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.

Views - Evo-Hybrids

On a recent trip to Seattle, bastion of American environmentalism, I was thoughtfully provided with a Toyota Prius as a rental car. To be honest, apart from the fact that it looks like you're driving around in Julius Caesar's nose, it wasn't a bad piece of kit. It's true that the only real excitement to be derived from driving a Prius lies in needlessly accelerating in order to brake heavily and see the little green regenerative energy symbols appear on the electronic screen. However, as an appliance it works quite well.

Despite it’s growing popularity I’ve decided that the Toyota is doing the hybrid concept some injustice. Whilst mating batteries and internal combustion engine is a polite dinner party way to approach the subject, there’s a long history of more exciting examples. The possibilities arising from a mix-and-match approach have seduced many manufacturers and my list of the greatest mixed up love-children from the automotive world is as follows.

The AC Cobra is an obvious, but hard to ignore contender on such a list. Sometimes you're getting what you need from one aspect of a car, but are left disappointed in another area. For the AC Ace, the problem was essentially, Pretty But Slow - what you might unkindly call the Paris Hilton dilemma. Solving it created a brutal combination of enormous American V8 and slightly bewildered British sportscar. Inserting a 4.7 litre and then a 7.0 litre V8 into a car the size of the Ace was rather like building a hydro-electric power station inside a crofter's cottage. Some will point out that the Cobra wasn't a particularly great handling car but anyone who's seen a picture of Dan Gurney bullying one around the Targa Florio or stood next to one at idle will find such criticism hard to hold on to.

Others had a more ambitious vision, deciding that merely combining the DNA from two countries wouldn't be quite enough to get the job done. The Menage a Trois approach was vindicated by the Gordon Keeble GK1, the result of the English persuading the Americans and Italians to take a room together, before turning out the lights and jumping in too. Remarkably, despite the room in question being on an industrial estate in Slough, the super coupe that was produced was rather wonderful. Just under 5 and a half litres of Chevy V8, sitting in a very pretty Bertone styled body meant that you and 3 friends could hit 60 in 7.5 seconds and go onto 140 mph. Not bad for 1963. Sadly, as well as providing the vision and the understatement (in the form of the tortoise bonnet badge) the Brits also supplied the manufacturing crisis that helped to kill the GK1 with less than 100 made.

Good though they were, the use of American V8s was sometimes motivated by economic considerations as much as design purity. They provided an inexpensive route to off-the-shelf power. Gordon Murray though did not adopt a "that'll do" approach to building the world's fastest and most expensive production car. He wanted 550 hp or so for his McLaren F1. With BMW's custom 6.1 litre V12 he found 627 of them and an engine that would spit 3 foot-long flames from the back of the car. You couldn't show off about switching to battery power in the McLaren but you could stick a long tail on the back and take it to Le Mans. The F1 represented barely contained motorsport-derived fury, combined with bespoke luggage and as such stands as a high water mark of hybrid lunacy.

In the corporate world, few phrases highlight the wonder of the hybrid world quite so well as "Lamborghini V10-powered, German executive saloon." Presumably someone at Ingolstadt went out for Friday drinks one week, had rather too many Jagermeisters, fell asleep in his clothes and had a dream involving Chancellor Helmut Kohl singing Nessun Dorma. Whatever the inspiration, the Audi S8 took a concept that was rather poorly attempted by the Lancia Thema 8.32 and made it actually work.

And then there’s Morgan. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Malvern went mildly and politely bonkers with the Aero 8. As if a bonded-aluminium, laser cut chassis wasn’t revolutionary enough, the retro-anachronism suddenly had a BMW V8. A great engine, marking time in the boring looking M3 met with the wild looking Morgan, was allowed to make quite a bit more noise, wear odd clothes and suddenly everything made sense. At least it did once the AeroMax changed the front end from boss-eyed to Hugo Boss.

Yes the Prius allows its owners a moment of new-technology smugness. But by bringing together two unremarkable engines in an unremarkable body it consigns itself to mediocrity. It’s cars like the Morgan and the Cobra, combining pieces of disparate, sometimes fractured, brilliance that represent the Evo-Hybrid - a car that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Reviews - Lotus Evora

No manufacturer has a model range like Lotus. Ferrari and Lamborghini supply haute-couture with cars that are faster but less agile. Pagani and Bugatti, in their pursuit of shock and awe, make cars that are both more powerful and more intimidating. Porsche has an SUV on its books.

Lotus does pure, undiluted driving pleasure. Does that come with concessions?Absolutely. There are no cup-holders in a Lotus Evora, There are no heated seats in a Lotus Exige. And there are no memory seats in a Lotus Elise. None are needed.

If the Elise was the original cocky teenager that set modern Lotus on the road to driving-zen, the Exige represented the wild-child 20-something who got experimental haircuts and a tattoo. Now we have the Evora, the 30-something who got a gym-membership, a black turtle-neck and their own office. It’s the same person, just in different guises and I’ve been given a day with a brand new test car and some mountain roads to see just how the little car from Norfolk grew up.

The location of those mountain roads is America’s Pacific North-West. An invitation from Butch Bockmier, one of the owners of Lotus’s Seattle dealership, to try the new Evora in new territory proves impossible to resist. Before diving into the car I start with a quick drive in a 2007 Exige S to get reacquainted with the Lotus brand of petrol-headonism and to provide a benchmark.

You don’t get cockpit tinsel in an Exige. You get three small knurled dials for the heating and ventilation, the occasional LED-topped pimple controlling headlights and electric windows and a stereo. You adjust the wing-mirrors by sticking your hand out of the window. None of this matters of course because above 5000 rpm the Exige experiences a small psychotic episode. Give the accelerator a hefty shove in second and the sound from behind you changes from hornet to screaming buzz-saw. As the rev counter touches 6000, the addictive shove of G-force strengthens. As it touches 7500 there’s a lunatic whistle from the supercharger and a small red light illuminates in your peripheral vision to tell you that the Exige is ready to do it all over again in 3rd. This is 220 forced induction horsepower in 915 kilos. It’s the wonderful, violent, deftly balanced little car that I remember. Time to switch to the Evora.

Within 5 minutes of the start of my drive I’m sitting in the rain at a freeway on-ramp watching a blue on white 2009 Mustang GT next to me light up its tyres. Watching big V8 muscle break traction and then fishtail down through the spray on to the road below is always good entertainment. It also provides a demonstration of an alternate route to 200 bhp/ton. The 1.5 ton Ford uses a 4.6 litre, 300 hp V8, the 1.3 ton Lotus a 3.5 litre 276 hp ‘six. The Mustang has the edge on noise, but I’m headed to Lotus territory.

My destination is the Summit at Snoqualmie about 40 miles east of Seattle. It’s a ski resort in winter but I’ve received a tip that the area offers the right setting for exercising a Lotus and a quick check on Google Earth shows a promisingly twisty route just off the interstate. There’s short freeway schlep to get there so, sat in the Evora at 60 mph in the rain, there’s time to take stock.

Now, a Lotus Exige is no more designed as a motorway commuter than an F-15 Strike Eagle is designed to take you and your family on holiday to Torremolinos. The Evora however is different. In sixth gear, there’s a muted drone from the engine at the 70 mph legal limit. Conversation doesn’t require raised voices and road surface imperfections are confidently absorbed. The Toyota engine provides useful torque when needed. It won’t snap your head back in the higher gears but overtaking is easy and drama free.

From the driver’s seat the Evora dials back the highly-strung energy of the Exige and there’s even a nod towards gadgetry. To the right of the dials is a neat red digital schematic of the car showing tyre pressures and vital fluid temperatures. To the left a graphic shows the fuel tank level. Compared with the Exige’s cockpit, the slice of leather running across the dash, colour-matched to the seats, is almost decadent. It’s red leather in the car I’m driving, lending the impression that the instruments are set into a red-lipped mouth ahead of the driver. If it’s what you want, the Evora can be as demanding as watching Monarch of the Glen with a mug of warm milk.

And yet...as you drive, the Lotus begins a stealthy campaign to corrupt your calmer driving instincts. The steering wheel is small and always communicating. The Evora isn’t nervous, it’s just acutely transparent. The wheel occasionally writhes gently in your hands as the car explores a camber change before returning obediently to its original path. The gearlever sprouts from a central island and presents an aluminium sphere a perfect hand-drop away from the steering wheel. In fact, the positioning in 4th and 6th is so good that you feel the Evora constantly goading you to let your palm fall the bare inches to the right and find the lower gears.

40 miles of temptation later my exit appears, I pull off the freeway and stop. The narrow road ahead is deserted. It snakes downhill from where I sit, bounded by huge boulders and, after a couple of hairpins, disappears from sight into a pine forest complete with tourist-brochure ribbons of mist.

Time to learn more. Compared with the Exige the gear change has a longer throw and a more metallic feel. There's a reassuring weigh to the controls, heavier than the smaller car’s, though not actually heavy. This, together with the slightly larger dimensions mean that it’s initially not quite as easily placed as the Exige. But to hold the the steering wheel is to mainline uncut information from the road beneath the wheels. The road’s damp with mist and the camber changes constantly but the Evora’s ability to deploy most of its power without getting twitchy means that confidence grows fast. After three or four miles of an increasingly wide grin I turn around and make a return pass.

Pushing harder on the run up the hill, it’s true that a little of the explosive acceleration of the Exige has been sacrificed. The Evora nonetheless should manage 0-60 in 4.9 seconds and go on to 160 mph and it does so making a more cultured sound. There’s more bass than the 1.8 'four can manage so the Evora growls where the the Exige wails. The supercharger whine has gone, instead the Evora provides the occasional, well mannered pop on the overrun. Close to the top of the road again and around a corner the shrapnel of a small rock-fall covers my half of the road. An abrupt swerve troubles the Lotus not at all, it darts around the debris with insouciance.

Parked for a moment next to a resting lime green snow plough, a man with a parka and black labrador delays getting into his truck to shout, “What's that car? Is it a Lotus?"

“Evora”, I reply. He gives up on the truck and comes over. "How much is it?" "Around 86 thousand dollars". He whistles. "Man I'd love to have one of these. Guess I'll have to keep fixing the ski-lifts a little longer."

It’s certainly a handsome car. Ultimately for me the styling loses a little of the delicacy of the smaller cars. Hard to avoid perhaps, but there's a slight heaviness about the rear haunches that introduces a hint of awkwardness for me. That said, it stands up well against the 911 in my opinion. In the dark metallic grey of this car, the Evora has a well calculated predatory air about it.

As I head back into Seattle, kids, imprisoned in the third row of people carriers, do literal double-takes and proceed to ignore Spongebob Squarepants on their TV screens as the Evora appears next to them. Their parents up front nudge each other and point.

Lotuses all share a certain otherworldliness on the road, heightened in the land of the pick-up and SUV. There's a sense that a Lotus on the freeway, like roller-skating at a funeral, is technically possible but somehow, shocking. It's not that the cars are ill at ease in that setting, just that alongside giant Ford F350s, Grand Cherokees and Crown Victorias, their looks suggest you recently arrived from a parallel dimension.

This sense of drama is likely to be a little reduced in the UK, where a Lotus is a more familiar sight. But in any market, behind the wheel, it’s easy to be seduced by the Evora. The bonnet drops out of sight, leaving the road apparently disappearing a foot ahead of your toes. On either side the wings slope down towards the centre-line and a single wiper sweeps across the screen. At traffic lights the heat wash from the front radiators makes the view ahead dance gently. As with the smaller cars, there’s a hint of the Le Mans Prototype here.

It’s a confident car the Evora, unafraid to retain the DNA of the Elise and Exige as it moves up a weight division. That it manages the transition successfully is undoubted and welcome, the 911 has too long been untroubled in its niche. Its price and perhaps the perceived lack of glamour in its Toyota-sourced engine will give some pause for thought. But for those who care about the sum of the complete package, the balance of power, feel and response, the Evora represents a company at the top of its game.

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.

Views - Paradise Regained...

The other night Sir David Attenborough confided the existence of Ilha Queimada Grande or Snake Island. Lying off the southeastern corner of Brazil is a small piece of land with one golden lancehead snake for every footstep. Sir David explained in his breathless, award-winning manner that the snakes are the top predators and no-one but scientists are allowed to set foot on the island. The few fisherman who have ignored the warnings have all died quickly. The Brazilian government maintains a protective bubble that allows a serpentine paradise to flourish.

Which is all very nice for the snakes. So why is there no equivalent for motorists? Not just any motorists but rather the ones who want to do with cars the things that cars were designed to do. An island sanctuary for speed. Imagine it...

You pull out of your drive carefully. Your caution proves well-founded. With your front wheels barely onto the pavement, you slam on the brakes to avoid the red-lined, screaming duel between Peugeot 205 GTI 1.9 and Renault 5 Turbo. Suburbia here is the battle-ground for that most pugnacious incarnation of daily transport, the hot hatch. Every illicit, late night, residential estate match-up can be explored without reprisals. For Everyman, the Golf GTI takes on the Ford Escort RS Turbo; Wolfsburg's 16 valves against Dagenham's Garrett boost-pusher. For the connoisseur, Clio Williams battles Lotus Sunbeam Talbot. For the jaded, Fiat Uno Turbos challenge Maestro Turbos down well-manicured 1/4 miles. A haze of expiring tyres, tortured clutch and brake dust lies thickly about. Waste gates snigger in the next street as you set off.

The police are here of course, it's not Escape From New York, but they have a new remit. Drive your car into someone's kitchen and they'll cart you off, show up with those neon strip lights on your car and they'll taser you in the pants, but every road is a legitimate race track. I like to think that half the policemen resemble Sergeant Al Powell from Die Hard. They're eating Twinkies and drinking Big Gulps whilst hitching up gun belts and going sideways in Police Cruisers. But they like the sound of a rev-limiter as much as anyone else (and they'll laugh at you if you lift through the fast right-hander on Newman Drive).

The other half are Italian policemen. They sometimes flag you down but only because your car was styled by Pininfarina and has a v12. It makes them cross if you're not wearing your shirt unbuttoned to the nipple-line and they'll challenge you to race them in their Gallardo. Some hand out free bruschetta...

You leave suburbia and take the slip-road for the dual-carriageway. Then you have to pause because the road ahead is blocked. A sub-lime Hemi Cuda and Hertz Shelby GT350 are rocking on their suspension mounts and smoking their tyres. They get lined up and bellow off into the distance, fish-tailing slightly. A small group on the verge cheers, passes round a bottle of bourbon and waits for the Superbirds to show up.

After a couple of miles you leave the dual-carriageway and find some fast-sweeping A-roads set into a landscape of rolling fields and small villages. The thorough-breds are being exercised here. Think Mille Miglia through the Cotswolds. You're passed by a dark blue Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato. Whilst every line on the car demonstrates subtle, understated perfection shaped in metal, it's being driven at ten-tenths by someone who knows what it was built to do and who has two wheels kicking up dust on the next apex. As it disappears from view, exhaust note bouncing from the stone walls, it's followed by a thundering Daytona. The low-lying sun, glints on the four chromed exhausts, the jewel-like brake lights flash for a moment and then six Weber 40s open and the big, beautiful coupe is gone.

Leaving the A-roads behind you look for the twisting Bs and you know you've found them when the Caterham R400 appears in your rear-view mirror. Out-braking you into the next corner, the incredible little car spits fire from its four-into-one side pipe on the overrun and then seems to bend physics' rules as it accelerates away.

So all we need, other than political will, millions of pounds and Murray Walker (who will be employed to broadcast constant commentary in his best apoplexy) is a location. To me the best options here seem to be a) the construction of a man-made island somewhere in the Mediterranean, or b) the annexation of Gloucestershire.

No.7

Review - Chevy Impala - Fallen Idols

The 2009 Chevy Impala is a wonderful car. No, that’s not quite right.

The 2009 Chevy Impala is an woeful car. No, not right either.

The 2009 Chevy Impala is a car. That’s about right.

The fact that this is really the only accurate statement that can be made in relation to the Chevy is something of a disappointment to me. As a just-off-the-plane English guy dipping a toe into the US motoring world, it’s true that Avis rent-a-car is not perhaps the ideal place to get a spike of automotive adrenalin. However, it is a useful place to get a realistic view of Everyman’s motoring life. The stuff you can rent at Avis is the stuff the majority of the population is driving on the roads.

And this is where the disappointments began for me. Before I walked over to bay F41 at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the name Impala was not without glamour for me. It conjured up images of football field-sized hoods, Nimitz-sized rear-decks, some pretty unrestrained fin-work and those triple-rear lights. Yup, I was in 1958. And in 1964. And even in 1970 (although the fins were in remission by then...)

The Impala was always laughably remote in character from its furry African namesake (graceful leaping and prancing, partnered with startling acceleration not being a key part of its standard repertoire), but that didn’t matter. The Chevys in my mind had a low-slung, graceful menace about them. You wouldn’t so much drive an Impala as pilot it smoothly through shoals of lesser cars. You could cruise in a Impala. You could arrive in an Impala. You could chop an Impala, install hydraulics where normal suspension should go and scrape the rear fender along the ground whilst pointing the headlights at the streetlights. You would always look good.

When I arrived at bay F41 this mental bubble was pricked. For a start, the arse (as we’d say in England) was gone. I mean, the trunk was still intimidatingly large compared to a European car. I felt momentarily ashamed that my suitcases were barely noticeable once inside. But the Impala was no longer a car that would impress Fergie with it’s posterior. All the Impalas in my mental records had the kind of rear-deck that a Sunseeker yacht would be pleased to flaunt at St Tropez. The addition of a couple of swim-suit clad girls, lounging on your trunk-lid seemed to be what the acreage of metal was designed for. No longer.

Apart from it’s sadly docked rear, the Chevy had the right number or doors and didn’t look actively offensive in the way that Crown Victorias or Ssang-Yong Mussos do. Cup-holder? Check. Big comfy seats? Check. Pointless nod to technological advancement? Check (those silly automatic headlights). It was all a bit plain-Jane, particularly in boring white with hearing-aid beige interior, but not disconcerting. The disconcerting stuff happens when you drive the car, I discovered.

Picture an elderly golden labrador. Picture this labrador asleep in the late afternoon in a warm room after a long walk and some food. Now imagine giving this happy, snoozing dog a gentle prod with the end of your finger. What happens? Nothing. It might roll-over, or snore with renewed volume, but the level of activity will not change. In imagining this, you have also successfully imagined what happens when you gently increase the pressure on an Impala’s accelerator pedal. Nothing. Perhaps a little more noise.

Now go back to the old, sleeping dog and, instead of a gentle prod, give him a meaningful kick in the mens department. What happens? Disconcerting things happen. The dog will lurch to his feet, probably making quite a bit of noise. He may look wildy around while doing so and will then most likely disappear off in a fairly random direction banging into the furniture as he goes.

This is also what happens when you increase the pressure on the Impala’s accelerator pedal to the point where the car’s electronic brain is forced to admit that it can no longer go on pretending that you’re not there. By way of teaching you a lesson it will then change down and give the engine some beans. You will almost immediately regret your actions as you wrestle the lurching, bewildered old thing back on track and will go back to cruising sedately. This conveniently will allow the Impala to remain almost permanently in high gear at 60 mph, thus presenting reasonable fuel economy figures.

You can get an Impala to go around corners. It will accelerate (eventually) and stop (without much body control). You can heat it up and cool it down to the required temperature quite easily. People in the back will be comfortable on long journeys. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Many of you will no doubt point out that at no stage of it’s development has any Impala pretended to be a Lotus Elise. You’d of course be right. My complaint is merely this. If your car looks the way a 1958 Chevy Impala looks it doesn’t matter that the dynamic experience is awful. But when you mate an iconic name with a body that has the visual tension of a suitcase and an anaesthetized driving experience you have problem. Mustangs, Camaros and Challengers are alive and well, but for me, right now, the Impala is catatonic.

No.7