Notes From the Hard Shoulder (17 page)

We're dealing with the sharp end of the law here, so for the usual legal reasons our 'victim"s name has to be concealed. I can tell you that he's in his mid-20s, and that even in the dimness of the Omega's rear seat his whole head looks a mess – dirt, bruises, old scars and vivid new stitches, the legacy of one of the roughest upbringings the country has to offer. The nature of our meeting suggests the
inside
of his head isn't in much better shape either, the legacy of a hard drug habit. 'A typical Glaswegian thug,' I am discreetly informed. We'll call him Bastard.

'Why'd you do it this time then, Bastard?' asks the driver, a hint of despair in his voice.

'I can't help it, man, I'm addicted to it.'

'You did it for the chase, yeah?'

'Aye. I'd love a smoke, you know.'

But smoking isn't allowed in police cars, and is impossible with your hands cuffed behind your back.

The atmosphere in the police Omega is relaxed, anticlimactic, friendly even.
PC Kyle Morrison and Bastard are obviously well known to each other. Some of the 32 previous convictions have seen to that. They chat.

'That was the same route you took last time, you know,' says Morrison, incredulously, as we pull up at base and our fugitive climbs awkwardly out. Another officer discreetly holds a lit cigarette to his lips so he can have a few drags before being bundled inside for questioning. As he disappears, Bastard turns to me. 'You from a newspaper then?'

'Car
magazine.'

His face lights up. 'Max Power, yeah?' And then he's gone. The dark car pound is near silent except for the lurch of cooling engines and the barking of Brodie the police dog from the back of the
Volvo, and the air is heavy with the stink of roasted brakes and clutch plates. The bastard has just nicked another car.

Chief Inspector
Alex Martin of the
Strathclyde Police Traffic Group is well aware that police pursuit work is a controversial subject. Speed, as any traffic cop who has just stopped you will be quick to assert, kills.

'There's always been a car-
crime problem in the north side of Glasgow especially,' he explains. The area he covers is host to some notorious housing estates, where
car theft is just one branch of a lawlessness that involves serious drugs, burglary and violence. Traditionally, one third of all vehicle thefts in Strathclyde have been made in his area, and over a third of the force's car chases take place on the Chief Inspector's patch.

'If it became known that the police would never exceed the speed limit we'd never catch any of these bad guys,' he says – and these are guys who are often 'on the fringes of other criminal activity', guys who always make a run for it. 'But at the end of the day our people are ordinary drivers and subject to the same rules as everyone else, and should they be involved in an accident while driving a police vehicle, then that will be fully investigated. Should there be sufficient evidence, and I admit there are occasions when there has been, then they are reported for careless driving.
Our guys are not immune, and I believe that's only right.'

The Scottish approach to the issue, like some aspects of Scottish law, is slightly different from the English one but is still based around intensive driver training. It's obvious that Martin and his men regard the driving school at Scotland's
Tulliallen Police College as quite simply the best in the world. But where some English traffic cops are taught specific pursuit driving skills, the Scots are not. The point is that police driving should not be a specialism, but rather just driving to a highly advanced standard. This is critical to Martin's safety argument. 'We believe there's no need to teach pursuit driving; if you can teach someone to drive safely at speed, that should be enough.'

The seriousness of Glasgow's car-
crime problem led, in 1994, to the formation of Strathclyde's special Stolen Vehicle Squad, a collaboration between the traffic and dog departments and the outfit we are to join for a Monday night shift. The dog is a crucial but last-resort member of the team: in the event of a 'bale out' – when the thief abandons the car and legs it – then the dog can be called in to bring him down. One member of each shift is always a specialist dog-handler, a man who lives with the dog at home and work and will probably adopt it as a pet at the end of its working life. It can be hard on the dog – last year one was stabbed by a desperate fugitive.

Rivalling the dogs as stars of the SVS roadshow are two fully marked-up Volvo
T5 estates. They are standard cars but for the usual police paraphernalia: a dog pen that fills half the load bay and extends into the
nearside rear seat to allow a quick exit through the door, and uprated pads and discs sourced from 'a racing outfit'. The Volvos were chosen for reasons of acceleration, braking and handling that allow it to keep touch with a recklessly driven lesser car without taking risks at junctions, red lights and any other hazards at which a police driver
must
slow down.

The two Volvos usually work in conjunction with a fully equipped but unmarked car that can scout unobtrusively and then call in the marked cars if necessary. The T5s are famous among the locals. If absolutely necessary, a police helicopter can also be called into action.

The squad is successful. 'Car crime
is
going down,' says Martin. Last year the outfit made 348 arrests and recovered stolen vehicles worth half a million pounds. The shift starts at 19.00 hours.

The rear seat of a police car. A stiff-shirted, slightly intimidating figure up front, and the constant crackle of radio that is the leitmotif of law enforcement. I am in tonight's unmarked car, Rover 800 callsign Tango Mike Eight, with
PC Malcolmson.

By 19.30 reports come through of a recklessly driven silver Honda, registration unknown but possibly stolen, on one of the Possil Park housing estates. The plain car's siren goes on and I am treated to the curious sound of a police car from the inside: strangely muffled, constant, without the doppler effect. We drive briskly through the town – 'making progress', the police would call it. I am forbidden by the terms of my being here to record the speeds reached, but in any case when I ask how fast we're going Malcolmson says
'thirty' without hesitation. He later also warns me to be careful what I say if we become involved in a pursuit – the standard in-car video is now equipped with sound recording, so that the mandatory police driver's commentary can supplement the video evidence in court. 'Very helpful to the jury,' says my driver; not so helpful if I'm screaming blue murder from the back seat.

But the Honda has gone to ground. Back at base we meet up with the two marked cars and Brodie, the German shepherd which, at a word from his master,
PC Gordon Harper, would pin me against the wall. 'Otherwise he could go into a schoolyard full of kids and happily play around.' Good dog.

An hour's cruise around in Omega Tango Mike Six introduces me to the Ruchill estate, dilapidated epicentre of Glasgow's car crime and a place where law-breaking often begins in childhood. 'We stopped a car last week,' says
PC Andy Pryde. 'The driver was 15, and there was a 14-year-old, two 13-year-olds and a 12-year-old on board too.' A burned-out Astra in a strip of waste ground stands like a portent; there is a soft tinkle of broken glass as a hurled bottle falls short of the car. The police have no friends here.

As I switch to the T5 at 21.15 another sighting of the renegade Honda comes through, lights and sirens go on and the Volvo bounces off its rev limiter as it screams to another area of
Possil Park. I catch sight of a scrawled slogan on a derelict wall – 'fuck the polis'. I was warned that Brodie has a strange sixth sense for crime, and as we enter the estate he begins to bark
madly. We find the abandoned Honda
Civic, largely intact, but the steering column surround and ignition barrel are torn apart. 'Cars are still too easy to steal,' confirms PC Pryde. A gang of young lads hangs around 10 yards off, watching. The cops know one of them may well be the culprit, but no one's going to grass anybody up here.

Honda Civics are popular tonight. At 22.10 the radio jabbers out reports of a stolen dark-red one. Again we shriek to its last known location, a residential area about half a mile square. The drivers know the roads like cabbies; know that if they lurk at the two likely exits from the estate while the plain car goes in, they might catch the Honda as it bolts. If it's still in there. We sit with the windows open, listening for the squeal of tyres that is the signature of
joyriding. Nothing. After over an hour we admit defeat and return to base for tea break.

At midnight, with the kettle not yet boiled, the hand-held radio delivers a cool, emotionless report that the Honda has been sighted on the run. The world goes mad, cups and chairs fly as the squad scrambles for its cars. I find myself back in the Omega, grappling with the rear seat belt – this is a police car – as insane acceleration and cornering toss me around the rear bench. The three cars split up and head for the last sighting at the Milton estate, hoping to outflank the 'target vehicle' on all sides.

The
Rover spots it first. The radio explodes with instructions aimed at getting a marked car in pursuit, after which the Rover will back off but stay in touch – its job then is to video the action from behind in the
hope of presenting the bigger picture. Within a minute the Volvo has latched on to the Honda's tail.

But we go the other way, drawing on detailed road knowledge to box the Honda in and contain the pursuit. Across a strip of rough ground I glimpse the lightless Civic pursued by the wailing T5.1 see it again, going the other way, as we jockey for an intercepting position. The choreography, absurdly, is reminiscent of a Keystone Cops car chase but the mood is deadly earnest.

We make the interception, but the Honda is driven hard at us and PC Morrison backs off – a deliberate collision is not an option. We join the end of the flashing, bawling train and peel off again. I realise then that the Civic will never break away from the housing estate – it is a matter of time and careful manoeuvring, manoeuvring at speeds quicker than I can think or blurt my own commentary into my tape recorder. The swerving, bucking Honda is ever more contained, driven into decreasing circles of hopelessness. Crowds form on pavements and jeer at the police cars. Missiles are thrown. A brick strikes the windscreen of the Rover and destroys it; another does for a Volvo door skin.

An officer on foot appears as we move in from the flank again – I honestly couldn't tell you where or when he was dropped off by a fourth car – and deploys Stop Stick. This, an evolution of the notorious Stinger, is an extending, triangular-section aluminium strip with razor sharp edges, but shrink-wrapped in plastic for safe handling. It is flung across the road just as the Honda appears, and I actually see it drop as the tyres are savaged. In the split second before the pursuing
Volvo arrives at the same place it has been whipped away by a cord.

Now the Civic slews across an open expanse towards a corner bound in by raised pavements and iron bollards, the Volvo still glued to its tail. We move in on its open flank. It cannot escape. Yet still the driver won't give up, aiming for a gap between the metal posts and mounting the pavement with an audible clang from the Honda's nearly naked wheels. The Volvo cannot follow – insufficient ground clearance. But the Omega, with its higher ride height and sump guard specified as a result of painful experience, can. We pursue the now decrepit Civic until its suspension finally collapses. In the time it takes me to climb through the rear door PCs Morrison and Pryde have pinned the culprit to the ground and handcuffed him. Car thieves have been known to be armed.

Calm, professional detachment has immediately asserted itself. I'm reeling from the sheer terror of it all, but the aftermath of the chase is deeply sobering. Someone's Civic LSi is completely trashed, two police cars are damaged, cooked brake pads and discs will all be replaced as a matter of course. It seems a destructive and expensive way of collaring someone who, the police would say, should have been banged up long ago anyway.

But I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that the experience has given me a ghoulish thrill. The whole issue of joyriding and police pursuit is heavily clouded with political and sociological arguments, but in the end nicking cars is nicking cars. And I have to say we got the bastard.

There must be more important things in life than the colour of your car, but anyone who has ever owned a brown one will know that, somehow, it matters.

I've had 15 cars in my motoring lifetime and seven of them, including the current one, have been dark blue. A psychologist friend tells me this is a good thing. He points to something called the
'achievement motive', which says that dark colours are preferred by people who are going places. You might imagine that go-ahead types are roaring around in yellow sports cars, but a little study of any merchant bank's car park or the spaces reserved for our captains of industry reveals that the real movers and shakers of this world are tooling around in sober-hued executive expresses. Bright-red Ferraris and mint-green Porsche 911s are obviously for playboys, tarts and wasters.

So I'm quite pleased to have a dark-blue Jaguar but sometimes I look at it out of the window and wish it was orange.

This wouldn't be a problem if I had an MCC Smart, because for between £450 and £700 you can have all the Smart's plastic body panels changed for something completely different. There is an official Smart centre within half a mile of my house and the job takes about 30 minutes, or less time than some haircuts. I could drop the car off, have the rug rethink and arrive home a new person. The Smart is the only car that allows you to do this.

The
Top Gear
staff have a Smart + Passion Cabrio and, predictably, within a few months of taking
delivery they were bored with it being all black. They thought it would be a good idea if I drove it all the way back to Smartville, the factory in Sarreguemines on the French/German border, to effect an identity crisis.

The blokes down the pub didn't, reasoning that a Smart was inappropriate for a 960-mile round trip. But this is missing the point. If the Smart isn't usable as a normal car, then it will actually contribute to the very problem that it purports to help solve – that of urban mobility and parkability. A pure city car is a pointless idea, as it will require every owner to have another, proper car for long journeys. That means that for every Smart prowling the streets of London, Manchester and Edinburgh there would be another, full-size car parked by the road somewhere, which amounts to one-and-a-half cars where previously there was only one. Bad result.

So with a fruity rasp from the 54bhp three-pot, that staunch mucker
Lensman Debois and I headed for the far side of France laden with 1,001 pieces of camera equipment and one spare pair of pants for me. On paper the
Top Gear
Smart is a mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive, two-seater convertible Mercedes, but this won't quite wash with your mates, nor does it quite stack up on the A26 out of Calais, where the car's top speed of around 84mph is pretty much smack on the French autoroute speed limit. A long incline leaves it slightly winded and turning on the air con is like giving it a swift punch in the guts.

I have one or two other minor criticisms. The
tachometer, mounted in a sort of robot's eyeball thing on top of the dash, can be swivelled away from your
line of sight. Why? So your passenger can keep an eye on the revs for you? And why must cheeky little cars always have cheeky little horns? The Smart's hooter sounds like the battery-operated Pifco item I had on my childhood bicycle and for some reason seems to be directed into the cabin rather than outwards from underneath where the bonnet would be if the Smart had one.
Toot-toot!
Hello, said Noddy.

Otherwise, driving the Smart on a long journey is a bit like driving a car. The seating position is good, the radio works and the mechanicals thrum away fairly unobtrusively. It's surprisingly comfortable. In fact, from the driving seat it is easy to forget that the Smart is such a small car, because the view forward is like that out of a mid-size MPV.

But then, the Smart isn't really a small car at all, just a very short one. The original Mini or Cinquecento is a truly small car: a proper four-seat car built to a slightly smaller scale than a normal one. The Smart is to the same scale as an A-class Merc; it's just that, like so many things in life, it comes to a rather abrupt end.

Shortness has its advantages – it's obviously good for parallel parking – but a few busy French towns reveal that shortness counts for Jacques Sheet in terms of traffic-busting capability. In a traffic jam, the eight-foot, two-and-a-half-inch Smart has to wait in line just as the 17-foot Bentley does, because the length of the road is not the issue. To beat congestion you need to be narrow, which is why couriers ride motorcycles.

But it does get there. After 10 hours of autoroute, routes nationales, evil coffees and restorative games of bébéfoot, we arrived at Smartville. It's a large and very
modern complex shaped like a giant plus sign and clad in white tiles, which can presumably be changed for red ones if they get fed up with it. Completed and brightly painted Smarts spill out of the end of one arm like, well, Smarties. Touring the plant, you have to be careful not to step on the moving rubber roadway or you could end up back outside again.

At the centre of the plus sign is a large, open-plan training and fault-rectification area where we parked our black Smart. Trolleyloads of replacement panel sets like Airfix model components were wheeled out for my consideration. It's a bit like buying a new pair of shoes, really. It occurred to me that the Smart would be a great car to buy in kit form since, like Camelot in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
it's only a model.

I quite liked the red panels, but then realised that the thick strut that would be the B pillar if the Smart were a complete car would always be black, as it's part of the Tridion safety frame that forms the rigid core of the thing. Didn't really go, so I sent those away.

Silver was quite nice too, but having gone all that way I fancied something a bit more radical. Eventually, realising that it wasn't my car anyway, I selected something called
Numeric Blue. The raffishly named and immensely patient
Gerard Frangart and
Raphael Marques shouldered me aside, went at the Smart with power tools and fists and, not much more than 30 minutes later, we had something in pale blue and plastered with random numbers. Absurd, really, because the V5 registration document still says it's black.

Within a few miles of beginning the return journey I began to suspect that the whole thing was a terrible
mistake. Confirmation came at a roadside burger van, whose proprietor was careful to establish that we worked for a good manly car magazine before agreeing to a photograph of his premises with the gaily coloured Smart in the foreground. Then, prophetically, we got a puncture and were shafted by the owner of a small rural garage.

The Smart's funky enough as it is. A true eccentric doesn't need a silly hat to be recognised as one, and the Smart was enough of a novelty item in plain black. It's a bad comedian who laughs at his own joke, after all. I also began to worry about how the
Top Gear
staff would take it. They went home for the weekend leaving a black Smart parked outside and would return to discover that a conceptual artist had been at it with a tin of psychedelic alphabet soup. I quickly arranged for the original panels to be shipped home as well, just in case.

The Smart, in the end, doesn't need to make a statement. It's convincing enough as a car. In fact, I think I might buy one, because, on returning home, I discovered another advantage of extreme shortness.

The back half of my garage is full of the usual stiff paint brushes, broken bicycles, Wellington boots, unidentified tinned substances and 'useful' offcuts of wood. Buying just the front half of a car is going to be a lot easier than clearing all that stuff out.

And they do it in a very nice dark-blue colour.