Don't Stop Me Now (29 page)

This will make Britain a laughing stock in the eyes of the whole world, so consequently we must quickly find something else to crow about. And that brings me neatly on to the Aston Martin V8 Vantage.

In the past few weeks this new car has been subjected to a torrent of crowing as various motoring correspondents have vomited eulogies on to the page. But I’m afraid that I must be the voice of reason here.

First of all, Aston Martin is owned by the Americans and run by a German whose most recent decision saw engine production being moved from Newport Pagnell to Cologne. So it’s about as British as Budweiser.

And then there’s the price. At
£
80,000, the Vantage is
£
20,000 more than was originally suggested and, crucially,
£
20,000 more than the car with which it was designed to compete: the Porsche 911.

Of course, with a three-year waiting list, the Aston is unlikely to depreciate much, so that makes the premium more palatable. And that leaves us with the next problem. A lack of power.

Eventually there will be a faster version called the Vantage Vantage probably, or the Vantage Squared, but for now, when you change down and pull out to overtake, the baby Aston accelerates briskly but with none of the savagery you might have been expecting. It’s fast. But it’s not blistering.

The engine starts out in life as a 4.2-litre Jaguar V8 but is then extensively reworked to become a 4.3 that churns out 380 bhp and 302 torques. This isn’t enough. It’s less torque than you get from a Mercedes SLK, less bhp and torque than you get from a Vauxhall Monaro. And more worryingly it’s less bhp and torque than you’ll get from the next Jaguar XK, which will be cheaper as well. And just as beautiful.

Annoyingly, with a 4.3-litre V8 allied to a chassis made from air and a body fashioned from the froth on a cappuccino, the Vantage could have been really quick, cartoon quick, fast enough to fan a forest fire with its wake. But if they’d done that, why would anyone have spent about
£
20,000 more on a DB9? It’s not like the Vantage is different in any other way. Apart from the lack of back seats, the new V8 has exactly the same Volvo sat nav
system as the DB9, exactly the same hard-to-read dash as the DB9 and exactly the same Ford trim as the DB9.

In other words, like the DB9, the Vantage was built using whatever the Aston engineers could get their hands on cheaply. As opposed to the 911, which was built using whatever took the Porsche engineers’ fancy.

I’m sorry if this all sounds negative but I’m being realistic here. And I’m also being realistic when I tell you that in a straight fight, on any road or track, the 911 will be faster. Not just because of its superior grunt but also because it brakes better, steers better and corners more confidently.

But, and this is what makes cars such fun to write about, given the choice of a Porsche 911 or a V8 Vantage, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. I’d buy the Aston.

While it may not be as nippy or as thrilling as the 911, it has a he-man feel on the road that I like. Thanks to heavy steering, heavy brakes and a heavy six-speed manual gearbox, they’ve made the syllabub-light body feel like a meat pie. The 911 is for nancy boy racing drivers. The Aston’s for gentleman thugs.

That said, it’s by no means uncomfortable. Be in no doubt that it’s a firm car, designed for the bends, but the suspension never gets panicked by ridges and potholes in the same way that it does in, say, a Mercedes SL. It’s always controlled. Down. Up. Stop.

And then there’s the noise. Oh my God. What a soundtrack. From inside, all is quiet and serene. At normal speed, when the European Union testing people are listening, all is quiet and serene.

But put your foot down and a little valve in the exhaust system changes everything. Under full-bore acceleration, this car doesn’t rumble or howl. It sounds like all the most exciting bits of the Bible. It sounds like Revelation.

And it’s just so loud. When my wife went for a spin on a balmy summer’s evening, I heard her change from fourth to fifth a full two miles away.

A Porsche may well have the power and agility to get past, but stuck in the sonic boom from those exhausts, I suspect the German car would probably disintegrate before it ever got the chance.

The way it sounds is a good enough reason to buy the Vantage but there’s more: the way it looks.

This, of course, is the Aston party trick. A Vanquish is so pretty you overlook the fact its flappy paddle gearbox is useless. A DB9 is so pretty you overlook the fact it goes wrong quite a lot. And now we have the V8, which is so pretty you overlook the fact it’s not quite as good as a 911.

In the same way you’d overlook the undoubted charms of Cherie Blair with her law degree and her international connections for a chance to spend the night with – I was going to say Jordan, but I think Keira Knightley is a bit nearer the mark somehow.

Oh, and one more thing. The amount of global-warming carbon dioxide produced by the Aston’s big V8 is roughly equivalent to the amount produced by a dozen sprinters in a 100-metre race. Just thought I’d mention it.

Sunday 18 September 2005

The new Pontiac Solstice is America’s first attempt at making a sports car in more than 50 years. And not since David Beckham’s wayward penalty kick against Portugal have we seen anything go so wide of the mark. It is comically awful.

And that sets a question. How come America’s massive car industry can’t make what is basically beans on toast? A light, zesty, pine-fresh car with an engine at the front, a simple foldaway roof in the middle and rear-wheel drive at the back? Lotus can make a sports car using nothing but a melted-down bathtub and the engine from a Rover. Alfa Romeo can make a sports car using steel so thin you can read through it, and an engine that won’t start. Then there was Triumph, which made a sports car even though its entire workforce was outside the factory warming its hands around a brazier and chanting. So what’s America’s problem? Well, here in Europe early cars were expensive coach-built luxury goods for the tweedy and well-off. It wasn’t until the 1940s that cars for the common man came to France, Germany and Britain, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that they came to Italy. They haven’t arrived in Spain even today.

As a result we still have an innate sense that a car is something you save up for, something a bit decadent and
exciting. Whereas in America the everyman Model T Ford came quickly after the introduction of internal combustion, so there was never a chance for cars to earn that upmarket cachet. As a result, they’ve always seen the car as a tool: nothing more than an alternative to the horse.

In Europe we talk about style and how fast a car accelerates. In America they talk about how many horse boxes their trucks can pull and how much torque the engine produces.

If you do encounter someone over there who’s fond of performance cars they’re only really interested in how much g can be generated in the bends, whereas here those of a petrolhead disposition don’t care at all about grip, only what happens when it’s lost and the car is sliding. Then you are into the world of handling. A world where nothing but skill keeps you out of the hedge.

There’s more, too. From day one American motor sport was all about sponsorship, which is why the oval raceway was developed. It meant the whole crowd could see all the sponsors’ names all the time. The cars never zoomed off into a wood.

Here, they did. Motor racing was a rich man’s game, held far from hoi polloi on airfield perimeter roads. And on twisty tracks like this, grip was nowhere near as important as decent handling.

Add all this together and you start to understand why we have Lotus, Ferrari, Maserati and Aston Martin. And they have the Ford F-150 Lightning pick-up truck: 0–60 mph in a millionth of a second. Enough space in
the back for a dead bear. And on a challenging road about as much fun as a wasabi enema.

They also have the Ford Mustang and last week that’s what I was using to cruise up the 101 from Monterey to San Francisco. The sun was shining, 104.3 the Hippo was massaging my earbones with soothing West Coast sounds and, like everyone else, I was doing a steady 65 mph, my heart beating in slow monotonous harmony with the big V8.

This new version has been styled to resemble the original from 1965, and that’s a good thing. Less satisfactory is the news that it’s also been engineered to resemble the original with all sorts of technology that in Europe would have been considered old-fashioned by Edward Longshanks.

There’s no complex double-stage turbocharging here; no elegantly machined swirl chamber to extract the best possible power and economy from the smallest possible engine. It’s a 4.6-litre V8 with just one camshaft, three valves per cylinder and the sort of power output the average European would expect from a juicer.

The platform for the new Mustang comes from a Jaguar S-type. But then the Americans take it back in time by fitting a solid rear axle such as you’d find on a Silver Cross pram, and a Panhard rod, dismissed by Newcomen as being ‘a bit too last year’.

So what’s it like to drive? Well, the previous day I’d taken it on a hard lap of the extraordinarily beautiful Laguna Seca raceway, which, because it’s the curliest track in North America, is regarded by racing drivers all over
the world as one of the greats. Mansell. Villeneuve. Even
Top Gear
’s Stig goes all misty-eyed at the mention of it.

And frankly it was more than a match for Ford’s big daft horse. Its brakes were cooked by turn six; the final slow corner completely overwhelmed the live rear axle; and through the fearsome Corkscrew, which twists down a gradient so steep you can’t even walk up it, I’m afraid Mr Ed was about as pin-sharp as a punt gun. I damn nearly soiled myself.

Is it fast? Well, you get 300 bhp, which is about 200 bhp less than BMW gets from a similarly sized engine. But nevertheless it will get from 0 to 60 mph in 5 seconds and reach a top speed of 150. That’s not bad for an ox cart.

But by European standards this car is rubbish. Its engine has wasteful, unused capacity that turns fuel into nothing, it couldn’t get from one end of a country lane to the other without running out of brakes, and it handles like a newborn donkey.

There’s more, too. It’s got a gruff engine note, its interior has the panache of an Afghan’s cave and… and… and I can’t go on. You see, I’m running through all this car’s bad points, but I’m afraid my mind is consumed by the bit where I was doing 65 mph on the 101, listening to some Eagles on 104.3.

And then by the subsequent memory of grumbling along the waterfront in San Francisco itself, the city setting for
Bullitt
, the film that etched the Mustang for all time on the petrolhead’s radar.

You see, I kept thinking, I’m in a Mustang in San Francisco on a glorious September afternoon. And I liked
that a lot. I liked it so much that I became consumed with the notion of maybe taking a small part of the experience home with me.

The numbers look good. Because the Mustang is made from pig iron and lava it is extraordinarily cheap: $25,000. And
£
13,800 for 300 bhp is tempting. Even if you factor in the cost of shipping, changing the lights and paying Mr Blair some tax, it’ll still only be
£
22,000.

For that you could have a Golf GTI, which alongside Ford’s canoe looks like the Starship
Enterprise
. It’s more practical, easier to run, and around Laguna Seca undoubtedly it’d be a whole lot more competent. Whenever I drive a GTI I’m always full of admiration for its abilities, but when I was driving that Mustang I liked it. And that’s sort of more important.

Of course, the American way means they’ll never be able to build a sports car. It explains why the Pontiac Solstice is so dire. But the simplistic, covered-wagon approach doesn’t really matter on a car like the Mustang, not when you’re doing 65 mph in the sunshine and the Doobies are serenading you with
Long Train Running
. Not when it means you get a car this handsome for 13 grand.

The only worry is that if I did buy a Mustang, I’d get the car over here and on a wet November night realise that, actually, what I wanted to bring home was San Francisco.

The Mustang, then, is a great car in America. But here you’re better off with a Golf.

Sunday 25 September 2005

It was Sheikh Yamani, the former boss of Opec, who pointed out that the Stone Age didn’t end because the world ran out of stone. Nor did the Iron Age end because we ran out of iron. And you can be fairly sure the Oil Age won’t end because we run out of oil. Nobody knows when this will be because nobody knows how much there is down there, and equally nobody knows how much demand there will be for it in the future. In the past 40 years the population of the world has doubled.

So will it double again in the next 40? Or will we all be killed by parrots? Only the world’s environmentalists, with their crystal balls and their tarot cards, seem belligerently certain about what’s going to happen next.

Oh, and the car firms. Toyota says that in the next 10 years one million of the 7 million cars it’ll be making every year will be part-petrol, part-electric hybrids. And now BMW, Daimler-Chrysler and General Motors have joined forces to provide some competition.

Sounds great, but this technology is not designed to replace oil, merely to eke it out. And it’s only catching on because the world is awash with hippies who really do think that by driving around in a Prius they’re saving the world’s water beetles. Think of hybrids as council-run bottle banks: almost completely useless marketing tools
designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy about being green.

More realistically, the future will bring extraordinary advances in efficiency. I remember, in the mid-1980s, Daihatsu shocked the world by producing an engine that could produce 100 bhp per litre. But soon you can reckon on being given 150 bhp per litre and more. Already Volkswagen has a 1.4-litre motor that uses turbocharging, supercharging and direct injection to produce 167 bhp. That’s way, way more eYcient than any complex triple-engined hybrid.