Born to Be Riled (16 page)

Now, we are not dealing here with a car bore. Car Bore Man has a beard and oily fingernails. Car Bore Man has an MG and drinks beer with twigs in it. Car Bore Man feels a genital stirring whenever you whisper ‘track rod end’ in his ear.

Whereas Mr Blazer and Slacks would not be able to identify a track rod end if one were to leap out of a hedge and eat his foot. Mr Blazer and Slacks would have trouble telling the difference between a Humber and a humbug.

Mr Blazer and Slacks, however, is even more boring because his specialist subject is… motor racing of yesteryear. Ask him who set what lap record for what team in the 1956 Cuban Grand Prix and he’ll know. In fact, there’s no need to ask because he’ll tell you anyway sooner or later.

As far as Mr Blazer and Slacks is concerned, real motor racing stopped when tobacco sponsorship and seatbelts moved in. Today, he maintains, F1 is just a business where people with regional accents are paid huge sums of money to do something that’s no more spectacular than ironing.

Real motor racers were gentlemen who used their
family’s money in the pursuit of the ultimate lap. Real motor racers did the decent thing and died whenever they crashed, which was every weekend.

Unfortunately, I’m a soft touch for these people. They assume that, because I know how much an Audi A3 costs, I must be on first name terms with Archie Scott Brown and Donald Fotherington Sorbet who, don’t you know, set the lap record in 1936, etc. etc. etc.

At this point I discover horse-like qualities and manage to fall asleep while standing up.

There is nothing in the world quite so dull as trips down memory lane, especially when the lane in question is Silverstone.

Or so I have always thought. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been researching a programme I’m making about Aston Martin, and in among the snot-like offal I’ve encountered some three-quarter inch pearls.

Then I met Stirling Moss who, in less than ten minutes, managed to convince me that Fifties motor racing was more exciting than watching an Apache helicopter gun-ship trying to get a Hellfire missile up the exhaust of a well-driven Dodge Viper.

This is because you never knew what would happen next. There was a driver in the 1930s who, as night fell, pulled into the pits while racing in the 24 hour race at Le Mans.

He changed out of his sports jacket and suede shoes into a dark suit and formal black lace-ups so that he should be properly dressed. And the following morning he changed back again.

His team, it seems, didn’t mind one bit. Indeed, on the very last lap of the race, they hauled him in to the pits
again, saying they were nearly out of champagne and did he want the last glass?

And then there’s the sportsmanship. Stirling once travelled all the way to Indonesia so that he could engage some long-forgotten adversary in mortal combat on the track.

When Stirling’s axle broke half-way through the event, things looked bleak. But the other chap lent him one – a kindly gesture which Stirling repaid by beating him.

This was the old way. In the final round of the 1959 World Sports Car Championship Aston Martin set fire to their pit garage, which would have been curtains. However, the team next door pulled its car out of the race so the hot favourites could carry on.

At around the same time, a driver called Peter Jopp – you simply must know him – suffered a mechanical failure and sought assistance from a fellow competitor who was lounging around on the grass. ‘Only too delighted,’ said the other chap, summoning his parents’ butler. ‘Courtney,’ he barked at the old retainer, ‘after you’ve poured Mr Jopp a Pimms, perhaps you’d be good enough to mend his clutch.’

The spirit was matched only by the amateur nature of technological developments. When Ferrari developed a flip-up rear spoiler on the back of their racer, they told the other teams it was a device to prevent fuel spilling on the hot exhausts. And everyone believed them.

Cooper found one of its racers wouldn’t fit on the trailer so they sawed the rear end off, only to find that it went faster as a result.

Now when you’ve been brought up on a diet of Schumacher and launch control devices, this is just
delightful. Drivers racing for no money. Team bosses helping one another. Pulling into the pits for a glass of fizz. It’s all too agreeable.

But what was the motivation? Stirling Moss doesn’t even hesitate. ‘I did it because I loved driving a good car quickly.’

It’s funny. He was standing there in a blazer and slacks. He had a clipped accent and a smart tie. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, but the man takes the era and brings it alive.

Some say he is the greatest driver that ever lived. Well I don’t know about that, but I do know this. When he starts to reminisce, I start to feel like I’ve got a wet fish down the front of my trousers.

If you were to use sensitive military equipment you might detect a slight rise and fall of the chest, and perhaps a gradual downward trend in the eyelid department, but that’s about it.

If you were to use ordinary medical techniques you’d pronounce me dead, and take away my eyes and liver for transplant purposes.

Tiredness comes in great waves, reaching a point where even speech is no longer possible. Uttering a simple ‘uh’ is out of the question. I am, quite literally, dead to the world.

It’s a condition that lasts right up to the moment when my head hits the pillow, and then BANG: the eyes flash open, the heart begins to beat like a Deep Purple drum solo and my mind could beat a Cray supercomputer at chess.

I write scripts. I think of new story ideas, and already this year I have six plots for new books. As the digital clock continues its remorseless march past 4 a.m., I’m sitting up bathed in sweat, wondering why the vicar had popped out of the wardrobe at that precise moment.

And what were Genesis thinking about when they decided that they were lawnmowers and it was time for lunch… wait a minute. I wonder if anyone knows what the car was on the cover of Peter Gabriel’s first solo album? I could do a story about that.

The story is then written and mentally logged by which time it’s 5 a.m. and I’m starting to get angry. In 90 minutes, I shall have to get up and go to work. I can’t do a day’s work on 90 minutes’ sleep. Not when I only had 34 minutes last night.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve done the unspeakable and taken up decaffeinated coffee, which is like liquid lettuce. I’ve tried drinking huge quantities of Scotch. I’ve counted sheep, but that all went terribly wrong when I started to wonder whether other farmyard animals could bound over fences. Can pigs jump? That’s a big, big question.

I’ve tried herbal remedies, though they also keep me awake, worrying that someone will find out. Clarkson’s on herbal medicine. Must be a poof.

The problem is that I will not use prescribed drugs. Once, on a long, no smoking flight from Beijing to Paris – don’t ask – I took a Mogadon and was still wondering
how such a tiny, tiny tablet could possibly work on a 15 stone adult… when I went unconscious.

I was in a coma all through the stopover in Sharjah, and at French customs I thought I was the captain of a federation starship. Do NOT take a sleeping tablet, unless you have nothing on for about two weeks.

The worst thing about insomnia is that no one sympathizes. Tell someone you can’t sleep and they’ll give you chapter and verse on how easily they nod off. Why do they do this?

When I meet a blind person, I don’t tell him that I can see just fine.

But now it doesn’t matter any more, because for the past week I’ve been getting the full eight hours a night. I’ve been waking up each morning well able to handle all manner of heavy machinery.

The cure is not, I’m happy to say, a dangerous and addictive drug. It is not some dubious root from Mongolia. It is not alcohol either, unfortunately. No, the cure comes from a most unlikely source – Toyota.

You only have to mention the word ‘Camry’ and I’m long gone. Indeed, I had to get a colleague to type ‘the C word’ just then because if I’d done it, I’d have been unable to finish the story.

I want to make it plain that this is by no means a bad car. For the money, you’d be hard pressed to find a better built machine on the road. It’s quiet. It’s comfortable, and it’s incredibly easy to drive.

But all this engineering whiz kiddery is shrouded in by far the dullest shaped body I have ever seen in my whole life. There is no single feature that is in any way even slightly outstanding. There is a bonnet because you need
one to hide the engine. There is a passenger cell where people sit, and there is a boot for luggage.

All I need do now is think about the shape and I come over all drowsy. If, while cleaning my teeth at night, I glance out of the bathroom window and see it in the yard, that’s it – I’m a goner.

Now obviously, we can’t all buy a C**** just to help us sleep – I mean the 2.2 litre base model is £19,000 and that’s a hill of money. But I suspect a photograph of such a car pinned to your bedroom ceiling would work.

Or cut out this next bit of the story, and read it before you go to sleep every night. The C****, you see, has HSEA glass to reduce glare and eye fatigue and cut down on heat build-up. HSEA cuts ultraviolet by 86 per cent and solar energy by 74 per cent. The stereo has autoscan… feeling drowsy yet?

What if I tell you the engine and transmission is mounted in its own cradle-type sub frame and that the suspension geometry has been fine tuned to raise the rear roll centre? Gone yet?

OK then, and this is all you’ll need. The rear wheels have been set with initial negative camber.

It’s marvellous; the first ever car with medicinal properties. But it’s not alone out there. Next week, I’ll tell you all about the Nissan QX and how it put me into a deep, hypnotic trance.

I blame miniaturization. Clever people have stopped inventing things and started making what we’ve already got, smaller. When I had a hi-fi system in the 1970s, it was a massive, teak thing with an arm like something from the Tyneside docks. But today, you need tweezers to hit the buttons and Jodrell Bank to see the read-outs.

Then there are cameras. I saw a guy in the States last month with a device that was actually lighter than air. Had he dropped it, it would have floated, which is perhaps a good thing, but honestly, you can’t beat my Nikon which needs its own team of baggage handlers at airports.

And then there’s Kate Moss. Well look. I like big breasts, a big amount of food on my plate and I’d much rather watch
Terminator 2
at the cinema than on video. I also like big cars, a point rammed home this month when I drove Big Foot. First of all, its nine-litre V8 gets through alcohol at the rate of 5 gallons for every 300 yards. This is good stuff. This is 29 gallons to the mile and that makes it by far the least economical vehicle in the world. It’s fast too. No one has ever done any performance tests, but having done a full-bore, full-power
standing start I can report that we are talking 0 to 60 in about four seconds. This is impressive in any car but it’s especially noteworthy in something that has tyres that are over 6 feet tall. To get in, you climb up through the chassis, emerging into the cockpit through a trap door in the Perspex floor. Everything about the pick-up truck body perched up there on the top is fake. It’s just a plastic facsimile of a real Ford F150 – not even the doors open. There’s just one centrally mounted seat with a full, five-point racing harness and about 2500 dials in front. There are warning lights too, each of which was carefully identified by my tutor before I was allowed to set off. But I didn’t listen to a word he said. Nor did I pay attention when he talked me though the gearbox. It’s an auto but, though there’s no clutch, you do have to pull the lever back each time you want to shift up. And that was the problem: pull is the wrong word. You are supposed to wrench it back, as I’d soon discover.

With the lecture over and my neck brace in place, the instructor was disappearing through the trap door when he turned and said: ‘Have you ever driven a fast car before?’ I told him I’d driven a Diablo and he left, wearing a peculiar smile on his face.

To fire that mid-mounted tower block of an engine, you just hit a big rubber knob and then thank God you’re wearing a helmet. It’s loud like a hovering Harrier and when you hit the throttle it sends your vision all wobbly.

About one second into what felt like an interstellar voyage, various dials and the noise suggested a gear change might not be such a bad idea, so I eased the lever back. Nothing happened. The revs kept on building, so I tried again. Nothing, except this time a selection of warning
lights came on. By now I was in a temper so I yanked the lever back and the truck just seemed to explode forwards. This could catch a Diablo and run over it.

And even though it was on wet grass, it seemed to ‘dig and grip’ pretty well. I never did find out how well, though, because by then I was struggling for third and may have hit first instead. I was in Vermont but people in Gibraltar heard the bang. They gave me another five minutes before the people from Ford hit their remote shutdown button and the engine died. I was going to give them hell but decided to run away instead when I noticed the rev-counter telltale said I’d taken the £100,000, nine-litre motor to 10,000rpm.

I didn’t stop running until I was in Chicago, where I decided that Big Feet (is that the plural?) are wasted at exhibitions, jumping over saloon cars. We should use them for trips into town. I’m about to move to Chipping Norton where, I’m sure, it’ll go down a storm.