Clarkson on Cars
Book Jacket
PENGUIN BOOKS
CLARKSON ON CARS
Jeremy Clarkson made his name presenting a poky motoring programme on BBC2 called Top Gear. He left to forge a career in other directions but made a complete hash of everything and ended up back on Top Gear again. He lives with his wife, Francie, and three children in Oxfordshire. Despite this, he has a clean driving licence.
Clarkson on Cars
JEREMY CLARKSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
To Jesse Crosse –
who started the ball rolling
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
All articles in Part 1 first appeared in Performance Car between 1985 and 1993
All articles in Part 2 first appeared in the Sunday Times between 1993 and 1995
This collection first published by Virgin Books 1996
Published in Penguin Books 2004
25
Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 1996
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-01788-4
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part 1
Dear Diary
Golf GTi Loses Its Crown
Dishing It Out
Cars in Review
Big Boys’ Toys
Mobile Phones
Last Year’s Model
Watch It
JMC NO
Big Bikes
Invaders from Can
The Revenger
Charades
Pedal Pusher
Girls and Rubber
In a Flap
Sweet White Wine
Auto Football
The Best Man
Racing Jaguars
Non-Sleeker Celica
Green Machine
Democratic Party
Cat Lover
Goodbye to All That
Down, Rover
History Lesson
Ski’s the Limit
The One That I Want
Global Warming
People’s Limousine
Radio Daze
Horse Power
Non-Passive Smoking
S-Classy
Would You Buy a Used Alfa from This Man?
A Question of Sports
Volvo Shock
No Free Lunch
Are Cars Electric?
Cruel to be Kind
An Able Ford
Train Strain
Cruising Soundtrack
Big
What to Buy?
All Change
Sex on Wheels
In a Car Crash
Speed Kills
What’s That Then?
I Had That Geezer from Top Gear in the Back Once
Part 2
Acceleration Times are a Bit Nonsensical
Adverts Versus the Truth
Politicians and Style Motors
Do the British Love Cars?
Lancia Out of the UK
So What’s the Big Deal with the Beetle Then?
Just What is It about the BMW?
Where’s all the Style Gone?
Hondas are Bought by Old People
Why Do People Drive Differently All Over the UK?
You Can Tell What People Drive by the Shoes They Wear
The New Ferrari 355
Sitting on a Porsche
Clarkson’s Highway Code
Why aren’t Car Ads Aimed at Old People?
The New Range Rover Looks Like a Taxi
Princess Diana Drives Audi Sales Up
Star Car – Alfa Romeo Spider
Routefinder Satellite Technology
The Pickup Truck Phenomenon
Safety Measures – Who Needs Them?
Speed
Nasty Nissans
Road Rage
The New Jaguar
Stop Thief; Not Me
Go West, Young Man
Who Gives a Damn about the Countryside?
Are Fast Cars a Problem?
Car Pools won’t Work
The Mondeo V6 is Very Good – Really
Name That Car
Bull Bars Should be Banned
Buttons are Not Just for Christmas
Don’t Get Noticed
Gadgets
Formula One Racing – as Dull as Ever
Can You Really Own a Lotus?
Soft Tops
Ugly Cars Got No Reason
Why are Van Drivers Mad?
A Christmas Tale
Greenslade – Music and Cars
20 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Jeremy Clarkson
Acknowledgements
As I have no ambition, I have to be spurred on by others. It was Jesse Crosse, the first editor of Performance Car, who said I should write a column, and I shall forever be in his debt. And it is my wife, Francie, who makes sure these days that I’m always in the right place at roughly the right time. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without her.
There are people in the motor industry too who gave me a leg up in those early days: Barry Reynolds at Ford, Chris Willows at BMW, John Evans at Mercedes and Peter Frater at Chrysler are four notable examples.
And then there are friends like Jonathan Gill, Andy Wilman, Anthony ffrench Constant and Tom Stewart whose wit and wisdom I’ve plagiarised shamelessly for years.
Part 1
Dear Diary
I do not wish to regale you with tales of my movements towards the end of this month, for two reasons. Firstly, you would be unutterably bored; and secondly, I will miss most of the engagements involved anyway.
I will miss them because I have not written them down anywhere. People have rung to invite me for a weekend’s skiing, for a two-day trip to Scandinavia, for dinner, for whatever.
Not being used to such popularity, I have said yes to everything, without really knowing whether anything clashes or, to be honest, when anything is.
It is a minor miracle if I ever manage to get anywhere in the right decade, let alone on the right day.
The reason for this shortfall is that I have never kept a diary. Oh to be sure, I’ve started many a year with every good intention, filling in my blood group in the personal section and entering things that happened a week ago so that if anyone peeps, they’ll be gobsmacked at what appears to be a gay social life.
By February the entries are getting pretty sparse. By March I’ve lost it or Beloved, in a flurry of domesticity, has fed it, along with the odd airline ticket and several cufflinks, to the washing m
achine. You may be interested to hear that I have the cleanest cheque book in Christendom.
Most of my time on New Year’s Eve was spent dreaming up all sorts of resolutions. This year, in among things like a four-weeks-and-already-broken ban on alcohol, and a fairytale promise to get fitter, I vowed to keep a diary.
The question was, which one? In the run up to Christmas, any number of motor manufacturers sent such things. And, as they say in Scunthorpe, very nice too.
Slimline and quite capable of fitting in a jacket pocket without making me look like an FBI agent, they do however face some stiff competition.
First, there’s the Peugeot 405 Fil-o-fax-u-like. Now, these things are of enormous benefit to the likes of Beloved, who has simply millions of absolutely lovely friends and needs to remind herself when my Visa card needs a wash. But to unpopular people like my good self, they’re rather less use than a trawlerman in Warwick.
With just five friends and, on average, two party invites a year, there’s no real justification for me to be strolling around the place with something the size of a house brick under my arm.
Besides, it has a section for goals, which I presume refers to ambition rather than football. I have several ambitions but writing them down won’t get me any nearer to achieving them. I want to be king, for instance, and being able to see tomorrow’s racing results today would be pretty useful too.
Then there’s my Psion Organiser. It’s advertised on television as a sort of portable computer that fits neatly in a briefcase and acts out the role of diary, alarm clock, address book and calculator all rolled into one.
As far as I’m concerned, though, it is of no use whatsoever, because I can’t be bothered to learn how it works. The instruction booklet is bigger and even more boring than the Iliad and anyway I think I’ve broken it by getting into edit mode and telling it to bugger off.
Casio do the Data Bank which is disguised as a calculator. It can even be used as one but beware, those who even think about entering an address or an appointment will screw up the innards good and proper. Well I did anyway.
These electronic gizmos are all very well but I want to know what is wrong with a good old pencil and a piece of paper?
I mean, if someone rings up (chance’d be a fine thing) and asks me to a party next week, I could have it written down in what; two, three seconds? I would need a team of advisers and a fortnight’s free time even to turn the Psion on.
The advantage is that it does have an ability to remind me audibly when I’m supposed to be going somewhere. This is where Pepys’s little tool falls fait on its face.
It’s all very well remembering to write something down but this is about as much good as cleaning your shoes with manure if you don’t look at the diary on the day in question.
Even so, I’m a man of my word and, consequently, I’m keeping a diary like a good little boy.
Choosing which book to use was not easy. I have the sex maniac’s diary, which tells me where in the world I can have safe sex, how to apply a condom and on what day of the week I can indulge in what they call the Strathclyde muff dive.
I also have the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Who’s Who diary but it is full to bursting with bad photographs of people in brown suits.
The International Motors’ diary – they’re the people who import Subarus, Isuzus and High and Dries – is a convenient size and has all the usual Letts schoolboy stuff in it about temperature and time zones and Intercity services.
But I do not urgently need to know when the main Jewish festivals are. Nor, frankly, am I terribly bothered about when Ramadan begins.
Toyota’s diary begins with a lovely shot of their Carina car in front of the Pont du Gard in the Ardèche, skips blissfully over the Letts schoolboy behaviour and gets straight on to page after page of slots for the parties.
But far and away the most tasteful offering for 1989 comes from those Italian chappies at Fiat. Largely, the editorial section at the front of their book is taken up with a list of decent restaurants.
It doesn’t say they’re decent though, which should make for some fireworks when a trainee Fiat mechanic from a dealer in Bolton comes to the capital on an Awayday and gets presented with a £60 bill at Poons.
You can tell Fiat have aimed their diary at men near the top. But this one is no good to me either, because the allergies section on the personal page is far too small. I am allergic to cats, penicillin, pollen, house dust, nylon, trade union leaders and that man with the Tefal forehead who masquerades as Labour’s health spokesman.
Ford’s gives no space at all to allergies and is full of all sorts of stuff I never knew I didn’t need to know – but this is the one I’ve selected. Instead of giving each week a page of its own, Ford have crammed an entire month on one double-page spread.
This means I can do my shoelaces up on 4 April and feed the hamster on 16 May, and those who peek into the book will think I’m as busy as hell.
Golf GTi Loses Its Crown
At this rate, the weightlifting gold at the 1992 Olympics will be won by a paperboy from Basildon. And apart from having arms like the hind legs of a rhino, he will believe the world is full of cars that can go faster than 300 mph.
Since the advent of what the publishing industry calls new technology, it has become a great deal cheaper to produce the printed word. This is why one now needs the anatomical properties of Kali to read the Sunday Times, and why the shelves at your local newsagent’s are groaning under the weight of perfect-bound, laminated forestry.
You may have wondered how the producers of Successful Cauliflower magazine make any money. The answer is, they don’t, but seeing as it costs naff all to make it in the first place, nobody’s complaining!
Not so long ago, people bought their favourite magazine for a decent read on the bus. It would be stitched together from shoddy paper and when it was finished, it could be hung on a clip by the lavatory. Not any more.
Take Country Life. Full of ads for houses that no one can afford and no one wants; you don’t rad it, you arrange it on the coffee table as you would arrange a bunch of flowers. You may even feel the need to iron it occasionally.
It is not a magazine. It is a statement. It says that while you may live in a neo-Georgian semi with a purple up ’n’ over garage door, you are fully conversant with the delights of hopelessly expensive manaor houses in Oxfordshire.
Or Horse and Hound, with its nonsensical line, ‘I freely admit that the best of my fun, I owe it to Horse and Hound.’
Nowadays, there are a million country-house and interior-design glossies full of curtains which cost £8000 and would look stupid anywhere but Castle Howard.
Two luminaries in this domain are Tatler and Harpers and Queen, which are read a bit, but only by the middle classes scouring ‘Bystander’ or ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ for photographs of their horrid, frilly-dress-shirted friends.
But the best of all are the car magazines.
There was a time when they treated the car for what it was – a device which used a series of small explosions to move people around. But now, it is an artform. The days when you could get away with a front three-quarters shot taken in the office car park are gone.
Then there are the front covers. How many times has the Golf GTi lost its crown? To my certain knowledge, the Escort XR3 was the first to steal it, yet when the Peugeot 205 GTI came along a couple of years later, somehow, the Golf had got it back again.
And therefore we read in 72-point bold that the Golf GTi had lost its crown again, this time to the 205 GTI.
So the Vauxhall Astra, you might imagine, would have to pinch it from the 205; but no, at some point Peugeot had given it back to VW – who reluctantly had to hand it over again, this time to Vauxhall.
Then in no particular order it has been worn by the Peugeot 309 GTI, the Astra GTE 16v, the Escort RS Turbo, the Delta Integrale and the Corolla GTi. But for some extraordinary reason, the prized headgear never gets handed directly from one winner to the
next. It always goes back to VW in between times.
For now, it is being worn by the 16-valve Astra but you can bet your bottom dollar that VW will have it back in time to lose it to the new 16-valve Integrale.
The Quattro has been through a similar series of machinations. The Delta Integrale pinched its number one slot but had to give the crown back to Audi shortly afterwards because it was wearing the Golf’s at the time.
Audi held on to it for a bit but only a couple of months ago, relinquished it to Porsche’s 911 Carrera 4.
And aside from dispensing crowns on a weekly basis, headline writers have become obsessed with speed.
‘WE DRIVE THE 220-MPH JAG THEY DARE NOT BUILD’ is the latest game. Not to be outdone, a rival publication, you can be assured, will drive a 230-mph Jag that can’t be built the very next week. And so on towards infinity perhaps.
We smirk when we read that Freddie Starr ate someone’s hamster, yet we are expected to believe that some scribbler has driven a Jaguar that no one has built at a speed that current tyre technology won’t allow anyway.
I have driven a BMW 750iL at an indicated 156 mph on the autobahn and believe me, it is a bowel-loosening experience I do not wish to relive. Sure, I enjoy going quickly, but the notion of driving something like a Porsche 911, which has been tuned by a foreign grease monkey, at the speed of sound in a Welsh valley, appals as much as it amuses.
The thing is that if you have a magazine on your coffee table that talks on its front cover about a car that hasn’t been built doing 300 mph on the Milton Keynes ring road, visitors to your home will be impressed.
If you leave motoring publications lying around which talk about how seatbelts save lives, those same visitors will drink their coffee very quickly and leave.
Business-speak impresses too. Honda have smashed Porsche 48 times and Toyota have bludgeoned BMW to death on a weekly basis for two years. And all this smashing and bludgeoning has resulted in every move a manufacturer makes being seen as utterly crucial.
As in, ‘ON THE LIMIT IN ROVER’S LIFE-OR-DEATH MAESTRO’; or how about this recent gem: ‘LOTUS’S MAKE-OR-BREAK ELAN.’