ONEUPMANSHIP What’s interesting about this little tete a tete is that it pitches a small car the intended rear-engine, rear-wheel drive platform of which was rejected by the world’s second largest car maker on the grounds of cost, against a small car only armed with precisely that platform because a third party -the world’s third …
In addition to spending leg numbing lengths of time on the loo, most creative types seek inspiration through as great a diversity of sensory input as possible. The designers of both cars in this brisk, Britain versus Bavaria face-off, for instance, strike me as stout devotees of the silver screen. Excluding hi-fi installation specialists whose …
TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Remember those Kia-Ora-fuelled, matinee movies of yore wherein every party scene featured a gurl sporting an orange mini dress, white thigh-length patent leather boots and impossibly pointy breasts flailing through four bars of the ‘hitchhiker’ atop the grand piano before the action cut away to our hero parked at a corner …
JAGUAR XF SPORTBRAKE vs MERCEDES CLS SHOOTING BRAKE Jaguar Director of Design Ian Callum has dusted off his tricorn and conjured a boat. No, I’m not being derogatory about the lines of the new XF estate; he really has designed a boat. It’s a rather spiffing, 20ft long sharpened suppository with teak decking, a curved …
Two surprising revelations surfaced over the course of the first night I’ve stayed awake throughout since I was a schewdunt: Firstly, New York may be the city that never sleeps, but you just try getting a cup of coffee anywhere in London at 3.00 in the morning; and, secondly, with precious little else to peer …
X-TYPE ACROSS THE USA. Of all the encouragingly daft souvenirs I’ve accumulated over the course of this three and a half thousand mile, X-Type enhanced lunge across America -diminutive mouth organ earring (Nashville), severed baby alligator head (Russellville), fake Elvis Presley driving license (Memphis), whole rattlesnake walking stick (Oklahoma), fetching bear carving for the …
VELOSOLEX. MISERY. It was the cross that did it; the final straw. It wobbled by six hours into the slowest, hottest, coldest journey I’ve ever made in my life. And, at that moment, I came to the conclusion that bicycles are only fit for healthy children who don’t mind appearing in public wearing a hand …
VANQUISH. Too busy bullying squirrels in the local park to notice 130 slavering pounds of incoming canine Exocet, a friend’s Heinz 57 mutt recently found itself the hapless recipient of a rigorous going over at the jaws of a particularly malevolent Doberman pinscher. Unfortunately, my quick-thinking chum had heard that the only sure-fire …
THUNDERBIRDS ARE SLOW. The Great White Shark has a bite pressure of three tons per square centimetre. Its favourite meal is seal. It attacks from directly below said hapless snack; 2500lbs and more of bunched muscle propelling a mouth full of serrated teeth the size of a shot glass vertically upwards at a good …
BACK TO THE FUTURE The rules are simple: Staying in the company of your car (which –with the Karl Malden-hootered Bristol Freighter no longer lumbering aloft out of Lydd- rules out air travel unless you can blag a ride in an RAF Hercules), just how far can you travel in one 24 hour period? …
RING PIECE It’s no good. The die is cast. It’s definitely going to happen… And my only hope of retaining some small shred of decorum is to try and synchronise the inevitable with the passing of a particularly loud machine… Green Hell it may have been to Jackie Stewart, but to me -12 …
NASCAR If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, then NASCAR is surely the USA’s way of teaching the rest of the world motor racing. The banked, two mile oval of an American Speedway circuit is the coliseum of the new millennium; burgers and stock cars the bread and circuses of the …
The Saab Moose Crash Test. Meece? Muce? Mace? Mooses? Wasted conjecture. There is, it transpires, no plural. Furthermore, strictly speaking, we’re talking elk here; moose, though identical, all live in Canada and star in nature films. In the interests of trade, the Swedes themselves are wont to get this wrong too, since tourists know …
WHITE MISCHIEF. Nothing, we’re told, focuses the mind quite like fear… Codswallop. Truth is, when the ocean liner of sang froid inadvertently clouts the iceberg of blind terror, courage instantly tramples the women and children of wisdom and logic underfoot in a frantic scramble to be first aboard the lifeboats. I know this …
IKUZO, IKUZO, IKUZO… (‘ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go…) As recently as a scant 150 years ago, Japan’s strictly enforced policy of self-imposed isolation guaranteed any visitor to its shores a terminally warm welcome: The hapless tourist would be met on the beach by an enthusiastic crowd armed with a large …
HOBBYCAR ON LOCH NESS. How much do false teeth cost in Germany? I only ask because an entire coachload of Leica touting tourists, recently caught tooling, at attention, through the Scottish highlands early one May morning, badly need to know. And it’s all my fault. I was, at the time, behind the wheel …
Goodbye to Old Tat… Back in the early days of our relationship, when the safest way to establish what might have been for supper was to loiter outside the kitchen window as it hurtled by en route to the ever burgeoning throng of staunchly constitutioned local fauna (Pavlova for the Pavlovian, as it were), …
APOCALYPSE? NOW THEN…. Deep in my impressionable past lurks a favoured short story concerning a stout police sergeant on a standard issue, un-sprung bicycle. The premise of the tale was that policeman and bike spent so much time joined at the saddle that an infinitesimally small yet relentless degree of molecular transfer actually took …
BUGATTI VEYRON 16.4 GRAND SPORT VITESSE Price £2,440,000 (est) Engine 7993cc 64v quadruple-turbo W16, 1184bhp @ 6400rpm, 1106lb ft @ 3000-5000rpm Gearbox Seven-speed twin-clutch, all-wheel drive Performance 2.6 sec 0-62mph, 7.1 sec 0-125mph, 16.1 sec 0-185mph, 5.9 sec 0-62-0mph, 12.9 sec 0-125-0mph, 23.9 sec 0-185-0mph, 254mph, 12.2mpg, …
BARBIE. “Like, I mean, as if … That Aqua stuff: “I’m a Barbie girl, in my Barbie world…” What kind of baloney is that for chrissakes? HELLO-OH. I’m, like, totally not into that scene. It totally sucks. Eeuch. I mean, excuse ME, I was, like, 40 years old on March 9th (Pisces; totally cool …
Switzerland COOL RUNNING Legendarily beautiful, obsessively tidy, alarmingly punctual and wallet-meltingly expensive, Switzerland is, for me at least, the stuff of nightmares. Not for any of the above reasons, you understand… It’s the cheese that does the damage. Most Swiss national dishes invariably involve the consumption of enough suitably hole-ridden cheese to …
Snugged chin deep beneath a duvet of aromatic foam, big toe fumbling an ecstatic top up from the hot tap, the soap dish-to-ceiling panoramic glazing of my bathroom affords me an unimpeachable view of a large, blatantly male vervet monkey which has just catered across the roof, thumped onto my private terrace, settled itself in …
DUTY FREEZE. In the absorbing world of extreme cold, Absolute Zero weighs in at around -273.16 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, molecules simply stop moving. So forget about wrapping up warm, you’re already dead. At a mere -20, as indicated on the thermometer hanging outside the Jukkasjarvi Ice Hotel reception today, my molecules …
SERVING SUGGESTION. Frog’s legs, definitely: On the basis that you should try everything in life once except incest and folk dancing, it just has to be the frog’s legs. Besides, that particular dish isn’t actually on my menu for tonight and I feel like being an awkward customer. Purely in the interests of research, …
BLOTTO IN BURGUNDY…. “You can swallow if you like, you know” chides Bruno Jaivrand of the Beaune tourist office. “But, if you do, it becomes hard to remember which wine is which after you’ve tasted a dozen or so…” Yesh indeed. But, hunched deep within the cellars of Maison Champy, the oldest of the …
IF THE SUIT FITS… Some of us are natural clothes horses; lean, lucky people who can stroll into any store and buy a standard, off the peg suit that looks as if it had been lovingly tailored specifically with them in mind. I, on the other hand, am a clothes hippo. Having been …
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN. To say that Tim Heywood designs boats is akin to crediting Edward Lutyens with the erection of the occassional, home-counties conservatory. Only the very, very rich indeed visit Tim’s Thames-side studio when they feel a floating, weekend retreat coming on. So, if you’ve just won the national lottery, …
TALES OF THE RIVERBANK. Like so many good ideas, it hatched in the bath. Not, I hasten to add, my long standing fisherman’s fantasy of catching a wild Scottish salmon, hurrying it, muscles still quivering to memory of the surge upstream, to a traditional West Highland smokehouse and then -abetted only by a loaf …
HEAVEN SCENT. Bees. It never occurred to me that there would be bees… I’ve had a bit of a problem with nature’s pollen navvies ever since, atop a bicycle, aged eleven, I head-butted a particularly boisterous specimen coming the other way. Understandably, it retaliated. And, for the next week, I staggered myopically about with …
ICELAND. Prihyrningsfjallgardur… Kirkjubaejarklaustur… Bjarnarflagsstod… You’d be forgiven for assuming that the cat’s been stomping about on my keyboard again. Truth is, however, plucking place names at random off a map of Iceland as we fly north over the island’s vast, utterly uninhabited interior, I’m praying that we don’t get lost over the course of …
ROBBERY WITH VIOLINS Its narrow, cobbled streets ambling amiably across a largely nondescript corner of Lombardy’s flat, fertile plains about an hour’s pelt down the autostrada south east of Milan, the city of Cremona can be all too easily overlooked by the inattentive traveller. But this, if there’s any music in your soul …
HERE BE DRAGONS. …From deep within the massive, slab sided flanks of Dracula’s brooding mountaintop fortress echoes a piercing, agonised scream that sends wildlife scurrying for cover and brings the hairs on the nape of the neck of every mortal within earshot springing smartly to attention… Sorry to shatter the pastoral peace, everyone. …
HOLLAND AND HOLLAND. On learning that perhaps the most important ingredient in the manufacture of a 12 bore shotgun costing about the same as a brand new 328i Convertible is, in fact, soot, you’d be forgiven for thinking twice about disturbing the moths in your wallet. However, having just spent an utterly riveting …
For most of the North London beret and brioche set, saving the whales remains very much a five day a week concern. Let’s face it; come Friday evening, the only Wales on the collective radar is the one hosting the weekend cottage, the only serious consideration joining the M4’s camelhair coat caravanserai in the appropriate …
Finding myself more than somewhat short of the odd £65,000 to spend on my next motor car, I find it hard to credit that those who do have said sums sloshing to and fro in the petty cash tin should be overmuch concerned with such piffling trivia as running costs. However, with UK market perceptions …
It is, perhaps, appropriate that these three up-market down-sizer SUVs should all be here presented in assorted hues clipped from some dubious permatan salon colour chart. What better way to inadvertently reinforce their gently reassuring Made for Chelsea credentials? Mercedes’ new GLA enters a segment more crowded than the stern rail of RMS Titanic at …
MUD SLINGING It’s highly unlikely -even if you find yourself in the market for one- that any of these denizens of the Dorking driveway will get your heart going like a stolen moped. Fact is, though, these four C-SUVs represent one of the few automotive markets that still records regular growth, which makes the (deep …
SIX OF THE BEST. Sensible of Socrates to guzzle hemlock, it transpires; the alternative exit route in 399BC Athens being almost too grizzly to contemplate… Those found guilty of treason were force fed a muscle relaxant and strapped to something uncomfortable in a public square. The executioner would then insert his hand in the victim’s, …
C-CLASS GROUPIE ‘I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner; I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm’s Cortina.’ Substitute the Cortina with any of these five premium D-segment offerings and, despite being penned 40 years ago, the first two lines of Sir John Betjeman’s poem Executive still strike a …
BRIDGE OF SIZE (assuming the shot of the cars on the little bridge is the opener!) What price perfection? Fork out £83,755 for a Maserati Quattroporte S, £97,895 for a Range Rover TD V6 Autobiography, £90,810 for a Mercedes-Benz S 350 L or a whopping £172,730 for Bentley’s Flying Spur Mulliner, and you certainly have …
Column, May 2008. Having spent the last week adopting the at-ease stance of a stout moth and the walking style of one John Wayne, nothing would please me more than 15 minutes in a sound-proofed room with the smug bastard responsible for coining the glib onomatopoeia ‘snip’ to describe the hilariously unpleasant experience of …
COLUMN – JULY 2012 Huntin’, shootin’ ‘n’ fishin’ emporia the size of an out-of-town Sainsbury’s and the odd, immaculate Dodge Charger aside, some of the finest diversions punctuating any languid drive through America’s Bible Belt take the form of church signs. Often dwarfing the pristine clapboard edifices they cheer for, said signs employ …
Column July 2009. When Aston Martin boss Dr. Ulrich Bez first stood up in the dining room of the achingly beautiful and astonishingly haunted Chateau de Mercues on the outskirts of Cahors to make his DBS launch introductory speech, he said, and did, absolutely nothing. No impassioned pleas to quell the claret-fuelled hubbub, no …
Whisper who dares, but the trouble with most classic cars is that they have a nasty habit of metamorphosing from object of desire to utter rubbish the instant you actually get behind the wheel. A few years back, finally sating my impacted molar-strength ache to drive a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona –a car which, …
COLUMN April 2014 Good job the animal kingdom’s a tad more sensible about evolutionary diversification than the motor industry. You don’t find bees suddenly deciding they’d work better if they were the size of tennis balls, or cheetahs thinking ‘Hmmm… Fins… Now that’s a pretty neat idea, and clearly a hit with dolphins, I …