywhere, and no other nation makes you get into a condom just in case.
It gets worse. After my snorkelling expedition, I tried to rent a jet ski. But a state law meant that I had to sit down, in the blazing sunshine, and take a written exam. What’s to learn? There’s a throttle and that’s it. My daughter was riding a jet ski at the age of five. An idiot could do it. I pointed all this out to the blond surfer dude who was running the course, but it was as if he’d been programmed: safety is everything.
Not on a jet ski, it isn’t. Fun is everything. Whizzing about and trying to splash your mates is everything. Getting knocked off by a big wave is everything. If you want to be safe on a jet ski, get off it.
So there you are, in a country where they drive on the same side of the road as us, speak the same language and have the same head of state. And the same summer weather, if my recent trip is anything to go by. But it’s not the same at all.
And it especially isn’t the same when you look at cars. In every other country in the world people may like the brand of car they drive, but not so much that they would punch someone in the face for driving something different.
To the average Aussie there are two brands. Ford and Holden. And even if you are a solicitor and you drive an Audi, you are instinctively in one of these two groups. I was going to say it’s like the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, but it isn’t. It’s more ingrained than that.
There is such fanaticism, in fact, and loyalty, that both Ford and General Motors make cars specifically for the Australian market. We’re talking about a country of just 22 million people – most of whom are in Earls Court. That would be like making a car specifically for Romania. It wouldn’t happen.
That said, it is not expensive to engineer a car for the Australian market. Certainly, you don’t have to employ a stylist. The current crop of Holdens aren’t too bad, in a meaty, knuckle-dragging sort of way, but the Fords … Oh dear. And it was always thus, even back in the days of Mad Max and his Interceptor.
I tried the new Ford Falcon FPV Boss 335 GT when I was over there and it struck me that someone had spent a few quid on the engine and then nothing at all on anything else. I’m told this is how it should be when you are upside down. Which you will be if you try to make it go round a corner.
The old Falcon V8 was a bit of a problem child because the turbocharged V6 model was faster and nice to drive. So Ford has teamed up with Prodrive – the famous Aussie motor racing house in Oxfordshire – to create the new one.
It was a big ask because the base engine comes from a Mustang and it has asthma. To try to insert a bit of ephedrine, it is now fitted with a supercharger and an intercooler, which means you get lots of grunt. So much that every time you set off you ‘lay a couple of darkies’. People cheer when you leave a skid mark like this in Australia.
So it’s quite gruntsome in a straight line, but it is too big, too soft and too heavy to be remotely good at anything else. And inside, you get the impression everything is made from Cellophane. My snorkelling suit felt more robust.
By rights the FPV should not exist. It’s pointless. But then so is the koala, and we’d all be a bit sad if we woke up one morning to find that the last button-nosed little stoner had fallen out of his tree.
10 April 2011
Botox and a bikini wax and I’m ready to roll
Jensen Interceptor S
It’s the coolest name ever given to a car. ‘I’ll pick you up at eight. I’ll be in the Interceptor.’ Imagine being able to say that. Or even: ‘Darling. About tonight. Shall we take the Interceptor?’ It sends a shiver down your spine. Maserati is a good name. Thunderbird is even better. But Interceptor? That’s the best of them all.
Of course, it wouldn’t be quite so good if the name were writing cheques the body of the car couldn’t cash. You can’t be called Clint Thrust if you have a chest like a teaspoon and limbs from the canvas of Laurence Lowry.
Happily, the Interceptor looked magnificent. It was big, with a body styled by Carrozzeria Touring of Italy that included a thrusting bonnet, an unusual wraparound back window and gills. It was distinguished. It was fantastic. It was one of the best-looking cars ever made.
Sadly, I never drove one of the originals and it’s hard to find out what they were like since the only person I know who had one was Eric Morecambe and, unfortunately, he’s no longer with us. From what I can gather, though, the driving experience was ‘absolutely awful’.
The engine was a Chrysler 6.2 V8, which turned money into noise but produced very little by way of power in the process. Which was probably a good thing since the enormous live rear axle wasn’t really attached to the car in a way you’d call finished. And to make matters worse, Jensen would simply pop down to the local supplier whenever it needed a steering rack and come back with whatever was on the shelves. Some Jensens, by all accounts, were accidently sold to customers with steering designed for the Triumph Stag.
As a result of all this, the Interceptor sits in the bargain basement bin of the nation’s classic car market. While you are now expected to pay hundreds of thousands for an Aston DB5 or an E-type Jag, a decent Interceptor can be yours for around £5,000.
You may think it would be worth it, just so you could offer to take people out in your Interceptor. But I should imagine you’ll get there two days after you set off, covered in soot. Reliability wasn’t a Jensen strong point and things won’t have improved with time. So that’s that, then. Memory Lane this morning has turned out to be a dead end.
Except it hasn’t, because the car we’re talking about isn’t really a Jensen Interceptor. It started out in life that way, but then an Oxfordshire-based company called Jensen International Automotive came along and gave it the full bikini wax and Botox treatment. The car you see is an Interceptor S and it’s absolutely brilliant.
First, the original American engine has been thrown away and replaced with another one. It’s the rather good all-aluminium 6.2-litre V8 from a Corvette. You get a Corvette gearbox as well, but from there backwards, things get a bit more complicated. The live rear axle, the leaf springs and all the rest of the Roman technology is replaced with a fully independent setup, with some bits coming from the old Jaguar XJS – the limited-slip diff, for example – and some from the new company.
The front AP Racing brakes have six-pot callipers with ventilated and grooved discs. The tyres are low profile. The dampers are adjustable. And … are you dribbling yet?
I was. So I climbed inside and it all got better and better. It’s a faithful reproduction of the Jensen original with white-on-black Smiths-style dials, quilted seats and, best of all, a push-button radio that offers you the choice of 5 Live with a slight crackle. Or just the crackle. There is, however, a discreet iPod connection in the glove box.
It’s extraordinary when you
sit in a car from this period how light and airy the interior feels. Because the pillars are there simply to support the roof, rather than to absorb the impact of hitting a bridge, they are thin and spidery. It feels like you are sitting in a glass bubble, and that makes you feel like you’re on show. Which, if you are driving an Interceptor, is exactly where you want to be.
Be warned, though. So much of you is visible as you drive along that you need to think about what you’re wearing. I suggest a g-suit of some kind. Or, if you don’t have one, a black polo neck and some Jason King-style sunglasses.
I genuinely felt, as I set off for the first time, that this could be the perfect car. Olde worlde style with modern dynamics. A Georgian house with central heating.
Sadly, it was not to be. The problem is that if the new company changed every single feature, the end result would be classified as a new car, and would need to face all the modern safety and emissions tests. So some of the period features remain. The wipers, for instance, which move back and forth nicely. But remove not a single drop of moisture.
Then there’s the wind noise. The fact is that, back in the Seventies, cars had rain gutters and ‘that’ll do’ was the guiding principle of all West Midlands panel beaters. So at 70 mph on the motorway, even in the new car, it sounds like you’re wing-walking.
The biggest problem, though, is the steering. They’ve been forced to keep the original rack, and no matter how many adjustments you make to the geometry, you’re not going to get round the fact that it was designed by a man who wanted most of all to go on strike. As a result, it’s heavy, there’s little self-centring and it’s so low-geared you need a lot of arm-twirling just to move three degrees off the straight ahead.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . Page 5
