Born to Be Riled (55 page)

I’d have given up at this point and gone skiing, but, no, Hans took off his bad jacket, rolled his sleeves up even further and began on the styling. He developed all sorts of plastic add-ons, spoilers, aprons and skirts, but each one spoilt the purity of the original.

So the car he lent me this week came with none of it – just four big wheels that were just about acceptable and a brace of chromed exhaust pipes that looked ridiculous.

And what about the suspension? What wizardry has been woven here? What little tweaks? Well, they did a lot of head scratching and decided that the original couldn’t really be beaten, so, er, well, they did nothing. Just fitted some bigger brakes that reduce the stopping distance by about an inch, probably.

So there you are. The new AMG S-class Mercedes-Benz: £25,000 more than the standard car, and for that you get absolutely nothing. Not even peace of mind that it’ll still be there in the morning.

No, really. It comes with what’s called keyless entry. You keep a credit card-sized transmitter in your wallet so the car can sense when you’re getting near. It then opens the doors, allowing you to slide in and start the engine by touching the gear lever. But when you get out again and walk away, how do you know if the doors have locked? Every time I walked back to check, they were open, but that’s because the transmitter was in my wallet. So I have no idea whether the system works or not.

I have no idea either how much this car would be worth after a year. Standard S-classes will always find a home with one of the endless upmarket minicab firms who see it as a short cut to all the plum jobs and big tippers. But I can’t see Mr Patel going for a model with oil injection jets.

All in all, then, the new car is daft. You pay £100,000 now and, in a year, you’ll get £1 back. If you’re lucky.

That said, however, the world is a daft place. You could provide Michael Winner with hot and cold running flunkies and he’d still complain that the sun was in his eyes. And I know plenty of people who do a £30 million deal and think, ‘Right. Where’s the next 30 mill. coming from?’

For some people, enough is never enough. You could put them in the first-class compartment of a 747 and they’d spend the entire journey fidgeting because they weren’t far enough forward. They wouldn’t even be happy with a deckchair nailed to the nose cone unless it came with an extending arm that enabled them to fly along 40 feet in front of the plane itself.

These are the guys at whom the AMG S-class is aimed, and they will lap it up. It’s no better than the standard car, but it’s no worse. And it is a lot more expensive, which is what matters most of all.

Put an imaginary billion in the bank and you’d have a car like this. I would. And if next year they came out with a special Myrrh edition with panda bear ear upholstery, gold pedals and a Jacuzzi, I’d have one of those too.

In the real world, the normal S-class is still the best car in the world, but on planet Plutocrat the AMG is even better.

It’s happened again. Just months after Mercedes was forced to recall all its A-class hatchbacks because they had a worrying habit of falling over, Audi has had to pull the TT. It seems that if you lift or brake while cornering at high speed, the back will snap into violent oversteer and you will slam into the crash barriers. Already, in Germany, two people have been killed, and Audi has had to act fast.

Remember, Audi was pretty well wiped out in America 10 years ago by rumours that their cars suffered from ‘unintended acceleration’. Dim-witted Yanks said that even if they had their foot on the brake, the car kept on accelerating at full speed until it slammed into a child/pensioner/dog.

I must confess that I felt rather sorry for Audi on that one. It was, let’s face it, the fault of America’s education system and a proliferation of lawyers rather than an engineering problem over in Ingolstadt. A car simply cannot accelerate unless its driver hits the wrong pedal – easily done in a land where the smart bombs can’t even be guaranteed to hit the right country.

And now I feel sorry for them all over again. Quite apart from the major redesign, they’re having to pay a small fortune to fit the 40,000 examples they’ve already sold with different stabilizers, altered dampers, modified wishbones and a new rear spoiler. They’ve got two deaths on their hands, and they’re looking down the barrel of a serious public relations disaster.

The trouble is, the TT never really knew what it was. If it had been billed as just a motorized jacket, a poseur’s
pouch with no delusions of racetrack glory, they could have fitted wooden suspension and all would’ve been well. But it was, after all, going to carry the Quattro badge, and it was going to have a 225bhp engine, so it needed to be sporty as well. And that meant it had to have some lift-off oversteer.

In motoring magazine land, we’ll tolerate front- and four-wheel-drive cars only if they give us this handling quirk in spades. Lift-off oversteer is more vital than customers. If we can’t get a car to go sideways while careering past a photographer, it is dismissed as a hopeless dud. Understeer is for wimps.

It’s a saloon-car thing. It’s pants. And the car makers know this, so they dial it into their sports cars to keep us happy. Oh, sure, they know full well that in the wrong hands, in the wrong weather and on the wrong road it can be fatal, but they want good reviews…

The thing is, though, that the Audi was by no means the worst offender. If you want real lift-off oversteer, try a Peugeot 306 for size. That thing behaves like a hungry puppy, wagging its tail at the slightest provocation. And while this is a huge hoot on an airfield, it can be downright scary in the wet.

Just think. You’re barrelling along, snicking through the gears, feeling the tyres scrabbling for grip when, all of a sudden, while going round a corner, you find a tractor coming the other way. So, in a panic, you lift off. And whoa, now you have to miss the tractor while controlling a lurid tail slide.

Only recently I was called old and fat for saying I’d rather have a Golf GTi, which always ploughs straight on, than a 306. But it was for this very reason. On a racetrack,
the 306 kicks the Golf’s arse, but in the real world, I’m telling you, it’s the other way round.

I congratulate VW for ignoring the pleas of us motoring journalists. And Alfa Romeo too. Back in the summer, I went to an airfield with a GTV and tried everything in my limited repertoire to make it misbehave, but it wouldn’t. So, if you’re faced with an emergency, there’s one less thing to worry about.

And what about the Focus? Car of the Year. Best-selling car in Britain. Darling of the motoring press corps. And why? Because when you lift off in a bend, the tail swings out.

Audi was only trying to get some of this glory with the TT, and that is probably why the company was angry with Tiff and me when we came back from the launch and said it was a dog. We said there wasn’t enough feel and that the oversteer, when it came, was rather cynical; a bit of icing to disguise the fact that the cake itself was a bit stodgy.
Autocar
, of course, raved, saying the handling was in fact superb. Just like they did with the Mercedes A-class.

And Audi pointed this out to the two TG boys who wouldn’t toe the line. Everyone else likes it, they said. We’ve had rave reviews in Germany, they said. And now they are admitting that the car’s handling ‘in certain circumstances’ has been criticized. I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.

But I still feel sorry for them, and that’s why I have spent the last few minutes working on a solution. Cars that oversteer need to be ugly, and that way people who want a car to pose around the harbour bar are not going to be caught out when the damned thing starts doing the waltz at 150mph. Enthusiasts are forever saying they don’t
care what a car looks like, so fine. Get someone from Morphy Richards to come up with some poseur-repelling styling and all will be well.

This week I was going to tell you all about the new Rover 25, but after my less-than-flattering review of its bigger brother recently Rover says that all their press demonstrators are booked out until February. And no more reservations are being taken. Roughly translated, this means: ‘Get lost, sunshine.’ Undaunted, I asked if I could perhaps borrow one of the new Land Rover Defenders. Finished in original Atlantic green and equipped with snazzy alloy wheels, I’m seeing quite a few in south-west London and, to be honest, they look rather good. But guess what? Rover has only one demonstrator, and it’s booked out for ever.

I’ve been down this road before. Toyota once banned me from driving its cars, and Vauxhall made life difficult after the Vectra episode, but there are other ways of getting test drives and, in time, I’ll explore them. So be afraid, Rover. Be very afraid.

For now, though, let’s talk about the Lamborghini Diablo, which
Autocar
says is ‘the last genuine supercar on sale’. It’s a thought-provoking argument that made me think about the definition of a supercar. I’ve always taken it to mean a car where practicality and cost worries are crushed in the quest for speed and style. And, on that basis, lots of cars fit the bill, but I sort of know what they
mean about the Diablo. You can’t drive around in this heavyweight brute with its rippling abs if you have a concave chest and spectacles. No, I mean it. If you have limbs like pipe cleaners, you will not have the strength to push the clutch pedal down and, even if you could, you’d think the gearbox had jammed every time you tried to move the lever.

This is bad enough, but it must also be pointed out that you can’t drive the Diablo if you have a neck like a birthday cake and arms like ship’s pistons. Oh, sure, you might be strong enough, but you’ll be too big to fit in the cockpit.

I know only two people who have bought a Diablo, and one is Rod Stewart, so, really, it’s pretty pointless talking about the new model. But since there’s no Rover, I shall plough on regardless.

It’s called the GT, and it is able to whisk small, strong people from 0 to 100mph in under nine seconds. Scientists call this level of acceleration ‘bleeding scary’. To achieve this, Lamborghini’s engineers – and they are the maddest bunch of people I’ve ever met – lifted a few quid from their new owners at Volkswagen and threw the old Diablo’s body away. They replaced it with one that looks exactly the same but is made from ultra-light carbon fibre. This added about £100 million to the cost of making the car but saved 70 kilogrammes.

Then they set to work on the V12 engine, which was taken up from 5.7 litres to 6.0 litres and equipped with all sorts of titanium wizardry so that it now produces perfect silence and geraniums at town-centre speeds but a colossal, thunderous, ear-splitting, tree-felling 570bhp further up the rev range.

I could tell you about the top speed, but I have no idea what it is and no intention of finding out. I do know that the official fuel consumption figures say that, around town, the Diablo GT will return seven miles to the gallon.

It won’t. Cars never match the official figures in real life. So actually, it will probably return no more than 4mpg on a busy, stop-start Friday night. And that is so bad it’s quite funny.

But then this is the point of the Lambo. The whole car is so bad it’s hysterical. The air-conditioning works with the punch of an asthmatic blowing at you through a straw. The rear visibility is almost completely nonexistent and, while I see the new model has a backwards-looking video camera and a screen on the dash, you’ll still have to say a few Hail Marys before pulling out of an oblique junction. There are no gadgets and gizmos either. Just an angry snarl and a big right fist.

And yet. When you put your foot down hard and that engine girds its loins for a full-frontal assault on the horizon, there is an ‘Oh, my God’ moment that no other car can quite match.

I once drove a Diablo at 186mph, not because I wanted to, but because I lost the ability to move my feet. Ferraris have lost this raw terror factor in recent years, and Porsches never really had it. The only other car I know that can do this bowel-loosening, supersonic baritone thing is the Aston Vantage, and that’s nearing the end of its life.

So
Autocar
may have a point. It seems the chill wind of environmentalism has created an ice age in which dinosaurs like the Diablo find it hard to thrive. Only six of
the new GTs are being imported to Britain, and I suggest that, if you want a last-chance power drive, you give it a whirl.

Eating out in Birmingham was always one of life’s more disappointing experiences. First, you had to find Birmingham, which is located above a series of tunnels, and then you had to find some food. Usually, this meant parking in a multistorey and then being beaten up a lot. Eventually, you’d have your wallet nicked, so, bleeding and hungry, you’d go back to the multistorey to find your car had been stolen as well.

When the ambulance finally took you home, six weeks later, you’d had time to ruminate on your night out, and most people usually reckoned that going into Birmingham city centre after dark was a ‘bad thing’ and that they wouldn’t be going again.

To entice them back, a number of restaurants are now opening. You must still zigzag from your car to the front door, making use of whatever cover you can find, and your car still won’t be there when you come out, but at least you won’t go home hungry.

Le Petit Blanc opened recently, and in the next few months there will be Bank and Fish. But my attention was drawn this week to the launch of a new ‘independent’ called the Directory that offers food which is described as eclectic modern British. At the bar this includes a club
sandwich, Cajun chicken or a chargrilled vegetable sandwich that could be modern British were it not for the addition of pesto and crème fraîche.

Therein lies my point. Modern British is entirely eclectic, a selection of ingredients that are only British insofar as they were nailed together here before being served. I even found out this week that the chip was invented in Belgium and that fish in batter was introduced to us by an Italian.