Notes From the Hard Shoulder (11 page)

I've spent the last week driving a car with a bad battery, a dicky charging circuit and a less than reliable starter motor.

Come to think of it, I've spent much of the last 20 years driving cars like this and, to be perfectly honest, it's bloody boring. Few things in life are more useless than a car that won't start, so if its ability to do so is in any doubt, the best thing to do is leave it running.

All those years of jump leads and bump starts have scarred me. Every time I shut a car down, even a new one, a part of me wonders if it's going to start again. Irrational, I know, but to me it's rather like that sound of a car horn at the beginning of the Stones' 'Honky Tonk Women'. I've heard it a thousand times, but every time it comes on the radio in the car I look around to see who's beeping at me.

For this reason, I won't be test driving the new Citroen C2 'Stop&Start', a car that turns itself off every time it comes to a halt in the interests of the environment. Even if you simply pause at a zebra crossing, it cuts out. I'd be a bag of nerves.

I know, because around 10 years ago I tried something similar in the form of the VW EcoGolf, I think it was called. This was a normal Golf with a whopping battery and some rudimentary electronic controller that killed it at traffic lights and then fired it up anew when you pulled away. On a technical level, it seemed to work quite well. On a mental one, it was like a form of psychological torture used by an oppressive regime;
the sort that destroys a man's mind without leaving any visible wounds. I write as someone who recently completed a 300-mile journey in an old car without stopping the engine once, even during lunch and a short afternoon nap.

What, in any case, is the point of all this? Making a car that knows when to turn itself off can't be easy, and I suspect that thousands of Citroen's engineering man-hours have been devoted to the problem when they could have been better spent hunting down and despatching whoever was responsible for the Pluriel.

But no doubt someone, somewhere, has done a calculation to show that if every engine in Britain stopped for a few seconds at every junction we could reduce CO
₂
emissions by a billion tons a year, or something like that. This sort of thing is beginning to annoy me. We've had the one about turning the telly off instead of leaving it on standby, and sooner or later I'm going to calculate what reduction in CO
₂
could be achieved if every driver in the country saved a little vehicle weight by removing the owner's handbook from the glovebox. With so many cars, televisions, refrigerators and boilers in the land, it's easy to turn innocent human fallibility into some sort of climate crime.

Beer, for example, must be destroying the planet. If you drink beer, as I do, you have to get up in the night for a wee-wee. That means turning the light on and consuming a tiny bit of electricity. Negligible, really, but if every adult male is doing it, it can be shown to equate to another X tons of pollutant in the air.

Rambling is especially selfish. If you walk for 20 miles, I imagine you build up an enormous appetite.
This means using more gas or electricity to cook more food, and places a greater demand on the refrigeration at Sainsbury's. Since the Ramblers are one of the biggest organisations in the country, this must mean that stomping around in a kagoul is blighting the lives of our children.

And so it goes on. It would be interesting to know how much CO
₂
is being produced by the computers of environmentalists who generate fatuous statistics.

The facts are these. There is a finite supply of fossil fuel left and, in broad terms, consuming it is going to create the same amount of pollution. It doesn't matter whether I drive the Bentley and use it all up tomorrow, or drive something that conks out temporarily at every junction and eke it out for another few years. Conserving energy is ultimately fruitless and, more to the point, completely at loggerheads with the demands of a progressive world.

So – and assuming that fossil fuel consumption really is an issue – here's a suggestion. All the endeavour and ingenuity, all the time, equipment and resources, all the wit and learning; in short, every manifestation of human effort being wasted on the
C2 Stop&Start, the hybrid, the wind farm and the ecological washing machine – it should all be directed towards finding the alternative.

Not so long ago, driving a Ferrari or a Porsche would have invited accusations of being a right tosser. This was possibly fair enough, since the culture of the time said that anyone who took cars that seriously was probably a bit of a saddo.

Porsche and Ferrari have always taken themselves terribly seriously. Porsche bang on about 'excellence' and Ferrari about 'passion', as if they're the guardians of the proper expression of these conceits of the human condition. But it's all cant, really. Excellence is more important in the manufacture of synthetic heart valves, and passion manifests itself more properly in the bedroom. Attempting to express these things through one's choice of car was perhaps indicative of a few problems in the trouser department.

And how unimaginative was it, if you suddenly found yourself a bit flush, to go and buy a 911 or an
F360? The 911 was like the Hugo Boss suit of the successful executive, and choosing a Ferrari was as hackneyed as the expression 'just like mamma used to make' in the description of lasagne in an Italian restaurant menu. Thinking people would think of something a bit more original.

But something strange has happened. All of a sudden, the 911 and the F430 are what the clever people are buying. What were for so long clichés are now rising from a mire of confused car culture like swords of truth. Crikey.

I'm not going to claim that everything's rosy. There's still far too much tasteless Ferrari
merchandise for my
liking, and far too much talk of the significance of
Formula One. These people are claiming that the
F430 was developed using the computer 'normally reserved for
Michael Schumacher's racing car', but this is obviously bollocks. Why would they do this? Does Michael Schumacher not let other Ferrari people use his stapler?

And the 911 isn't entirely in the clear, because Richard Hammond has just ordered one, and he uses hair product. But even so, the
911 and F430 are suddenly very cool.

One reason for this is that people are once again taking cars very seriously. They may be portrayed as the biggest threat to society since Hitler, and we may be encouraged to feel guilty about them and to want a small diesel hatchback, but deep down people are very, very switched on to what makes a great car. I cannot remember a time when so many people have wanted to engage me in highly informed conversation about cars and what they're like. And I don't just mean the bores from my local; I'm including people like my neighbour Ben, who pinned me against the wall for a good half hour to talk about a Mercedes Benz he'd been looking at, even though he can't drive. And earlier this year I discovered that my mother understood the effect of low-profile tyres on ride and handling.

If we're going to take cars seriously, we need serious cars. Some serious cars that spring to mind are the Bentley
Arnage T, the Fiat Panda, the Vauxhall
Astra VXR, the
Lexus GS430 (no, really), the Citroen
C6 and the Renault Grande Espace. In the arenas in which they compete, they do what they're supposed to do
with conspicuous thoroughness, to the enduring satisfaction of the intelligent and informed owner.

It's the same with the 911 and the F430. They're superb cars that work brilliantly, and in this day and age that's what matters once again.

Viewers will remember that we had the 911 up against the BMW
M6 and the Aston V8 on the Isle of Man a few weeks back. I was expecting to go for the Aston, but after a few hundred miles I realised that the 911 was still a better car. It's always difficult to explain what makes a 911 great; in fact, on first acquaintance it feels decidedly wonky. The driving position is still slightly odd and old-fashioned, and the engine is still ostensibly in the wrong place. But once it gets under your skin – and it will – it's there for good. Maybe there is something in heritage, bloodline and all that other guff that Porsche would put forward in the showroom.

There certainly is where Ferrari is concerned. There's more utter cock talked about Ferrari than about any other subject on earth, even football. But there is something about a small V8 Ferrari that cannot be found in any other car. It's not mystique or any of that nonsense. It's because it works, brilliantly.

When we took the F430, the
Zonda and the Ford GT to France, I became unutterably convinced of this. The Fezza is the connoisseur's choice, the one that the true lover of cars and driving will appreciate the most. Surely it's no coincidence that the F430 is the product of a company that has been devoted to the supercar cause for decades?

You simply cannot fake this stuff. Other makers seem to imagine that they can leap straight into the
realm occupied by Porsche and Ferrari with some ludicrous performance figures, seductive styling and a bit of savvy marketing. But some of us know better. Other cars may be more fashionable, but look beyond that and you will discover that the others aren't actually as good at being great cars.

But here's what really amazes me. The Porsche and the F430 no longer look ostentatious. Every other expensive sports coupe or supercar has become so bound up with bling and football that these two are now appearing to go quietly amidst all the fuss. The latest 911 is one of the most subtly beautiful yet, but remains workmanlike and discreet. The interior is superbly assembled yet is still, above all else, entirely functional, whereas the Aston's interior is disappointing in its details and smacks of flim-flam.

The F430 is clearly still a touch flamboyant, especially in spider form, but it is inoffensively styled. It's more like a perfectly turned ankle than a pumped-up cleavage. Compare it with the
Zonda thing that Hammond was driving in France. It's covered with bits of carbon fibre, which is now the Burberry check of the supercar world. It's all tinsel and has nothing to do with the joy of driving.

Call me old-fashioned, but my first requirement of a cooker is not that it's brushed stainless steel; it's that it roasts joints.

The other day, I and my two
Top Gear
colleagues had a bit of a race. The venue was
Castle Combe circuit, the cars were three '70s Italian exotics, and we were deeply embroiled in one of our old-car challenges.

Laps were driven against the clock; there were points won for beating a certain time and points lost for being late. Usual sort of thing.

This much I can reveal. I was last, in an old Lamborghini, and I'm absolutely delighted. I've never been especially good at circuit driving, I have immense difficulty in driving fast and talking to the camera at the same time, and in any case I always end up caring about our old nails too deeply. These are noble and dignified reasons for defeat, and better than the lame snivelling about misfires and wonky brakes that we're used to hearing from the other two.

Better still, the Castle Combe experience helped me to resolve one of the great conundrums of my life as a motoring journalist. Perhaps uniquely amongst my contemporaries, I have never done a track day. And now I've decided that I'm never going to. Never.

For what, exactly, is the point? Apart from the sartorial horror of having to dress up in Nomex overalls and gaily coloured fireproof booties, a track day achieves nothing.

Some of you may be thinking that a track day would make me a better driver. But I'm afraid this is just a rumour put around by advanced driving instructors who run track days, rather in the way that bald men are more virile according to bald men. A race track is
not like the real world. There are no pedestrian crossings or bus lanes and all the cars are going in the same direction. I have never driven down the old A40 – one of my favourite roads – to find that someone has thoughtfully placed some fluorescent bollards at the turn-in points for bends. Neither has the local council erected a sign saying BRAKE just before that sharp right-hander near Thame. These are things for me to enjoy working out for myself.

And then there's
Frank Melling,
Telegraph Motoring's
voice of classic motorcycling. He has vowed to take me on a bike track day, but I've decided this is a poor idea as well. I'd probably fall off or end up with a bad dose of Old Bike Face, a skin condition brought on by slavish adherence to classic motorcycling principles and riding through winter in an open-face helmet.

And why would I want to be a better rider? As the marketing people might say, it would be off-message vis-à-vis my core brand values of being a bit useless. If I was any good at riding a motorcycle, all the fear and fun would go out of it. Likewise, if I was good at driving on a circuit, I would be completely redundant at
Top Gear,
where it's my job to be Captain Slow and come last whenever we have a race.

Another school of thought says that track days will reveal something about your car. This much at least appears to be true, since the old Lambo revealed a '70s Malteser. I had braked heavily and rather late for a sudden chicane, or some other track feature with no parallel on real roads and put there purely to annoy me, and saw the fluff-covered vintage confection shoot
out from under the passenger's seat. But as I lifted off to turn in (or however these track types articulate the perfectly ordinary business of driving) it disappeared again. I haven't seen it since.

Elsewhere, the rear-view mirror fell off on a lefthander and hit me in the face, and my mobile phone disappeared down one of those crannies 'twixt seat and console designed to admit a mobile phone but not an adult hand. Remarkably, they knew how to do this even in 1975. And under the passenger seat of every car there is, somewhere on the seat-sliding mechanism, a huge blob of thick and filthy grease. This is found on brand-new cars and I can now confirm that it's still there 30 years later, awaiting the moment when someone has to retrieve his wallet after a track day.

Few things in life are more futile than a track day. It is an affront to the liberty and independence offered by the car – not to mention the awesome achievements of the world's tireless road-builders – to wantonly drive in such a way that you will, inevitably, end up exactly where you started one minute thirty-nine point two five seconds later and needing some new tyres.

Or, worse, wedged between some old ones and needing a whole new car.