Don't Stop Me Now (23 page)

And then, when I was very wet and cold, I unlocked
the car, which illuminated all the lights except the one under the door mirror on the passenger’s side, which went out. So I locked up again, and it came back on again.

At this point I thought of an expression that rhymes with bucket and went inside for dinner. Or pudding as it had become by then.

So, the ‘Cresta’? It looks like a Vauxhall from the 1970s, it’s cramped, the gearbox is stupid, the ride is too hard and its wiring is as cockeyed as the leaning tower of Pisa. And yet, despite all this, I absolutely loved it.

First of all, there’s the name. Despite the efforts of everyone who’s owned the company over the past 30 years, it still has a ring. ‘Shall we take the Maserati tonight, darling?’ That sounds good. And then there’s the way it goes. The 4.2-litre V8 develops 400 brake horsepower, which is a hundred down on the German benchmark these days. But, unlike the German rivals, there’s no electronic limiter, so when the AMG Benz is on the buffers at 155, you’ll be able to keep on going. All the way to 170.

Then there’s the noise. Mostly, it’s quiet and serene in the super-tasteful cabin, but when you put your foot down, there’s a faraway, dreamy peal of thunder. It’s great.

What’s more, on a dry, clear day when you don’t have to worry about wipers and dipping the lights, even the gearbox becomes manageable. Not nice, you understand, and nowhere near as good as a proper manual. But usable nevertheless.

The best thing about this car, though, is the ‘feel’. At no point do you have a sense that you’re in a large four-seater saloon. It turns and grips and brakes with a fluidity and a sense of purpose that you just don’t get from any big Jag, Audi, Mercedes or BMW.

I’ll tell you what it feels like. It feels like a Ferrari – and, technically speaking, that’s the highest praise there is. But, of course, the Maserati is not a Ferrari. And that makes it even better.

It’s less brash than a Ferrari, more refined than a Ferrari, more practical than a Ferrari and, at
£
70,000, less expensive than a Ferrari as well.

Sunday 6 February 2005

The other night, my local MP, an up-and-coming Tory, told me over dinner that Tony Blair had banned smoking, smacking and hunting in just one week. ‘So imagine what he’d be able to do in the next five years.’

I was thinking about this the next day as I drove through a 20 mph ‘home zone’ on my way to a no-smoking restaurant in Oxford when on to the radio came a man with news of a proposed law that would ban four-wheel-drive cars from ‘green laning’ in the countryside.

It seems that for some time now the infernal Ramblers’ Association has been twittering on about maniacs in souped-up Land Rovers spoiling the peace and serenity of the countryside by chewing up the nation’s footpaths and deafening the birds.

This seems fair enough, until you pause to consider. According to my calculations, there are in Britain 82,000 miles of countryside footpaths on which cars are not allowed. Then we have 18,000 miles of bridleway on which you may ride a horse (so long as you’re not chasing a fox, obviously) but on which cars are still banned. In fact, there are only 2,500 miles of byways on which you can take a car.

So walkers have more than 95 per cent of the country’s paths to themselves, plus all the land on which Tony says
they’re now allowed to roam. Yet they want more. They want it all. And, of course, because the ramblers are urban communists for whom the Labour Party has a natural affinity, they tend to get what they want.

So the government is looking at how this ban can be implemented, what it should cover and where. But I bet there’s one thing they’ve overlooked…

Most of the people who go green laning, at heart, are murderers for whom
Deliverance
was not a film but an aspirational lifestyle choice. They wear combat trousers, collect knives and the only thing they like to do more than cataloguing all the heads they’ve severed is deliberately getting their car stuck in the mud so that they and their friends can spend the rest of the day digging it out again.

Over the years I have met several green laners and I could just tell they all were wondering what my head would look like on a spike. So if they’re banned from driving in the countryside, I have very real concerns that the green and pleasant land will become a bloodbath. Ramblers may well cease to be troubled by the roar of big V8s, but they may well be deafened by the sounds of other ramblers being made to squeal like a piggy. Blair’s Witch-Hunt will turn into The Blair Witch Project.

Of course I don’t know why I’m bringing this up, because whenever Mr Blair’s government gets the scent of a potential ban in its nostrils it can’t be stopped. So 4×4s will be outlawed from the countryside; and then, after a period of extended congestion charging, they will be banned from city centres, too. Which means the
country’s murderers, footballers, school-run mums and black DJs are going to need a substitute.

Actually, they’re going to need a substitute even without government legislation because off-roaders are a fad, just like hot hatchbacks were a fad in the 1980s. And obviously fads, by their very nature, eventually go away. It’s hard to predict what might be next, but I keep looking at the Renault Vel Satis and thinking, ‘Hmmm.’

You see, we buy a 4×4 for the same reason that we used to buy a hot hatch. It’s because we have a latent fear of the four-door saloon. A four-door saloon is seen as being boring.

A four-door saloon is what Terry and June used. A four-door saloon is a repmobile, a car you choose when the boss has given you no choice at all.

So what are the alternatives? An MPV, which is a sign you’ve completely given up with life? A two-seater convertible, which would be no use for the family? A Volvo estate? What, like Jerry had in
The Good Life
? Puh-lease. So eventually we end up at the large and stylish door of the Vel Satis.

In essence this is a normal two-wheel-drive, five-seater, five-door executive car designed to compete with the BMW 5-series and the B-class Mercedes. But because Renault knows it has neither the technical flair nor the badge to compete with the Germans on level terms, it has gone its own way.

The result is a strange but rather fabulous-looking creation that doesn’t look or feel quite like anything else on the market today. And that’s because no car I know
is so wilfully stylish. It’s all form, and forget the function.

I love it, but there’s a big question to be answered. Does the style of the thing mask some technical deficiency and, if so, does it matter? I mean, half the bottle openers you can buy these days look great but could no more open a bottle of wine than plough 400 acres of East Anglia. Doesn’t stop you buying them, though, does it?

Well, when we step inside the Vel Satis, we find seats that, unlike the Germanic norm, are huge and squidgy. Strange for a country where mothers think it is their social responsibility to make sure their children have small bottoms, but very good news indeed in a country where mothers force-feed their children with lard to keep them quiet.

Then there’s the space. All cars feel a little claustrophobic when they are full of people, but having five in the Vel Satis is like having five in the ballroom of the Grosvenor. Partly, this is down to an enormous amount of head- and legroom, and partly it’s down to the choice of colours.

You see, in a BMW or a Mercedes you have a choice of black, black, black or dark black, whereas every Vel Satis I’ve driven has been kitted out with lots of cream and beige. This means it feels what an estate agent would call light and airy.

Some of the detailing is exquisite, too, like the marquetry on the woodwork, and, as usual with French cars these days, the list of equipment that comes as standard is dazzling. The satellite navigation system is particularly noteworthy because it actually works.

I know this, because when I asked it to find a route into the middle of Oxford last week, which is a bit like asking it to find a route into the bowels of Fort Knox, it didn’t simply explode. What’s more, it didn’t make a single mistake earlier in the day, even though I had to be in Chippenham for breakfast, Le Caprice for lunch and home for tea.

Unfortunately, on this eight-hour round trip, the rest of the car was not quite so competent. The 3.5-litre V6 in my top-of-the-range,
£
31,000 test car is the same 3.5-litre V6 you get in a Nissan 350Z. It’s a good engine, with plenty of oomph, but it’s too much for a front-wheel-drive car. So any request for more speed was met with a Gallic shrug and a puff of wheelspin.

Then there’s the ride. Most of the time it’s as soft as the seats, and that makes for an uncannily un-German feel, but when the road surface goes all blotchy, the suspension just can’t cope at all and flicks into wobble-drive. This becomes wearisome after a while.

But the driving position becomes wearisome way sooner than that. Get the seat right for your legs, and the wheel is too far away for your arms.

And then some of the trim fell off. It was only a small piece and it didn’t really matter, but it provides a clue to the Renault’s shortcomings.

It’s a large, luxurious car from a company that simply doesn’t understand luxury at all.

Sadly, then, the Vel Satis is an appealing but ultimately hopeless replacement for your 4×4. But don’t despair, because one day a company with more experience of
quality engineering will follow suit and sell us a car that’s not only properly stylish but good underneath as well.

BMW mechanicals. With a Conran look. It’s the next big thing.

Sunday 13 February 2005

Cricket, obviously, is a monumentally dull spectator sport. And so is golf, and so is snooker. But the dullest, most excruciating sport of them all – and I’ll brook no argument on this – is the day-long motor race at Le Mans.

At four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, a grid full of cars from companies you’ve never heard of, and drivers whose names you can’t even pronounce, set off on what in essence is a 24-hour economy run. And then it goes dark.

Now I’m sorry but how, in the name of Zeus’s butthole, can anyone with even a tiny sliver of intelligence imagine that spectators will be interested in watching a sport they can’t see? A pair of headlights is coming towards you and then, after a short, deafening roar, they are replaced by a set of red tail-lights whizzing off into the night. Was that a Courage that just went by, driven by Alfonso Percolinno? And if so, was it whining or coming last? There is no way on God’s earth of knowing.

All you do know is that the race, when it finishes at 4 p.m. on the Sunday, will be won by the team with the most money. And that, for the past few years, has been Audi. Although, for marketing purposes, the car is not always called an Audi. Sometimes they replace the four rings with a flying B and call it a Bentley.

Frankly, it would be easier, and quieter, if each team were asked to roll up with a copy of its most recent bank statement. Then the champagne could be given to the one with the biggest number of noughts. That way we’d all be spared the public-relations-inspired test of a car’s fuel consumption, held under cover of darkness, half a country away from where 80 per cent of the spectators live.

There’s talk among the sport’s fans that things will improve when the field is made up of proper road cars that everyone recognises. This, they say, is already happening, with Aston Martin entering a DB9, Chevrolet a Corvette, Lamborghini a Murciélago, and Ferrari a 575.

Apparently, if this new class becomes numerous and competitive enough, the one-off Audi-style prototypes will be banned and it will be the basis on which all endurance racing is founded. That sounds great, but there are still two problems. First, it will still go dark, so for a third of the race we won’t see what’s going on. And second, the Italians will bend the rules so hard that they are as near as dammit broken.

In fact, it’s already happening. You see, the new class is supposed to be for GT cars. That would be ‘grand tourers’ like the Corvette, the DB9 and the 575. But what Maserati has done is go cap in hand to its sister company, Ferrari, and take away all the components from an Enzo, which is no more a GT car than my dog. From these it has made a racing car.

Of course, the rules say that 25 road versions must be sold, but finding 25 people from a customer pool of 6 billion isn’t that hard. Even when the car in ques
tion costs
£
520,000 and doesn’t even have a back window.

If I’d been running the governing body, I’d have smiled while they explained how this car obeyed the letter of the law, and then told them to get lost. But I’m not running the governing body, so, even though it’s racing on wooden tyres, it’s already out there winning races without breaking out of a canter.

More importantly, the 25 road cars have been sold, and last week I gave one of them a damn good thrashing.

Yes, it has the same carbon-fibre skeleton as an Enzo and the same 6-litre V12 engine. It has the same flappy paddle gearbox, too, and the same set of controls for raising the nose to get over speed bumps, firming up the dampers and altering the savagery of the gearbox change action. But because it was conceived as a racing car, it needed better aerodynamics than the Ferrari on which it’s based. So it’s a full 2 feet longer than the already bulky Enzo and a foot wider. The MC12, then, is absolutely bloody massive. And because you can’t see anything out of the back, parking is jolly tricky.

But, amazingly, driving it isn’t. You expect, when you see that air intake on the roof and those ludicrous overhangs, that it’s going to be a full-on racing machine, a fire-spitting bone-breaker. And when you step inside, to be confronted with proper race harnesses instead of seat belts, there is a sense of ‘here we go’.

But the engine fires quietly, the gearbox slides into first, and the steering is no heavier than a Nissan Micra’s. You can even remove the roof. The most astonishing thing, though, is the ride. This car glides over bumps, the
suspension absorbing the road-worker Johnnies’ laziness without transferring a single ripple to the cool blue interior with its Milanese fashion house upholstery.