All I want for Christmas is - a Triumph TR6

FATHER CHRISTMAS will be cursing my dad this year. It’s always a squeeze getting every last present onto that sleigh – so there’s no way there’s room for a Triumph TR6 too.

All twelve reindeer will be gasping for breath as they struggle to pull 1,100kg of beefy British sports car through the sky behind them on their big festive delivery, and chances are the bearded wonder himself will be reported for breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act for making his flying companions haul unreasonably heavy loads. Then there are the logistics of getting a two-seater roadster down a chimney successfully. It’s all that fault of that man who wrote in asking for a TR6 rather than a festive jumper – and that pesky Champion car bloke who encouraged him!

Luckily I don’t think my dad’s expecting the elves to do all the hard work for him – but he has been worryingly thorough in his plans to pick up a bit of classic car heritage to enjoy his retirement in. He’s already worked out, for instance, that plenty of TR6s the Americans bought new are now being repatriated - and that it’s potentially cheaper to buy one of these and have it converted to right-hand-drive than it is to pay a small fortune for a Blighty-spec original.

The thought of a TR6 is an exciting one. Most importantly, he hasn’t done the thing I dread most of all whenever I hear someone thinking about buying an old car – the idea of buying it as an investment.

Classic cars as investments belong in a sad world that forever seems to appear in the glossy supplements you get with Sunday broadsheets. The one where bottles of expensive wine and whiskey gather dust in basements full of delicious liquids destined never to be drunk, toys are unplayed with and carefully tucked away in their boxes and holiday cottages sit unoccupied for months at a time, pricing the locals out of the market. Their owners have no intention of using them for anything other than to make money – and they put the prices up for people who truly enjoy them.

There’s nothing wrong with being clever with your motoring purchases – I know one tale of a chap who bought an E-type when they cheap, enjoyed it until it outvalued his house and then used the proceeds to pay off his mortgage. Smart move, but the word ‘enjoyed’ is the most important word in that sentence. Old cars thrive on being used and enjoyed – there’s nothing sadder than seeing one carted from show to show in a trailer when you know it never does any meaningful miles.

That’s why if a Triumph TR6 does show up anytime soon I’ll insist it gets used on country lanes on sunny afternoons and appears at car shows. Otherwise I’ll have to give Lapland’s finest a ring – they’ll have to come out and take it back. Merry Christmas!

Forget Bugatti - the Fiat 124 Spider is what I'm looking forward to

IT’S ironic that 50 years after the national speed limit was introduced spy shots have emerged online of what’s likely to be the world’s fastest production car.

The Bugatti Chiron – bet on it being one of the stars at next March's Geneva motor show – will pick up where the Veyron left off by going even faster. Which means 267mph – more than twice what a Fiesta EcoBoost will do and nearly four times of our motorway limit – is its starting point.

This is the point where you’re probably about to ask the question I get punted at least four times a year – why, if we’re only allowed to do 70mph, are cars like the Chiron even allowed to exist?

I’ve no clever answer other than to point out that all manner of devices capable of causing chaos if they’re misused – kitchen knives, angle grinders, Porsche 911s and so on – are used on a daily basis by reasonable people capable of using them without getting carried away. The Chiron has as much right to trundle up the A59 as your grandad’s Triumph Herald does.

So you’re allowed to drive it – but using it as an instrument of driving enjoyment in Cameron's Britain is a bit like hiring U2 to do the entertainment at your mate’s birthday. Spectacular, but a bit much.

Anyone who really appreciates driving will know powering along a straight isn’t the fun bit – it’s the corners, where light weight, supple suspension and talkative steering count for far more than simply going fast. Which is why the Fiat 124 Spider has me more far more excited than anything Bugatti can come up with.

For starters it’s good to see Fiat’s finally realised it can make models that don’t crib off the 500 – having made its city car into a seven-seater MPV, I was half-expecting a Fiat 500-based amphibious fire engine rather than a sports car. It’s also based on the Mazda MX-5 so the 124 Spider should be a corker to drive, and with styling that’s a bit more chic than the Japanese car.

Doing a million miles an hour isn’t the point – the Fiat 124 Spider is supposed to be fun doing entirely legal speeds, which has got to be a good thing for a nation obsessed with speed cameras.

I’ve no problem with stealth bombers on wheels being used (sensibly) on Her Majesty’s highways – but I’d have a 124 Spider, money no object, over a Chiron any day.

Porsche's unlikely tip for saving the planet

AS NOBLE callings go saving the planet isn’t exactly glamorous. Sorting out recyclables from household rubbish, paying 5p for shopping bags and sticking solar panels on your roof isn’t exactly the stuff of dreams.

Happily, this worthy-but-dull drive to keep the environmentalists happy needn’t extend to driving itself. As long as you’ve got a spare £76,412 lying down the back of the sofa it’s now entirely possible to help save the planet – by buying a turbocharged Porsche 911.

In fact, buying a turbocharged sports car is now the ONLY option you’ve got if you want a brand new 911 (which, I suspect, most of you do). There are all sorts of complicated explanations for why turbochargers are beneficial but the end result is a sort of automotive alchemy where weedy engines can be persuaded to work harder than bigger, heavier ones.

Anyone who went to school in the Eighties will already have learned from their bedroom walls that Porsche knows a fair bit about using turbos to eke a little extra out of the 911. In fact you’ll be pleased to learn that even in the latest model range there’ll be a proper 911 Turbo. Turbochargers went on to make Formula One cars unfeasibly fast (until they were banned) and flame-spitting rally cars a bit too tricky to handle, and in the 1990s your diesel hatchback wasn’t complete without one. Unlike hybrids and electric cars, turbocharging has instant petrolhead currency too. For anyone who disagrees, I present the Volvo T5, the Audi Quattro, the Ford Escort RS Cosworth and the Mitsubishi Evo.

But this time Porsche’s been clever. It’s used turbochargers as an excuse to make the 911’s engines smaller and – here’s the important bit – more efficient and kinder to the environment. Where the outgoing Carrera had a 3.4-litre flat six, this one makes do with just three litres, and you’ll get more to the gallon too. It’s essentially the same trick Honda’s pulled off with its diesel offerings – swapping a 2.2-litre engine for an equally gutsy 1.6-litre – and the magic ingredient that makes Ford’s paperweight of an Ecoboost engine work is the hoofing great turbocharger it’s married to.

So there you have it – you can tell your Greenpeace pals that the new 911 is entirely sensible as green-minded purchases go. Just don’t tell them it’s 20bhp more powerful and seven seconds quicker around the Nürburgring or you’re stuffed.

Coincidentally this is Life On Cars' 911th post. Spooky or what?

MG needs to get back to its sports car roots

OPAL FRUITS, Stephen Fry’s tweets and Top of the Pops. It’s funny how you only really start appreciating some things when they’re gone.

In fact, I’d like to add the MGF to that list. It's roughly 20 years since its launch  – and the more I think about it, the more I realise its absence is a fairly significant bit of Britain’s automotive armoury missing.

Okay, so it wasn’t perfect. If I had a pound for every armchair critic who dismisses the ‘F for blown head gaskets I’d have enough to buy a replacement Rover K-Series engine, but much more serious were its poor showings in customer satisfaction surveys when it was new. Oh, and Anthea Turner was a proud owner.

Yet despite Anthea’s best efforts Britain loved the ‘F – in fact, for a brief stint it actually outsold Mazda’s MX-5 – so for more than a decade it acted as the nation’s fun, inoffensive sports car of choice. Just like the MGB did a generation earlier.

Where is the modern equivalent? It’s the middle of summer, there’s a generation of company car drivers given allowances rather than mid-range Mondeos by their fleet managers – and what I suppose would be called the MGG is nowhere to be seen.

MG is alive and well, but it should be hunting on the territory it used to call its own as well as targeting the Hyundai-peddling masses.

I drove an MG3 last year and it was frugal and fun in an old-school, Citroen Saxo-ish sort of way. I suppose – and feel free to raise your eyebrows at this one – it does sort of live up to the legacy left by the old MG Metro. Fair enough, but what I reckon the world really craves is another proper MG, the sort you can pop the roof down and enjoy when the sun’s shining, and hole up in the pub and discuss breakdowns when it isn’t.

The MGF’s old rivals – the Fiat Barchetta, the Toyota MR2, the Alfa Spider and so on – are all gone, leaving the MX-5 as just about the only option left if you want a small, fun, inoffensive sports car.

Now is the time for MG’s Chinese masters to make it happen, but chances are they won’t. Don’t get bored with waiting – chuck a grand at a cheap MGF and remind the world what it’s missing.

Why Britain needs the Mitsuoka Roadster - even if you hate it

APOLOGIES if you’ve come here expecting a thorough dusting down of the new Vauxhall Astra.

As family-friendly hatches go it’s hugely important, given that it’s built in this neck of the woods and if you aren’t buying one, chances are you’ll know someone who’ll inevitably get assigned one by their fleet manager.

But while I’m looking forward to getting a go in one it’s not the snippet of motoring news that registers highest on the Simister-ometer. New Vauxhall Astras come along every couple of years. Someone deciding they’re going to import offerings from Japan’s weirdest car company, on the other hand, is genuinely curious stuff. A warm welcome, then, to Mitsuoka!

Chances are you’ve no idea who or what a Mitsuoka is, because for years they’ve been confined to the Japan. In essence what the company does it tap into the Orient’s obsession with woolly British nostalgia by taking other company’s models and then giving them the sort of radiator grille you’d normally find on a Morris Oxford. Ever seen those Nissan Micras rejigged to look a (tiny) bit like a Jaguar Mk2? That’s Mitsuoka’s handiwork. As is the Galue, a mid-range Nissan made to look like a 1950s Bentley.

Until now, these utterly Marmite and endearingly odd cars have only ventured over here through the world of unofficial imports, but now you can buy one of its cars in Britain for the first time. The Mitsuoka Roadster might very well be a Mazda MX-5 pretending to be a Morgan at a fancy dress party – and it might cost a eyebrow-raising £54,000 – but it’s that rare thing. It’s a brand new car that’s positively overflowing with charm and character.

The Surrey firm who’ve taken the brave decision to import it reckon it’ll sell because there are lots of you out there who love the look of Britain’s classic cars but can’t be bothered spending every weekend in the garage, spanner in hand. That’s why it’s got a grille clearly nicked off your granddad’s Daimler Majestic, and then nailed onto a car with a folding metal roof, ABS and automatic air con.

It’ll be a tall order flogging us Brits a Mitsuoka Roadster when it costs two grand more than a Porsche Boxster S, but I reckon after the departure of Daihatsu there’s room for another oddball manufacturer from the Far East.

No matter how horrifically retro its offerings look.

TVR is back - but patience is a virtue

IT'S GREAT news that TVR is back.

After so many rumours and false starts it finally looks as though things are looking up for my favourite manufacturer. Les Edgar, the current company boss, didn't do a Lotus and promise the world all sorts of exotic appetisers when he bought the defunct manufacturer back in 2013.

What he did instead was quietly assemble a team, worked out what he wanted to do and then went off and did it - and what he's come back with is a design partnership with McLaren F1 design legend Gordon Murray, an engine agreement with Cosworth - yes, as in Escort Cosworth fame - and plans for four new models. I'd normally say I can't wait, but in this case I - and every other sports car nut - will have to wait two years.

Which - if you're familiar with the world of British sports cars - is a rare bit of common sense.

For every MG or Morgan the British landscape is littered with defunct sports car names who undid themselves with overambitious - and not terribly well thought out - ideas. Remember the Delfino Ferroce? Or the Strathcarron SC-5A? Or the Dare DZ? Of course you don't, but I remember all of them being touted during my motoring youth as brilliant new ways of cracking the sports car nut. Of all those two-seater hopefuls that bit of history I can only think of one - the Ariel Atom - that's pulled it off.

TVR, of course, was at one point the dominant force in British sports cars but prudence wasn't exactly its strong point. Rather than honing its existing offerings - the wonderful Chimaera and Griffith - it decided to ditch its supply of Rover V8s and come with its own engines, go racing at Le Mans and create the Cerbera Speed 12, a car so powerful it broke the machine used to test it. Like all good parties, it had a colossal hangover, and the Blackpool factory closed its doors nearly a decade ago.

That's why I'm glad - from the initial signs at least - Mr Edgar isn't over-egging the pudding. He's realised he can't do it alone and teamed up with some of the best brains in the British car industry, and more importantly he's taking his time to get it right.

I'm sure I can't be the only petrolhead who'd rather wait two years for TVR to get its revival just right than to have another Delfino Ferroce rushed into the showrooms. If you've ever listened to a Griffith at a set of lights or watched a Tuscan being thrashed at a track day you'll realise those three letters mean so much more than something you order at a cocktail bar and that it's important its custodians don't cock it up.

No rush, chaps. No rush at all!

Why it isn't hard to get a go in your favourite car

FORGET swimming with dolphins or selfies in front of the Taj Mahal. Surely the ultimate red letter day has to be driving your favourite car.

That’s why I switched my excitement level to giddy schoolboy setting when I was finally told I’d be getting a go in my ultimate ‘bedroom wall’ car. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to drive Ferraris and Lotuses to Rolls-Royces and Jaguars, but with the notable exception of the E-type none of those were Blu-tacked proudly above my desk when I was eight years old.

That particular honour, in fact, went to something built just over the water in Blackpool using some Rover V8s and a never-ending supply of glassfibre. That’s why I’ve spent the last 20 years just itching to get a go in a TVR Griffith.

I love this car because it had that wonderfully British underdog quality. It was a sinuously styled two-seater which in the early Nineties had the ability to embarrass the Ferrari 348 and the Porsche 911, despite costing about half the price. It had a tuned version of my favourite engine – if you can’t imagine what a bored out Rover V8 sounds like, just imagine a thunderstorm with the volume doubled. It was the car that put a tiny Lancashire manufacturer on the map.

Naturally, being given the keys to one was like being told your complimentary first class British Airways tickets to New York have landed through the letterbox or that Michelle Keegan’s waiting in the bar for you. The moment the V8’s rumble turned into an almighty bellow and lunged towards the horizon is a motoring highlight I’ll never forget.

The good news is that in this day and age your automotive fantasies can quite easily become realities. As long as it isn’t anything ultra rare or hand-crafted from unobtainium – if it’s a Ferrari 250 GTO or a Porsche 959, for instance – there are companies more than happy to lend you your object of motoring desire.

Getting a go in a Gallardo or a 458 Italia is as easy as popping into WH Smith and buying one of those supercar trackday experience packages. If, like me, it’s the older treasures you’re into, there are plenty of firms out there who’ll happily lend you a classic – I am, for instance, looking into one at the moment who’ll lend my dad a Triumph TR6.

Whatever you do, if you do have a car that was on your bedroom wall when you were a kid, don’t leave it gathering your dust on that bucket list you haven’t started yet. Go out, do it, and enjoy it.

Sadly, if it was Farrah Fawcett or Diana Rigg on your bedroom wall, I can’t help you – that’s a very different column for a very different publication!

Lotus and Ariel take their sports cars off road

THE INTERNET is currently bursting at the seams with people wondering whether they’re going to get their hoverboards this year. It’s 2015, which if you grew up in the Eighties or early Nineties only means one thing; finally being able to see how much Back to the Future II jumped from fiction to fact.

It’s odd looking back at the all the things proclaimed as being the future back in 1985, and I don’t just mean the Sinclair C5. Things like four-wheel-steering and talking digital dashboards were about as futuristic as Human League records – but how of many today’s cars actually have them? On the other hand, Eighties luxuries like folding door mirrors and reversing cameras are making it into even the cheapest of today’s cars, and safety essentials ABS and airbags are de rigueur. 

But I’d love to know is what petrolheads will be thinking in another 30 years when they look back at motoring’s latest rethink. This is the year, it’s looking increasingly likely, when the British sports car whipped off its trainers and slapped on some walking boots.

I’m not talking about Jaguar’s four-wheel-drive version of its F-type, but sports cars designed specifically for venturing up forest tracks rather than setting blistering lap times around Oulton Park. We’ve had sporty off-roaders before, of course, but it’s looking increasingly likely 2015 will be the year of the off-roady sports car.

Word on the automotive grapevine is that Lotus is making an off-road version of its Evora, which will keep its rear-wheel-drive but will be jacked up and fitted with knobbly tyres. It might sound preposterous, but given Lotus’ engineering talent I’m really looking forward to seeing if they can pull it off. The existing roadgoing Evora cope that badly when I treated it to a spot of impromptu off-roading for a photoshoot at Southport Beach when I test drove one a few years ago, either!

Luckily, you don’t have to wait until Lotus finishes to see what an off-road sports car looks like. Ariel has managed to cross its already mildly unhinged Atom with something you might find in an Action Man toy set, called it the Nomad, and is about to put it on sale. It hasn’t got four-wheel-drive either, but with the chunky tyres, the minimal weight and the 200bhp the 2.4 litre Honda engine chucks out, it’s unlikely you’d need it on the rough stuff. As unlikely as an off-road Ariel Atom sounds, I think it’s going to be fantastic.

So is the off-road sports car something that’s going to catch on or is it an automotive dead end? Given the appetite for cars that even look a bit off-roaders but aren’t – take a bow, Nissan Qashqai – I’d like to think it’s the former.

I’m more likely to pilot an Ariel off-road than to take up hoverboarding, that’s for sure!

The Mazda MX-5 has lost weight. I have not

A BIT like those village fete competitions where you have to guess how many pickles really are in the jar, every petrolhead and his dog are trying to work out how many ounces Mazda really has shaved off the new MX-5.

It’s an important question, largely because the prize, rather unlike a village fete, isn’t a bottle of wine or a weekend for two in Cleethorpes. It’s the promise of what could be the most exciting new car you’ll drive next year. 

Mazda itself is being coy for now as to just how much of a Gillian McKeith regime its two-seater roadster has been through. It won’t say exactly how much weight the new fourth-generation car has lost over its predecessor, only that it’s ‘more than 100kg’ lighter than the car that went before it.

When you do the maths that means the latest car will weigh at tops 1,053kg – or 2,321 pounds to you, Mr Farage – but probably less. All of which means it’ll be tantalisingly close to what the original weighed in at when it was launched 25 years ago – and the new car will have more power to play with too!

Why, you might be wondering, do a few pounds and ounces matter here and there, particularly when you’ll freely admit you can’t fit into the skinny jeans you wore a quarter of a century ago? It’s important because I’ve held my ground in pub debates for the last three years that the MX-5 is the best small sports car ever made.

The reason why it is the best-selling roadster the world’s ever seen is largely because it offers up the previously unthinkable combination of Triumph Spitfire fun with Toyota Yaris reliability. It is the darling of motoring journalists everywhere largely because it is beltingly good fun – and it’s why I’m on my second, having very reluctantly sold the first one.

It’s also important for the wider car industry as a whole because – as any eco-friendly car company exec will tell you – weight is the enemy, blunting performance and meaning you have to kill more polar bears with exhaust fumes to make up the shortfall. Making the new MX-5 lighter at a time when the trend is making cars ever heavier is an important example to the car world of less being more.

In fact, the MX-5 brings with it only one real problem. Being so light means any excess weight you’re carrying will only undermine its own brilliance – what’s the point of shaving the equivalent of a fat mate off the car’s weight when taking a fat mate along for the ride will cancel all Mazda’s hard work out?

It’s a good thing it’ll be long after Christmas before the new MX-5 lands here. The post-festive diet will have kicked in by then!

Mazda - please don't ruin the MX-5

AT 2am tomorrow morning (4 September) petrolheads will be treated to an event that’s only happened three times in the past quarter of a century. Mazda will unveil a new MX-5!

Regular followers of Life On Cars will already know I’m a big fan of the rev-happy Japanese roadster and its appetite for British B-roads. In fact, I’m now on my second MX-5 (and before points it out, I know it’s badged as a Eunos), and I’m yet to tire of its never-ending appetite for a blast down the nearest country lane.

It is the one car which - no matter how many times I hear the hairdresser gags – earns the respect of even the most hardened cynics by blending traditional sports car thrills with pretty much unshakeable levels of reliability. I’m the fifth motoring journo I know at Classic Car Weekly’s offices to have owned one, and even a mate who’s been firmly of the MGF-is-better mentality for years surprised me by rocking up in a Mk2 1.8 Sport version the other day. The MX-5 is, I’ve long maintained, the best small sports car ever made.

That’s why the unveiling of the fourth generation car in the early hours of tomorrow morning is such a big deal.

Mazda itself said itself earlier this year the winning formula for what’s gone on to be the world’s best selling sports car is a lightweight design and perfect front-rear weight balance, so every keen driver from Norfolk to North Virginia will be hoping Hiroshima’s best engineers haven’t forgotten how to make a cracking car.

Jeff Guyton, Mazda’s European president, said: “The MX-5 is the product that best epitomises Mazda’s convention-defying spirit and our love of driving. “It has been grabbing people’s attention for 25 years, and with the new generation model we’re aiming to share this passion with yet another generation of drivers.”

Fingers crossed, then. Mazda, please don’t muck it up!

Fire up the... Alfa Romeo 4C

YOU know as soon as you sink into the 4C’s leather-lined bucket seats that it isn’t like Alfa’s other offerings.

True, this slice of Italian exotica might share the same turbocharged 1.8 litre engine that you’ll find in the range-topping versions of the family-friendly Giulietta, but it’s been tuned to 240bhp. It’s also mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive and offers up room for you and just one of your friends in its snug cockpit, making it feel more like a Ferrari that shrunk in the wash!

The first thing you’ll notice when clambering in through the 4C’s curves is that it’s left-hand-drive, but don’t let that put you off if you’re in the lucky position of being able to afford one of the Milan manufacturer’s most striking offerings in years. It’s very similar to the cheaper Lotus Elise in terms of its size, and layout, and while its supercar-esque haunches make the 4C initially feel wider than it really is it soon shrinks around you and inspires plenty of confidence.

With the carbonfibre-clothed 4C weighing just 895kg, Alfa didn’t bother with power steering, and it’s all the better for it. Its low centre of gravity and light weight means this car thrives on tight, twisty roads, entertaining you with its feel and handling and utterly charming you with the charismatic howl from the engine and the whoosh of the turbocharger when you press on. The double clutch gearbox, operated from paddles mounted on the steering wheel, is also a joy to use, and you’re soon left in doubt the 4C is a truly special set of wheels to drive.

In fact, the only real letdown is that the interior doesn’t wow you in the way that wonderfully curvaceous exterior does – anyone familiar with the Giulietta or MiTo will feel instantly at home, but when you’re driving it’ll be other motorists appreciating the aesthetics most.

It might also seem expensive – particularly because the particular test car I drove came with a handling pack, costing an extra £3,500 on top of the £45,000 starting price. Think of it as a shrunken Ferrari, however, and it suddenly makes sense.

The 4C has the looks, the presence and the noise fit for any Italian supercar – it just happens to cost the quarter of the price of a 458 Italia. Count me in!

The Jaguar F-type may be beautiful, but...

THE other day I ticked off another entry from my car lover’s bucket list. I have, after what feels like an eternity, finally driven the Jaguar F-type.

While there’s a full Life On Cars review on the way – and therefore powder to be kept dry – it was a truly special set of wheels which I loved and hated in almost equal measure. I loved it because it’s a lucid, loveable celebration of what talented British engineers achieve when the money men actually get behind their vision for a change, and because it’s those increasingly rare new cars which genuinely feel like an event to drive.

Yet I hate it because – in the words of Joe Jacobs, the boxing manager – we wuz robbed. Robbed of the car, I’ve long reckoned, should have been the F-type all along.

That’s right; 14 years ago the world was shown another F-type and – in much the same way as the original E-type did back in ’61 – collectively gawped at what was a truly mesmerising vision of a Jaguar sports car. Even though I was only 13-years-old at the time, I’d already decided what car I’d be getting once I was finally old enough to appear on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

 In much the same way the E-type was sired by the Le Mans-winning D-type of the 1950s, I loved the way that the F-type presented at the 2000 Geneva Motor Show was directly inspired by an even wilder Jaguar show car – the wonderfully bonkers XK180 from two years earlier. The difference was that while 1998’s offering was always presented as being a bit too unhinged for wider public consumption, the F-type watered down the XK180’s excesses just enough that Jaguar said that maybe – just maybe – there would be a road-going version. It even went to the trouble of setting up a hotline simply so car nuts could pester them about putting it into production.

The F-type as Jaguar originally intended it would not only have been clearer in its objectives, taking on the Boxster directly rather than sitting above it at the expense of Jaguar’s own (and now killed off) XK model, but it was so much more beautiful than the current car. It’s a good thing I was too young at the time to ring that hotline, otherwise Jaguar’s management would have a restraining order against me.

Don’t get me wrong – getting a go in the new F-type is as a fabulous as being offered a date with Michelle Keegan. It’s just I was still secretly hoping for Keira Knightley’s number instead.

Mazda Eunos Roadster - a return to form for Life On Cars

After very reluctantly getting rid of a 1990 Mazda MX-5 last April, Life On Cars writer and Classic Car Weekly news editor David Simister has done the sensible thing - and bought another one.

Click to enlarge...

Originally published in the 29 January edition of Classic Car Weekly. All rights reserved

David Brown will have a tough job developing a new sports car

IMAGINE the biggest number you can think of and then multiply it by ten. Nope, you’re still nowhere near how much it costs to develop a new car.

It’s such a fantastically enormous quantity of money that it hurts your head thinking about it. VW, for instance, threw £50bn at developing what it calls the MQB platform, which in layman’s English refers to the bits and bobs which hold the current Golf, Audi A3 and its family cousins together. Spend much less and you get the David Simisters of this world poking fun at the fact your latest sales rep special has a cheap-feeling dashboard.

My point is that because it costs such an extraordinary amount of cash to develop a new car properly, very few firms can actually afford to, which is why MG Rover went bust and why – despite the best efforts of the Chinese – you haven’t been able to buy a new Saab for nearly three years. It’s why Aston Martin’s ‘new’ models are always thinly-disguised rehashes of the decade-old DB9 and why Fiat ended up buying Chrysler outright the other week. Virtually no one can afford to develop a car.

Which is why I’m just a bit cynical about what’s roughly the 327^th attempt by a British businessmen to set up his own sports car company.

Last weekend I got word of David Brown’s efforts to set up his own firm, called David Brown Automotive. The name’s great – chiefly because it immediately conjures connotations of a (non-related) David Brown’s involvement in Aston Martin, which led to a string of beautiful GT cars – and the badge, a stylised Union Flag, pushes all the right patriotic buttons. He’s got talent on board too, in the form of Land Rover’s former design boss, and he’s confident he get a new car, as if from nowhere, ready to wow us this April.

It’s bold, it’s British, and it’s a new sports car. But haven’t we heard all this before?

For every Ariel Atom or Caterham there’s a Marcos or a Jensen, or an Invicta or a Lea-Francis, that has promised to take on Johnny Foreigner with a new sports car developed for about 50p – and subsequently vanished without trace. There are handful that crack this toughest of automotive nuts, but I’ve just got a horrible feeling that the David Brown will join all the other old sports cars you’d forgotten existed.

I would love, of course, to be proven wrong and for a plucky Brit to come good for a change. Sadly, I have my doubts.

Kia gets it right with the GT4 Stinger

THINGS are looking grim in America at the moment.

While you were busy worrying about high tides and gale force winds, people on the Eastern Seaboard have been enduring something which Michael Fish types call a polar vortex, nudging temperatures to so comically cold that the Niagra Falls actually froze. People haven’t been going to work. They’ve uploading footage of freshly boiled water turning instantly turning into snow onto YouTube instead. 

As a result I was surprised anyone actually braved the bitter conditions for a trip to this year’s Detroit Motor Show, but those who did have been rewarded with an historic moment in motoring. A Korean company unveiling a genuinely gorgeous and exciting car.

This, as far as I’m aware, has only happened twice before in the entire history of South Korea’s car industry, making it a sort of solar eclipse of motoring. The first was back in 1995, when Hyundai launched the Coupe, which caught the car world napping because it was curvaceous and charismatic when everything else it made at the time – the Accent, the Sonata and so on – was at best bland and at worst visual pollution. Then, in 2008, it launched a rear-wheel-drive GT car called the Genesis, but none of us ever got to see it because the company has never sold it in this country.

The rest of the world launches cars designed solely with the wow factor in mind every other week – we’ve got the F-type, Italy’s got the Alfa 4C, Japan’s got the Toyota GT86. Korea’s upped its game lately with attention-grabbers like the Kia Soul and the Hyundai i40, but its ‘wow’ cars, the sort of thing your eight-year-old son Blu-tacks to his bedroom wall, are few and far between.

That’s why I really hope Kia gets its latest concept car into production. Even without the freezing Detroit weather outside, it is a truly cool car.

For starters, the name is spot on – ladies and gents, meet the Kia GT4 Stinger, which makes it sound like a fighter plane. It also might only have a 2.0 litre engine, but it’s turbocharged, and chucks 315bhp through a six speed gearbox at the back wheels. Yet the thing which really stops you in the GT4 Stinger’s tracks is the way it looks, which is stunning.  It’s all bulging wheelarches and narrow windows, and it looks like it means business.

Think of it as Kia’s answer to the Nissan 370Z or – if you’re a bit older – as a sort of Korean reinvention of the Ford Capri. Get making it, chaps!

Aston Martin and AMG Mercedes confirm engines agreement

ASTON MARTIN has signed an agreement with Mercedes which will see the British sports car using the German firm’s engines in years to come.

The company this week formalised a deal which will see it collaborate with AMG, Mercedes’ official tuning and motorsport division, to bring new V8s to the next generation of Aston’s sports cars.

It ends the company’s reliance on the current Ford-developed V12 and the Jaguar-sourced V8.

Winter is here. Thank God for Honda and its new small sports car

IT’S that time of year again – the bit where I’m dreading more motoring misery and driving home in the dark.

A flotsam of leaves have fallen from the trees onto an increasingly wet and windy north west landscape, the clocks have been wound back, and the predictable slew of automotive experts have been rolled out to tell us how we’re all going to have to concentrate extra hard to make sure we don’t crash in the dark.

The perfect time, then, to talk about small, open top sports cars.

Maybe I’ve spent too much time poking my nose around old MG Midgets and Triumph Spitfires this summer, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the more recent al-fresco offerings and haven’t exactly been bowled over. The Jaguar F-type, for instance, toyed with us for years with its promises of being a Boxster basher that’d make every Brit proud, but while it looks fabulous its £58,000 starting price isn’t exactly in tune with a nation worried about paying its next gas bill.

Toyota’s open-top version of the excellent GT-86, it’s now being widely rumoured, has been axed, while the problem with the rest of the small sports cars you can actually afford is that there simply aren’t any. The MG TF, Fiat Barchetta, Daihatsu Copen and Toyota MR-2 are all gone. Mazda and Alfa Romeo have teamed up to create two MX-5 based roadsters, but the finished product still seems a long way off. That is the only ray of faint sunshine in a winter utterly devoid of fun cars.

Or at least it was until Honda and Caterham got in on the act.

I smiled the smile of a chocoholic let loose at Cadbury World when I found out Caterham – who, don’t forget, have been a bit busy running F1 teams lately – have got back to basics and made a cheaper version of the Seven which goes back to its roots. The end result might not be the quickest thing the company’s ever created, but it costs the same as a low-spec Ford Focus and has skinny little tyres, a motorbike engine and next to no weight or creature comforts whatsoever. In other words, big fun.

But even that pales into comparision with what Honda’s been up to, on the other side of the world. While all the eyes at next month’s Tokyo Motor Show will be on the new NSX supercar, the boffins have also found time to create the S660, which is a tiny, mid-engined, open-top sports car.

Forget the technology and the snazzy styling – it’s the new Healey Sprite. Get making it, Honda!

Alfa Romeo 4C is finally ready for the UK

It might have been a long time coming, but Alfa Romeo has finally confirmed the UK details of its striking 4C sports car.

The company said that the mid-engined coupe will cost £45,000 when it goes on sale next month, and will use a new turbocharged 1.8 litre petrol engine producing 240bhp. With the car weighing less than a tonne, Alfa expects the car to hit 60mph in just 4.5 seconds before rocketing on to a top speed of 160mph.

Just 3,500 will be brought into the UK, with the cars being delivered next year.

Don't get stung by one of driving's biggest distractions

IT WAS on a fine summer’s afternoon I discovered perhaps the most dangerous driving distraction known to man.

The Government’s answered calls – although not on a mobile phone while at the wheel, obviously – to up the penalty for those caught texting while driving to ninety quid. Rightly so, I reckon, because trying to spk 2 ur m8 abt 2nite while at the helm of an Audi A4 in the outside lane is, in anyone’s book, a recipe for disaster.

Unfortunately, the Ministry of Transport hasn’t yet found ways to legislate against some equally attention-grabbing, but rather less avoidable, motoring distractions. Nanny State could, for example, do something about those lorries you always find conveniently parked up in fields alongside motorways and dual carriageways, but of far more pressing concern are the appalling spelling, grammatical and punctual errors on an alarming number of them. One, at the side of the A1, reads “Believe ON the Lord Jesus Christ”*, which constantly provokes in-car debate about whether it’s best to believe while standing, quite literally, on the son of God. Another, plugging a car care specialist, proclaims “Diesel’s repaired”. Is it? Trust me, there are few things more dangerous while driving on a dual carriageway than being forced to consult my imaginary copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

There’s also the unavoidable motoring horror of the sneeze, which not only blinds you entirely for half a second or so but, if it catches you off-guard, leaves the inside of your windscreen covered in snot (interior windscreen wipers, by the way, could be a great suggestion for anyone thinking of entering Dragons’ Den). Driving while preoccupied by a recent bereavement is a no-no too, and if you’re a man, there’s the added distraction of billboards with pictures of Keira Knightley on them.

All of these however, pale into comparision with the distraction I encountered on that gloriously sunny afternoon in the North Yorkshire countryside. I was driving a bright yellow Triumph Spitfire – read badly built Mazda MX-5 if you haven’t done your GCSEs yet – down the country lanes, lapping up the rays, when a bee landed on the inside of the windscreen. Seconds later, it flew off and landed straight on my chest. All the advanced driving lessons in the world can’t help prepare you for a spot of motoring melissophobia. How I didn’t crash someone else’s prized classic sports car, I will never know!

What’s more, while bees are fairly benign creatures which only sting when they’re threatened, I dread the day when a wasp – a useless species which stings small children just for fun – decides to join me for the drive.

The Government don’t just need to clamp down on texting drivers. They need to ban wasps as well.

*I am aware that 'on' and 'in' are both, for historical reasons, considered acceptable, but it still draws up interesting debates about the evolution of the English language. Just one I'd prefer not to have while driving along the A1.

New Porsche 911 Turbo ups the supercar ante

If you’ve won the lottery lately and fancy showing up your neighbours with a shiny new supercar, then the latest in a long line of turbocharged Porsche 911s might just fit the bill.

The new Porsche 911 Turbo, based on the current ‘991’ generation of the evergreen German sports car, packs both a rear-mounted 520bhp flat six engine and four wheel drive into its £118,349 price tag, while the Turbo S version ups the stakes, offering up 560bhp for a cool £140,852.

Porsche GB said of the new arrival: “In the forty years since the first prototype appeared, the place of the Porsche 911 Turbo at the technological summit and peak of dynamic performance has never been in doubt. “Now, with the unveiling of the new ‘Type 991’ generation 911 Turbo and Turbo S, the car’s reputation as a technology showcase combining the virtues of a circuit race car with those of an everyday road car reaches new heights.”

If you can afford it, the first right-hand-drive 911 Turbo and Turbo S models arrive in Britain in September.