Born to Be Riled (30 page)

Atlanta is one of the world’s most peculiar cities. It has the requisite pointy skyscrapers and if you ask for a small Coke in a Taco Bell, it still comes in a bucket. This is America.

And yet somehow, it isn’t. The people, largely, are slim, and regularly you’ll see a well-dressed, pretty girl in an Alfa Romeo Spider.

And then you’ve got the valet parkists at the Ritz Carlton. They’re efficient for sure, but they don’t crawl across the driveway on their stomachs, clutching at your
legs like you’re the only person in the world who shares the same type of bone marrow.

I read recently that America’s business travellers had voted Atlanta the rudest city in the world… and that’s it. That’s why I like the place so much. Ask for a pail of Sprite in a restaurant and you’ll be ignored. Summon a man to fix the television in your bedroom and he’ll stomp around, prodding the remote control and swearing at you for breaking it. It’s fantastic. It’s just like Britain.

And it’s very like Britain if you head north to the town of Braselton, which was recently bought by Kim Basinger. Here you will find Road Atlanta, which isn’t a road at all. It’s a swooping, Spa-like race track where the girl on reception greets you with the distinctly un-American ‘Hello love.’

Men drift around in the background, being English, and then you’re introduced to the boss who, it turns out, lives in Field Assarts – a small village just outside Chipping Norton.

I was there to drive the Vector, an American supercar about which I had serious doubts. When I first heard of it, 20 years ago, it was being made in California by a man whose mouth was so big you could park a lorry in it.

He used to claim that his car, which had a twin-turbocharged Corvette V8, could do more than 200mph, but I saw no test results to back this up. Indeed, the only time I ever even saw a Vector was in the film
Rising Sun
.

Anyway, he went bust and the company was relocated to Florida by the same Malaysians who own Lamborghini. But not long afterwards, they simply locked the factory doors and walked away.

However, despite this chequered past, there, at Road
Atlanta, was an enormous American lorry which housed a brand-new Vector, and alongside it there was a huge black limo which had been driven overnight from Jacksonville, six hours to the south.

In the back was Vector’s new boss. Now I was expecting a ten-gallon hat to stumble from the back door, followed several hours later by a stomach. But no, a cheeky chappie in a two-piece pinstripe bounded over and introduced himself in a Thames Estuary accent as Tim.

Turns out, he served his time at Lotus, where there is only one mantra. The car must be light.

But the £100,000 monster being poured from the back of that gigantic truck appeared to have been fashioned from a cocktail of lead and mercury. It was huge: 6 inches wider than a Diablo and 10 times more striking.

As is the way with supercars, getting in is like potholing. You crawl under the Kevlar gull-wing door and burrow over the sill to find an interior which is shockingly cramped. Put a veal in there and Dover docks would be closed down for a month.

Still, you turn the key and behind your head a 5.7 litre, 500bhp Lamborghini V12 explodes into life. This is what supercars are all about. Deep discomfort, allied to unspeakable noise and fear. If you feel like a veal with a rocket strapped to its back, you’re in a supercar where Nessun Dorma. If it’s all comfy and quiet, you’re in a Nissan Dormobile.

It was odd then, to discover that when I shoved the throttle into the carpet the car merely went a little faster. Only when the revs crawled past 4000 did it really wake up, but by then I was already tired. The steering is power-assisted, but only a little bit. And you don’t press the brake
pedal to slow down; you have to climb in the footwell and use a jack hammer on the damn thing. It absolutely will not oversteer either.

Now at this point, I’d like to say that the first man ever to buy one of these cars had the right idea. He took down the wall of his house, put the car in his sitting room and built the wall again.

And yet I suspect that somewhere in the package there is a good car. It reminded me in many ways of an early ’80s TVR which we could, so easily, have written off as kit-car junk. With a bit of careful development, mainly to make the engine work at low revs, the Vector could pick up the baton that Lamborghini, I understand, is soon to drop. Rumours coming from the factory in Bologna talk of an empty order book and even emptier pockets.

It is, of course, pretty damn hard to take on Ferrari and Porsche but there’s no doubt in my mind that Vector is using the right recipe – a British chassis, Italian power, American prices and Buck Rogers styling. They just want to make sure they don’t get that all the wrong way round.

If they succeed, they’ll be selling the nicest American surprise since Atlanta. If they don’t, they’ll be selling a crap car.

Every year, I predict who will win the Formula One world championship. And every year I am completely and utterly wrong. This year, I said it would be Jacques Villeneuve… but don’t worry, I’m not losing my touch.
Martin Brundle’s job is safe, because I was wrong again.

I may have been right with the outcome but, as with examinations, you must be able to show how you worked it out. And on that front, I was all over the place. You see, I said Jacques would win every single race, have it wrapped up by Silverstone, and that we were in for the dullest year of racing since the drivers’ strike.

And I wasn’t alone. Everyone who knows which way up a helmet goes agreed with me. So what went wrong? Well I’m not big on conspiracy theories. I don’t, for instance, believe that Princess Diana was murdered by one of the Queen’s corgis. My hair was not cut this morning by Elvis Presley. And I think Neil Armstrong did make his giant leap on the moon, not on a soundstage in Nevada. But at the end of qualifying for the European Grand Prix last month, one of my eyebrows was raised just a little higher than normal. And at the end of the race, the other one had joined it. With hindsight, you can see things starting to go awry in Austria. Schumacher was romping away with the title when he was hit with a 10 second penalty after passing Heinz-Harald Hopeless under a yellow flag. Result: Villeneuve closed the gap.

Then there was Japan, when Jacques could have sewn it all up. But no. He didn’t slow down for a waved flag while qualifying, he was under a one-race suspended ban and that was it. He was out. Result: Schumacher closed the gap.

And just in case Jacques thought about appealing, he was warned that Eddie Irvine had done this before and had seen his ban extended from one to three races. Result: a bunch of promoters with Blair-style grins. These penalties had been imposed for clear misdemeanours, but
I find it odd that the only two drivers to have fallen foul of the law this year were the two fighting for the title, and that both did so in the championship’s dying hours. Anyway, when the circus arrived in Spain for the big showdown, Villeneuve and Schumacher were one point apart, and I had buttocks you couldn’t have prised apart with a blow torch. However, during qualifying we were asked to believe that Michael and Jacques on this, the greatest day in motor racing, had driven round the circuit at exactly the same speed – something that had never, ever happened before. Far-fetched? Not if you think
Star Wars
is a true story.

Then came the race. Over the year I’ve come to respect Schumacher, who seemed to be genuinely pleased when he won. He undoubtedly had an inferior car – one of my beloved Ferraris. He had proved himself a truly great driver, and after his praise for Eddie Irvine in Japan, a gentleman. But in Spain he proved that, when all is said and done, he is still a German. So he was out and Villeneuve was on his way to victory, not only in the race but in the championship too. Hip hip hooray and so on.

But wait. What’s this? Team managers dash about in the pits, and look what’s happening. Hakkinen has overtaken Coulthard. On the straight. Fisichella has been blue-flagged, and Villeneuve’s car seems to be suffering some damage after all. Now, obviously it would be improper for me to suggest even for one moment that there had been some behind-the-scenes jiggery-pokery going on, but did you see Coulthard on the podium? He looked like a man whose dog had just died. Even Hakkinen, who I expected to burst with pride when he finally won a race, looked like he’d just failed all his A-levels.

There’s talk that Sylvester Stallone is working on a Hollywood blockbuster about Formula One, but if someone presented him with a script based on the 1997 championship, he’d dismiss it as completely implausible.

Bernie Ecclestone has done a magnificent job with Formula One and he needs these last-minute showdowns. But we, the keen viewers, need to be assured that it is still motorsport, with young men going wheel-to-wheel in a life-or-death struggle for glory. And not panto.

I’d only been driving the new Jaguar for 20 minutes when, inevitably, it happened. On a rain-streaked M42 my rear-view mirror filled to overflowing with the menacing sight of a steel-wheeled BMW 316. Inside, the driver was barking into a mobile phone, his face contorted with rage that I should be in
his
way.

Now there was a time when I’d have eased the Jag into a lower gear and floored the throttle, but next weekend I shall be 38 and I just can’t be bothered any more. So, as soon as a space appeared, I moved politely into the middle lane and smiled as Mr Neo-Georgian screamed past, on his way, no doubt, to yet another crisis at the photocopier shop.

It was, I’m afraid, a rather patronizing smile because matey could have brought any BMW to the battle and he’d have lost. I was driving the new supercharged XK8 you see, and no German production car can even get close. Not even the new Porsche 911.

The standard XK8 has already been voted the most beautiful two-seater sports car in the world by a bunch of Italian designers, but now Jaguar has added some teeth to create what’s called the XKR. Basically, it’s propelled along by a supercharged 4.0 litre V8 engine which produces a simply staggering 370bhp – roughly the same as a Ferrari 355.

This is a natural successor to the old Jaguar XK120 which, 50 years ago, was also voted the most beautiful car in the world. And then, on a deserted stretch of Belgian motorway, it achieved 139mph, making it the fastest too.

The new XKR goes further. Even though it is burdened by various pieces of Prescottery in the exhaust and an automatic gearbox, it will get from 0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds and onwards to a top speed in excess of 175mph. Well it would, but an electronic referee blows the whistle at 155mph.

These are impressive statistics but it is the quality and the relentlessness of the power delivery that leaves a more lasting impression – that and the top-end clout. From 140 to 155mph, when the supercharger is eating steroids by the handful, it is an almost unbelievable 50 seconds faster than a standard, unsupercharged XK8.

So that passers-by in their weedy BMWs are able to tell what they’re dealing with, the XKR has different wheels, twin bonnet louvres and a microscopic boot-lid spoiler. And that’s it. There isn’t even much of a difference with the price – the coupé is £60,000 and the droptop I tested is £66,000.

So it’s well-priced, pretty and very, very fast. What more could you possibly want?

Well actually, quite a lot. You see, the new car is
smooth and wafty and will, I don’t doubt, find a great many friends at golf clubs all over Houston. I can see Los Angeles dentists arriving to buy this car by the bus load. They’re going to just lurrrve that wood and leather interior, and the comfort, and the silence.

However, there are some changes I’d like to see before I’d buy one, and first of all they need to get it down. A real jaguar, the furry Attenborough type, prances about on tiptoe when it’s cruising, but as things get serious it’ll hunker down on its haunches – and the XKR doesn’t.

It sits too high, with a huge gap between the wheels and the wheel arches – you could erect a tent in there. One designer I know described the XKR as an off-road sports car, but he was wrong. It isn’t a sports car at all because the suspension, though beefy, is sadly boneless. My six-cylinder XJR saloon has a much meatier feel, both in terms of the ride and the steering. It feels like it’s in attack mode, which for a car of this type is how things should be.

Then there’s the seats. If you are broad-shouldered – like the chairman of Jaguar, incidentally – you will find them so narrow that driving through high-speed corners, you fall out of them. BMW offer sporty, heavily bolstered alternatives and I really can’t see why Ford’s luxury division does not.

This, I guess, is my point here. BMW make lovely cars for a certain type of person but they know there will always be a small number of people who want
bigger better more
. So they have the tiny and separate Motorsport ‘M’ division who take the best… and make it better.

Mercedes does the same sort of thing. You can buy a car off the peg, or if you want some snarly, bone-snapping
get up and go, you can buy one that’s been tweaked by AMG.

What Jaguar needs is the same sort of thing – a wholly owned, but separate, engineering-based outfit that could take a car designed for everyman and turn it into a road-going rocket for the few.

They wouldn’t even need to touch the engine – it’s easily good enough already – but that said, if by fiddling with camshafts and fuel flow they eked out a few more horses, I wouldn’t complain. Some exhausts that offer a muted V8 beat wouldn’t go amiss either.

The standard XKR is a superb dish that’s been well thought out and beautifully prepared. It is an excellent grand tourer, but with some slightly different seasoning it could be turned into something else. It could be turned into a sports car.

Imagine the horror. You’re a cameraman with the BBC’s natural history department and you’ve been dispatched to Tierra del Fuego in South America where, once every ten years, a strange frog comes out of the mud, mates, and then dies.