Don't Stop Me Now (22 page)

Recently I suggested that no car does quite so much, quite so well as the new Volkswagen Golf GTi. But after a couple of weeks with the Forester I’m forced to think again. It’s built as well as the Golf, goes as well as the Golf, it’s more practical than the Golf and it isn’t going to be stopped, should we have a cold snap.

Of course, despite the limited slip differentials, it isn’t as much fun to drive as a Golf – it’s too tall for that – but, even so, it is the perfect bridge between Chelsea and the more rugged bits of outlying Cheltenham. And that makes it pretty much the perfect car for the townie who wants to blend in with the green bits.

There is, in fact, only one thing that stops it from getting a rare and exclusive five-star rating. For some extraordinary reason, the car that does everything won’t change gear on your behalf. It’s not available as an automatic, and that means it’s a bit like a barn conversion with an outside bog.

Sunday 23 January 2005

I have some donkeys. The small one that looks like a cow is called Eddie. The quiet grey one that doesn’t do much, except bite the hand that feeds it, is called Geoffrey, after the chancellor that did for Mrs Thatcher. And then there’s the beautiful one: she’s called Kristin Scott Donkey.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Ms Scott Thomas. I’ve seen
The English Patient
20 times, except for the bathroom scene of course. I’ve seen that so often the DVD’s got a hole in it.

As I’m sure we all know, Kristin lost both her father and her stepfather in air crashes. She went to Paris to study drama and still lives there today with her obstetrician husband, François Olivennes – a man for whom I’ve felt nothing but hatred. Until now. Because the crush is over.

In a recent newspaper interview Kristin laid into Britain, saying it was stuck in the 1950s, that everyone who goes to hospital dies, and that we’re all fat, acquisitive television addicts.

Now, I’m sorry, but no one ever emigrates because of the success they’ve enjoyed at home. No one ever says: ‘Well, I have a happy home life, I’m rich and I have many friends… so I’m off.’ The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they’ve cocked
everything up in their own. So their views are bound to be jaundiced.

Everyone you see planting olive groves on those endless ‘new life abroad’ programmes is inevitably a sad and lonely individual who thinks their homeland is to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in their empty, shallow, friend-free, halitosis-ridden lives.

This is why Australians are all such chippy bastards. Because every single one of them is descended from someone who, at some point, made a complete and utter hash of their entire life. This means they all have a failure gene in their make-up.

Of course, I also think that Britain is a nation of inarticulate, pugilistic slobs. I agree with Kristin, completely, but I’m allowed to say this because I live here. I’m also allowed to say that I much prefer France. I like France so much, in fact, that I’d like to demonstrate the point publicly, by buying a French car.

Of course, a French car is built by disgruntled and uninterested Algerians in a factory with a floor made out of mud, so it’s not going to last very long. But then it’s a statement more than a car really. I mean, a French car shows other road users that you loathe Tony Blair, that you disapprove of his stance in Iraq and that you prefer a quail’s egg to a burger any day of the week.

The problem is that while the French are very good at mushrooms and shooting pigs, they’ve been in an automotive oxbow lake since about 1959. Now, though, we have the Citroën C4.

You’ll no doubt have seen this on your television,
turning into a robot and dancing. Well, in real life the car can’t do that. But it can do pretty well everything else. It may be the same size as a Ford Focus or Vauxhall Astra but it costs less, and it can do far, far more.

For instance, if you nod off while driving down the motorway, sensors under the front bumper will detect the moment when you stray into another lane and set off a vibrator in the seat to wake you up. My wife liked this feature so much she drove all the way to London last week on the hard shoulder.

Then there’s the steering wheel. The rim turns but the middle bit stays still so all the buttons are always in the same place, and my, what a lot of buttons there are. You can set the sat nav, organise the cruise control, change the radio station, adjust the volume and answer the phone. There are so many buttons, in fact, that you’ll almost certainly stray out of your lane while trying to find the right one.

Don’t worry, though, because if you don’t want a Meg Ryan moment there’s even a button to turn the Rabbit off.

Now. Have you ever inadvertently pulled the bonnet catch while driving along? No, neither have I, but that hasn’t stopped Citroën fitting a flap to make sure you can’t, unless the passenger door is wide open.

I bet you have worried, however, that your car will be broken into. Well the C4 has an alarm and an immobiliser as you’d expect, but in addition its side windows are made from laminated glass. It’s not bulletproof, but it’s the next best thing.

Next up, we have the air-conditioning system, which
comes with a little flap into which you can insert a tailor-made capsule full of your favourite air freshener. That beats hanging a Christmas tree that smells of lavatory cleaner from your rear-view mirror. At this point I should draw your attention to the digital speedometer that is designed to ensure it’s readable even in bright sunlight, the double door seals to cut wind noise, the nine speakers, the six airbags and the 280-watt amplifier. And then there’s the electronic brakeforce distribution, the anti-lock brakes, the electronic stability control and the emergency-braking assistance, all of which have helped the C4 get a five-star Euro NCAP safety rating.

I should remind you at this point that I’m not reviewing a
£
100,000 S-class Mercedes. I’m writing about a normal, everyday family hatchback; a family hatchback that’s an orgasmatron with swivelly headlamps. Yup, when you turn the bit of the wheel that does actually turn, the searchlight-bright xenon bulbs turn, too, illuminating bits of the road that would otherwise be hidden.

Of course, the old DS had this feature about 200 years ago, but it didn’t have front and rear parking sensors, or wipers that come on when it rains, or lights that come on when it’s dark, or tyres that let you know when they have developed a leak.

It’s not often that I’m stunned by any car, leave alone a family hatchback. But the C4’s equipment package genuinely had me reeling in open-mouthed disbelief.

And now you’re expecting the but. The moment when the whole pack of
cartes
comes crashing down.

Well, sorry, but the five-door version is elegant and the
three-door is properly striking. And I must say the 2-litre VTS coupé I drove went, handled and stopped with much aplomb and vigour. It wasn’t as much fun as a Golf GTI because it felt heavy. But then it would, with all that stuff weighing it down.

If you don’t fancy the hot version, don’t despair, because there are 22 models on offer, including four trim levels, five different petrol engines and a choice of three diesels. You’ve got to be able to find something you like in there.

You’ll certainly be able to find something you can afford because even the VTS rocket ship is listed at
£
17,195. That’s a full
£
2,000 less than a Golf GTI and that on its own is a good enough reason to ignore the VW. But then you have the
£
1,100 cashback deal that Citroën is offering at the moment. Factor that in and the price falls to just
£
16,095. And that… that is truly incredible value.

Of course, I can pretty much guarantee that your C4 will break down every 15 minutes. Citroëns just do, and I’m not fooled by the three-year warranty on this one. Having the fault fixed for free in no way compensates for being stuck on the hard shoulder at three in the morning. Although, if you leave the lane sensor on, you will at least have a nice time waiting for the tow truck.

Certainly, I would expect Kristin Scott Thomas, with her love of the French, to have a C4. But in fact it turns out she has a Volvo estate. How English is that? You can do better. You can be English and have a French car.

Sunday 30 January 2005

Have you driven a modern-day Ferrari? Because it doesn’t matter what you drive now, you would stumble from the experience, reeling in slack-jawed, wide-eyed astonishment at just how good it had been.

In a current Ferrari you have a oneness with the machine that you simply don’t get from any other car. You feel connected, you feel assimilated. The steering, the brakes and the throttle don’t feel like a collection of metal and wires and carbon fibre. They feel like they’re organic extensions of your fingers and your toes.

This means you have no sense of manhandling the beast, of taming the monster. And because everything you do feels as natural and as instinctive as breathing, you can go much, much faster than you dreamed possible.

I was, at this point, going to liken Ferrari to Manchester United. But the simile doesn’t quite work because in the world of football there are Chelsea and Arsenal who, on the day, are capable of beating the big boy. But in the world of cars no one gets even close.

When you climb out of an Aston Martin Vanquish and into a 575, it is like climbing out of the eleventh century and on to the bridge of the
Starship Enterprise
. Emotionally, both cars tug your heart strings with equal force, but mechanically the Ferrari is hundreds of years ahead.

We see the same sort of thing higher up the scale, too. Porsche was undoubtedly proud of its Carrera GT, and no doubt Mercedes had a warm, gooey sense of contentment when its McLaren SLR went on sale. I drove both, and they were magical. And then I drove Ferrari’s rival, the Enzo, which, as a speed machine, was just miles better.

From this we can draw a sad but inescapable conclusion. Having the money to buy a Ferrari and then buying something else means you are going home with second best. You are buying south of the river, a Henman, a Bolton Wanderer.

So why do we do it? Why have I ordered a Ford GT when I could have had a technically superior 430 from Ferrari? Why are we tripping over Bentley Continentals when their owners could have had a 575 or a 612? Why is the DB9 one of the world’s most sought-after cars when on any playing field, against any Ferrari, it would lose about 6–0?

Well, of course, the problem is very simple. Ferraris are just a little bit disgusting, with a dash of Beckham and a hint of Ferdinand. A Ferrari just won’t go with your Fired Earth flooring and your BBC2 viewing habits. A Ferrari is sculpted vulgarity, which means we must turn our attention now to its bastard son. The Maserati Quattroporte.

I’m aware, of course, that the comedian Jimmy Carr reviewed this car when I was away, and I’m aware that he liked it very much. But then, what was the editor expecting? Asking a man who replaced a Rover 75 with another Rover 75 to review a car like the Maserati is a
bit like asking a refugee from Chad to review the Ivy. He’s going to be overwhelmed.

I wasn’t. I’ve been watching Maserati’s endless attempts to crack the nut for nearly 20 years now, and they’ve all been completely hopeless. Everything, from the wheezing Biturbo through the old Quattroporte to the 3200GT, was nothing more than a great badge from the 1950s nailed to a car that had all the grace and aesthetic appeal of Hattie Jacques.

The company was owned by Citroën, the Italian government, and then an Argentine playboy who sold bits of it to Chrysler, which couldn’t manage and offloaded the whole thing to Fiat, who eventually fobbed it off to Ferrari, who joined forces with Volkswagen and turned the horrid 3200GT into the 4200, which wasn’t very nice either.

At this point the powers that be in Italy decided I had it in for their useless bits of half-arsed engineering and banned me from driving all of their press demonstrators. So, last year, when they launched the new Quattroporte, I was in Coventry.

No big deal, I figured. Coventry’s exactly the place to be when you have
£
70,000 in your pocket and a burning need to buy a large, fast, four-door saloon car. There was, I convinced myself, no way that the big Maserati could possibly hold a candle to the supercharged Jag.

I was still thinking along the same lines as the spat with Maserati ended and they said I could borrow a Quattroporte after the man from the
Welsh Pig Breeders’ Gazette
had had a go. And so, last week, what looked like a swollen Vauxhall Cresta rumbled up my drive.

I stepped inside and, after a bit of fumbling among a dizzying array of buttons, found the switch that slides the seat backwards. It didn’t work. At first I assumed this might be because it was Italian, and therefore broken, but in fact the seat was as far back as it would go. Which wasn’t far enough.

That night, however, I wedged myself into the ‘Cresta’ and set off for dinner with the local lord. It was dark and sort of drizzling, so I constantly needed to flick the wipers on, and dip the headlights as I met cars coming the other way.

This was unusually hard to do because the ‘Cresta’ has a stupid, flappy paddle gearbox that is operated by levers right next to the headlamp and wiper stalks. So every time I met a car coming the other way I changed into fourth.

You can solve this by pushing a button that makes the gearbox an automatic. But then the changes are so ham-fisted that you will feel like you’ve moved back 200 years. And the ride’s pretty sudden as well.

We arrived at the big house and I pressed the central locking button, which illuminated a light on the underside of the passenger-side door mirror. Hmmm. Was this some kind of feature, a time-delay device to light the path to the door? Or was it a faulty piece of wiring?

I waited to see if it would go out. And then I waited some more. I was just about to give up waiting when I thought that most people with Maseratis would have a long walk to the house, so maybe it would stay on a while yet. So I waited a little longer.