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.
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