Don't Stop Me Now (30 page)

Ultimately it’s possible we’ll all be driving cars powered by hydrogen. Maybe it will be burned internally, as a substitute for petrol, or maybe it will be used in a fuel cell to generate electricity that’s then used to provide power. Either way the only emissions are heat and water. That keeps the hippies happy and it should keep normal people happy, too, because there’s a limitless supply of hydrogen. Britain, we’re told, would only need four nuclear power plants to keep every car, van and truck in the land going.

Don’t hold your breath, though. We’re a fair way off this clean dream becoming reality. It’ll be a technology familiar only to our children. And that’s the beauty, because who knows what might happen between now and then. Maybe some extraordinary new science will be discovered, or perhaps limitless power will be found on Mars. We can predict only that something will replace oil, in the same way that something replaced stone.

And we could leave it at that. But no. The world’s motor industry, in a desperate bid to sound caring and
kind, says that soon your car will be directed to a parking space by satellite spies in the sky, it will park itself and it will be safe if you have a crash. With nothing but water coming out of the exhaust you’ll be able to run down as many pedestrians as take your fancy on the way to work, safe in the knowledge that neither they, nor you, nor the planet will be hurt in any way.

And then, when the car has reached the end of its life – currently that’s after an average of 14 years – it will be melted down and turned into a water sprinkler for what, in the past, had been the developing world. Think about that. Lots of smiling Ethiopians sitting in their gardens, watching your old Range Rover water their lawns.

The world’s motor mandarins paint a picture of a world with no war, no poverty and no pollution. It’ll be a world where George Monbiot sits every week staring at his computer wondering what on earth to worry about. Transport 2000, the eco-pressure group, will be gone. And every Sunday night
Top Gear
will smile its way through yet another review of yet another completely safe, completely slow, completely dull p.o.s. Oh yeah? Well, if that’s the case, why are we in the middle of a power battle not seen since the Second World War. Mercedes and BMW are making bigger, heavier and increasingly powerful cars that can’t park themselves, can’t crash without injuring everyone within six miles, and produce enough carbon dioxide to fry a whole flock of great crested grebes.

Then there’s Volkswagen, crowing about its 1.4-litre engine that produces 167 bhp. But not half as loudly as it crows about its Bentley Flying Spur, the fastest four-door
saloon in the world, and the new Bugatti Veyron, which churns out 1,000 bhp.

These motor industry guys are like errant husbands, whispering sweet nothings to their wives about love and affection while pouring half a gallon of baby oil over their lover’s breasts. What you see is not what you get. But then again, what you get isn’t half brilliant.

And that brings me neatly on to the new Volkswagen Golf. Think about what that name means. A car for everyone, a sensible, safe, practical tool in which people and luggage can be transported reliably, efficiently and as cheaply as technically possible. The Golf, remember, was the successor to the Beetle.

Yes, so why’s the new model got a 250-bhp narrowangle V6 engine? Why does it go from 0 to 62 mph in 6.5 seconds? Why, if VW is so bothered about the world, does it keep on going all the way to 155 mph? Why? Because it’s great, that’s why.

No, really, this is a fabulous car. Apart from a bit of jewellery at the front and some blue brake callipers it looks like a normal Golf. You really have to stare at it for quite some time to notice it’s riding a little lower than usual and that the tyres are suspiciously wide.

It’s much the same story on the inside. The chunky, flat-bottomed steering wheel hints at something that really doesn’t seem to be there. It just feels Golf-ish. And it keeps on feeling Golf-ish when you turn the key and set off. The ride is comfortable, there’s no unnecessary noise and everyone has lots of space. A lot more than they’d get in, say, a BMW 1-series.

Then you put your foot down and suddenly the world starts to go backwards. Not harshly or sportily. It’s not like the GTI, this. It’s a big, refined power, more like gravity than internal combustion, so you feel like you’re in a Mercedes. Only I’d like to bet the VW is better made.

And cheaper. Prices for a three-door start at less than
£
24,000, which is exceptional value for money, and even if you go for a five-door with a double-clutch DSG flappy paddle gearbox (which is what I’d do) you’re still asked to pay less than
£
26,000. And that’s a lot of car for the money. It’s more than that in fact. It’s every car you could ever reasonably need. Fast, well made, practical, surprisingly economical and above all discreet. Nobody’s ever going to mistake you for a footballer, that’s for sure.

We don’t know what the future holds, so we can’t plan for it. We only know what’s in the here and now, and this Golf R 32 is as good as it gets. Which is why I’m giving it the rare accolade of a
Sunday Times
five-star rating.

Sunday 20 November 2005

When you push a car past 180 mph, the world starts to get awfully fizzy and a little bit frightening. When you go past 200 mph it actually becomes blurred. Almost like you’re trapped in an early Queen pop video. At this sort of speed the tyres and the suspension are reacting to events that happened some time ago, and they have not finished reacting before they’re being asked to do something else. The result is a terrifying vibration that rattles your optical nerves, causing double vision. This is not good when you’re covering 300 feet a second.

Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won’t see the obstacle in the first place. By the time you know it was there, you’ll have gone through the windscreen, through the Pearly Gates and be halfway across God’s breakfast table.

It has always been thus. When Louis Rigolly broke the 100 mph barrier in his Gobron in 1904, the vibration would have been terrifying. And I dare say that driving an E-type at 150 mph in 1966 must have been a bit sporty as well.

But once you go past 200 mph it isn’t just the suspension and the tyres you have to worry about. The biggest problem is the air. At 100 mph it’s relaxed. At 150 mph it’s a breeze. But at 200 mph it has sufficient power to lift an
800,000-lb jumbo jet off the ground. A 200 mph gust of wind is strong enough to knock down an entire city. So getting a car to behave itself in conditions like these is tough.

At 200 mph you can feel the front of the car getting light as it starts to lift. As a result you start to lose your steering, so you aren’t even able to steer round whatever it is you can’t see because of the vibrations. Make no mistake, 200 mph is at the limit of what man can do right now. Which is why the new Bugatti Veyron is worthy of some industrial-strength genuflection. Because it can do 252 mph. And that’s just mad – 252 mph means that in straight and level flight this car is as near as makes no difference as fast as a Hawker Hurricane.

You might point out at this juncture that the McLaren F1 could top 240 mph, but at that speed it was pretty much out of control. And anyway it really isn’t in the same league as the Bugatti. In a drag race you could let the McLaren get to 120 mph before setting off in the Veyron. And you’d still get to 200 mph first. The Bugatti is way, way faster than anything else the roads have seen.

Of course, at
£
810,000, it is also jolly expensive, but when you look at the history of its development you’ll discover it’s rather more than just a car…

It all started when Ferdinand Piech, the swivel-eyed former boss of Volkswagen, bought Bugatti and had someone design a concept car. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is what the next Bugatti will look like.’ And then, without consulting anyone, he went on, ‘And it vill have an engine that develops 1,000 horsepower and it vill be capable of 400 kph.’

His engineers were horrified. But they set to work anyway, mating two Audi V8s to create an 8-litre W16. Which was then garnished with four turbochargers. Needless to say, the end result produced about as much power as the earth’s core, which is fine. But somehow the giant had to be cooled, which is why the Veyron has no engine cover and why it has 10 – count them – 10 radiators. Then things got tricky because the power had to be harnessed.

For this, VW went to Ricardo, a British company that makes gearboxes for various Formula 1 teams.

‘God, it was hard,’ said one of the engineers I know vaguely. ‘The gearbox in an F1 car only has to last a few hours. Volkswagen wanted the Veyron’s to last 10 or 20 years. And remember, the Bugatti is a damn sight more powerful than any F1 car.’

The result, a seven-speed double-clutch flappy paddle affair, took a team of 50 engineers five years to perfect.

With this done, the Veyron was shipped to Sauber’s F1 wind tunnel, where it quickly became apparent that while the magic 1,000 bhp figure had been achieved, they were miles off the target top speed of 400 kph (248 mph). The body of the car just wasn’t aerodynamic enough, and Volkswagen wouldn’t let them change the basic shape to get round the problem.

The bods at Sauber threw up their hands, saying they only had experience of aerodynamics up to maybe 360 kph, which is the effective top speed in Formula 1. Beyond this point Bugatti was on its own.

Somehow they had to find an extra 30 kph, and there
was no point in looking to the engine for answers because each extra 1-kph increase in speed requires an extra 8 bhp from the power plant. An extra 30 kph then would need an extra 240 bhp. That was not possible.

The extra speed had to come from changing small things on the body. They started by fitting smaller door mirrors, which upped the top speed a bit but at too high a price. It turned out that the bigger ones had been keeping the nose of the car on the ground. Without them the stability was gone.

In other words, the door mirrors were generating down-force. That gives you an idea of how much of a bastard the air can be at this speed.

After some public failures, fires and accidents, and one chief being fired, they hit on the idea of a car that automatically changes shape, depending on what speed you’re going.

At 137 mph, the nose of the car is lowered by 2 inches and the big rear spoiler slides into the slipstream. The effect is profound. You can feel the back of the car being pressed into the road.

However, with the spoiler in place, the drag is so great you’re limited to just 231 mph. To go faster than that you have to stop and insert your ignition key in a slot on the floor. This lowers the whole car still further and locks the big back wing down. Now you have reduced downforce, which means you won’t be going round any corners, but you have a clean shape. And that means you can top 400 kph.

That’s 370 feet a second.

You might want to ponder that for a moment. Covering the length of a football pitch, in a second, in a car. And then you might want to think about the braking system. A VW Polo will generate 0.6 G if you stamp on the middle pedal hard. You get that from the air brake alone on a Veyron. Factor in the carbon ceramic discs, and you will pull up from 250 mph in just 10 seconds. Sounds good, but in those 10 seconds you’ll have covered a third of a mile. That’s five football pitches to stop.

I didn’t care. On a recent drive across Europe I desperately wanted to reach the top speed, but I ran out of road when the needle hit 240 mph. Where, astonishingly, it felt planted. Totally and utterly rock steady. It felt sublime.

Not quiet, though. The engine sounds like Victorian plumbing – it looks like Victorian plumbing as well, to be honest – and the roar from the tyres was biblical. But it still felt brilliant. Utterly, stunningly, mind-blowingly, jaw-droppingly brilliant.

And then I reached the Alps, where, unbelievably, it got better. I expected this road rocket to be absolutely useless in the bends, but it felt like a big Lotus Elise.

Occasionally, if I accelerated hard in a tight corner, it behaved strangely as the four-wheel-drive system decided which axle would be best equipped to deal with the wave of power. I won’t say it’s a nasty feel or dangerous. Just weird, in the same way that the duck-billed platypus is weird.

You learn to raise an eyebrow at what’s only a foible, and then, as the road straightens out, steady yourself for Prince Albert’s boiler to gird its loins and play havoc with
the space–time continuum. No, really, you come round a bend, see what appears to be miles and miles of dead straight road, bury your foot in the carpet and, with a big asthmatic wheeze, bang, you’re instantly at the next bend, with your eyebrow raised again.

From behind the wheel of a Veyron, France is the size of a small coconut. I cannot tell you how fast I crossed it the other day. Because you simply wouldn’t believe me. I also cannot tell you how good this car is. I just don’t have the vocabulary. I just end up stammering and dribbling and talking wide-eyed nonsense. And everyone thinks I’m on drugs.

This car cannot be judged in the same way that we judge other cars. It meets drive-by noise and emission regulations and it can be driven by someone whose only qualification is an ability to reverse round corners and do an emergency stop. So technically it is a car. And yet it just isn’t.

Other cars are small guesthouses on the front at Brighton and the Bugatti is the Buri Al Arab. It makes even the Enzo and the Porsche GT feel slow and pointless. It is a triumph for lunacy over common sense, a triumph for man over nature and a triumph for Volkswagen over absolutely every other car maker in the world.

Sunday 27 November 2005

Sir Ian Blair, the preposterous London police chief, said recently that the newspapers whipped up far too much of a hullabaloo about the murder of Soham schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. And that nowhere near as much coverage is given when some poor black kid is killed. Obviously the case of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor must have slipped his mind. And Stephen Lawrence, for that matter.