Views - Edge of Darkness

In broad terms 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, sounds and behaves 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”. 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.

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.