Don't Stop Me Now (6 page)

The engine started out as a 5.5-litre V10 that was all set to be used in the back of a racing car at Le Mans. But a last-minute rule-change favoured smaller turbo units, so the programme was scrapped.

Nearly. In fact, Porsche’s racing division handed over its stillborn engine to the road-car people, who had to worry about emission regulations. That meant adding a third piston ring, which meant fitting longer pistons, which took the engine up from 5.5 to 5.7 litres.

But the ceramic clutch remained. The Skunkwork stealth materials remained. The racing power remained too, all 612 brake horses of it. And you should hear the noise this thing makes. It’s like driving around with the bastard love child of Jaws and Beelzebub in the boot.

Strangely, though, it’s not the engine that impresses most of all about the Carrera GT. It’s the weight. Unlike any other road car ever made, all of it – the body, the tub, even the support struts for that monster V10 – are made from stuff that sure as hell wasn’t in the periodic table last time I looked.

The result is an extraordinary lightness. The targa-style roof, for instance, lifts out in two panels, each of which is light enough to be carried away by a strong ant. The seats weigh less than a bag of sugar. This car is so light I would be loath to leave it parked in a high wind. Certainly you’d feel guilty driving it after a big lunch.

The result is simple. Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that’s hard to explain.

I’ve been in some pretty fast machinery over the years, but nothing prepared me for the neck-snapping, spleen-bursting, hammer-blow explosion of power that came the first time I floored the Carrera’s throttle.

I was on an arrow-straight forest road in eastern
Germany and it was like I was caught up in a
Doctor Who
special effect. Nought to 60 was dealt with in 3.9 seconds. Nought to 100 took 8, and then it really started to fly. Even at 175 there was no let-up, no sense that the engine was having to fight the headwind. There was just more power, more acceleration, more speed and more of that amazing noise.

What made the experience even more bizarre was the way the engine lost its revs between gear-changes. Because the ceramic clutch is so light, there’s nothing for it to fight. You just get that wawawawa, like you do from a Formula One engine.

Now, we have seen this kind of blood-and-guts stuff before, from Ferrari and McLaren and even some of the new boys like Pagani and Koenigsegg. But the Porsche feels different from any of them.

It feels finished. The quality of the body is as good as you’d expect from a Toyota Corolla and inside there’s exactly the right blend of luxury, style and weight saving. Ferrari just tends to nail a speedo to the dash and leave it at that. Pagani uses too much chintz. The Carrera is perfect.

And there is no doubt that from any angle it is utterly beautiful. I had a long discussion recently with a friend about the difference between art and design. And without wishing to sound like Alan Yentob, the Carrera seems to sit at a point where the two disciplines meet.

It looks like the result of a liaison between Henry Moore and Isambard Brunel. It is engineering at its artsy-fartsy best.

The next time a car comes along that is better than this, it will be using a completely different technology. Because when you’re limited to what we have now, this, quite simply, is as good as it gets.

Sunday 12 October 2003

With the audience figures for Radio 1’s
Breakfast Show
in free fall, bosses have decided to replace the DJ Sara Cox with someone else whose name escapes me. The Queen, probably.

It won’t make the slightest bit of difference. No one tunes in to a music radio station because of the announcer. We tune in because of the music, and the music on Radio 1 is from a never-ending stream of increasingly angry black men who, so far as I can tell, wouldn’t know a piano if one were to land on their heads.

No, I do not sound like my father. He couldn’t tell the difference between Ted Nugent and Karen Carpenter; it was all rubbish to his ears. Whereas today there is simply no difference between 50 Cent, Wyclef Jean and Black Eyed Peas. Except for the number of times each of them has been shot.

I have been paying rather more attention than usual to music recently because Sue Lawley invited me on
Desert
Island Discs.

The luxury good was easy. I decided I’d take a jet ski, though I was tempted, when I met Sue, to ask her along instead. She’s hugely attractive.

The book was harder. You’re given the
Complete Works
of Shakespeare – to get your fire going, presumably – and
the Bible. But you’re allowed to take one other. That’s impossible. Not being five, I find all books dull after I’ve read them once.

But the most impossible thing of all was the music. Like everyone else, my list of Top 10 greatest all-time songs features around 250 tracks. Fourteen of which are the best ever.

And to make matters worse, some of the 14 best-ever songs are not the sort of things I would care to share with the nation. Telling the audience that one of your favourite tunes is ‘Clair’, by Gilbert O’Sullivan, is not that far removed from walking into the pub and telling everyone you have genital sores.

For instance, I’ve always had a soft spot for Sad Café. In the wee small hours I can admit that to myself, along with a fondness for Camel and Yes and Supertramp. But not in a studio, at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Not to Sue Lawley.

It was for this reason I also decided to steer clear of anything classical. Unlike some of the guests on the show, who prove themselves to be interesting and mysterious by choosing pieces in B flat by someone unpronounceable from Transylvania, the only classics I know are from adverts. And I fear I may have looked a bit of a fool if I’d asked for that piece from the Pirelli tyre commercial. Or worse, that one they all clap along to at the Horse of the Year Show.

So what I ended up with was my best-ever eight songs (that I’ll admit to liking). And you know what? The most recent was Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ from 1977. This makes me
a very, very old man, and that means I’m feeling well qualified this week to write about Honda’s new Accord Tourer Type S.

Over the years Honda has tried and tried to give itself a youthful appeal. It has injected its cars with Botox, collagen and testosterone. It has even slotted 190 bhp engines under the bonnet of a Civic, but this was like fitting a spoiler to a plastic hip. All it did was increase the speed the old lady was going when she hit the tree.

It came up with a funky small car which it called the Jazz. It even offered it in the same shade of metallic pink as a nine-year-old’s nail varnish. And what happened? My mother bought one.

There were sports cars in the 1960s, and Honda does a wonderful sports car now: the S2000. There have been three prolonged lunges for glory in Grand Prix racing and even a foray into the world of supercars.

But it’s to no avail. I was busy admiring an electric-blue NSX on the A40 last week when, with no warning whatsoever, it veered across my bows and shot up a slip road. And who was driving it? Well, it was Mr Bean himself, Rowan Atkinson.

At first I thought the new Accord Type S might be yet another attempt to woo thrusting young executives out of their BMWs and Audis. It has the requisite black interior and the de rigueur fake carbon-fibre cubbyhole covers, so that inside it looks like a gentleman’s electric razor. In addition it has a huge orange speedometer that goes up to 160 mph, twin exhausts, lights like Butler &

Wilson jewellery and a titanium gear lever that offers a selection of six forward gears.

‘Oh no,’ I thought, as I eased out of the drive. ‘It’s like someone’s father undoing one too many of his shirt buttons and trying to dance.’

But it isn’t. The 2.4-litre i-VTEC engine doesn’t spin quite so readily, or sound quite as fruity, as Honda’s other sporty engines, and nor does it develop quite as much power as I was expecting. That said, it’s a very good engine, which is coupled to a sublime gearbox. But both are overshadowed by the ride.

Not even the new Jaguar, with its air suspension, can cope with bumps as well as this Honda. Even when you’re going quickly, and you won’t be because you grew out of that sort of thing 40 years ago, there are no jars or shudders.

On the road I use to test this sort of thing, I was astonished. You feel the car rise as it crests a bump in the road and you tense, waiting for it to crash back down again. But the crash never comes. It settles gently, like it’s a burly paramedic and you’re on a stretcher.

Strangely, this doesn’t seem to have affected the handling unduly. The steering’s beautifully weighted. There’s a good, seat-of-the-pants feel. The brakes are powerful and the seats hold you in place perfectly. This is all very clever. I’ve been saying for ages that I want a car that’s fast and sporty, but not so that it breaks my spine in two every time I run over a badger. And that’s what you get from the Accord Type S. Performance for the Past-It boys.

There’s more, too, in the shape of a low
£
20,000 price tag and unburstable mechanicals. I found out the other day that in the past 13 years there has never been a single failure of Honda’s VTEC system. Not one. Ever.

People talk about Volkswagens being reliable, and Mercs. But if I may liken reliability to the M1, the German cars are only at Milton Keynes. Toyota is outside Leicester, whereas Honda is already on the A1, going into Scotland.

I hope the tyres are reliable, too, because (as is increasingly becoming the norm these days) no spare wheel is supplied. It saves weight, say the car manufacturers. Yeah, right. And money.

You only get a puncture once every 150,000 miles, they counter. Sure, but when it happens it’s nice to know you’ll only be held up for 20 minutes, not two weeks while a replacement tyre is shipped from Yokohama.

And no, we’re not fooled by the sealant and pump that are supplied. This may work if you discover a drawing pin in the tread when you come out of the house one morning. But they are of limited use if your tyre is in 578 small pieces all over the M20.

The only real upside to this penny-pinching is the extra space in the boot. Not that the Accord estate needs it. The rear end is almost Volvoesque in its vastness.

So, a pretty good effort then, all things considered. Except for one enormous detail. Look at the picture and tell me if you have ever, in all your life, seen anything quite so ugly.

If I may bring the M1 into it again, we have Gérard
Depardieu at Bedford and the new British Library at Sheffield South. But this is off the top of the map, up round the North Pole, alongside Ranulph Fiennes’s frostbitten fingers.

Why, for instance, does the rear window taper when the bodywork does not? And why does such a big car come with wheels like Smarties? I’ve seen more balance and cohesion at a stag party and more aesthetic merit in a Prague housing project. Did Sara Cox design it? Or was it drawn in the middle of a yardie shootout? In my Top 10 worst-ever looking cars, a list that currently features 145 different models, this is number one. Along with 38 others.

Sunday 19 October 2003

The man from Budleigh Salterton Council was adamant. ‘Of course it’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘People take their cars on to the beach all the time. Don’t worry, it’s surprisingly firm.’

Beaches are never surprisingly firm. If anything, I’d say they’re surprisingly un-firm. It doesn’t matter whether they’re made of shale, shingle, grit, sand or big slabs of volcanic rock, they’ll munch you up and hold you fast until the tide can come along to finish you off.

Over the years I’ve had to dig countless cars off various beaches around the world. A Corrado in South Wales. A Saab Turbo in St Tropez. And, most notably of all, a massive Lamborghini LM002 on Hayling Island.

But I never learn. So I drove the
£
110,000 Bentley Continental GT on to the shale at Budleigh Salterton, thinking that its four-wheel-drive system would get me off again. And with the words of the man from the council ringing in my ears: ‘If it does get stuck, we’ve got a man with a tractor.’

Great. Except, when it did get bogged down, the man with the tractor had gone home.

Welcome, then, to the joys of filming for
Top Gear
which, incidentally, returns to your television tonight. Albeit without the Bentley, which – when I left the scene
in the dead of night – was still buried in stones up to its axles.

Happily, however, before Mother Nature intervened, I did have plenty of wheel time with what is probably the most talked-about new car of the year. David Beckham is getting one. Elton John has bought one for his boyfriend. But I hear that the first to roll off the lines will go to Gordon Ramsay.

Bentley, then, will be supplying the wheels to the kind of people who get their diet from Atkins, their frocks from Versace, their Botox from Harley Street, their tans from Barbados and their friends from the pages of
Hello!

So what kind of car is it? Well, the first thing you need to know is that it’s fast in a wholly new and exciting way. Normally, a quick car introduces you to each one of its horsepowers and torques with a lot of shouting and growling.

Ferrari even invented a new type of exhaust that gets louder the faster you go, and now everyone’s at it. Hit 3,000 rpm in an Aston Martin Vanquish, for instance, and a little valve diverts all the waste gases away from the catalytic converters and silencers and into what sounds like the room where God practises shouting.

People who claim in court that they drove a really fast car without realising just how fast they were going are either lying or stone deaf. Or they were in a Bentley Continental GT.

It’s uncanny. You put your foot down, wait the tiniest of moments while the turbos gird their loins, and then
the view goes all wobbly. There’s no increase in noise, no increase in drama. You just have time to register the speedo needle climbing at what looks like a suicidal rate and then, with barely a whisper, you arrive at wherever it is you’re going.