Notes From the Hard Shoulder

by James May

  The Rover spots it first. The radio explodes with instructions aimed at getting a marked car in pursuit, after which the Rover will back off but stay in touch – its job then is to video the action from behind in the hope of presenting the bigger picture. Within a minute the Volvo has latched on to the Honda's tail.

  But we go the other way, drawing on detailed road knowledge to box the Honda in and contain the pursuit. Across a strip of rough ground I glimpse the lightless Civic pursued by the wailing T5.1 see it again, going the other way, as we jockey for an intercepting position. The choreography, absurdly, is reminiscent of a Keystone Cops car chase but the mood is deadly earnest.

  We make the interception, but the Honda is driven hard at us and PC Morrison backs off – a deliberate collision is not an option. We join the end of the flashing, bawling train and peel off again. I realise then that the Civic will never break away from the housing estate – it is a matter of time and careful manoeuvring, manoeuvring at speeds quicker than I can think or blurt my own commentary into my tape recorder. The swerving, bucking Honda is ever more contained, driven into decreasing circles of hopelessness. Crowds form on pavements and jeer at the police cars. Missiles are thrown. A brick strikes the windscreen of the Rover and destroys it; another does for a Volvo door skin.

  An officer on foot appears as we move in from the flank again – I honestly couldn't tell you where or when he was dropped off by a fourth car – and deploys Stop Stick. This, an evolution of the notorious Stinger, is an extending, triangular-section aluminium strip with razor sharp edges, but shrink-wrapped in plastic for safe handling. It is flung across the road just as the Honda appears, and I actually see it drop as the tyres are savaged. In the split second before the pursuing Volvo arrives at the same place it has been whipped away by a cord.

  Now the Civic slews across an open expanse towards a corner bound in by raised pavements and iron bollards, the Volvo still glued to its tail. We move in on its open flank. It cannot escape. Yet still the driver won't give up, aiming for a gap between the metal posts and mounting the pavement with an audible clang from the Honda's nearly naked wheels. The Volvo cannot follow – insufficient ground clearance. But the Omega, with its higher ride height and sump guard specified as a result of painful experience, can. We pursue the now decrepit Civic until its suspension finally collapses. In the time it takes me to climb through the rear door PCs Morrison and Pryde have pinned the culprit to the ground and handcuffed him. Car thieves have been known to be armed.

  Calm, professional detachment has immediately asserted itself. I'm reeling from the sheer terror of it all, but the aftermath of the chase is deeply sobering. Someone's Civic LSi is completely trashed, two police cars are damaged, cooked brake pads and discs will all be replaced as a matter of course. It seems a destructive and expensive way of collaring someone who, the police would say, should have been banged up long ago anyway.

  But I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that the experience has given me a ghoulish thrill. The whole issue of joyriding and police pursuit is heavily clouded with political and sociological arguments, but in the end nicking cars is nicking cars. And I have to say we got the bastard.

  THE SMART CAR. NOT AFTER WE'D FINISHED WITH IT.

  There must be more important things in life than the colour of your car, but anyone who has ever owned a brown one will know that, somehow, it matters.

  I've had 15 cars in my motoring lifetime and seven of them, including the current one, have been dark blue. A psychologist friend tells me this is a good thing. He points to something called the 'achievement motive', which says that dark colours are preferred by people who are going places. You might imagine that go-ahead types are roaring around in yellow sports cars, but a little study of any merchant bank's car park or the spaces reserved for our captains of industry reveals that the real movers and shakers of this world are tooling around in sober-hued executive expresses. Bright-red Ferraris and mint-green Porsche 911s are obviously for playboys, tarts and wasters.

  So I'm quite pleased to have a dark-blue Jaguar but sometimes I look at it out of the window and wish it was orange.

  This wouldn't be a problem if I had an MCC Smart, because for between £450 and £700 you can have all the Smart's plastic body panels changed for something completely different. There is an official Smart centre within half a mile of my house and the job takes about 30 minutes, or less time than some haircuts. I could drop the car off, have the rug rethink and arrive home a new person. The Smart is the only car that allows you to do this.

  The Top Gear staff have a Smart + Passion Cabrio and, predictably, within a few months of taking delivery they were bored with it being all black. They thought it would be a good idea if I drove it all the way back to Smartville, the factory in Sarreguemines on the French/German border, to effect an identity crisis.

  The blokes down the pub didn't, reasoning that a Smart was inappropriate for a 960-mile round trip. But this is missing the point. If the Smart isn't usable as a normal car, then it will actually contribute to the very problem that it purports to help solve – that of urban mobility and parkability. A pure city car is a pointless idea, as it will require every owner to have another, proper car for long journeys. That means that for every Smart prowling the streets of London, Manchester and Edinburgh there would be another, full-size car parked by the road somewhere, which amounts to one-and-a-half cars where previously there was only one. Bad result.

  So with a fruity rasp from the 54bhp three-pot, that staunch mucker Lensman Debois and I headed for the far side of France laden with 1,001 pieces of camera equipment and one spare pair of pants for me. On paper the Top Gear Smart is a mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive, two-seater convertible Mercedes, but this won't quite wash with your mates, nor does it quite stack up on the A26 out of Calais, where the car's top speed of around 84mph is pretty much smack on the French autoroute speed limit. A long incline leaves it slightly winded and turning on the air con is like giving it a swift punch in the guts.

  I have one or two other minor criticisms. The tachometer, mounted in a sort of robot's eyeball thing on top of the dash, can be swivelled away from your line of sight. Why? So your passenger can keep an eye on the revs for you? And why must cheeky little cars always have cheeky little horns? The Smart's hooter sounds like the battery-operated Pifco item I had on my childhood bicycle and for some reason seems to be directed into the cabin rather than outwards from underneath where the bonnet would be if the Smart had one. Toot-toot! Hello, said Noddy.

  Otherwise, driving the Smart on a long journey is a bit like driving a car. The seating position is good, the radio works and the mechanicals thrum away fairly unobtrusively. It's surprisingly comfortable. In fact, from the driving seat it is easy to forget that the Smart is such a small car, because the view forward is like that out of a mid-size MPV.

  But then, the Smart isn't really a small car at all, just a very short one. The original Mini or Cinquecento is a truly small car: a proper four-seat car built to a slightly smaller scale than a normal one. The Smart is to the same scale as an A-class Merc; it's just that, like so many things in life, it comes to a rather abrupt end.

  Shortness has its advantages – it's obviously good for parallel parking – but a few busy French towns reveal that shortness counts for Jacques Sheet in terms of traffic-busting capability. In a traffic jam, the eight-foot, two-and-a-half-inch Smart has to wait in line just as the 17-foot Bentley does, because the length of the road is not the issue. To beat congestion you need to be narrow, which is why couriers ride motorcycles.

  But it does get there. After 10 hours of autoroute, routes nationales, evil coffees and restorative games of bébéfoot, we arrived at Smartville. It's a large and very modern complex shaped like a giant plus sign and clad in white tiles, which can presumably be changed for red ones if they get fed up with it. Completed and brightly painted Smarts spill out of the end of one arm like, well, Smarties. Touring the plant, you have to be careful not to step on the movi
ng rubber roadway or you could end up back outside again.

  At the centre of the plus sign is a large, open-plan training and fault-rectification area where we parked our black Smart. Trolleyloads of replacement panel sets like Airfix model components were wheeled out for my consideration. It's a bit like buying a new pair of shoes, really. It occurred to me that the Smart would be a great car to buy in kit form since, like Camelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it's only a model.

  I quite liked the red panels, but then realised that the thick strut that would be the B pillar if the Smart were a complete car would always be black, as it's part of the Tridion safety frame that forms the rigid core of the thing. Didn't really go, so I sent those away.

  Silver was quite nice too, but having gone all that way I fancied something a bit more radical. Eventually, realising that it wasn't my car anyway, I selected something called Numeric Blue. The raffishly named and immensely patient Gerard Frangart and Raphael Marques shouldered me aside, went at the Smart with power tools and fists and, not much more than 30 minutes later, we had something in pale blue and plastered with random numbers. Absurd, really, because the V5 registration document still says it's black.

  Within a few miles of beginning the return journey I began to suspect that the whole thing was a terrible mistake. Confirmation came at a roadside burger van, whose proprietor was careful to establish that we worked for a good manly car magazine before agreeing to a photograph of his premises with the gaily coloured Smart in the foreground. Then, prophetically, we got a puncture and were shafted by the owner of a small rural garage.

  The Smart's funky enough as it is. A true eccentric doesn't need a silly hat to be recognised as one, and the Smart was enough of a novelty item in plain black. It's a bad comedian who laughs at his own joke, after all. I also began to worry about how the Top Gear staff would take it. They went home for the weekend leaving a black Smart parked outside and would return to discover that a conceptual artist had been at it with a tin of psychedelic alphabet soup. I quickly arranged for the original panels to be shipped home as well, just in case.

  The Smart, in the end, doesn't need to make a statement. It's convincing enough as a car. In fact, I think I might buy one, because, on returning home, I discovered another advantage of extreme shortness.

  The back half of my garage is full of the usual stiff paint brushes, broken bicycles, Wellington boots, unidentified tinned substances and 'useful' offcuts of wood. Buying just the front half of a car is going to be a lot easier than clearing all that stuff out.

  And they do it in a very nice dark-blue colour.

  SOURCES

  Car Magazine

  'I've never felt such a spanner' (July 1997); 'If he knows, he's not saying anything' (August 1996); 'Police car, lights, action' (May 1998); 'Don't forget your toolkit' (June 1995); 'The Vauxhall Vectra, a representative view' (August 1995); 'The Motown Story' (January 1998).

  Top Gear

  'How great cars come to be abandoned in old barns' (September 2006); 'Some observations on rear-end handling' (January 2005); 'These modern supercars are all bloody rubbish you know' (December 2005); 'Brown's green tax – a bit of a grey area' (March 2005); 'It's a car, Jimmy, but not as we know it' (April 2006); 'How the peace and quiet of England was ruined by the noise of people complaining' (June 2006); 'Jeremy Clarkson ruined my dream car' (August 2006); 'Is it a car? Is it a bike? No. And no.' (March 2000); 'A clot on the landscape' (April 2001); 'I'm just going to Iceland. I may be some time.' (December 2001); 'Harley-Davidson, a hanging offence' (October 2001); 'The Smart car. Not after we'd finished with it.' (July 2002); 'Charles Darwin may be onto something' (March 2005); 'Achtung! Bentley!' (September 1999).

  Daily Telegraph

  'This is personal' (March 2006); 'Poetry on motion' (April 2004); 'The best driving song in the world ever' (May 2005); 'This Jaguar looks a bit half-baked to me' (June 2005); 'My cup runneth over and into the centre console' (January 2004); 'Track days, or the futility of going nowhere' (October 2005); 'Be afraid. Be very afraid. But only of the size of the bill.' (October 2005); 'The technical revolution in the toyshop' (November 2005); 'The folly of trying to save fuel' (November 2005); 'Any colour you like, as long as it's available from Dulux' (November 2005); 'Breaking down is not so hard to do' (November 2005); 'The Range Rover of outstanding natural beauty' (December 2005); 'Please keep off the mud' (December 2005); 'How to deal with van drivers' (December 2005); 'Naked motorcycle porn showing now' (January 2006); 'Pious Porsche peddles pathetic pedal-powered product' (January 2006); 'Lamborghinis are great. You should have one.' (February 2006); 'The future of in-car entertainment' (February 2006); 'Porsche outperforms desktop printer shock' (March 2006); 'In case you're reading this on the bog, here are some equations of motion' (May 2006); 'Men, rise up and embrace the wheelbrace' (May 2006); 'Classic cars – you have been warned' (May 2006); 'I'm gay, but not that gay' (June 2006); 'The building blocks of the car of the future' (June 2006); 'Only the French would build a car designed to break down' (June 2006); 'Britain's surface industry fails to deliver' (July 2006).

  Conde Nast Traveller

  'A cheap holiday in someone else's camper van misery' (August 2002).

  INDEX

  AA

  abandoned cars

  ABS

  'achievement motive'

  aeroplanes

  Air Transport Auxiliary

  Airfix 1/72nd scale Heinkel

  Airport Shopping Dare

  alcohol

  Alfa Spider

  Arnott, Robbie Paul

  Aston Martin

  Audi

  TT

  Austin

  Healy 3000

  Seven

  Autocar

  Barrow, Clyde

  Barthol, Oliver E

  Battle of Britain

  BBC

  Belloc, Hilaire

  Bentley

  Arnage T

  Continental

  T2

  Bentley, WO

  Bernoulli, Daniel

  bicycle

  Porsche

  Biela, Frank

  Bilbo's Design

  Bintcliffe, John

  BMW

  CI

  5-series

  M6

  7-series

  V8

  Brady, James

  breakdowns

  Brief History of the Royal Flying Corps (Barker)

  Bristol F.2b Fighter

  Brompton

  Brown, Gordon

  Bryson, Bill

  BTCC

  B24 Liberator

  Burns, Holly

  Cadillac

  camper vans

  Campion, Thomas

  Car Magazine

  carbon emissions

  cars

  abandoned

  attempts to combine virtues of motorcycle and

  breakdowns

  classic

  colour of

  crime

  design

  development of

  entertainment in

  niche models

  restoration of

  seats,

  sports

  supercars

  Castle Combe

  Celeste Motor Caravan

  Cessna

  Chevrolet

  Camaro

  Silverado

  Chrysler

  Chrysler, Walter

  Chung, Wang

  Citroën

  C2 Stop&Start

  C4 VTS

  C6

  DS

  Saxo

  vibrating seat

  Clarkson, Jeremy

  Classic Nouveau Registrations

  Cobo Center, Detroit

  coffee

  Commando War Stories in Pictures

  complaints about noise

  congestion charging

  countryside, anti-car sentiment in

  Coward, Mike

  crash test dummies

  'creative play'

&nbs
p; crime, car

  cruise control

  cup holders, in-car

  Daewoo 95MPV

  Daily Telegraph

  'Dance Hall Days' (Wang Chung)

  dashboard spot-the-difference game

  Datsun 120Y

  Davies, Maurice

  de la Mothe, Antoine

  Debois, Lensman

  Dennis, John

  Detroit

  Dickens, Charles

  Dodge

  Donington Park

  Dornier 217

  Drivesafe

  Ducati Monster

  Durant, William

  DVLA

  Earl, Harley

  Electric Light Orchestra

  engines, modern

  see also under individual car

  entertainment, in-car

  environment

  European Experimental Vehicles Committee

  European Union

  Euro-Sid

  Exford White Horse Inn

  Exmoor

  4 x 4s

  'Fair If You Expect Admiring' (Campion)

  Ferrari

  F360

  F430

  Lamborghini, rivalry with

  Lego Technic

  merchandise

  Fiat

  Cinquecento

  Panda

  Tipo

  Focke-Wulf

  Ford

  Cortina

  Focus

  GT

  Highland Park factory

  Laguna

  Model T

  Mondeo

  Museum

  V8

  Xantia

  Ford, Edsel

  Ford, Henry

  Formula One

  Frangart, Gerard

  Frost, Bruce

  fuel, folly of saving

  Fusker

  Gardner, Peter

  General Motors

  Gent, P

  Germany

  global warming

  Gordon, Hanya

  Great Sports Car Debate

  Hackenberg, Dr Ulrich

  Hammond, Richard

  attitude to flying

  breakdowns

  in-car games

  911, buys

  Zonda, drives