Clarkson on Cars (22 page)

For two reasons, alarm bells immediately began to sound. First, this is a club and clubs are for the insecure who thrive on the company of the like-minded and like-bearded.

Down at the local golf club, they all give one another idiotic names and abbreviate everything. And they all treat the chairman with some kind of divine reverence, forgetting that he only got the job because (a) he has the woolliest pully and (b) he’d been on the committee for longest. The same goes for the Freemasons. And the Guild of Motoring Writers. And the infernal Round Table.

Secondly, the alarm bells were ringing because this whole ‘tall’ thing smacked of minority interest behaviour. We’ve had the race relations board to tackle racism and the equal opportunities commission to bop sexism on the head. I was fearful I was being lured into something which would set its stall out to fight something that doesn’t even exist – heightism.

Yes, I’m 6 ft 5 in but some of my best friends are midgets. My girlfriend, for instance, is just one inch tall.

Neither of us has ever been abused, physically or verbally, because of our height and neither of us has ever found it to be a particular problem. What, then, if there is no such thing as heightism, is the point of a Tall Person’s Club?

Maybe we’ll all get together once in a while and call one another Lofty or other amusing names. Maybe it would be a chance to meet tall members of the opposite sex.

But no. Apparently, the idea is to lobby various manufacturers, convincing them that they must start taking us into consideration. Or else.

The club wants taller door openings. But I was brought up in a seventeenth-century farmhouse and it never bothered me. The club wants higher kitchen units. Why, for Christ’s sake? Find a sink that comes above your knees and the last excuse you have for not doing the washing up has gone.

And, needless to say, the club wants more space in cars. Well, at 6 ft 5 in, I’m just about at the very edge of reasonableness and yet the only car I absolutely cannot drive is a Fiat X19. Again, no bad thing.

Sure, in an F40, my head is on the roof and, in a Renault 25, my knees have to adopt a position which is most unladylike, but not at all unreasonable for a man. Come to think of it, not unreasonable for a woman either.

What I’m trying to say is that of the 750 cars on sale in Britain today, all will accommodate someone my size. Indeed, most will readily accommodate those of an even taller disposition. I even saw Herman Munster in a Mercedes 190 the other day.

Now, fair enough, some people are more than 7 ft tall and I would imagine that finding a car when you’re that big is just about impossible.

And I’m afraid that it will stay just about impossible because car manufacturers simply cannot be expected to organise an interior for a seven-footer.

Or, if they did, can you imagine the problems of fitting the necessary equipment to make the same interior suitable for someone like my girlfriend, who, as I said, is just an inch tall.

If you are born long and freaky, then by all means join a club but don’t expect it to answer your prayers for an easier life. Because it most certainly won’t.

Far better, in the current environment, to move to Fulham where the council will give you a specially converted Cadillac limousine. Or two, if you have a predilection for members of the same genital group.

Today, my desk is freed from the burden of supporting a computer and assorted in-trays. In their place there is a pot of
foie gras
and a glass of Dom Pérignon. The whole office is bathed in an almost ethereal light while outside, beautiful young people are flouncing by, smiling in the spring sunshine.

The stock market has registered its biggest single jump for five years, leaping 130 points in just fifteen minutes, and there is talk of interest rates coming down.

For the fourth time in thirteen years, Britain has elected a Conservative government. Though it was clear by 2 a.m. that the forces of good would triumph, I stayed up until four so that I could watch that man Kinnock squirming in defeat. It was a glorious sight.

With a bit of luck the recession will now screech to a halt as business rejoices but just in case the economy needs a kick-start, I have taken steps.

First, I have instructed an estate agent to sell my flat so that I can get something a little more palatial, and secondly, I have taken the curious step of ordering a car.

Not a rash decision this as I’ve been chewing over the concept of just such a move for the best part of a year now. The question has fluctuated between: do I really need one and if I do, what sort should it be?

With the concept of Kinnock and his sidekicks getting into office, I felt that buying a car before the election would have been just plain stupid.

With his programme of spending money on social services and the National Health Service, anyone with a job would have been squeezed until they bled. And then squeezed a little more. And then, men would come round and take away our video recorders to give to the poor, who under Labour, would have become the very rich.

I therefore needed my savings more than I needed wheels, but conversely I don’t think it’s right that a motoring journalist does not own a car. Many do not, arguing that there is always something new to test, but I hardly feel we can pontificate about motoring when we don’t have firsthand experience of it.

Until you’ve queued for a tax disc and wondered why you can’t apply through the post, or until you’ve heard an insurance broker suck air through his teeth when you said ‘GTi and no, it won’t be garaged’, you don’t really understand what’s what. Anyway, now that I know my savings will be left alone, the time has come to do buying. But what?

First to fall off the short list was the old pagoda-roofed Mercedes SL. Lovely car and all that, but cars I own often spend months on the street without ever being called into service and my experience of really old cars is just when you need them the most, they are at their most stubborn on the starter-motor front.

Mercedes are engineered like no other car in the world but when something is 25 years old, it doesn’t really matter how well it was built, it will just be unreliable.

Second to go was the BMW Z1. Though this would be absolutely perfect because it’s modern enough to be reliable and different enough to be fun, they are still too expensive. Hunt hard and you can get one for £16,000 but £16,000 is an awful lot of money to spend on what would be street furniture for 360 days a year.

The Porsche 944 Turbo was lasting well on my list because here is a beautifully engineered, well-made car that you can now buy for less than £10,000. It is exceptionally good fun to drive, remarkable to look at and I have no doubt that it will be a Michelangelo’s David when it comes to standing the test of time.

But there’s something prattish about a Porsche. Urban yobs enjoy converting them into De Loreans and I sort of know why. I’m not really the type of person who indulges in the art of gobbing on people but the temptation is strong when a Porsche struts by.

And that just about covers all the cars in which I’d be even remotely interested. I’d love an XJS but they really are too big for London, and too thirsty. Same goes for the Range Rover. And yes, I know a 325i or a Golf would be sensible but hell, that’s like being nice, or balanced, or reasonable. I despise reasonableness with the same gusto that I despise socialism.

I’ll tell you something else as well. Excluding all exotic nonsense I don’t really like new cars. They’re too sanitised and adonised and, oh the hell with it, I can’t think of another word that ends in ‘-ised’, but boring will do.

I just can’t whip up any enthusiasm for the worthy Rover convertible or the Citroen Volcane. All those roadtests saying it was once king but it handed the crown on to the 19 16v which has subsequently passed it on to the Tipo have the same effect as a Mogadon ‘n’ whisky mix. I even borrowed an AMG-tweaked 24-valve Mercedes coupe the other day and nodded off in it.

However, there is one exception that proves the rule. It is made by Ford but don’t bother hunting behind the pot plants down at your local dealer because they won’t have one. It is a convertible with a powered hood. It has air conditioning, cruise control, electric seats, windows and mirrors and it barrels along at speeds up to 125 mph thanks to the installation of a 5.0-litre V8 engine, which makes all the right noises.

It is a Ford Mustang GT and I have discovered that you can buy one-year-old examples in America for $11,000. Ship one over, pay your taxes, insure it for a year and you still get change from £10,000.

It will undoubtedly be reliable because that engine is not exactly overstressed and I will, for the first time ever, have a convertible so that I can enjoy the sunshine.

And believe you me, there will be sunshine this summer, even when it’s cold and wet. There will be sunshine in my heart because while the country in which I live overcharges for its cars and then sells a whole load of nasty ones, its people, for the fourth time since 1979, have, to use a footballing expression, done good. Thank you Basildon. Thank you Portsmouth South.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is a weighty tome but, in essence, it suggests that we all began as amoebas, then we were fish, then we were monkeys, then we were men.

And whenever we were going up the wrong path, nature gently inserted something like an ice age. This would kill off the evolutionary mistakes, like dinosaurs, allowing the rather more successful species to survive.

Undoubtedly, this will happen again one day soon, and all the socialists and car-stereo thieves will be swept away in a maelstrom of locusts and acid. Nature takes its time with this evolution game but, over and over again, it is proved to be right.

Look at the avocado pear. When nature discovered that avocado and prawns made a wholesome double act, it began, bit by bit, to enlarge the stone so there’d be space for the filling.

So it goes with the seal. Originally designed as a land-based mammal, it developed a penchant for fish and, as a result, nature has spent the last 200,000 years turning its legs into flippers and its lungs into hot-air balloons. Doubtless, by the year 4992, the seal will have gills, so that it never needs to surface at all.

According to some recent research, man is getting bigger. In 1992 we are, on average, one inch taller than we were in 1892, and one has to wonder where this will end. Perhaps nature has decided that we should all be 200 feet tall, but feels that there will be chaos if we suddenly start producing 16-foot-long babies. So it’s being done nice and slowly, allowing us to get used to our new-found stature, an inch at a time.

Now, let us for a moment compare this state of affairs to the alternative put forward by those ancient scribes who wrote the Old Testament. God wakes up one morning, cleans his teeth and decides: ‘I know. I’ll make a man and a woman today.’ So he does. In a matter of hours, the woman’s had a fling with a snake, given herself up to the devil and had two children, one of whom eats the other and climbs into bed with his mother, claiming that if she doesn’t come across, it’ll be curtains for humanity.

Either way, there’s bugger-all point tracing your family tree because, if Darwin got it right, your great-great-great-great-grandfather was an amoeba and, if the Old Testament was right, you stem from someone who ate his brother and pulled his mum. Even if, en route to this discovery, you find that you are a direct descendant of Richard the Lionheart, it really is only a small consolation.

But this is a peccadillo, a momentary loss of the thread. The point is that evolution may be time-consuming and boring, but it beats the crap out of revolution any day.

Look at the world of politics. The Greeks, somehow, invented democracy, the only real rival to which, excluding the excellent concept of feudalism, has been Communism. But a prerequisite for Communism is that the population like eating cabbage and being shot, so it didn’t last very long – except in Cuba, where they’re all on drugs anyway. Then there’s the world of cars.

Nothing is guaranteed to send me scuttling for the door faster than when a well-scrubbed engineer, with a biro he lost two weeks ago stuck behind his left ear, announces that his company is about to unveil an all-new car. It begs the question: ‘What the hell was the matter with the old one?’ But no one ever asks because everyone is crossing and uncrossing their legs, barely able to contain their excitement at the prospect of a new gearbox.

Take the new Honda Prelude. This is a stunning-looking car, and I will pat the back of anyone who says they were even slightly involved with its styling, but for heaven’s sake, did it need a new engine, a new floor, a new interior and a new four-wheel steering system too?

If you are going to change everything you run the risk, as Russia did in 1917, or as God did in the Garden of Eden, of getting something horribly wrong.

The Rover SDI was unreliable but, instead of concentrating their efforts on quality, the designers came up with the all-new 800, which had a hole the size of France in its torque curve.

The original Toyota MR2 was beginning to look a little dated but, instead of a mild facelift, we got an all-new MR2 which, by all accounts, had the handling prowess of Bambi. Then there was the Celica. A few tweaks would have kept the eighties version as fresh as lavatory cleaner but no – in came something that looked like an extra in a Vincent Price movie.

And Subaru. For years it’s made solid, dependable farm vehicles, but does it stick to its specialist subject? No, it invents the SVX, which is to the world of coupes what vomiting on the Queen’s corgi is to your chances of getting a knighthood.

Now compare these revolutionary cars to those which have been gently evolved: the glorious Jaguar XJS, the characteristic Porsche 911, the Rolls, the Morgan.

And best of all, when it comes to illustrating the point, the Range Rover. Though the silhouette remains the same as it was in 1972, it has been evolved gradually, taking on four doors when it was deemed necessary, adopting a 3.9-litre engine when a 3.5 was no longer enough, sprouting anti-lock brakes, leather upholstery and various other toys, as market forces dictated.