Clarkson on Cars (6 page)

Alternatively, you can ring up one of the endless cherished-number-plate dealers in the
Sunday Times’
Look Business Personal Finance News, section 24, and tell him what you’re after.

They keep details of what’s on offer and who wants what and are normally able to help, providing your request isn’t too parochial.

However, if you wish to take the plunge, I should do so in a hurry because when I win the football pools, I shall buy up every number I consider tasteless and throw them into the Marianas Trench.

Then, I shall bomb all numbered houses with names and if there’s anything left in the kitty, I will erect kart tracks on every cricket pitch in Christendom.

I do not hold with the decision to hold Britain’s première motor race at Silverstone for five years on the trot, because it is a very boring circuit indeed, but at least if you’re important, like me, you can camp out in the middle and run into nice people who say even nicer things, like why don’t you come and have a spot of lunch?

The big hassle is that if you wish to run into a lot of these people you must be in several places all at the same time.

Which in turn means you have to forge expeditions that make Ranulph Fiennes’s Transglobe jaunt look like a Saturday cycle ride to the shops.

The last time I spent a few days at Silverstone I had a motorcycle at my disposal which, in theory, is the ideal tool for the job but (and this may come as a surprise to those of you who know me as a devil-may-care kinda guy who thinks nothing of hanging upside down in stunt planes) I do not know how to ride things with two wheels.

I had a go but after I’d engaged the clutch and applied full throttle, I found myself spinning round in a rather noisy circle.

This, I learned later, was because I’d forgotten to release the front brake. I also learned that the onlookers would have been immensely impressed with the stunt had they not caught a glimpse of my countenance, which, instead of bearing a proud and cocky grin, registered only abject terror.

And that was the end of my brief encounter with motorcycles, which, I have decided, should be left to those with acne, no imagination and a penchant for wearing rubber clothes.

Not being someone who readily goes back on his word, I found myself facing something of a dilemma as the Grand Prix weekend loomed ever nearer. Was I, a) to forget my vow and get a motorcycle; b) get a push bike and risk a cardiac arrest; or c) should I rely on shoe leather, which would mean a range limitation of no more than one or two feet in any direction as a result of acute, inherent and irreversible laziness?

The answer, as is always the case in such cheap games, was in fact, d) none of these.

Suzuki and Honda came to the rescue with a brace of four-wheeled motorbikes which seemed to offer the perfect blend of nippiness (sorry), fresh-air thrills and car-like safety.

In fact, they didn’t. The Honda fell short of the mark by some considerable margin because it is, without a shadow of doubt, the most frightening thing yet created by man. Which is saying something.

The Suzuki failed to live up to my expectations because it is runner-up to the Honda in the sheer terror stakes.

Richard Branson has driven a powerboat across the Atlantic in seven minutes; he has flown a hot-air balloon the size of Birmingham over the same distance in nine and a half seconds but he knows nothing of real danger because, as far as I know, he has never tried to go anywhere on a quad bike.

You see, it’s no good just sitting on these four-wheeled motorcycles and hoping you can get to where you want to go, because, depending on which machine you choose to use, you will either end up at your destination covered in bruises or you will end up at completely the wrong place.

The £2495 Honda TRX 250 fourtrax is an out-and-out racer, with extrovert styling and a two-stroke 250-cc motor which will propel it to 100 mph having dispensed with the 0 to 60 increment in about five seconds.

Although it could be used in farms or forests, because nature has yet to invent an obstacle to stop these buzz bombs, the TRX is bought in small numbers only by people who wish to win various off-road races.

The controls are familiar to any motorcyclist, the only fundamental difference being the throttle, which is not activated by a twist grip. Instead, there’s a little thumb-operated lever which stands no chance of jamming open should the infernal thing fall on its side.

Which it does. Often.

While it is akin to a Group B evolution car, the £2999 Suzuki LT4WD is sort of Range Roverish. Like the Honda, it gets mostly motorcycle controls but it has no clutch, a reverse gear, three ranges, a locking differential and switchable two- or four-wheel drive.

We are forever being told how clever the Japanese are becoming in the art of miniaturisation, but to have crammed this little lot into a machine the size of a salted peanut is nothing short of remarkable.

It’s powered by a four-stroke 250-cc engine which develops 20 bhp and has five forward gears which can be shifted even with the throttle wide open. Every other lever on it, and there are 37, is a brake.

The Honda’s main failing is a simple one. With 45 bhp on tap, it is too bloody fast for appalling weeds like me.

When it’s off the cam, everything is fine and it potters round at a leisurely pace, popping and spluttering a bit but getting by all right.

However, if you inadvertently get the motor in its thankfully narrow power band, then the front wheels leave the ground and you must sit there and do nothing until you hit something. Well that’s what I did anyway.

If you remove your thumb from the accelerator, the engine braking is sufficient to hurl you over the handlebars. If you steer, the back slews round and you roll, and if you keep the power on, you just end up going faster and faster, until you’re scared rigid and incapable of taking any preventative action at all. You are, not to put too fine a point on it, stuck in a no-win situation from which there is only one escape: an accident.

The Suzuki has a less serious problem but it’s one that warrants a mention none the less. In essence, the rider has no say in which direction it goes.

You can do what you will with the handlebars but you will continue to make straight line forward progress until a) you stop by applying one of the 37 brakes or b) you run into something.

Now, if you stop, you will have to dismount, lift up the front, take a theodolite bearing on where you want to go, drop the front down so it points in the proper direction and set off again towards the next accident.

I found the best way to alter course was to strike things a glancing blow. With practice, it’s possible to bash into the selected target at exactly the correct speed and angle so you emerge from the confrontation pointing at your destination. A bit like snooker on wheels.

The best targets for such assaults are people, as they’re mushy and don’t harm the bike’s bodywork or tracking. Car doors are good too because they buckle and bend long before anything on the super sturdy Suzi gives up the ghost.

So, after a brief flirtation on the Honda, I gave it to a colleague for the duration and I later saw him fairly regularly, on each occasion wearing a frightened look on his face and heading off towards whatever horizon was currently nearest.

I stuck with the Suzuki, and, after a while, became quite accustomed to ricocheting my way from baby to grannie to car door to helicopter landing gear in a sort of large-scale demonstration of Brownian motion.

Only once did I hurt myself on it. Because of its huge, underinflated tyres and plethora of gear ratio and drive selection levers, I figured it would be as adept at traversing rough ground as those hamster lookalike thingummys which live in the Andes.

So, bearing this in mind, I tried to scale a 45-degree slope which felt, as I reached halfway house, like I’d overdone things. Doubtless the bike was sailing through the test without even gently perspiring, but from where I sat, it felt like there was no way we’d reach the crest.

The foot I put down to act as a sort of stabiliser was promptly run over by the back wheel which, thankfully, wasn’t as painful as you might imagine. This though is because my left foot is used to being squashed. In the past year, it’s been run over four times, once by myself in an XJS and three times by other people. And I’m not joking either.

Happily, on rough ground, the front tyres do enjoy a modicum of grip so I was able to turn round and head back to
terra firma
where they became as sticky as sheet ice again.

All the while, I kept being overtaken by this maniac on the out-of-control Honda who kept squeaking about how he’d just overtaken Gordon Murray and run Nigel Mansell off his moped. Poor chap spent the entire evening muttering about power to weight ratios and how slow Thrust Two is.

As I loaded my Suzuki on the back of a Mitsubishi pickup truck for the homeward voyage on Sunday evening, I was quite sad. There’s a challenge in mastering a four-wheeled bike that one simply does not encounter in the everyday world of electric-windowed cars.

I should like to be able to buy such a beast for everyday use but unfortunately, because they have no indicators or tax discs, they cannot be taken on public highways and byways, which is a shame. It should be much easier to drive on a road than in a field, there’s so much more to hit.

I don’t understand how F. Giles Esq can be allowed to pedal his pre-Boer War tractor up the A1 at 2 mph when the lord of the manor isn’t even able to dart across the Nether Middlecombe to Lower Peasepottage back road on a Suzi Q to see how his sheep are doing.

Unless this silly law is repealed immediately, I shall become an anarchist.

Now let me make one thing perfectly clear. If I say I will be in the pub at 8 o’clock, I will be in the pub at 8 o’clock.

I will not arrive, breathless, at a quarter past blaming the traffic or an unlikely encounter with a crazed Bengal tiger.

Punctuality is a fine art and I have mastered it to such a degree that as the second hand of my unusually accurate Tissot rock watch – the one that’s as individual as my own signature – sweeps round to herald the appointed hour, I will be just about to enter the pre-arranged venue. My expected companion, however, is rarely, if ever, in evidence. This makes me mad.

What I can’t understand is how on earth other people aren’t able to manage the business of being on time quite as well as I do. Some do the breathless bit, some try to claim that they’ve been in a meeting which went on a bit but these people are usually estate agents and thus not worth talking to anyway. Then there are those who saunter in an hour late with nary an apology.

No matter. The thing is that if you arrive before the people you’re supposed to be meeting, you must find something to do.

Something that lets other people in the bar know that you haven’t been stood up. You can always hear them muttering about how ‘she isn’t coming’ and sometimes how they’re ‘not in the least bit surprised with a face like that’.

You try desperately not to look at your watch every four seconds until eventually you are forced to cast aside all thoughts of giving the person just another five minutes. When you leave without speaking to anyone, it lets those who have been laughing at you know they were right all along.

Thus, if you’re ever in a Fulham pub and someone greets you like he’s your best friend, it’ll probably be me, so don’t worry about it.

Far and away the best way of passing the time on such occasions is to insert various coinage into a space invader machine thingy. I do this a lot.

In fact, I’ve just worked out that I spend more time playing computer games than I spend on the loo. This makes me an addict. I need help. These machines have become my confidants. I talk to them, thank them when they’re kind, swear at them when they’re not.

And I’ve become rather good at them, which is a shame. Of all the things I could have been good at, it would have to be computer games, wouldn’t it? What about raising money for the deaf? Or organising RNLI balls? Or being able to drive round the Nurburgring with gusto?

Some of the more modern games are a bit baffling; you know, the ones where you insert 20p in exchange for six seconds of bangs and explosions, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with the buttons you’re hitting, before a terse message explains that the game is over.

Worse than my autobank, some of them.

Asteroids will always hold a special place in my heart along with Scramble and Pole Position but recently I’ve discovered that one can buy similar games for use on home computers like the one I’m using to write this story now.

The best I’ve found to date is called Grand Prix Simulator which costs a meagre £1.99. Such is its popularity that it is currently topping the little known Gallup charts for home computer games. How long will it be before someone commissions a bunch of pollsters to find out which flower shop is selling the most hyacinths?

Anyway, you control a little car which beetles round a track trying to beat either the bogey car or an opponent or both. Complete the first course successfully and you get to reach stage two, where the track becomes trickier and the bogey car driver more competent.

Happily the programmers at Codemasters who make Grand Prix Simulator have resisted the temptation to use complicated graphics such as one finds on modern-day arcade machines. I always find that home computer games programmed by clever dicks are harder to play than a game of archery in a foggy beehive, don’t you?

Thus, the cars are simple squares and you, the player, look down on the circuit rather than along the bonnet of your steed.

Funniest of all, though, is the fact that leering from the promotional material that accompanies this game is the dreadfully ugly face of my old mate Johnnie Dumfries, the man who lost his job at Lotus when Camel insisted that at least one of their Grand Prix drivers had a face to match their new yellow paintwork.

Johnnie, says the Codemasters’ press release, reckons the game is every bit as exciting as the real thing – a comment which should, I feel, be taken with liberal helpings of salt.