Views - Addicted to Louvres

Why do people pay $10 million dollars for Ferraris? Why do people like Ferdinand Piech mobilise entire companies to sell loss-making titans like the Bugatti Veyron? Why are the Aston Martin One-77 and Caterham Levante sold out amidst an economic melt-down that is bankrupting entire countries? Why, indeed, are you reading this blog? The answer is addiction and addiction to three things.

Some might argue that the factors responsible for automotive infatuation are many and complex. Social trends should be analysed and cultural phenomena dissected.

Actually it boils down to three factors that hold the mind of the petrolhead in a stranglehold: Beauty, Utility and Mechanical Intrigue.

Beauty first of all then. Of course not all cars are beautiful, the SsangYong Rodius being the clearest example. However cars do exhibit beauty across a bewilderingly wide range. The Aston Martin DB9, the Lotus Elite and the Porsche 917 are all beautiful and all display their beauty in distinct ways. The Aston does so in the same dangerous way as a samurai sword, the Lotus is a dainty exercise in perfect proportions, the Porsche a brutal exponent of functional beauty. All hold captive the eye of the petrolhead, all can lay claim to being pure sculpture. But if we only consider beauty then we can’t separate cars from paintings, flowers and Brangelina.

Aside from their looks, cars are useful. That Aston Martin DB9 will transport you across continents in a cocoon of matinee-idol style. The car essentially is Dean Martin. A Mini offers both the option of cheap urban travel and a means to win the Monte Carlo Rally. A Range Rover (only the first and most recent incarnations registering on the beauty scale) offers you an armchair that will scale sand dunes and then take the kids back to university. A Rolls-Royce Phantom represents a three hundred thousand pound reminder to Maybach owners that the spark of genius responsible for their bank balance has inexplicably deserted them on at least one occasion.

So they look good and they help with stuff but then so does a Mont Blanc pen or an iPod. The third factor that gives cars their perpetual allure is their mechanical heart. Take the back off the iPod and it’s boring inside. Unscrew the pen, also boring. But open the bonnet of a car and you find an engine, a machine designed to mix explosive quantities of fuel and air. Its purpose is explosions. You find four-barrel carbs, superchargers, tappets, wastegates, double-overhead camshafts. Take the exhaust pipe off and engines spit fire, they’re barely civilized.

And quite apart from the beast under the bonnet, cars are full of mechanical wizardry. Limited slip differentials stand helpfully in the way of limitless slip, sequential gearboxes enable high street heroics, ceramic brakes help to slow everything down again. If you get things seriously wrong, roll-bars flick up in milliseconds, explosive charges fire airbags at us and your seat-belt will grab you.

Apply the same three factors to other objects and you can test the power of this triple attraction. Books for example are staggeringly useful things to have around. As far as physical beauty is concerned though, they’re never going to challenge a Type 57SC Atlantic. And as for mechanical intrigue – not a chance, hard-back or soft-back is as far as it goes.

Watches, once you start to spend reasonably large amounts of money are pretty good to look at. And if you opt for a skeleton movement then you can ogle your tourbillon too, for a mechanical fix. But when you get to utility…well keeping time is good, but that’s all they’ve got. When is it, what day is it, how long did that take – then your watch is out of tricks.

I claimed addiction lies behind all this automotive madness at the start of this article. By way of persuasion I offer a parallel to the seduction job performed on us by cars. Cigarettes. These also hit us in threes. Your mind knows that when you light up you absolutely do look like Bogart / Bacall. In the minutes before the exam room, when deadlines bite and after the shock of a surprise, the routine of smoking restores sanity. And once it’s tried nicotine, your brain is a junkie for life. The way the hold on our minds is applied is different, but whether you’re buying Evo, James Coburn’s 250 GT California or twenty Marlboro the name’s the same – addiction.

Reviews - 1979 Porsche 911SC - Flat Six Saviour

Now for most of us it’s not much of a stretch to see the Porsche 911 as a great car. But why the 911SC, which is neither the fastest, nor the most exclusive of the 911 clan. Well there are two reasons. Firstly, without the SC there may well not have been any more Turbos, Carrera 2s or GT3s and secondly, because I’ve just bought one and I love it.

So to begin with the SC’s claim to be the car that saved the 911. In the 1970s the western world in particular was limping through a bruising encounter with two energy crises. In 1978, when the SC was launched, oil prices were edging up towards their 1979 peak that would follow the departure of the Shah from Iran and the production shortages that would follow.

Against this background, Porsche were quietly refining themselves. Though what they were producing was the best version yet of a car that was already some 15 years old. The new car was an amalgam of some of the best bits from cars that had come before together with a sprinkling of improvements. The engine block from the 1975 Turbo went into the mix, along with the flared body from the earlier ’74 Carrera. Galvanised bodies were now par for the course and creature comforts like electric windows and upgraded heating and ventilation joined the party.

Now a 1978 Porsche 911SC was producing only around 180bhp, which wasn’t a jaw-dropping amount even 30 years ago. The Ferrari 308 GT4, which was nearing the end of its production run by 1978, could deliver a healthy 230-250hp from its 3.0 litre V8, whilst a Lamborghini Urraco in P300 form could offer around 265 bhp, though it too was not long for the world. Back in Blighty at least the Lotus Esprit wasn’t kicking sand in the Porsche’s face. It’s 2.0 litre, four cylinder engine could only summon up around 160hp and it would take the so-called “Essex” Esprit Turbos of 1980 to break the 200 bhp mark.

However, with fuel prices escalating, potential high-end sports car owners may have been beginning to baulk at the though of feeding thirsty and somewhat temperamental Italian V8s. The domination of Le Mans by Porsche with the 917, the 935 and the 936 throughout the decade may also have been crossing some people’s minds.

But despite the motorsport credentials, and the well chosen specs, the SC would also need the personal intervention of Peter Schutz, CEO of Porsche between 1981 and 1987. By the end of the 1970s Porsche had decided to replace the 911 with the new 928 but 1980 saw slow take-up for the new cars. Schutz’s decision to extend the production run of the 911 (according to some accounts by taking a marker pen and extending the line on a chart off the paper and onto the wall of a colleague’s office) would turn out to be a wise one. Almost 60,000 SCs were sold in the 5 years it was in production. The rest, as they say, is history.

So why do I love the SC? Well partly for the looks. To my eye the SC is one of the best looking of all the 911 variants. It’s lost a little of the delicacy of the earlier models and gained a little useful muscle mass in my view. The trademark flared haunches have arrived but have not yet become something for Fergie to sing about. The wings, that from the drivers seat resemble the torpedo tubes on a WW2 PT boat (my car, my fantasy ok...) provide the classic 911 ‘face’. The wonderful curve form the top of the windscreen down to the rear bumper is one of the greatest styling features ever for me and on the SC it’s not been diluted by the need to increase the cars dimension to incorporate ever more toys and safety equipment. I actually went to the dealership with the intention of buying a Lotus Elise, not an ugly looking car by any stretch of the imagination. That I came away with a 30 year old Porsche says something about it’s continued visual impact.

But the driving experience is also key to the SC’s hero status. No the 911 doesn’t have any of the air intakes, the various gills, slots and mirror appendages that would allow me to deploy active downforce on the way back from the newsagents with some milk. But, when you turn the key you are introduced to something even better.

Now, even at idle an old 911 makes, to my ears, a wonderfully menacing, bass-thump. In fact I was childishly delighted to have it set off the car alarm on a neighbouring Toyota in a multi-story carpark last week. But when it hits 4500 rpm, you realise that this is only speed at which you will now use it. Approaching a tight 25 mph motorway exit, you get your braking out of the way, then change down early, from 3rd into second, pausing slightly on your way through neutral so the gearbox has time to decide that it will indeed let you have the gear. You sort of request your next gear from this car, gentle backwards pressure on the lever until you’re approved. You can feel the rear tyres hook up, the back of the car hunker down a shade and then as you feed in the power, the wailing starts...It’s not a big car, the 911, and at moments like this the power and weight of the that flat-six seem to dominate the cabin.

We’ve all been ‘educated’ to know that a rear-engined Porsche is now about as dangerous as Miley Cyrus. We know its no longer the tail-snapping handful it once was, but perhaps a small part of us wishes it might still be. When the car has an engine note that suggests you have a baleful demon held captive behind the rear seats, and comes from the days before Porsche Stability Control, it’s like getting to look behind the facade for a second. Like stroking one of those ‘tame’ lions that have been raised by humans and which once in a while will remember that you could be food.

Sure inside there’s a world of idiosyncratic Germanic wonder. Heater controls are on the floor and also on the dash, with another bit stuck on top of the cassette storage thing for good measure. The wiper controls are on a stalk and on a little twisty dial above one of the dials and the pedals stick up out of the floor. But that doesn’t matter. Someone once described older 911s to me as like small aircraft. When you start them up or drive slowly, they grumble and vibrate and make you sweat because there’s no power steering and first gear’s a sod when cold. Then you get a little heat into the systems, your speed comes up, the vibrates seem to cancel each other out, the steering lightens to become a tactile delight and you’re flying.

So there it is. The 911SC. Part of the reason you can still buy a 911 today. And still one of the world’s greatest sportcars.

Icons - Lotus

Owning a Lotus is a bona fide mark of petrol headed tendencies. No one will mistake you for someone who views cars as appliances if you own a Lotus. For as long as I have been reading them, car magazines have been pitching Hethel’s machines against Porsches, Ferraris and other exotica and drivers have been racing them in the same fashion. Yet in some ways, superficially, it seems hard to rationalise the company Lotus keeps.

In the 1960s for example, Ferrari was making the 365 GTB/4 which offered around 350 bhp. The Lotus Europa, on sale from Lotus during the same time frame, could muster a little over 100bhp. During the 1970s the Lamborghini Urraco had a 3.0 liter V8 that managed around 250bhp, whilst the new Lotus Esprit could summon only around 160bhp. Even after the Esprit gained a Garrett and broke the 200bhp mark, it was outmatched in outright power terms by the 911 Turbo, which started out at around 260bhp and was soon well over the 300-mark.

But to view Lotuses in this light is as pointless as criticising a leather-strapped Patek Phillippe for it’s failings as a diving watch. Or worrying that your hand-made shoes make poor soccer boots. Lotuses deserve to sit in exotic car showrooms, next to Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis for two reasons. One is their relationship to power versus weight.The other is their handling dynamics. These are the reasons that we love Lotus.

Beginning with the Mark VI, Lotus showed what could be done with a 50bhp Ford side-valve engine in a car that weighed less than 500 kilos. Yes the car itself looked a little like a soapbox racer, but in one of the most impressive of all automotive evolutions, that same basic shape is still now embarrassing 600 bhp supercars as a Caterham. It worked in the 1950s against XK140s and it still works more than 50 years later against Gallardos.

And then there’s the Elan. Now the only problem with a 1960s Elan is that if you’re any taller than the cast of Willow, it will look as though you’ve stolen your nephew’s pedal car. If you can ignore that you find a jewel-like, 700 kilo rocket. Still nowhere near hitting the 1 ton mark, the more powerful Elan’s had around 125bhp. Getting to 60 in under 8 seconds feels very quick in a pedal car. There’s just nothing made like this anymore. A Mazda MX5, one of the more basic 2 seater sports cars of the last 20 years weighed in at comfortably over 1000 kilos at its most basic and had little or no more power.

What the Elan and it’s predecessor the Elite also showed was that Lotus can do pretty cars too. It’s true that in this area things went a little south during the 1970s and 80s but few cars from any manufacturer have the delicacy and beautifully balanced proportions of an Elite or Elan. Rather like a vintage KrisKraft or Hughes H-1, when mechanical design is this good, it almost seems a pity to sully it with inconveniently shaped human beings at the controls, breaking up the flow of the lines.

Then came the Esprit, showing that you didn’t have to cloth your car in the most beautiful body ever penned in order to sear an image onto the retinas of a generation. The silhouette of the Lotus Esprit is one of the most immediately recognisable automotive designs ever. What the Esprit also underlined was the enduring logic behind Lotus’s low weight approach. The Esprit Sport 300 of 1993 squeezed, you’ve guessed it, 300 bhp out of the four cylinder engine. The car weighed a whisker under 1200 kilos. The result was 0-60 in 4.6 seconds and 0-100 in 11.7. The contemporary Ferrari 348 took 5.8 seconds and 13.7 seconds to cover the same increments and it would take the considerably more expensive Ferrari F355 to eclipse the Lotus.

And then in the mid-90s Lotus managed a new trick. Somehow condensing the light weight of the Mark VI, the aesthetic precision of the Elan, and the drama of the Esprit, Lotus produced the Elise. There are few cars as fascinating to look at as a Lotus Elise. The car showed that you could do muscular without being ostentatious, that you could have outrageous acceleration without outrageous cost and that purity of driving experience was still part of the engineering DNA at Lotus. If you valued being intimately connected to the road surface, being back in a car that offered you a seat, pedals and a view of the aluminium that supported you and being able to hear a small, violent 4 cylinder engine burn fuel a foot behind your head, then Lotus had what you needed.

If, after considering what the Elise had to offer and feeling that it was a little too... pedestrian for you, Lotus had that covered too. You could have an Exige. And if the Exige still felt rather “Driving Miss Daisy”, then there was the 340R. Nowhere perhaps is the Lotus philosophy more clearly observable than in this progression.

You buy a Lotus because what you really want, underneath the fleeting enjoyment of iPod connectivity, heated seats, dual-level air conditioning and sat-nav is to be back in the soap-box racer you had as a kid. To be sat back on the sled at the top of an icy hill with the adrenalin pumping. You want to be given a seat, a gear-stick and 3 pedals and Lotus will get you as close to that purity as you can stomach.

You can go all the way to the 2-Eleven and pick bugs from your teeth, or you can take the racing DNA, the handling balance, the luxury of a roof and leather interior and go Boxster hunting in an Evora. Buying a Lotus is not about the power output, or the top speed or getting the best valet spot. It is about combining engine, chassis, suspension and controls to distill, not dilute the driving experience.

Views - Edge of Darkness

In broad terms I think that there are two types of people in the world. In one camp, the people for whom the only difference between a Zanussi and a Zonda is the brand name and cost. The people for whom a car is nothing more than a fairly costly appliance. In the other camp, the people for whom cars have an intrinsic fascination and worth that is hard to quantify. For these people, a car’s ability to move something between two places is fundamentally subordinate to how it looks and sounds as it moves.

Automaniacs (those in the second camp) generally select cars by thinking first of all about the really important questions like: “How will owning one of only 250 Porsche Sport Classics make me feel?” Some of them, however, will stray from the light and also wonder, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a ’76 Aston Martin Lagonda in the garage?”

Car makers know this and as a result devote considerable time to the creation not just of beautiful future classics but also of “Cars that you shouldn’t want, but do.” A case in point is the Range Rover Sport. On a purely practical level you shouldn’t buy a Range Rover Sport because it doesn’t answer any need better than an LR3 or a Range Rover HSE does. A purist wouldn’t pick one either because those same two alternatives both look better and drive better.

I want badly to be a connoisseur of fine automobiles, to reject the ill-proportioned and ill-conceived, to have a fantasy garage that resembles a Coys catalogue, but I’m not. I fall victim to the love that dares not speak it’s name. I know I shouldn’t want a Jeep Wrangler with a six inch lift and a Golden Eagle painted on the bonnet because they’re old, creaky, lean like a holed frigate and look like a surprised spider. But I do want one.

I also know I shouldn’t really think about Noble M600s because they’re not as pretty as an Aston Martin, the engine’s from an SUV and having a dial that controls the power provided by your engine is only a good idea on a microwave. But I strongly suspect that the moment you close the door from the driver’s seat in an M600 you enter a parallel world free from the leash of mortgage payments, dental appointments and cholesterol.

There’s a type of Porsche Cayenne called the Transsyberia that I know is an aberration, not least for its name. But despite forcing myself to sit down and look at pictures of Sir Stirling Moss in 722 while watching the opening scene of The Italian Job, I still want to take two and half tons of back and orange madness out onto a public highway. I’m not at all confident that I would be able to resist the temptation to smoke the tyres frequently. I harbour a secret desire to take one to Pebble Beach Concours and perform doughnuts around the canape tables.

Every decade throws up it’s rogue’s gallery of temptations. In the eighties it was anything Ford made that included the letters XR, but particularly the XR4i. In the Nineties it was those Volkwagens with a supercharger that was in some way I don’t understand shaped like a letter “G”. I believe the whole family from Polo, through Golf to Corrado was afflicted. In the first decade of the 21st century steroidal Mercedes saloons began to get preposterous enough to catch my eye and now in 2010 it’s all I can do to stop myself typing Audi Q7 into Google Images.

It’s my belief that the signature of real Automaniacs, the people whose love of cars is deep and a little worrying, is this secret desire to experience the left-of-field, less refined and downright vulgar. The mark of the truly damned is not the immaculate and irreproachable collection of Italian sportscars displayed in the beautifully lit coach-house, but the slightly shabby Lamborghini LM002 in the barn. It’s the half second pause at the full-page advertisement for Overfinch that betrays them, the quickened pulse at the mention of Vauxhall VXR8s.

The automotive world encompasses immense variety. At it’s extremes lie the wondrous and the despicable but every increment between the two is marked somewhere. The task of the Automaniac is to represent in their garage a glimpse of this spectrum. And that is why, once the DB4GT Zagato and the Lotus Elite have been located I shall be on the look-out for a nice Bricklin SV1.