Aston Martin power point

Aston I tested in 2007, photographed Isle of Bute
There seems no point in bigger engines in bigger cars, which do 200mph, or would if there was anyplace to do it and anybody brave enough to try. I’ve managed 185 (electrically timed) on a test track and I can not think of a road where I would care to. Neil Lyndon, articulate as ever in The Sunday Telegraph, admits to being enamoured with Aston Martin for 50 years, but says it, “…must be rather like being a fan of Manchester City. Occasional eruptions of fervently inventive world-beating creativity interspersed with ages of miserable underachievement.”

Prompted by the Duke of Cambridge’s appearance in the Prince of Wales’s DB6, Lyndon ruminates on a make Ford acquired in 1994. “It seemed (Aston’s) ship had finally come in. At last it was in the care of indulgent patrons who wanted exactly what all Aston lovers longed for. Ford built a factory at Gaydon the equal of Ferrari’s at Modena They seconded top designers, wrote them a blank cheque and said they were to achieve nothing less than their best work.”

Beautiful proportions, the DB7, even though cobbled from Jaguar parts.
Ford backed away, leaving Aston looking for new backers but, “Cars in the last four years have, at bottom, been variants on existing models. The Virage Coupé is a kind of genetic extrusion from the DB9, which appeared in 2004 and was a rethink of the DB7 of 1994.” It’s all too true. Like Lamborghinis, Astons have become bigger, more powerful, more complicated, faster, and more expensive. At £160,000 they begin to look faintly absurd. Owners no longer appear macho or even sportif so much as profligate. It’s even worse with Bugattis.

The traditional Aston radiator shape has been preserved - just.
Aston’s 6 litres and 500 horse power is fine for a toy you use on a track day, or even real racing, yet it is excessive for a road car.

They should get back to high-efficiency smaller cars, exquisitely engineered. There were great 2 litre Aston Martins.

There was a memorable 1750cc Alfa Romeo of the 1930s, of watch-making precision that made fierce mechanical noise. Ferrari’s first masterpiece was a 2 litre V12. The DB 2 Aston was a modest 6-cylinder of 2½ litres designed by WO Bentley. The DB4 of 1958 was 3.7 litres. Jim Clark’s DB4GT Zagato, of cherished memory, had 314 horse power. In 1969 the DBSV8 was 5.3 litres.

Aston Martin DB2/4, engine design by WO Bentley
There is a hint of desperation among supercar manufacturers, announcing ever more extravagant cars at ever more ridiculous prices. Jaguar has said it will sell 250 CX-75s in 2012 at £700,000. Its engineers’ flights of fancy were once D-types, which won Le Mans. Now, it seems, they are just flights of fancy.

Borrowed plumes. The late Victor Gauntlett, who owned the company, lent me his personal DB2/4 for the RAC Golden Fifty Rally.

More gloom from the AA

The AA should stick to what it used to be good at.
Tick-box stuff from the AA. It's worried about the MOT Test. Says 94% of 18,700 members polled last summer thought it quite or very important to road safety. What this means is 93% ticked the box saying quite important and 1% very important. What is the AA thinking about adding exclamation marks to fretting over a 40% failure rate, for a test brought in fifty years ago? Cars are safer, they last longer, and although 62% believed extending tests to every other year would lead to more unsafe cars on the road, that means 38% didn’t.

AA publicity is Nannysome: “Reliance on the MoT test as a yearly safety check is best illustrated by the 17.6% failure rate on lighting and signalling, the vast majority of which could be fixed by the owner soon after a bulb blows. ‘Roads this winter have been littered with cars driving with a headlight, tail light or stop light out. The only time many of these drivers do anything about it is when the car goes for an MoT test or when traffic police pull them over,’ says Edmund King, the AA’s president.” Who, it must be said, will do anything to get himself a sound-bite. Being gloomy works best.

Far better to believe Marie Woolf in The Sunday Times: “Drivers will be required to take fewer MoT tests under government plans that could save motorists hundreds of pounds. Ministers are preparing to relax the frequency of vehicle checks - possibly replacing annual MoTs with tests every two years. Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, wants to delay the first MoT on a new car from three years to four. The government is proposing to consult on other options - the most liberal would allow MoTs every two years over the subsequent six years. That would mean only four tests in 10 years, halving the number.”

MoT tests at £55 invariably go up when testers suggest new tyres or shake their head over rusty sills. Hammond wants to remove the burden for drivers facing petrol price rises. Cars now have long service intervals, most have technology that warns of faults so we should make the most of improvements in cars since the grease gun was banished and structural failures caused accidents.

The Sunday Times also says: “The transport secretary is looking at the motorway speed limit: 70mph is too slow for modern cars and 80mph would be acceptable given the far better brakes and safety measures in cars today. That could be enhanced by "smart" speed limits, which would vary according to road conditions. These ideas are encouraging if they lead to action. It won't end the war on the motorist but it will make driving a bit cheaper and more pleasurable.” Hooray to that.

Glum AA will shake its head. Edmund King will be on every news channel except perhaps Al-Jazeera.

Picture from the archives: Original Mercedes-Benz 300SL photographed at Brooklands.

All Motorists Now

Budget comment rolled in yesterday. PRs flattered people we’ve never heard of that somebody wanted to know what they thought. Emails tsunamied. Airwaves brimmed with rubbish. And you could tell where he was coming from when Jon Snow on Channel 4 News said “motorists”. Real people hardly ever say motorists. It’s like “bloated plutocrats” or “spivs”, loaded with innuendo, “gnomes of Zurich” and “idle rich”. The Today programme was at it too. Predictably. Motorists are posh people or “fat cats” driving “gas guzzlers”. It’s archaic, out of date. We are all middle class, we are all motorists. George Osborne’s fuel prices affect everybody, the District Nurse, the dairyman and the supermarket van driver. Yet Jon Snow kept challenging Danny Alexander as though motorists were a race apart, gaining privilege at others’ expense. Unfortunately the usually astute Alexander didn’t manage a riposte. TV presenters and smart radio commentators use words carelessly, like “poverty” and “hard-working families”, which silly politicians work into their own lexicon along with tiresome claims that they have “done the right thing”, when what they mean is “what I think was the right thing.” Bah, I say. Humbug.

Kylie and Kars

Kylie Minogue likes cars but she has moved up-market. In 2002 Ford sponsored her 39-date European Fever Tour, from Cardiff to Barcelona. She was pictured with the production StreetKa roadster to provide a preview before it went on sale in 2003. “The partnership with Kylie was the perfect way to show off StreetKa ahead of its launch,” said Peter Fleet, marketing director. “StreetKa and Kylie had a lot in common; they were both small, beautiful and stylish.” The car was formally unveiled to the public at the Paris Motor Show in September 2002.
Well, now it’s the Lexus CT 200h. Lexus will be lead sponsor of Kylie’s 2011 UK concert tour, Aphrodite – Les Folies. Elegant, contemporary and chic, trills today’s press release from Lexus. Director Belinda Poole shares Peter Fleet’s view: “Kylie is the perfect ambassador for Lexus. She has the energy, style and popular public profile that will re ach directly to customers new to the Lexus brand.” Kylie, “who has enjoyed huge success as an actor, singer, dancer, model and designer”, was thrilled too: “I’ve been lucky enough to have a preview of the car, which is stylish and elegant…” She will have her own specially specified Lexus.
The Sunday Times once ran a series, which ran alongside my motoring column, on Stars and Cars. It had to be discontinued when it became obvious that many celebrities didn’t own any cars. They had not chosen them. They drove round free in those secretly on loan from manufacturers and then gushed about them like Corporate Press Releases. Kylie's a smart girl and at least she’s honest about it.

Motoring campaigns

Leaden campaigning. The AA discovered on 5 January: Fuel prices soared 2p a litre yesterday. Scarcely agitation. A typical 50-litre tank refill now costs £8.59 more than a year ago. A two-car family is now spending £36.46 more a month on petrol than at the start of 2010. Tell us something we didn’t know. Two hundred and fifty words later, Edmund King the AA’s president summoned up courage: The April increase in fuel duty must be scrapped. That deserved to be first, not last.



Mike Rutherford, something of a campaigner himself, wrote recently. “My greatest hope for 2011 is that a new, loud, unbiased, unashamedly pro-motorist organisation will finally surface. It must fight for the driver more passionately and effectively than the tired old RAC and AA which are giant corporate, insurance-based businesses first and motoring pressure groups second.”



True. The AA was once called a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Its roadside services are splendid but its campaigning is obstinately patronising: “Be sure to check your oil and water before setting out.” Establishment organizations, like governments, are constricted by the need to remain in office. The Association of British Drivers gets closer to real campaigning but even it’s a little wordy: The police are always very keen to emphasise that the aim of setting speed traps is not to fine and penalise drivers but to get them to adhere to the speed limit. Indeed, camera sites are supposed to be signed for that very reason. However, the case of Michael Thompson, fined a staggering £440 including costs for warning a driver of a speed trap shows these claims to be false.

ABD spokesman Nigel Humphries explains: "If the true aim of police speed traps is to get drivers to adhere to the limit then why object to drivers warning others? Surely this achieves that objective in exactly the same way as signing a speed camera, something that has long been accepted as a positive means of slowing traffic?"

Humphries continues: "The prosecutors in this case have many questions to answer. Firstly, they have contravened a previous ruling on an almost identical case in the High Court. Secondly, prosecutor John Owston states that 'idiots' brake heavily when they see speed traps and cause accidents. He also states that driver's reaction upon seeing Mr Thompson's flash would be that there is some sort of hazard ahead and to approach it at a lower speed. If prosecutor Owston can see this then surely he can see that Mr Thompson's actions are in the public interest?"

The ABD hopes that Mr Thompson will appeal against his conviction and offers him every support in doing so.

Once again the last line ought to have been the first. “The Association of British Drivers will defend the rights of anybody warning oncoming drivers of speed traps.”



That was, after all, what the AA was founded for in 1905.

TRY SELLING CARS

I once sold one like this
Anybody who writes about cars should try selling them. A spell in the motor trade will show buyers care little for 0-60 times, understeer, top speed, bhp or the ratio of bore to stroke. They don’t know mpg, mph, ABS, PAS, ECOnetic or Duratorq. All that matters is if mother can get in and out. Or (see BMW item below) whether there is room for the dogs. I had people choose cars on how big the ashtrays were. Colour was vital, a sunroof essential, price negotiable. One catchy gadget, a lever that wound the driver’s window in one movement, proved a clincher. Was the boot big enough to carry samples? Somebody refused a car with carpets – smelly and unhygienic. Small buyers were a problem. So were tall ones. Never had an automatic? Try one now sir; goodness me no something else to go wrong.
Some customers would have nothing “flashy” at any price. They wanted to be anonymous, invisible. Others wanted only the garish and bought cars with chrome grins. Better if it looked American. It scarcely mattered if a car went quickly, so long as it looked as if it might. You could tell on demonstration drives, if prospective buyers watched the car’s reflection in shop windows, they were hooked. Back then Japanese cars were regarded suspiciously, not just because of what happened to our lads in the war, but they seemed flimsy. Germans cars were OK. Germans were engineers.

Prejudice? We were a Wolseley family until a disastrous 6/80 overhead camshaft gave trouble. Mother forbade Wolseleys. Father bought a 3 Litre Princess Vanden Plas instead, a bit upmarket, mechnically identical to a Wolseley 6/99. Mother didn’t do camshafts but she liked wood on the facia.
My brief spell in the Glasgow motor trade taught me more about car buyers than years of research. It was a brief spell. I wasn’t good at it. I was young and it was a rough ride, yet showed me that buyers were conditioned more by what chums told them in pubs, than what they read in The Glasgow Herald. Notwithstanding the purple prose of JB McLaren. Or me.

Blood Sweat and Tyres

The man, “who blew his mind out in a car,” according to the Beatles in A Day in the Life was the Hon. Tara Browne (1945-1966) son of Lord Oranmore and Browne, who died at the wheel of his Lotus Elan after hitting a parked car in Chelsea. I didn’t know that until I started reading Blood Sweat and Tyres, The Little Book of the Automobile, by David Long. I have been in this business so long that it isn’t often I pick up a book about cars crammed with things I didn’t know. Here’s another. After crashing at Brooklands in 1913 Percy Lambert was buried at Brompton Cemetery in a coffin streamlined to match his car. There’s more. BMW commissioned artists like Andy Worhol, David Hockney, Frank Stella and a dozen others you’ve never heard of to do paint jobs on BMWs. They had half a dozen on display at Le Mans Classic last week, looking bizarre. I can’t imagine what they were thinking about. Seemed a waste of perfectly good 3.0CSLs, 635CSi, M1 M3 and many more and judging by the display at Le Mans nobody is remotely interested in them. They are listed among a mass of useless (but invariably absorbing) information in Blood Sweat and Tyres.

Long enjoys lists. He includes the list published in Classic and Sports Car of what designs car designers a) were most proud of and b) most admired. Giugiaro, Peter Stevens and Marcello Gandini all chose the Citroën DS as the most admired. Ian Callum admired the Ferrari 250GT SWB and said he was proudest of the Jaguar XK but that was probably because Jaguar expected him to. Talk to him and he’ll probably say the exquisite Aston Martin DB7.

What a fascinating book of things you didn’t know. There are some things I thought, “Ho-hum”, such as Long’s assertion that thousands of migrating birds use the M5 as an aid to navigation. I think I’d like to see the research. Also not sure about supporting Earl Mountbatten’s claim to have invented headlamps that swivel with the steering.

Long might also have elaborated on a few items. I actually did know that Eleanor Thornton was the model used by Charles Sykes for the Spirit of Ecstasy and she was drowned en route to Egypt. The SS Persia was torpedoed on 30 December 1915 and what he doesn’t say was that she was accompanying Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, with whom she had been having an affair since she became his secretary in 1902.

The entry on Britain’s first sports car (maybe debateable) was a Vauxhall long describes as, “inexplicably named after a Prussian nobleman”. This was the Prince Henry. It was of course titled in recognition of being built for the 1910 Trial sponsored by Prinz Heinrich. See The Vauxhall File, Dove Publishing, 2007, page 50.

Blood Sweat and Tyres is published by The History Press at £9.99

SEAT, The Guinea's stamp

Pretty road test SEAT outside the old house at Rothesay
I used to have a mother-in-law who apologised for not having any real sherry in the house: “I’ve only got this Spanish stuff,” she said. Noreen was from a generation for whom Spain never quite got over the Civil War. Spanish equalled down-market imitation.

It is a bit like that with SEAT. I wrote in Scotland on Sunday in January 2003, that some brands somehow fail to make the grade. Nothing wrong with SEAT cars; they’re Volkswagen Group, but there is something missing. Ever since they were Spanish-built Fiats, and dusty dented ones were hire cars everywhere on the Costa Sunbed, they have never quite found their place. It’s image.

In 1953 the Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (SEAT) made Fiats under licence in a factory in Barcelona, from imported Italian components. The Franco government wanted SEAT to be self sufficient and develop home grown models. The Italian bits hadn’t been very good, but the Spanish ones were no better, and although a million and a half cars were built in ten years, SEAT only prospered so long as competition was kept at bay by Spanish tariffs. SEAT had too many workers, old equipment, and antiquated factories.

It also lost a lot of money rescuing Authi in Pamplona, which had been making Austins and Morrises. Government meddling in motor industries never works. Fiat withdrew support, SEAT invented cars of its own bit it didn’t even do this well, Fiat sued over copyright and it was only with difficulty that courts were convinced a Rondo was not a disguised Ritmo. After the oil crises of the 1970s, Franco’s death and Spain’s recovery, SEAT’s luck changed. It began assembling VWs, designing a car of its own with an engine from Porsche Engineering.

Toyota nearly bought SEAT but was put off by its debts, then in 1985 VW took 51 per cent. It built new factories, making the Alhambra with Ford at Autolatina in Portugal. SEATs were stylish, well-made and racy-looking. VW promoted them as sporting, which was where it all came unstuck. Despite years of promotion SEAT still lacks charisma. VW has image, Audi has image, Skoda has image but SEAT hasn’t.

SEAT’s progenitor Wilfredo Ricart made trucks in Barcelona, the Empresa Nacional de Autocamiones SA, (ENASA). They were called Pegasos, like the winged horse of Pegasus. Ricart also made Pegaso cars, which were exquisite, exclusive, extremely expensive, and between 1951 and 1958 with dry-sump lubrication and sodium-cooled exhaust valves, made Ferraris look dreary. He never thought of calling them ENASAs.

SEAT should have called its cars Pegasos but it’s too late now. Ricart created a heritage that would have been priceless for dull old SEAT. Heritage provides reputation, image. It is, as Burns might have said, the guinea’s stamp although the car’s the gowd for a’ that. Exclusive classic cars with heritage include BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, MG (for the time being anyway) and Porsche. SEAT, I’m afraid, doesn’t make it.
Good detailing. The rear door handle is recessed cleverly to make a 4-door look like a coupe. Automotive News reports: HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) -- Volkswagen AG is aiming for a breakeven at struggling Spanish subsidiary SEAT in the next five years. It is counting on new models to boost sales. Volkswagen has agreed to raise capacity at Martorell, near Barcelona, SEAT CEO James Muir said late on Wednesday. SEAT is using just 60 percent of the plant's capacity. The plant-usage breakeven point is about 65 percent to 68 percent, according to J.D. Power Automotive Forecasting. Anything below results in big losses. SEAT's operating loss widened last year to almost 340 million euros ($431.9 million) from a loss of 78 million euros the previous year. "You can't return to profits just by cutting costs," Muir said. Volkswagen has tried several times to revamp the brand.

Global Warming

Global warming alarmists are losing the plot. You can tell it by the way they suggest anybody who disagrees with them is close to a holocaust denier, and probably a gross polluter. David Aaronovitch (Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers: The Times November 24) adds a predictable canard that, “The witless have permission to drive Porsche Cayenne Turbos”. There is no mistaking the malevolence, convincing me once again that Private Willis in Iolanthe knew what he was singing about, concluding that Nature shared out political views at birth. Alas WS Gilbert's 19th century distinction between Liberal and Conservative was too restrictive. In reality it is between Cavaliers, convinced practicality will see them through, and Roundheads, dirigiste, fundamentalist, pioneers of political correctness who always know what is best for everybody. Cavaliers view government as a sort of referee rather than a maker of restrictive laws and regulations. Roundheads are disciplined, severe and disapproving, convinced of life’s wretchedness and determined to Do Something About It. The division is as fundamental as gender, profound as tall and short, indelible as race or colour and transcends political boundaries. There are Cavaliers and Roundheads on both sides of the House.

Take speed cameras and congestion charging. Cavaliers hate them as Big Brotherly, oppressive, harsh and in the end ineffectual. Roundheads love them. They imagine they punish offenders, organise traffic, and pour cash into the public purse. Take global warming. Cromwell (Oliver not Thomas) would have embraced it as a common cause, requiring action from all to avert hellfire and damnation. Charles I would have treated such doomsters with disdain, remembered the cold snap in the Middle Ages, and driven off in his Porsche Cayenne Turbo, the masterpiece of precision and fuel efficiency.

Cromwell suffered pangs of conscience as he browbeat peasants into compliance, all for their own good you understand, while Charles lost his head. However, come the Restoration common wealth proved to be nothing of the sort, common sense prevailed and the People’s Republic of England collapsed. You can scare some of the people some of the time, but you can not scare all the people all the time and as John Brignell put it, in his review of Christopher Booker and Richard North’s book, Scared to Death, a phenomenon of our age began, “That returned us to the primitive state of our superstitious ancestors, with their witch hunts.” The Aids epidemic was a prototype scare. The UN has since admitted it grossly exaggerated its scope and effects, but scare nevertheless followed scare. There was hysteria about listeria, mad cow disease, the millenium bug, satantic abuse, speed killing, lead in petrol, human CJD, E Coli, passive smoking, asbestos and now there is global warming. Politicians and scientists played charades, created legislation, bureaucracy blossomed, lawyers prospered and the sight of world leaders jostling for attention in Copenhagen provides no reassurance at all that global warming is yet another, following the same ruinous course as the others. The only crumb of comfort is that, as Cromwell was one of the first to discover and Aaronovitch will too, Roundheads, in the end, lose.


close

Motorway driving

This has nothing to do with motorway driving. This is me acting as riding mechanic on the 1906 Grand Prix Renault at Le Mans. (see below)

Scotland on Sunday 27 July 2003

I was driving up the M6 after a two thousand mile round trip mainly on motorways. For the most part the driving was not bad. White Van Man now drives Sprinters at 110mph in the outside lane but except for an articulated truck crossing my path while the driver dived for his Yorkie Bar, or fell asleep, it was pretty well without incident.

Biggest nuisance was the undertaker, left-side traffic stealing through, then pulling in front. One white van passed on the left, swerved over to the outside lane, dodging from lane to lane in a frantic and dangerous bid to get ahead. It made no sense, and made law-abiding drivers wonder where the traffic patrols were.

So what was I doing in the middle lane when there was overtaking space on the left? I like to set the cruise control to an indicated 80mph, that is 77mph for the 10 per cent the law allows, plus a couple of mph to take account of the flatter most speedometers have. At this speed the middle lane of the motorway is comfortable, flyers can fly by on the outside, trucks trundle along on the inside. Everybody, you would think, would be happy.

Not so. Self-appointed guardians of the Highway Code, which says in effect you should always pull over to the left, come up behind at 85mph and make a great display of swerving out to overtake, flash indicators and point leftwards in rebuke. It is never clear exactly what they are mouthing but it seems like indignation. People get shirty if the left lane is unoccupied and there is much flashing of lights, but I am too old and dignified for road rage, and let them get on their high blood pressure way.

I take the view that smooth consistent and predictable behaviour is far better on the motorway (or anywhere else) than dashing from side to side. I am pleased to find the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) supports this. The IAM manual "Pass Your Advanced Driving Test" on the thorny issue of lane discipline says:

"Return to the left when you can, but do not do this over zealously so that you end up constantly skipping from one lane to another. Far too often on motorways you see strings of cars bunched needlessly in the right hand lane queuing up to pass a few people drifting along in the centre lane."

The emphasis is on the over zealous. Unnecessary lane changing can make accidents.

“Drifting along in the centre lane” seems to exclude those, like me, going about their lawful affairs at around the statutory speed limit. Driving experts disapprove of Slow Lane, Middle Lane, and Fast Lane; the outside one is the Overtaking Lane but in theory if the Middle Lane is occupied by 70mph traffic nobody should be overtaking anyway.

The safest roads are those on which all the traffic is doing the same speed. If everybody is bowling along at 50 or 60 or 70 nobody is going to be taken by surprise and leave those lurid skid marks that mean somebody has had a heart-stopping moment or worse. Consistency, changing lane as seldom as possible, and constant monitoring of the mirror are the recipe for motorway safety.

RENAULT RACING



Scotsman Motoring, Eric Dymock 4 May 2006

Renault might look a bit of a Johnny-come-lately to Formula 1, but next month celebrates the centenary of not only grand prix racing, but also its first victory. Perching me high on an antique racing car, with the wind in my face, convinced me of the fortitude of drivers in the heroic age of motor sport. I managed it for several miles; they battled it out on dusty gritty roads in the searing heat of a scorching summer, literally up hill and down dale, for two whole days.

The 1906 French Grand Prix at Le Mans was no hour-and-a-half sprint by Schumachers and Alonsos, cocooned in fire-proof clothing, and strapped into fat-tyred roller skates. A hundred years ago next month, fearless Hungarian Ferenç Szisz and his intrepid riding mechanic Marteau, sat on a swaying one-and-a-half-ton monster with a 13-litre engine, averaging 63mph for the entire 770miles. They reached 100mph, bounced perilously on bone-jarring ruts in the compacted clay surface, scarcely easing up on stretches of railway sleeper roads by-passing villages along the 64 mile course.

Then as now, team managers were up to technical tricks. The flints and the heat shredded tyres; most fatalities in racing followed tyre failure, so in collaboration with Michelin the Renaults’ big wooden artillery wheels had detachable rims. The jantes amovibles were fitted to the back wheels since they wore out faster. Instead of cutting off the worn-out smoking remnants of the old tyres with knives and forcing on new ones, Szisz and Marteau undid eight nuts, and put on a ready-inflated tyre and rim. They were on their way in two minutes instead of their rivals’ ten, and by the end of the first day had 26 minutes in hand. After a second day, despite a last lap nursing a broken spring, they won by half an hour.

Renaults moreover had the first double-acting hydraulic dampers ever used on a racing car, not only for comfort and controllability, but also to spare the tall, narrow and vulnerable tyres.

British carmakers had been suspicious of the French Grand Prix. The Petit Parisien confirmed their doubts about its sporting nature, when it said: “If we win the Grand Prix we shall let the whole world know that French motorcars are the best. If we lose it will merely be by accident…”

The industries were deadly rivals. The British thought the contest would be rigged, so left it to Germany and Italy to enter three teams of three cars, challenging 25 from ten French manufacturers. The race was known simply as The Grand Prix; there was no other. The title meaning big prize, had already been used for the Grand Prix de Pau on 17 February 1901, but it was not applied to anything else until the 1920s.

Officially the Grand Prix of the Automobile Club de France (ACF), the 1906 event was the first great national race, inaugurating a series that has counted towards the drivers’ and manufacturers’ world championships since 1950. The doubts of the British in 1906 were by no means ill founded. The Entente Cordiale had been signed barely two years earlier, but the French motor industry was the biggest in the world, its members formed the nucleus of the ACF, and they had been frustrated by the rules of the Gordon Bennett Cup, the first attempt at international motor races.

This specified one team per country, which seemed unfair to the French, because they had more manufacturers than anybody else. Prompted by the industry that formed the bulk of its membership, the ACF proposed teams for its Grand Prix, entered by make rather than country. The chief protagonists from Italy were Fabbrica Italiani di Automobili Torino (F.I.A.T. forebears of Ferrari) along with Itala, and from Germany the mighty Mercédès. Besides Renault the French teams included Lorraine-Dietrich, Darracq, Gobron-Brillié, Grégoire, Hotchkiss, Clément-Bayard and one of the oldest names in the industry Panhard-Levassor.

Renault’s commemorative expedition to Le Mans used Agatha, the closest thing to the 1906 racers, all of which have been lost. One of ten built, at $8,500 each for William Kissam Vanderbilt Jr to compete in the Vanderbilt Cup races on Long Island in 1908, Agatha is only 7.4litres but leaps off the line with astonishing vigour. The big crankshaft, with pistons the size of biggish teapots, turns only at between 1,200rpm and 1,800rpm, yet pulls with the low-speed strength of a steam engine. Changing gear is ponderous, accomplished with a certain amount of clunking and heaving of the big lever, even in the practised hands of owner German Renault dealer Wolfgang Auge.

The great car’s first owner was Harry Payne Whitney, Vanderbilt’s cousin and heir to a cotton gin fortune. It then passed to mining millionaire Robert Guggenheim, before coming to Britain before the first world war for Lord Kimberley, famous surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, then collector Marcus Chambers of Clapham. The value of all old racing cars collapses when they are no longer eligible for competition, and Chambers later the motor sport manager of the British Motor Corporation (BMC), bought it at the bottom of its cycle. He advertised it in Motor Sport of August 1935 under Veteran Cars as: “1907 Sports Renault, £30 or offer.”

Brothers Anthony and John Mills, named it Agatha, and when Anthony a Royal Air Force squadron leader was killed soon after D-Day it was sold to Charles Dunn until auctioned in 1992 to Wolfgang Auge. It is now almost priceless.

The course of the 1906 race is easily followed. It lies to the east of Le Mans, well clear of the Circuit Permanent de la Sarthe where the Automobile Club de l’Ouest runs the great 24-Hour Grand Prix d’Endurance. Triangular over undulating countryside it goes by the N157 to St-Calais, the D1 to La Ferté Bernard and the Route Nationale N23 back through Connerré to the start-finish line near Le Mans, where the twin tunnels built for spectators to walk from the pits side of the road to the grandstands have been carefully restored

Saab

SAAB

You can’t help thinking Saab is marking time with its new 9-5. The appearance is improved now they’ve got rid of the clumsy chrome surrounds for the grille and headlights. They have rung some changes in the engines and you have to believe Jan- Åke Jonsson, Saab Automobile’s Managing Director when he says, “This car is the start of a new era for our brand.”

It could scarcely be anything else. Given the dire state Saab was in as part of General Motors, it probably marks the end of an old era at the very least. It was only in June that General Motors Corp confirmed a memorandum of understanding for the purchase of Saab Automobile AB by Koenigsegg Group AB.

The sale, expected to be complete by the third quarter, included $600 million from the European Investment Bank (EIB) guaranteed by the Swedish government. More support will come from GM to pay for day to day operations and invest in new products. That means this 9-5 announced in Frankfurt. It must have been in the final stages of development when GM was planning to move production to the Opel factory in Rüsselsheim.

“This is yet another significant step in the reinvention of GM and its European operations,” intoned GM Europe President, Carl-Peter Forster extremely relieved to get shot of the embarrassing little Swedish firm. GM had never been able to make a go of it since buying 50 per cent in 1989 and the remainder in January 2000. He said, “Saab is a highly respected automotive brand with great potential. Closing this deal represents the best chance for Saab to emerge a stronger company. Koenigsegg Group's unique combination of innovation, entrepreneurial spirit and financial strength, combined with Koenigsegg's proven ability to create world-class Swedish performance cars in a highly efficient manner, made it the right choice for Saab as well as for General Motors.”

Well he couldn’t say anything else.

Part of the transaction was for GM to provide Saab with architecture and powertrain technology during what was described as a defined time period. This must now mean Saab producing the 9-5 in Trollhättan, but who is going the buy the things during a “defined time period” however long or short.

The Konigsegg deal is bizarre. Founded by Christian von Koenigsegg in 1994, it is a tiny outfit that makes the 395 kph (245mph) CCX at Angelholm, southern Sweden, in a former Swedish Air Force hangar. Norwegian entrepreneur Bard Eker owns 49 per cent through his holding company Eker Group AS. Koenigsegg made 18 cars last year, Saab around 90,000. Koenigsegg employs 45 people, Saab 3,400.

Saab has made cars in Trollhattan since 1949. The 9-5 and 9-3 built in Trollhättan, the 9-3 Cabriolet by Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria.

The announcement of, “The most technically advanced Saab ever” has a hollow ring. Saab is careful to say it was conceived, built but only “chiefly” developed in Sweden, and will compete head-to-head with leading premium class competitors. It can at best be interim and its on-sale date of 2010 means Trollhättan is being hastily reorganised to make it. How difficult to shift the company culture back from dreamy aerospace to what Saab really did best, quirky all-Scandianavian relatively low-tech but high-quality mid-range saloons.

“Dramatic wraparound window graphic echoes Saab’s aviation heritage. With styling inspired by the award-winning Aero X concept car and a muscular, low-slung stance, the new 9-5 heralds the introduction of a bold and expressive design language.” They really can’t get out of the rut. “Aircraft-inspired head-up information display (HUD) - fuselage-smooth surfacing of the bodywork - deep grille flanked with curving, ice-block headlamp units. The entire glasshouse is presented as a ‘wraparound’ mono graphic: the disguised windshield and side pillars giving the cabin Saab’s signature cockpit look. In this interplay of proportions, the windshield and roof are reminiscent of the classic 900 model.”

Saab, like Jaguar, was one of the classic makes that lost its way under big corporate ownership. Ford and GM did not quite know how to keep the good bits and manage the money side. There were too many cooks in Detroit, and the broth was spoiled. The 9-5 will probably be a perfectly good car but it remains to be seen if the European Investment Bank’s $600million will be enough, or if Sweden is going to see yet another Phoenix Four emerge to turn a profit out of a crisis.

Dove Publishing produced the award-winning SAAB HALF A CENTURY OF ACHIEVEMENT 1947-1997. See www.dovepublishing.co.uk.

Other People's Driving

Other people’s driving always makes good copy in a motoring column. Witness the eloquent David Finlay (www.carkeys.co.uk) ‘Motorway Madness’ 17 July. The idea aired recently that police could levy on the spot fines recalled a driving incident 21 years ago that I used in my Fast Lane magazine column. Magistrates are quite right to resist providing the plods with such authority. The courteous, cultured and intelligent Peter Dron edited Fast Lane and was kind enough to run my column every week for four years. He took the view that editors should not interfere with what a columnist wrote. The authorities are still dithering over what to do with the A303 close to where this incident took place, unable to make up its mind what to do with the bit passing Stonehenge. I wonder how long the chap in the Sapphire survived. The 21 years that have passed have also seen speed cameras come and very nearly go. And my son is now 42.

Fast Lane, April 1988

True story. I am driving a Porsche Turbo, not mine, Porsche’s, along the A303. It is a fine morning, the road is damp, then sun’s well up, it is closing 9am and I am thinking, ‘hello my son’s 21 today’. So I remember the date. It is February 2, and I am driving from deepest Wiltshire to Egham.

Do not ask why, that is not part of the story.

At about 0830, a man in a hairy tweed suit has put on a hairy hat, adjusted his glasses, said goodby to his wife and got into his blue Ford Sapphire, new last year, clean as a whistle. He comes from womewhere near Market Lavington, or Tilshead on Salisbury Plain (where they’re up in arms about the army building a German village, to practise fending off the invading hordes expected at any time from the east). He is on his way to his office in Salisbury, and he willreach the A303 in about half an hour at a village called Winterbourne Stoke. There have been two fatal accidents there since I came to the district, it is an unhappy little place. He is thinking it’s a nice sunny day, a bit windy perhaps, as he collects his morning paper and gives a lift to a friend.

I drive from the junction with the A36 Salisbury-Bath road. The A303 is a well surfaced dual carriageway, block, glistening and beckoning. This Porsche accelerates with satisfying swiftness, zero to 60mph in 5.7 seconds. It is one of the fastest point to point cars I have ever driven, nimbler than a 928, yet, at 160mph, nearly as fast. It will exceed twice the legal speed limit with ease. I drift past the odd car and truck – crawling, unhurried, their drivers day dreaming. Winterbourne Stoke, surprisingly enough, is not yet bypassed by this trunk route, now splendid dual carriageway for much of its length.

You drop down into Winterbourne, whee the whitewashed houses stand out clear in the crisp morning light. You can’t overtake, there’s a double white line curving left handed, then right, as the road narrows to standard two-way. The big disc brakes squeal just a little – wonderful brakes with the four-piston fixed calliper of the 928S and ventilated discs. The 944 slows obediently behind a large white covered lorry. A refrigerated van I guess.

The B3083 joins from the left. The A303 bends to the right through the village. There are good sight lines. The truck is doing about 40 – there is a speed limit. I am about four cars’ lengths astern so I can see in sharp detail.

The Sapphire noses out from the side road, the driver looks, I can see his round face and silly hat – and on he comes. The truck driver can no more believe it than I can. His brake lights go on. There is smoke from his locked wheels, which he seems to sense. The brake lights go off. I am going to see a painful accident. I think of the traffic I have just overtaken. They’ll say, “I bet it was the Porsche’s fault; serves him right,” when they see the wreckage. Ungracious, but that’s how people are.

The Sapphire is now well into the truck’s path. But the truckie, to his credit, is equal to the situation. Here is a one-man ABS system. The brake lights go on again – and off – and on – and he steers round the Sapphire with inches to spare. It is like the Ford TV commercial for anti-lock brakes.

I don’t expect he will ever read this. Fast Lane doesn’t sell much to truckies. I wish I’d noted down his number, or the name on the side, so that I could write and tell his boss what a good driver he’s got. I felt like pointing out to the Sapphire driver that his life had just been saved.

I needn’t have bothered. Truckie stopped and without so much as pause to wipe his brow opened his door, got down, and told hairy tweedy himself.

Question. Who is the hooligan? Wind the video back a couple of minutes. Here is old tweedy, going about his presumably lawful occasions, strapped into his Sapphire on a quiet country road, passing the time of day with his chum. Ambling to work, talking about last night’s TV. Paying not a blind bit of notice to death stalking him from his starboard side on the A303.

Here am I, in my splendid Porsche, disappearing over the brow of the hill in a cloud of spray with finger-wagging and cluck-clucking from anybody who happens to see me, and a wigging from the local bench had I – heaven forfend – been exceeding the statorury speed limit.

Which of us was being dangerous?

The difference I suppose might lie in acknowledging that driving cars is dangerous. Tweedy at 5mph seemed to think he was bomb proof, while I know perfectly well that I could have an accident as easily as anybody – but try not to.

I am no campaigner for lifting the 70 limit. I am not deeply unhappy about the present state of affairs. Imposing it in the first place was crass, a panic measure by the miserable Tom Fraser, a Minister of Transport besides whom the witless Bottomley seems inventive and dynamic. But now nobody pays much attention to the limit. Unless you sweep past them at 130, not even the police. They’ve got more to do. Chief Constables would like photographic speed-monitoring equipment, which would be a touch uncomfortable, but since I don’t break the limit by much on motorways as a rule, it wouldn’t concern me.

Besides, it is just as well there are some powers that authority has in reserve for the wholly incompetent. I would prefer if they were able to impose a stricter IAM-style driving test – that would weed-out a few. Failing that, throw some penalty points around and get them off the road that way.

The awesrome thought is that there are Hairy Tweeds who don’t just poke the nose of their shiny new Sapphires out on to the A303 at 5mph. They are out there, on the M3 every day, doing 70 or more. God help us.