Free Don't Stop Me Now by Jeremy Clarkson Page B

break down all the time and the dealer won’t be able to fix it. The Audi A6 is on its last legs. The Saab 9–5 is mad. The Lexus is dull. You won’t pay
£
30,000 for a Volkswagen. And I’m sorry but if you’re worried about aesthetics you’re hardly likely to go for an S-type Jaguar.
    The BMW, then, is still out in front. But only because all the other cars are so far behind.
    Footnote
    I wonder what would have happened had I been caught speeding on my way to the hospital in the 5-series.
    Had it been by one of the two speed cameras I drove past, I fear no amount of pleading would have worked. You can’t argue with a box.
    Whereas if we had real policing on the road, I feel surePlod would have been understanding. It’s a small point, but one which is rarely raised in the speed camera debate.
    My daughter incidentally turned out to be suffering from a small bruise. And a large dose of hypochondria.
    Sunday 7 December 2003

MG SV
    I have a fairly comprehensive, all-enveloping hatred of MGs. They may have been acceptable when Kenneth More was stepping out of his Spit and taking Susannah York to the saloon bar at the Downed German, but by the time I was old enough to notice they were absolutely horrid.
    With their wheezing, asthmatic little engines, they were as sporty as a man in an iron lung. And with their botched suspension they cornered like a horse in wellingtons.
    No, really. When the American safety wallahs announced in the early 1970s that every car’s headlights must be a certain height above the road, all the car makers redesigned their cars’ noses to comply with the new legislation.
    Not MG, though. They simply stuck blocks in the suspension to raise the whole car a little higher off the ground. That’s a bit like cutting out draughts by fitting uPVC windows. Effective, but dynamically and aesthetically unwise.
    And I haven’t even mentioned the sort of people who drive the damn things. They are not hairdressers. In fact, come to think of it, they wouldn’t know what a hairdresser was, with their mad barnets and theirhuge, sprouting face-fuzz. And they are always dirty because they have to spend so much time under the car, mending it.
    David Attenborough is currently putting the finishing touches to a six-part documentary about the life of bugs. Doubtless he has been to the ends of the earth in search of all the most rare and disgusting creepy-crawlies. But there was no need, because there’s no insect that can’t be found under an MG driver’s fingernails.
    These guys bathe in engine oil. They eat Swarfega. And they talk and talk and talk about nothing but their infernal, limp-wristed, boneless-handling, sloth-slow, pug-ugly cars that are so unreliable even the damn wheels need servicing every few hundred yards.
    ‘It takes you back,’ they always say. And I’m sure it does, to a time of diphtheria and demob suits. Frankly, I’d rather go forward, and that brings me slithering to a halt beside the car you see in the pictures this week: the new MG SV.
    My God, it’s a beast. There’s nothing wheezing or asthmatic about the huge V8 that lives under its bonnet. Though it can muster a wonderful bronchial cough when you poke its throttle with a stick.
    Honestly, when you hear this thing start, it feels like everything within a hundred yards of the air intakes, all the air, the birds and the flies, have been sucked into the cylinders.
    It started out in life as one of the world’s worst engines: the 4.6 that powers Ford’s Mustang in America. But Rover have changed everything, even the block, to createa snarling, chesty monster that spits fire and havoc down those twin Scorpion exhaust vents.
    Fuel consumption? Well, let me put it this way. Flat-out at 165 mph it’s downing a kilo of unleaded every minute.
    In standard tune you get 320 bhp, which, in a car that’s made entirely from carbon fibre and weighs just 1,400 kg, is enough to get you from 0 to 60 mph in 5.3 seconds. The car I drove,