What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (35 page)

Many, many years ago, during an economics lesson at school, I spotted a picture in the
Melody Maker
. It was an aerial shot of Emerson Lake & Palmer’s tour trucks thundering down some remote motorway. One had the word ‘Emerson’ picked out on the roof. One had ‘Lake’. And one had ‘Palmer’.

It was pretty cool. And so, while moving the
Top Gear Live
tour from a gig in Amsterdam to the next night’s venue in Antwerp, we saw no reason why we shouldn’t do something similar.

Actually, to be fair, the promoter did see a reason. ‘There are only three of you,’ he said. ‘We don’t need three coaches. We could go in a van.’ But we were most insistent. One would have ‘Top’ on the side. One would have ‘Gear’. And one would have ‘Live’.

And so it came to pass. And we were jolly pleased with ourselves as we trundled down the motorway. They were great coaches, with tea and coffee-making facilities and light snacks provided free of charge. This was rock-star living.

It was only when we arrived in Antwerp that we realized we’d driven the entire way with our buses in the wrong order. ‘Live Gear Top’, said the message. And that was just the start of the problem.

Antwerp is a small city with many narrow streets and cobbles so bumpy that even the prostitutes have to walk around in flat shoes. It was designed for pedestrians in sandals, or maybe the odd horse. Not a convoy of three fifty-seat coaches, which soon became as stuck as Winnie-the-Pooh in Rabbit’s hole. This caused a bit of a traffic jam.

Within a minute, one of the inconvenienced motorists expressed his displeasure by blowing his horn. And this unleashed a torrent as all the others joined in. The noise was incredible.

The drivers said we’d have to get out and finish the journey on foot, but for two reasons we didn’t want to do that. One, we’d be lynched, and two, if we continued to sit on board, everyone would assume they were being held up by a party of Japanese tourists.

‘Unlikely,’ said the promoter. ‘English is not the mother tongue in Belgium but they speak it well enough to work out the anagram of “Live Gear Top”.’ And so, with heavy hearts, James Emerson, Richard Lake and Jeremy Palmer emerged into the cacophony.

I’ve never heard anything so pointless. What did these people hope to achieve by sitting there, leaning on their hooters? Did they imagine that the coaches would simply disappear, crumbling to dust in the barrage of decibels? Or did they think that the noise would cause the offending drivers to think more clearly about how a solution might be found?

Fat chance of that. The car horn is like the screech of a frightened vervet monkey. It’s a warning. A precursor to impending doom. One blast is enough to make anyone look around. When you have a hundred horns, though, sounding continuously, it causes the brain to go into a sort of panicked mush.

You can’t think straight. You don’t know whether to go left or right, whether to run or stand your ground. So you just wait there, ghostly white in the headlight beams, looking as if every ounce of gorm you’ve ever had has suddenly migrated from your face to your feet. For all I know, the buses are still there. Because I didn’t just walk to the hotel. I ran.

I do not understand why the modern car has a hooter. Because, as we’ve established, it is useless at clearing an obstacle. And if you do have to use it to sound an alert to another driver, it means you weren’t anticipating the road ahead and what might happen
next. The horn, then, is an admission on your part that you’re a crap driver.

I blew mine the other day. I was making my way out of a petrol station and had spotted the hatchback pulling out of a parking space just ahead. Of course the driver had seen me. Cars are pretty big, and mine was a Ferrari so it was pretty loud and pretty red as well. You can’t sneak up on things in a Ferrari, so with that in mind, I kept a watchful eye on the hatchback, and kept going.

Sadly, though, it did too, and eventually I had no choice. I had to pip. What makes this incident even more harrowing is that the hatchback in question was a Peugeot. I should have known. I warned my daughter when she was learning to drive that she could forget all about mirror, signal, manoeuvre. The most important thing on the road is to be aware that Peugeots never, ever, do what you’re expecting them to do.

Just because they’re in the left lane and indicating left, that doesn’t mean they are actually going to turn left. Last summer, on these pages, I said I’d seen two accidents in one week. Both featured Peugeots. And still it goes on. You look, when you’re out and about, and I can pretty much guarantee that the next car you see upside down in a hedge or parked in a florist’s window display will bear the prancing lion on its nose.

I don’t know why the police bother with measuring tapes and photo evidence. In any two-car smash, it’s dead easy to work out who was to blame: the chap in the Peugeot.

I was driving one last week. It was the new 208 GTi, and I must say that, like many other cars in the range, it’s rather good. Peugeot is at pains to say that it’s not designed to be a word-for-word replica of the original 205 GTI. On the upside, this means you don’t get incredibly heavy steering and woeful unreliability. On the downside, you also don’t get riotously exuberant at-the-limit handling.

What you do get is the same turbocharged 1.6-litre engine as Mini uses in the Cooper S, four seats, a usable boot, a steering
wheel the size of a vicar’s saucer and the sort of character that causes you to drive along as if your hair’s on fire.

It’s not perfect. The gear change feels loose, and when you hook a tyre into the potholed apex of a bend, you can feel it banging and scrabbling through the steering wheel. But this doesn’t really put you off. In some ways it’s nice to feel that you’re part of the action and that the gearbox is rather more than a switch. It seemed a very human car. It’s also fairly well priced and well equipped. The satnav on my test car was very good, and the glass roof was a joy too.

Problems? Well, the seat gave me a bit of backache after an hour. But at my age a Vietnamese massage does that as well, so I can’t grumble too loudly. Worse was the 208 GTi’s tendency to settle to a 110 mph cruise. The Mini does this as well. It must be a characteristic of that engine and its acoustic qualities. But whatever; on a motorway you have to keep a constant watch on the speedo.

Overall I did like this car, but when all is said and done, the Ford Fiesta ST is better. However, the Peugeot does come with one feature that the Ford cannot match. When you are driving it, everyone gives you a wide berth.

18 May 2013

According to the promotional material, the MG6 was conceived, designed, engineered and built in Britain. It’s a great British name, and a great British car. A slice of Jerusalem among the dark, satanic mills of Germanic nonsense. A UKIP pin-up girl with windscreen wipers. Brown beer with a tax disc.

This is a car for people who grew up dreaming of driving a sporty B but who are now to be found at home, in their wing-backs, flicking through the channels and muttering about how there’s nothing to watch on television these days. It’s a car that takes them back to their youth. A car that reminds them that Britain was, and still is, the greatest country on earth. It’s the Spitfire, the hovercraft and Nelson. It’s Churchill. It’s Elgar. It’s Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Brunel.

Except it isn’t. Because it turns out that the MG6 is actually built in China by SAIC Motor – the company that now owns MG Rover (though not the name Rover). It is then shipped over to Birmingham, where a small team inserts the engine. Claiming that this car is British is like claiming that an Airfix model was built in your front room. It wasn’t. It was merely assembled there.

Yes, the car we buy here was styled in Britain, and some of the chassis work was done here too, with – whisper it – German components. But in essence, while this car may be pretending to be Kenneth More, it’s as Chinese as a chopstick.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because, typically, what happens when a Far Eastern country starts exporting cars to the West is you get a substandard product with a price that’s so low,
no one really cares that it’s held together with wallpaper paste and has an engine that sounds as if it’s running on gravel.

Then, in an alarmingly short time, the cars are suddenly as good as their European rivals. Toyota went from the Toyopet to the Lexus LFA in about five weeks. One minute Kia was making the woefully awful Rio, and the next it had the bloody good Cee’d.

The company behind the MG6 started with an advantage. It didn’t begin with a jungle clearing and a workforce that thought it was making dragons: it began with the underpinnings of the Rover 75 and employed people who navigated to work with their iPhone 5. In theory, then, the MG6 would drive quite well and come with a DFS everything-must-go price tag. Which would make it a tempting proposition even without the nonsensical
Last Night of the Proms-
style marketing.

So why, I wondered, was it so hard to book a test drive? Excuses were always made. Other phones were ringing. Other priorities had to be addressed.

Well, last week I sneaked behind the wheel for a short drive, and very quickly the reason became obvious. This car is not bad at all. It’s hysterically terrible.

Let’s start with the ignition key. You know those cheap electronic toys that you buy children from the gift shop on a cross-Channel ferry? Well, this has the quality of the wrapping in which they are sold. And naturally it didn’t work.

I learnt this outside the police station in Ladbroke Grove in west London. The traffic lights went green and I set off. But I didn’t because the car stalled and it would not restart. So I pushed it to the side of the road where, after several attempts, the diesel engine finally clattered into life.

At the next set of lights exactly the same thing happened again. And so at the third set I made sure it didn’t stall by summoning 3,000 revs and setting off nice and gently. This made the whole of Notting Hill smell of frazzled clutch.

There are some other interesting faults as well. This is not a
small car. It’s a little larger than a Ford Focus and a little smaller than a Mondeo. But inside it has the headroom of a coffin. Speaking of which, it didn’t do especially well in its Euro NCAP safety tests. The airbag didn’t inflate sufficiently well to stop the dummy driver’s head hitting the steering wheel, and while the feet and neck were well looked after, protection for the thighs and genitals was only ‘marginal’. I make no observation about that. Yet. Of course, as it’s a Chinese car that’s assembled in Longbridge, you would not expect much in the way of quality. And it doesn’t disappoint …

It’s a widely held belief that mass-produced plastic was developed around the turn of last century. Well, the dashboard on the MG6 appears to be fabricated from a plastic that pre-dates that. I think it may follow a recipe laid down in the Middle Ages, when villagers would use cattle horns to make rudimentary windows.

Naturally there are many sharp edges. There’s one in particular on the steering wheel that could probably give you an elegant paper cut on that sensitive bit of webbing between your index finger and thumb.

Then there’s the kung-fu cupholder. It’s not damped, as it would be in a normal European car, so when you push the button your drink leaps out onto your passenger’s leg like Cato from the Pink Panther films. And it is a struggle to get any can I’ve ever seen to fit in it.

I shall talk now about the steering. It’s electric. But only literally. It feels as though the steering wheel is connected to an egg whisk of some kind. Spin it fast enough and the blades turn, causing a vat of creamy milk to start thickening. After this happens it begins to revolve v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and that action produces a centrifugal force that turns the front wheels. It’s a neat idea but I’m not sure it works very well.

As a boy, I used to look at my dad driving and wonder how he knew how much to turn the wheel when going round a corner. Alarmingly, in the MG6 you don’t.

Last weekend in Scotland I encountered many members of the MG Owners’ Club, driving from breakdown to breakdown with dirty fingernails and big grins on their faces. They had their roofs down, despite the cold, and it all looked very hearty and rorty and James May-ish.

The MG6 offers an experience that is nothing like that. It may say MG on the rump but it is as far removed from its predecessors as you are from an amoeba. It’s a carrier bag with a Coco Chanel badge. And I think that’s rotten.

The whole car’s rotten, really, and here’s the clincher. It’s not that cheap. The Magnette model I drove is £21,195. And for that you can have a normal car that doesn’t lacerate your fingers, stall, refuse to start, bash your head in every time you go over a bump and ruin your gentleman sausage if you have a crash.

In the whole of April the new MG operation sold thirteen cars throughout the whole of the UK. I’m surprised it was that many.

26 May 2013

Monaco bills itself as a glittering jewel in the south of France. But in reality it’s a mostly overcast collection of people who choose to live far from their friends and family, in a 1960s council tower block, under the control of an extremely weird royal family, among a squadron of arms dealers and prostitutes.

And all so they can save a pound in tax. This makes it the world’s largest open prison for lunatics. And then, once a year, the grand prix circus rolls into town – and it all gets worse.

I stayed on a giant boat on what’s called the T-jetty. That’s pole position for the gin palaces, and you probably think that this would be heaven. Hot and cold running waitresses dropping tasty morsels into your mouth whenever you are breathing in the right direction. And some Formula One whizz-kid and his almost completely naked girlfriend waiting next door for you to nip round and chew the fat. That’s the message you get from the television pictures.

The reality is somewhat different. You hear of a party on a neighbouring boat, so you think you’ll pop by for a drink. Alas, every single person in Monaco has heard of the party also and has a similar plan. So, to prevent them all from getting on board, the boat’s captain has hired a French security team that stands about with curly-wurly earpieces making sure nobody gets on board at all.

You watch the men pleading and explaining that they are personal friends with the boat’s owner, but this is no good because he’s not at his own party. That’s the key to being a proper billionaire. Throw a party and then have dinner somewhere else.

Then you have the women, who are selected for admission purely, it seemed, on the basis of how naked they are. Amazingly the party does somehow happen, although everyone on board spends their entire evening making sure that they are talking to the most important person in the room. An example. I thought I’d introduce myself to Martin Whitmarsh, McLaren’s boss. But he was chatting to an Indian chap who was more important than me, so I was ignored. In fact, I was ignored so spectacularly by everyone that I ended up talking to the cabin boy for most of the night.

The next day you wake with a sore head. And to make everything more terrible, someone has pushed a microphone into a beehive and is blasting the resulting sound through the Grateful Dead’s speaker system across the whole principality. So you stagger about looking for Nurofen, eventually sourcing something appropriate from someone who’d crashed on a sofa. She was a nice girl. Apart from her Adam’s apple.

You then think it would be nice to go over to the paddock. But between your boat and the vast F1 motor homes is a 15-yard strip of water. And to cross it in a knackered dinghy with a Kenwood mixer on the back costs €20. That works out at more than £1 a yard. I think it would have been cheaper to use a private jet.

And it’s pointless anyway, because to collect the passes that have been supplied by Bernie Ecclestone, you need to go through a security barrier for which you need your pass. ‘
Non
,’ said the security guard.

This is one of the most important things about ‘doing’ Monaco for the grand prix. Yes, you need to spend all day smoking cigars the size of telegraph poles and wearing red trousers. That’s important, of course. But mostly you must be festooned with so many passes that you are in danger of slipping a disc. A lot of passes shows a lot of connections. None means you are paying another €20 to go back to your boat.

Then the race starts. And even though the boat on which I was staying was about the height of Nelson’s Column, and even
though I climbed right up to the radar mast, all I could see was the top of the cars’ air intakes, momentarily, as they sped past the swimming pool.

So I went into the cabin to watch it on TV, which was fine except I couldn’t hear what Martin Brundle was saying because of the din outside. It’s strange. Most sports are perfectly watchable without someone explaining what’s going on. But with motor racing you really do need Mr Brundle to tell you why no one is attempting to overtake the car in front. Or else it just looks like twenty-two thin young men driving around a town.

I’ll let you into a secret. Not one of the people on any of those boats saw the race. Nobody in the council blocks did either. In fact, the only people who could see more than a few feet of track were the real fans who’d arrived by train that morning in their branded Vodafone shirts and climbed the hill beneath the palace. They may have found it wasn’t worth the effort.

And increasingly that’s what I’m starting to think about F1. I love the idea of watching men race cars. But more and more I sense that, really, F1 is now merely televised science. It’s just earnest chaps staring at laptops. And then lodging protests against one another for the tiniest of things. And in Monaco, which is supposed to be the highlight of the season, it’s simply science in a big, daft wedding cake. I’d prefer to see a street race in Wakefield.

And there’s more. There was a time when we were told that F1 was the launch pad for new technology and new ideas that one day would filter down into our road cars. But I suspect it doesn’t even do that any more.

Which brings me to the Mazda CX-5. There are plenty of cars such as this on the market today. They’re called crossovers or soft-roaders and they are very popular with school-run mums and caravanners. And I struggle to think of a single thing they have in common with F1 racers.

In Britain the bestseller of the breed is the Nissan Kumquat – it’s not actually called that and I can’t be bothered to look up its
real name. But the only reason it’s the biggest seller here is … that it’s built here.

On paper the best is the Mazda. It’s cheaper to buy, cheaper to insure, cheaper to fuel and cheaper to tax than most of its main rivals. It’s faster and more powerful than lots of them, too. On paper it’s a no-brainer. The winner.

And it’s not bad on the road either. The ride is very good. The steering wheel is connected to the front wheels, and when you change up, the 2.2-litre diesel engine becomes a little more quiet. This, I suppose, is its chief drawback. It’s a little boring. Actually, scratch that. It’s catastrophically boring. It’s Jane Austen with cruise control.

There’s no pomp at all. There’s no kinetic energy recovery system. No paddle-operated gearbox. No carbon fibre. No aero. It’s a thing for the real world. The Monaco Grand Prix, on the other hand, really, really isn’t.

2 June 2013