Born to Be Riled (56 page)

And so it goes with the eclectically British Nissan Primera. To get round EU import restrictions, it was assembled in Tyne and Wear, but the parts came from Japan. Oh, sure, Nissan will argue that a huge percentage of the car’s total value was British, but this included the lavatory paper in the gents and the flowers given to customers on delivery. The gearbox and engine were as Japanese as sushi.

I used to hate this notion: that you could employ half a dozen former dockers to fit a car’s windscreen wipers and it would suddenly become all John Bullish and strut around shouting ‘two world wars and one world cup’ every time it saw a BMW. But I note that the new Primera is not only being built in Britain. It was designed here, too, and it isn’t even being sold in Japan. Nissan has woken up to the fact that Ford and Vauxhall are perceived to be European because the cars they make here are designed here and, generally speaking, are not sold in America.

So the new Primera: what’s it like? Well, I’ve just spent a week with one and, to be honest, it’s like a Japanese saloon car. It looks like a Japanese saloon car. It drives like a Japanese saloon car. And this is not a criticism. There’s
nothing wrong with Japanese saloon cars providing they don’t pretend to be Moroccan or Portuguese. This new car is European. It just doesn’t feel it, and that’s not the same thing at all.

Like the old model, the new one is almost wilfully boring to behold. They’ve fitted a new nose, but it looks like a tongue, and round at the back it looks like… do you know, I can’t remember. And I can’t picture the side either – just that tongue at the front.

Inside, it’s grey. It was probably black or brown, but I remember it as grey. As far as space is concerned, it is fine. I could sit behind myself, if you see what I mean, and there were lots of little nooks into which the sales rep could put his electric razor and gum.

But you know, sitting there in the showroom, the new Primera is like the old Primera. Just another car. Just another way of spending £15,000 on four doors and a seat. To see why this car is so good, you need to take it for a drive.

Now, I know I had the 2-litre super-sport ripsnorter, so of course it was good. But the chassis on this new car is little changed from the chassis on the old, so even the lowly models will have handling way above their station. This is perhaps the only repmobile out there that is genuinely good fun to drive.

I must say the five-speed gearbox was a bit vague, but you could always opt for the hyperdrive auto with six-speed sequential override. I have no idea what this is, but it sounds fab. As does the engine. At high revs it makes an angry, growly noise which urges you to explore that handling prowess.

Indeed, this is exactly the sort of car you should use if
you wish to eat in one of Birmingham’s new restaurants. It’s big enough to take all your friends, and good fun on the way. But best of all it looks so terribly dreary that nobody will nick it.

The first time I drove a Porsche Boxster, everything was just so. I was on my way to Scarborough to film it, with nine of its closest drop-head rivals, and I was crossing the Yorkshire wolds, which play host to some of the best driving roads in Britain. And, boy, was I having fun, slithering round the corners, enjoying the metallic rasp of that 2.5-litre engine as it passed 5000rpm and generally doing the sort of speeds that aren’t allowed.

And then I noticed a pair of headlights in my rear-view mirror, a way off to start with but getting closer. Eventually, they were right on my tail and, obviously, I reckoned this was one of the others on its way to Scarborough – the BMW Z3, perhaps, or the fearsome TVR Chimera.

But no. When it finally overtook, it was a 1.3-litre Vauxhall Nova. And from that moment I’ve always rather hated Porsche’s attempt at a mass-market sports car.

I suspect that, when the original idea came along to do a small, two-seater convertible, the Stuttgart marketing boys in their tartan jackets were well aware that such a car might pinch sales from the 911. So, to create a gulf, they insisted that the Boxster should be de-tuned to the point where its engine would struggle to mix cement.

And quite apart from the fact that it couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom, it was far too expensive. Why pay more than £30,000 for a two-seater car when, for half that, you could have a Mazda MX5, a car that manages to have front and rear ends that are distinctly different? You could drive a Boxster backwards and nobody would be any the wiser.

Given the choice of any two-seater sports car, I’ve always put the Boxster in about ninth place, just ahead of the three-wheeler Morgan but behind pretty well everything else. Even the dreadful BMW Z3.

However, Porsche’s engineers must have been aware that their baby was out there being minced by Novas, so they walked into the marketing department, taped everyone to their chairs and set about righting some wrongs. Thus, there’s now a 2.7-litre engine in place of the 2.5 and an S-version that costs £42,000. And at that price it had better be unbloody-friggingbelievably good.

Let’s start with space. There’s plenty, if you’re a suitcase. In fact, there’s a choice, if you’re a suitcase. You can go either in the back, behind the engine, or in the front with the spare wheel. If you’re the driver, things are not so good. Obviously, there’s plenty of headroom, if the roof is down, but if you are cursed with a brace of legs I’m afraid you’ve had it. They simply won’t go under the wheel, which is like the London Eye, only bigger.

My first instinct, on climbing into the new Boxster S, was to climb right back out and use the Jag, but in the name of research I persevered. And now, a week later, I’m glad because, truly, the car has been transformed.

Sure, it still looks like something out of
Dr Dolittle
, and the engine sounds like it came out of a Hoover, but there
is fun to be had here. It is what the old Boxster wasn’t. A sports car that’s capable of outrunning a Vauxhall hatchback. And this is important.

Whereas the original car was fine at dinner parties, where you could walk into the room brandishing a Porsche key-ring, this new one can cut it out in the real world. Up here in the Cotswolds, or down here if you’re Scottish, there’s a meatiness to the power delivery and an unusual crispness to requests from the helm. Yet none of the old car’s rigidity or comfort over bad road surfaces appears to have been lost. This means that, on the motorway, it doesn’t interfere with the job in hand: thinking up new nicknames for Mr Prescott, mostly. I guess since he’s now in charge of second homes and building in the south-east, we’ll have to call him Two Houses.

And before you know it you’re within the M25 and ready for the cut and thrust of London, where it goes all wrong. Because it looks the same as the old car, nobody knows you’ve bought a serious flying machine and, as a result, everyone gobs at you.

Really. In a BMW, people won’t let you out of side turnings, and rightly so, but in a Porsche, people deliberately get in your way and, if you ask them, politely, if you could squeeze by, most indulge in the most fabulous hawking before letting fly with a docker’s oyster the size of a cabbage. If this is something you find undesirable, then don’t buy a Porsche.

Or if you must, make it the S and stick to the countryside. Out here, you’ll be going too quickly for anyone to realize what you were in. And you’ll be having far too much fun to care, even if they do.

With the possible exception of the Vauxhall Vectra, every single new car that comes along is better, faster, safer and more reliable than the model it replaces. So, on that basis, the best car ever made must be in production right now.

Obviously, it’s something compact and fuel-efficient, like the Volkswagen Lupo. And yet somehow the Lupo misses the point completely. It’s a tool, a device, a white good that happens to be blue or yellow. It is bought with the head, rather than the ill-gotten gains of some rash moment when you stood bolt upright and said: ‘I have just got to have one of those.’

If cars were like Black and Decker workbenches, people wouldn’t talk about them in the pub, drool over them at motor shows, yearn to own them so much that it actually starts to hurt. And that’s why the Lupo, excellent though it may be in the Co-op car park, actually comes pretty close to the bottom whenever I’m asked to name the three best cars ever made.

Number one on that list is the Ferrari 355, and I really don’t think I can be bothered to explain why. Not again. So let me put it this way. Until quite recently I didn’t actually own a car. There seemed little point when, every Monday morning, a raft of new models would be delivered to my door, fully fuelled, insured and ready to go. Obviously, I enjoyed driving them, but not once did I ever think of actually buying one. Some were good, but none was ever that good.

Until one day I climbed into a 355 and, within an hour
or so, I knew my standard of living was about to fall dramatically. I bought one a month later and, really, that says it all. Actions, you know, speak so much louder than words.

Not that you can hear either in my next choice, the Aston Martin Vantage.

Now I know there’s a new DB7 Vantage, and I know that, dynamically speaking, it eats the big old bruiser, bones and all, for breakfast. It’s prettier, easier to handle, nicer to drive, more reliable, and all those other things that just don’t matter.

I’d love to own a DB7, but I fear I’d spend my entire time beating the steering wheel in a silent rage, angry that I didn’t buy the real thing. The most powerful car on the market. Its big brother. The old V8.

Aston likes to say the DB7 Vantage is made by hand, but in reality the 6.0-litre V12 engine comes in a box from Ford – well, Cosworth to be precise, but let’s not split hairs. My point is that the 5.4-litre V8 that goes in the old car is beaten into shape on site by men in brown store coats.

And there’s more. The old engine delivers 600bhp, which might sound like overkill, but remember the car into which it’s fitted weighs more than two tons. That’s really why I like it so much: it’s all so excessive, bigger than it should be, heavier, faster, more brutal. You just know that, if it were a person, it would have gout.

Choosing a third car was hard. Every fibre in my body said it should be the new BMW M5, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. I went back to the reference books, kicked some twigs round the garden and racked my brains for something less… less German.

The car I’ve come up with is a Datsun. Well, actually, it’s a Nissan, which is nearly as bad, but then it’s also a Skyline GT-R, and that’s not bad at all. What I love about this car is that it’s so completely Japanese. It’s as though the designers just gave up and said: ‘Look, we’ve tried for 50 years now to copy European style, and we’re hopeless.’ So the roof is there simply to keep the rain out, the doors exist only to facilitate entry, and the bonnet is a device for providing access to the engine. This car has absolutely no style at all. And it’s even worse on the inside, where you’re treated to acres of grey interspersed with lots of shiny black. Horrid is too small a word.

However, what the Japanese can do is technology. So the Skyline wades into battle sporting every gizmo known to man. It has four-wheel steering, variable four-wheel drive, a g-meter, ceramic turbos, the lot.

And it all works. I spoke last week to a chap whose last Skyline did 160,000 miles before it blew up. And that was only because he drove all the way from London to Val d’Isère with no oil in the engine.

In the real world the Skyline is faster than an Aston Vantage and a match for the 355. Mainly because the Nissan’s arsenal of driver aids allows you to take diabolical liberties and get away with them. Seriously, you can turn this car into a corner at a preposterous speed, then alarm your passengers by undoing your seatbelt and getting in the back, safe in the knowledge that the unseen silicon will save the day.

Some say that Subaru’s Impreza and Mitsubishi’s Evo VI can match the Skyline for less than half the price, but then there are those who say marzipan is a foodstuff and that anchovies make an ideal topping for your pizza.
They’re wrong. As a driver’s car, the Nissan is about as good as it gets.

And would I buy one? No. Not a chance.

All is not as it seems. In this month’s edition of the Geneva airport in-house magazine, they talk of a city where the people ‘add a friendly note to the litany of pretty valleys, castles, cathedrals, abbeys and, of course, the old traditional pubs. A region of unforgettable splendour.’

Would you like to guess what they’re talking about? Nope, you’re quite wrong. In fact, they’re describing Birmingham, which to my knowledge has no pretty valleys, no castles, no abbeys and no unforgettable splendour. Just a lot of cars on bricks.

And this brings me to the television advertisement for the Volkswagen Bora. ‘Any excuse’ is what it says, and to hammer the point home we see a Dutch architect driving all the way back to an Alpine research institute because he’s forgotten his pen.

Well, when I was faced with a trip to Blackpool last weekend, I did indeed choose to use a Bora, rather than any of the other cars lying around in my drive. And why? Because of the new V5 engine? The blue dash or the discreet styling? Because it would offer unflappable reliability and silent running? No, not really. I used it because it was the only car out there that had a full tank of petrol.

And then there was the business of coming home. I was
faced with a simple choice. Take the car or take up the offer of a lift in a helicopter. Ooh, that’s a hard one. I’ll have to ask the audience.

Obviously, I should have said: ‘Look, I know I’m tired after marching round all day with a cannon on my back and a ton of lead shot in each pocket, but what I want now is four hours on the M6. I don’t want to fly over Birmingham’s pretty valleys and unforgettable splendour. I want to see it all from ground zero. I’m going home in my Bora.’

But, strangely, I was more tempted by the notion of getting home in 50 minutes and leapt into the Squirrel as though it was Saigon in 1975 and Charlie was swarming through the embassy gates. I even thought about filling the seatbelt fastening with Superglue in case someone tried to drag me out again.