Don't Stop Me Now (3 page)

Whack on some opposite lock to catch the slide. Whoa, it’s still going. More lock needed. More effort. Your arms are really hurting now and you’re desperately trying to balance the throttle, to find the sweet spot that will hold the back end in check.

There. There it is. Smoke is pouring off the tyres now, but the car is powering sideways and under perfect control
through the bend. Inside, you have sweat in your eyes, you feel like you’ve been arm-wrestling a mountain all morning, but with the dopamine coming you don’t notice a thing.

Welcome, then, to the world of the super-fast supercar. They are utterly stupid, of course. Just like the people who drive them. Us.

Sunday 6 July 2003

The week before last, during that mini heatwave, I left work at about eight o’clock and cruised, top down, up to the traffic lights under the A40 flyover in west London.

A right turn would take me back to my flat, a superheated box with neither garden nor air. Then I’d be forced to lie awake all night long, stuck fast to the sheets, listening to policemen tearing up and down Westbourne Grove while testing their sirens.

A left turn, however, would take me to the tranquillity of the Cotswolds and my family. Here I would be able to sleep with nothing to wake me save the shush-hush of the barley and the pitter-patter of tiny foxes nibbling at the chicken run. And that’s why I went left.

It was a good decision, too. Because after some 40 minutes I turned off the motorway and, with the sun a six-inch coin of brilliant scarlet light in an utterly clear, deep-blue sky, I mashed my foot into the SL’s thick, velvety carpet…

… and went absolutely barking mad. I braked hard into each corner, nudging the gear lever once, twice and sometimes three times to keep the revs right up, until I hit the apex of the corner, and buried the throttle once more.

The tarmac was hot and sticky, and it crackled slightly
as the new Michelins cut through it like waterskis on a windless lake. And rising above it all, as wave after wave of power and torque surged down the prop shaft, came the hard-edged, machine-gun, staccato roar of that supercharged Mercedes V8 engine.

It was enough to make a man quite chubby with excitement. And with the sun beginning to kiss the western horizon I remember thinking, ‘Well, if I hit a tree now, I’ll at least be going out on a high.’

It was a wonderful drive home. Me and the machine, not just singing in perfect harmony but fused in a bout of gaily abandoned man-love. This was the raw, undiluted pleasure of driving almost for driving’s sake.

Except, of course, that’s rubbish, because it wasn’t raw or undiluted at all. The Mercedes puts up a firewall comprising about a million gigabytes of silicon between the driver and the business end of things. It’s got a braking assistance system and computer-controlled air suspension, along with traction control, power steering and a fly-by-wire throttle. I was driving a fascimile of a car, rather than the real thing: it moaned and groaned and twitched and flinched just like the true item, but in my heart of hearts I knew that I was making love to little more than a hologram.

All modern cars isolate you from the road, they cocoon you in a safe, quiet world of velour and Radio 2 and air-conditioning. The wind that ruffles your hair in a modern convertible isn’t wind at all, rather a gentle breeze that has been massaged by an aerodynamics engineer somewhere in Frankfurt. And the nice rorty little rasp
from your exhaust at 5,000 rpm was in fact put there by someone in an anechoic chamber in Stuttgart. So when you’re in a car, you’re really in the Matrix.

In the past I’ve never been able to get out, to smell real air and hear real engine noises. I was never able to do the Keanu Reeves thing because at 6ft 5in. I’ve always been much too tall to fit into a Caterham Seven.

Now, though, there’s a longer, wider version available for the chap with the fuller, longer figure. And last weekend I gave it a whirl.

Bloody Hell Fire and Holy Mother of Christ: apart from being bigger, it was a whole lot more powerful to boot. In fact, it offers up 442 bhp per ton, and nothing else on the road gets even close to doing that. A Ferrari 575, for instance, produces a figure of only 298 bhp per ton, while the Lamborghini Murciélago manages 319 bhp per ton.

At first you’ll wonder where the power has gone. But that’s because you’ll be changing up when the noise and the vibrations become intolerable. But don’t. In fact, you change up when blood is spurting out of your ears and your right foot has been shaken clean off your ankle. Then you discover where the power is – hiding its massive bulk in the uppermost reaches of the rev band.

Go there and, no matter what you happen to be driving right now, you’ll be surprised at the punch it delivers. I know I was.

What’s more, you can actually see the suspension working, and the brakes too, and when you turn the wheel the road wheels move, right in front of your eyes. You can place this car bang on target every time. Not just near the
white line, as you would in a painfully slow Lambo or a pedestrian Ferrari, but bang on that line.

I’ve always assumed that a car like this would feel like an extension of your hands and feet, but it’s the other way round.

I felt like a part of it: an organic component, but a component nevertheless.

You use a normal car to take you somewhere, and it tries to make that journey as pleasant as possible. But you would never use a Caterham as a means of transport, because this is driving for the buzz of it, and as a result you’re not a passenger. You are there to do a job, which means you are no more and no less important than one of the pistons or the windscreen wipers.

This is the real deal. Everything that happens happens because it happens. Not because some German in a white coat thinks it should happen. The marketing department has not created the noises, the jolts and the acceleration. They’re there because this is a light, powerful sports car and these are the characteristics you must expect of such a thing.

I didn’t like it. Partly because I still don’t fit properly – the steering wheel sits on my thighs, which means I simply could not apply any opposite lock in an emergency. Also, while Caterham will build a car for you, it’s designed to be a kit that you build yourself. That’s why it bypasses regulations on noise, safety and emissions. Great, but I’d never fully trust anything I’d built myself: I’d always assume that a wheel was about to fall off.

Most of all, though, I didn’t like the Caterham because
it was like camping. The roof looks so terrible that you can’t possibly drive around with it up. But then again, it’s so fiddly that you can’t possibly drive with it down either. Plainly, it was designed by a man who likes to sleep out at night, possibly with some Boy Scouts, far from anywhere, with just a thin layer of canvas between him, the boys and the rain.

And then there’s the business of what you should wear when driving the Caterham.

This is the only car that demands a trip down to Millets before embarking on even the shortest journey.

You need a woolly bobble hat, an anorak and some Rohan trousers. There’s an almost wilful lack of style to this kind of motoring, you see. A. A. Gill described his run from the station in my wife’s Caterham last year as ‘the worst five minutes of my life’.

The problem here is that we are in the very furthest corner of motoring enthusiasm. And, as is the way with all hobbies, things go off the rails when people start to take them too seriously.

Everyone likes to dangle a worm in the water from time to time. But the Caterham is the equivalent of getting up at three in the morning and sitting in the rain, on a canal bank, until it goes dark again.

Everyone looks up when Concorde flies over, but the Caterham is the equivalent of flying to Greece to snap some Olympic 737s. Would you risk getting locked up for your love of this car? Man at Millets would.

I’m interested in motor racing but I don’t want to be a marshal. I find stamps pretty but I don’t want an album.

I like music but I’m not going to build my own instruments. And I like driving but I’m far too old, rich, soft and poncey – and still slightly too big – for what, without any doubt, is the ultimate driving machine.

Sunday 27 July 2003

Suppose you had a priceless Ming vase, you wouldn’t use it as a dice shaker or a vessel for serving punch at Boxing Day parties.

In a similar vein you wouldn’t use a racehorse to hack out, and you wouldn’t use a pearl-handled butter knife to pick a lock. So it’s faintly ridiculous to suppose a supercar can co-exist in the real world alongside young men from Kazakhstan in Nissan Laurels and even younger men from Albania on pizza-delivery mopeds.

So what is it for then, exactly? Getting down and growly on the world’s racetracks? Well, yes, obviously, but even here things can go awry.

Just recently I attempted to see how fast the new Koenigsegg supercar could accelerate from 0 to 60 mph. But as I let the clutch in, one of the many belts that drives something important in the engine bay shredded and I was left in a world of noise and smoke, going nowhere.

Last week I attempted a similar test with a
£
320,000 Pagani Zonda, and again it all ended in tears. As I floored the throttle and the 7.3-litre Mercedes V12 engine girded its considerable loins for an assault on the horizon, the clutch shouted, ‘For God’s sake,’ and exploded. There was a lot of smoke. Hence the tears.

Lamborghinis are especially good at this. Once, to
amuse the crowds at Goodwood, I decided to do a massive wheel-spinning start off the line. But this was a Diablo, with four-wheel drive and tyres bigger than the rings of Saturn, so the only thing that could possibly spin was the clutch. It did. And I had to drive up the hill with the V12 tearing its heart out, but only doing four or five miles per hour.

It has always been thus. I once drove the world’s first supercar, a Lamborghini Miura, but I cannot tell you how fast it went since it oiled its plugs at every set of lights, and stalled. And there wasn’t enough juice in the battery to get it going again.

A friend recently described his old Bentley as being like a middle-aged man, oohing and aahing its way through life because bits of it which worked perfectly well yesterday had suddenly decided to give up the ghost today.

Supercars, on the other hand, are like athletes, forever suffering from hamstring injuries and groin strains.

No, really. My wife goes to the gym every morning and as a result is permanently broken in some way. The bathroom cabinet looks like Harry Potter’s potion store. Whereas I, whose only exercise is blinking, am never ill at all.

So, if you can’t go quickly in a supercar, and you can’t use it for everyday chores like shopping and taking the children to school, what can you do with it?

Go out for dinner? Oh puh-lease. Where are you going to leave it? In the street? In a multi-storey car park? And what shape do you suppose it will be in after you’ve finished your Irish coffee and mints?

I once parked my old Ferrari outside a restaurant, with the roof off. It didn’t seem like a problem, since I was in the Cotswold village of Deddington where the crime statistics talk of some scrumping in 1947 – and that’s it. But when I came back, the interior had been used for what I can only assume was the world championship gozzing competition. I have never seen so much phlegm.

Sure, you can take such a car to a friend’s house for a party. But then, how are you going to get home? Driving a bright yellow Lamborghini at two in the morning is as obvious as weaving down the street with a traffic cone on your head.

Of course, one day you’ll be in your supercar on a wonderful, sweeping mountain road, and suddenly all will become clear.

But not for long, because pretty soon you’ll round a corner to find a party of ramblers or cyclists, or maybe both. Do you think they’re going to (a) point appreciatively at your car or (b) shout obscenities?

And later, when you have broken down, or smashed the low-riding front end clean off on a dip in the road, do you think they’ll (a) stop to help or (b) laugh at you until they need hospital treatment?

Buy a supercar, and your neighbours won’t like the noise. Your wife won’t be able to climb aboard in a short skirt, your friends will be jealous, and other road users will make signals. It’s hard to think of any group or body that likes a man in a supercar; small boys, perhaps. But is that what you want? Probably not, I suspect.

None of this, of course, stops us wanting supercars, so
I was therefore intrigued by the new Lamborghini Gallardo. Unlike all the previous Lambos, there is no rear wing big enough to land helicopters on, and no air vents that slide out of the side when the going gets hot.

Yes, it looks sporty, but it’s not like rocking up for work in a gold lamé jacket and tartan trousers. In a dark colour you might even call it discreet.

Inside, there’s been another break from Lamborghini tradition. I fit. And the air-conditioning works, and you can see out of the back window, and there’s a stereo that you can hear.

Oh, the engine makes a noise all right, but it doesn’t prompt the sort of purple prose I normally use for cars of this type. There’s no spine-tingling howl. It doesn’t sound like Brian Blessed on the verge of an orgasm or Tom Jones making man-love for the first time.

There’s a very good reason for all this. Italian politicians may think their German counterparts are humourless, strutting Nazis, and the Germans may have responded by taking their towels off the beaches of Tuscany this year. But all is well between the two nations in the world of car-making, because Lamborghini has been bought by Audi (itself part of the Volkswagen group), who have brought a dollop of common sense to the most lovably idiotic carmaker on earth.

As a result, the engine is an Audi V8 unit with two extra cylinders welded on to the end to create a 5-litre V10. It drives all four wheels via a six-speed gearbox, but you don’t need to be a man-mountain to control everything. The clutch is light. The steering wheel moves
easily. And you can change gear with one hand! Normally I have to get my super-fit wife to drive the Lamborghinis that we have on test. But even I, with arms like pipe cleaners, could manage the Gallardo.