Notes From the Hard Shoulder Read online

  Every T110 MAS, Dl CKS or HAR 13Y wants a personalised registration plate these days, and with catastrophic results. Some of the offerings currently advertised in my pile of car mags are just plain cringeworthy. Does R19 MEO look like 'romeo' to you? It does? May I suggest you stop driving immediately. Does J4 DFS really say 'Jade's'? MYA 35E it does. Do you expect people to be impressed? I'm going to think you simply can't SPE 1L.

  Look, Mr P Gent: paying several thousand pounds for P9 ENT is a grave M15 TAK, because a 9 does not look like a G even through the wrong bit of your bifocals. And if you happen to be called Barry, I would counsel against buying 134 RRY because that's not your name. It's not even a word. And when people find out you spent £9,995 on it they're going to think that YOU 51R are a bit of a TOS 53R.

  Viz comic once famously pointed out that it was much cheaper to change your name to match the number plate you already had than fork out for a personalised one. I've come up with another idea. I'm going to claim that the letters in my registrations are actually clever acronyms. Thus the Bentley's, TOY 102W, means 'Tiller Of Yacht' and the SPF 856R on the Jag advises of a 'Suspicious Puddle in Footwell'.

  On second thoughts, this is a RUB 15H idea. I've also noticed that the Bentley's number looks like it could be meant as a personalised one, so I'll have to write to Classic Nouveau Registrations and request something completely meaningless instead. This is going to be a tough call for an organisation that thinks SA02 RAH says 'Sarah'.

  There is no more tragic testimony to our society's self-obsession than the personalised number plate. If you really think I need to know that your name's Terry, just get a big felt tip and write 'T3rry' on the rear bumper. Unless you're the stationery magnate I once met who had the registration number A4 PAD, no one is going to be impressed.

  Please, please stop it. It's not B1 GOR C13 VER.

  IS IT A CAR? IS IT A BIKE? NO. AND NO.

  Attempts to combine the virtues of the car and the motorcycle in a single machine have rarely been successful. An early example was the so-called motorcycle combination, a German development. Originally, this comprised a normal motorcycle fitted with a wheeled platform on to which a Spandau machine gun was mounted. However, its makers soon discovered that it was impossible to ride the bike and work the gun at the same time.

  Rudimentary bodywork was added to the gun platform and a second German installed with the sole job of firing the weapon, leaving the original rider free to operate the motorcycle's controls and shout 'Himmel!' when a wire, stretched across the road by the French Resistance, sliced his head off. Unwittingly, the sidecar had been born.

  After the war, British bike designers refined the idea, removing the machine gun, installing the wife, and thus creating a means by which the motorcycle licence holder could transport the nuclear family, though ideally only around right-hand bends.

  A later development was the microcar, a movement again spearheaded by the Germans. After the war car-building materials were in short supply, but a job lot of leftover cockpits from the Messerschmitt and Heinkel factories were quickly converted into simple runabouts, although shortages meant that none was ever fitted with more than three wheels. As with the earlier combination, any motorcyclist who had survived the cheesecutter experience was permitted to drive one. But again the concept did not really take off, although quite a few turned over.

  The car/bike hybrid then stagnated until the year 2000 and the launch of the – German again – BMW CI. This time, however, the philosophy was a winner – a crash-proof scooter designed for just one-up riding and allowing hard-pressed senior officers to cut confidently through the horrific build-up of traffic caused by the now infamous Retreat from Longbridge.

  The C1 rider sat in a proper seat with a five-point safety belt and behind a windscreen fitted with a wiper and washer system. Protruding bump-stops protected machine and occupant in the event of a fall, and the whole offered frontal crash protection equivalent to that of a small car. No airbag was fitted, however, and C1 riders were denied parachutes in the belief that they would undermine morale, although a heated seat, sat-nav and ABS were available. In Britain a helmet was mandatory lest the rider should be recognised.

  The C1 was simplicity itself to ride, being essentially a twist 'n' go CVT-equipped scooter with additional bodywork. And because the engine was a mere 125cc and limited to 15bhp, full car-licence holders could ride it providing they passed Compulsory Basic Training, basically a programme of indoctrination involving bollards.

  Initially, the C1 was seen to wobble around at low speed owing to its high centre of gravity. Later, it was observed cranked over at mini roundabouts and later still abandoned outside a cafe while its rider recovered from the shell-shock induced by its four-stroke Rotax single.

  Overall, though, the C1 was considered the best attempt yet to combine the security of the car with the convenience of the bike, being narrow enough to bypass traffic jams but without the risks associated with earlier two-wheelers. However, some regarded it as a bit poncey. To counter this, BMW also developed a proper l,100cc motorbike on which riders could still have proper crashes.

  IF HE KNOWS, HE'S NOT SAYING ANYTHING

  As the subject for an interview, this man does not look at all promising. The survivor of over 100 life-threatening car crashes, he is best described as the strong silent type, bearing the traumas of his unfortunate lifestyle with tight-lipped, unflinching stoicism. Sid – for side-impact dummy, more properly Euro-Sid to distinguish him from the US equivalent – reveals the misery of his life only through the electronic data logger wired up to the 25 or so transducers and accelerometers implanted in his rather unsavoury rubbery body.

  He lives and works at the Transport Research Laboratory near Wokingham and his keeper, Adrian Roberts, is evidently very proud of the lad, TRL having played an influential part in Sid's upbringing and Roberts being personally responsible for his thorax. (His record-breakingly untidy office is littered with books on anatomy and creepy bits of dismembered body.) Sid's work involves not testing new cars but, in effect, testing the tests proposed for side-impact legislation. He sits in for you and me at a preview of the accident supposedly waiting to happen to us, giving an uncannily human form to the mass of recording equipment that determines whether our bones would break. The data on which such calculations are based comes from real accident statistics and the grisly business of crash testing with cadavers. Sid has a brother who also works at TRL. His name is Sid, too.

  Considering his obvious personality shortcomings, Sid is a remarkably interesting bloke. (A bloke he definitely is, by the way – the shape of his pelvis confirms it.) He was born in 1990 but was conceived back in 1983 when, in a moment of far-sightedness, a working group of some subsection of the European Experimental Vehicles Committee managed to stay awake long enough to recognise the need for a dedicated dummy design to serve Europe's upcoming side-impact laws. Prior to our man there were two different French dummies, an English one and a number of donor organs available for spare-part surgery, such as an abdomen from Holland. Euro-Sid was created, Frankenstein-like, from the most promising bits of his numerous ancestors – well bred he is not – though these days most of the parts are made in Letchworth. The head, however, comes from America, which probably explains his fine cheekbones.

  When I met Sid he was slumped on his trolley in the TRL storeroom, head lolling to one side, bits of junk lying in his lap, expression (what there is of it) fixed and uncomprehending. As in the trenches, his life consists of interminable stretches of inactivity interspersed with brief bursts of unimaginable danger. Interpreter Roberts relishes his description of Sid's role in a typical experimental side-impact test, describing the horror within earshot of the wretched mannequin. Actually, he doesn't have any ears.

  Like the highlight in some sideshow of the Victorian grotesque, he is wheeled out before the expectant crowd and strapped roughly into the driving seat – he weighs the same as a fully grown male and is 'not helpful', says Rober
ts. He is then brought to 'life' with a short, sharp electric shock to his sensors, lights blaze, cameras roll, an ominous whirring sound swells as the crash barrier accelerates to 30mph, but Sid, with the iron-jawed dignity of a revolutionary before the firing squad, 'just stares straight ahead'. The impact is at its most punishing on his spring-loaded ribs and pelvis; his head often smashes against the window and a few seconds later Sid is slumped on the passenger seat in eerie silence, his agony downloaded to the grey box of electronics behind him.

  He is not actually designed to sustain physical damage – his ribs, for example, flex beyond a point where ours would snap, sensors determining what real bones would do. He once lost a leg in an accident but generally gets off lightly compared with his more distant relatives in frontal impact testing, whose heads have been known to roll around on the floor. A placard around his neck proclaims: 'Lives left: 6/10'. Another six prangs and Sid will be ruthlessly pulled apart by his keepers for recalibration, to ensure his capacity for suffering has not been dulled. He is still young for a dummy; Roberts reckons there are years of alternating neglect and abuse left in him.

  Sid's job is a crucial one and he performs it with Samaritan selflessness, absorbing our own pain by proxy and softening the blow if it should ever come to us. And yet I can't help but dislike him intensely. It's something to do with his impenetrable exterior, his spooky sub-humanity, his contemptible passivity; make a cruel joke about his missing forearms, slap his face, strap him in a car and crash it, pull his head off even – his expression remains cold, fixed and unreveal-ing. Such a loveless existence must make an impression somewhere other than in the crash-test log. Like the mild boy who was bullied at school, there is surely only so much even a dummy can take....

  I now have a new nightmare in which Sid and all his po-faced friends rise up, take to the roads and exact a terrible revenge.

  PART 3 – THESE ONES ARE ACTUALLY ABOUT CARS, SORT OF

  HOW GREAT CARS COME TO BE ABANDONED IN OLD BARNS

  Every now and then, one of the classic car magazines runs a type of story that has always baffled me. It begins with the revelation that something like a rare Lamborghini has been found abandoned in a garage.

  Reading on, we discover that it's been there since 1980. It's very dusty and the tyres are flat but, remarkably, it's complete and in need of only 'gentle recommissioning', as the classics lot put it.

  A few months later we see a picture of the same car, gleaming like new, and bowling down a tree-lined road in the hands of a bloke who never imagined he could get his hands on such a thing. Marvellous.

  Now here's what I've never understood. How did anyone ever forget about owning a Lamborghini? Or grow bored of owning one? How did a car that is obviously in sound condition end up sitting idle for 25 years? If the previous owner didn't like it, why wasn't it sold? Or even given away? All it took was a postcard in the local newsagent's window.

  I can see how a fountain pen might work its way to the back of a desk drawer and be overlooked for two decades. A few years ago I bought my girlfriend a pair of boots that she didn't really like, and they are in the corner of her wardrobe, still in the original box and awaiting the great day when they appear on eBay as an item of mint and unused retro chic. But a car? I really don't foresee a day when I can't be bothered with my Boxster any more, and I just leave it in its garage gathering mould and mouse droppings. Apart from anything else, I'd want the garage space.

  But now I understand exactly how it happens. I recently drove around France making a new programme for the BBC, and for this purpose I bought a 1989 Jaguar XJ-S convertible.

  It was a good one. Everything on it worked, there was no rot, the hood was free of tears, the mileage was confirmed at under 60,000, and I loved it. Before I left I had it thoroughly serviced and checked over, and a few marginal components such as radiator hoses and brake pads were replaced. It still had its original toolkit and spare wheel, and even the unused bag thing that the conscientious owner is supposed to use to cover the hood when it's folded. And I've always wanted an XJ-S convertible.

  After a few days of driving around France, it sprang a small oil leak. Tiny, really, and from the little micro switch that governs the oil pressure gauge on the instrument panel. Sadly, this little component was not available in any of the local garages I tried, so I resigned myself to topping up the oil instead. It was only losing a spoonful of 20/50 each day, and as it was all dripping on France I wasn't that bothered. I'd sort it out when I got home.

  And this is exactly where all those Lamborghini-in-a-barn stories really begin. The Jaguar had crossed that invisible line between being a car and being a car that 'needs some work'. It was the first scuff on a new pair of shoes, the first chip in the paint of a newly decorated room, that moment when the case for your sunglasses disappears.

  So when the air conditioning packed up owing to some otherwise minor electrical fault, I decided to live with it for the moment. The car needed work anyway, so that was just something else to add to the list. As was the passenger-door mirror, which somehow became detached from its electric motor, so that the motor whirred away but the mirror didn't move. I could sort that out in half an hour when I was in my own garage with my own toolbox.

  I think you can see where this is going. There were now three faults with the Jag, and fixing them all was probably a day's work. That became two days when a Frenchman drove into the back of me and bent the bumper. And then it needed another day, because another Frenchman (or it may have been a German, since we were in Alsace and no one is entirely sure who owns it at the moment) scraped a rear wheel arch in a car park.

  This is why the so-called 'rolling restoration' of an old car never works; the notion that the car can be driven while you complete all those little jobs concerning trim, paint, interior lights, dicky alternators and so on. It's not possible, because in driving the car you will create problems quicker than they can be cured. A rolling restoration is really just a headlong and brake-less descent to the scrapyard.

  And as the weeks passed, more things fell apart. The trip computer died, the back of the driver's seat fell off, one of the windows became loose, the exhaust started blowing when I clouted it on a boulder, the radio aerial jammed in the down position.

  Here's where it ends. For complex reasons to do with insurance for filming, the Jag was actually bought by the production company making the programme, the idea being that I would buy it from them when we'd finished. I've now put it in their car park and run away, so it could stay there for 20 years. And then a Classic Cars journalist as yet unborn will find it and wonder how it came to be forgotten.

  I still want an XJ-S, but I don't want that one. It's broken. If I'd mended the oil leak I might have stayed on top of it, but I didn't and now it's ruined. It's been filed under 'too difficult', like the letter from the video hire shop reminding me that I still have their copy of Where Eagles Dare and owe them £120. That's been at the bottom of my in-tray for at least six years.

  If there's anything wrong with your car – anything – stop what you're doing and go and sort it out. Now. Same goes for your house. There's probably a loose door knob or a damp patch that needs fixing. Do it.

  Do it, before the next problem comes along, or it will all become too much. It may seem like nothing more than an irritating small job to you, but somewhere, a man with a bulldozer is limbering up for the demolition job.

  BREAKING DOWN IS NOT SO HARD TO DO

  I've had the AA out five times in the last six months. Once for a motorcycle, twice for the Range Rover, once for the '70s Lamborghini and now for the 911. If I carry on at this rate I'll be blackballed and required to go into the club library with my revolver to do the decent thing.

  Most breakdowns are pretty tiresome – flat batteries, wonky starter motors, fuel-pump fuses and what have you. And on the whole they seem to occur when the car isn't even running, which invites comparisons with the old saw about the Christmas tree lights that were working when you put th
em away.

  But the 911's was interesting because it resulted from the failure of a small electronic sensor on the crankshaft, the signals from which are vital to the function of the little computer that ministers to the engine. So when that went, everything packed up. There was no misfiring, no clattering, no precursor of dissent from the workings of the flat six, in fact no warning at all. One moment the 911 was functioning perfectly, the next it wasn't functioning at all.

  There must have been an exact point in time, yet occupying no time in itself, that divided the era when the 911 worked from the era when it didn't. It was a good, clean breakdown.

  Curiously, I'd been reading Ralph Barker's excellent Brief History of the Royal Flying Corps in World War 1. Engine failures were common in early aeroplanes, especially during the full-power stress of take-off, and the correct course of action was (still is, in fact) to pick a field as near to directly ahead as possible and return to earth with the aeroplane in a reusable condition. The wrong course of action was to give in to the impulse to turn back to the airfield, which would usually result in a stall, a spin and a crash.

  This bit of early aviation lore served me well on the dual-carriageway portion of the A4 near London. With the 911 suddenly, utterly and irrevocably dead in the outside lane, there were but a few seconds in which to choose a place to land. With just a few mph left on the clock, I rolled safely into the car park of a corporate complex.

  Contrast this with the demise of my chum Hammond's ancient MG Midget. That breakdown was such a drawn-out and agonising episode that there was time for us to have an argument about it while it was still happening.