Don't Stop Me Now (13 page)

I was therefore decidedly nervous as I tippy-toed out of my drive in Autodelta’s passport to the next life. I’d said a tearful goodbye to my wife, and hugged the kids: Daddy wasn’t coming back.

The accident, I knew within moments, was going to be a big one, because this car isn’t ferociously fast. It’s much quicker than that. Ferrari throttle? Forget it. When you stamp on the accelerator it’s like you’ve hit the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive. Suddenly all the stars are fluorescent tubes.

In bald English, 0–60 mph takes 5 seconds. Flat out you’ll be doing 175 mph, and therefore there has never been a hatchback this hot before.

A corner was coming. And then it was a distant speck in my rear-view mirror. I vaguely remember turning the wheel and I have a dim recollection of being astounded by the grip… and then the moment was gone.

No, really, the damn thing’s a barnacle. Normally, in a tight bend, a front-drive car will spin the inside wheel uselessly, which means the one on the outside suddenly has to do all the steering and power-handling. But obviously it can’t and you understeer off the road. But with that diff, the inside wheel doesn’t spin, it grips and grips and then it grips some more.

Yes, bumps will cause some violent tugging at the wheel, and yes, it graunches horribly while reversing at slow speed, but the upside is a whole new chapter written into the laws of physics.

I’d love to stop at this point and give the man who made this car a nice warm feeling in the pit of his tummy. But I’m duty bound to point out one or two shortcomings.

First, the body kit was awful, but worse than this was the ride. The car I drove belonged to a 22-year-old – I’d
love to see his insurance bill – and he’d set it up completely wrong. It had the compliancy of an RSJ and the comfort of sitting down sharply on the sharp end of a piledriver.

But, I see from the brochure, you don’t need to fit springs and dampers made from oak and iron. You can have more conventional stuff if that’s what you fancy – and take it from me, you do. You can leave the body kit off the options list as well.

This has an effect on price. As tested, my car cost
£
40,000, which, considering the speed and grip, has to be the bargain of the century. But if you just stick to the engine, the diff and some tasty tyres, it’s going to cost a lot less.

Better still, you can have all the important modifications that can be fitted to any Alfa: the 166, the 156 and the GTV. And that’s a tempting prospect. It means you can have an Alfa Romeo. Not just a Fiat with an Alfa Romeo badge.

Sunday 25 April 2004

Ask anyone who is truly, properly famous and they’ll tell you that the single greatest gift God gave to man was anonymity. The ability to walk into a restaurant without being pointed at. The comfort blanket of being able to make a phone call safe in the knowledge that nobody else is listening – because nobody else cares about what you have to say.

Anonymity? Ask Harrison Ford, or Madonna, or John Ketley, and they’ll tell you that it’s more precious than two functioning lungs.

Oh, you see all those silly, half-naked soap stars desperately trying to attract the attention of the paparazzi outside two-bit PR puff parties. But if they were to really make it, if they really were to become a household name with a household face and a household love life, if we really were to find out what they have for their elevenses and where they are every minute of every single day, and what text messages are stored on their mobile phone, they’d go absolutely mental.

I’m not famous, but I do appear on the television from time to time, and that’s enough to make my life difficult on occasion. Chiefly because sometimes I forget myself and I think I
am
famous.

Last year I was shown to my hotel room in Dubai by
a porter who, when he’d shown me how the door worked and explained what the bath was for, asked: ‘Do you think I could have your signature?’

‘Sure,’ I replied, with a huge grin. So, snatching up a piece of hotel notepaper, I wrote: ‘To Ahmed, with lots of love, from Jeremy Clarkson.’

‘No,’ he said, with a puzzled face. ‘I mean, do you think I could please have your signature onthe registration form.’

This year, the same sort of thing happened again. I was lying on a sun lounger, generally taking in some Caribbean rays, when I noticed the telltale glint of a paparazzi lens in the bushes. Angrily, I threw down my book and stomped over to express my displeasure.

Sadly, it was a wasted journey, because when I’d finished shouting the poor guy explained he hadn’t a clue who I was and had been photographing someone called Alex Best, whose bikini top had slipped down a little.

And there you have it. This girl was apparently married to a footballer and then lived in a jungle. And that’s enough to make the positioning of her swimsuit interesting. Can she possibly have been ready for that?

Can any one of these Madonna wannabes imagine what it would be like to be photographed every single time they walk out of the house, and how they would cope when the assistant in the local knicker shop telephones the newspapers to tell them what colour bra they’ve just bought?

Only last week I was having a serious heart-to-heart with a friend when, quite out of the blue, a brassy woman with metal hair marched up to me and asked what I thought of the Honda CRV. And, like I said, I’m not famous.

If you want a sense of how it feels to be well known, try walking into your local bistro naked. Or go to work tomorrow dressed as a trout. Or, better still, buy yourself a Porsche 911 GT3RS.

It’s finished in Human League white and has red wheels. It says GT3RS in foot-high letters down the door. And it has a spoiler the size of a hospital stretcher.

As a result, everyone tries to come alongside so they can point and stare. And, worse, complete strangers stroll over in petrol stations, and won’t go away even when you put the nozzle down their trousers and produce a match.

There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want this car. A steering wheel that has nothing to do with your direction of travel. A roll cage where the back seats should be. And a ride quality that… well, put it this way – I doubt it would make a suitable platform for disarming a nuclear weapon. Or getting a tattoo. But the worst thing about it is the never-ending attention it draws.

Which brings me on to the world’s best antidote to fame – the
£
26,500 Subaru Legacy Outback Estate. Russell Crowe could drive through the middle of Pontefract in this car and nobody would notice, even if he were naked at the wheel. You could impale Uma Thurman’s head on the radio aerial, and that wouldn’t do the trick either.

It’s so invisible that you could almost certainly drive it into the vault at the Bank of England and steal all the gold. And speed cameras? Help yourself, because the Outback makes the F-117 stealth fighter look like a pterodactyl.

Then there’s the quality. In the past couple of years I’ve noticed a distinct downturn in the robustness of
virtually all cars. Mercedes used to be a byword for durability but now it’s a byword for being on the hard shoulder at four in the morning with steam coming out of the bonnet. And Volkswagen has suffered, too, coming near the bottom in the
Top Gear
customer satisfaction survey. Toyota used to employ a man to ensure the switches all made the right sort of click when you pushed them, but, judging by my recent experiences, I think he may have left. And then there’s the new Volvo V50, which feels like it’s running on suspension made from tinfoil.

The Outback, though, is different. When you shut the door, it makes exactly the same noise as a dead pheasant hitting the ground at 40 mph, a sort of muffled, autumnal ‘bumph’ sound. And the quality of the material used on the dashboard is up there with Sabatier.

Of course, in recent years Subarus have become famous for going through woods at high speed, spewing stones into the faces of men in bobble hats.

The Legacy, however, is far removed from all of this. The top-of-the-range 3-litre version does 0–60 in a whisper-quiet but rather pedestrian 8.1 seconds and is all out of ideas at a near-silent 139 mph.

This, then, is more a Subaru of the old school. Let’s not forget that when these funny cars with their flat-four engines and four-wheel drive started arriving in Britain, they weren’t sold through plate-glass and rubber-plant dealerships. No, they were sold to country folk by agricultural supply centres.

That’s why on the Legacy’s door panel there is a sticker explaining its four-wheel-drive layout. To remind you
that under the invisible, Teflon-tough skin, it’s still a tractor.

There’s been a rash of new estate cars in the past few months. Jaguar has whacked a greenhouse on to the back of its X-type, Volvo has the aforementioned V50, and we mustn’t forget the old hands from Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW.

Think of this lot as holiday destinations. You’ve got all the obvious ones, such as Minorca and Florida, plus a couple of new choices, like Costa Rica and Rwanda. Well, the Subaru is like Croatia, you see: you wouldn’t normally even consider it, but those who do so keep returning there, year after year.

I must say I was deeply impressed. It was smooth, quiet, dignified, and it had quite the largest sunshine roof I’ve ever seen. Certainly, if you ever tire of it as a car, you could use it as a hangar for your helicopter.

More than this, however, I enjoyed the way it dealt so easily with any kind of road surface. The slightly raised suspension meant that the car’s underside was high enough to miss the boulders on rutted lanes, but not so high that on twisting A-roads it felt like I was in a boat.

I really was enjoying this car, right up to the moment when I completely lost it in the long-term car park at Birmingham airport.

This was one of those times when anonymity doesn’t work for you. Another, of course, is when you want a table at the Ivy.

Sunday 9 May 2004

This week I have been reading mostly about the battle of the north Atlantic, and just how terrifying and terrible life must have been for Britain’s merchant seamen.

The seasickness, the bone-numbing cold, smoking with cupped hands so Fritz couldn’t see the glow through his periscope, and then, when (not if) you were torpedoed, being plunged into the oggin, where your head was cooked by the burning fuel oil and your body frozen by the icy waters. Sausages suffer a better fate on the barbecue.

But they had to keep going out there because Britain needed 55 million tons of imported commodities each year in order to survive and, by 1941, thanks entirely to the U-boats, the amount coming in had been nearly halved. We barely had suffcient raw materials to build ships to replace the ones being lost.

Consider the maths. The U-boats were sinking more than a hundred ships every month. In 1942 alone, 7.75 million tons of Britain’s merchant fleet went to the bottom. To make matters worse, for every seven ships sunk, the Royal Navy was getting one U-boat. So you might deduce from all this that we were getting our stiff upper lips kicked in.

But no. Churchill once said that he considered U-boats to be the biggest threat to our survival, and as a result a huge amount of time, money and manpower was diverted to thinking of ways they might be neutered.

This set in motion perhaps the most astonishing techno-race in human history. We developed sonar, the Germans had to think of a way to get round it; we fitted aircraft with radar, the Germans gave the subs radar detectors so they could dive when a plane was on its way. We broke their codes. They broke ours. We built fast frigates. They built faster U-boats. We invented forward-firing depth charges, the Germans built better pressure hulls to go deep; and when we introduced four-engined Liberator bombers that could cover the whole Atlantic, the Germans developed engines that ran on hydrogen peroxide and breathed through snorkels so they never needed to surface. And all of this happened in just four years.

Now, whenever a scientist or an engineer says something might be possible, it’s always claimed that no working model will be ready for 30 years. What good’s that, if it’s a cure for cancer? Back then, they were having ideas, testing them, building prototypes and getting the damn thing into production in weeks.

Of course, war is a great motivator. A point that’s being made obvious by the horsepower race we’re seeing at the moment.

Since the Germans aren’t allowed to fight other countries any more, they’ve decided to fight themselves with
Audi, Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW all engaged in a full-on scrap to see who can extract the most power from a road-going engine.

It all started, I suppose, when BMW announced the M5 would have 400 bhp. That seemed like a colossal achievement and I remember remarking at the time that Jackie Stewart had had less when he won the world championship. But pretty soon Bee Em’s 400-bhp V8 was made to look like a paraffin stove.

Mercedes came along with a supercharged 5.5 litre that got perilously close to 500. Then Volkswagen announced it was working on a Bugatti supercar that would offer drivers a nice round 1,000. And to show they were serious, they built a twin-turbo W12 for the Bentley Continental with 552 bhp.

BMW immediately scuttled back to its drawing board and began work on a V10 for the next M5, while Mercedes pointed the eeking machine at its 6-litre V12. This was deemed a ‘bit light on the throttle’, so they enlarged it to 6.5 litres and added a couple of turbos. The result was 612 bhp. A few supercars claimed marginally more, but when it came to torque, this engine was way out in front with 738 lb per foot. In short, it was the most powerful road-going engine ever made… and now they’ve gone and put it in a car.

Putting 738 lb per foot of torque on the road is like putting a full-scale avalanche in a snow shaker. It’s like lighting your sitting-room fire with Mount Etna: 738 lb per foot of torque is insane.

Maybe, just maybe, and this is an argument that hangs
by a silvery thread, Ferrari could get away with such a move. The car would need to be carefully designed by people who understood aerodynamics and traction, and it would almost certainly not resemble any car we’ve ever seen. Who knows, to contain and harness that much power it may have to look like a Saturn 5 launcher, or an oil rig. Or a pepper grinder.