Notes From the Hard Shoulder

by James May

  The whole point of a Lamborghini, as we've explained ourselves many times, is that you want one because you're not interested in buying into racing heritage or thoroughbred provenance. That's for Ferrari and Maserati owners. Lamborghini is a bit of an upstart, and you have to demonstrate that you realise as much. A black one suggests that you believe in it, which would be ridiculous. Lamborghinis are a bit vulgar and as such should be celebrated openly with something like the orange. Or that bathroom-blue. But he just didn't get it.

  And this is what surprises me. Jeremy is a self-styled champion of vulgarity. I happen to know that he has a very large television set, for example, and electronic garden gates. He goes to footballers' parties and once boasted of going to London's 'biggest restaurant'. But here he is, on the verge of acquiring the automotive medallion of gauche, and he's suddenly concerned about drawing too much attention to himself.

  But no worry, because, as with most posh car showrooms, the Lamborghini one provided a selection of painted metal strips and upholstered squares with which the discerning customer can experiment with colour combinations before signing the order form. Playing with these is a pretty good game in itself, and almost as much fun as trying on the frames in Specsavers.

  So, out of interest, I tried the green/black paint with the orange leather. It was awful. It made me think of coffee mugs with 'world's greatest golfer' written on them, or 'amusing' doorbell chimes. On the other hand, the orange paint with the creamy pale perforated leather looked like the colour scheme of a man who didn't give a bull's arse about what other people thought, and this, I decided, was what Jezza should have.

  So I gathered them up and dived between him and the salesman, waving them around. But he snorted, and then continued talking to the dealer about the price of the cup-holder option.

  So I tried the bathroom-blue paintwork with a dark-blue plain leather, which I can assure you would look utterly glorious. Again I approached the man with the Bang & Olufsen mobile, only to be dismissed because he was deep in conversation about service intervals.

  In desperation, I even tried white paintwork with the black leather. I found him discussing residual values. I really do think the man may have lost it entirely and turned into an executive.

  This is the first time I've ever failed at this game with someone I know well. I have a recurring dream in which Jeremy is on fire and I have the fire extinguisher but can't get the pin out. Even so, I can't stand by and watch him buy the wrong Lamborghini.

  So it's over to you. Write to Jeremy at the Top Gear magazine address. You don't even need to include a letter. Just remember to mark your envelope, 'James is right, as usual.'

  THE RANGE ROVER OF OUTSTANDING NATURAL BEAUTY

  Today, from the window of my office, I have an uninterrupted view of my 1992 Range Rover Vogue SE. I think it may be the sort of thing WB Yeats had in mind when he wrote of 'All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old'.

  In case you weren't reading two years ago, or you have since found something more interesting to contemplate, I should explain that the Rangey was bought in strict accordance with my principle that one's biff about car should not cost more than £1 per cc of engine displacement. Not the mintiest Range Rover in the world, then, and definitely not the most aromatic.

  And I have never neglected a car quite like I have Old Stinker, which sits there looking positively doleful as I walk on by, averting my eyes from its cack-encrusted flanks and the pastie wrappers piled on the dash and visible through the windscreen. I'm beginning to believe that everything I have ever taken into the Range Rover is still in there, and that includes a bootful of old building materials that I was supposed to take to the dump several months ago. Trouble is, the Range Rover is the dump, and if I parked it with the windows open it would soon, like any other skip left around here, be full of my neighbours' garden rubbish.

  This is most uncharacteristic. I carry a Hoover around in the Bentley, just in case, and I keep a small, stiff paintbrush in the Porsche for removing dust from those little crevices around the switches. When I drive the Boxster I adjust the air vents and heater controls not for my own comfort, but so that the overall arrangement is symmetrical. I also polish my shoes and wash up while I cook. I can't stand muck, filth and disorder, and yet I've somehow allowed the Range Rover to become completely feral.

  One reason for this is that it offers a welcome opportunity to escape the rigours of modern urban life and roll about in my own ordure like Neanderthal man. This office is somewhat similar: an oasis of dirty cups, empty beer bottles, waste paper and general squalor in an otherwise spotless household, like a dog's egg in the middle of a croquet lawn. But there's a better reason for treating the Range Rover in a way that, if it were my cat, would land me in the clanger.

  You see, this five-owner, 110,000-mile car is an utterly dependable old bus that I would happily drive to Australia tomorrow, and in the certain knowledge that I would get there. It has never, ever failed me. Of course, this being an old product of Land Rover, lots of little things have gone wrong with it, but here's the weird thing: they always mend themselves.

  At first, I thought I was imagining this, but it's happened so many times now that I have to acknowledge something is going on. Items that you would get a garage to attend to but for which I have allowed nature to take its course have included a broken fan, two broken electric windows, the air conditioning, the air suspension controls, the headlight main beam switch, one of the seat motors, the rear windscreen wiper, the rev counter, the central locking and a slow puncture.

  I swear I'm not making this up. In fact, it's beginning to give me the creeps a bit. Yesterday, a light bulb had blown in the instrument panel. Today, it glows like the star of David. If I go anywhere near this thing with a spanner or a screwdriver it immediately crosses that invisible line that separates the merely poorly from the dead. But if I leave it alone it eventually recovers. It's a bit like having a spot. Squeeze it and you will be left with a scar, but leave the job to time's patient skill and eventually it will disappear, leaving you with a completely unblemished nose. If I drive the Range Rover when several things are not working I can feel that it's slightly out of sorts, because some of its qi energy is being directed to the task of healing.

  And to think that the occasional sandalled leftist has scrawled 'climate crime' and 'environment nazi' on its heavily soiled bonnet. Nothing could be more inappropriate, since what I have in my Range Rover is the world's first organic and alternative therapy vehicle; a truly living machine with the antibodies to mechanical ague coursing through its metal metabolism. It is, in fact, the most ethically correct, GM-free and plain greenest vehicle I have ever come across.

  I mean it: if I leave it alone for a week, things grow on it.

  POETRY ON MOTION

  People of Britain, put aside your concerns over the cleanliness of hospitals, Gordon Brown's plans for public spending and trying to remember the name of the Liberal Democrats bloke. This election drudgery is of no more consequence than the captaincy of the local bowls club when set aside the great denouement that awaits you here; namely, the final and incontrovertible resolution of the Great Sports Car Debate.

  I salute you, readers of Telegraph Motoring. Some weeks ago I asked you to settle a debate that has reverberated through lounge bars across the land for three generations: what, exactly, and in no more than 12 words, is the definition of a sports car? At stake was the future custody of a l/43rd-scale die-cast model of a Mazda MX-5 that has sat on the windowsill of my office for the last six years.

  To be honest, I expected a handful of old biffers to write in about the Austin Healey 3000, and indeed they did. One of them even apologised. But there was more. From every corner of these sceptered isles the pithy missives flooded in; my letter-opener is like the bread knife in a busy sandwich bar, burnished and flashing in the morning sun, worn to half its original depth by the unrelenting slicing action of over 450 openings.

  I have to say, tho
ugh, that simply sending in the name, or even a picture, of your own car is not really good enough. On the other hand, Ms Hanya Gordon made it straight to the shortlist by including a bag of American Hard Gums, while anyone who had the temerity to dismiss my old 911 was immediately filed under 'B'.

  There was a man who called me a big jessie for not buying a TR6, a man who said 'sports car' was a contradiction in terms, some misleading stuff about driving gloves and bonnet straps, and quite a bit of chicanery involving complex phrases that formed the acronym SPORTSCAR. The crossword is on the back of the main paper.

  There was whimsy from old ladies who yearned for the bark of a straight six and the glint of a wire wheel glimpsed with an expectant twitch of a curtain, and there was baser stuff from young men revolving around things that are or aren't possible in the cockpit of an MG. It is famously said that 40 per cent of American marriages are proposed in a car, but it seems that the British are keen to dispense with these stuffy and outdated formalities. Holly Burns of Glasgow sent me a treatise of mediaeval density and including some French words, which is no good to a man who needs something to remember for the pub, while the brevity consolation prize goes to Mike Coward of Southport, who said that a sports car is 'yee-haaa'. But then, so's square dancing.

  I liked the suggestion of Reg Santer, from Horsham, that 'a sports car is all in the mind', until I realised that he was playing into the hands of manufacturers who claim sportiness for their mini-MPVs. Maurice Davies almost won with 'A Don Quixote story fused to an engine' and Paul Smith of Kendal seemed close with 'One being driven faster than it ought to be'. But then I realised that this would be true of a Kia Rio in any situation.

  There was the philosophical, such as Anthony Marshall of Barnsley with 'a state of mind with wheels but without remorse or thought'. The snappy: 'one designed to go from A to A', according to Peter Gardner of St Albans. And the foreboding, from Mike Peers of Henley: 'Every man's dream, few men's reality, and every mother's nightmare.' Then again, I had a girlfriend like that.

  You see, it's difficult, which is why this debate has raged for so long. But when I read that a sports car is 'An ode to joy/on open road/Wind in face,/Grin like Toad' I realised that the poet's skill with imagery was needed to define it in 12 words or fewer. Here's Hamish Kidd, possible former lyricist with Wham:

  Free as air

  Wind in hair

  Heel 'n' toe

  Let's go

  Brrrm brrrm!

  Or, drawing heavily on Spike Milligan, Ian Hourston of Orkney:

  A sports car is

  A car with fizz

  Forget your quiz

  It's simple, viz:

  A whiz.

  And Bill Richardson of Guisborough, apparently a student of Hilaire Belloc:

  A powerful engine in a saucy shell,

  Built to go like bloody hell.

  But I thought I'd stumbled upon an undiscovered fragment of Ted Hughes when I opened an offering that defines nothing precise about the sports car yet somehow captures its essence completely. The winner is Alan Lidmila of Sheffield with 'The floored howl, dawn clear undulating blacktop wheel-gripped view ahead.'

  That should silence the car bores in my local.

  ONLY THE FRENCH WOULD BUILD A CAR DESIGNED TO BREAK DOWN

  I've spent the last week driving a car with a bad battery, a dicky charging circuit and a less than reliable starter motor.

  Come to think of it, I've spent much of the last 20 years driving cars like this and, to be perfectly honest, it's bloody boring. Few things in life are more useless than a car that won't start, so if its ability to do so is in any doubt, the best thing to do is leave it running.

  All those years of jump leads and bump starts have scarred me. Every time I shut a car down, even a new one, a part of me wonders if it's going to start again. Irrational, I know, but to me it's rather like that sound of a car horn at the beginning of the Stones' 'Honky Tonk Women'. I've heard it a thousand times, but every time it comes on the radio in the car I look around to see who's beeping at me.

  For this reason, I won't be test driving the new Citroen C2 'Stop&Start', a car that turns itself off every time it comes to a halt in the interests of the environment. Even if you simply pause at a zebra crossing, it cuts out. I'd be a bag of nerves.

  I know, because around 10 years ago I tried something similar in the form of the VW EcoGolf, I think it was called. This was a normal Golf with a whopping battery and some rudimentary electronic controller that killed it at traffic lights and then fired it up anew when you pulled away. On a technical level, it seemed to work quite well. On a mental one, it was like a form of psychological torture used by an oppressive regime; the sort that destroys a man's mind without leaving any visible wounds. I write as someone who recently completed a 300-mile journey in an old car without stopping the engine once, even during lunch and a short afternoon nap.

  What, in any case, is the point of all this? Making a car that knows when to turn itself off can't be easy, and I suspect that thousands of Citroen's engineering man-hours have been devoted to the problem when they could have been better spent hunting down and despatching whoever was responsible for the Pluriel.

  But no doubt someone, somewhere, has done a calculation to show that if every engine in Britain stopped for a few seconds at every junction we could reduce CO2 emissions by a billion tons a year, or something like that. This sort of thing is beginning to annoy me. We've had the one about turning the telly off instead of leaving it on standby, and sooner or later I'm going to calculate what reduction in CO2 could be achieved if every driver in the country saved a little vehicle weight by removing the owner's handbook from the glovebox. With so many cars, televisions, refrigerators and boilers in the land, it's easy to turn innocent human fallibility into some sort of climate crime.

  Beer, for example, must be destroying the planet. If you drink beer, as I do, you have to get up in the night for a wee-wee. That means turning the light on and consuming a tiny bit of electricity. Negligible, really, but if every adult male is doing it, it can be shown to equate to another X tons of pollutant in the air.

  Rambling is especially selfish. If you walk for 20 miles, I imagine you build up an enormous appetite. This means using more gas or electricity to cook more food, and places a greater demand on the refrigeration at Sainsbury's. Since the Ramblers are one of the biggest organisations in the country, this must mean that stomping around in a kagoul is blighting the lives of our children.

  And so it goes on. It would be interesting to know how much CO2 is being produced by the computers of environmentalists who generate fatuous statistics.

  The facts are these. There is a finite supply of fossil fuel left and, in broad terms, consuming it is going to create the same amount of pollution. It doesn't matter whether I drive the Bentley and use it all up tomorrow, or drive something that conks out temporarily at every junction and eke it out for another few years. Conserving energy is ultimately fruitless and, more to the point, completely at loggerheads with the demands of a progressive world.

  So – and assuming that fossil fuel consumption really is an issue – here's a suggestion. All the endeavour and ingenuity, all the time, equipment and resources, all the wit and learning; in short, every manifestation of human effort being wasted on the C2 Stop&Start, the hybrid, the wind farm and the ecological washing machine – it should all be directed towards finding the alternative.

  THESE MODERN SUPERCARS ARE ALL BLOODY RUBBISH YOU KNOW

  Not so long ago, driving a Ferrari or a Porsche would have invited accusations of being a right tosser. This was possibly fair enough, since the culture of the time said that anyone who took cars that seriously was probably a bit of a saddo.

  Porsche and Ferrari have always taken themselves terribly seriously. Porsche bang on about 'excellence' and Ferrari about 'passion', as if they're the guardians of the proper expression of these conceits of the human condition. But it's all cant, really. Excellence is more important
in the manufacture of synthetic heart valves, and passion manifests itself more properly in the bedroom. Attempting to express these things through one's choice of car was perhaps indicative of a few problems in the trouser department.

  And how unimaginative was it, if you suddenly found yourself a bit flush, to go and buy a 911 or an F360? The 911 was like the Hugo Boss suit of the successful executive, and choosing a Ferrari was as hackneyed as the expression 'just like mamma used to make' in the description of lasagne in an Italian restaurant menu. Thinking people would think of something a bit more original.

  But something strange has happened. All of a sudden, the 911 and the F430 are what the clever people are buying. What were for so long clichés are now rising from a mire of confused car culture like swords of truth. Crikey.

  I'm not going to claim that everything's rosy. There's still far too much tasteless Ferrari merchandise for my liking, and far too much talk of the significance of Formula One. These people are claiming that the F430 was developed using the computer 'normally reserved for Michael Schumacher's racing car', but this is obviously bollocks. Why would they do this? Does Michael Schumacher not let other Ferrari people use his stapler?

  And the 911 isn't entirely in the clear, because Richard Hammond has just ordered one, and he uses hair product. But even so, the 911 and F430 are suddenly very cool.

  One reason for this is that people are once again taking cars very seriously. They may be portrayed as the biggest threat to society since Hitler, and we may be encouraged to feel guilty about them and to want a small diesel hatchback, but deep down people are very, very switched on to what makes a great car. I cannot remember a time when so many people have wanted to engage me in highly informed conversation about cars and what they're like. And I don't just mean the bores from my local; I'm including people like my neighbour Ben, who pinned me against the wall for a good half hour to talk about a Mercedes Benz he'd been looking at, even though he can't drive. And earlier this year I discovered that my mother understood the effect of low-profile tyres on ride and handling.