Clarkson on Cars (7 page)

How, pray, can sitting in your living room steering some electrons round a TV screen be as exciting as travelling at 200 mph behind a crazy Italian who, on balance, would rather you didn’t overtake him?

As it turned out, Johnnie was more than willing to take me on in a do-or-die battle to the death… er, I mean flag.

Needless to say, I thrashed him and like a true cynic did not accept any of his feeble excuses. I know his wife was in hospital at the time and I know the burden of having accepted a Jaguar drive was hanging heavily on his shoulders but I have problems too, you know. I mean, the shoe-lace in my left brogue is getting awfully thin and, not being the sort of person who ever sets foot in a shop, I have no idea where one sets about borrowing a replacement. Do Russell and Bromley, for instance, have a press test fleet I wondered as I lapped the Scottish Earl before he’d even left the grid.

Time and time again I explained that in order to go forward, you simply press the letter ‘F’. But he just couldn’t grasp it.

I wonder if the bosses at Codemaster realise this. These two younglings, six-year-old David Darling and his four-year-old brother, Richard, expect to sell well over 200,000 copies of their latest offering – and that will mean a substantial injection to their £2 million turnover.

Fair enough, they have become very rich because they exploit the weaknesses of people like me. But is their life really complete?

Have they ever seen a ptarmigan in its full winter plumage? Do they know where Siena is? Is it possible they’ve never ridden on the back of a dolphin? These are the things that matter in life. Playing with computers just fills in the gaps.

2001 isn’t that far away any more you know.

I was never allowed to play with guns when I was a child. While various friends were able to scamper around the local woods with their Johnny Sevens, I had to make do with an old twig. And convincing an eight-year-old he was dead simply because I’d pointed a piece of larch his way was not quite as easy as you might imagine.

Twenty years on and the ban still exists. However, this is probably just as well because if the law did permit me to bear arms, then this week alone two people at least would have died horrible, bloody deaths.

First to receive a neat 9 mm hole in the side of his face would have been the service manager at a large London Fiat dealer who tried to charge Beloved a staggering £418 for some minor work on her Panda.

Second would have been the driver of a Citroen CX estate who, in a display of intransigence to rival Mrs Thatcher at an EEC farm subsidy committee meeting, brought Fulham Road to a grinding standstill.

The plethora of smashed computer keyboards and broken telephones that litter the office are testimony to the fact that not so very far below my veneer of calm lies a rampant beast with foam round its mouth and a bright-red countenance.

This aspect of my make-up was, I think, inherited from my grandfather who regularly threw his shoes through the television screen whenever Harold Wilson’s face appeared on it.

Now, as things stand, the situation is not too complicated. After I’ve dialled directory enquiries for the ninth time and it’s still engaged, I will hurl my telephone at the wall. It’s my plaster. It’s my phone. I can thus do as I like with them.

Similarly, when I’ve spent two days working on a story and my computer announces that it’s made a syntax error and, as a result, the fruit of my labours has vanished into a silicon no man’s land from which there is no escape, the keyboard and sometimes its accompanying screen often learn what it’s like to collide with a sledgehammer.

Again, the consequences, as far as others are concerned, amount to a big fat zero. The world continues to revolve, various whales still get regular supplies of plankton and biscuit-and-raisin Yorkies don’t seem to get any cheaper.

Now, when stuck behind some moron in a Nissan who is driving with all the alacrity and the verve of a koala bear on Valium, just what options are open to the unarmed Britisher?

One can shout a little but she will not hear. One can, one probably does, salivate to some extent – but she will not notice – or one can resort to the horn and lights, but she will not care.

As a result, one is forced to let one’s pacemaker take the strain while dreaming of thumbscrews and racks and vats of boiling oil into which all Nissan drivers should be immersed.

Sticks and stones may break her bones but words etc, etc.

I’d like to think that if an Uzi machine pistol was lying on the seat beside me, I’d only use it to shoot holes in the culprit’s tyres – but this is a bit like thinking I could sit here at 11 in the morning with a biscuit-and-raisin Yorkie and not eat it.

In America, of course, one is allowed to go about one’s business carrying an entire armoury in one’s flak jacket, and this explains why we are forever being regaled with tales of cabbies in New York who shoot people whose cars have stalled at the lights. I don’t blame them. I know I would.

A country where one is given the wherewithal to rid the roads of awful drivers seems like one helluva place to live and I’d be off like a shot if I thought I wouldn’t have to adopt a silly accent, wear daft clothes and drive around in a soggy car with chrome all over it.

These drawbacks have always been enough to make staying in Britain worthwhile… just. Now, though, thanks to my ‘Revenger’, the land of hope and glory is a much more satisfactory place in which to lay my hat.

This £9.95 toy, according to its Taiwanese manufacturers, is the ultimate weapon in the fight against frustration. It can, they say, reduce tension and hostility in almost any circumstances. And they speak the truth.

It is a small black box with high-tech knobs and BMW-style service indicator flashing lights all over it, which one attaches to one’s dashboard with the provided Velcro strips.

What it does is make a selection of noises. Press button A and the speaker emits a death ray sound similar to the awful cacophony space invader machines make in pubs when you’re trying to speak with someone you haven’t seen for ages.

Button B is labelled ‘front machine gun’, and this predictably makes sort of Bren noises, while button C reproduces the sound of a high-velocity shell: wheeeeeeeeeeeeekaprunch!

Apparently, Bloomingdales in New York sell one of these things every four minutes and Selfridges on Oxford Street report a similar level of interest.

However, my example has been somewhat modified to make it even better. The trouble is that the standard kit deafens only those who are sharing a vehicle with it. You can stab all three buttons at once but Mrs Nissan-Driver, in blissful ignorance, will continue to stall in that yellow box every time those infernal traffic lights indulge in a spot of metamorphosis.

As I’ve said before in this column, I am to engineering what parsley sauce is to Bosch fuel injection but when it comes to electronic whizzkiddery, I’m a match for that bald chappie who made a million electric slippers that no one wanted to buy.

Thus, I have been able to run a wire from my Revenger to a much more powerful speaker which is located just behind the radiator grille of my CRX.

Its inventor, 29-year-old David McMahan, says: ‘The Revenger is as harmless as jingle bells but has a tremendous therapeutic effect.’ Not any more it ain’t me old mate.

Such is the authenticity and volume of my machine-gun sound that I have actually seen people duck when my finger hits the ‘trigger’. One day, one of the Nissan-clad berks will have a heart attack when they hear the 84,000 decibel rendition of a shell heading their way. This will be a good thing. I see myself as a R0SPA pioneer.

Time and time again, blithering idiots have given me palpitations with their unbelievable antics on the road. Well, no longer am I going to get mad. I’m going to get even.

Unfortunately, a group calling themselves the moral majority – actually, they’re surprisingly few in number and live in socially aware places like Hampstead and Barnes – will undoubtedly kick up the most godawful fuss when my modified Revenger gets its first victim.

But these people must stick with their muesli and their lentils. I’m on a mission.

His slippers were slightly at odds with the neat brown suit, pristine white shirt and silk tie but, nevertheless, he was the managing director of a major Japanese corporation. Clad in a pair of Chinos and an open-neck shirt, it didn’t tax anyone’s powers of perception to ascertain that in the world of motoring journalism, I rank well down with the chaps who rewrite press releases for papers like the
Bengal Bugle
.

Yet the man in the brown suit was indulging in a bow which took his face so close to the ground that just for a moment, I figured he was smelling the gravel.

He wasn’t the only one either. Everyone with whom I came into contact on my two-day, whistlestop tour of Japan spent the entire duration of our conversation rubbing their noses in the dirt. It takes some getting used to.

But I managed it and now I am fast losing friends by insisting that if they wish to speak to me, they avert their eyes.

I read somewhere the other day that nearly 80 per cent of Britishers had never been in an aeroplane. Taking that quite remarkable fact a stage further, it would be sensible to assume that the vast majority of the 20 per cent who have flown somewhere have flown within Europe be it southern Spain, a Greek island or Majorca.

Among those who have ventured futher afield, I would hazard a guess that America is usually the most popular destination.

In essence, Japan is still an unknown quantity in terms of personal experience. Sure, we all are fully aware that it’s a paid-up member of the capitalist Western world but because it’s on the other side of the globe and doesn’t have holiday-isle status, it isn’t all that popular with foreigners from the English-speaking world.

Generally speaking, I’ve always had the world divided into four categories and largely, these views are echoed by those with whom I’ve conversed on the subject.

We have countries behind the Iron Curtain where we expect to find downtrodden people in brown coats shuffling from one decaying tower block to the next in search of a lettuce or a Beatles album.

Then we have the third world where lots of people in loin cloths sit around wondering why there are no more lettuces.

Third comes the West, with billions of lettuces that everyone can afford to buy whenever they want.

And finally there’s the Far East – Thailand, Burma etc – where everyone sits in the lotus position with their hands on their heads wondering what on earth a lettuce is.

Go to any of these places and you know what to expect. You know America is full of people in checked trousers who say ‘gee’ a lot. You know people in Australia go to work in shorts and call one another mate. You know the French will be rude, that the Burmese will be polite, that Hong Kong’s full of skyscrapers and imitation Rolexes and that Antarctica is bloody cold.

Since all those spoilsport explorers wandered round the world last century discovering places and writing about them, there are no surprises left. And it’s still going on today. Between them, Wilbur Smith and Bob Geldof have given me a razor-sharp, Kodacolor Gold image of exactly what Africa is like. And I’ve never even been there.

Japan, though, was a shock. Because they build television sets that look like European television sets, gramophones that look like European gramophones and motor cars that look like European motor cars, it’s easy to believe that they’re as Westernised as a plate of McDonald’s fries or the Queen.

But this, I can assure you, is not the case. They may have all the exterior trappings of what you and I would call Western civilisation but they are fundamentally different both deep down and on the surface.

My two-day visit to the Daihatsu factory provided a fascinating insight into just what makes these chaps tick and more importantly, whether I was wrong in a
Performance Car
story twelve months or so ago to argue that they would never be able to destroy the European car industry with the same consummate ease they crushed various local motorbike businesses.

Obviously, in two days, you cannot glean all that you could in a lifetime but I’ve heard politicians spout wildly on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing. And people listen to them.

The first thing that will strike you as odd in Japan is how polite everyone is. Quite apart from the neverending bowing, they have obsequiousness down to an art that even the Chinese haven’t mastered.

The Daihatsu PR man who sat in the back of my car to explain how I should get about in what is the world’s worst-signposted country epitomised this. Whereas in England, you or I would shout, ‘Take the next left’, he would lean forward, apologise for blocking the view in my rear-view mirror and say, ‘Excuse me, Mr Crarkson, would you mind taking the next turning you find to the reft.’ By which time I’d gone past it.

The Daihatsu factories and offices were bedecked with Union Jacks to mark our visit, receptionists bowed so low that they disappeared behind their desks and everywhere there were signs saying things like ‘Welcome respectful journalists from UK’. I am not respectful. I have a criminal record in France and I pick my nose.

Whereas at European press functions, a PR person and a couple of directors will play host to upwards of 50 journalists, Daihatsu wheeled out their president, Mr Tomonaru Eguchi, and enough hierarchy to make up six rugby teams. The result was that I felt sorry for them if something went wrong with their arrangements.

At an Audi press launch recently, one errant driver finished the slalom by smashing his Quattro into the electronic timing gear. It was hugely funny to watch the stony faced Germans trying to cope with this unexpected hiccough.

In Japan, the test route Daihatsu had chosen for us to evaluate their new four-wheel-drive Charade was plagued with an eight-mile traffic jam which wrecked their schedule. I nearly cried. If this had happened in Germany where they tried just as hard to be organised, you’d have heard me laughing in Aberdeen.