Born to Be Riled (46 page)

So while I appreciate the Evo’s ability to generate one g while cornering on ice, I’d rather not have people point and say: ‘Ooh, look, there’s that bloke who used to be on the television. And he’s driving the stupidest car in the whole world.’

The motoring magazines have called it a ‘Porsche eater’ and a ‘road rocket’, but in the real world, where people wear brogues, it is, I’m afraid, irretrievably vulgar. You may have one only if you are a drug dealer or a footballist. Pity.

But don’t despair: the Evo has a sister, a car that combines the four-wheel-drive grip, the active yaw control and the turbocharged wallop in a body that’s rather less Geri Halliwell and rather more Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s called the Galant, which conjures up visions of Sir Walter Raleigh, a man who would happily lay down his freshly laundered cape so the Queen could cross some puddles. But a man with big pants.

And so it goes with the Evo’s sister. Yes, it has spoilers and flared wheel arches, but they’re small and discreet.
And inside there’s a wood-look dashboard, automatic transmission and a cool, detached air. You almost expect to find Edward Fox in the glove box. You can pop into town and the agri-yobs will continue to destroy the bus shelter without looking up. You can sit in one of Mr Prescott’s traffic jams and people will carry on picking their noses. It’s just another car.

But peer into its trousers and you’ll find a 2.5-litre V6 engine which, for that little extra something, has not one but two turbochargers. So it’ll get from 0 to 60 in 5.5 seconds and on to a top end maximum of 150mph. It’s not as fast as the Evo – what is? – but, amazingly for a car that’s bigger, more comfortable and better equipped, it’s cheaper. The more expensive five-door estate is £29,995. This is remarkable value for money.

Really, I want to conclude with a soaring eulogy, a rising crescendo of enthusiasm and affection, but I need to be a little bit careful. I told you only a month or so ago that the new Mercedes S-class is the best car in the world. And then, more recently, I typed a report on the Holden HSV in pure dribble. I know I should hold the few remaining superlatives back for the upcoming BMW M5 but I’m sorry, the Beemer can cocoa. With the Galant, I’m going for broke. It is utterly magnificent, an all-too-rare blend of Japanese high-tech with genuine good looks.

There’s something here for everyone. Gail Porter’s fan club will appreciate the active yaw control, in particular the green LED that comes on to tell you it’s working. You will like it because it has a three-year warranty. And I like it because it’s a 150mph estate.

You couldn’t possibly buy an Evo VI, but the
Galant gives you a taste of high octane, high living without the heartburn. It is, in short, superb.

Learner drivers are always taught that, when a car starts to skid, you take your feet off all the pedals and steer in the direction of the slide. Yeah, right. And when you’re learning to ski, you just nail a couple of planks to your shoes and whiz down the mountain.

Believe me on this one. When a car starts to slide, you can do whatever you damn well want. You can tear the steering wheel from its mountings or stamp on the pedals like you’re playing the organ and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference. You may as well eat your own nose because, in just a few seconds’ time, you’re going to be upside down in a ditch.

I should know. I’ve been test-driving cars for 15 years and that means finding out what happens when traction is lost. It means going to the outside of the envelope and then taking one more tiny shuffle into the great never-never land where you’re ripped from the driving seat and replaced by the laws of physics.

I know the theory of handling as well as anyone. I know about weight transfer and tread shuffle. I know precisely what you should do in any skid, on any surface, but when I go out there and actually do it I always end up in a ditch, on my head.

I know, for instance, that it is theoretically possible to steer a car using the throttle. You open it up a touch
and the back starts to slide. You keep it there to maintain the slide and then, when the road straightens, you ease off the power to bring everything back in line. For 15 years I’ve talked in the pub about cars that can be steered on the throttle and cars that can’t. And it’s all been nonsense because I’m not Michael Schumacher. Using the throttle in an attempt to steer a car simply determines how fast I go into the ditch.

But this week it all became clear. I was struck by a blinding flash of light and now there is no limit to my power. I am super-driver, a man who’s no longer in harmony with his wheels. I am their master.

I was at Kemble airfield in Gloucestershire with the new BMW M5 and a photographer who was keen to capture some sideways action for a magazine feature. No problem, even for me. Anyone can get a car to go sideways. It’s what happens when you’ve gone past the camera that’s hard and uncomfortable.

But not this time. I got the car sideways, and it just stayed there. And then, when I’d had enough, I eased off the power and it settled back in line. Happy? No, no, no. I was wearing a grin so wide it shattered both the side windows.

There’s more, too, because the M5 comes with a little button on the dash that sharpens both the steering and the throttle response. Press this and even Thora Hird could become Mistress Power Slide, a warrior princess in petrolhead heaven.

For hour after delicious hour I hurled that car round the perimeter road, its back end never quite in line with the front, and… blimey! What’s that funny noise? Oh, no, the rear tyres have fallen apart.

No, really, in the space of a morning I managed to wreck two 18-inch Dunlops that cost £387 each. Oh, and there’s no spare. BMW gives you a can of sealant and a pump, but this is of limited use when you’re down to the canvas.

So let’s think a little bit about the implications. Without any doubt, the M5 is the most flattering car a man can drive. It turns a ham fist into a sirloin of pork and handles, quite simply, like a dream. But if you peel away the handling prowess, like the handling prowess peels away the tyre tread, what are you left with?

You’ve got Sebastian Faulks with no writing skills. You’ve got George Clooney with a face like a horse’s arse. You’ve got a £60,000 BMW 5-series made at a factory in Dachau, on the site of a former concentration camp. Sure, an incredible leviathan lives under the bonnet – a V8 that develops 400bhp – but you need to keep the nanny-state traction control on to preserve those tyres. You’ve got a fabulous interior, but you can have something identical in a 528i for half the price.

Certainly, your neighbours won’t be terribly impressed by the M5, partly because the satin-finish wheels are vulgar and partly because it makes a deep, Brian Blessed booming noise that kills dogs and breaks all your finest Czechoslovakian glass.

It is demonstrably better than the 540, but the only place where you could possibly demonstrate its ‘betterness’ is on a track or an airfield. And when your friends are all driving home afterwards, you’ll be on the phone trying to find a tyre that no one stocks.

So obviously the M5 is a stupid car? Well, no, not really. Because you’re never going to take it to an airfield,
and you’re never going to slide it round the corners, and who gives a damn if your neighbour’s dog explodes? It pains me to say this, given my history of baiting BMW, but the M5 is magbleedingnificent.

So there I was in the back of a cab with Rodney Bickerstaffe, general secretary of some union or other, on the way to Bond Street to buy my wife a handbag. Pretty surreal, huh? And then the nightmare began. There are two criteria that must be met by a handbag, each of which is mutually exclusive: it must be fashionable and it must be practical.

While I was driving along with my wife the other day, she asked me to find her sunglasses. This meant diving into her bag, where I discovered she had a normal pair of spectacles, a spare pair, a normal pair of shades and a pair she got on prescription. And none of them were right, so the search continued, down past the make-up bag, the mobile phone, enough keys to baffle a warder at Brixton jail, two wallets and a foldout photograph frame. Further down, below the plasma, there was a medicine chest, another mobile phone, more keys and then the sanitary area. And at this point I gave up and said: ‘Look, darling, I really can’t find them. Can’t you just squint?’

This is a woman who doesn’t need a handbag so much as a binliner. But that would never do, because in
Vogue
I see the modern woman sports something no bigger than a tea bag. Well, she does today, but I know enough about
fashion to know that, by the time I’d got to the till with a microscopic blue Versace, it would have become as up-to-date as an ox cart. And by the time I got back to the shelf to change it for something in grey, there’d have been a punk revival and I could get a binliner after all.

I began to understand how Prince Philip might have felt when he discovered that two homosexual priests had been playing tonsil hockey at one of his garden parties. Bewildered, in a what’s-the-world-coming-to sort of way.

I finally settled on something with studs and then stood back in horror as I watched my wife transferring the contents of her old bag into the new one. It was like watching the Queen Mother move all her furniture into a two-bedroomed terraced house.

And within a month it’ll be out of date. But what the hell? Staying fashionable, on the handbag front, is not that expensive. The big problem is staying fashionable in cars. Cars never used to strike much of a chord with the terminally trendy because everyone had a Ford Cortina and you’d have to wait maybe six years for a new model to come along. That and the sheer expense of a car meant there was never a sense of here today, gone tomorrow. But now car makers have reinvented the idea of fitting a wide variety of different bodies to the same basic platform. So a whole raft of supposedly new models can be made, economically, in small numbers. It’s called niche marketing.

When Volkswagen launched the new Golf-based Beetle back in January 1998, people with black clothes and tiny handbags ordered one straight away. It was the car of the moment, but American demand was so massive
that British deliveries are only just beginning now. And I’m afraid the moment is past. To review the Beetle as a car would be as pointless as reviewing the latest La Perla knickers on the quality of the stitching. It was designed solely to be a fashion statement, to be a bandwagon on to which the 1960s revivalists could jump.

Thanks to the Abba thing, we’re now in a 1970s time warp that should have been good news for Rover. Only they got muddled and thought it was the 1470s. Really, I’m surprised their new 75 isn’t offered with a thatched roof.

Today, you’re far better off with the Mercedes Smart, which is positively
de rigueur
in St-Tropez. But when the next registration prefix comes along, you should be thinking very carefully about Fiat’s six-seater Multipla.

It’s a long, long way from being the best-looking car in the world, but handsomeness rarely has anything to do with making a fashion statement. I saw a girl in the Style section of this paper last week wearing what appeared to be a wastepaper basket.

Even in the countryside, where the Hermès headscarf has been the crowned head of state for 2000 years, people are starting to get the idea that cars can be fashionable. So it’s off to Cheshire with the Range Rover and into the courtyard with Toyota’s Landcruiser.

Flares may be out in the Voodoo Lounge but, believe me, flared wheel arches are in on the range. And don’t worry about the Made in Japan sticker because so is sushi.

This is complicated, I know, but things could be worse. With the trendification process now enveloping everything from music and cars to clothes, food and entire
postal districts, it can’t be long before houses are swept up in the style tidal wave.

‘Oh, my dear, Georgian is so last year. You’ve got to pull it down and build something in yellow.’

Have you any idea what life is like for a travelling salesman? The traffic jams. The endless parking tickets that eat into your commission. And all the while sweat is pouring down your back because the fleet manager was too mean to put air-conditioning in your hateful, diesel-powered Vauxhall Vectra. On Wednesday you drove all the way to Carlisle only to find the chief buyer had gone out for lunch with his secretary and – snigger, snigger – they weren’t expecting him back.

I know a bloke who used to sell franking machines for Pitney Bowes. And to win over secretaries, he’d ask to see their tongues, pull a face and say they’d been licking too many stamps. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine having to chat up a fat temp just so you can flog her boss a crummy franking machine?

We like to dream the American dream of life on the road, sailing across Montana with the warm wind in our hair, but the reality is somewhat different. Because life on the road in Britain means you’re a rep, and you have a Vauxhall and you’re stuck in a jam watching prime ministers flash past in the bus lane.

You bought a Lion bar when you last filled up with petrol and bits of it have landed on your shirt; you failed
to close that last deal and now, at 6 p.m., you’re hunting for somewhere to spend the night. You’re on a budget of £50, it’s pouring with rain, and you’re in Cardiff.

I know exactly what it’s like because I’ve done it. You crawl round the one-way system, wipers smearing the neon, in a desperate search for that elusive grail, a two-star hotel where the sheets are made from natural fibres.

That’s my abiding memory of life on the road. Nylon sheets, waking up every morning with my hair on end, and spending all day pumping 4000 volts into anyone with whom I shook hands. That, and being laughed at in Indian restaurants for eating on my own. ‘Look at that bloke with the funny hair. He’s got no mates.’

Other reps used to eat in the hotel, with waitresses called Stacey tottering about in micro-skirts. But I’m allergic to patterned carpets and, when you’ve heard ‘Stairway to Heaven’ being murdered for the thousandth time by the Mike Twat Singers on the piped Muzak system, you have to get out.