Clarkson on Cars (38 page)

But here we are, 23 years down the line, and electric windows are even fitted to absolute bottom-of-the-line hatchbacks.

The trouble is, of course, as base-level cars have begun to feature a long list of standard equipment, the makers of more expensive models have been forced to trawl the very outer reaches of what is sensible to make their cars look like value for money.

I sort of knew things were going wrong when Nissan brought out its Bluebird. Here we had a car with two trip counters. Sometimes, even now, late at night, I can’t sleep as I try to work out what was going on in the mind of the man who reckoned that two trip switches was a good idea.

There must have been a reason, or his bosses would have said no, but for the life of me, I can’t work out what it might be.

Gimmicks have long been a Japanese thing. While every other car maker in the world was offering four wheels and a seat, they came along with four wheels, a seat… and a radio.

When everyone else began to fit a radio, they did a trip switch. And then two.

And now, it’s all gone silly. The Mitsubishi 3000GT, for instance, features a number of television screens which tell you what sort of air is coming from which sort of vent. If you have a hot face and cold feet, you glance down to see a red arrow pointing at your head and a blue one at your toes.

Clever stuff, but it goes further, because another TV screen tells you how much of what sort of frequency your stereo is pushing out. An LED graphic equaliser read-out. Of course. How ever did I get by without one?

Now I want to make it quite plain here and now that I love toys. I have an aluminium can crusher. I lust after everything on
GQ
magazine’s ‘Objects’ page. I bought my stereo only because it came with a power amp that hums and has a huge red light on the front.

This, I’m sure a hi-fi expert would tell me, is only a big empty box with a light on the front but I don’t care because it looks good. As do all those screens in a 3000GT.

Two trip switches don’t on the other hand, and nor do the fold-away head restraints in a Mercedes. These are the people who brought you a double-glazed car and illuminated vanity mirrors in the back. These are the people who devised an arm which delivers your seatbelt when you shut the door and now they’ve gone further. Hit a button on the dash and the rear headrests drop down to make reversing easier, but short of getting into the back and pulling them up again, they stay down, flat and flaccid.

And talking of things that move, what about the spoiler on the back of a VW Corrado. At 40 mph, it raises to provide questionable extra downforce – fair enough, at a pinch, but why is there a manual-override button?

Apart from trying to fool the guy in the car behind into thinking that you are bigger in the trouser department than you really are, there is no benefit at all in driving around town with your spoiler up.

Talking trip computers, happily, have gone to that great gimmick scrapyard in the sky but when they were in vogue, my colleague on
Top Gear
, Chris Goffey, turned a speaking Maestro on its roof. And as he dangled there, upside down, the silicon back-seat driver announced: ‘Oil pressure low.’

Today, we have multi-faceted automatic gearboxes. Now call me an old hasbeen but I thought the whole point of automatic transmission was to save effort. You put the stick in D and off you go.

Not any more. The gear lever in the Vauxhall Omega I drove last week was festooned with more buttons than a nineteenth-century bodice.

There was one for economy driving, one for sporty moments and one for when it snows. Then there was the overdrive facility.

But there are more stupid things. Audi fits stereos which have buttons that can only be operated by micro-physicists. If you use a finger to adjust the volume, you’ll inadvertently nudge nine other controls which, if you’re very unlucky, means you could finish up with Terry Wogan shouting at you.

For a true button frenzy, you just can’t beat Saab. The topflight 9000 model comes as standard with no fewer than 104 switches at a driver’s disposal.

And none of them operates what I consider to be the most significant gimmick yet invented.

Both the Ford Escort Cosworth and the Jaguar XJ6 that I have run in the past two years had a heated front windscreen and I can’t tell you how much I miss it on the new Jaguar, which does not.

Cars do steam up and being impatient, most people will set off before the fan has strutted its stuff. Well, with a heated screen, you just touch a button and before you’ve put your seatbelt on, the glass is pine fresh and as clear as morning dew.

Nissan, I hear, are working on a car with two heated windscreens.

They don’t televise inter-county basket weaving. They don’t charge spectators £70 for the privilege of watching sheep-dog trials. And when someone wins a beetle drive, the results aren’t disputed by laboratory technicians.

But in Formula One, they do all of these things even though it has become, with the exception of cricket and golf, by far and away the most tedious spectacle in the world.

I’ve made half-hearted declarations before, about not watching F1 any more, but Brazil was the final straw.

Damon Hill promised, just before the start, that we were in for one of the most exciting championships in years. Then, a couple of hours later, Murray Walker admitted that the only thing keeping the race alive was the fuel stops.

Well, now look Murray, you are the best sports commentator I’ve ever heard, but you must admit that there are more exciting things to do on a Sunday than watching cars being filled up with petrol, some of which wasn’t really petrol at all, we later discovered.

If I want to watch people refuelling, I can pop down to the local Texaco station. Hell, I can even do it myself, but as I screech up to the pump and stand there watching the numbers click round, there are no crowds, and BBC Sport doesn’t pay my agent billions for the exclusive rights. This is because filling up with petrol falls into the category of things labelled ‘Not Interesting’.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of anything that is less interesting. Ironing springs to mind but even duller than that is what happens in a Formula One race between the fuel stops.

Nothing happens, that’s what. In the televised highlights from Brazil, there wasn’t a single overtaking manoeuvre, except when the car in front broke down. And mechanical failure isn’t interesting either. I ran out of petrol the other day and for damn sure, no one gave a toss.

The tabloid newspapers have realised that the only interest in Formula One is the Damon Hill versus Michael Shoemaker battle, which is a thinly disguised rerun of World War Two. Only we won that.

And anyway, if I want to watch Britain giving the Germans a good pasting, I’ll go down to the video shop and rent
The Dambusters
.

So look; if you want to see good car racing, forget F1. Switch off in droves and turn your attention instead to the British Touring Car Championship where the lead will change more times in one lap than it does in a whole year of Grand Prix.

You can bang door handles in the BTCC and push the car in front round a corner, in the fairly certain knowledge that the result won’t be a black flag, a spin, or death and manglement.

In Brazil, Mr Shoemaker was so much faster than everyone else, he very nearly lapped himself. In the BTCC, you win by inches, not light years.

And another thing. I’ve been going to Grand Prix for years and I never, ever see a driver. They hang around in their motorhomes nibbling a little light pasta and sipping an isotonic drink until just before the off.

And then at the end, they’re on a helicopter halfway back to Monaco before you’re out of the car park.

BTCC drivers are forced by the rules to mingle with the paying punters in the paddock on race day. They must sign autographs and they must do a parade lap, and if they refuse, they’re fined.

This means everyone has a chance to meet the stars and form opinions. If Patrick Watts or Paul Radisch says something nice to your wide-eyed son, you can cheer the guy on in the race.

Or you can form opinions based solely on the cars they drive. My wife has a Volvo and desperately wants them to win this year. I’m not that bothered just so long as the BMWs lose.

All around Europe, other countries are copying the BTCC and all around the world, television companies are buying the rights to broadcast it. And that gives the car companies, who’ve only paid a paltry 5 million to be on the grid, a nice warm feeling in their underpants.

And on top of all this, the major tittle-tattle dominating the run up to the F1 season was the size of Nigel Mansell’s arse. In the BTCC, people have had a weightier problem – like who’s going to win.

In Britain, Lotus is a bit of a joke.

To those who have actually owned one, it stands for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious, while to those who pay little attention, it’s a Formula One racing team that doesn’t win very often.

And then there’s the corporate side of things. Founded by Colin Chapman in 1948 with a tarted-up Austin Seven, it struggled along for 40 years, becoming embroiled in the De Lorean fiasco and emerging as a corporate plaything for General Motors.

But last month, faced with a need to do something about its huge losses, GM paid off Lotus’s debts and sold the whole shooting match, except the race team, which is now independent, to Bugatti.

This, in itself, is odd because though Bugatti has a huge and ultra-modern factory, along with grand and ambitious plans, it has, so far, not made very many cars: perfume, head scarves and models, yes, but cars? No.

Geographically, Lotus has always been disadvantaged too. We can understand that cars are made in Detroit because this is Motown and we know about Essex and Coventry and Birmingham but it is hard to equate Norfolk with motor-car manufacturing.

Lotus has become world famous for its technology, its work on anti-sound and active ride suspension is well documented and state of the art, yet this seems at odds with Norfolk, just about the only county in England with no motorways in it.

You expect to see a lot of agriculture in Norfolk, a lot of turkeys too, but for heaven’s sake, the garages don’t even take credit cards. No, in Britain, Lotus is a bit of a joke.

And, in recent years, the cars haven’t helped either. There was the Elan, lovely to drive but blessed with the reliability of British Rail. Then there was the Elite, lovely to drive but odd-looking. The Excel was lovely to drive too but it was unreliable and over bumps, it had a habit of banging the driver’s head into the roof.

Then there was the best Lotus of them all, the Seven, as driven by Patrick McGoohan in
The Prisoner
. But Lotus sold this design to Caterham Cars who last year sold 550 of them, earned a Queen’s Award and can now boast that they make more cars than the company to which they owe their existence.

In 1990, it looked like Lotus would make a decent car in the new Elan, but it proved too expensive and unreliable, so GM pulled the plug on it. There’s talk now that Bugatti wants to start making it again, but don’t hold your breath.

Small wonder then that Lotus has never quite managed to shake off its image as a kit car manufacturer, a place to go for plastic cars that break down a lot.

So why then did James Bond use a Lotus, twice? In
The Spy Who Loved Me
, he tooled around under water – where the plastic wouldn’t rust, of course – and in
For Your Eyes Only
, he went to Cortina in one for some skiing and spying.

And why is Lotus such an obvious hit in America? Richard Gere wooed Julia Roberts with one in
Pretty Woman
and then both Sharon Stone and her girlfriend used Lotuses in
Basic Instinct
. A new soap, set in the Caribbean and due for launch next year, also sees the hero behind the wheel of a Lotus every week.

Well, here’s the deal. All these people have used the Esprit, a mid-engined two-seater which was designed by the master of Italian style, Guigaro.

He was responsible for the first Golf and the mark one Scirocco. He did the Alfasud and the Maserati Merak. He is a genius but his finest hour came when he finished his coffee, sharpened his pencil, and did the Esprit.

And even the seventeen years which have elapsed since then, and the countless design changes by Lotus themselves, have failed to remove the sheen. Indeed, today’s Esprit, the S4, is the best looking of the lot and must rank as one of the most beautiful cars in the world.

Perhaps that’s why it is now the only car Lotus make, at the rate of one a week.

But that’s more because, though it is a pretty car, and a fast one, and a car chosen by the stars, it is not desperately expensive. £46,995 is not much for a car that should, given enough road, be capable of 165 mph.

In a straight race away from the lights, up to say 100 mph, it will hang on, gallantly, to the tails of far more expensive machinery, like the £80,449 Porsche Turbo and the £144,000 Lamborghini Diablo. It is actually faster than the £78,000 Ferrari 348GTB.

And this is quite an achievement for a car whose engine looks like something out of a Moulinex Magimix. It is a mere 2.2-litre, four-cylinder unit, making it about the same as the engine in your Ford Mondeo, but because it has a sophisticated turbocharger, it develops 264 bhp which is enough to make the plastic, and thus light, car very, very fast indeed.

And because it is so small, there’s room behind it for that rarest of rare things in a supercar; a boot.

Now that’s the on-paper stuff, the kind of material you can find in a brochure; but two questions will be at the forefront of any potential customer’s mind. What is it really like to drive, and how far will it go before I need to telephone the RAC?

Well, I managed 1500 miles in a week before I needed to call someone out. But it was Autoglass, and not the RAC, and it was because a mutant had broken in and not because the engine had gone bang. In fact, nothing went bang and nothing dropped off. Nothing looked like it was going to drop off either.