I suppose if you had a priceless Ming vase you wouldn’t use it as a dice
shaker, or a vessel for serving punch at Boxing Day parties.
In a similar vein you wouldn’t use a racehorse to hack out, and you wouldn’t
use a pearl-handled butter knife to pick a lock. So it’s faintly ridiculous
to suppose a supercar can co-exist in the real world alongside young men
from Kazakhstan in Nissan Laurels and even younger men from Albania on
pizza-delivery mopeds.
So what is it for then, exactly? Getting down and growly on the world’s
racetracks? Well yes, obviously, but even here things can go awry.
Just recently I attempted to see how fast the new Koenigsegg supercar could
accelerate from 0 to 60mph. But as I let the clutch in, one of the many
belts that drives something important in the engine bay shredded and I was
left in a world of noise and smoke, going nowhere.
Last week I attempted a similar test with a £320,000 Pagani Zonda and again it
all ended in tears. As I floored the throttle and the 7.3 litre Mercedes V12
engine girded its considerable loins for an assault on the horizon, the
clutch shouted “For God’s sake” and exploded. There was a lot of smoke.
Hence the tears.
Lamborghinis are especially good at this. Once, to amuse the crowds at
Goodwood, I decided to do a massive wheel-spinning start off the line. But
this was a Diablo with four-wheel drive and tyres bigger than the rings of
Saturn, so the only thing that could possibly spin was the clutch. It did.
And I had to drive up the hill with the V12 tearing its heart out, but only
doing four or five miles per hour.
It has always been thus. I once drove the world’s first supercar, a
Lamborghini Miura, but cannot tell you how fast it went since it oiled its
plugs at every set of lights, and stalled. And there wasn’t enough juice in
the battery to get it going again.
A friend described his old Bentley recently as being like a middle-aged man,
oohing and aahing its way through life because bits of it that worked
perfectly well yesterday had suddenly decided to give up the ghost today.
Supercars, on the other hand, are like athletes, forever suffering from
hamstring injuries and groin strains.
No really. My wife goes to the gym every morning and as a result is
permanently broken in some way. The bathroom cabinet looks like Harry
Potter’s potion store. Whereas I, whose only exercise is blinking, am never
ill at all.
So, if you can’t go quickly in a supercar, and you can’t use it for everyday
chores like shopping and taking the children to school, what can you do with
it?
Go out for dinner? Oh puh-lease. Where are you going to leave it? In the
street? In a multi-storey car park? And what shape do you suppose it will be
in after you’ve finished your Irish coffee and mints?
I once parked my old Ferrari outside a restaurant with the roof off. It didn’t
seem like a problem since I was in the Cotswold village of Deddington, where
the crime statistics talk of some scrumping in 1947 — and that’s it. But
when I came back, the interior had been used for what I can only assume was
the world championship gozzing competition. I have never seen so much
phlegm.
Sure, you can take such a car to a friend’s house for a party. But then how
are you going to get home? Driving a bright yellow Lamborghini at two in the
morning is as obvious as weaving down the street with a traffic cone on your
head.
Of course one day you’ll be in your supercar on a wonderful, sweeping mountain
road, and suddenly all will become clear.
But not for long, because pretty soon you’ll round a corner to find a party of
ramblers or cyclists, or maybe both. Do you think they’re going to a) point
appreciatively at your car or b) shout obscenities?
And later, when you have broken down, or smashed the low-riding front end
clean off, on a dip in the road, do you think they’ll a) stop to help or b)
laugh at you until they need hospital treatment?
Buy a supercar, and your neighbours won’t like the noise. Your wife won’t be
able to climb aboard in a short skirt, your friends will be jealous, and
other road users will make signals. It’s hard to think of any group or body
that likes a man in a supercar; small boys perhaps. But is that want you
want? Probably not, I suspect.
None of this, of course, stops us wanting supercars, so I was therefore
intrigued by the new Lamborghini Gallardo. Unlike all the previous Lambos,
there is no rear wing big enough to land helicopters on, and no air vents
that slide out of the side when the going gets hot.
Yes, it looks sporty but it’s not like rocking up for work in a gold lamé
jacket and tartan trousers. In a dark colour you might even call it
discreet.
Inside there’s been another break from Lamborghini tradition. I fit. And the
air-conditioning works, and you can see out of the back window, and there’s
a stereo that you can hear.
Oh, the engine makes a noise all right, but it doesn’t prompt the sort of
purple prose I normally use for cars of this type. There’s no spine-tingling
howl. It doesn’t sound like Brian Blessed on the verge of an orgasm or Tom
Jones making man-love for the first time.
There’s a very good reason for all this. Italian politicians may think their
German counterparts are humourless strutting Nazis, and the Germans may have
responded by taking their towels off the beaches of Tuscany this year. But
all is well between the two nations in the world of car making, because
Lamborghini has been bought by Audi (itself part of the Volkswagen group),
who have brought a dollop of common sense to the most lovably idiotic car
maker on earth.
As a result, the engine is an Audi V8 unit with two extra cylinders welded
onto the end to create a 5 litre V10. It drives all four wheels via a
six-speed gearbox, but you don’t need to be a man-mountain to control
everything. The clutch is light. The steering wheel moves easily. And you
can change gear with one hand! Normally I have to get my super-fit wife to
drive the Lamborghinis that we have on test. But even I, with arms like pipe
cleaners, could manage the Gallardo.
I liked it, too, hugely. I liked it even more than the Ferrari 360 because
it’s better balanced and easier to control at the limit. It changes
direction like a fly, grips like a barnacle and goes like a jet fighter on
combat power. At one point I saw 175mph on the clock and there was plenty
more where that came from.
It is a technological tour de force, a genuinely very good car, even if it is
a trifle pricey at £115,000. But it left me feeling underwhelmed: there was
no sense of occasion, like I felt when I first stepped into a Ferrari 355,
or a Diablo, or a Zonda even.
This is important, because supercars appeal to the small boy in us all. We may
hate the bastards who have them and we may know they make no sense at all,
but that doesn’t stop us wanting one. And there’s the thing: I don’t
particularly want a Gallardo.
As I stepped out of it after a two-day stint, there was no pulsating desire to
get back in again, and keep going. Although this may have had something to
do with the fact that after three hard minutes on the test track the clutch
was a thin veneer of dust on the main straight.
There we are then. The message remains the same. If you want to go really,
really fast, buy a plane ticket.
VITAL STATISTICS
Model: Lamborghini Gallardo
Engine type: V10, 4961cc
Power: 500bhp @ 7800rpm
Torque: 376 lb ft @ 4500rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manual
Suspension: (front and rear) Double wishbone, anti-roll bar, anti-dive
and anti-squat
Tyres: (front) 235/35 ZR 19 (rear) 295/30 ZR 19
Top speed: 192mph
Weight: 1,430kg
Acceleration: 0 to 62mph: 4.3sec
Price: £115,000
Verdict: A technological tour de force which betters the Ferrari 360
but lacks that sense of occasion
