James May - The Times

[RedMoon11]

Captain Slow Has Hung Up His Slippers. Now I’m Brigadier Balistico

Ferrari is playing up the F1 technology behind its first hybrid supercar but what wins your heart is its sheer beauty and superb handling

James May     Published: 11 May 2014

ONCE ON a much earlier trip to visit Ferrari in Maranello, I stayed at Il Grande Albergo Bruno, which I thought sounded quite exotic. Until I realised it simply meant “the big brown hotel”, which rather spoilt everything.

I suspect Ferrari will have a similar problem with its new hybrid supercar, the LaFerrari. It seems almost romantic, but translated into English it sounds more like a car that might have belonged to a forgotten 1980s beat combo: the TheFerrari.

Still, silly name but a fabulous car, the diametric opposite of a Jensen Interceptor. It’s stunning — just standing alongside it, merely contemplating its existence, triggers a carnal disturbance.

One of the things I love about Ferrari’s styling is that it’s never become hung up on design heritage or any timorous nonsense like that. A new model always looks resolutely modern, and that, I’m sure, explains why old ones are often more coveted than other cars. A Ferrari is of its time, although sadly this does mean we have to live with the 1984 Testarossa.

But a Ferrari must also dwell at the fuzzy edge of what can be achieved with the performance and roadholding of a car; otherwise it has no dignity. Without this a Ferrari would be nothing more than a stylistic sham, just as a Range Rover would be if it were useless off road.

I love supercars, even though I know they’re a bit ridiculous, that they confer no particular qualities on their owners and that no distressed woman has yet run into a room and cried in desperation, “Can anyone here drive a supercar?” I love Ferraris the most. I own one, in fact, and I love it mainly because ’tis a thing of beauty that gives me a small tingly sensation whenever I look at it.

So the LaFerrari is gorgeous, and that’s the way it should be. Its interplay of curves and corners makes the lozenge-based theme of Lamborghini’s (admittedly knockout) Aventador seem a bit trite. Inside, LaFerrari — can we dispense with the “the”? Good — treads a perfect line between stripped-out weight consciousness and good taste. It’s obviously pared back in line with its serious performance remit, but it’s not a dreary temple to composites and Alcantara. It’s still somehow upholstered.


The LaFerrari has a fixed driving seat — it is the pedals and steering wheel that are adjustable. This allows for a lower roof and a lower centre of gravity

There’s also a lot of regular new-age supercar stuff to consider with LaFerrari. It’s made from carbon fibre, of course, four varieties of the stuff, blended together, popped in an autoclave and baked at 150C for three hours or so until uniformly stiff and horribly expensive.

There are active aerodynamics all over it: splitters, a front wing and a movable rear one that doesn’t merely go up and down — as the Porsche 911’s does — but veritably dances around by degrees depending on what’s going on. It even knows when you’re about to enter a corner, apparently.

It has the same wheelbase as a 458 Italia and same overall length as an Enzo, but it is 40mm narrower than the latter and its centre of gravity is 35mm lower. This alone, says Ferrari, is worth 2.2 seconds a lap at the Nürburgring. It also explains why the driver’s seat is fixed, and that it’s the pedals and wheel that move to counter the impression that someone else has borrowed your car.

Fixing the seat reduces the overall length — by the amount a conventional seat is required to move fore and aft — and doing away with the seat mechanism puts the driver, and hence the roof, and therefore the centre of gravity, lower still.

And that’s all wonderful, but it is stock supercar fare. What’s really interesting here is that LaFerrari is a hybrid, the company’s first, and this needs some qualification. A hybrid, we all know, is a car with an internal combustion engine and an electric motor. It might be a “series hybrid”, such as the Fisker Karma, in which the engine works simply as a generator of electricity. It could be a “parallel hybrid”, such as the ubiquitous Toyota Prius, in which either the petrol engine or the electric motor or both can drive the wheels.

Or it could be LaFerrari, which is really a road-going interpretation of Formula One Kers (kinetic energy recovery system) technology; the electric motor is there as a sort of power supplement — a bit like those capsules for men advertised on the backs of buses.

It’s important to understand that LaFerrari cannot be driven on electric power alone because, as Ferrari bluntly puts it: “We are not interested in electric cars.” LaFerrari is a petrol-powered supercar like any other Ferrari, and works only because you fill it up with super-unleaded.

Rather, the electric motor and battery pack are there as a means of harnessing and reusing energy that in earlier and less enlightened times we would have thrown away to the cosmos in the form of wasted heat — mainly from the brakes. Braking wastes fuel because you’re getting rid of energy that was obtained from the fuel. Kers saves it instead in the form of generated electricity and presents it ready for use when you want it — when it’s time to accelerate.

This is not a car with a 789bhp V12 petrol engine and a 161bhp electric motor. It’s a 950bhp car, and the electric motor is simply an element of the powertrain, in the way the alternator or the oil pump is. That motor is always doing something — driving, generating charge — and should be thought of as part of the transmission since it helps with the job of converting furious combustion into motion.

Here, perhaps, is an easier way of thinking about it. The appeal of the internal combustion engine actually lies in its shortcomings, in the peaks and troughs in its delivery, which we must learn to exploit, and in that it needs a gearbox to be useful to us.



James in the LaFerrari

A high-revving and peaky supercar engine is the most exciting because it is in some ways the most flawed — it must be stretched and worked hard to give of its best. A plodding diesel with its uniform torque curve makes more sense, but doesn’t really translate into a buzz in your abdomen.

LaFerrari’s hybrid system gives you low-down torque — that is, sheer grunt — when you need it most: powering out of a bend, rolling on in a high gear. It offers a diesel-like quality but only when you require it. The rest of the time it sparkles like the windows in Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. How brilliant is that?

Obviously I’m simplifying this. You should be grateful, as the technical presentation through which all this was explained included a lot of graphs and charts. I timed the event, and it came out only about 15 minutes shorter than Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. Kers is a fairly simple idea in physics but a fiendishly complex proposition in real-world automotive engineering.

Thankfully, if you are lucky enough to buy LaFerrari, you can forget all this. The car is, as Ferrari’s seemingly 15-year-old test driver Raffaele de Simone put it as he climbed in next to me for a lesson on the Fiorano test track, “just a Ferrari”. The controls are perfectly familiar to anyone who has driven a 458 — most of them are the same, in fact — and you drive LaFerrari as you’d drive any other car.

It is simply a blindingly fast and beautifully balanced supercar, with sublime steering and an intoxicatingly granular engine that happens to out-perform its Enzo predecessor while cutting its CO2 levels by more than 200g/km. This is not a measure of Ferrari’s concern for the planet but of how much more efficiently petrol can now be consumed. It’s like being some sort of energy benefits cheat.

You can, if you want, dial up a segmented circular dashboard display that will show you as a series of flashing lights exactly how your energy is being managed. I don’t recommend it, though, because it’s like trying to drive through a prog-rock gig, and a bit distracting.

Feel it instead. As I drove up the tortuous roads in the hills above Modena, I would enter a sharp bend, boot the pedal to drive out of it and think, for a tiny fraction of a second: “Sod it — should’ve gone down another gear.”

But then in less time than it takes for one of Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo’s eyeballs to twinkle I’d realise that I had it right after all. That’s the real-world effect of LaFerrari’s hybrid drive, a wonderful credit and debit system for dealing with power, and the harder you go, the better it works. The more you spend, the more you save — just as with one of those garden tool promotions at B&Q.


The LaFerrari

It was much the same on the Fiorano track, where the forgiving nature of the power delivery covered up for a few untimely changes and a bit of shoddy positioning. I thought my performance was absolutely balistico; Raffaele said my handling of the notorious “turn seven” was now “really quite good” but around 25mph slower than it should have been. I’m pretty sure it’s the quickest I’ve driven a car around a track, including the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport.

But quicker than the McLaren P1 or Porsche’s 918 Spyder? This is the hybrid supercar showdown that the world seems to be waiting for, and sooner or later it will have to happen. One of them will be the fastest round a circuit — the Top Gear track, perhaps — and thus probably the planet’s quickest road-going car.

It will be intriguing, but in a way I’m not really bothered. We will need the telescope of history to know whether hybrid drive is relevant in the long run, or if it’s just a buffer during a gradual shift to moving around using other sources of energy.

Anyway, I’ve already decided I want LaFerrari. Time will gradually diminish the significance of the dry figures that denote its performance, and only the artistry will remain. I want the Ferrari for the principal reason that anybody wants one. Because it is the loveliest.

Ferrari LaFerrari

Engine: 6262cc, V12 petrol unit with electric motor
Power (combined): 950bhp @ 9000rpm
Torque (combined): 663 lb ft @ 6750rpm (estimated)
Transmission: 7-speed dual clutch automatic
Acceleration: 0-62mph: 2.9sec
Top speed: 217mph-plus
Fuel: Not available
CO2: 333g/km (estimated)
Road tax band: M (£1,090 first year; £500 thereafter)
Price: £1m (subject to exchange rate)
Release date: All 499 sold out

JAMES MAY'S LaFERRARI VERDICT

In a sentence: LaFuture of supercars

CRITIC'S RATING: ★★★★★

You might not be able to get your hands on a LaFerrari
 but you can search for a used one on driving.co.uk

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1408221.ece





www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-mays-first-drive-review-ferrari-laferrari-2014/

[Flying Lady]

You are absolutely a star for posting this article in its entirely, delicious photos included. Thank you so much!

[RedMoon11]

Lose the Lada, Comrade: Try a Lamborghini

The people’s car began as a box on wheels, says James May, who tells its story in a new TV series. But as the people got richer, the cars got flashier

James May Published: 10 August 2014



Watch a trailer of James May's Cars of the People


CARS OF the people sounds like a mantra from a proletariat uprising. If only history were that simple.

In fact, what I regard as the first true people’s car was a socio-political initiative by an oppressive regime. I mean the Volkswagen Beetle, the vehicle that came to popularise the term people’s car (although it didn’t create it — the idea had been kicking around in Germany for a while). The KdF Wagen (Kraft durch Freude — German for strength through joy), as the Beetle was then known, turned out to be a Reich rip-off.

National socialism’s foray into motor trading made Dame Shirley Porter’s sale of homes for votes look no worse than a game of knock down Ginger on a Westminster council estate.

Would-be buyers of the car paid for stamps to stick in a savings book with the idea that the book, when full, would be redeemed for the car. Instead, the Beetle factory was converted to produce the Kübelwagen (a military vehicle that was to the Germans what the Willys jeep was to the allies) and the customers never received the cars they had been promised.

The car bores will ask why I haven’t yet mentioned the Ford Model T. It does appear in my three-part series Cars of the People — starting on BBC2 at 9pm tonight — but only briefly. To start with, it has all been said many times before, and I wanted to avoid driving one because there always comes a moment, as an unexpected hazard emerges, when you forget which lever to pull or pedal to press.

No, the people’s car story begins in earnest in the 1930s, when the possibility of cars for all was first recognised outside America. Hitler was a great admirer of Henry Ford — and, more worryingly, vice versa. So we start with the Beetle.

Motoring becomes the new opiate and a means of controlling the masses, buying their fealty, or liberating and empowering them. It depends on which country and which decade you’re in.

The Beetle is the most interesting and scandalous car of all time and one worthy of three hours of telly on its own. But we must move on to Lada, VEB Sachsenring Automobilewerke — the maker of the Trabant — and the fledgling Subaru, to name just a few.

A true people’s car was one attainable by those who never imagined they could own such a thing — or would even be allowed to. But once that point was passed and car ownership became more of an assumption than a privilege, the definition changed.

The people’s car became a matter of aspiration, with a hint of working-class hero — more Lennon than Leninist. Ford reasserted itself here, with the Mustang and Capri, svelte coupé forms previously the preserve of the toffs but now available to the plebs at saloon-car prices.

Rolls-Royce, too, fell into hands with dirty fingernails, a victim of its own arrogance and overproduction. The classic Shadow, originally a symbol of plutocracy, has become the plaything of hobbyists with a distinctly limited budget, driven with a hint of irony, in the way peaceniks wear army surplus combat jackets.

In between there are the likes of a Zündapp car that’s the same at both ends, the inevitable Reliant and a funny French thing made from tin.

I’ve tried to avoid the obvious clichés of Model T, Austin 7, Mini and Toyota Corolla. I’ve been deliberately bloody-minded about the definition of people’s car in order to explore some shadier corners of the meaning of the tired old phrase. That’s why there’s a motorcycle in the series. And a van.

There’s also a lot that isn’t there but probably should be. The sport ute of Australia springs to mind, as does the original Toyota Land Cruiser. India’s Maruti factory would be worthy of study — the only one I’ve visited running at more than 100% capacity — and the Tata Nano gets only a brief mention.

Still, it has been an automotive riot, and a revealing one: weeks of travelling the world driving almost exclusively crap cars. There’s more if anyone wants it, because, as I’ve hinted, people’s car is an expression open to reinterpretation, in the best traditions of historical research.


Ford Model T (1908-27) - Not really in the BBC2 series. Sorry (Alamy)


Trabant (1957-91) - A very bad ad for central planning (Alamy)


Peel Trident (1965-6) - There’s a saying: ‘What looks right, is right.’ This looks ridiculous and is (Alamy)


VW Beetle (1938-2003) - An instrument of evil. Think before you buy (Alamy)


Honda Super Cub (1958 - ) - Outsold the world’s three bestselling cars, combined (Getty Images)


Messerschmitt Tiger (1958-61) - Strangely exciting, at least for Battle of Britain fantasists (Alamy)

Lada 2011, then Riva (1970-2012) - Stayed in production far longer than expected (Lada)


Ford Transit van (1965 - ) - No life goes untouched by the greatest light commercial vehicle in history (Alamy)


Ford Capri (1961-94) - You always promised yourself one. According to Ford (Alamy)


Lamborghini Countach (1974-90) - Teenage pin-up idol hasn’t aged well (Alamy)

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1443775.ece

www.driving.co.uk/news/james-mays-motors-for-the-masses/

[RedMoon11]

Slow Rider

Top Stuff! Top Gear man breaks ranks to back The Times on bikes

Published August 14 2014

James May doesn’t rock, long hair and leather jackets notwithstanding, but he does roll. He rolls on special occasions in a Ferrari and on airport runs in a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead. For longer urban errands he uses a small new BMW, and for shorter ones a folding Brompton bicycle.

Mr May’s admitted use of a bike is not the only thing that sets him apart from Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, his fellow Top Gear presenters, who call him Captain Slow. He is also, from today, the first of them to endorse The Times’ campaign for safer cycling.

This counts as progress — for the campaign, which emphatically shares the May view that “the roads belong to everybody”, and perhaps for Mr May himself. For it was barely five months ago that he took part in the presentation of four Top Gear cycle safety videos to Westminster Council. One suggested: “Work harder. Buy a car.”

Not everyone got the joke. In Oregon, where green radicals mingle uneasily with monster truck racers, there was earnest debate over whether the three British petrolheads might actually be serious. Back in Britain, one two-wheeled hill-climbing evangelist said he was “so angry I could put my fist through the TV”. The truth is Mr May is much more than a car guy. He is a former choirboy, a competent flautist and a well-read oenophile. It is hardly surprising that he sees the health benefits and the sheer common sense of cycling , which include the fact that more people on bicycles means more space left for driving.

In the manner of Rodney “can’t we all get along” King after the Los Angeles riots, he asks for an end to “road sectarianism”. He even backs our call for 4 per cent of the transport budget to be spent on better bike paths, which some believe should include “pootling” paths for slower riders. Captain Slow, meet Mr Pootler.


www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/leaders/article4175595.ece

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Top Gear Rides to Rescue of Cyclists


Kaya Burgess
August 14 2014

James May, the Top Gear presenter, has called for an end to “sectarianism” between drivers and cyclists on the roads and has given his support to The Times’s Cities Fit for Cycling campaign.

The presenter is best known for his motoring expertise and 15-year association with Top Gear, but he also owns three bicycles and uses a folding bike to make short journeys near his west London home.

The Times’s campaign calls on the government to create an annual budget for building safe cycle routes, to encourage more people to travel by bicycle.

“I’m all for bicycles in cities,” said May, who has never been without one since he was three. “We use bicycles to go around locally and also for fun occasionally. Typically, our bike rides would be three or four miles. I go to the shops on it.”

He said that even Jeremy Clarkson, his Top Gear co-presenter, uses a bicycle for short journeys near his Oxfordshire home.

Cyclists and motorists are often depicted as warring tribes, but May said this was a dangerous attitude.

“We need to get rid of road sectarianism,” he said. “Car drivers supposedly hate cyclists, cyclists hate taxi drivers, taxi drivers hate motorcyclists, bus drivers hate lorries. I just think if everybody was a little bit more pragmatic, that would do more for safety.”

May, 51, dismissed claims from some motorists that cyclists do not belong on the roads.

“I would say that the roads belong to everybody,” he said. “That old argument that ‘I pay road tax and the bicycle doesn’t’ often isn’t true. In any case, roads are funded centrally so the tax [from Vehicle Excise Duty] doesn’t actually go on roads, so no one has a greater right to the road than anybody else, that’s nonsense.”

May said that cycling was “not going to cure the world of all its ills” and was not ideal for long commutes, but he said that increasing the number of cyclists would help to free up Britain’s “ludicrously overcrowded” roads.

“The benefits to driving if people ride bicycles are that there is more space left for driving,” he said. “It’s a simple arithmetic truism.”

This week marks a year since David Cameron pledged a “cycling revolution”. British Cycling has criticised the prime minister for failing to create an annual cycling budget to deliver his promise.

The Commons transport committee called on the government last month to spend £600 million a year on cycling. This is also a demand of The Times’s Cities Fit for Cycling campaign, supported by the AA and British Cycling.

Asked if he agreed with calls for this annual budget, worth about 4 per cent of the transport budget, May said: “Yes, I think that is fair enough.”
He added, however, that many cycle lanes found on roads were “complete bollocks” and created confusion rather than improved safety. Urban planners should spend more time riding bikes to understand what was needed, he said.

Asked if he supported plans in London to build segregated cycle routes on major roads, he said: “That would take a lot of brains and thought, but it is an essentially good idea.” May said that the presence of cyclists on roads was now an accepted part of city life. “Cycling is becoming more popular in London, there are a lot of bikes and people are starting to recognise that they need to be accommodated.

“There are so many more bicycles now than there were, say, a decade ago, that people notice them and subconsciously we are modifying the way we drive around town.

“There are people who talk about wanting to make safety clothing mandatory, road tax for bicycles, registering them and insuring them,” he added. “I think all that stuff is utter nonsense. The whole point of the bike is that you get on it and you ride it and you can ride it when you’re a kid or when you’re absolutely flat broke and it’s so agile.”

May encouraged cyclists to find quiet backstreet routes to avoid dangerous roads and suggested that it was reasonable for cyclists to ride “slowly and carefully” on wide pavements

In a less practicable suggestion, he also joked that London Tube lines could be torn up, with the tunnels turned into “bicycle and moped superhighways”.

The Times’s Cities Fit for Cycling campaign includes calls for:

All parties to pledge to create a £600 million annual cycling budget — just 4 per cent of the transport budget.

More than £900 million has been pledged in London over the next decade. More than £300 million has been spent for the rest of UK since 2010, but this is only one eighth of the level recommended by the Commons transport committee and no annual budget has yet been created.

All roads to be made safe for cycling at the design stage and for dangerous junctions to be redesigned

The government is due to release its Cycling Delivery Plan this month, outlining “cycle-proofing” measures. More than 10,000 Times readers identified blackspots on a map which was passed to the government as a guide.

All lorries operating in urban areas to be fitted with sensors, cameras and extra mirrors

The capital will ban lorries without extra mirrors and side-guards. Some supermarkets and cement firms and contractors have already insisted on fleets of cycle-friendly lorries.

Cycle safety to be a core part of the National Curriculum and the driving test

Funding for Bikeability training in schools has been extended to 2016, but many schoolchildren still do not receive it. The AA and BSM have introduced cycle safety as a module for all instructors.

Follow the campaign at thetimes.co.uk/cyclesafety

www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article4175840.ece

[RedMoon11]

James May on Six of the Best Fictional Cars


Flying Ford Anglia in Harry Potter

James May
Published at 12:01AM, December 13 2014

I’m convinced that the influence between fictional cars and real ones is a two-way thing. If you look at later real designs of Rolls-Royce cars, such as the Camargue and more recently the Phantom, they wouldn’t have looked the way they do had it not been for Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds FAB1 Rolls-Royce.

Cars lend themselves particularly well to children’s fiction — it’s very easy in a child’s story to give them a genuine personality, an actual character. If you look at the two headlights and the grill they definitely have faces; eyes and a mouth and all the rest of it. It’s quite interesting, if you get a car and try drawing spectacles on it you can find the right pair of glasses for a car in the same way you can for a human.

I’d say you are most affected by fictional cars when you are young. When you are a child they are intoxicating in so many ways: a car represents freedom; it’s a glittering bauble; it’s adulthood in steel and rubber. The people who drove them, Bond, Starsky and Hutch, whoever , were incredible, untouchable men. When you’re an adult and you are looking at a car that gives you what I call the fizz — that inexplicable stirring below your stomach but slightly above your genitals — I think part of that is to do with childhood, a childlike longing for these fictional cars. I own an old Rolls-Royce and I’m sure that’s something to do with Thunderbirds.

James May’s Toy Stories is on BBC Two on Christmas day (5.10pm)


Flying Ford Anglia in Harry Potter
We would design supposedly flying cars in the back of our maths exercise books. I was in my forties by the time I saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets but when the Anglia took off and floated about I thought “Yes!” — that was exactly how I had imagined it.


Thunderbirds FAB1 Rolls-Royce
When I was a kid I liked the idea of a Rolls-Royce, something really massive and quite swoopy. I know it was pink but I was too young to be bothered by gender stereotypes.


Peter Perfect’s Turbo Terrific, Wacky Races
Now this would be seen as appallingly corny and inappropriate — man with well-shaped, prominent chin drives very powerful car and tries to get off with Penelope Pitstop — but when you’re only eight it was wonderful.


KITT in Knight Rider
Knight Rider was strangely prophetic . When we were kids voice recognition was utterly unthinkable. It would never have occurred to us that in our lifetime there would be cars that would do as you told them. Now voice recognition is quite common.


The car in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
I think it appeared only a few times but it was a great-looking car, very boxy and square, a Yank Tank. My father bought me the Corgi version as a boy; when you pressed it Napoleon Solo leant out of the window and fired his pistol. Life was very simple back then. I absolutely loved it.


The Ghostbusters Cadillac ECTO 1
Whoever chose this, unwittingly or otherwise, was quite clever because it’s a spooky-looking car. This is a late-Fifties design and the the same car could be either a hearse or an ambulance. This is going to sound a bit weird but there is something about the face of that car, the shape of the grille, that it actually looks haunted.


www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/article4295638.ece

[RedMoon11]

Your Hands Are Grimy and You Say It’s an Investment. Yes, You’re A Classic Car Fan

It’s a debate that has kept publicans in business for years: what are the best cars ever made? Come and see my pick at the London Classic Car Show

James May    Published: 14 December 2014



THIS EXHIBITION is going to cause some massive arguments. At least, I hope it does, because that’s exactly the point. How do you even start to identify the 13 most important cars in history? That’s only one for every decade that the motorcar has existed. You could debate it in the pub for hours, and I suspect a number of Britain’s beleaguered locals have survived on the back of arguments like this, but in the end I’ve been forced by self-discipline and circumstance to narrow it down.

This raises a second question. Does my choice of cars pass the critical “Radio 4 test”: that is, if they put me on the Today programme, could I argue the case for each car with conviction? I believe I could, the interruptions of John Humphrys permitting.

The cars on display in a special gallery at the London Classic Car Show will span the entire history of the car. There are six predictable choices, presented in the Hall of Obviousness, and you could probably guess what they are right now without reading another word. Then there are another six in what I’m calling the Chambers of Bloody-mindedness. They are not as well known, but I believe they are just as significant historically. They’ve simply been forgotten or misunderstood.

Finally, in a chapel of its own, there’s the car that I believe is the most important ever made. It’s certainly the car that looms largest in my motoring life — the biggest inspiration. But I’m not going to give that one away. You simply have to visit the show and indulge me through my halls and chambers to get to it. The exhibition must be viewed as a piece, as what someone more marketing-savvy than me might describe as an immersive motoring history experience.

But back to the cars in the hall and the chambers. These are cars that didn’t just improve incrementally on what was already there. They totally changed the way that people saw, used or merely contemplated “the car”. In one way or another, they all played a part in advancing our understanding of what was normal.

In 1972, for example, body rot and dubious reliability were as much a part of the motoring landscape as furry dice and firing WD-40 in the vague direction of a dead engine on a damp morning. Then the first Honda Civic came along. It was good to drive and it didn’t break down. That doesn’t sound much of a claim in the modern world, but back then it was extraordinary.



To be brutally frank, my relationship with classic cars is a troubled one. I love the history, the amazing stories that some of them have bequeathed to us, the politics and infighting that either propelled them into the world or hindered them. But I don’t really want to own or drive them. Old cars simply aren’t as good as modern ones. If they were, they’d still be in production.

And yet, and despite rumours that the market is flattening out, classic cars are enjoying a bit of a renaissance. I suspect this is because there’s nothing better than buying a toy and kidding yourself that “actually, darling, it’s an investment”. The expression “better than money in the bank” is probably keeping the old-car market buoyant. I suspect it’s a myth. A few exotics appreciate significantly, but most just go wrong.

In any case, if I’m going to spend my evenings up to my elbows in componentry, I prefer old motorcycles, especially Japanese bikes of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of their appeal is simply fiddling about with them and trying to make them work properly, which some people would say of old cars, but the problem with cars is that they’re a bit awkward to work on and so much of what matters is hidden away.

It’s very difficult to look at something like a 1960s DB Aston and know if it’s a perfectly sound example or a skin of shiny paint disguising the remains of the Titanic. I know people who have got this wrong, and it’s cost them a breathtaking amount of money to sort out.

A two-cylinder Honda from the same era costs very little to start with and can be hoisted onto a bench and examined in all its naked detail very easily. A simple old bike readily satisfies my enthusiasm for making and mending stuff and allows me to sate my tool fetish. A modern bike — I do have one, incidentally — can’t do this, because it’s too new to need any work, and even if it did, the job would require specialist diagnostic kit. That means, in essence, plugging it into a computer, which would make garage work feel more like accountancy.

By contrast, a carburettor problem on the Honda allows me to flex my fingers, break out the tiny screwdrivers, take the thing to bits and look for the problem with a magnifying glass. Then I can say (add your own geeky adenoids): “Aha! The idle jet on No 2 is clogged up with gum. Disgusting.” It’s a very nice, happy, calm place for me to be.

I do own one classic car: a 1972 Rolls-Royce Corniche, as seen in a 2008 episode of Top Gear in which Clarkson and I showed off the cars we’d actually spent our own money on. He has a Mercedes 600 "Grosser".



I’m very attached to the Rolls because I’ve had it quite a long time now, and I’ve spent a bit of money on it (because it’s an investment). But in all honesty I’m slightly allergic to it, or more accurately the seats. If I drive it for more than about half an hour, I have to wash all my clothes and steam-clean myself in the shower. It makes me itch. I believe it may be something that was used in the largely unregulated tanning process back then, probably the urine of a redheaded virgin.

Weirdly, the seats in the TG studio are made from a Rolls-Royce from a similar era.We sit on those for only 10 or 15 minutes to do the news, but even after that I feel myself turning slightly clammy, as if I need to be taken outside and hosed down by the Dunsfold firefighters. I think they’ll have to go. The seats in my BMW i3 are made from something like recycled copies of The Guardian’s art pages and don’t make me itch at all.

We’ll be back in January, and — since everyone keeps asking me — I think Top Gear could, theoretically, continue for ever, even if driverless cars will soon be able to go around the track faster than the Stig. I’ve included an autonomous car in the exhibition, because it seems to be happening suddenly, whether we like it or not, and the Google Car is just the start. But I like the idea that a car can take me around without my having to intervene in the process.

For 90% of the time, driving is just complicated enough to engage your full attention but not interesting enough to stimulate you. Think of a typical motorway journey. You have to exist in a sort of semi-coma.

So I’d have a robotic car tomorrow. It can be my designated driver. People have the idea that a self-driving car means the end of driving, but I don’t see why it should. I imagine that for as long as I’m alive I’ll still be able to drive a car the old way, for the pure fun of it. Maybe that’s what “classic cars” will mean in the future. They will be the twee canal boats of the wheeled-transport world.

So there will still be a Top Gear in 2034 and the presenters will still have something to say about whatever the car has become. Maybe, before we peg it, the much-vaunted cyberpresenter will be upon us, and we shall be able to carry on even after we have turned to dust like the dream of the affordable Ferrari.

What a terrible thought.

THURSDAY JANUARY 8
5.30pm Show’s preview evening opens
7pm James May reveals his Cars That Changed the World

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1494294.ece
www.driving.co.uk/news/lccs-2015-james-mays-most-important-cars-in-history/

The show is at ExCeL London and is free for children under five, £15 for children up to 16 and from £20.50 per adult. A family ticket for two adults and three children on Sunday is £52 (all tickets subject to £3 booking fee). More info: thelondonclassiccarshow.co.uk; 0844 854 2018.
www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1494405.ece

[RedMoon11]

Twelve Cars That Changed History — You’ll Have To Guess The 13th

James May   Published: 14 December 2014


1886 Benz Motorwagen

1886 Benz Motorwagen
People will argue about this, but the Benz Motorwagen was the first true car as we would understand it. It has only three wheels, a tiller and a single-cylinder engine with hot-tube ignition, but it’s an engine, there is steering and there are wheels. It’s a car. It also made the first true car journey when it was driven more than 100 miles by Benz’s wife, Bertha, accompanied by her teenage sons. It’s a heroic story. She repaired the fuel line with her hairpin and the ignition with her garter, or some such bodice-ripping stuff.


1906 Cadillac Model K

1906 Cadillac Model K
The real hero of the mass-produced car story isn’t Ford’s Model T, but the Cadillac Model K. Its engineer, Henry Leland, was the first to show that you could build a car out of parts that were so accurately made that they could be put together in any order and were interchangeable: if you took a water pump off one car, you could put it on another. It’s difficult for people to get their heads round now, but before that, parts had to be fitted individually because they could not be made accurately enough. Leland made Henry Ford’s moving production line possible.


1901 Waverley Electric

1901 Waverley Electric
At the beginning of the 20th century, electric cars outsold petrol-powered cars in parts of America. Many people — this will sound familiar — thought that electricity was a much better idea because it was clean and quiet and didn’t make ladies’ skirts grubby.


1908 Ford Model T

1908 Ford Model T
The brilliance of the Model T is the way that it was made, rather than the car itself. In 1903 cars were being made by teams of blokes working as fitters. Then Ford gave us the moving production line. It came to Ford’s chief engineer when he watched a slaughterhouse in operation, which is a de-production line. He thought that if the process were reversed, he wouldn’t be able to put cows back together, but he might be able to build cars. In the lifetime of the Model T, the price reduced by two-thirds while the workers’ wages doubled.


1933 Standard Superior

1933 Standard Superior
This was the work of Josef Ganz, a respected Jewish engineer. It is widely accepted that he came up with the basic layout and philosophy of the Beetle. Ferdinand Porsche, encouraged by Hitler, didn’t actually steal the design, because there was a very free exchange of ideas at the time, but the idea for the layout is pretty much borrowed. Without Ganz and the Standard Superior, the Beetle would probably have been very different.


1938 Volkswagen Beetle

1938 Volkswagen Beetle
The Beetle story is a real thrill. It has many strands to it. At the start of the Second World War, there was the massive scandal of the savings scheme for buyers that came to nothing. Nobody who put their money in got a car because they couldn’t really build it for the price and the factory was designed to build munitions. Then it was bombed to bits. If it hadn’t been for a few models left in the factory, dispirited German engineering staff and the British Army’s encouragement after the war, it would have disappeared. Instead, it became the world’s bestselling single-platform car, even though early models were pretty horrendous to drive.


1959 Austin Mini

1959 Austin Mini
An original Mini is incredibly uncomfortable and a bit hairy if you crash it, but also fantastic fun to drive. The features that made it such a radical package — combined transverse front engine and gearbox, front-wheel drive, room for four in a tiny body — also made it brilliantly responsive. It was definitely the work of creative engineers. I don’t believe marketing would ever have come up with something like it.


1964 Ford Mustang

1964 Ford Mustang
The Mustang is based on the humble Ford Falcon. Ford had the idea that if you were just a blue-collar working family, you needn’t be confined to a life of family car drudgery. You could get a Mustang for only a bit more than you would spend on a saloon. Ford would give you a big bonnet and a decent-sized engine and a great deal of presence at a reasonable price. In the first six months it was the fastest-selling car in history. It is the car that democratised style and performance.


1972 Honda Civic

1972 Honda Civic
The West had long accused Japanese designers and engineers of being mere copyists rather than innovators. But the original Civic was a great innovation, because it was a compact, lively and fuel-efficient car that was well made and almost faultlessly reliable. And this at a time when a horrible oil crisis was looming. In automotive terms it was like finding a Sony Walkman in a shop full of valve radios.


1980 Lada Riva

1980 Lada Riva
One of the most despised and mocked cars of all time is also one of the most significant. A deal between the Soviet Union and Fiat resulted in the building of a factory in Togliatti to produce a “Sovietised” version of the pretty 124 saloon. By 1980 the Russian version had been horribly ruined by in-house “improvements”, but it is the car that did more than any other to put communism on wheels. About 20m Fiat 124-derived cars have been built. The vast majority of them were not Fiats.


1997 Toyota Prius

1997 Toyota Prius
Yes, I know it’s a bit left-field and not particularly Top Gear, but I have always said — mark my words — that in the future we will see the Prius as a significant car. It was the first mainstream car of my lifetime that caused people to rethink the basics of how a car should work, and it reopened our minds to the idea of electric motors turning our wheels. Some commentators are already saying that you should hold on to an early one as “an investment”.


2009 Bruno the prototype ExoMars rover

2009 Bruno the prototype ExoMars rover
This is Europe’s version of the Curiosity Mars rover and is said to be even more sophisticated. It is truly autonomous, self-sustaining and suitable for use on other planets. The European Space Agency hopes to put a version of Bruno on the Red Planet by 2018. It is surely the world’s most advanced all-terrain vehicle; if the future of the car is anywhere, it’s in this. Preceded by Bryan and Bridget.


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1494278.ece

[RedMoon11]

www.driving.co.uk/news/lccs-2015-james-mays-most-important-cars-in-history/

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James May: Why the Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5 is the most significant car ever

Boing! That Baddie’s On A One-Way Trip to Hyperspace

James May    Published: 18 January 2015



Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5
Price: 9s 11d (1965)



WHAT’S the best car in the world? That is easy: it’s the Ferrari 458 Italia. It’s beautiful and exciting and occupies a perfect central position on a spectrum representing at one end total transport pragmatism and at the other unusable and unaffordable exoticism. The 458 is in the sweet spot.

But the most significant car of all time? That’s a bit harder, and it was the brief for my Cars that Changed the World walk-through exhibition at last week’s London Classic Car Show. With space for just a dozen cars, ruthlessness was demanded. So I’m afraid the Jaguar E-type was out, and so was the Austin 7. The Range Rover as well, and the Audi quattro, the “Blower” Bentley, the Ford Escort RS1800, the Citroën DS and many other cars suggested to me, thank you. And the Volkswagen Golf GTI. Sorry.

In the end I settled on six cars that you would expect to find in such a show — among them the Ford Model T and the VW Beetle — and six more that I believe deserve greater recognition, including Josef Ganz’s Standard Superior (or what’s left of it) and, well, the Honda Civic. And then, in a darkened antechamber, I displayed the car that I believed, above all others, advanced the state of motoring: #the13thcar. I chose the Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5. (It’s item No 261 in the 1965 Corgi catalogue, if anyone’s interested.)

Look, childhood is formative, and those of us who love cars loved them first as die-cast toys. In the first year of production more than 2.5m Corgi Bond Astons were sold, making it the fastest-selling car of all time. It was revised and enlarged in 1968 (No 270, toy nerds) and is about to be relaunched again as a 50th-anniversary tribute. It has therefore been more formative than any other toy car. QED.

The popularity of the Bond Corgi is simple to analyse. It wasn’t just the association with the film Goldfinger, and it certainly wasn’t fidelity. It’s the wrong colour, for a start. Apparently Corgi’s marketing team didn’t like the proposed — and cinematically authentic — silver finish because it looked too much like the raw zinc alloy of the unpainted body, so a hasty decision was made to paint it gold as a nod to the film’s title. Classic car bores will also want me to point out that the back of this supposed DB5 is all wrong: the rear lights are too small and the fuel filler cap is in the wrong place, the result of some tooling design from Corgi’s DB4 model being carried over.

The real reason is this. It may not seem it when compared with the iPad, but by the standards of 1965 the Corgi Bond DB5 was a gadget-laden miracle. Rival toy makers were amazed by how much functionality Corgi had worked into a 1:46 scale model a mere 4in long.

There was the full glazing, detailed interior and working suspension that already characterised Corgi’s cars. Better still, pressing a small button under the left-hand sill extended the front overriders and the two machineguns hidden behind the grille. Pressing the twin exhaust pipes raised the bulletproof shield from the boot. And, most important, pressing another button on the side made the roof spring open and ejected the gun-toting baddie from the passenger seat. Wowzers! Or whatever we said back then.



It is the working ejection seat that is so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of people about my age. It was an unimaginable marvel, albeit one that caused as much frustration as delight.

The problem was that the ejection system was just too powerful. From rewatching Goldfinger I calculate that at 1:46 scale the plastic baddie should be propelled maybe 3in into the air. So I don’t really know what Corgi was thinking back in 1965. It seems to have acquired a job lot of leftover springs from the Lee-Enfield rifle-bolt factory, which were strong enough to send him into low Earth orbit. Even after half a century lying compressed in a loft, the spring in a Corgi Bond DB5 is a lethally primed contraption that clicks menacingly like a pistol in a mock execution.



In fact, the ejection of the baddie from a Corgi Bond DB5 is a quantum event. He is in the seat and then he is somewhere else altogether — there being no discernible transitional phase between the two states. Where did he go? Into the vacuum cleaner. If art imitates the experience of life, then the film should be re-edited so the baddie is ejected by Sean Connery’s 007 and then finished off by a Hoover the size of a skyscraper.

As it was, the baddie’s supersonic upward trajectory was arrested only by the ceiling (unless you played with your toys outside, in which case he was in your neighbour’s garden), from where he would fall to the dark and heavily patterned carpet that characterised the 1960s and 1970s and become invisible. He was, you remember, less than an inch long and not even a complete man, all of his legs below the shins having being sacrificed to make way for the mechanism. From the Hoover bag he made his way to the dustbin and a rubbish tip far, far away.


Bond’s DB5 in Goldfinger

I imagine there are millions of them still locked in the earth because he almost certainly wasn’t biodegradable. Earnest archeologists of the post-apocalyptic world will find one, gently remove the bag fluff with their paintbrushes and ask what it can possibly be. Then for hundreds of years people will find more exactly the same all over the world. They will conclude that he is the votive icon of some forgotten global religion rather than a tiny plastic manifestation of the most crashing disappointment of childhood.

It was depressingly easy to lose the baddie. When you picked the car up, your thumb fell naturally onto the little trigger. Plink! He was gone, for ever. Countless children must have ejected him while eagerly extracting the toy from its box, never to see him again. While we were working on the exhibition, one of my colleagues accidentally fired the baddie from our Corgi into the infinite void of an open-plan office. It took the entire staff two hours to find him.

Was anything else ever so easily lost? I can’t think of anything. As children we would come to lose many other things — faith, innocence, virginity — but nothing was lost as simply as the baddie from a Corgi Bond DB5. There are no official statistics on casualties, but it seems reasonable to assume that the vast majority of them were lost within a few firings, maybe after one, and often within the first few hours of ownership. The toll for Christmas Day 1965 probably puts history’s worst battles in the shade.



Bond’s DB5 in Goldfinger is painted silver, but Corgi took a late decision to give it a snazzier gold finish — apparently after the packaging had been printed

And the people at Corgi knew they were selling children a spring-loaded tragedy in waiting. They knew, the bastards, because the second-generation Bond DB5 was sold with a spare baddie. But why just one? You needed a bagful.

This is the other respect in which the Corgi Bond Aston is such an important vehicle. Yes, it instilled in many of us an unshakeable enthusiasm for cars, but it also helped to prepare us for dealing with the harsh reality of adulthood. You would not, after all, be a professional footballer or rock star, you would never see Deborah from next door naked and the little man from your Corgi DB5 would never be found. Like so many of the things we held dear and people we loved, he became landfill.



Consider this: during my research for the exhibition, I did not meet a single former owner of a Corgi Bond DB5 who hadn’t lost the little man. That’s why today a mint example of model No 261, complete with box, the printed sheet of “secret instructions” and an original baddie — not one of the many reproduction ones that are perforce available — is worth hundreds of pounds, even though it was produced by the million and originally sold for 9s 11d (less than 50p, or roughly £8.40 today).

There is a more upbeat side to all this, though. Aston Martin, we know, has existed for more than 100 years under conditions of constant commercial brinkmanship. It is often said that the tie-in with Bond and Goldfinger saved the company during one of its more parlous periods. Yet in the long term I think it’s the toy that saved Aston.

People I know of my age who are now in a position finally to buy “a nice car” are inevitably drawn to Astons. Some of it is to do with Britishness, some of it with Bond fantasies, but largely, I suspect, it’s the influence of this most iconic of toy cars. Without Corgi we might not have Aston Martin.

Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5
Scale: 1:46
Weapons: Two machineguns, retractable
Passenger seat: Ejector, powered by coil spring
Rear shield: Bulletproof, can be raised and lowered
Sales: 4m (estimated)
In production: 1965-8
Price: 9s 11d (1965)

James May’s  Verdict ★★★★★
The car that kept Aston in business


Top Gear “Question Time” special

The new series of Top Gear starts a week today. If you want to know what’s coming up, you can tune in to a special Question Time-style version of the show hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. The trio will be doing the equivalent of an intimate gig in front of a live audience. Critics as well fans will be invited to put their questions. The event will be broadcast on the Top Gear YouTube channel at 9pm this evening(Sunday, January 18). You can also send your questions, in video format, to [e-mail].

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Aston Martins


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1506821.ece

www.driving.co.uk/news/james-may-why-the-corgi-james-bond-aston-martin-db5-is-the-most-significant-car-ever/

James May's Cars That Changed The World at the London Classic Car Show

Published on Jan 15, 2015

Prior to the announcement of his #1 most important car in history, James May opened his personal exhibit at the inaugural London Classic Car Show at ExCeL, London.
 Find out more: www.driving.co.uk/tag/the-london-classic-car-show/

[RedMoon11]

[RedMoon11]

[RedMoon11]

 

I’ve ordered the very last one — all I need is a job to pay for it

James May  Published: 26 April 2015

JAMES MAY: I ORDERED A FERRARI 458 SPECIALE — ALL I NEED NOW IS A JOB TO PAY FOR IT

"Hashtag firstworldproblem"

By James May   Published 27 April 2015

Ferrari 458 Speciale, £208,090

NOBODY yet knows what is going to happen in the future of Top Gear or its three former presenters. That is the honest truth, despite what you may have read elsewhere. No one has even arrived at a definitive pronunciation of “fracas” yet, so what chance is there that we’d have rescued our careers?

The three of us may be reunited on screen, we may go our separate ways, or we may disappear from the television altogether and each assume a place, alone, in the corner of a pub where any unsuspecting passing drinker who strays into an exclusion zone studiously avoided by the locals will be subjected to a predictable “I used to be on TV” routine.

Whatever we do, it will be scrutinised ruthlessly. Our fans feel betrayed and believe a spell has been broken. Our foes are rejoicing at the banality of our demise. If there’s a hint of mediocrity in any future endeavour, both parties will feel vindicated. Even if Top Gear is revived in a new format with new hosts and isn’t as successful as it once was, that’ll be our fault. And if it’s better, then we were overdue for retirement anyway.

I accept that this is a bit of a hashtag firstworldproblem, but I’m finding it quite difficult to handle. Humility is the key, I think, to coming out of this well.

I therefore decided that driving around in my bright yellow Ferrari 458 Italia was no longer really acceptable. That would give out entirely the wrong message. I don’t want to be mistaken for the scion of a Saudi oil dynasty when in fact I’m an unemployed television presenter trying to keep a low profile. So I thought I’d better have a dark blue one instead.

OK, that was an unnecessarily lengthy run-up to a fairly feeble punchline, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised it’s all over. Anyway, I really have ordered a new Ferrari, which I accept is a strange thing for an unemployed person to do. It may never have happened before, in fact. So here’s how it really came about.

There we were, all three of us, on the brink of a new three-year contract to make Top Gear, after which we would definitely chuck it in with dignity and hand the reins to a new generation, assuming we were still alive. There were a few details to resolve about time frames and other mundane stuff, but the groaning draft version of this document was actually sitting on my desk.

This was a great privilege, and a once-in-a-lifetime event; an invitation to continue presenting the world’s biggest TV show for — let’s not be shy — a handsome salary. Although I am often racked with Protestant self-loathing over this sort of thing, I decided to reward myself with a new motor from Maranello.

I’m already on my second one, but they’ve both been second-hand. This, again, was an opportunity that was only going to come along once; the chance not only to take delivery of a freshly minted and unfarted-in Ferrari, but to revel in the process of specifying it. If I moved quickly and paid a deposit, I could be one of the first people in Britain to own the new 488 GTB, the future, turbocharged direction of the mid-engined V8 Ferrari.



But then I had a better idea. Why not the 458 Speciale, the more powerful, more focused and altogether more nerdy edition of the standard 458 that Ferrari likes to claim is actually a different model in its own right? Then I would own the last normally aspirated mid-engined V8 Ferrari. It’s a car I’ve already driven extensively — and love.

There was even a certain amount of fiscal sense in this (hashtag still applies, see above). The top-shelf editions of the past two V8 Fezzas, the 360 Challenge Stradale and F430 Scuderia, are actually appreciating impressively in value. At £208,090 before options, the 458 Speciale is expensive but, like every hopeful classic car owner in the land, I could claim it was better than money in the bank.

Smoke poured from the back of my man-maths calculator as I made this case to Woman, whose arms remained resolutely folded throughout; as well they might because our house needs a new roof. I’m pleased to say that common sense prevailed — on her part, I mean — but only because I didn’t admit to my plan for gold wheels.

I rang my dealer —and I use that expression deliberately, because we are talking about a drug of sorts here. No chance, because the order books for the 458 Speciale were now closed. But then he rang the factory, which agreed to make one more — for me. Imagine that. I would own the last example of the last normally aspirated mid-engined V8 Ferrari. It was better than finding a Canaletto at a car boot sale. Yes, please, I said breathlessly.

Off I went, then, to help make what would have been the last film of the recently truncated Top Gear series, a cinematic marvel on the Yorkshire Moors about the pure pleasure of driving in three wildly different cars: a Rolls-Royce Wraith, Ford Fiesta ST and Porsche 911 Targa. Life seemed marvellous.

And then the demons stormed the flimsy steel of “Fracasgate” and everything in the future shattered like the mishandled Christmas bauble that the future turns out to be. It all evaporated, exactly as the poet Thomas Gray warned us: “The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, and all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave” — along with the unsigned contract on my desk and unspoken permission to use the Concorde room at Heathrow terminal 5. It had all gone. All, that is, except the order for a 458 Speciale lodged in Ferrari’s factory system, with only the final details to be confirmed. Oh cock, as I used to say when I was on telly.


The order book for the 458 Speciale was closed but Ferrari offered to make one more for May. Then came ‘Fracasgate’

Things began to move forwards at a pace appropriate to the Cavallino Rampante — the Prancing Horse. An invitation to visit the factory and choose the specification arrived, so I found myself at Heathrow (but not in the Concorde lounge) bound for Maranello and an appointment with Anna in the Ferrari Atelier — a room that is a real-life version of those car configurators we all like to fool around with, the main difference being that you need actual money to play.

A car of the type you have ordered is parked in the middle of the space. Along one wall wheels of different styles and colours are displayed. Along another are the seat options to sit in. Books of carpet and Alcantara swatches are artfully littered around the top of an exquisite mahogany table. Multicoloured cataracts of beautiful hide cascade down walls. Painted metal panels stand in serried ranks for your inspection.

At one end is a huge screen displaying a more sophisticated version of that online configurator so every possible combination can be displayed in virtual, door-openable and sit-inable form. It’s an intoxicating experience. I was in there for hours, troubled only by the knowledge I couldn’t pay for any of it.

I think they may have smelt a rat when I started talking about my vision of a “tastefully austere 458 Speciale”. And then another when we arrived at the colour choices for that stripe that runs over the bonnet and roof. My dark-blue- with-gold-wheels scheme looked good with a two-tone grey one, but then I noticed the stripe costs almost exactly the same as a basic Dacia Sandero.

Maybe I didn’t need the stripe. “You ’ave to ’ave thee stripe-ah,” said Anna in a way that made my knees crumple like the bonnet of a shunted lightweight Jaguar E-type. I had the stripe. The sat nav? Yes. Reversing camera? Might as well. Nose-lift system for clearing speed humps, extra Alcantara trim on the dash, floor mats (about £1m)? Yes, yes, yes. When you haven’t even made provision for the colour-coded wheel centres, it’s all a bit academic.



I left with a PDF of my completed car. It is truly a thing of loveliness. I lie in bed alternately staring in wonderment at the pictures on my iPad and trembling in the lonely darkness over the massive figure I noticed at the bottom of the file. By the time you read this my 458 will have begun its inexorable creep through the Ferrari production system.

The foundry is charging its furnaces to cast the engine block and cylinder heads. Sewing machines whirr, screwdrivers and spanners twirl. It’s a beautiful process and a slow one — months, rather than the 90 hours it takes to build a Mini — because this is a genuinely hand-built car. But it will get to the end, and then I’ll have to pay for it.

But look: this car really is an investment. I know that’s the most abused expression in car retailing, but for once it’s actually true. I could resell it immediately and get my money back, maybe even more. There’s a cash-flow issue, but this is not a financial disaster.

But then again, why would I do that? This really is an opportunity that was only going to come along once, even when it wasn’t actually meant to. I’m not making an investment, I’m buying a car I truly adore and that gives me a small tingling sensation whenever I think about it. It’s being built now, for me personally, to my precise specification, by people who love their work. It will be my privilege to drive around in it.

Hang on a minute. Unemployed middle-aged man from Hammersmith orders the last-ever Ferrari 458 Speciale, in dark blue. What on earth was I thinking of? Just moments before I signed the order form and committed myself totally and irreversibly, I had a sudden change of heart. I ordered it in bright orange.


Ferrari 458 Speciale specifications

Price: £208,090
Engine: 3497cc, V8
Power: 597bhp @ 9000rpm
Torque: 398lb ft @ 6000rpm
Transmission: 7-speed automatic
Performance: 0-62mph in 3.0sec
Top speed: 202mph
Fuel: 23.9mpg (combined)
CO2: 275g/km
Road tax band: M (£1,100 for first year; £505 thereafter)
Release date: Sold out

Go to driving.co.uk to search for a used Ferrari 458

Click to read Clarkson's review of the Mercedes-AMG GT S
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-mercedes-amg-gt-s-2015/

Click to read Hammond's review of the Indian Chief Dark Horse
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/richard-hammonds-exclusive-outing-on-indian-chief-dark-horse-motorbike/
jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/297923/thread

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1547349.ece

www.driving.co.uk/news/james-may-orders-the-last-ferrari-458-speciale/

[RedMoon11]

James in Maranello, Italy 2 April 2015


jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/297879/thread

[RedMoon11]

JAMES MAY DRIVES THE 2015 FERRARI 488 GTB (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)

Crikey, Have I Bought The Wrong Ferrari?

The new £184,000 turbocharged 488 GTB is a clever and ruggedly handsome beast. And that could be annoying for James May, who has just ordered its £208,000 predecessor

James May   Published: 7 June 2015


VIDEO

The James May review : 2015 Ferrari 488 GTB
★★★★★
A close second to my 458 Speciale. . . but then I would say that

PROS
✓ Debilitatingly quick
✓ They've made it sound good
✓Quality is improved over the 458

CONS
X Some will miss natural aspiration
X Feeble air con
X What's with the weird door handle?


I AM pretty confident that at no point in Hollywood history has a tear-stained woman run into a room and shouted: “Is there anyone here who can drive a supercar?”.

Supercars are completely irrelevant to humankind’s progress. So are lots of other things, but supercars especially so. They are indulgent, possibly arrogant, definitely fatuous, difficult to own without looking a bit of a plonker and, the argument goes, unusable in the real world. I love them.

The real trouble is that a car such as the Ferrari 488 GTB, with its active aerodynamics, sophisticated slip control, electronic diffs and all the rest of it, is so capable that anyone below the rank of racing driver or factory test pilot will struggle to find what aviators such as Chuck Yeager called “the outside of the envelope”.

This has always been true of really high-performance cars, but recent Ferraris have left me feeling even more inadequate than supercar ownership would suggest. It doesn’t matter how alert you are to the visceral relationship between the machine and the human, there are aspects of the 488’s capabilities that cannot be understood by the quivering, panicking ball of ectoplasm that forms in your guts at the approach to that sharp right-hander at the end of the straight at Fiorano, Ferrari’s test circuit.

Like a Formula One car, the 488 really does work better the faster you go. That’s the idea. But movable aerodynamic surfaces and fiendish algorithms controlling the distribution of drive to the wheels are not things that can easily be felt. And so — curiously, given the amount of algebra deployed in its creation — driving the 488 anywhere near its limits becomes a matter of faith. You have to believe it will do it. It will. But I don’t. A set of preconceptions born on bicycles and cemented in everyday cars simply won’t admit it.



Here’s the conundrum. Every mid-engined V8 Ferrari in the type’s eight-car history, starting with the 308 GTB of 1975, has as a matter of policy been faster than the one before it, where “faster” means not just the Top Trumps headlines but the Fiorano lap time. Fast lap times rely on trick chassis dynamics above all else, but power is still the key.

Here we arrive at the real reasoning behind the “controversial” new twin-turbo V8. Sergio Marchionne, the new chairman of Ferrari, which will soon be spun off from its parent group, Fiat, says it is “absolutely” about emissions, since, unlike Lamborghini, for example, it will then have no small hatchbacks to balance the CO2 books.

But Amedeo Felisa, the chief executive and the engineer behind the latest Ferraris, says turbocharging was inevitable. Wringing more power out of the normally aspirated Ferrari V8 would have meant another increase in capacity (difficult because the pistons would become restrictively big), raising the rev limit (ditto because there’s a cap on how quickly all that stuff can fly about) or adding more cylinders (which makes the engine too big). Intelligent turbocharging is the answer.

Those of us of a certain age still regard turbos as a bit of a fraudulent quick-fix route to a rather crude and blunt form of performance, or as something fitted to a diesel. There’s no substitute for cubes, as US muscle-car enthusiasts would say.


 James May drives the Ferrari 488 in Italy Pictures by John Wycherly-john@johnwycherley

But actually turbocharging is a substitute, because by force-feeding the engine with the vital elixir of combustion it does, in effect, become bigger. The old horror of turbo lag has been banished by digital electronic control, and the rather bovine belch of the wastegate, which we associate with “agri-yobs” in Subarus, has been disguised in the exhaust bark.

The result is an engine with about 100bhp more than a standard 458 Italia’s, despite a drop in capacity of almost 600cc. It’s also lighter, more compact and lower in the car. The downside is that when, aged 12, you climb off your Raleigh Chopper to gaze through the glass engine cover of the Ferrari you’ve just spotted at the side of the road, the motor looks a bit disappointing. There are no magnificent plenums atop the “V” any more and it looks a bit dwarfed by the engine bay. You can imagine old blokes saying, “Eeh, that’s nice and easy to work on,” like they do when they look under the bonnet of a Triumph Spitfire.


James May says the 488 GTB is more square-jawed and gravelly-sounding than the pretty 458 Speciale he has ordered from Maranello

The shift to turbocharging is, as much as anything else, a cultural one and one Ferrari is clearly managing with some nervousness. Torque delivery is cleverly limited in the lower gears, for example, to prevent the impression of an on-off delivery. The exhaust note and the bark on the overrun has clearly been engineered to make the diehards happy. But there’s no disguising a fundamental difference between this blown motor and the old atmospheric one.

The old 458 engine held a hidden treat in the last few thousand of its revs range; a place where the unit came alive and that you dipped into as a guilty pleasure, like the jar with the garibaldis in it. It was here, in pure bangs-for-buck terms, that the engine was at its most efficient and devastating. This “treat” has disappeared with the turbo engine; either that, or it’s there all the time. At high revs a turbocharger is something of an issue, as it necessarily restricts the exhaust. Instead it’s doing its best work in the mid-range. Ferrari’s boffins can produce a graph — they can for most things, up to but excluding lunch — that shows how in a 488 I will actually be using full power more of the time than I would in a 458, but the experience is initially baffling.



In simple terms, you arrive at the red line before you’re expecting to because you haven’t had your garibaldi biscuit yet, and the gearchange lights on the steering wheel have become something of a necessity rather than the slight embarrassment they are on the 458. The 488 is so flexible and so debilitatingly quick, it almost feels like a car with Kers (kinetic energy recovery system), which it is in a way, as the turbos are reclaiming energy that would otherwise be wasted as a pressure build-up in the exhaust.

I like it. The engine note has been orchestrated to remain amusing and gravelly, anointed with a hint of new-age turbine hiss. But if you listen with your internal fizz gland instead of your ears, the unit is revealed to be incredibly smooth. It feels modern and progressive. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” as Alfred Tennyson said in Idylls of the King. Arthur is dead! He had trouble breathing.

Given that I declined an early place in the 488 order book in favour of a late 458 Speciale I’m also slightly alarmed to realise how much I like the look of the 488. Where the 458 is pretty and quite feminine, the 488 is more square-jawed and handsome. You can sense the “constant fight” the stylist has had with the aerodynamicists, but it’s all been resolved nicely. All, that is, except the monstrous carbuncle (© Prince of Wales) of that door handle.



What were they thinking there? Allegedly, its shape helps direct air into the rear intakes, but I can almost imagine the design team setting off for the Ristorante Cavallino in Maranello and one of its members saying, “Santo cielo, we’ve forgotten a door handle. Someone go and slap something on, quickly.” It does say something, though, that the airflow is now such an issue that the door handle mustn’t just stay out of its way but has to get involved.

Other points worthy of note: the air-conditioning is slightly feeble, in the best Ferrari tradition; the ride is still surprisingly good for such a potent car; and the driver’s-side window switch doesn’t come off in your hand, as it does in my current 458, at inconvenient moments. Not that there’s ever a convenient moment for a window switch to fall off. The sat nav, still displayed in a small screen on the right of the binnacle, is now more intelligible than Ferrari’s last effort, but that’s a bit like saying you’ve moved to the nice part of Hammersmith.

But the important question, of course, is this: was I wrong to choose the Speciale when I could have had this new departure for Maranello?

It’s tempting to say yes, I was wrong. Not only is the 488 absolutely fantastic, there’s a strong case for embracing the world the way it is and not becoming a stuckist. I don’t see the advent of the turbocharged Ferrari as the end of something great, it’s only what Winston Churchill would have called the end of the beginning.



Apart from anything else, a quick poke around the factory reveals that the slackers at Ferrari haven’t even started building my car, despite their insistence a few months ago that I fly out immediately to specify it before it was too late. So I could change my mind.

I won’t, though. They are both things of knee-trembling loveliness. Each has a distinct and intoxicating character. The issue of “Have I bought the wrong V8 Ferrari?” does not resonate like the same question applied to a pension annuity or even a 12-month mobile phone contract. Neither is, as my mother would say, entirely necessary.

Be in no doubt, though, that the 488 GTB aces the 458 on outright ability. Be in no doubt also that there’s no George Medal for heroism awaiting you in either.

2015 FERRARI 488 GTB SPECIFICATIONS
Price: £183,974
Engine: 3902cc, twin-turbo V8
Power: 660bhp @ 8000rpm
Torque: 560 lb ft @ 3000rpm
Transmission: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 3.0sec
Top speed: 205mph
Fuel: 24.8mpg (combined)
CO2: 260g/km
Road tax band: M (£1,100 for first year; £505 thereafter)
Release date: On sale now

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Ferraris

---

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MAY



On the Hyundai Accent 1.5 diesel

‘It cost £9,400. For that you get . . . well, it’s like a car, really, only not quite as good’

During the Top Gear Winter Olympics special

• ‘With Jeremy’s shooting, you’re perfectly safe so long as you stand directly in front of the target’

• ‘And now, the car every footballer’s wife’s hairdresser’s masseuse has been waiting for: the new Mercedes SLK’
  
• ‘Those people say, “Ooooooh, dolphins, they’re so clever.” But they’re not, are they? They can’t even engineer an e-diff’
• ‘Rule of future classic [cars]: Jeremy’s selling, you buy’

On diesel convertibles

• ‘It’s like a supermodel smoking a pipe: it’s just wrong’

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1564266.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-may-drives-the-2015-ferrari-488-gtb-exclusive-video/

[RedMoon11]

[RedMoon11]

Exclusive: James May drives the 2015 Ferrari 488 GTB

The new £184,000 Ferrari 488 GTB is a clever and ruggedly handsome beast. And that could be annoying for James May, who has just ordered its £208,000 predecessor, a 458 Speciale.

[dit]

I don't know whether it's my screen, but all those Ferraris in the video look pink, a sort of bright raspberry pink. Doesn't look right, somehow. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose, but then again I'm one of those people who thinks that all Ferraris should be red.

[RedMoon11]

Jun 9, 2015 13:34:43 GMT dit said:

I don't know whether it's my screen, but all those Ferraris in the video look pink, a sort of bright raspberry pink. Doesn't look right, somehow. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose, but then again I'm one of those people who thinks that all Ferraris should be red.

It's the video. I watched it on my computer, my tablet and the YouTube app on my TV for comparison. Sometimes the cars have hot pink shiny highlights and sometimes they look a blue based, cherry red , instead of the yellow based, tomato red, Ferrari Red. The video crew at The Sunday Times Driving needs better equipment
The photos of the car in the article and from Twitter look to be the typical Ferrari Red

[dit]

I was fairly sure from the opening shot of a number of cars parked up together that it was a trick of the light, as I don't think Ferrari would make a whole bunch of their vehicles in deep raspberry - it's a pretty niche colour! Yes, Sunday Times Driving needs to borrow filters etc from...well, perhaps the Top Gear team?

[RedMoon11]

Me and My Motor

James May on being sacked, and a Ferrari he couldn’t afford

From Vauxhall Cavalier to Ferrari 458 Speciale

Nick Rufford  Published: 21 February 2016


Ferrari 458 Speciale: sharper all round

AS ONE of the three presenters who made Top Gear the world’s most popular factual television programme, James May earned the nickname “Captain Slow”. He was the cerebral, bumbling enthusiast who practised “Christian motoring” — driving within the speed limit and letting people out at junctions — the counterweight to Jeremy Clarkson’s laddishness.

Viewers were never sure whether May was putting on an act or whether he really was a bit accident-prone, but the story of buying his latest car suggests the stars have never quite aligned for the 53-year-old. May wavered for years over buying a limited-edition Ferrari 458 Speciale. So long, in fact, that it was going out of production when he finally placed his order. Just as he was congratulating himself for securing the very last one, fate intervened. A new Top Gear deal fell through after Clarkson got into a tussle with a producer. May was left with a £250,000 bill for the Ferrari — and no income.

“We were all three of us on the brink of a new three-year contract. I decided to reward myself with a new motor from Maranello. Then, suddenly, it had all gone. Oh cock, as I used to say when I was on telly.”

Worse was to come when the car arrived and he tried to park it. “The first time I arrived at the garage door I rotated the mirror knob [to fold in the mirrors] and nothing happened. Later I found out that you get the folding function only if you specify it as an extra. Each time I park I have to get out to fold the mirrors, and then get back in again.”

Since then things have looked up for May. He and his two Top Gear co-presenters have signed a lucrative deal with Amazon, and the Speciale has rocketed in value.



Driving it, compared with his previous Ferrari, is akin to seeing TV in ultra-high definition for the first time, he says. “The Speciale is a 458 broadcast in 4k — it’s sharper all round. The downside is that to some I look even more of a knob than before — largely down to me ordering it in orange with gold wheels.”

It’s a far cry from his first car, a 1978 Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6L that came with “pre-stolen hubcaps” and a stoved-in rear door. “I acquired it at the age of 18 and drove off into the countryside. It was like going into space — it nearly killed me with excitement. To young people it probably doesn’t sound much, but because the world was black and white then and we ate coal, this was: ‘Wow! A Cavalier L.’ ”

May graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in music, and then took a succession of jobs on car magazines. “In those days I used to get fired a lot. When my involvement in Top Gear came to an end, at least I was ready for it.”

May doesn’t think of himself as a car collector; more an impulse buyer. His collection includes a Porsche 911, a Rolls-Royce Corniche and a BMW i3 electric car, as well as a Fiat Panda (his runabout) and 40 motorcycles.

All this poses a problem: parking. May lives in a mews house in Hammersmith, west London, with his partner, Sarah Frater, a dance critic, and two orphaned cats, the Fluff and the Bounce, and there is little space in the street. “Manoeuvring the Fezza into the underground car park is a bit like removing a plaster from a hairy leg. It’s agony and might just as well be done swiftly and mercifully — using the launch control.” To those unfamiliar with the term, that roughly equates to flooring the accelerator, closing your eyes and hoping for the best. Not unlike May’s career, you might think.

JAMES MAY: MY LIFE IN CARS

1981 Vauxhall Cavalier Mk 1
1986 Mini Clubman
2007 Rolls-Royce Corniche
2010 Ferrari F430
2015 Ferrari 458 Speciale

My dream car
Despite everything I’ve said, it actually is the Ferrari 458 Speciale. Sublime.


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1669194.ece
www.driving.co.uk/news/me-and-my-motor-james-may-on-being-sacked-and-a-ferrari-he-couldnt-afford/

[RedMoon11]

James May
The May Review: As pretty as a Matisse, until you see the driver

Ferrari 488 Spider




The Sunday Times, 15 January 2017

Back when I was a boy, a car with a removable roof was just about the most exciting thing I could conceive of. More exciting, even, than the Airfix 1/24th scale BF 109 Emil. Imagine it! Being in a car, but also being outside.

I didn’t ride in a convertible until I was 16. My mate Dave was a year older than me and had his licence. More importantly, his trendy mum had a Triumph Spitfire, which he was allowed to borrow. So off we went, hood down, cruising around town, hoping to impress some girls, not realising we were two downy-faced boys in a small convertible and there was nowhere for them to sit even if we’d been successful.

I still loved it, though. So much so that, in my early twenties, I scraped together (that is, borrowed from the bank) enough money for a 1960s Triumph Vitesse drophead, with the six-cylinder engine, you know. It was a product of the British motor industry of the era, so it was crap, but I loved that too; loved it in an era when I would still go out in the car for the sheer joy of it.

Now look. Look how age has wearied me. In my defence, it was a cold, grey day when I had Ferrari’s 488 Spider, but after driving for a bit I found myself parking in a lay-by and thinking, “Well, I suppose I’d better take the roof off now and try it like that.”


Ferrari 488 Spider

If you’ve thrown the magazine down in a fit of outrage because James May is such a spoiltbastard, well, fair enough. It’s a mid-engined V8 Italian supercar, and it has a pretty good heater. I just no longer feel the urge to take the roof off a car.

There is, in fairness, a lot to commend open-topped cars. You smell things sooner, the seasonal changes resonate more clearly and exposed drivers are more sociable. Accident statistics back this up — if you’re not cocooned in an all-metal box, you’re less inclined to give someone the finger, just as we’re all more confrontational online than in a pub. But it’s a bit blowy, isn’t it?

More importantly, a 53-year-old bloke in an open Ferrari looks like someone who hasn’t resolved the issue we faced in the Spitfire: that is, girls aren’t interested. I also feel that driving a beautiful car is an act of generosity by its owner, allowing other people to see and enjoy its form. It’s like buying a Matisse and hanging it on the outside of your house. Unfortunately, the effect is ruined if you put my face in the picture, not least because, despite my efforts at modernity, I still haven’t embraced the cult of the male moisturiser.

Some years ago, when I passed 45, I came up with a simple rule. As you reach for the button or lever that lowers the roof in a convertible, pause and think to yourself, “Would I do this if I was naked?” Yes, if your skin is as taut as a balloon and your hair cascades from your head like one of Tennyson’s wild cataracts. But if the answer is no, then leave it up.

So, with the roof safely back on, let’s continue. Since I own a Ferrari, and before you point it out, I will confirm that you can never use anything like its full potential on the road. I’m never going to wear my Omega on the moon, either. But knowing that the watch will do all that space stuff is reassuring.

Likewise, for the 488 to be believable, it must be honed to perform as well as possible on Ferrari’s test track, first because that gives it credibility rather than the status of designer frippery, and second because that capability gives the car a certain sensory edge that can be appreciated even when you’re just biffing around on a favourite B-road.



So it alarms me that, with the roof up, there are more than a few creaks coming out of the Spider. I don’t doubt that if I dig deep I will arrive at a disclaimer about torsional rigidity — the traditional bugbear of roofless cars — expressed in an impressive figure involving newton metres and radians, or the like. But it still sounds a bit like HMS Victory doing a gentle lee ho.

What that suggests to me is that the singular purpose of a Ferrari — to be the finest conduit of driving sensations — has been compromised in the interests of looking like a bit of a knob. I can’t tell the precise difference between the convertible and coupé in normal driving. But I know.

I’ve just realised I sound like a bit of a mardy git. It’s a Ferrari, and the roof comes off as a bonus. There. One advantage is that you can open the rear window independently of the roof and soak up some extra engine sound, and that’s nice. But, to return to being mardy again, that’s the only advantage I can find to having this roofless one. I might add that, ceteris paribus, second-hand Ferrari V8 coupés are always worth a bit more than the Spiders.

So, ignoring the roof issue and the odd creak, I found myself very much enjoying the Ferrari 488. I don’t buy into the widespread grumble that turbocharging has robbed the engine of its character. The reasoning is that the absolute high-rev histrionics of the V8, the part of the rev range where it traditionally reveals the demon in its being, is lost, because ultimately turbochargers restrict breathing at high revs.

But the payoff is that the mid-range is terrific. This is a blindingly responsive car, and the subtle management of torque curves and gear ratios — there are some fabulously baffling graphs to depict this — can at times make the 488 feel almost like a mini LaFerrari, with hidden bucketfuls of thrust available even if you’re a bit slapdash with gear selection, reading the road and all that other helmsman stuff. It’s tremendous fun and it feels very, very special.

But, since I mentioned the Kers-equipped LaFerrari, here comes my final beef. I recently drove the new Honda NSX, with its selectable hybrid drive system. That is a car you can reverse out of your garage and drive through town in quiet all-electric mode. It also gives intelligent electric power to the front wheels, making it a very sophisticated four-wheel-drive supercar, but only in that yawning moment when you need it. The rest of the time it’s just another exciting mid-engined firecracker that just happens to cost about £60,000 less than the 488.

Next to that, my Ferrari, this Ferrari and all other mid-engined sports cars are beginning to feel strangely unenlightened.



Jeremy Clarkson is away


www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/the-sunday-times-magazine/the-may-review-as-pretty-as-a-matisse-until-you-see-the-driver-x5bfcnbgx
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-may-review-ferrari-488-spider/

[RedMoon11]

SATURDAY INTERVIEW
‘We are sick to death of each other . . . like any work colleagues’
A Christmas drink with Clarkson? That’s definitely not on James May’s agenda this year

Damian Whitworth
24 December 2016
The Times

James May is nicknamed Captain Slow but has a motorcycle collection and is handy behind the wheel of a 200mph Ferrari LaFerrari
NEALE HAYNES

James May began this year with a broken arm that proved an uncomfortable burden during the stressful process of building a post-Top Gear career with his fellow petrolheads Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond.

The year ends after the successful launch of The Grand Tour and a message of congratulations from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and their new boss.

So will he be going out for a drink with Clarkson to celebrate? “No!” he says, shooting me a look which indicates that he thinks I might be quite mad. “I don’t even know where he is. I think he’s going away somewhere. We are sick to death of each other by the time we get out of work.”

On screen the three of them bicker and tease and moan about each other but that’s just a TV act, isn’t it? “No, we genuinely get on each other’s tits,” says May.

What was it exactly, during the months of travelling the world together, that irritated May about Clarkson? “Just his presence really. We are very different people. He’s not interested in this,” he says, gesturing at his garage, where we are talking and where he comes to tinker with bikes and toy trains. “I am not interested in going shooting or to fashionable restaurants. We are work colleagues.”

Their office these days is a very large tent that they have been carting around the world while filming the series they devised after Clarkson was fired from Top Gear for punching a producer, and his co-presenters decided to follow him into the unknown. Vindication came in mostly positive reviews for the lavishly budgeted new show and a recent message from Bezos.


A LaFerrari aka F150 limited production hybrid sports
CRISTINA QUICLER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“He just sent an email saying well done,” May says. Amazon has not released viewing figures for The Grand Tour. “They never will. It’s policy. We know they are more than good enough but they won’t say what they actually are. They are happy.”

May is now part of both the fastest show on television and probably the slowest. In The Reassembler, perhaps the most unlikely commission of the year, he was filmed in a workshop reassembling an electric guitar, a Bakelite telephone and an antique lawnmower while providing a running commentary in his charming, idiosyncratic style. The programmes were shown on BBC Four. Clarkson may have fallen out dramatically with Auntie but May has “no quarrel whatsoever with the BBC. I approve of it and we should defend it. It can live side by side with other services like Amazon.”

He was more nervous and anxious about The Reassembler than he was about The Grand Tour. “I thought people were going to think, ‘He’s lost his marbles. He’s putting a lawnmower together and chuntering on about it and forgetting to look at the camera.’ A lot of people do think it’s complete bollocks but fortunately enough people like it. Nobody is more amazed than me.”

A second series of four programmes starts next week. He starts by putting a Hornby train set back together again. It is a gloriously bonkers and calming antidote for anyone feeling frazzled after trying to set up a child’s new Playstation. It makes compelling viewing for those of us who are hopeless at fixing things.

“You think you are hopeless. You have been told you are. Did you have a very middle-class upbringing? It’s the class system, I am afraid. Interfering. Making this distinction. The idea that you are a practical person or you are an intellectual one.

“I don’t like the idea of the 11-plus. I don’t think you can take a child aged 11 and say, ‘This person is professional, sedentary-class material. And this one is a tradesperson.’ Which is what we seem to do. That’s nonsense. Renaissance man in Italy would have embraced both equally and written poetry while designing a telescope.” He thinks that we have become “scared” of fixing things like bicycles. “It’s only a bloody bicycle. Nothing particularly mysterious about it.”

Even Clarkson took up cycling at one stage. He looks scornful. “Nooo! He rode from his flat in Notting Hill down to the BBC, which is pretty much downhill, and got a researcher to take it home again. His dalliance with cycling was brief.”

May goes to Christmas gatherings praying that the kids have been given Lego or a train set “then I won’t have to sit and talk about mortgage rates”. Parents daunted by the prospect of assembling a trampoline or a Scalextric on Christmas Day should “just do it. As long as you are not using machine tools it is not likely to hurt you. Or get the kids to put it together. Kids haven’t been hamstrung by all these sociological ideas about whether or not you are supposed to do stuff.”

He has one misgiving about The Reassembler. “The thing that worries me is that people will start to imagine that I am an evangelist for the olden days. Not at all. I can remember the Seventies. The technology was pretty terrible. Modern everything is better. I believe in video games and I am obsessed with my iPad. Sarah [his partner] takes it off me sometimes because I play with it too much. It doesn’t mean we have to completely abandon these more tangible, purely mechanical or electromechanical things. I find them very therapeutic.”

He likes that most modern products are not built to last. “The disposable society is quite a good thing. You want people to work furiously on smartphones to improve them and have a new one every six months or year because it’s going to be better. This idea that things in the past were made properly and last for ever is misty-eyed nonsense.”

May suggests that we shall get better at recycling and may once again become a great manufacturing nation where “we don’t have to worry about filling the world with crap because this bicycle or your phone is simply the current host of these materials and they will re-emerge as a kettle or a part of a computer or a part of a car. Then we can revel in making things and we can have new cars all the time.”

His own car collection includes an electric car and an old Rolls Royce, which he is trying to sell because he is allergic to the old leather. This dilapidated garage in west London contains eight motorbikes, half a dozen bicycles in varying stages of repair, workbenches and a lathe. He buys most of the bikes to fix up and plans to sell them. “I’ve got too much stuff. But compared with Gandhi we are all slightly overendowed with possessions.”

He loves working in here but says that he is reluctant to pursue the “man in shed thing”. He says: “One of the problems with the way the world has gone, probably ever since Pip and Joe went to the forge in Great Expectations, there is this notion that the woman stays in the home, bloke goes in the shed after a certain age. I find that a bit miserable.”

May, 53, lives with his partner, Sarah Frater, a dance critic, and plans to convert the garage into an extension. “I will be able to mend a bicycle while there is cooking going on. Or Sarah can mend the bicycle while I do the cooking. We are gender-neutral and modern.”

Although Clarkson and Hammond call him Captain Slow he was fined for speeding at 37mph in a 30mph zone on one of his motorbikes and for The Grand Tour drove a Ferrari LaFerrari, which has a top speed of more than 200mph.

So which ride would he go for given the choice between the Ferrari LaFerrari and its 950 horsepower or the eight-reindeer power of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen? “Santa is faster, he must be. He gets to all those chimneys in one night. But you’re more in control in the Ferrari. Animals are unpredictable.”

He and his co-presenters are careful on public roads. “We’d be ruined if we were caught doing anything reckless but also it’s a mark of civility to be able to drive politely. I hate people beeping.” He’d like to see a meter in cars “and every time you blow your horn £5 goes to the NHS”.

May himself seems very mild-mannered. “Well I am so far, but the quiet ones are always the ones who do the massive murder aren’t they? So let’s see.”

May and Clarkson were once filming in the Arctic and found themselves separated behind an ice floe. May was gripped by the thought that he could kill Clarkson with the shovel he was carrying. “This is the actual spade,” he says, picking it up and examining it fondly. Was there a specific argument that prompted his dark thoughts or did he just fantasise?

“Fantasise is probably a bit of a strong word. I’m only joking. I wouldn’t really kill him with the shovel. But it did occur to me that if you were looking for one of those perfect crimes I could probably have got away with killing him. The ice would have melted and he would have sunk to the bottom of the sea and so would the shovel.”

Did he harbour similar thoughts in the Namibian desert this year? “Not death. A bruise would do occasionally I think.”

He says that he still gets excited every time he heads to the airport for a filming trip. “It’s brilliant. But we are knocking on a bit, it’s tiring and not particularly healthy.”

When they are away filming the trio drink together and interviewers have been in awe of their capacity. Asked about his drinking this year, Clarkson deflected the question by saying that he didn’t drink as much as May. “Clarkson!” May chuckles. “No, we are not drunks. We do like a drink obviously because we are middle-aged, middle-class men. There’s no drink problem, that’s nonsense. We are very sensible grown-up people.”

He admits that he had “had a few” when he slipped on a wet pavement and broke his arm a year ago but says that it was not outside a pub, as some reported. It was a restaurant. He was with Sarah. Clarkson and Hammond certainly were not there.

James May: The Christmas Reassembler, BBC Four, Wed 9pm; The Grand Tour is available on Amazon Prime

CURRICULUM VITAE
Born January16, 1963, in Bristol
Education CaerleonEndowed Junior School; Oakwood Comprehensive School; studied music at Lancaster University
Career Temporary post as a records officer in a hospital; short stint in the civil service; sub-editor on The Engineer, then on Autocar magazine before becoming a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and Car magazine.
TV career began in 1998 with the Channel 4 series Driven. Presented Top Gear from 1999 to 2015 and filmed other TV series including Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure and James May’s 20th Century. He has written books: May on Motors (2006) Notes from the Hard Shoulder (2007) and James May’s 20th Century (2007).
Family Lives with his partner, Sarah Frater
QUICK FIRE
Clarkson or Hammond? Neither
Fly or drive? For pure pleasure probably fly. To get anywhere, drive
Goose or turkey? Turkey
Paul Smith or Savile Row? Paul Smith
Pint of Fuller’s or glass of prosecco? Fuller’s
Big tent or garage? Garage
BBC or Amazon? Both


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-are-sick-to-death-of-each-other-like-any-work-colleagues-vvczcpx3h

[RedMoon11]

The May Review: AT FIRST MY ROLLS-ROYCE CORNICHE WAS ECSTASY — NOW IT’S JUST ITCHY
Rolls-Royce Corniche

Leather upholstery dries out, cracks, scuffs and stains. Don't let that put you off buying James May's Corniche

James May
5 March 2017



My relationship with old cars has worsened steadily over the past few years. Having made two series of Cars of the People for BBC2, I can state categorically that they don’t work properly. Not even when they’ve been lent to you by Porsche’s own museum.

As an idea, the car came good only circa 2005. Everything before that was a protracted research and development programme foisted on the unsuspecting public. We should probably keep one example of everything in a museum, as a warning from history, but the rest should start new lives as kettles and toasters.

My relationship with my own old car, a Rolls-Royce Corniche hard-top, is especially troublesome. I wanted one of these ever since, as a fluff-faced youth, I dropped back in a line of slow-moving traffic to allow one to blend in from a slip road.

In those old days, as Tennyson might have it, one summer noon, an arm/Rose up from out the bosom of the car,/Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,/Waving a thank-you to me.

I was besotted.

I eventually bought one 20 years later, in 2008, a lovely original and unmolested 1972 car in garnet with a rich-tea-biscuit interior. I fell for that old “Rolls-Royce for Mondeo money” chestnut and, on the whole, it’s worked out quite well. A Corniche with a 1950s-era 6.75-litre V8 is not economical, spares for old Roycers are a little on the dear side and I have been a bit neurotic about the whole business and made sure it’s never wanted for anything. Not even an internal lightbulb. I paid £20,000 for the car and I’ve probably spent more than half that on looking after it, so the big question is: has it depreciated? We’ll find out in two weeks, as it’s up for sale at the Bonhams Goodwood Members’ Meeting auction. I simply can’t drive it any more.

Here’s why. I drive around in the Royce for a bit, put it back in the garage, go into the house and become aware that I feel a bit, as my grandmother would have said, queer. A bit itchy. A little like I’m coated in an invisible layer of something unsavoury.

If Sarah, my other half, approaches me after I’ve been in the Corniche, she recoils with horror and says: “Urgh. You’ve been in the Rolls-Royce.” I then have a thorough shower with carbolic soap and a wire brush, and domestic harmony is restored.

Meanwhile, I’ve discarded whatever I was wearing into the laundry basket in the bedroom. But then, come bedtime, I’m kept awake by it. Churchill was tormented by the black dog of his despair during the night; I am tyrannised by something horrible lurking in the wicker. So all the clothes have to go into the washing machine, along with the cotton liner of the basket itself. It’s become that bad.

I’d be interested to know if anyone has experienced anything similar with an old car. My highly qualified and level-headed colleagues put it down to me being “weird”, but I know I’m not imagining it. It has rendered the car fairly unusable, really, because I can’t drive it to any sort of event. I can drive it only if I end up back at home for a damn good boil.

What I am describing here is not, I suspect, a true allergy. I don’t come out in a rash, have difficulty breathing or anything like that. No one else who has ridden in the car has been affected; most people comment on how nice it smells in there. There’s nothing wrong with it (just in case you’re thinking of bidding). It’s all about me and the way I react to it, and it has become partly psychological because I’m reluctant even to open the door.

What is it? I’ve talked to a few people who understand this sort of thing, and one compelling explanation is that it’s the horsehair used to stuff the seats. Horsehair was known to cause illness among upholsterers in the olden days, not least because it could contain anthrax spores. But I have never had any problems with living horses, apart from a tendency to fall off them, so I’m not sure it’s that.

I have noticed, however, that other old leather things — jackets, antique suitcases, some other cars, Jeremy Clarkson’s face — can have a similar effect on me. I also know that tanneries in the past used processes and chemicals so horrible that modern legislation has in effect outlawed them. I’ve heard stories of visitors to tanneries vomiting.



This is what I think it is. Something that was used in the preparation of the Corniche’s leather is changing in some complex molecular way and drifting around in the car’s interior. Cleaning it with expensive stuff seems only to excite whatever is going on in there. I’m fairly confident it’s not a reaction to Bakelite or exquisite marquetry, so it must be something to do with the leather. I realise this must all sound a bit First World problem — man can’t drive his Rolls-Royce because it makes him feel funny — but there it is. It doesn’t happen in modern leather-trimmed cars, and shoes don’t trouble my feet in the slightest. But the Rolls does, so it has to go. It’s sad because it’s a thing of great loveliness, but I was itching to own one for years and the problem should have gone away when I bought it, not gradually intensified.



What this (admittedly unusual) experience has done is fortify me in my growing belief that leather is a ridiculous material for car upholstery. I left for work this morning wearing my new coat, which is thermally insulated, lightweight, durable, wipe-down, waterproof yet breathable. Synthetics have come a long way since we turned our noses up at vinyl, leatherette and velour.

Yet as I drove I was sitting on something like a dead bullock’s buttocks. How medieval is that? Leather is too hot in summer and too cold in winter; it dries out, cracks, scuffs and stains. Car makers charge a hefty premium for it, but it’s nothing more than a by-product of cheeseburgers. Maybe it’s time for us to move on.

Unless you fancy a very tidy 1972 Corniche, in which case don’t move on just yet.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-may-review-at-first-it-was-ecstasy-now-its-just-itchy-0wj9f7s9r
www.driving.co.uk/news/james-may-at-first-my-rolls-royce-corniche-was-ecstacy-now-its-just-itchy/

[dit]

I enjoyed that article. I'd heard that James was having to sell the Roller for that sort of reason, but it's interesting to hear the details from the horse's mouth, as it were.

[RedMoon11]

James May
The May Review: Ferrari GTC4Lusso T
Turbo power puts the wind up purists

14/16 May 2017



I was never particularly fond of the old Ferrari FF. As a grand tourer with a V12 engine in the front it was pretty effective at compressing Belgium to a mild inconvenience on the way to your spa retreat in Heidelberg, but it never really gave me the fizz.

It was a bit cumbersome, a bit thick-set and slightly lacking in razor-edged Ferrari magic. There was also something disturbing about the four-wheel drive.

Most of the time it was rear-wheel-drive, but when circumstances demanded — when sensors told the car’s brain that the front end needed a bit of help — it would divert some of the drive to the front. There’s nothing unusual about that, because lots of all-wheel-drive road cars have done something similar for a long time. The problem was the way Ferrari did it.

If you’ll forgive me for a moment for lapsing into car-speak, Ferrari rejected the idea of anything so plebeian as a transfer box or diff arrangement, and instead gave the FF’s engine a second gearbox at the front of the crankshaft. This drove the front end through two clutches, one per wheel, which were electronically managed to allow a varying degree of slip. Seriously.

It sounds incredibly convoluted, and it was, but Ferrari’s reasoning was sound. This arrangement saved weight and, more importantly, bulk, which meant the engine could be mounted lower, with all the benefits that bestowed on the car’s handling.

I once had the pleasure of driving an FF up a narrow, twisty mountain road in Austria in the wet. I really couldn’t feel the transfer of drive to the front, even on a greasy hairpin. Excellent, I thought at first: this incredibly esoteric bit of electromechanical technology is unobtrusive, which is how it should be.

But then I began to wonder if it was there at all. Two slipping clutches? Really? I’d digested a great deal of information about this drive system — including the monthly partwork that Ferrari likes to think of as a technical briefing pack for the media — but I’d never seen or heard of anyone getting underneath an FF to see if it was true. I certainly hadn’t.

After a while, I wondered if what Ferrari had given us was not a novel all-wheel-drive solution but a belief system. It was there because I thought it was there.

My lucky pebble, which travels everywhere with me, really is lucky. That is, if I don’t have it with me then some of what the motorcycle racer Keith Code would call my “$10-worth of concentration” would be consumed by worrying about it, leaving less for driving, climbing a ladder or running away from a bear. So the pebble’s presence is lucky because it improves my mind.

It’s the same with the FF’s drive system. All I was doing in Austria, like any sensible person, was finding the point where I thought I was pushing my luck and then backing off a bit. That’s just as effective as four-wheel drive. So perhaps the FF customer is paying a hefty premium for a prescription for red Smarties in a convincing-looking brown bottle. Possibly.

It was a difficult theory to test, even when the GTC4Lusso — the renamed, updated FF — came along, because it still had the same system. But now we can find out, because we have the twin-turbocharged V8 GTC4Lusso T, which is rear-drive only. Apologies for the incredibly long run-up.

Inevitably, Ferrari is saying this is not a cheaper, less sophisticated, two-wheel-drive version of the FF, even though it is cheaper and less sophisticated (and two-wheel-drive) — it’s something different. Its owners will be 30 to 45 years old, apparently, and are described, in a masterful twist of marketing skulduggery, as driving “mostly in high to medium-grip conditions”. If I weren’t so old I’d fit the buyer profile perfectly, because I hate slippery roads and — naturally — I always make sure I buy a car unsuited to them.

The engine, man! The engine! Yes, it’s turbocharged, which to the Fezzarati is like a diesel, but really that’s just the farts imagining the olden days were somehow better, so they should just join a folk group and move on.

It’s clever induction, because the vanes of the two impellers, or turbines, are phased to reduce lag. You can think of this as a form of sequential turbocharging. As with the 488, the torque curves are engineered within each gear, with the help of the turbos, to provide progressive urge without the cataclysmic whump that might result were all this forced induction allowed to rampage unchecked around the graph paper.

The Top Trumps figures are 602bhp of power at 7500rpm and 561 lb ft of torque, all yours between 3000 and 5250rpm, but the significant one is 7500rpm. The last naturally aspirated Ferrari V8 revved to 9000rpm, and this is what the old guard misses.

I always get the feeling that Ferrari is desperately managing the characteristics of its turbocharged engines to ease a cultural change, but really we’re just going to have to deal with it. Brexit is worse. We dealt with sat nav, paddle gearboxes and even, long ago, driving cars ourselves instead of employing “a man”. It’s the modern world that Paul Weller told us about.

More important, I think, is that the steering has been geared to be more “lively” than in the V12 car, which even Ferrari’s boffins said was a bit “lazy”. The weight distribution is also subtly altered, from 48:52 front to rear on the V12 to 46:54, and there’s rear-wheel steering. High to medium-grip conditions, here we come.

Actually, I’m not going to claim I can feel this in absolute terms, but the combined effect of all these is to make the GTC4Lusso T feel like — I’m just going to join the Stuckists for a moment — a proper bloody Ferrari.

Apart from that — and like all current supercars and GTs — it’s too wide to be properly enjoyed on the sort of road (around Tuscany, in this case) where it should be at its best. Otherwise, it’s tremendous. The noise is right, the urge is instantly accessible, the magic is back. And I forgot to mention that this is now a devilishly handsome car. I feel good being in it. Better than James Brown.

The thing I love about this sort of car, and this one in particular, is the way all the stuff about weight distribution, chassis dynamics and in-gear torque curves fades away next to the overriding attribute of making utterly effortless progress.

Back off just a bit, like I did back in Austria in the 4WD FF (yes, I accept it is a four-wheel-drive system, not just a placebo), and the GTC4Lusso T becomes a very relaxing experience. And yet, when you come up behind another car, you realise what astonishing speed you’re maintaining. It’s a deeply satisfying moment of realisation.

I talked rather cruelly about compressing Belgium at the beginning of this piece. In fact, you could climb into this car and demolish the whole of Europe. And we’re into that sort of thing these days.




www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-may-review-ferrari-gtc4lusso-t-lzrc9fqdw

www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-may-review-ferrari-gtc4lusso-t/

[RedMoon11]

INTERVIEW
James May: ‘I am more liberal than people think’
The TV presenter talks to Robert Crampton about life after Top Gear and his new book

Robert Crampton
10 June 2017


James May: “Everyone loves to think of me as very old-fashioned and tweedy”
ZAC FRACKELTON FOR THE TIMES. PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE HEIGHTS RESTAURANT, SAINT GEORGES HOTEL

After an hour in the company of James May, I find myself in danger of having to revise my longstanding, profound and (I had assumed) implacable dislike of Top Gear. The man is so engaging, modest, solicitous, thoughtful and downright likeable that I feel almost ashamed of my verdict on the show which made him — and his colleagues, one seemingly benign, the other seemingly obnoxious — rich and famous beyond all reason.

In its former Clarkson-Hammond-May incarnation, before their widely publicised split from the BBC in 2015, Top Gear was the most watched factual TV show on the planet. Their next show, The Grand Tour, on Amazon Video, launched in November last year, and has only confirmed their huge appeal. Each episode is said to have cost £4.5 million.

We meet to discuss The Reassembler, May’s new book based on the BBC Four series in which he takes apart common items such as a lawnmower, an electric guitar, a record player and then puts them back together again. It is oddly compelling. The second series was broadcast this year, and (YouTube views included) it attracted 1.7 million viewers, only slightly fewer than the reborn Top Gear at the end of the last series, still on the BBC.

May, 54, confides that doing this book “is the most honest I’ve ever been. I’m quite reserved about revealing too much about myself.” Just to be clear, this is not a tell-all autobiography (far from it). Rather, he means that this programme and book constitute a far more candid representation of his actual personality than the less subtle output for which he is best known. “We’re caricatures of ourselves on Top Gear and The Grand Tour, whereas this is just me, wittering on.” The opposite to Top Gear then? “Yes, but we’ve always been pretty honest. We weren’t making a drama. I used to say it’s all true, but it’s not real.”

The other huge difference with the Reassembler project is that it is just him, with none of the bantering interaction that makes his work with Clarkson and Hammond so watchable. “I think people like the element of ganging-up, there’s always two against one, a little bit of bullying.” Did he ever feel bullied? “No, no. I’m the more reasonable, level-headed one in reality so I’m quite happy if the other two find what I do ridiculous, because I know in my heart it’s just their weakness and inadequacy.”

Unlike his two colleagues, May did not go to public school. “I went to a modern comprehensive in Rotherham. My education was relatively liberal and progressive. You could do music and metalwork and physics and a bit of drama. It was tremendous.”

A talented pianist and flautist, May studied music at Lancaster University. However, he also spent a year at technical college learning metalwork. “My dad ran a foundry, so in the summer I’d work there as a moulder. That was quite informative.” Such is May’s reserve, “quite informative” means he really enjoyed himself. After university, he did a brief stint in the civil service before moving into motoring journalism, not doing any television work until well into his thirties. You sense he needed the extra years to grow into his screen persona.


James May, right, with Richard Hammond, left, and Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear
JUSTIN LEIGHTON/BBC

“I was always a late developer,” he says. “As a teenager I was quite nerdy. I had lots of mates, we used to go off and have adventures, but I didn’t play football or rugby. We’d build bicycles, go over the woods, build bonfires, build Airfix models, blow things up. I had mates who were into natural history — we didn’t call it that, of course, we called it spiders and toads.”

May has retained an affection for animals. Besides his long-term partner — Sarah Frater, a dance critic — he shares his house in Hammersmith, west London, with two cats, Fluffy and Bouncer. “I’d like a dog as well but it wouldn’t be fair, my lifestyle doesn’t permit it.” The couple have no children.

And he is also, I read, a vegetarian? “No, I’m not,” he admits. “A year ago I gave up red meat as an experiment. So I did that half-arsed London thing where you eat chicken and fish, but not steak or shepherd’s pie. I thought I’d do it for a month and just kept going. I wanted to see what would happen.” And? “I’m not convinced it’s made any difference at all.” Lost weight? “Not really.” More or less alcohol? “I drank more because the food was a bit boring.”

He tells me that that very morning, he had a cheeseburger, his first in a long time. “I liked it, but it wasn’t like being released from prison.” Not a big red meat man in the first place, then? “Not massively.” Not the sort of chap to get really angry if steak isn’t on the menu? “No, I’d be quite happy to have a vegetable pasty,” he replies, sweetly and loyally refusing to rise to the blatant invitation to slag off his pugilistic pal.

That said, after Clarkson’s sacking for punching a producer, May says his and Hammond’s decision to follow their colleague out of the door at the BBC “wasn’t really about solidarity with Jeremy, but solidarity with the viewers. We left of our own volition after a lot of soul-searching.” His main motivation, he says, was that people would be able to continue “to watch the three people they like watching. For whatever absurd reason that is.” For better or worse, he says, “we’re stuck doing this”. The considerable salary (May and Hammond are rumoured to be £7.2 million a year, with Clarkson on £10 million) helps too, of course.

You sense May’s burgeoning solo career in reflective, thoughtful, “slow TV” is where his real interest lies, however.

“The conflict I have about The Reassembler thing,” he says, “is I know it looks slightly reactionary. I’m not Ukip or Brexit and I don’t believe things were better in the olden days. Everything was sh*t until about 20 minutes ago. Obviously the world isn’t going to the dogs, otherwise it would have been there by now. I know everyone loves to think of me as very old-fashioned and tweedy, but I’m not. I’m very liberal. The world has got better and all the old ideas about class, race, sexuality, habits, dress and so on can all go out the f***ing window. It’s going to happen so we may as well get on with it.”

Hasn’t he, I suggest, made a career out of not getting on with it? “I hope we’ve been parodying it a bit as well,” he replies. “I’ve discussed this with Jeremy. We often do things we think are a joke, but we’re horribly conscious that to some people we might seem terribly Ukipy and Brexity and we’re not, but we might be seen that way.” Like when Clarkson referred to an Asian man as a “slope”? That’s just not funny, is it? “That’s just not funny,” he agrees, adding in a stage whisper, “That’s why I wasn’t in that bit!” It was just racist, right? “I think it probably is, yes.”

I take your point, I say, and I might have missed the odd nuance, but watching Top Gear or The Grand Tour, I’m struggling to see how you are satirising what you say you are satirising. “Maybe we’ve been too subtle,” he sighs. “When it comes down to it we’re actually pretty modern people.”
The Reassembler by James May is out now (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)

James May’s perfect weekend

Wine or water?
Wine

Green juice or Weetabix?
Weetabix

Reality TV or period drama?
Period drama — if by reality TV you mean Big Brother. Which I don’t believe is real

Vintage Jag or Enzo Ferrari?
Enzo. I don’t own an Enzo but I’ve got two Ferraris

6 Music or Classic FM?
6 Music

Online shopping or local boutiques?
Oh dear . . . I use eBay a lot to buy engineering components, so online

Deliveroo or cook it yourself?
Cook it yourself. I’m not much good, but I enjoy it

Fishing in Scotland or Caribbean beach?
I’d like to try fishing in Scotland

I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
A drink


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-am-more-liberal-than-people-think-xml2ps3ll

[RedMoon11]

THE JAMES MAY REVIEW: 2017 SUZUKI IGNIS

No bum steer from this nipper: it’s a gas

www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/the-sunday-times-magazine/the-may-review-suzuki-ignis-2n9v5b756
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-may-review-2017-suzuki-ignis/

A version of this review appears on James May’s page on the Drivetribe social network
drivetribe.com/p/reviewed-flatulence-NczeXJJ6RQuMt8BxzGQeHA?iid=KAE4mNAAT7SfK6kn4xEYFw

[RedMoon11]

The James May Review: Ferrari Portofino

What a relief, it’s not a proper prancing horse



4 March 2018

Something troubled me about the new Ferrari Portofino right from the off. It started, in fact, during the inevitable pre-drive technical briefing, presented on this occasion in a below-stairs grotto lit by soft red bulbs like some high-class clip joint, where the porn is pictures of posh convertible cars.

One of them showed a Portofino artfully posed with the camping gear one can allegedly fit into its boot. Really? Camping, in your Ferrari? I suppose it might have been a joke, but a joke in a Ferrari technical briefing is a bit like a meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England sanctioning the Ibiza club mix of Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.

At one point there was a gratifying slide showing a picture of a piston and a graph about peak cylinder pressure at 7500rpm, which is 10% up on the Ferrari California’s. That’s more like it! But this was quickly swept aside in favour of more lifestyle imagery and marketing. Honestly, it’s the end of days.

Still, I did at least learn a few things: 70% of buyers of the “entry-level” convertible Fezza are new to the marque, and they drive them half as much again as the owners of the mid-engined cars. More women buy them, though not as many as Ferrari would like, because most women have more sense.

Also — and this was conveyed to me most emphatically in an email even before I left for southern Italy — Ferraris are not expensive to own. All new ones come with seven years’ servicing included (which is a genuinely great thing), the fuel economy is better than ever in the new turbocharged era, and high residuals mean the real cost of long-term ownership is low compared with the crippling fiscal burden that attends owning an executive saloon, an SUV or any of the other tawdry tinsel of the unenlightened motoring masses. On paper, this is all true enough, but neatly overlooks the need to find £166,180 in your 2p and 1p jar in order to buy a Portofino in the first place.

What is this thing, exactly? It’s a V8 twin-turbo, 592bhp, not quite two-plus-two, front-engined roadster with a clever retractable hard top. Very handsome it is, too, but if I were a real bore, I’d say it isn’t a proper Ferrari.



The problem (usual caveat about it being a First World one) is this: once the roof comes off a car, everything else about it is secondary. When driving a Ferrari 488 Berlinetta (hardtop), part of the delicious thrill is the mere thought that you have accepted a certain amount of practical compromise and huge expense in return for being gifted an instrument of pure and uncompromised driving pleasure.

In the Portofino, the gift is God’s creation; the foals gambol alongside the road, the Woodbine spices are wafted, and merrie it is while summer lasts, but the same is available in equal measure in a Mazda MX-5 or a rotting Triumph Herald.

I hope this doesn’t sound mardy. It’s not meant to, I’m merely trying to articulate why the Portofino isn’t the same prospect as other Ferraris. It’s for the same reason that, on the used market, the Berlinetta versions of the mid-engined cars generally command a higher price than the Spider variants. The latter are seen as slightly flippant and off-message.

Fortunately, however, I’m not a complete car bore, so if we can put aside the facile worry that we’ve been a bit of a snowflake about Ferrari ownership, there’s a great deal to enjoy.

It looks like a Ferrari. It has supposedly been inspired by the Daytona but I don’t see this and regard that statement as a moment of weakness by Ferrari’s marketeers. One of the things that has made Ferrari so great is that it has always styled contemporary cars that come to stand unequivocally for their time. Look at the Testarossa now, a perfect paradigm for what the 1980s were about. Likewise the 308 of the 1970s. The Portofino has an angular modernity about it and, to my eye, suggests some Japanese influence.

It smells like a Ferrari too. It’s the unmistakable whiff of a luxury good, which I find comforting. The controls are all what you’d expect in a Ferrari, although it’s worth noting that the steering wheel’s Manettino switch — perhaps named after a 19th-century Italian tenor resident at La Scala — here offers just three settings: Comfort, Sport and one where all the driver aids are off, which you shouldn’t use, otherwise why didn’t you buy the 488? See what I mean? They really should drop this setting and add one below Comfort denoted as “Poncing About”. It’s excellent for that. To my mind, the true measure of a high-performance car is how relaxing it is just to ponce about in. It’s what made the original Bugatti Veyron so astonishing.

The engine is an absolute monster, and the turbocharging naysayers really can pipe down now. Never mind that it can propel the Portofino to 60mph in under 3.5 seconds; Ferrari’s meticulous engine management means the powerband — the region of the graph between the onset of maximum torque and maximum power — lasts for 4500rpm, making this a very tractable car. Gearchanges can be discharged with race-car brutality if you keep your shoe down. They can be feathered if you curl your toes as you flick the paddle with a dismissive fingertip. The exhaust barks encouragingly, the steering is beautifully weighted for a charge through a curva pericolosa, a slight rear weight bias gives the Portofino a faint muscle-car demeanour. But, really, who gives a toss? The single stalkless flower of the sun hangs in the inverted bowl of spotless blue etc etc and I am back to appreciating this car for what it primarily is, namely, one without a roof.



This is a particular treat for a Briton. If you live in the south of France, where the sunshine is predictable, a convertible can become a bit of a bore. But here, every opportunity to lower the roof is a small triumph in the long battle against the egg-headed miserablists of the Met Office, and precious as a result.

This, in the end, is why I fell for the Portofino — for the very reasons I doubted it in the first place. That its Ferrariesque characteristics are slightly dormant is actually its appeal. They are something to be dipped into at leisure, and very gratifying when they’re indulged. The rest of the time, this car is just a deeply desirable and muscular roadster with an especially effective wind deflector. That it also happens to be a Ferrari is simply confirmation of your wealth and good taste.

There’s something else. Of all Ferraris, the Portofino is by far the most usable, and that’s something worth considering as the years advance and settling into one of the V8 cars elicits an ever-louder sigh of relief. The poet Larkin wrote of the tyranny of “age, and then the only end of age”. But it’s nice to know there will always be an appropriate Ferrari to go with it.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-james-may-review-ferrari-portofino-nbpmmwmtm

[RedMoon11]

jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/301402/thread

*Sames as the above Sunday Times review but with more pix*

THE JAMES MAY REVIEW: 2018 FERRARI PORTOFINO
What a relief, it’s not a proper prancing horse

Published 09 March 2018
By James May

www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-may-review-2018-ferrari-portofino/

[RedMoon11]

THE JAMES MAY REVIEW: 2018 FERRARI 488 PISTA (VIDEO)

Oh my darling, this could be goodbye.

Published 24 June 2018 /11 July 2018

By James May

THIS MAY be a measure of how overindulged I’ve become, but of all the world’s circuits, the one I know best — the only one I can remember with any certainty — is Ferrari’s private test track at Fiorano. I even know the names of some of the people working there.

So there I was, having just cleared the blind crest of the bridge and committed myself to the right-hander that leads to the downhill approach to the slow double-left bit (see what I mean?), in the fastest production Ferrari to have been timed around this track, the 711bhp 488 Pista. As the corner opened up, I steeled myself and gave it what some of my professional rivals call “full tap”.

Well, I performed a gorgeous and perfectly controlled tail flick followed by a smooth transition to the full-bore run down to the left and left again. This sort of thing could do enormous damage to my Captain Slow reputation, but in my defence it was the car what done it. I simply mashed the pedal, and Ferrari’s boffins performed the stunt on my behalf through the good offices of electronic driver aids and chassis dynamics.

It was bloody good, though. I hope people were watching. Ferrari is still the premier purveyor of exquisite driving artworks. No other car maker can cajole engineering and aesthetics into quite the same happy confluence — it does my head in.

In the 488 Pista (meaning “track”), shape, sound, smell and colour are perfectly arranged to produce such a fizz that I believe it could move something in the bowels of Christ.

There are some who dismiss the whole “Ferrari effect” as an elaborate and cynical marketing operation designed to sell baseball caps. They are simply not my friends. I can be at a dinner party and allow my mind to sneak away and think about being in a Ferrari while my face and mouth maintain an apparent interest in Brexit. It’s that bad.

But I see two problems with the Pista. The first is personal, as I own this car’s predecessor, the 458 Speciale. The second is the appearance of the A110, a pocket-size sports car made by Alpine, the Renault skunkworks. More on this — the greatest thing to come out of France since the Mouli cheese grater — later.

When the Pista was announced a few months ago, I received a call from my automotive drug dealer to say I could have one, but I’d have to make my mind up by Monday. It was Friday evening. I struggled with this one for the whole weekend. It didn’t help that continued enthusiasm for the Speciale, the last of the naturally aspirated V8 Fezzas, is such that I could sell it at a healthy profit, buy the Pista (£252,765) and still have enough change for a new suit and a slap-up fish supper.

The Pista would almost certainly be better than my car, because the latest special edition of a mid-engined V8 Ferrari has always been superior to the previous one, all the way back to the 360 Challenge Stradale. The Pista would give me an extra 114bhp, even more sophisticated aerodynamics and yet more subtle electronic intervention when you’re taunting the Reaper with a pointy stick. It might even look better.

I just couldn’t decide. In the end I decided to stick with what I had. For a start, a part of me I despise believes my car — one of the last built of the last of the naturally aspirated blah, blah, blah — is a shrewd investment.

Moreover, my orange (with gold wheels) Speciale is very much mine, personally specified in the last yawning moments of production at a time when my professional life was in some turmoil and in accordance with the mantra once relayed to me by Chris Evans: “Always buy the Ferrari you can’t really afford.” It somehow can’t belong to anyone else.

So that’s that, then. But, dammit, the Pista is better. This was impressed upon me relentlessly during my Fiorano visit, which I thought was a bit insensitive. It began during the obligatory pre-drive technical presentation. Everything is lighter and more responsive, and the motor sport technology transfer (largely from the 488 Challenge racing car) is the most intensive on any road-going Ferrari to date.

There were attempts to be groovy, such as a graph to illustrate the “longitudinal fun to drive index” and even the brief appearance of the caption “Fun 2 drive”, which almost made me bite the rubber off my Ferrari pencil.

Ferrari is not groovy. Rather, it is devoted to making the next V8 special edition faster and more controllable around Fiorano than the last one; otherwise it isn’t a Ferrari.

Back to Fiorano, then. The Pista is breathtaking: blisteringly fast yet surprisingly benign, thanks to all that stuff in the graphs.

For my hot laps, I pedalled it far more aggressively than I would dare in an original 360 Challenge Stradale with almost 300bhp less. The Pista’s 711bhp may sound absurd for a 1,385kg car, but as Ferrari’s chief test driver once famously said, as long as you’re in control, the power is never enough.

Now I must introduce that Alpine A110, which I was driving a few weeks ago. Where Ferrari has applied its considerable intelligence to refining the supercar idea — power, turbocharging, use of lightweight materials, control of slip angles, speed of gearchanges and so on — Alpine has applied its to sports car basics.

The A110 makes do with a 249bhp four-pot unit, but it weighs not much more than a ton and is properly tiny. It is, most significantly, much narrower than the Pista.

This isn’t really about downsizing, saving fuel or reducing emissions. The ruthless paring translates as genuine mid-engined magic and tremendous feel in a real world of unknown bends and cars coming the other way.

The experience suffused me with supercar doubt. Just what, in reality, is the 488 Pista for? I’ve oft argued that driving something like a Ferrari is an act of civic generosity, like buying a Matisse and hanging it on the outside of your house so others can enjoy it. But I now wonder if owning a 488 Pista is like buying a Matisse and hanging it on your wall back to front, so you merely know the picture is there. Its abilities are that unfathomable.

I’m conflicted here. Ferrari says 60% of Pista owners will go on track days, but I find that hard to believe. Aside from one or two other people who earn a living talking cobblers about cars, I don’t know anyone who goes on track days. I certainly don’t take my Ferrari on track days. How could I enjoy it, waiting to be shunted up the chuff by an ambitious and fearless youth in a cut’n’shut Subaru?

At the same time, I don’t buy that tired old argument that supercars are “unusable” in the real world. Of course you can’t hope to exploit the dark corners of their capabilities, but that is also true of hot hatches.

The beauty of a track-bred Ferrari is that its ability to do all the Fiorano stuff makes it feel exotic in normal use. It lends an incredible clarity to its operation. It also makes it credible, like a watch that can be used at a depth of 650ft-plus, even though you’re not going there.

The fact is that, after fooling myself at the track, I took the Pista for a lengthy drive around the back roads of Emilia-Romagna, and it was utterly delightful. There are few activities to match the excitement of piloting a special-edition Ferrari with a rabid engine snarling away right behind your head. It makes me sick with a sort of machine paraphilia.

Should I have taken Ferrari up on its kind offer? Probably. OK, definitely. I haven’t, though, have I? But I have paid the deposit on an Alpine.

 

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-james-may-review-ferrari-488-pista-93fnxzcj8

Video - www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/james-may-review-2018-ferrari-488-pista-video/