According to the RAC’s annual survey, 44% of Britain’s drivers believe “all
the fun has gone out of driving these days”. Right. So what do the remaining
56% think? That driving is still an enjoyable thing to do? That taking the
car for a spin is something they might do for fun? Are they mad? Any sane
person will tell you that driving is
the most unimaginable chore and should be undertaken only when every other
possibility has been eliminated as unviable. Last weekend, for instance, I
had to go to Berwick-upon-Tweed, which is hundreds of miles from England,
and at no point did I even consider taking the car.
I thought, to start with, about flying and then, when I added up the check-in
times, I looked into the possibility of chartering an aircraft. Then, when I
added up the cost, I thought about maybe walking. Eventually I went on
something called a train. It’s a slightly Victorian solution, I admit, but
it doesn’t half get cracking. And as the north of England flashed past the
window in a big grey blur I read the papers and drank tea and it was all
very jolly. Certainly it was a damn sight more jolly, and a damn sight
faster too, than driving.
Speed, when it comes to travel, is everything. Because travel in itself is a
complete waste of time. You sit there, with your life ticking away,
achieving nothing. This is why most motorists, so stifled with boredom and
the sheer pointlessness of it all, usually resort at some point in the
journey to picking their nose. It’s something to do, something to keep you
sane.
It’s also why I love fast cars. I derive no pleasure at all from doing 180mph
— if I’m honest, it’s a little bit frightening — but I derive a huge amount
of pleasure from covering 180 miles in an hour. It means I get wherever I’m
going more quickly. And that means I have more time to do stuff that is
worthwhile.
This is what the socialists and the environmentalists just can’t get into
their thick heads. Their lives may be empty and friendless, but some of us
don’t have the time to dawdle.
If I leave London after work in a ponderous and hopeless diesel car, then I do
not have sufficient power to overtake slower-moving traffic on the run from
Oxford to Chipping Norton. This means I get home after the children have
gone to bed, which means they don’t see me. And that in turn means they’ll
grow up to be glue sniffers or Liberal Democrats.
If, on the other hand, I set off in a car with 350bhp I can get past people in
Peugeots more easily. That means I’m home in time to read the kids a story.
Having 350bhp makes your family more secure and your children happy. Having
350bhp enriches your life.
That’s why the new Audi RS 4 is one of my favourite cars from the past 12
months. Yes, the new front seats are so vast there’s only enough rear
legroom for Toulouse-Lautrec, and yes you don’t even get electric windows in
the back, which for £50,000 seems like penny-pinching.
But the big V8 engine fires a whopping 414bhp at the four-wheel-drive system
and that means you can really make some serious progress. What’s more,
unlike any other fast Audi from the recent past, it handles beautifully and
is comfortable as well.
Then there’s the 5 litre V10 BMW M5. This is another star from 2005 because,
like the Audi, it churns out 400bhp. But unlike the Audi there’s a button on
the dash that ups the output to 507bhp. That’s a lot. Back in the summer I
even devised a little test to find out if the big Beemer was as fast as the
new Ferrari 430. It took two corners and the shortest of straights to prove
it isn’t, and then the Beemer broke. The third 5-series in a year that I ’ve
sent back to base with a mangled diff.
What’s more, the M5 is far from the prettiest car in the world and the
interior is more complicated and unfathomable than the interior of a laptop.
But if you get your children to set the gearbox, the suspension and the
power output and then put duct tape over all the knobs and switches so the
settings can’t be changed, you’ll find this is a genuine four-seater time
machine. I absolutely love it.
But I don’t love it as much as the car that whipped its arse back in the
summer. The Ferrari 430 is truly extraordinary, a blend of noise and
savagery that almost makes the act of driving a pleasure. It doesn’t feel
like a car, this; it feels like what you hope a car might feel like.
It feels almost as good, in fact, as its big brother the 612. I drove this to
Switzerland back in February and thought at first it was just a big loping
GT. Then I reached the Alps and it turned into a shrink-wrap pocket rocket.
It was magical.
The new Aston Martin V8 Vantage pulls off a similar trick, only with a much
squarer jawline and a much louder noise. If you want to make a din and look
good in the process, this has to be your car of the year. It isn’t mine
because it isn’t quite fast enough.
Other notables, but for very different reasons, are the VW Golf R32, the Mazda
MX-5 and the Nissan Murano, which despite the efforts of the press office to
piss me off at every possible opportunity emerges as the best of the year’s
not-quite-off-roaders.
My favourite car from 2005, though, is the 252mph Bugatti Veyron. And it’s not
just the car of the year. It’s the best car ever. It’s the way it manages
the air so beautifully while its absurd W16 quad turbo 8 litre power plant
pushes it along faster than any road car has gone before.
It’s the way it’s shorter than a BMW 3-series but wider than a Maybach. It’s
the way it doesn’t look like everyone’s perceived idea of a supercar. It’s
the VW quality and the extraordinary fuel consumption. Not even Hemel
Hempstead can get through 100 litres as fast as the Veyron. It’s an
engineering masterpiece, this car.
Better still, there’s no ashtray and when you climb past 100mph the windows
automatically close. So when you’re really blatting along you can’t smoke.
This, then, is a car that gets you where you’re going very, very quickly.
And it’s not just good for your mind. It’s good for your lungs, too.
Hammering along in this at @*x mph was one of the highlights of my year. But
it wasn’t the highlight. In second place was a test designed to show off the
new radar-guided cruise control in the Mercedes S-class. The idea is that
the car “sees” a stationary car in front and pulls up without the driver
having to do a thing.
But it didn’t work. In front of the German TV cameras the car blasted out of a
smoke-filled hangar and straight into the back of another S-class.
Embarrassed Germans explained that the system hadn’t worked in the metal
hangar so they’d decided to fake the test for the film. That’s bad enough.
But they forgot to tell the driver . . . and that’s just brilliant.
It was beaten, though, just yesterday by a dawdler in a Peugeot who held me up
for 15 miles while pootling along at 40mph. And then, without slowing down,
he drove into a village and tripped a speed camera. A Bugatti gets the car
journey over quickly. But watching a dawdler who thinks he’s driving
carefully get zapped by a Gatso . . . that almost makes the journey
worthwhile.
