Clarkson on Cars (39 page)

I have telephoned Norris McWhirter to see if 1500 miles is some kind of record for a Lotus, and he’s checking.

It must be said that I hadn’t really looked forward to my stint with this car because the last model, the S3, was a dog. The brakes were useless, the steering was unassisted and furiously heavy as a result, and it wasn’t big enough inside for anyone other than Colin Moynihan.

But as the miles rolled by in the S4, my mind changed. New seats, in black leather with yellow piping, mean the interior is big enough for big people, and a new instrument panel means you can see all the dials except the clock but this is no problem because you WILL get there on time.

It really is every bit as fast as it looks and more, it feels every bit as fast as the figures say it is. The noise isn’t desperately exciting – it sounds like a Cortina – but it goes from o to 60 in less than five seconds and that can, and does, hurt your neck.

It corners beautifully but on a private test track, it proved the point that mid-engined cars can be tricky if you have only average driving ability. When you step over the mark, they bite.

So, they pulled me out of the field and I was off again, enjoying the decent ride, the positive power steering, the chunky gear change, the prodigious power, the stares of other road users and a cockpit that’s every bit as user friendly as a telephone, only more stylish.

But the Lotus didn’t play its trump card until its last evening in my tenure. There were a whole load of cars at home that night – the Escort Cosworth, a big Mercedes, a Honda Prelude VTEC and a Porsche 968. My wife, staring at this metallic playground, said, ‘Let’s take the Lotus.’

Sports cars are coming back. Strangely.

Amidst all the brouhaha which accompanied the launch of the new MG last week, it was easy to miss a startling new trend.

For the last twenty years, car firms have been run by bean counters in suits whose only concern has been the figure at the bottom of the profit and loss accounts.

The designers and engineers have been as clever as ever but the suits in charge have systematically erased all free thinking. Any daring new idea was presented to a bunch of ordinary people in so-called ‘customer clinics’ and if the invited guests, in their anoraks and cardigans, raised so much as an eyebrow, the car was scrapped and the designer beaten.

The result has been plain to see. Cars have been getting duller and duller to the point where the only reason why you would buy a Ford Mondeo rather than a Renault Laguna was the proximity of your nearest dealer or the advertising. Did you want a car with inner strength or a car you can believe in? Me? I wanted neither.

What made the whole scenario even more depressing was the public apathy to cars that were in any way radical. Take the Mazda MX5. Here was a simple sports car that blended old-fashioned, rear-wheel drive, roof-down motoring with sixties style and modern-day, Japanese reliability.

To begin with, it sold well enough but once the fashion victims had bought one, sales began to slump. The trendies moved on to something else after a year and there was no one to take their place. In 1994 only 1000 MX5s were sold in Britain.

BMW had the same problem with the Z1 – the best car they ever made just didn’t sell. And we all know how long the Lotus Elan lasted. Things were so bad last year that the best-selling convertible in Europe was the hugely expensive Mercedes SL.

Now, bearing this in mind, you might imagine that the suits at the top of all the car companies would be even more adamant than usual that they wanted aeroblob styling, chintzy seats and five doors.

But no. Quite apart from the MG which is radical enough from Auntie Rover, there’s a new Renault Speeder which has to be seen to be believed. Not even Gerry Anderson could have conceived of this car! If the producers of
Space 1999
had suggested this design for Martin Landau’s personal wheels, they’d have been sacked.

For Christ’s sake, it doesn’t have a roof of any description and one version of it doesn’t even have a windscreen.

But despite the truly wild styling, which can only have been done after a heavy, heavy night on LSD, it is hurried along by the 150 bhp engine from the Renault Clio Williams. That keeps the price down to ‘less than £20,000’.

Then there’s the Fiat Barchetta. Renault’s people had used up Europe’s entire supply of drugs while doing the wonderful Speeder so the Fiat is a little more normal, but then so is the price – just fourteen grand.

Nevertheless, here is a little two-seater sports car which sounds and looks wonderful. And who cares that the steering wheel is on the wrong side? This is a car with a ‘must have’ factor. I simply adored it.

And the list doesn’t stop there. BMW might have felt that the sports-car market could be left to the MG division of its Rover arm, but no. Next year, there’ll be a Z3 which, guess what, is a little two-seater sports car which should sell for less than £20,000.

And the story doesn’t end there either. Mazda, who can claim that they started this particular ball rolling, are said to be close to a replacement for the MX5, and we can therefore be assured that Toyota and Nissan are on the case too.

Had enough? Good, because there’s more. For some time, Porsche has been touting a little, mid-engined sports car around the world’s motor shows, and now, we hear, it too is destined to become a production reality.

Called the Boxer, it is going to be a little more expensive than the MG, the Speeder and the Z3 but the figure of £25,000 has been mentioned. And that, for what is a startling car with a Porsche badge, is cheap.

But if we’re talking value for money, then you are well advised to reach for your Yellow Pages right now. Ring your Mercedes dealership and tell him that you want an SLK.

This a scaled-down version of the SL which is likely to arrive in Britain next year wearing a price tag of around £25,000. For that you’ll get a supercharged engine, Batmobile humps on the boot lid and what is said to be serious sports handling. Mercedes never get things wrong, and I very much doubt if the SLK will break that tradition. It, among all the sports cars about to come out, is the one I find most tempting.

But before I went as far as signing on the dotted line, I’d need to be assured that this global warming business is for real. If it really is true that the planet is heating up, then I shall buy a convertible.

Odd, isn’t it? The car industry created global warming and now it’s delivering a wave of soft tops so that we can all enjoy it.

Until last week, any discussion about what is an ugly car and what is not would have provoked a lively and interesting debate.

Until last week, if you’d asked a thousand people to name the most hideous car of all time, you’d have got a thousand different answers.

Until last week, it would have been entirely possible to argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that one man’s meat is another man’s diarrhoea. I, for instance, would label Princess Diana as one of the world’s great-looking women, whereas others I know think she is a big-nosed twit with a predilection for using twice as much peroxide as is really necessary.

And the same goes with cars. Until last week, I’d have argued that the Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer was the best-looking car ever made and that the most recently departed Toyota Celica was the ugliest.

Other people, with some justification, may say the boundaries are drawn by the E-Type Jaguar and the Reliant Robin, or the Lotus Esprit and the Lancia Dedra. One chap I know says he feels sick whenever he sees a Nissan Micra, which means he doesn’t get out much.

But, now, Ford has ended all the debate. We can still bicker about superlatives at the top end of the scale, but at the bottom, we can draw a line. The new Granada is, without a question or shadow of doubt, the ugliest car ever made.

If it was a film it would be
Top Gun
. If it was a woman, it would be Ena Sharpies. If it was an office block, it would be that chunk of concrete which now sits in the middle of the roundabout at Hammersmith.

A Ford spokesman said, ‘We wanted a bold look and are happy that we have something which gives the car a real identity.’ Quite.

I have spoken with a number of designers about it, and while all wish to remain anonymous, each agrees that Ford has gone mad. One said he saw the writing on the wall at this year’s Geneva motor show when their new concept car – the Ka – looked like a piece of ‘pink vomit’.

Another said that a car is often likened by members of the public to a human or an animal’s face. Some cars look startled, some like they’re smiling. Some look cross, or evil or like the proudest lion in the jungle. ‘But,’ said our man, ‘the new Granada looks like someone’s just rammed a banana up its bottom.’

The question that bugs me is that hundreds of senior Ford people must have been agonising over the shape for years and that none of them has had the wit to stick up his hand and say no. This, according to a senior British designer, is called the Emperor’s New Clothes theory.

He explains that at Jaguar recently, various Ford designers were bamboozling executives with all sorts of weird and not-so-wonderful designs which were progressing along nicely until a kid on the production line stood up and said they were nasty. Then another hand went up, and another and another until the top brass were forced to agree that they too thought they were wrong.

Nevertheless, if anyone ever dreams up a Right Stuff bravery award, it must go to the man at Ford who walked into a board meeting with those drawings and said, ‘This is it boys. This is the new Granada.’

And they bought it, which means that now, Ford’s stunningly effective marketing team has what might fairly be termed a right old problem on its hands. And in order to take our minds off the shape, they’re telling us that this may very well be the last large Ford ever to be designed and built in Europe.

Good. Even the Americans with their golfing trousers and their fondness for Formica could not make such a hash of it. Even they would not fit that oval nose and think it looked anything other than daft. Even they would not have chosen those headlights.

And round at the back, even Ray Charles would have had something to say about the way the boot lid curls down, like it has melted. I have yet to see the interior but fear it will be no better.

Ford has become a favourite uncle to the British, as ingrained in society as the BBC and fish and chips. Its cars are a more common sight out there than acne at a youth club dance.

None are dynamically perfect but they’re all quite good at everything. There’s no reason NOT to buy a Ford and for that reason alone, I always advise people who don’t really care what they drive to buy whichever model they can afford. You can’t go wrong with a Fiesta, or an Escort, or a Probe, or a Mondeo or even, though this is stretching it a bit, a Maverick.

But with the new Granada, it rather looks like the favourite uncle has gone a bit loopy. It’s like going round for tea one day and finding him engrossed in a spanking magazine.

The new car will be launched at the Motorshow this autumn but if Ford has any sense at all, it will have had a face lift by then. Either that, or it will be the first new car ever to be supplied in a plain brown wrapper.

It was sad to see that Northern Foods is to sack a couple of thousand people and even worse to note that the whole future of doorstep milk deliveries now hangs in the balance.

There’s something very British about a rosy-cheeked milkman whistling his way up your drive in the morning. He may have been up since four but he’s always smiling, bringing good cheer to the elderly and dispensing bonhomie to lonely housewives in their negligees.

However, while it may be sad to see an end to this very British tradition, I shall be rejoicing. And so will every other commuter.

Because milkmen adopt an entirely different persona as soon as they are behind the wheel of their floats.

In recent months, this column has produced a stream of bile for motorists of one type or another but I’m the first to admit that, broadly speaking, most people are pretty good drivers… so long as they are in an ordinary, anonymous saloon.

In his Sierra, a milkman is polite and charming but in his float, he begins to cackle the cackle of someone who is terminally deranged.

As the round wears on and the punch from his battery pack begins to fade, the top speed of his float falls to a crawl. By 8.30, with the morning rush hour in full flood, only the most sophisticated global postioning satellite can tell he’s moving at all. On any sort of incline he isn’t.

But he doesn’t care. And if he has a delivery to make at number 23, he will pull up directly outside number 23, and never mind that by doing so, he completely blocks the road.

Impeded drivers blow their horns and swear but Milkie doesn’t seem to notice. He’s now in full whistle mode so there’s no way the people at number 23 can guess their milk has been brought to them by one of Lucifer’s disciples.

And milkmen are not the worst offenders. That accolade goes to the Dustbinerie, a sinister bunch of men who, when back at base, slaughter goats and drink their blood.

What I want to know is this – why do our dustbins have to be emptied first thing in the morning when half the population is asleep and the other half is trying to get to work?

Why can’t they come and collect my rubbish in the middle of the day when their banging and crashing is not even slightly bothersome? And at midday, they can park their truck in the middle of the road for an hour, and no one will mind.

Then there’s van drivers. What is it that makes all of these people believe their vehicle is three inches narrower than it really is? Or do they get a £5 bonus for every wing mirror they can break?

There is no sight quite so terrifying as being on a narrow street with cars parked on either side and a van with three men in it coming the other way.

You know he won’t slow down, which is bad enough, and you know that in a few seconds you won’t have a driver’s side door mirror, which is expensive, but worst of all, the van will be doing at least a hundred miles an hour. More, if it’s an Astramax.