Spanish fishermen. What two words bring such cohesion to the rest of Europe?
Whatever the problems elsewhere we all hate them and their huge floating
vacuum cleaners. They’ve Hoovered up their own coastline and now they’re
using a billion pounds of our money to Dyson the shores of every other
member state.
Turkey probably thinks that if it joins the EU the biggest change will be the
abolition of its death penalty. Not so. What they don’t realise is that they
will be taxed an extra £1.50 in the pound so that Manuel can rock up and
catch everything in everyone’s garden pond. Live in Ankara? Got a goldfish
in a little bowl in the kitchen? Well, be afraid. Be very afraid.
And yet when that oil tanker, the Prestige, went down the other day suddenly
Manuel and his merry band were no longer pirates raping the seas from the
Faroes to the Falklands. Television reporters stopped calling them “Spanish
fishermen” and went for the sympathy jugular, calling them “local
fishermen”.
This, of course, conjures images of some silver-haired old walnut tending to
his nets while his creaking old boat gently tugs at its moorings. “Oh no,”
we’re all supposed to think, “all of his catch will be ruined. He will
starve. His children will die.”
Pah! I’ve been to this part of Spain. It’s full of trawlers the size of South
America. They never fish off their own coast — that’s been barren for years
— and they only ever return to base for the next subsidy cheque.
And there’s another thing: oil floats, so quite how it impacts on the
nonexistent fish I have no idea. The only creatures that could possibly be
harmed are sea birds but, I’m sorry, this is not Britain. Here you only need
to spill a gallon of diesel and Rolf Harris is there in a jiffy with a team
from the local puffin parlour. Every bird is given a treatment that would
cost Tara Palmer-Tomkinson half a year’s salary.
I can’t see this happening in Spain. If you live in a country that stabs cows
and throws donkeys from the top of churches, how can anyone be genuinely
blubby over the fate of some blackened guillemots.
Oh they might act a bit, but all they want out of this is EU cash. That’s all
the Spaniards ever want.
If I were in charge, I’d simply point out that crude oil is 3m-year-old
seafood that died and rotted. Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is
like sticking a safety pin into an elephant’s foot. The planet barely
notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent
billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the
waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never
accept the planet’s ability to self-heal. And they were spectacularly wrong
again with the Prestige.
When it was first holed they said it should be bombed. A couple of points on
that. Heavy crude will not burn unless it’s been heated first, and if it’s
in water it won’t burn at all. But if by some miracle it had caught light,
think of all that smoke. Why not just let the ship sink to the bottom where
the oil would solidify in the cold water and be as benign as sand? But
enough on the trouble with Spain, let’s talk about its cars.
Spain is not a big manufacturing country. In fact, if you went through your
house you probably wouldn’t find a single thing that was made there. But
they do nail the odd car together, which are called Seats.
From memory I could tell you who makes almost every car on the road, roughly
how much it costs and vaguely what it’s like to drive. But without using
reference books I have no idea what Seat makes. I believe there’s a car
called the Ibiza and possibly one called the Toledo. There’s a people
carrier too, and I think that’s it. What I do know is that they’re all VWs
for less money. But if you want a cheap Volkswagen and really don’t care
about the badge, why not buy a Skoda? I have even considered borrowing a
Seat to see what’s what but then thought, what’s the point? In 15 years of
writing about cars nobody has ever stopped me in a petrol station and asked
me about them. I get paid to notice them and I don’t. So they’re like the
Prestige: harmless but about 7,000ft below our radar screens.
Apparently, Seat is the fun side of Volkswagen. It’s the slightly wayward son
who sleeps all afternoon and nicks a fiver occasionally from his dad. But
everyone forgives him because when the sun goes down he’s quite a laugh.
A Volkswagen, then, with a sense of humour. That’s the theory, but to find out
if it works in practice I borrowed something called a Leon Cupra R.
It’s trumpeted as the work of Seat’s motor sport department. What motor sport
department? I have racked my brains for 40 minutes and I cannot think of a
single area in which Seat takes part. It used to be in rallying, but not
now. Perhaps it does canoeing or something that’s not on television or in
the papers. That would be a very Seat thing to do — something invisible.
The Cupra R is billed as the fastest car ever built in Spain. But that’s like
being the best chocolate maker in Egypt. I’m sure Seat’s canoeists were
jolly pleased to have squeezed 210bhp out of VW’s 1.8 litre turbo but this
colossal output doesn’t translate into particularly scintillating
performance.
Zero to 60mph in 7.2sec was par for the course in 1985 and though a top speed
of 147mph sounds good, especially in Iberia, where it’s actually faster than
the speed of light, it’s ho-hum in the first world. VW’s Golf R32 and Alfa’s
new 147 GTA will both climb past 150mph.
The Seat fights back by being a mere £16,995. That’s way cheaper than the VW
and the Alfa, and significantly less than Ford asks for a Focus RS or Honda
for a Civic Type-R.
To find out what it feels like on the road, I deliberately set off 15 minutes
late to see my daughter’s school play. There were 70 children, 68 speaking
parts, and she was one of the two, but I still had to be there and on time.
Things started badly. In fact, I never even got out of the drive before I
crashed. Seat talks about the pinpoint active chassis and the four-pot
brakes but neither stopped me understeering off the gravel into my new curly
wurly tree. I don’t know its proper name. We now simply call it “broken”.
On the proper road it really wasn’t bad. Third gear acceleration is
particularly strong, which is good for overtaking, and it is grippy without
being uncomfortable. The long wheelbase probably helps here.
It helps with interior space, too. Even with a pair of Recaro seats the size
of Devon in the front there was still a deal more space than you get in most
hatches. A decent-size boot, too.
As for quality, well I don’t know. Underneath it’s a Volkswagen, which is a
good thing. On top it’s Spanish, and that’s not.
I wouldn’t buy one. When it’s good it’s quite good, and that’s not good
enough. When it’s bad it’s not bad, which isn’t good enough either.
Other than that, what can I say? It’s from Barcelona. Just like Manuel.
Vital statistics
Model: Seat Leon Cupra R
Engine type: Four cylinders, turbocharged
Power: 210bhp @ 5800rpm
Torque: 199lb ft @ 2100rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manual
Suspension: (front) independent MacPherson struts, coil
springs, anti-roll bar; (rear) twist beam rear axle, coil springs, anti-roll
bar
Tyres: 225/40 R18
Fuel: 32.1mpg (combined)
CO2: 211g/km
CO car tax: £1,560 for a higher-rate taxpayer
Top speed: 147mph
Acceleration: 0 to 62mph: 7.2 sec
Insurance: Group 17
Price: £16,995
Verdict: Quite good and, in this class, that's not nearly
good enough
