Don't Stop Me Now (19 page)

One thing hadn’t changed, though. Parents (i.e., me) are still turning up in expensive cars they’ve borrowed for the day.

When I was at school we had the local bobby check the registration plates on all the visitors’ cars and you wouldn’t believe how many were from rental companies. On one speech day we calculated that a full 25 per cent of the motors had been hired by mums and dads who obviously felt their own wheels were too downmarket.

They probably felt good stepping out of the Avis Cadillac or Hertz Jag, but the elation rarely lasted since, as a punishment, we liked to fling their sons from the top of the church tower. One father arrived at the end of term in a chartered helicopter, which we thought was so obscene we took his son round the back of the cricket pavilion and set fire to him.

Public schools were, and always will be, anti-chav. They are bling-free zones where uniforms must be secondhand, watches must be broken, stereos must be wooden and cars, ideally, must be Subaru Legacies.

All of this came flooding back last week as I nosed into the genteel quadrangle of a traditional school, which shall remain nameless, in an egg-yellow Porsche 911. That wasn’t mine.

You could see the sneers on the pupils’ faces. You could see them making a mental note that when my child starts there he will be made to pay. I doubt, in these softer times, that he will be murdered but they may well chop up his teddy bear. And it’s all my fault. A Porsche 911 is bad enough. But an egg-yellow Porsche 911 with ‘Porsche GB Press Fleet’ written below the terrifyingly personalised number plate. That, quite simply, is as low as you can go.

Or so I thought. The next day, to get to another school, I inadvertently climbed into a Mini Convertible with stripes on the bonnet. This would have been like turning up at a black-tie cocktail party dressed as a 6-foot banana, so I parked it in the next village and walked.

What’s desperately annoying is that I had the perfect
public school parent car parked in the drive at home. It wasn’t a Subaru but a silvery grey Audi S4 Cabriolet. One of the most tasteful, unassuming and beautifully made cars money can buy. Yes, with four-wheel drive and a V8 engine, it’s as lively as an Ibiza discotheque, but from the outside it’s no more ostentatious than a Regency town house in Bath.

This car really is very fast. There’s no V8 burble, no vulgar-sonic Route 66 soundtrack to attract attention, just a relentless whine to accompany a blurring of both the hedgerows and the speedometer needle. And then, before you know it and with seemingly no effort, you’re doing an indicated 155 mph and being prevented from going any faster by the electronic limiter, put there to keep the Green Party happy. Even at high speeds the electric roof doesn’t lift or flap and nothing rattles. And with it down there’s space for a family of four to enjoy a buffet-free cruise. In so very many ways, then, this is a great car. Practical, well made, fast, silent, stylish and cool. There are very few cars that do quite so much quite so well. So why, you may be wondering, did I not use it?

Well, behind the veneer of sophistication and brilliance it is badly flawed. First of all, I couldn’t get comfortable. If I arranged the seat so my legs could reach the pedals the steering wheel was too far away, and if I sorted out my arms I could only go a mile before cramp started to solidify my right calf. I’ve never noticed this in an Audi before, but my cameraman, who’s also long, says he suffers from exactly the same thing in his A3.

And it’s not just the driving position that makes life
miserable. I know I’m starting to sound like a stuck record but Audi has absolutely no idea how to tailor a car to accommodate the sloppiness of Britain’s roadworker Johnnies.

Where an S-type Jaguar glides and floats over potholes and ridges the Audi crashes and judders. The ride comfort is simply appalling. On one dip, where the A40 joins the M40 just outside Oxford, I really thought it was going to take off.

On a smooth track the hardtop S4 handles beautifully, and I have no doubt the cabrio would be similarly impressive, but the price you pay for this is too high and not necessary. BMWs handle without being uncomfortable. So do Jags and Mercs. So Audi must find the people responsible for this shortfall and, at the earliest possible opportunity, throw them in an unheated lake.

The people who did the satellite navigation system should go, too. It’s very clever, shoehorning the screen in between the speedo and rev counter, but with no map it doesn’t work. With no map you can’t tell how far off the route you are until you’re in Snowdonia.

Over the course of a week, this car drove me mad. Think of it as a shepherd’s pie that’s too salty, or a wonderful holiday resort that’s full of German taxi drivers. It was so close to perfection and yet so very, very far away.

That’s why I left it at home and that’s why I went in the Porsche, and that’s why my children are going to spend five years at school with no teddy bear.

Sunday 3 October 2004

What, exactly, is the point of the M1? In the early 1960s, for sure, it was a technical and sociological masterpiece, a concrete intranet connecting Britain’s provincial muscle with the financial brain in London.

When my grandfather first started driving from Don-caster to London in the early 1950s, he had to break the 150-mile journey with an overnight stay at the George in Stamford. The M1 changed all that. The M1 meant he could, and did, pop to Simpson’s on Piccadilly simply to buy a pair of socks.

Now, though, things are very different. We read all the time about the migration of people from the north to the south-east and how five million new homes will have to be built in the home counties to accommodate the new boys.

But it’s not migration at all. It’s simply a load of people who came to London for a day’s shopping and can’t get back. They’re waiting for a moment when the traffic reports say the M1 is running smoothly, but it never comes because it is no longer an intranet. It’s a permanently clogged artery.

And it’s not like there’s any kind of alternative. Every train that leaves King’s Cross or Euston only gets 30 miles before one of the day trippers, heartbroken by the
enforced separation from his family up north, leaps in front of it, bringing the entire network to a halt.

The A1 is no good either because every time you stop for petrol or a snack in one of those eastern county flatland service stations, you are murdered by a lorry driver.

Last week, as I set out for Yorkshire, the woman on Johnnie Walker’s afternoon radio show said Britain’s spinal cord was jammed pretty much all the way from junctions 22 to 32. As a result, I averaged 32 mph over the 170-mile journey. Some people can run faster than that.

I had time, as I sat behind a big van for hour after interminable hour, to speculate on what needs to be done. And it’s really very simple.

When the M1 was completed, 45 years ago, there were 2.8 million cars in Britain. Today there are 27.5 million. This means we need not one motorway linking the north with the south. We need 10. No arguments. No public inquiries. The government has to ring Costain and say: ‘Go out, tomorrow morning, and build nine more motorways from London to Leeds.’

Sadly, I had this worked out by junction 23, which meant I had another nine junctions, still behind the van, to think about something else. So I started weighing up the car I was in – the new Mercedes SLK350.

This was more complicated, because it costs
£
36,110, which is about a third of what you’re asked to pay for my car, its big brother, the SL55.

You’d expect, of course, that this saving would be immediately apparent, but I was buggered if I could find it. Like the big car, the smaller one has two seats, a metal
roof that folds electrically into the boot, heated this and electrically movable that.

In fact, if anything, the little car does slightly better on the gadget front because it has a seven-speed automatic gearbox and, joy of joys, heater vents in the headrests. This ‘air scarf’ means that as you drive along with the roof down your head is cocooned in a pillow of warm air. Mmmmm.

I think the SLK looks better than the SL, too. Yes, the front, which nods at the world of Formula 1, is faintly ludicrous, but the overall proportions are better somehow. And because the SLK has normal suspension, rather than air, it has a more predictable ride, too.

Power? Well, the SL55 with its supercharged V8 will get you from 0 to 62 in 4.7 seconds and on to a top speed of 155. The new SLK with a 3.5-litre unsupercharged V6 takes 5.5 seconds to get from 0 to 62, and will also reach 155. So the only difference is 0.8 of a second in the zero-to-62 dash which, on a journey that was taking half a lifetime, didn’t seem all that much.

Because the cars are so similar, it’s hard to work out what’s going on. Is Mercedes making an indecent profit on the
£
100,000 SL or is it selling the
£
35,000 SLK at a catastrophic loss?

By junction 25 I had the answer. Everything in the SL feels substantial, whereas everything in the SLK feels like it was made by a satellite channel’s version of
Blue Peter
. I’ll take one example: the sun visors. They’re hard, brittle, nasty to the touch and feel like they’ll break in less than a month.

Magnify the cost savings here across the whole car, and it explains why the SLK is so damn cheap.

And now things get really complicated. Is that a good thing? Should we dismiss the SLK for being flimsy and thin, or should we rejoice in the fact we can buy such a fast, well-equipped and good-looking car for such a small amount of money?

I ummed and aahed all the way past Nottingham and decided, as I finally reached the M18, that we should rejoice. So long as the main components have some Mercedes unburstability, who cares if some of the trim pieces have come from Mattel’s reject bin?

And now, with a clear run up to the Wolds, there was an even bigger question to answer. What’s this SLK like?

The old one was a pretty, well-made thing that had the sporting credentials of a small occasional table. As a result it became the transport of choice for everyone with a tanning salon, all female television presenters, and Nicole Kidman – although hers, it must be said, had a 6.5-litre V8 under the bonnet.

The SLK was girlie central, bought only as an accessory to make your hair look good rather than rip it out in lumps by the roots.

The new one is completely different. Obviously, with that 3.5-litre V6, it’s much faster, but it’s harder too, and more poised. Even the old farmyard-style steering system has been junked to make way for something more precise and with more feel. This, as I discovered on the singletrack roads of East Yorkshire, is a serious, proper, grown-up sports car.

You can make good, safe and very fast progress, and what’s more you can have an enormous amount of fun in the process, even if it’s wet, there’s mud on the road and you’ve just spent four hours in a traffic jam.

It’s not perfect, though. The traction control and the anti-lock brakes both cut in far too early. It’s like driving along with an extremely overenthusiastic health-and-safety man in the dashboard.

And then there’s that infernal seven-speed gearbox. Jesus. Who thought this was a good idea? With so many ratios to choose from, the onboard computer can never really make up its mind, so when you put your foot down it selects third and then thinks, ‘Ooh no, hang on a minute, let’s have second. No wait. Third was good… or what about fourth?’

And because the exhaust note verges on the irritating at the best of times, the car begins to sound like a field full of frightened cows mooing their way through a tuneless song.

When I finally arrived at journey’s end, I decided that, despite Merc’s almost hysterically awful reputation with manual boxes, I’d definitely go for a six-speed self-shifter over that stupid auto, which comes close to ruining the whole car.

I have to say, though, that despite these shortfalls the SLK is actually a better car than its big brother. It’s more fun, and less golf-clubby too.

But what about its peers? Well, I haven’t driven the Nissan 350Z convertible, which looks interesting, nor have I tried the drop-head Chrysler Crossfire, which
doesn’t – chiefly because it’s actually based around the dreary old SLK.

That leaves us with the BMW Z4, which is one of Chris Bangle’s more successful styling efforts. Mind you, that’s a bit like saying Milton Keynes is one of Britain’s more successful new towns. It’s still weird-looking. And it does have an unforgivably hard ride, and a sat nav with the IQ of a chaffinch.

Choosing between this and the SLK is tricky. For sitting on the M1 in a jam, the SLK is a more satisfying place to be. It looks good, there are many toys and that air scarf is the brainchild of a genius.

But if you want to avoid the motorway and use back roads instead, the slightly more cohesive Z4 gets the nod.

Sunday 31 October 2004

One of the things I used to admire about BMW was the focus shown by its designers and engineers. They were the snipers of the car industry, lying in wait while the enemy blundered about with smoking tanks and faulty machine guns, and then, boomf, delivering a killer shot that never missed.

Once the company had stopped fiddling about with three-wheelers and converted Post Office vans, it developed a recipe that served it well for nigh on 30 years. All its cars had double headlamps at the front, a straight-six engine in the middle, and rear-wheel drive at the back.

There were, in essence, three body styles, five engines and a range of options, so the customer could indulge in a spot of pick’n’mix.

You could have a small car with a big engine and no equipment. Or you could have a large car with a small engine and electric everything. But whatever you chose, there was a rightness to the feel of the thing. A sense that the company had put driving pleasure above everything else.

Then it did a Coca-Cola. The sniper decided he didn’t want to be a sniper any more and changed the damn recipe. So we ended up with four-wheel-drive cars that were made in America, and two-seater convertibles, and
a wide range of diesel engines. And then it put a chap called Chris Bangle in charge of design.