Born to Be Riled (11 page)

Inevitably, my bank manager wrote regularly. Now he could have called me all the names under the sun, he
could have used language blue enough to make Quentin Tarantino blush. He could have made threats of violence and it would have had no effect.

Instead, he used the strongest word in the English language: ‘disappointed’.

‘I am disappointed to note…’ he would begin and my Adam’s apple would swell to three times its normal size. By saying he was disappointed, he was suggesting that he had had high hopes but that I, personally, had let him down.

Since those days I’ve been very careful about using the ‘D’ word. When reviewing cars, I’ve said that they were foul, or dull, or that they couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s backside. But I have never used the word ‘disappointing’. Until now.

The Lotus Esprit V8 is disappointing. The cruellest six words you will ever read. I had high hopes of this car, and
it
let
me
down.

On paper, the car looked good. Here was a machine with OZ racing wheels and Brembo racing brakes. Here was a car with the latest generation of ABS and, to top it all, a twin-turbo V8 with 350 horsepower. Here, in short, was my kinda car.

When it arrived there was nothing to suggest anything was amiss. The Esprit may have been around since the Bay City Rollers, but with its curvier corners and its eyebrow wheel-arch extensions, it looked really rather good sitting in my yard.

I wasn’t entirely convinced by the leather and wood interior, which seemed out of place in a mid-engined supercar, but that’s like saying you won’t eat pizza because you don’t like olives.

I admit it: for a few brief moments, I actually thought about buying one.

Then I went for a drive and I was reminded of
Top Gun
, a film that, like the Esprit, promised so much. I’d seen the trailers and noted that there was unprecedented aerial footage of state-of-the-art American fighter planes.

I’d read reports which spoke of unparalleled access given to the producers by the Pentagon. And there was Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise to boot.

It all opened well too, with those slow-mo shots on board the aircraft carrier. There was purple haze and yes, from seat H16, a few excitable squeals. This was going to be two hours of kapow, whiz bang action.

But, in fact, it was two hours of sheer, unadulterated drivel during which time grown men punched one another on the shoulder instead of shaking hands, and talked nonsense. Furthermore, they were all called improbable names like Ice Man and Maverick and Goose.

When Maverick refused to engage the enemy because he’d killed Goose while trying to show off to Ice Man, I was nearly sick. And when he returned to the ship, and was given a hero’s welcome, I vowed that if I ever met Tom Cruise I’d hit him.

Then the little pipsqueak went and married Nicole Kidman, making the need to wallop him even more urgent.

I digress. The point is that the Lotus was as much of a disappointment as that film.

The reason why its 3.5 litre, blown engine only develops 350 horsepower is because the Renault gearbox would blow up if it were asked to deal with any more.

As it is, it feels like the lever is set in concrete. To
get from third to second requires a two-week course on anabolic steroids. If you want reverse, you need the negotiating skills of an anti-terrorist policeman.

And when you get the beast rolling, another problem rears its ugly head: vibration.

The new engine has the same basic design as a Formula One unit, where refinement is not really an issue. In a road car though, the constant buzziness does get to be a bit of a bore.

When you take the motor past 5000rpm, the gear lever vibrates so much it feels like you’ve just grabbed a high-voltage cable. It’s a brave man who reaches for it, especially when he knows he can’t move it anyway.

Then there’s the noise. I was expecting one of two things: a V8 bellow or a crackly strum. In fact, you get almost nothing to write home about, a result, say Lotus, of forthcoming noise regulations.

Well listen here guys. When I hum gently, it’s an awful noise that makes the children cry. When Pavarotti hums quietly, people will pay £200 to listen. You can make a car sound nice
and
quiet.

You can see now, I’m sure, why the Esprit was such a terrible letdown. But unlike the Maserati Quattroporte I drove recently, there are at least some up sides.

First, it handles even better than any Esprit before, which is to say it handles absolutely beautifully. There is real class in the chassis here.

And second, it is truly fast, not daft like the F50, but quicker than a Ferrari 355, and that’s saying something. At less than £60,000, it is cheaper too.

But the Esprit has always been good value, fast and blessed with great, supercar handling. Its real problems in
the past have been a poor gear change and not much aural excitement.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

We have no Dralon either, and button-backed leather furniture is a bit thin on the ground too.

Should you drop round at sixish, in need of a drink, it’s in a cupboard in the kitchen. I’m sorry, but we don’t have a globe which opens to reveal the bottles inside.

So why, then, do I rave about the interior of a Rolls-Royce? Only a footballer would ever dream of fitting inch-thick, royal blue shag pile in his drawing room so why is it acceptable in a car?

And look at the wood on that dashboard. Perfect. Unblemished. Polished like a guardsman’s shoes. Now look at the wood on your refectory table. Knackered. Riddled with sixteenth-century woodworm. Ill-fitting pieces. And worth ten grand of anybody’s money.

Then there’s the Roller’s seats. There’s no doubt that the contrasting piping lifts the magnolia trim, but would you buy a chair for your hall which had cream hide and pale blue piping?

Things get even worse down the automotive scale too because once you’re in Roverland the wood becomes
plastic. You wouldn’t dream of having anything made out of plastic fake wood in your house and yet you’ll pay more for it in your car.

It’s madness and I don’t have an answer. I’m as guilty as the next man. I love the innards of my Jag but there isn’t a single square inch of it that would be allowed over the threshold of my house.

And as cars go, the Jaguar is good; tasteful, refined and, rarely for a car these days, fitted with a radio that anyone over 50 could operate.

But there are plenty of cars out there which not only have foul trim but which have been laid out by idiots as well.

Take Ford. It’s all very well designing a swooping dashboard which rises and falls like the distant hills in a child’s painting, but what if you want to put a can of Coke down somewhere? You wouldn’t accept curvy worksurfaces in your kitchen, would you? All your Brussels sprouts would roll on to the floor.

And sticking with the kitchen theme, there’s the Ford Galaxy people carrier. Whoever designed that upholstery had a cauliflower fixation.

It is a Dralon type fabric, textured like the walls in an Indian restaurant, but instead of fleur-de-lis sculptures, which might have been acceptable, they’ve ended up with something that looks like a fuzzy vegetable basket.

Renault, though, still holds the title of ‘worst ever fabric design’. Check out the seats on a Clio Williams to see what I mean. You could invite an entire rugby team to be sick on them and the owner would never know. Apart from the smell, perhaps.

One of the latest trends is to litter the interior with
leather that’s not only grey – unacceptable on shoes and worse in a car – but perfect: smooth like Formica, and odourless too. Leather is a natural thing, so kindly leave the blemishes in place. We like them.

We do not, however, like your passenger-side airbags. These prevent owners from fitting baby seats in the front, and reduce the size of the glove box to a point where its description becomes literal. A glove box. Not a gloves box, you’ll note. And what, pray, is the point of an airbag for the passenger? A driver needs one so that in a frontal impact his head will not hit the steering wheel, but what is the passenger going to hit? Nothing. Two airbags are as unnecessary as two slippers by Douglas Bader’s fire.

Car interior designers would be better employed finding space for little cubbyholes where we may keep our telephones, cassettes and fags. Thank you for the fuzzy felt coin holders, but as most parking meters take pound coins these days it means leaving a fiver’s-worth of metal in plain view all the time. Which means you need a new side window every day.

Thank you too for making sun roofs such a common fitment these days. They don’t allow any breeze to get into the car, but if you open them at anything above 3mph your eardrums implode.

And as a by-product of their uselessness, sun roofs also rob up to two inches of headroom, which renders the car useless to anyone who’s registered at the doctors as a human being.

I’m 6ft 5in, so you might say I must pay the price for blocking your view in a cinema, but my wife is a 5ft 1in midget who has never blocked anyone’s view of anything.
Yet despite her public-spiritedness, there are some cars – yes you, TVR – where she can’t reach the pedals.

Surely to God if a car firm can use platinum to extract poisonous gases from the exhaust, they can design an interior which can accommodate all forms of human life, and not just those that are average.

Yes, we’ve recently had the Fiat Coupé, which represented a significant step in the right direction but I really do think it’s time for car interiors to be radically altered. Why can’t we have raffia seats and straw matting on the floor? Maybe a real fire or a wood-burning stove instead of a heater. Why not?

Land Rover employed Terence Conran to design the interior of the Discovery, which showed spirit, but I was crestfallen at the result. I’d expected something really radical with new fabrics, new shapes, new ideas.

Instead, I got some map holders above the sun visors and a zip-up centre console bag. Wow.