Clarkson on Cars (2 page)

Since the advent of what the publishing industry calls new technology, it has become a great deal cheaper to produce the printed word. This is why one now needs the anatomical properties of Kali to read the
Sunday Times
, and why the shelves at your local newsagent’s are groaning under the weight of perfect-bound, laminated forestry.

You may have wondered how the producers of
Successful Cauliflower
magazine make any money. The answer is, they don’t, but seeing as it costs naff all to make it in the first place, nobody’s complaining!

Not so long ago, people bought their favourite magazine for a decent read on the bus. It would be stitched together from shoddy paper and when it was finished, it could be hung on a clip by the lavatory. Not any more.

Take
Country Life
. Full of ads for houses that no one can afford and no one wants; you don’t rad it, you arrange it on the coffee table as you would arrange a bunch of flowers. You may even feel the need to iron it occasionally.

It is not a magazine. It is a statement. It says that while you may live in a neo-Georgian semi with a purple up ’n’ over garage door, you are fully conversant with the delights of hopelessly expensive manaor houses in Oxfordshire.

Or
Horse and Hound
, with its nonsensical line, ‘I freely admit that the best of my fun, I owe it to
Horse and Hound.’

Nowadays, there are a million country-house and interior-design glossies full of curtains which cost £8000 and would look stupid anywhere but Castle Howard.

Two luminaries in this domain are
Tatler
and
Harpers and Queen
, which
are
read a
bit
, but only by the middle classes scouring ‘Bystander’ or ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ for photographs of their horrid, frilly-dress-shirted friends.

But the best of all are the car magazines.

There was a time when they treated the car for what it was – a device which used a series of small explosions to move people around. But now, it is an artform. The days when you could get away with a front three-quarters shot taken in the office car park are gone.

Then there are the front covers. How many times has the Golf GTi lost its crown? To my certain knowledge, the Escort XR3 was the first to steal it, yet when the Peugeot 205 GTI came along a couple of years later, somehow, the Golf had got it back again.

And therefore we read in 72-point bold that the Golf GTi had lost its crown
again
, this time to the 205 GTI.

So the Vauxhall Astra, you might imagine, would have to pinch it from the 205; but no, at some point Peugeot had given it back to VW – who reluctantly had to hand it over again, this time to Vauxhall.

Then in no particular order it has been worn by the Peugeot 309 GTI, the Astra GTE 16v, the Escort RS Turbo, the Delta Integrale and the Corolla GTi. But for some extraordinary reason, the prized headgear never gets handed directly from one winner to the next. It always goes back to VW in between times.

For now, it is being worn by the 16-valve Astra but you can bet your bottom dollar that VW will have it back in time to lose it to the new 16-valve Integrale.

The Quattro has been through a similar series of machinations. The Delta Integrale pinched its number one slot but had to give the crown back to Audi shortly afterwards because it was wearing the Golf’s at the time.

Audi held on to it for a bit but only a couple of months ago, relinquished it to Porsche’s 911 Carrera 4.

And aside from dispensing crowns on a weekly basis, headline writers have become obsessed with speed.

‘WE DRIVE THE 220-MPH JAG THEY DARE NOT BUILD’ is the latest game. Not to be outdone, a rival publication, you can be assured, will drive a 230-mph Jag that can’t be built the very next week. And so on towards infinity perhaps.

We smirk when we read that Freddie Starr ate someone’s hamster, yet we are expected to believe that some scribbler has driven a Jaguar that no one has built at a speed that current tyre technology won’t allow anyway.

I have driven a BMW 750iL at an indicated 156 mph on the
autobahn
and believe me, it is a bowel-loosening experience I do not wish to relive. Sure, I enjoy going quickly, but the notion of driving something like a Porsche 911, which has been tuned by a foreign grease monkey, at the speed of sound in a Welsh valley, appals as much as it amuses.

The thing is that if you have a magazine on your coffee table that talks on its front cover about a car that hasn’t been built doing 300 mph on the Milton Keynes ring road, visitors to your home will be impressed.

If you leave motoring publications lying around which talk about how seatbelts save lives, those same visitors will drink their coffee very quickly and leave.

Business-speak impresses too. Honda have smashed Porsche 48 times and Toyota have bludgeoned BMW to death on a weekly basis for two years. And all this smashing and bludgeoning has resulted in every move a manufacturer makes being seen as utterly crucial.

As in, ‘ON THE LIMIT IN ROVER’S LIFE-OR-DEATH MAESTRO’; or how about this recent gem: ‘LOTUS’S MAKE-OR-BREAK ELAN.’

Lotus are owned by General Motors, who are one of the world’s biggest companies. Their R&D department is universally revered, with lucrative contracts from such financially secure outfits as the MoD.

The Elan, successful or otherwise, will neither make nor break the company. It might on the other hand pinch the Golf GTi’s crown. Clarkson Decides.

It ought to be safe to assume, I thought, that if 60,000 Brits go to France and sit in a field all weekend, BBC news editors would be intrigued. They would, I was sure, despatch their best available crew to find out just what had driven so many people to do such a thing.

After all, when twelve women with short hair and dubious sexual preferences camped outside an Oxfordshire air base for a few days, they were besieged by TV reporters.

When a couple of hundred Kentish ruralites wandered down to the village hall to hear a man from British Rail explain why their houses must be pulled down, they emerged two hours later, blinded by camera arc lights.

When one man set up shop on Rockall, both the BBC and ITV hired helicopters at God-knows-how-much-a-minute to film the weird beard’s flag-waving antics.

And the South Ken embassy zone is permanently full of film crews, furiously rushing between the two people who have turned up to protest about the treatment of badgers in North Yemen and the half dozen who think the Chilean milk marketing board is overcharging.

So, how come when 60,000 Brits formed part of the 200,000-strong crowd at the 24 hours of Le Mans, it didn’t even get a mention on the
BBC News?

Rather than turn up for work on the Monday morning and face ridicule for not knowing who had won, I set aside twenty minutes on Sunday evening to find out.

I noticed with glee that the newsreader chappie hurried through the usual bits on China and the Maggon’s opposition to European monetary union and I fully expected the saved time would be used to show us how bronzed men and true had thrilled the crowds in what is easily the world’s most famous motor race.

But no. We had an interview with a cricketer who had hurt his cheek and couldn’t play. Lots of people hurt their cheeks and can’t do what they want as a result. I rubbed a chilli in my eye last night and they didn’t send Michael Buerk round to find out how much it hurt. When they beamed us back to the studio, there was the presenter with the Refuge Assurance Sunday League cricket results.

We heard how Mohammed from Leicester had scored 72, how Gary from Essex had bowled out six people and how Yorkshire were top of something or other.

I kid you not. They devoted more time to cricket than they did to the slaughter of 2600 people in China. And, of course, there was not one word about Le Mans. In the next day’s newspapers, it was the same story, with page after page about cricket followed by a brief paragraph that said, ‘Merc won Le Mans and Jag didn’t.’

Now, the argument that cricket fans trot out at times like this, and we can safely assume that the BBC’s news editors
are
fans, is that cricket has a bigger following in Britain than motor racing.

Bull. The Test and County Cricket Board tell me that in 1988, 137,583 people turned up to watch Sunday league cricket. That means the seventeen teams each have an average weekly gate of 1074. They get five to ten times that to watch a Formula Three race at Donington.

A Test match at Lord’s can pull in about 80,000; the British Grand Prix manages almost exactly double that number of spectators.

The
Cricketer
magazine has a circulation of 35,000 a month.
Motoring News
sells 78,000 copies
every week
. And then there’s
Motor Sport
and
Autosport
.

Those who claim cricket has a bigger following than motor racing are the sort of people who claim that fish are insects and that the Pope is a water buffalo; they should be made to live in rooms with rubber walls, and to wear suits with the arms sewn on sideways.

You will never convince the old boy network that runs things round here that cricket should be banished from television and replaced with motor sport; but you
could
buy a HAL 9000 satellite dish. Mine is sculpted into a two-fingered salute and pointed at Broadcasting House. The reception is awful, actually, but it amuses all the neighbours.

Quite apart from the fact that Sky is prepared to show us breasts and bottoms on a regular basis, it has two sport channels which devote a proper amount of time to the world of motor cars.

Now, you know about how the satellite dish and the scrambler and the installation will cost you £350, and you probably know that Rupert Murdoch runs the whole show, but you probably
don’t
know that, at any particular time of day, there will be some sort of motor sport being broadcast on the box. So when you’re bored with Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger sweating their way through another game of tonsil hockey, simply hit the force and watch Al Ulcer and Mario Androcles Jr slogging it out Stateside.

Tonight, you will go home for a diet of cricket, interrupted briefly at 7.00 p.m. for
Terry and June
and again at 10.30 p.m. for
Little and Large
. After
The Terminator
, I will watch some Indycar racing followed by a bit of in-car action from the CRX Challenge.

If you want to protest about the Beeb’s apathy on the motor-sport front, then for heaven’s sake, do absolutely nothing. Stay at home. Tidy your sock drawer out. Grade your grass clippings according to length. Do
anything
, but certainly do not form yourselves into a chanting, 60,000-strong mob or else the news crews will choose to ignore you.

Fear not though because I know exactly how to get coverage. Tomorrow, the six of us who have been converted to
USS Enterprise
space television will become homosexuals and make camp outside Broadcasting House. We will have our heads shaved and refuse to eat anything except almonds and watercress.

The day after, if the TV crews start to look bored, we will set fire to David Gatting.

On the basis that children should neither be seen nor heard, it seems absurd that airlines and other people movers do not provide soundproof boxes into which they can be inserted.

There are even people out there who, when buying a car, actually consider the well-being of their offspring. Manufacturers like Mitsubishi and Volvo use them as active selling aids even.

But why on earth should you worry about the comfort and safety of something that will do nothing on the entire journey other than fight with its sister, vomit and make loud noises?

When I produce children, I shall buy a Vauxhall Belmont. In order to fit in the back even half properly they will have to screw themselves up like one of those magician’s foam balls. Even then, they will not be able to see where they’re going because the Vauxhall has headrests like blackboards.

There are more comfortable fairground rides than the Belmont.

Eventually, they’ll beg to be put in the really rather commodious boot. Which is where they should have been in the first place.

This time next year, if someone were to ask if I’ve ever driven a Toyota Camry V6, I will look gormless for a minute or two. Then I will say no.

This will be wrong because I have driven a Toyota Camry V6 – the Bob Harris of motordom.

Turn on the engine, there is no sound; press the accelerator and still the only noise you can hear is a chaffinch, 50 yards away, rummaging through some discarded fish-and-chip papers.

In a temper, you engage D on the purrundah gearbox and bury the throttle in the pleblon carpet. The chaffinch looks over to see what the chirp was and goes back to his rummaging.

You could drive this car round a library and no one would look up. I live twelve miles from Heathrow, yet the sound of jets on their final approach is enough to warrant the evening TV being turned up. When Concorde is bringing Joan Collins’s hairstyle over again, a full-scale Judas Priest concert is unable to compete.

What I want and want now is for Toyota to buy Rolls-Royce, Pratt and Whitney and that French outfit that doesn’t know its left from its right.

I want them to show Europe and America that it is entirely possible to build an engine that doesn’t make any noise at all.

If you need to get from A to B in a hurry and the only car at your disposal is a Passat 1.9 diesel, then might I suggest you try jogging.

We are talking here about a very slow car indeed, o to 60 is possible, but only just.

At its launch VW talked at some length about how clean the new engine is. They used graphs to show what they were on about but these looked only like Luftwaffe air traffic in the 1940s.

They were at pains to point out that the new engine has not been designed with speed in mind but glossed over the fact that it’s barely capable of independent movement.