Don't Stop Me Now by Jeremy Clarkson
Authors: Jeremy Clarkson
Tags: Humor / General, Automobiles
Ads: Link
puncture once every 150,000 miles, they counter. Sure, but when it happens it’s nice to know you’ll only be held up for 20 minutes, not two weeks while a replacement tyre is shipped from Yokohama.
And no, we’re not fooled by the sealant and pump that are supplied. This may work if you discover a drawing pin in the tread when you come out of the house one morning. But they are of limited use if your tyre is in 578 small pieces all over the M20.
The only real upside to this penny-pinching is the extra space in the boot. Not that the Accord estate needs it. The rear end is almost Volvoesque in its vastness.
So, a pretty good effort then, all things considered. Except for one enormous detail. Look at the picture and tell me if you have ever, in all your life, seen anything quite so ugly.
If I may bring the M1 into it again, we have GérardDepardieu at Bedford and the new British Library at Sheffield South. But this is off the top of the map, up round the North Pole, alongside Ranulph Fiennes’s frostbitten fingers.
Why, for instance, does the rear window taper when the bodywork does not? And why does such a big car come with wheels like Smarties? I’ve seen more balance and cohesion at a stag party and more aesthetic merit in a Prague housing project. Did Sara Cox design it? Or was it drawn in the middle of a yardie shootout? In my Top 10 worst-ever looking cars, a list that currently features 145 different models, this is number one. Along with 38 others.
Sunday 19 October 2003
Bentley Continental GT
The man from Budleigh Salterton Council was adamant. ‘Of course it’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘People take their cars on to the beach all the time. Don’t worry, it’s surprisingly firm.’
Beaches are never surprisingly firm. If anything, I’d say they’re surprisingly un-firm. It doesn’t matter whether they’re made of shale, shingle, grit, sand or big slabs of volcanic rock, they’ll munch you up and hold you fast until the tide can come along to finish you off.
Over the years I’ve had to dig countless cars off various beaches around the world. A Corrado in South Wales. A Saab Turbo in St Tropez. And, most notably of all, a massive Lamborghini LM002 on Hayling Island.
But I never learn. So I drove the
£
110,000 Bentley Continental GT on to the shale at Budleigh Salterton, thinking that its four-wheel-drive system would get me off again. And with the words of the man from the council ringing in my ears: ‘If it does get stuck, we’ve got a man with a tractor.’
Great. Except, when it did get bogged down, the man with the tractor had gone home.
Welcome, then, to the joys of filming for
Top Gear
which, incidentally, returns to your television tonight. Albeit without the Bentley, which – when I left the scenein the dead of night – was still buried in stones up to its axles.
Happily, however, before Mother Nature intervened, I did have plenty of wheel time with what is probably the most talked-about new car of the year. David Beckham is getting one. Elton John has bought one for his boyfriend. But I hear that the first to roll off the lines will go to Gordon Ramsay.
Bentley, then, will be supplying the wheels to the kind of people who get their diet from Atkins, their frocks from Versace, their Botox from Harley Street, their tans from Barbados and their friends from the pages of
Hello!
So what kind of car is it? Well, the first thing you need to know is that it’s fast in a wholly new and exciting way. Normally, a quick car introduces you to each one of its horsepowers and torques with a lot of shouting and growling.
Ferrari even invented a new type of exhaust that gets louder the faster you go, and now everyone’s at it. Hit 3,000 rpm in an Aston Martin Vanquish, for instance, and a little valve diverts all the waste gases away from the catalytic converters and silencers and into what sounds like the room where God practises shouting.
People who claim in court that they drove a
And no, we’re not fooled by the sealant and pump that are supplied. This may work if you discover a drawing pin in the tread when you come out of the house one morning. But they are of limited use if your tyre is in 578 small pieces all over the M20.
The only real upside to this penny-pinching is the extra space in the boot. Not that the Accord estate needs it. The rear end is almost Volvoesque in its vastness.
So, a pretty good effort then, all things considered. Except for one enormous detail. Look at the picture and tell me if you have ever, in all your life, seen anything quite so ugly.
If I may bring the M1 into it again, we have GérardDepardieu at Bedford and the new British Library at Sheffield South. But this is off the top of the map, up round the North Pole, alongside Ranulph Fiennes’s frostbitten fingers.
Why, for instance, does the rear window taper when the bodywork does not? And why does such a big car come with wheels like Smarties? I’ve seen more balance and cohesion at a stag party and more aesthetic merit in a Prague housing project. Did Sara Cox design it? Or was it drawn in the middle of a yardie shootout? In my Top 10 worst-ever looking cars, a list that currently features 145 different models, this is number one. Along with 38 others.
Sunday 19 October 2003
Bentley Continental GT
The man from Budleigh Salterton Council was adamant. ‘Of course it’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘People take their cars on to the beach all the time. Don’t worry, it’s surprisingly firm.’
Beaches are never surprisingly firm. If anything, I’d say they’re surprisingly un-firm. It doesn’t matter whether they’re made of shale, shingle, grit, sand or big slabs of volcanic rock, they’ll munch you up and hold you fast until the tide can come along to finish you off.
Over the years I’ve had to dig countless cars off various beaches around the world. A Corrado in South Wales. A Saab Turbo in St Tropez. And, most notably of all, a massive Lamborghini LM002 on Hayling Island.
But I never learn. So I drove the
£
110,000 Bentley Continental GT on to the shale at Budleigh Salterton, thinking that its four-wheel-drive system would get me off again. And with the words of the man from the council ringing in my ears: ‘If it does get stuck, we’ve got a man with a tractor.’
Great. Except, when it did get bogged down, the man with the tractor had gone home.
Welcome, then, to the joys of filming for
Top Gear
which, incidentally, returns to your television tonight. Albeit without the Bentley, which – when I left the scenein the dead of night – was still buried in stones up to its axles.
Happily, however, before Mother Nature intervened, I did have plenty of wheel time with what is probably the most talked-about new car of the year. David Beckham is getting one. Elton John has bought one for his boyfriend. But I hear that the first to roll off the lines will go to Gordon Ramsay.
Bentley, then, will be supplying the wheels to the kind of people who get their diet from Atkins, their frocks from Versace, their Botox from Harley Street, their tans from Barbados and their friends from the pages of
Hello!
So what kind of car is it? Well, the first thing you need to know is that it’s fast in a wholly new and exciting way. Normally, a quick car introduces you to each one of its horsepowers and torques with a lot of shouting and growling.
Ferrari even invented a new type of exhaust that gets louder the faster you go, and now everyone’s at it. Hit 3,000 rpm in an Aston Martin Vanquish, for instance, and a little valve diverts all the waste gases away from the catalytic converters and silencers and into what sounds like the room where God practises shouting.
People who claim in court that they drove a
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