Don't Stop Me Now (17 page)

Computer software seems to be the answer. Because, so far as I can tell, my laptop’s brain is just about the only American-made household product that I simply couldn’t do without.

Out in the drive, however, it’s a different story. We have a Ford Focus, which is American, a Volvo XC90, which is American, and next March I will take delivery of a Ford GT, which has a British steering rack, a British gearbox and Italian brakes. But I know I’m fooling myself. That’s American, too. And so is the subject of this week’s column. The new Corvette C6.

It’s billed, like all previous Vettes, as a sports car to rival the best from Europe, and I hope you don’t mind if I snigger politely at this point.

America has never really made a sports car, because while we were hanging it out to dry on Welsh moorland roads or Alpine passes, they were racing between the lights on Telegraph Road. And for that you don’t need a pin-sharp turn-in. You need muscle.

And that, contrary to what you may have been told, is what the Vette’s always been about: it’s a car so pumped up on steroids, it would be unable to make it to a drugs test without falling off its motorcycle. It’s a car with arms like Schwarzenegger but a penis like a shrivelled-up little acorn.

I once spun an early incarnation of the previous Corvette off the road while charging round the only bend in Arizona. But no ticket was forthcoming from the attending police officer because, in his words, ‘These things spin so damn easy, you could park one outside a store, and when you came out it’d be facing the other way.’

People were nevertheless fooled into thinking the Vette was a sports car because it’s made from plastic in Kentucky, far from the powerhouse muscle pumping station that is Detroit. And what’s more, because it has always been fitted with massive tyres and no discernible suspension, it has always had a surfeit of grip. I think I am right in saying that the late-1980s Vette was the first road car ever to generate I G in a bend.

But really, the car’s major appeal has always been its
respectable go from its massive V8 engine and its jaw-dropping looks. The 1960s Stingray is one of the world’s truly ground-breaking pieces of car design. As much of a jaw-dropper as the Lamborghini Countach.

And so we arrive at the C6, expecting more of the same. It’s still plastic. It’s still made in Kentucky. It still has the big V8. And – stop laughing at the back – it still comes with exactly the same sort of suspension that you get on a Silvercross pram. Yup. It has leaf springs, which means it still rides like it’s running on wooden tyres.

Of course, fourteenth-century suspension has no bearing on the way the car goes. What does have a bearing is the gearbox.

Put your foot down and, after a hint of wheelspin – and with tyres the width of a tennis court, it is only a hint – the bruiser launches off the line with what might fairly be termed much gusto. And then, at around 30, everything goes horribly wrong because you have to select second.

There are levers at the National Coal Mining Museum that move with more smoothness than the gear shifter in a C6 Vette. To get to second from third, you really need a second elbow.

Happily, you’re distracted from this most of the time by the HUD. I’m not joking. This car has a head-up display, just like you get in an F-16 fighter.

It’s fantastic. Whole bus queues are hidden behind the digital speed read-out, which is going to make for some wonderful insurance claims: ‘The old lady was behind my
rev counter so I never saw her until she’d already bounced over the roof.’

There is lots of other good stuff, too. It is very, very fast, it makes a wonderful muted roar when you floor it, and even I have to admit that it’s eye-poppingly pretty.

So, you might be thinking, it’s just the same as all the other Vettes. But hang on a minute because it’s 5 inches shorter than the previous model and, thanks to lots of aluminium under the plastic body, it’s lighter, too. Can you believe that? As European cars, which are supposed to be sporty, get heavier and heavier, the car from the Land of the Stomach is actually losing weight.

In fact, the new Corvette weighs 128 kg less than a BMW M3, and this shows. I had a few laps of the
Top Gear
test track in an example with tyres that had been modelled on Kojak’s head and, whisper this, I loved it. Yes, the gearbox was a serious nuisance and it didn’t have quite the subtlety of a Porsche or a Beemer. It squirmed quite a bit under braking, for instance. But the steering was sharp, the grip was mighty and the speed was always intoxicating.

This gave me a problem when I climbed out and gave the keys back to the man from Chevrolet.

‘What did you think?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ I scoffed. ‘Left-hand drive, vulgar, plastic rubbish.’

But actually it isn’t. It is an extremely likeable car, and you can easily forget the railway junction gearbox and the jiggly ride and the cigarette-paper quality when you examine the price tag. It’s likely to be about
£
45,000.

So there we are. The only thing that would stop me buying one is my wife. But since you’re not married to her, I’d go right ahead.

Sunday 29 August 2004

When the announcement came through that TVR had been sold to a 12-year-old Russian boy, there was a sense in the land that Britain’s motor industry was no longer coughing up blood. It was dead.

But aren’t we forgetting something? Ooh, it’s on the tip of my tongue. I know there’s something… Why yes, of course. Rover! The still-intact tailfin of the crashed airliner that is British Leyland.

Oh, it may have been stripped of the Mini and Land Rover, and the rights to use names such as Riley and Wolseley, which BMW now owns. But it still has Longbridge. It still has thousands of employees. It is still a player.

But only by the skinny skin skin of its teeth. Sales are in free-fall, with the number of Rovers sold this year down by 19 per cent and the number of MGs down by 6 per cent.

The problem is that the line-up of cars on sale is now even older than the people who buy them. The 45, for instance, was launched when Rameses III was on the throne, and the MGTF is still painted with woad. And while MG Rover has so far spent
£
100 million developing a new mid-range car, which looks rather good, that’s only one-tenth of what’s really needed these days.

The company already had one tie-up with the Indians
to produce the truly ghastly and massively overpriced CityRover, and now details are emerging of a new co-production deal with the Chinese. There’s even some speculation that the romantically handled Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) might buy Rover, though God knows why.

As SAIC already has tie-ups with Volkswagen and General Motors, this would be a bit like Chelsea signing George Best. If the Chinese want British engineering skills, they could simply employ some British engineers. And if they want a base in the European Union, why buy Longbridge, which is in Birmingham and has a main road running through the middle of it? Why not simply build a brand new factory in, oh I don’t know, St Tropez?

Of course, I don’t own a short-sleeved shirt, or a set of golf clubs, or a freemason’s robe, or a blue British Airways loyalty card, and this means I don’t know anything about business. I’m here only to talk about the cars Rover makes, which brings me to the driver’s door of its latest offering: the MG Nutter Bastard Head-Butt Sister Shagger.

It’s a familiar-looking door because it’s exactly the same as the one you’ll find on a Rover 75. In fact, apart from a bit of tweakery here and a bit of chicken wire there, it is pure 75 – a car named for the average age of the people who buy it.

Inside, it’s much the same story. You have that familiar and enormous steering wheel and a sense that you’ve somehow found yourself in a Harvester theme pub. It’s all mock-Tudor this and half-timbered that.

At this point you will probably climb out again and
buy an Audi instead. But I urge you to persevere, because beneath the Radio 4 exterior beats a heavy metal heart in the shape of a 4.6-litre Ford Mustang V8.

With two valves per cylinder, it’s far from being the most sophisticated engine in the world, and nor is it the most powerful, nor the most economical. But Rover’s engineers have had it in the shed, and I must say it sounds and feels pretty good in a muted, throbby sort of way.

Think of it as the Merlin they used to put in P-51 fighters, an Anglo-American joint effort that is in no way as sophisticated as the creamy-smooth jets fitted to the German opposition, but a whole lot more charismatic and lovable nonetheless.

And now we get to the really good bit, because, instead of sending its power to the front wheels, which would be a recipe for torque steer followed by some hedge trimming, the oomph is fed down a prop shaft to the back wheels. So there you are. Beneath the Frank Finlay exterior, you get what, in essence, is a V8 muscle car with rear-wheel drive.

Rear-wheel drive matters. It matters so much, BMW is using it as the sole marketing thrust behind the new 1-series hatchback. The people at BMW know, unless they’re blind mad, that this new car is horrid to behold and as practical as a curly ruler, but that’s all OK because it’s rear-drive.

MG Rover has a similar philosophy. It didn’t bother changing the body, or the seats or the steering wheel on the 75. It spent every penny it had – all
£
4.50 of it – turning it into a rear-driver.

This is because, in the far, extreme corners of the
petrolhead’s domain, we all know that no car can be really good unless drive goes to the back. It is a given, the central pillar of all we hold dear. In a front-wheel-drive car, the front wheels have to do the steering and provide the propulsion, and this never quite works. Never. Even if you fit female front wheels that can multitask, there’s always the sense that both the power and the steering are being corrupted. It’s not pure. It’s not right.

In a rear-drive car, the jobs are split evenly around all four corners of the car, and while this isn’t a guarantee of success it is at least the right sort of bedrock.

In the MG NBHBSS, it does work. Brilliantly. If you’re going really, really fast, the whole machine assimilates you into its core, and you become one. The steering, unencumbered with power delivery, doesn’t send back any muddled messages about what the front of the car is doing, so I had the confidence to push harder. And the harder I pushed, the better it felt.

It’s not a razor-sharp handler. Think of it as a destroyer rather than a speedboat, but
in extremis
, trust me on this, it’s very good.

Twice, in the last run of
Top Gear
, I took this car on to the track simply to wake myself up, ready for the show. It got the adrenalin pumping and served as a reminder about why I fell in love with cars in the first place.

So would I buy one? Well, no, actually. Partly this is because there are many faults, like there’s nowhere to put your left foot, and partly because it could do with another 50 horsepower.

Also, I’d steer clear because I’d always have a nagging
doubt about the future of Rover itself. I’d worry that my expensive new toy would be stripped of its warranty and service back-up five minutes after I got it home.

Mostly, though, the reason why I’d steer well clear is that all those imbeciles who used to wobble about the middle of the road in their enormous Volvos have now got Rovers. Whenever I’m stuck in a huge tailback on the way into Oxford, it’s always a 216 at the front, endlessly indicating right and never actually doing so.

There’s a double mini-roundabout in my local town and I can pretty much guarantee that if I went down there now, there’d be a 416 in the middle of the junction, its driver glued solid by a wave of serotonin and fear. This is not a club I wish to join.

I therefore have an idea for the bosses at Rover. Forget these half-arsed tie-ups with engineering conglomerates in the emerging world. Make a pledge to go it alone, to fight back, to repair the damage done over the years by Red Robbo and the useless management and BMW. Adopt a Churchillian pose and speak to the workforce about fighting them on the beaches.

And then start the new dawn by publicly banning anyone from buying a Rover if they own a hat.

As I said earlier, I’m not a businessman and it might not be a sound business plan. But you’ve tried everything else, for God’s sake.

Sunday 5 September 2004

Back in April I drove the new Aston Martin DB9 all the way to Monte Carlo and decided it was perfect. I loved every single part of every single detail, so I wrote a rave review, gave it five stars and toyed with the idea of actually buying one. But then along came a car magazine whose findings were rather different. They drove the DB9 on mountain roads, where they claimed it felt ‘leaden’ and ‘floaty’. They said it flexed and crashed over bumps and speculated that it had been rushed into production before it was actually finished.

To make matters worse, this was
Evo
magazine, whose road testers are talented and manly. So, alarmed that perhaps I’d missed something on my 900-mile motorway jaunt, I decided to put a DB9 on the track and see what’s what when you really let rip.

I began with the traction control device turned on, and almost immediately I could see that the chaps at
Evo
had a point. The whole car seemed to squirm in the corners. There was no poise, no delicacy, and, with the back end tied down by an electronic straitjacket, the front was all over the shop.

But traction control always does this to a car, so I pushed the button to turn it off… and nothing happened. So I pushed it again, a bit harder, and with a slight sucking
noise the whole caboodle disappeared into the dashboard.

This was annoying, but worse was to come, because, having fished it out with a handy pair of artery forceps, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Instead of it being a simple switch, a device that connects two wires when you push it and disengages them when you push it again, there was a whole circuit board in there and two locating stubs the size of human hairs. It looked like the kind of thing you might find in an ECG machine, or a space probe. So, with a lot of a harrumphing, I left the job of reassembling it with an assistant and climbed into the car – the Ariel Atom.