Born to Be Riled (5 page)

Nissan announced that its really rather good 300ZX
would not be imported any more because the cost of making it comply with new noise and exhaust regulations meant it was no longer viable.

So what? It was a nice car sure, but it was like losing a distant acquaintance, a bloke who you used to see in the pub from time to time. There are lots of other blokes in the pub.

Then word crept out of Italy that Bugatti had financial difficulties, and that production of the turbocharged V12 EB110 had ceased. This was a bit more serious.

But let me assure petrolheads everywhere that in 1996 things are going to get a whole lot worse.

By far the most significant casualty is the Ford Escort Cosworth. Launched in 1992 amid reports that there were now more car thieves in Britain than motorists, it was burdened with whopping insurance premiums, and Ford didn’t help matters by making it rather expensive.

So far, they’ve sold 7000 and that, in Ford’s book, is just not enough. It’s an interesting point this, but if you pick up a dictionary in Ford’s headquarters, you’ll find the word ‘sentimentality’ has been deleted.

No really, it’s true. Ford owns 25 per cent of Mazda and it too has started 1996 with an announcement that by far its best car is off to God’s recycling bin.

The RX7 was a Japanese car that didn’t look Japanese. It’s what the E type would have looked like today and, with its turbocharged Wankel engine, it could go like stink too.

There was no room inside for anyone over 2ft 6in but that didn’t really matter. I used to enjoy my rare sightings of this oriental Batmobile – only 150 were sold in Britain – but not any more.

And it’s the same deal with the Volkswagen Corrado. Here was a handsome coupé which could provide a driving experience that was almost sexual. No car costing less than £20,000 could even get close, but last I heard it was coughing up blood and looking a bit green around the air intakes.

I am also concerned about the health of the Dodge Viper. There’s talk of new hardtop versions but I’ve heard that the roadster is about to be axed. It seems that each one sold costs Chrysler a few quid, and that in business this is a ‘bad thing’.

Other cars causing concern include the Lamborghini Diablo, the Honda NSX and the Lotus Esprit.

You’re starting to get the picture. Fast, truly exciting cars are being killed off so that pretty soon the officers will all be gone, leaving us with a field full of enlisted men.

The people with green hair are winning, and this is more baffling than an early Genesis lyric.

When I was 18, I had many big ideas which neither my housemaster nor parents would take seriously. I was a stupid and spotty person with a predilection for cap-sleeved T-shirts and ELP, and I was therefore daft. Almost daily, I was told, ‘No Clarkson, you are a fool and you may not wear training shoes for school.’

But today, people with army jackets and odd hair decide to live in trees, and yet we think they have something intelligent to say. If I was a reporter charged with the task of talking to these morons, my first question would be, ‘If you’re so bright, how come you aren’t running Unilever?’

Newbury is being strangled by traffic jams. Local traders are watching their businesses go to the wall. The
environment suffers as trucks and diesel cars sit belching their carcinogenic fumes into primary school classrooms.

Common sense dictates that a bypass should be built, but no… a few not-in-my-backyard locals have teamed up with a bunch of women who like to breast-feed sheep in public, and there’s going to have to be a re-run of the Somme to get the bulldozers through.

The trouble is that a bypass means that cars and trucks will be able to travel more quickly, and ‘quickly’ in 1996 is a dirty word, like ‘profit’ was in 1979. We are forever being told by imbeciles that they want people to think of speed in the same terms as drunken driving.

And they’re winning. According to a report a reader sent in, I see that Buckinghamshire County Council is to recruit thousands of volunteers to drive around at or below the speed limit to slow everyone down.

More amazing still, the local police force is backing the scheme where interfering busy bodies and pensioners will tootle around country lanes in their Austin Maxis at 7mph.

To these people and their green-haired brethren in Berkshire the fast car is a symbol of all that’s wrong today, but what they just can’t understand is that fast cars don’t have to be driven quickly. I have been known to go past schools in my 145mph Jaguar at 15mph.

The trouble is that this is a common-sense argument and that do-gooders with their politically correct shoes don’t have any common sense. Arguing with people as stupid as this is like arguing with a mug of tea.

Second, he believes in all sorts of alternative medicine which, from personal experience, I know to be nonsense. I have had a man stick needles in my ears to cure hay fever, but I sneezed so much they all shot out. And when I have a hangover, I could eat dock leaves till the cows come home but you just can’t beat a Disprin.

And third, he is separated from the world’s second most beautiful woman.

Against this sort of background, it is easy to see why I was on Urquhart’s side in
To Play the King
.

But now Prince Charles has shown himself not only to be a decent cove, but also the kind of leader that this country needs. Unlike John Major, he obviously has rather more than two pubic hairs in his underpants.

In fact, he must be hung like a horse because he has actually dared to take on the tiny, tiny minority of homo-sexualists who sit around in Camden telling everyone else not only what they can and can’t say, but also what they can and can’t think.

Time and again in recent years I’ve been cornered by these wishy-washy liberals who think that the motor car is the seven-headed beast from Revelation, and there’s been
no way out. My passion is killing the planet and they’re on the moral high ground, wagging their fingers.

Well, now the future King of England has given me a royal seal of approval to fight back.

So here goes. Women can’t drive. Immigrants need to take a driving test before being allowed on the roads in Britain. Old people should have to hand in their licences at the age of 65.

And when I meet someone I know to be homosexual I can’t help staring at their bottom, wondering.

But most of all, that American boy who went round Singapore spray-painting cars got what was coming to him. Apparently he’ll be scarred for life. Diddums. My heart bleeds.

In pubs throughout the land and on every golf course, people are whispering to one another about how they think flogging is a good thing.

When I left the house the other morning to find that someone had sawn the rear spoiler off my Escort Cosworth during the night, I was speechless with rage. To the casual observer, my body language suggested that I had inadvertently spilled some sulphuric acid in my lap.

Now, the politically correct say that the thief, when apprehended, should be taken to court, addressed by his Christian name and let off with a stern warning. I want him beaten to within an inch of his life, and everyone I know who has had a car vandalized thinks the same way.

Apparently, a radio station did some kind of straw poll about that American vandal and found that 97 per cent of its listeners think the Singapore authorities treated him fairly. The other 3 per cent, by the way, had beards. Yet if anyone says ‘bring back the birch’ on television or in the
papers, they’re labelled as far right extremists. So no one dares do it. Political correctness has stifled discussion and debate in this country to the point where 97 per cent of the population daren’t voice an opinion in case someone from the Camden thought police is listening.

But now, thanks to Prince Charles, you can go home tonight, beat your kids, eat a rare steak, go out in your V8-powered car, sleep with a woman without using a condom and then have a Capstan Full Strength. In other words, you should do what you’ve always done.

Only now you’ve no need to be embarrassed about it.

But here in the Cotswolds, in the last two weeks, we’ve had an ice age, a plague of frogs, mice and fog so thick you’ve needed a chain saw to get out of the drive in the morning. Today, the locals are expecting locusts.

For 15 years I lived in London and every day it was the same: 57 degrees and a bit of drizzle round tea time. I’d forgotten what extremes can do to a man, and his car.

Yes, we had burst pipes too, and it was a nuisance, but this was a flea bite compared to what was happening in the drive.

On the day when it dipped to minus 20 in Glasgow, it was minus 68 here and the weather people were talking about freezing rain. Well what we got in Oxfordshire was
a sort of see-through gravel which encased my Jaguar in an ice shell.

The doors should unlock themselves when commanded to do so by the remote control device, but they were as good as welded shut by the ice. I was out there with most of what Saxa made in 1995, and all sorts of sprays, for nearly an hour before I could get in.

As you’d expect, the car started, but all was not well. Both the anti-lock brake and traction-control warning lights stayed on. In exactly the sort of weather I needed these things, they had decided to stay in bed.

I couldn’t even get out of the drive. It may be gravel but the see-through ice pellets had encased it in a sort of ultra-slippery aspic, so that each touch of the throttle pedal was interpreted by the rear wheels as an instruction to impersonate a washing machine on its final spin cycle.

I’d been missing London badly and this was icing on the cake. The traffic may only move at 13mph in the capital but at least it moves. After ten minutes of trying to go forwards, I’d slithered backwards about 10 feet, and bumped into the stable block.

So what. We had the Volvo, a car built for such extremes. Er, no. I chiselled my way in, fired it up, hit the heater button and directed the warm air flow at the windscreen… which split clean in two.

What really annoyed me was that my mother-in-law’s Y-registered Fiesta worked perfectly. It would have rubbed salt in the wounds, but we didn’t have any left.

I considered firing up the lawnmower, but as it’s a convertible I resorted to the Volvo, complete with its bifocal windscreen.

Largely, the roads were passable provided you never felt
the need to exceed 20mph, but every 15 minutes someone came on the radio to say that we should all stay at home unless our journey was a matter of life and death. Well we’d run out of lavatory paper, so does that count?

I wouldn’t mind, but they’re still at it. Since the arctic weather moved over to New York we’ve had fog, high winds, torrential rain, and on each occasion the radio traffic people have told us to stay at home.

Well listen here guys, if I stay at home, you get a cat playing with some wool on a Thursday instead of
Motor-world
. If a doctor stays at home, people die. If snowplough drivers stay at home, the roads get even worse. If shop assistants stay at home, we can’t buy loo roll.

The trouble is that people listen to these radio idiots and overreact. They still go out, but they set their mental cruise controls at one.

Last Saturday, I pulled out of the drive right behind a B-registered Maestro which was being driven by a man who had turned his high-intensity rear lights on in November.

The fog was just bad enough to make overtaking dangerous so I was forced to do the 16 mile drive to Banbury, and the blessed relief of the M40, at 1mph.

When I came home at night, the fog had been replaced by astonishing rain and a wind that was moving people’s bungalows around. But I could see, and I was going to overtake people… except for one thing. I’ve forgotten how to do it.

A recent survey said that the average driver only uses full beam headlights for 2 per cent of the time at night, which seems about right. In town you never use them, on a motorway you never use them and on country roads
these days, something is always coming the other way.

Think about it. Only as recently as 15 years ago, you would brush aside slower-moving traffic like you dismiss bits of mince pie that have dropped onto your new Christmas jumper. But hand on heart, when did you last overtake someone?

It’s no better during the day either. On the rare occasions you find yourself on a normal road you can see a stream of cars heading off into the distance, so even when it’s safe to go past the car in front you don’t bother, because you’ll only have to do the same thing over and over and over again.

Plus, there is a similarly train-like concoction coming the other way. The British A road today has become like a railway line. The carriages are the cars, and the engine is that B-registered Maestro.

Overtaking has become a forgotten and pointless art for people in this country, as Damon Hill seems happy to prove every other weekend.

I learned very little, but I do recall being taught that the human being was greedy because of the anytime, anyplace, anywhere Martini advert.

I didn’t bother finding out why because I was in the middle of the
Melody Maker
crossword, which I’d cut out earlier and pasted in a copy of
The Economist
.

But now, 20 years on, I’ve discovered the Martini advertisement is not to blame for our acquisitive streak. It’s magazines.

Back in the days when
Melody Maker
and the
NME
were my bibles, I’d spend all my money on albums and ever more sophisticated hi-fi equipment. I really believed that ‘Snow Goose’ sounded better on my Garrard 86SB than it did on Andy Byrne’s miserable SP25.

I was out of the traps like a greyhound with chilli up its backside when CD hit the scene, but since Neil Young told
Q
magazine that analogue is better I’ve dusted down all my all LPs again.

I have a voracious appetite for magazines, even though I know the cover price is a tiny fraction of the resultant costs.

Last year I lived in London surrounded by friends and restaurants but, having picked up a copy of
Country Life
at the dentist’s, I now live in the countryside, where there are wasps and murderers and low-flying Tornadoes. The cinema is showing
Mad Max
, and everyone at the pub is saying there should be a sequel.

Naturally, we’ve started to take
Homes and Gardens
, and now the kitchen floor is being replaced with stone flags, a company called Smallbone is being asked to check out the units and Harrods have just delivered a bed so large that it encompasses three time zones.

When you pick up a magazine, you’d better have nerves of titanium or you’ll go broke.

But I challenge anyone to stay out of the bankruptcy
courts if they even casually browse through an organ called
Auto Trader
. This, I just know, is published by Lucifer himself. This is bad news on bog roll.

It’s a chunky 350 pages and it’s stuffed full of advertisements for secondhand cars, each one usually accompanied by a poor-quality black and white picture.

And yet it is one of the most compulsive reads in the entire universe. When I take a normal, glossy magazine to the loo in a morning I get pins and needles, but with this tome you develop gangrene.

I think the basic problem is money.
Auto Trader
concentrates its efforts on stuff we can afford, stuff we drooled over in the glossies five years ago, which is now being sold for beer money.

Let me give you a few examples.
Mercedes 500SEC. B reg. full spec includes air con, electric seats, cruise control etc. New 16 inch wheels and tyres. Very clean car. £6,795.

Think about that. What we have here is the classic football manager’s car with a 5.0 litre V8 engine, all the fruit and three-pointed star reliability for less money, after you’ve haggled a bit, than a Mini. Go on, admit it: you’re tempted.

Well what about this one then?
BMW 750iL. 1988. Diamond black with black hide upholstery, electric everything, cruise control, full service history, a truly stunning car. £8,345.

So there you have it. For the price of a downmarket Ford Fiesta, you can have a V12 BMW.

Every single page throws up a fistful of bargains which make a sale at DFS look like some kind of rip-off.

The book has just fallen open on the bargain basement section and there, at the bottom of the page, is a Mitsubishi Starion, which is a sort of Japanese Capri.

I remember testing this car back in 1985 and I thought it was wonderful, a real hooligan’s special with its 2.0 litre turbo motor, its simple rear-wheel drive layout and 170 horsepower. Nice seats too.

Well now you can have one for £995. Or, if the Starion is a bit too garish, how about a V12 Jaguar XJS for the same price? Or for a tiny bit more, a Porsche 944 or a Range Rover?

I don’t doubt for a moment that these cars have been clocked, stolen, pushed in boating lakes, crashed and welded together in a school project, but for nine hundred quid we’re not talking about the BCCI are we?

Yes, they will cost heaps to insure and, sure, a big V12 will eat fuel, but let’s be honest: the biggest single cost with any new car is depreciation, and you won’t lose much sleep over that.

Cars like this are best used as funsters, at weekends, so you can consider your purchase as a sort of gamble, a punt on an outsider in the 3.30 at Lingfield.

Its doors may fall off the first time you take it out, or it may sail through its MOT six months down the line. But either way, you’ll be able to stand around at parties telling everyone who’ll listen that you have a Jaguar XJS.