Don't Stop Me Now (14 page)

But no. Mercedes has simply slotted its amazing new power plant into the ordinary CL. Oh, they say they’ve beefed up the drive shafts and fitted bigger brakes, but that’s like saying, ‘Yes, we’ve employed Satan to teach Form IVb this year, but it’s OK because we’ve confiscated his cape.’ You can’t put 738 lb per foot of torque in a standard coupé… or can you?

I knew it was an ordinary Mercedes straight away because, even though it had been carefully prepared as a press demonstrator, it arrived at my house with one headlamp not working and a driver’s seat backrest that wouldn’t lock. Standard Mercedes build quality, then.

But there was nothing standard about its simply astonishing acceleration. My wife drove it first. Normally she will avoid anything big, heavy or with suspension, but her Lotus was away, being fitted with more power, so she climbed into the Mercedes, thinking it was just another hateful squidgemobile. She came home later that day and could only squeak.

I now know why. It is hysterically fast. From 60 to 130 it goes like a rocket, but, unlike any similarly speedy supercar, it makes no noise in the process. At 150 it sounds like a gentle breeze.

And, better still, it’s comfortable, too. Amazingly, Merc’s engineers have not felt the need to fit suspension made from brass and oak to try to keep the body in check. So you just glide from place to place, in sepulchral silence, at Mach 4. It’s almost eerie.

They haven’t fiddled with the exterior styling either, which means other road users have absolutely no clue about the nuke under the bonnet. I know you’re too grown up to be interested in this sort of thing, but on one trip a bloke in a Porsche Boxster came up behind and flashed his lights, trying to get past.

By the time his girlfriend looked up to see what was in the way, I was already at home reading the children a bedtime story. I would dearly love to have seen his face. ‘No, really, darling, there was a car there – I promise – and then it disappeared.’

You could have an extramarital affair with a car like this, popping out for hanky-panky and popping back before anyone knew you’d gone.

Of course there are some drawbacks to all this grunt, like you need to remember that half an inch of throttle movement in an ordinary car increases the torque reaching the wheels by no more than 10 lb per foot. Half an inch of movement in the Merc’s throttle, and you’ve added probably 200 lb per foot. This has an effect on grip.

No, really, any brutality – no matter how minor – will light up the rear tyres, which are not made from kryptonite or dilithium crystals. They’re just rubber, and rubber has a finite level of traction.

If you’re exuberant, you’re going to go off the road
backwards. But what a way to go. Germany is still after world domination, but being killed by its attempts this time around might actually be called fun.

Sunday 16 May 2004

Last weekend the skies turned blue, literally and metaphorically, when Richard Littlejohn, the roly-poly prowar columnist for the
Sun
, came for lunch. Over the years Richard and I have established that we share wildly different views on America, Israel, the Arab world, Yasser Arafat and what might be done to solve the 50-year war. So, instead of arguing, we have put the whole Middle East into a demilitarised, no-go zone and we simply don’t go there any more.

Unfortunately, we spent so much time toasting the demise of Piers Morgan that by six in the evening we had both forgotten the golden rule.

Giddy from the merlot, I pointed out that Britain cannot afford to run its armed forces, a National Health Service and a welfare state and that Europe, no matter how unpalatable and difficult it may be, must become a cohesive, unified forsh.

‘Nonshensh,’ thundered Littlejohn, who began to outline his vision of an Anglified world in which Britain, Ireland, Canada and Australia join forces to back the US, which, he says, is the last beacon of hope for this troubled and violent world.

Littlejohn, you need to know, spends a deal of time in a gated community in Florida. Much of his family lives
in Detroit. He really thinks America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. If you cut him in half… I’d be grateful.

I, on the other hand, feel more at home in a Zurich tram station than I do in the bar of a Ritz-Carlton hotel. And I have more in common with my dog than I do with the immigration officers at an American airport.

It’s the little things that baffle me most of all. The way every coffee shop plays Pachelbel’s
Canon in D
on the Muzak system, the way the middle classes don’t wear socks, the way they address one another in such loud voices across the hotel swimming pool, the inability they all have to locate themselves, or anyone else, on a map of the world, the love affair with country music, the mullets, the television ad breaks, the way they don’t offer you a cup of coffee or a drink when you go to their houses. I always feel like a civilised human being at a garden party for very rich apes.

The strangest thing about America, though, is that half the cars sold there every year are not cars at all. They’re SUVs. And the best-selling car of them all is the Ford F-150, which is a pick-up truck.

The car makers love this because a car is quite expensive to make. It needs to be safe, quiet, fast, spacious, economical and comfortable. And by the time you’ve shoehorned a list of requirements like that into a vehicle, the profit margins are tiny.

A pick-up truck, on the other hand, is made by nailing a couple of slabs of pig iron on to a chassis that would be recognisable to the makers of any nineteenth-century
covered wagon. Then you simply add leather seats to make it feel like a premium product, and charge whatever you like.

Those in the know reckon that on a $12,000 pick-up truck, Ford will make $3,000–4,000 more than it would from selling a $12,000 car.

Well, $4,000 dollars might not sound like much. But you need to remember that Ford has sold 800,000 F-series pick-up trucks every year for the past five years. They account for a quarter of all its sales and half its profits. They bring in $20 billion a year, which means that if the F-150 pick-up truck were a corporation, it would be in the
Fortune
100 list. It is, quite simply, a machine for making unimaginable lumps of money.

Do the American customers feel cheated by this? I should cocoa. Gas-guzzling cars are all but outlawed these days, but a pick-up is classified as a truck so it’s exempt from swingeing legislation on fuel economy. That means it quenches your thirst for a V8, and it gives other road users the impression that you are Charlton Heston.

When you have a pick-up, you are not an IT engineer from Intel. corp. You are a frontiersman who likes his beer cold, his deer raw and his music country-style. You can go to the woods at weekends with your other pick-up-driving friends and dream up plans to rid Washington of its coloureds. You have the military-style wheels. You have the military-style haircut. You have the guns. You even have the uncomfortable shirts.

Imagine my horror when my wife casually announced the other day she’d like a pick-up. ‘What,’ I exclaimed,
‘in the name of all that’s holy, do we want one of those for?’ We’re European. We were sipping tea while the Americans were shooting Indians. We’ve had 2,000 years to get used to civilisation, not 20 minutes. We’re advanced, we’re slim, we’re at the cutting edge of evolution. We think that shooting bears is daft. Budweiser gives us a headache and we think George Bush is an arse. So why in God’s name do we want to drive around in a car made from a hen house and two bits of railway track?

Apparently we need one for taking wounded chickens to the vets and picking up trees and donkey feed (life on the wild western frontiers of Chipping Norton can be tough).

I argued that if we must have a Ku Klux Klan mobile, it’d have to be Japanese, because at least they are built to withstand just about anything. ‘Look,’ I said, pointing at the news from Somalia/Iraq/Sudan/the Balkans, ‘I don’t see those freedom-fighter Johnnies turning up for the battle in a Land Rover or a Dodge Ram. They’ve all got Japanese pick-ups because, along with the cockroach and the AK-47, they’re the most indestructible things on earth.’

Without further ado, I called Mitsubishi and asked if I could borrow one of its L200 double-cab Warriors, which account for nearly half of all pick-up-truck sales in Britain. Sales of which, worryingly, have been growing at the rate of 40 per cent per year.

It arrived, sporting lights on the roof, chrome roll bars and chunky wheels. And it lasted three days before a hose fell off and, in a cloud of black smoke, it ground to a halt.

Sadly, they sent another and I took it for a drive. Where do we start? The ride was more uncomfortable than the Cresta run. There was no performance at all. Space in the back part of the double cab was a joke. And it’s all very well pointing at the undeniably large boot, but you can’t put anything in that because every time you pulled up at a set of lights, passers-by would simply help themselves.

There’s another problem, too. In his last budget, Gordon Brown decided that too many people were using tax-deductible vans and pick-ups as family cars at the weekend. And as a result, from 2007, those that do will be clobbered.

As a tax-avoidance scheme, then, the pick-up’s days are numbered, which means it must be judged as a vehicle. And I have to say it’s one of the worst I’ve ever driven. Yes, there’s a ruggedness to the undersides, and yes there is four-wheel drive. But why? We have no wolves and the only arms we’re allowed to bear have hands on the end.

If you really do want a work tool, buy a van. The only reason for buying a pick-up is because you want to look American. But there’s an easier way of doing that. Eat lots of chocolate and lose your atlas. Or get Richard Littlejohn over for lunch. You could even sit on him – it’s a lot more comfortable than sitting on a pick-up truck, trust me.

Sunday 30 May 2004

I’ve managed to completely forget how to drive. And since that was a split infinitive, it seems I’ve completely forgotten how to write as well. The driving thing is more of a worry. In the past couple of days I’ve pulled out on to roundabouts even though I could see perfectly well that a car was coming. I’ve jumped red lights. I’ve parallel-parked like I was using the force, and then yesterday, while reversing up a one-way street to shout at a bus driver, I backed, with a sickening crunch, into some poor chap’s Volvo.

My progress from the wilds of Huddersfield to the confines of Sloane Square has been set against a tuneless cacophony of blaring horns, furious parking sensor alerts, squealing tyres, rending metal and hurled abuse.

We see this kind of thing in sportsmen. They train, reach a peak of physical fitness and then, one day, for no obvious reason, they’re unable to perform properly. Of course, this doesn’t matter. It means only that they’ll lose the game. But on the road, the consequences can be far more serious. So why does it happen?

I’ve checked my horoscopes and none warns me to stay off the roads until the moon rises up out of Venus. I have no money or family worries. The job trundles on. And yet I can’t drive. So I’ve been forced to revisit an issue
that last reared its head about 20 years ago. Biorhythms.

It is said that the ancient Greeks first attempted to explain mood swings 3,000 years ago but it wasn’t until around 1900 that a psychologist and a doctor worked out why people in perfect physical health with no worries could sometimes feel unhappy. They reckoned that from birth we go through intellectual, physical and emotional cycles. Each works on a different time-frame, but there are occasions when all three are at a low ebb. This makes us muddle-headed and depressed and unable to park a Range Rover properly.

Back in the early 1980s the
Daily Mail
got hold of the story and for a while everyone was talking about it. Except me. I thought it was just another load of ley line, tarot card, Area 51, weird-beard twaddle. And I uncovered further evidence to support this scepticism the other day when I consulted aninternet biorhythm planner to find that my ideal partners – people with exactly the same ‘waves’ – are Uma Thurman (good) and Kim Jong-il (not so good).

However, I fed my birth date into the system and, bugger me, for the past three days all three of my charts have been bumping along the bottom. In essence, I’ve been driving up and down the MI in a two-ton Range Rover even though I have been a weeping, slobbering wreck with the co-ordination of a half-set jelly.

I was, at this point, going to bring up Carole Caplin and some conjecture on what she might do to solve the problem. On an ordinary day it would have been shrewd and incisive, but today, with my head full of wallpaper paste, I can’t seem to make any worthwhile link.

So I shall move on to the practical and cheap Ford Ka. Even though it looks like a teapot, it’s been a huge success in Britain, taking nearly half of all the sales in its class.

Recently it was improved with the fitting of an electronic milometer, a low-fuel warning light, and, on luxury models, a rev counter and a wash wipe facility for the windscreen. This does beg a question: what the hell did it come with before?

There’s a similar issue under the bonnet. The new engine will get you from 0 to 62 mph in 13.7 seconds, which is so slow you could start off on a biorhythm high and, by the time you were going past 40, be convinced you are no good at your job and that everyone hates you. Also, if this is the best the new engine can do, how gutless was the old one?

You might think that a solution to these shortfalls can be found with the Sportka (pronounced Sport Ka), but I’m afraid not. Despite the big alloy wheels, the fat 195 tyres and sports suspension, this comes with nothing more groovy than a 1.6 that has eight valves, just like a Triumph Herald, and a single overhead camshaft, just like your grandad’s old Hoover.

The result is 0–62 mph in 9.7 seconds and a cheek-rippling top speed of 108. In other words, it’s noticeably slower than the old 1.6-litre Golf GTi from nearly 30 years ago.

The Sportka has been around for a few months now, but I really couldn’t see the point of driving one. I mean, who wants a tweaked teapot? Who wants a hot hatch that isn’t even lukewarm? And what about that name: Sportka?