Clarkson on: women

Tekst: Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear)

There was a strange letter in last month’s magazine. It was from a 21-year-old girl who couldn’t understand why her love affair with cars was such a turn-off for men.

Well, trust me on this love, it’s not a turn off for me. There is nothing to warm the cockles of my tumescence more than the sight of a girl in a serious car. Emma Parker-Bowles, for instance, has a Mitsubishi Evo VIII and the thought of that, honestly, keeps me awake at night.

Just yesterday I saw a middle-aged housewife in rural clothes screaming down the M40 in a Lotus Elise. I nearly grew a third leg. And when I heard that Kate Moss had bought an old pagoda roof Mercedes SL, I had to go for a lie down.

We men have learned over the last few years that it’s a good idea to be in touch with our feminine side. If we cry in films, eat lots of salad and read Victorian poetry, it makes us more attractive. But there’s a flip side to that argument. Women can boost the magnetism of their pheromones by getting in touch with their male side. This would mean not changing gear until they hit the redline and fancying lap dancers.

My wife is so completely in touch with her male side, I’m surprised she hasn’t actually grown a scrotum. This is a woman who uses the C-word as early as possible at dinner parties to save time. Guests that shudder aren’t worth talking to, and those that don’t are worthy of further bottom sniffing.

This is a woman who’s just spent three weeks rallying her Elise around the Atlas mountains in Morocco with a girlfriend. Although that said, they missed out on the ultimate prize because one night, instead of handing in their time card, they went for a swim.

This is a woman who once said she couldn’t see the point of cars with less than 200bhp, who won’t drive my Mercedes because it’s an automatic and who loathes any car that has even a hint of pliability in the suspension. She thinks an Aerial Atom is too soft and an Evo FQ340, too slow.

When our third child was born, I suggested that her BMW Z1 might not be the most practical car and that she might require more seats. So she went out and bought a Caterham Seven as well. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

Then came the Elise, which arrived, and after a short test drive, was sent straight back to Lotus to have a louder exhaust fitted.

And now she’s bought a Land Rover.

Being mean, I tried first of all to veto the idea on the basis that she already owns two off-road go-karts, the Lotus, a Focus, a Volvo XC90 and a motorbike. When this didn’t work, I tried to convince her that Land Rovers are ugly and crude and that it would just be an expensive eyesore sitting in the yard.

I had in my mind’s eye a long-wheelbase, skinny tyred pickup truck with a corrugated-iron cover and the engine from a 19th century water pump. And in a list of things I wanted to buy, this would come in at about 9,450. I’d rather have gone on Strictly Come Dancing.

She smiled the smile of a woman who wasn’t listening and two days later came home with quite the most remarkable vehicle I’ve ever seen.

It’s an F-registered, left-hand-drive Land Rover 90 diesel which means it’s old, and so slow it can’t climb any sort of hill. That’s bad, but according to the vendor it has seen service with the Swiss Army which is good. It means it won’t have seen any action at all and the engine will have been turned off at all the red traffic lights.

What’s better is that all the military paraphernalia is still in place. That means camouflage paintwork, downward pointing lights that can’t be seen by aircraft, four 20ft aerials, a mine prodder, an engine air-intake above the windscreen and best of all... a gun. Yes. My wife is now so in tune with her masculinity, she’s bought a sodding tank.

To give it even more playground cred, its metal roof can be unbolted and removed completely, it has super-dark tinted windows and it sits on the widest, chunkiest off-road tyres BF Goodrich have ever produced. This thing, I kid you not, makes Lara Croft’s Land Rover look like a Suzuki Vitara. It makes Norman Schwarzkopf’s Hummer look like a Nissan Micra. It is butch, and them some.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks, chief among which is that, despite the seven seats, it cannot be used for transporting children because there are no seatbelts and the interior is stuffed to overflowing with razor sharp military protuberances that would sever a seven-year-old’s head in even the gentlest of accidents.

Nor will it be much cop at transporting fence posts and Christmas trees, partly because it’s a short-wheelbase 90 and partly because the back’s already full of camo nets, ammo boxes and chemical warfare suits.

Then there’s the driving experience. I’d love to tell you all about this, but I made such a fuss about not getting the damn thing in the first place, my wife hasn’t bothered putting me on the insurance. Still, I was taken out in it the other night and simply couldn’t believe how loud and crude it was. Nor could I believe how long it took us to do three miles.

That old diesel engine really did manage to make mountains out of molehills, turning even the most Dutch piece of level ground into a sheer rock face that required another gear change to keep moving. I think we hit 40 once. I know we arrived at the party an hour late, feeling like we’d just done an SAS assault course.

“Great, isn’t it?” said my wife.

“No”.

I suppose I quite like the radio which, with those enormous aerials could almost certainly be used to eavesdrop on operations in the Gulf. Actually, you could probably use it to monitor the progress of the Voyager space probe which left our solar system last month.

And I am interested in the piece which is an SA-80 that’s been converted to fire... actually, I don’t what know it’s been converted to fire. But I do suspect traffic wardens would think twice about ticketing a car that has a machine gun clipped to the dashboard.

What I love most of all, though, is that I don’t have to drive it. If I did, people would see me coming and think, ‘what kind of saddo would ever choose to tool around in a quasi-military Land Rover?’ A man in a car like this looks, at best, preposterous, and at worst, like a murderer.

But a girl in a car like this looks like she’s descended from the gods. A girl in a road-going tank is even more sexy than one in nothing at all.

Defending the Defender

Tekst: James May (Top Gear).

Never let it be said that I’m not a true motoring enthusiast. I’ve just spent a week in a Land Rover Defender 90, which, the more learned among you will know, is available only as a diesel. So that’s army transport powered by the evil genius of Dr Rudolf, and I have been driving it exclusively around the streets of London.

It’s a 90-inch job with a station wagon body plus some Lara Croft extras such as tread plates in unnecessary places. I’m constantly flabbergasted by it. Its basic design is older than my house – and you have to live in a pretty new house before you can say that of any other car currently in production. It doesn’t just hark from a time before computer-aided design, it seems to be rooted in an age prior to the invention of the mathematical instruments set we used for designing cars in the back of our maths books at school. The shape was obviously worked out using some pieces of folded cardboard, and the last time I saw hinges like the ones on the Defender’s back door, they were on the smokebox of a locomotive in the Science Museum.

Oh, sure, one or two cosmetic bits have been added over the decades. Lights and what have you, and a new plastic radiator grille. But as soon as you drive in to a few things on one of your ‘expeditions’, these will all fall off, and then you’ll be back with the Wilkes brothers’ farm biffabout of 1948.

I love it. It’s definitely a chap’s car. A woman would look ridiculous in it because you would know she must have more sense. I, on the other hand, am very happy bouncing around the capital, parking up and then standing on the bonnet just because I can. You may like to arrive in style – I like to arrive with an arse like a farmer’s face. Just how utilitarian is this thing? Well, there’s a flap just under the windscreen, running the full width of the vehicle, which can be opened with a crude lever from inside. Basically, you open this if the engine’s not quite noisy enough for you or, when you take the Land Rover to the local jet wash, you can do the inside at the same time.

However, yesterday, something bothered me about the Landie. At first I thought it was the centre console, which features all sorts of things that don’t belong in a Defender – electric window switches, seat heater switches, heated screen switches and a radio. Fitting these to a Defender is like carpeting a shed.

But it wasn’t just that. The real problem was that it was just too new. Somehow, a Land Rover is only truly acceptable when it’s old, and ideally given to you by your dad. I can’t really explain why, but it’s a bit like shotguns and wristwatches. Or money.

Now my Top Gear colleague Richard Hammond – he has a Land Rover that is cresting the peak of elegant decay. It’s a 110 V8 with ‘canvass and sticks’ (as Hammond would say. He means it’s got a removable and roll-upable fabric roof supported by a collapsible steel frame. And it usually does).

It’s black, but where the paint is flaking off in places you can see that it used to be red and the property of the Post Office. From a distance it looks quite tidy, but, up close, vegetation can be observed taking root at any sharp included angle. Anything not absolutely essential simply isn’t there any more, and several things that were once part of the engine are now in the passenger’s footwell.

It really is quite a magnificent thing and it has got me thinking. Soon, the Land Rover Defender will go out of production and England will be ruined unless something is done about it. Fortunately, I have a plan...

The other day, I had dinner with a man in his late Forties at his home. At the end of the meal he took out a bottle of rather fine but deeply obscure single malt whisky. In fact, it turned out to be his own. His father had bought a whole barrel of the stuff, freshly distilled, way back in the 1970s, and then left it in a hut somewhere in Scotland to age. This bloke hadn’t so much drunk his inheritance as inherited his drink.

Let’s face it, no-one has ever walked into a bar and asked for a nice young Scotch. The older the better, and that’s only possible if our forebears take the trouble to put the stuff aside for us. It requires a disciplined and far-sighted society, which is probably why we don’t have 18-year-old Greek ouzo.

Land Rover – officially at any rate – can’t actually build an old car, so it’s up to us to lay a few down while we’ve still got the chance. This requires thought. Whisky needs an old sherry barrel from the Iberian Peninsular. Balsamic vinegar, to take another highly coveted example, has to pass through a succession of barrels of various woods if it is to achieve the right flavour, and that can take 12 years.

So I quite like the idea of a barn-matured Defender. My experiences with the things suggests that two decades in the back of a cow shed should be just about right. That would give it a good nose.

On the other hand, those with a hardier palette might prefer a field-aged model, parked in a meadow with the windows half open to ensure a good mossy finish in 2025.

Come to think of it, this scheme would work rather well for the new Bentley Continental GT as well. It’s a great car now, but, rather like that cheap French grog that most of its first owners will drive off to collect once a year, rather nouveau. Half a lifetime in the car park of the Savoy – doors left unlocked so the odd pissed toff can sleep in it – should make it more pukka than a Rembrandt with your ancestors in it.

Sadly, my own father never did such a grand thing for me, and I don’t have any children of my own. So, had a son recently? Well, put his name down for a posh school or a golf club if you really must, but, for God’s sake, put him down for a Defender.


Nog een leuke quote van James May: “How utilitarian is it? There’s a flap under the windscreen, which you open if the engine’s not quite noisy enough”

Op de foto James May - Top Gear