Born to Be Riled (34 page)

I suspect all of us like to see the Germans fail from time to time, and that’s why I’ve rather enjoyed this whole Mercedes A Class saga. This tiny little hatchback, with its extraordinarily large interior, was going to take over the world. But half-way through Poland it fell over.

A journalist discovered that if you performed a sudden lane-change manoeuvre at anything above 37mph, the A Class would flip onto its roof. On the whole, this was a ‘bad thing’.

So bad, in fact, that Mercedes withdrew their new wonder-car from sale and set about making some changes. Clever traction control was added, the suspension was modified, and now the A Class is back.

So, have the changes worked? Well this week I waved a tearful goodbye to the children, checked my life insurance policy, took the baby Benz to an airfield, and went completely bonkers. I built it up to 90mph and went from full left lock to full right lock. I braked in the middle of corners, I did handbrake turns. I completely wrecked the tyres. And I’m sitting here now, writing this, so all is well…

… nearly. Unfortunately, the changes Mercedes made to the suspension have endowed the A Class with quite the most unforgiving ride you could possibly imagine. You would have David Beckham round for tea before you’d deliberately run over a cat’s-eye in this car.

I was therefore staggered to read that, for £180, you can fit firm, sports suspension. Really, you mustn’t. It’s quite firm enough already, and anyway, this most definitely is
not a sports car. Try any sort of speedy driving and in half a nanosecond the traction control comes down on you like a silicone ton of bricks.

I really do believe that what we have here is a bad chassis with a Band-Aid on it. It doesn’t work and, anyway, the A Class is ridiculously expensive. I know it’s a Mercedes but I find it hard to accept that a car which is shorter than a Ford Fiesta should cost, depending on the engine and trim you choose, between £14,490 and £17,890.

This is a great deal of money, especially when I tell you that Renault will sell you a larger, more comfortable and more practical Scenic for less than £13,000.

And yet. To drive a Scenic is to advertise the fact that you’ve had it. You have children and a gut. Your life is ruled, not by a need to be attractive and funny, but by the prices at Ikea. I’ve seen you in the supermarket, buying washing-up bowls.

The Mercedes may be horrid to drive and stupidly expensive, but in St Tropez this year it is
the
car. It may come with a boot, space inside for five and an engine that, in a head-on crash, slides under your legs. But it is also cool and funky. For years we’ve been eating lettuce and now Mercedes has given us some rocket.

I suspect that last year some corporate bigwig at General Motors was given an atlas for Christmas. And I suppose it must have been quite a shock for the poor chap to find
that his teachers, the newspapers and the television news had all been lying.

Imagine. For 50 years he had known without any doubt that God was called Hank and that the world stopped at Los Angeles. He knew the Americans had tried without success to find new civilizations – the launch pad at Cape Canaveral was proof of that. But here on his lap was this atlas – a book which spoke of strange and exotic new places where people breathed air and had central heating and Corby trouser presses. And yes, even cars.

Back at work after the Christmas break he would have been treated as something of a lunatic, as he rushed around telling his colleagues that there were life forms outside the USA. ‘What? In the ocean you mean? Fish? Whales? Sea cucumbers?’

‘No no. There are bipeds. In places like Japan and South Africa and The United Britain. And we can sell them cars. All we need do is put the steering wheel on the other side. We’ll be rich.’

And this did it, because now there’s an armada of General motors heading for the UK. There’s the Chevrolet Camaro, the big four-wheel drive Blazer, the Corvette and, most amazingly of all, the £40,000 Cadillac Seville STS.

Oh dear. I appear to have put Prestbury into a state of cataclysmic shock. For years, people in the neo-Georgian suburbs of Manchester have been on the look-out for something a little more vulgar and ostentatious than a Rolls-Royce, and now it’s coming. Not since Parker Knoll brought out their last recliner has Cheshire been in quite such a heightened state of expectation. The people there need to know what this new car is like.

Well now, I drove a Cadillac Seville last year and it was simply incredible. You could stop, get out, go shopping, have dinner and when you got back to the car three hours later it would still be rocking back and forth.

It may have looked a little more restrained than the finned, chromed monsters from the late 1950s but it was still as soft as a puppy, with the directional control of Bambi. In Arizona it was, of course, very comfortable, but for trips into Wilmslow it would have been utterly hopeless.

Cadillac, however, has not only moved the steering wheel but they’ve also changed the suspension. Indeed, I drove one this week and can report it doesn’t really have any.

They’ve noted that while American footballers take to the field in an all-over body tampon, rugby players protect their bones with nothing more than a shirt. So they obviously figure we don’t need springs or dampers – just four bloody great RSJs. And the he-man steering is so macho the wheel has a full beard.

There is, however, terrible disappointment elsewhere in the interior. Cheshire, I’m sure, was hoping for pearlescent vulgalour upholstery, Las Vegas lighting and button-backed, white carpets. But no. You get black leather and exactly the same sort of wood they used on Garrard turntables in 1975. You don’t even get a back-lit gold Cadillac motif in the middle of the steering wheel.

But do not think for one minute that this is a low-key sports saloon like the BMW 5 series. It has front-wheel drive for a start, and the automatic gearbox works in geological time. Put your foot down and several aeons will slide by before it kicks down.

And nor is it an executive cruiser. First of all, it is stupidly noisy thanks to absurd tyre roar and second, the driver’s seat is modelled on an electric chair. It features a device called auto lumbar support, which moves in tandem with your body.

Unfortunately, it was designed to support the average American back, which is a task every bit as difficult as propping up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I suspect that slender, lettuce-fed Prestbury backs will tire very quickly of being asked to rest on what is basically a piece of heavy engineering.

But you will never tire of the engine. This 4.6 litre V8 produces 300 horsepower, and that’s enough, despite the best efforts of the Darwinian gearbox, to get the Seville from 0 to 60 in 6.8 seconds and on to 150. Apparently, 19mpg should also be possible, and it is, if you are towed everywhere.

So what’s the big deal then? Well, not only does it sound utterly wonderful at high revs but it only needs servicing once every 100,000 miles. And, thanks to clever cylinder management, it can even run for 50 miles with no oil and no water. This will be a boon to the mink coat and no-knickers set, who are forever laughing over a lettuce lunch about how, that morning, they filled up the washer bottle with diesel.

An amazing engine, however, isn’t enough. If only they’d sent the Seville here with pleblon seats and Fablon decals down the side, Prestbury would gave gone, to coin a local phrase, ‘mad for it’.

But instead, they’ve toned it down, hoping to pick up a few BMW and Jaguar drivers. And they’ve failed on that one too, because the Seville just isn’t good enough. It was
a brave effort from our man with the atlas, but then it was a brave effort too the last time an American picked up a map of the world… and the army got sent to Vietnam.

Tiff doesn’t want you to know this, and after telling you I’m probably going to need another boyfriend, but last week, at the Pembury race track in Wales, he stuffed a Honda NSX. When Quentin and I heard, we exchanged glances and immediately guessed what had happened. Tiff, we reckoned, was too vain to wear his glasses on television, but without them he’s something of a mole. He was just trundling along, flashing his boyish smile at the camera and quite simply, never saw the corner.

In fact, the truth is somewhat different. You see, I’ve now seen the footage, and Tiff saw the corner just fine. He was sailing round it with a fair bit of understeer which he tried to correct with a little flick – a little
soupçon
to upset the back end. It worked too, but the rear just snapped round, lunging Tiff and £70,000-worth of supercar towards the end of the pit wall. Now, if you hit the end of a wall sideways, at 80mph, you’re dead. It would have been Goodnight Tiff. But, amazingly, the car slid into the pit lane and had scrubbed nearly all its speed off when it hit a bank of tyres at 30mph or so. Tiff says the accident happened in slow motion and that he had time to sit there wondering what on earth had gone wrong. I mean, being a racing driver, the accident obviously wasn’t his fault… And much as it pains me to
admit this, I think he’s right. It isn’t that he’s old and blind. It’s the NSX. I think there’s something wrong with it.

You see, back in the dim and distant past, Derek Warwick tested one of these cars for us… and spun off. In the Nurburgring story we ran, back in the autumn, the only car to leave the track with Barry ‘Whizzo’ Williams at the helm was the NSX. And now I’m hearing rumours that Mark Hales, another seriously good race driver, recently stuffed one.

So that’s the NSX off the list then. You see, here’s my problem. Last night, while my wife and I snuggled up in front of
Kavanagh QC,
she leant across and, out of the blue, said: ‘So, are you going to keep the Ferrari then?’ This is the equivalent of a salesman with his foot in the door just before he barges into the living room and spreads brochures all over the rug. Right now, she’s wondering why I keep a car that I hardly ever use. Pretty soon the wondering stops. And the recriminations start. To be honest, I’ve toyed with the idea of changing it, but for what? Certainly not an NSX and, much as I am impressed by the sports-exhausted Diablo, I’m not a has-been rock star. I have to admit I’ve been going through a Lancia Stratos phase, but I fear I’d use that even less than the 355. (He strokes his chin…) I’ve also thought about the Jaguar XJ220.

I’m sure you know by now that the new left-hand drives are up for sale at an Essex dealer for the sum of £150,000 each. You can, however, acquire a lightly used right-hooker, I understand, for a mere £85,000. At 17 feet long and 7 feet wide, you have to admit that the 220 is an awful lot of car for £85,000. I had to admit it too,
which is why last week I found myself in Wales driving an XJ220 for the first time, in anger. I’d been told it was heavy and cumbersome but when you bury the throttle, the power is sensational. This is noticeably more accelerative than a Ferrari F50 and, as we all know, much faster at the top end. It’s also a stable high-speed cruiser. You may have noticed in recent years that in race trim the McLarens have sprouted elongated tails – which makes them more steady at 220mph. But the Jag comes with a lengthy back end to start with.

I have to admit, I was falling madly in love with this previously unloved hypercar – until I needed to brake hard, that is. In the nick of time, I heard a little voice in my head. It was Tiff saying the XJ220 would be a lot better if only it had brakes. And so, when I stamped on the pedal, I was half ready for what happened. And what happened was nothing. Honestly, it was amazing. I had both feet on the pedal and I was still doing 100mph or more. I was still doing 100mph when I got home and saw the Ferrari just sitting there. Swap it? You must be joking. I’d rather lend it to Needell.

I have a dream. I see a world with happy, rosy-cheeked children scrumping apples. When you ring to book a seat at the cinema you will talk, not to a machine, but to Ma Larkin. And there will be an interval in the film where you eat pork pies and fudge.

No one will have a mobile phone that plays ‘The
Grand Old Duke of York’ and Bernard Cribbins will run your local railway station. Estuary English will be spoken only in the Thames Estuary which, incidentally, will be full of cormorants. And no one will die of anything.

Now I could publish this in a White Paper but you’d all laugh. You’d know that the Thames Estuary children would shoot all the cormorants and that Bernard Cribbins is already dead.

Well it’s much the same deal with the vision of Britain outlined this week by Mr Prescott in his much talked-about White Paper. I’ve read every one of the 160 pages and it is fantastic. No one could possibly argue with any one of the fat man’s dreams but, sadly, that’s what they are – dreams.

Take point 5.10. ‘We need to improve the image of the bus if we are to attract people who are used to the style and comfort of modern cars.’ And it goes on to say that the bus industry must respond to the challenge with a vehicle designed for the twenty-first century.

Right, well if you want me out of the car and in one of your buses by 2000, you’ve got 18 months to come up with a vehicle that can do this…

Yesterday, while making a white sauce, I found I needed some more milk and had to get to and from the shop in less than three minutes. I shall need a service that can handle this.

This afternoon, my mother is coming to Oxfordshire from Peterborough with two small children and their nanny. They don’t want to go via two train stations in London. So, if this new public transport is going to be as convenient as the car, there must be a bus service from Castor to Chipping Norton, 30 times a day.

And on board the bus I want electric Recaro seats finished in the finest hide, I want television, I want air conditioning and I must be able to play whatever music I wish without disturbing any of the other passengers. Also, there must be a screen, such as you find in the first class section of a British Airways 777, so that I can pick my nose without being overlooked. I shall also wish to smoke.

The bus must also be eco-friendly, so obviously a diesel engine is out of the question. Gas might be an answer, but a big V8 is better. Certainly, I shall be looking for 0 to 60 in less than ten seconds and a top speed of 150 or so. And it must be designed by Pininfarina.