Recently in Cars Category

I have had a few sleepless nights of late. When that happens, I resort to the pile of car magazines by my bed. There have been more than a few articles this year on Porsche 911s. The editors seem to need as little excuse for comissioning the tests as the readers to in consuming them. The GT3 RS has had an awful lot of attention of late, as did the GT3 before that. There was passing interest in the Sport Classic at the turn of the year. I read a brief review of the powerkitted Carrera S in evo recently and that's just an option. Two things occur to me: working in PR for Porsche must be a piece of piss and there are far too many 911 variants.

I wish I were in the position to buy a 911 but I'm not sure I'd be able to make the decision. I mean, I've always loved the Turbo. It's stupidly fast. It would be a wonderful way to blow quite a lot of lottery winnings. The trouble is that there are two more turbocharged versions quicker than the Turbo. There's the Turbo S which is like a Turbo with the knobs turned up to 11. It's twenty-odd thousand pounds more than the straight Turbo but quite a lot of the price difference is accounted for by extra kit which is optional on the lower priced car. Then there's the GT2 RS which is like a Turbo with all the knobs turned up to eleventy one then broken off and thrown away. It's a successor to the GT2 and the quickest road Porsche ever round the 'Ring, a geniune thing of absolute wonder. I ache for it like I haven't ached for anything since I first saw Gillian Anderson on the cover of Esquire dressed only in a pair of long black gloves and some transparent trousers. There is the small matter of the price. At £163,000 or thereabouts it's more money than anyone should consider spending on a 911.

If you have no money at all, then why bother considering money when daydreaming about silly motorcars? It's mostly a contrivance to bring the GT3 RS into consideration so bear with me a moment. The GT3 RS is the road tester's Holy Grail. It's the most track-focused 911 of them all. One ran in the 24 hour race at the Nurburgring this year having been driven to the circuit. It went the distance, did unconscionably well for a road car and then drove back to Stuttgart. The trouble is that the RS might be a bit too much for the road so maybe the GT3 is a better bet. It's quick, rides well, makes a wonderful noise and you don't have to have it with the roll cage in the back.

The problems are only beginning. If you're not going to have the roll cage, there's not much point in having the rest of the car so you could just have a Carrera.Go into your Porsche dealership and ask for a Carrera and they'll say "Which one?" You can have it with two power outputs - three, if you include the Powerkit - and two- or four-wheel drive. You can have a coupe, a convertible or a sort of hatchbacky with a big glass sunroof thing called a Targa. You can have it in a wide range of colours and if none of those suit you, you can have it any colour you like as long as your pockets are deep enough. If you go all the way down the range to a Carrera coupe you might as well have a Cayman S which is as quick for most people most of the time and handles better according to the road testers. And if you have the Cayman S you might as well have a Boxster S. It does all that the Cayman S does but has a roof which folds away so everyone can see you having your panic attack when you start worrying that you've bought the wrong car.

Buying a Porsche is not something someone who suffers from choice stress can do with equanimity. I haven't even mentioned the Cayenne or Panamera mostly because I can't bring myself to look at them. Neither have I bothered with classic Porsches in spite of the fact I can just about afford a 924 if I take the scrapings from down the back of the sofa to a scrapyard. It'll probably mean nothing to people who don't bother much about cars. They won't get it at all. Everyone else will completely understand why I might not always sleep very well when I start thinking about which 911 I would buy. Maybe I should only think about Lexuses at night. 

Spen King died a couple of weeks ago. For those who don't know, he was an engineer at Land Rover and was partly responsible for the basic appearance of the original Range Rover. He was one of a team of engineers who had to get the road testing programme underway for Land Rover's new station wagon project. He and a colleague designed some bodywork to go over the chassis which needed very little tidying by David Bache who was the stylist on the Range Rover project. His contribution to the Range Rover story was marked in a small way by the Range Rover CSK, a two door special edition which came into production late in the run of the original series car. He was evidently a talented engineer with a fine eye for design. He exemplifies all that Land Rover has been almost since the first one was created in 1948.

Last week, Land Rover launched its new baby at Kensington Palace. It had been previewed by the LRX concept at motor shows a couple of years ago. Land Rover announced last year that the new car would be the third Range Rover line. That's fine. Range Rovers cost more than Land Rovers, so presumably the cars will be more profitable. It has a rather silly name, though. It's called the Evoque. It's one of those names which can only have come from a naming consultant whose last client wanted a name for a mobile phone or a nutritionally balanced breakfast cereal for those women with a busy lifestyle. It's bollocks. Sorry, Bolloques. It's probably the worst thing about the car though. I don't much care that it'll be available with two wheel drive. It's a road car, after all. There will be hybrid versions and four wheel drive and it looks the absolute dog's bollocks. Sorry, Bolloques du Chien.

Rather more worryingly, Victoria Beckham was introduced at the launch as a Creative Design Executive. Let's leave the way that the language has been mangled (would you want an Uncreative Design Executive?) and think about what an over-polished and under-nourished person can do for Land Rover. I think it was the Autocar office staffers who suggested that she could advise on weight-loss but I may be wrong.I don't know how Posh Spice fits into the brand I know as Range Rover.  Can she cope with wet dogs and green wellies? Would she gralloch a stag? Could she get out of a wet and muddy field without the slightest fuss? The shires of England are stuffed with gels who can do all of the above and still look good doing it but sadly none of them have talked themselves into a high media profile. They're probably too busy doing stuff to be famous.

The thing which bugs me is that Land Rover has moved away from its engineering roots and the brand managers have taken over. The link between Ms Beckham and Range Rover was apparently suggested by someone at Vogue. Vogue? Since when does a car company listen to anything a fashion magazine has to say about anything. If it had been at the suggestion of Land Rover Monthly I might have understood, but Vogue? I know that the big Range Rover has a trim called Vogue but I thought that any links with the magazine had been cut donkey's years ago. I worry that Land Rovers and Range Rovers might cease to be things which slip into some people's lives and just work and become instead primarily accessories to a life-style. They have not until now been fashion items and I'd really rather that they didn't start that nonsense now.

This blog entry serves several purposes. It marks the passing of Charles Spencer King, one of the prime creators of one of my favourite cars. It marks the arrival of a truly fabulous little Range Rover which I hope brings the company huge success. Finally, it might mark the passing of Land Rover as an engineering-led company whose products have had honesty of purpose at their very core for over 60 years. I really hope it doesn't. 

I've been driving too much. In fact I've been driving so much I've gone through the mileage limit on my Mondeo and had to swap it with my colleague's Focus. I had a Focus Mk1 a few years ago and remember it with huge affection. It was a 1.6 Zetec and went down the Gloucestershire lanes where I lived like a puppy on a tiled kitchen floor. It was lots of fun. I loved it. I drove it a couple of times to Scotland from the Oxford and Tetbury and all over the south west. It rode smoothly and wasn't that noisy. It was relatively economical and I could get it serviced by anyone with a couple of spanners and a large hammer.

My current Focus is a Mk 2 LX with a TDCi engine and does a very good impression of a Massey Ferguson. The engine noise even at a cruise is too high. The ride is excellent but the seats have their non-adjustable lumbar support about an inch too low and now my back throbs. You can fart around and change the level of assistance the power steering gives you. I've not the least idea why. You have to guddle around in the car's settings to do it. There isn't a simple button like Fiat provides. It must have cost Ford money to develop this daft system. I'd rather that they spent money on better sound insulation which benefits all their customers all the time than pointless and difficult-to-use gimmicks.

Maybe all this is punishment for driving the Mondeo too much. I had a call this morning from my colleague who absolutely loves driving it. I can completely understand why. I'm going to miss it very much.

Horrible, isn't it? For those of you lucky enough not to know, this is a Citroen Xsara Picasso. It's parked precariously close to the edge of a cliff and there is no driver in this photograph because he's thrown himself off this very cliff. Picasso owners don't smile.

I can't be sure whether they don't smile because they drive a Picasso, or they drive a Picasso because they have no hope of joy in their lives. Whichever it is, in all the years that Citroen has been selling these things, I've never seen one with a smiling driver behind the wheel. I used to see the bemused smile of the Allegro driver all those years ago. I often see the smugly, self-satisfied smile on the excessively groomed face of the Porsche driver. I've seen smiles on the faces of the drivers of every single make and model of car apart from the poor wretches who drive Xsara Picassos. That's very sad.

I've heard it said that you only buy an MPV because you've given up. That's possible. Nothing says "Don't let life happen to me any more" quite like a Xsara Picasso. Quite how Citroen dealers sell them new any more is a mystery. Perhaps they use drugs. Or threats of violence. I can't think of a single reason to buy one of these instead of a C4 Picasso or a Berlingo other than the salesman threatening to shoot your dog if you don't. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'car dealer.'

I was pleased to read this story on the Autocar website this evening. I love Saabs. I'm not sure I'd like to own one because of the dreadful depreciation they suffer, but I'd be pleased to run one as my next company car and I was worried I'd not get the chance because of the closure of the company.

Saabs are nice cars for nice people. I do buy into that whole Top Gear thing about them. When I was a boy, the Saab 99 Combi Coupe was one of my favourite cars. There was a bloke who had an early red onesome time in the mid Seventies in Haddington. It was almost as exciting for me as the Rover 3500 SD1 which was parked outside the hairdressers as I walked to school every morning from early in 1978. I adored the early Turbos and lusted after a black one. A black Saab 99 Turbo is one of the coolest cars on the planet. The Saab 9000 was the best of the family of cars which came from the same platform. That wasn't such a big claim, given that the others were the gorgeous Alfa 164, the rather odd Lancia Thema and the truly execrable Fiat Croma. Going back further, there is the image of Erik Carlsson caning twin-stroke 93s through the forests. I remember Will Gollop rally-crossing a 99 which was a lot of fun to watch.

GM completely trashed Saab. They consistently failed to invest in new platforms and products for their Swedish company and instead gave the world a Subaru Impreza with a nosejob and worse, one of their truly hopeless American SUVs. The current 9-5 is a heavily revised 9000 from the early Nineties and the 9-3 worryingly close to a second-generation Vectra. In spite of that, Saabs have retained their charm for many people, especially in Britain.

GM is now trying to do with Cadillac what they really should have done with Saab. They are attempting to turn Cadillac into a competitor to the prestige German marques. The CTS-V has been round the Nurburgring in an unfeasably short time for a four door saloon from any country, never mind the USA. It's a great car but a completely unnecessary one. Cadillac is a great American name but one which still equates in the minds of many Europeans with huge pink or white land yachts. It's a long way from the urbane sophistication or quirky sportiness

It's a miracle that there is any brand equity left in Saab. They were turned into very safe Vauxhalls and Opels with their ignition key on the floor by the gear lever and managed to survive that. Now the Dutch are in charge. Let's hope that the creators of the truly gorgeous Spyker sports cars do a better job than the Americans.

My name is Richard and I love cars too much. I think that it's important to be honest with oneself and others and I have a thing for cars. I've known this for a ling time. I like to say that my first words were "broom, broom" but that's probably not true. I'd need to check that with my dad and I don't want another myth shattered, so I probably won't. Any of the projects I did at school had to be centred around cars and I've been compulsively buying magazines since I was tall enough to reach them on the shelves and hand over my money at the till, squeakily assuring the assistant that yes, I did want a copy of Motor instead of Victor.

My mum used to complain about the piles of car mags in my room. She said that if I'd saved my money instead, I could have bought a real car. She missed the point a bit and I couldn't really put into words at the time what I was doing. I was saving up fantasies. Teenage boys have other sorts of fantasies, and God knows I had those too but I thought even more about cars than I did about breasts and that's probably not normal.

I still save up fantasies. I have my classic fantasies of E-types and Ferrari 250GT  Competizione Berlinettas. I have more contemporary fantasies involving different Jags and Porsches, Zondas and Mercedes Benzes and Aston Martins and Rolls Royces. I've even got a particularly guilty one about a Range Rover. In all of them, I'm not really driving anything anywhere. Instead, I'm just hanging out with friends who would enjoy them as well and talking about cars.

I have an odd sort of memory. It's filled with car fact detritus. There are several reasons I failed my Higher Maths at school. One of the biggest was the distraction caused by the very wonderful Jane Farquharson who sat behind me and passed me cartoons she'd drawn but I maintain that another major factor was that my head was full of useless information about engine specs and handling characteristics of early 80's Fords. I had no room in my brain for differential calculus on top of Jane Farquharson and the very first XR3s.

Just this evening I was driving home. I stopped at a set of traffic lights and checked my mirror. I was able to identify the car behind from its seats as a Mazda RX-8. I couldn't see the rest of the car and dusk was falling. The RX-8 has a metal insert in its seats which represents the shape of the rotor in its rotory engine and I remembered that from a road test I read when it was launched several years ago. I can remember crap like that, but I can't remember my nieces' and nephews' birthdays or to call my dad occasionally. I think I'm beyond help.