Best Hot Hatch? | The Car Podcast #77

Hello, and welcome to episode 77 of the car podcast, Chris Harris and Friends. We're

very proud. 77 sounds like we've done a lot more than 71. Isn't that weird? They're not

both in the 70s. 77 is a much more aged number than 71. I don't know why, so maybe it's the

sort of repeat of the 7. So we'll start with the factory. I had a good factory lined up,

but this is brilliant. This is from Louis, who?

K, Louis K, I think.

Louis K, not Louis CK, not Louis K. And it is this, that when the Honda does the beep,

beep, beep, beep, beep thing, when you've not put the key in or you've got left the light

on, it's standing beep, beep, beep, beep, that is the letter H in Morse code, that three strikes.

Four dits.

I mean, how, what, a company of some detail, a company of some heritage and a company at

the moment that probably isn't enjoying Formula One, but that's for a later discussion.

Let's start with, I've just said to them that this is a great agenda, it is, but it's controversial,

and this first one here is not easily resolved. I will ultimately cast judgment here, the

way Cooper did last week. So let's start off with what's the best hot hatch? I mean, how

can you come up? I'm going to go first to Neil Clifford on this one.

I'm going to answer it as the correct answer, then you lot are all going to be scratching

around on the little bits of crumbs that are left of this discussion. Of course, it's the

Peugeot 205, GTI 1.9. For many reasons. A, it's the prettiest. Yes. It's the prettiest.

That is, well, actually, that's not even a debate, actually, it's the prettiest. It's

even that alone is enough. But that rorty little 1.9. And, you know, those journalists that say

all the 1.6 is sweeter, bollocks. It's all about the 1.9. What do they know? Because you get the

wheels, you get the badge, you get the superiority complex of having the right one, not the fucking

wrong one. And then the noise and that steering and the lightness and those seats. It's the best

one. I don't know how much better to express it. The little clarion stereo, those little round

little fog light switches and heated rear screen, the black on red dials. You get down into the

nuances of all. Don't get the power steering. Make sure you get the one without the glass

sunroof. I agree with that. I agree with that. There's all those little niches. I've had three

or four of the things. Get the dark green with the green carpets. Which model had the

all leather seats? Or am I going to do the MI16 engine upgrade? It's endless, that discussion.

But fundamentally, it's the best fun to drive. It's the best looking. It's got the best wheels.

And it probably was in the era of peak hot hatch. So I'll let you guys argue over the crumbs.

God almighty. There's a lot in there that I agree. I'm going to go to Manish next.

I think actually there is only one answer. And it's that. It's the Delta Integrale HF EVO 2.

It's not a hot hatch. Yeah, it's a hatch. And it's hot. It might have four doors,

but it's a hatchback. Do you mean the Integrale or the HF Turbo?

I meant the HF Turbo. EVO 2 HF Turbo. So I had a friend who had one of these in the mid 90s.

And he was actually a racing driver, a proper racing driver. And I think he would have been a

very successful racing driver. Exactly. Had it had it not been for a massive shunt he had

in Formula 2000 car. Someone chopped across him rather violently, took his wing off.

I think I don't remember where it was. Anyway, he went under a tyre barrier instead of into it.

And he broke both his legs below the knee in multiple places. They wanted to amputate.

And fortunately for him, there was a technique called the Elisaroff, where they put these

kaplunk hoops around your leg. It's now a pretty common technique, but he saved his legs.

And that was his road car. He became a senior instructor for Jonathan Palmer,

then he ran the Yass Marina circuit as senior instructor. This is what Philip drove.

This is his name is Philip Ellis. This is what Philip drove. And this

is Philip Ellis. We know Philip. Do you know Philip? As in, sort of, he did have ginger hair.

Well, I mean, he looks like Sterling Moss, the amount of air he has left, but...

Yes, no. A softly spoken kind man. He's honestly, he's the most incredible driver.

And he's a very, very good friend. I met him actually at university. He turned up in my room

at Cambridge with an actual go-kart. Not many people do that, do they? So, go here,

do you mind if I just put my... I think he, we've been at Palmer's.

He's still there. He's been for years. He went to Yass Marina. He may well have come back.

So, but the point is, Phil had this car and he drove me around in it in a very expert manner,

even in central London, and he redefined hot hatch. And it's got things like, it's got a turbo

charger. How does that not make it an even better hot hatch? Big Garrett. It's a big Garrett turbo

charger as well. Big. Not too little high turbo charger. So, that is way the best hot hatch.

Well, I think it's a very controversial intervention there from Manage, because I think

most of us agree that the intergrally wasn't the hot hatch like two weeks ago.

So, but I'm going to allow him to have that. He's going to have that. It's hot for him.

Chris Cooper. This is quite a controversial question, isn't it really? I hadn't quite realised how

controversial trying to define the herd as to what he is and isn't a hot hatch would be.

Even if we said, or with my little rule said, it's not a hot hatch. It doesn't mean they're not all

lovely great cars. They're like Labrador puppies. You'd want all of them. I mean, it's tempting to

say Neil's got a hole in one. He has. There's something about the first one though. There's

something about the first one you saw that made you think a hot hatch is something a whole lot

different. And the first car I followed that did that being driven with some spirit and did that

sort of abrupt turn and the inside rear wheel lifted. You saw it in real time. That's when you

thought, my little hashback doesn't do that. There is definitely something. It's not marketing.

It's not hype. A hot hatch is just the real deal. And the first one I saw doing that

was really, really interesting one. It was a Golf GTI Mk1 Otinger. Yes. Do you remember that?

And I knew it was because I'd been stuck behind it going through a little bit called

charring in Kent near where I grew up in Pluckley in my dad's Rover 3500 ST1.

I got close to it and I saw this little badge on the back. I could see it as it moved around.

I could see there was something different about it. And it had a little news agent.

You used to be on the outside of charring. You did a big turn into a right hander.

I thought that's amazing. It's quite hard to walk past that.

I mean, it's still, I was going to be French. What was it about the French that meant?

Was it just because they were really good at front wheel drive? Lots of French cars on

front wheel drive? They invented the hot hatch. They sort of did, didn't they? No.

You don't think they did? Who did? XR2? No, Golf GTI predicts them all.

It's sort of, the French made it their own. I've got an answer for it. I totally agree.

The reason why French cars make the best hot hatch is because they're light.

A German hatchback, by definition, is heavier because it's stronger and more crash protection.

No German car company could ever make a Citroen AX because they couldn't look themselves in the

mirror. No, they couldn't. Can I just say, because I haven't actually, as usual, I haven't

actually chosen one. I would go with the first one. I would go with Renault 5 GT Turbo, Phase 2.

Okay, that's interesting. So I come at this from a different angle, but I think I'm going to end

up in the same place. So the thorny issue here for me is not actually choosing the car. It's

hot hatch has to come from the hot hatch era, which is the 80s. Because I think there are better

hot hatches that have been made after the 80s. Of course, they're the cars that drive better, faster,

more exciting. But if they don't come from the 80s, I'm not sure they're part of the club. They're

their own newer club. And also, they allow this thread to continue for months when we consider

the greatest hot hatch of the 90s, the 90s. I also think great hatchery has at its base

two things, very lightweight. And that can only really happen in the 80s. By the time the 90s

came, they were already getting heavy. You drive a 106 access to i after an AXGT. It's like getting

into an S class. It's so heavy. So it has to be from the 80s. And it was quite tribal, wasn't it?

You forget how tribal life was. If you were a working man, it was Vauxhall or Ford. The French

stuff or the German stuff, parts too expensive, or you were just a wanker because you didn't drive

cars that were made in the UK. I can remember turning up in the 205XS and it was like,

I'm like, I'm trying to be exotic because I had a French car. Most other people have Fords and

Vauxhall. And I think the French made the ones that we love. And for me, I like the Renault,

but it's faster in a straight line and you're much more likely to kill yourself in it. All the

things that match in a hot hatch. But there's something about the shape and the sound and the

gear shift. The gear shift in the 205 GTI is so extraordinary. And that closely stacked gearing

with the long first gear. Yeah. So you'd accelerate first, second, you'd go second to third and the

revs would drop about one RPM. Yeah. It was just so exciting, all of it felt urgent.

So I think it is. Is it a 1.6 or 1.9? It's probably 1.9. I've had better drives in 1.6 though.

I've had better drives in 1.6. I would say now, at this stage in life, I'd have a 1.6 with 1.9

alloys because they look nicer. On the badge. Yeah. And the leather seat bolsters, I prefer the

cloth ones, you get in the 1.6. Yeah, because they go a bit exmery, the leather. I've done that story,

I remember about the hair growing out of them. I did that on this podcast that when Peugeot had a

warranty claim, because a batch of leather wasn't cured properly. And people were coming in with

six month old 1.9G tires and there was a hair growing out of the side bolsters.

Yeah, they're a bit cracked up. You need a bit of foot cream on the side of those.

But if you combine either carburation or very primitive fuel ejection and very light weight

and no assistance, you get a type of driving, a type of car that is not repeatable in future

eras. And the one thing I do disagree with is car magazines, I was guilty of this, car magazines

would get together the hatches of the eras. And I remember driving back to back a really good 1.9

GTI with the clear Williams. And everyone was gushing, it put me gushing about this Williams.

In reality, if you've been offered to drive home in one of the cars, 11 out of 10 people would have

taken the Peugeot because it was just so much fun to drive. Everything in the Renault just felt

like it had rubber between you and the control surface. It's amazing how quickly the rubberisation

of control surfaces came in the 90s. And by the time you get to the Nauties, the first generation

Focus RS is a car I just fell in love with. I did so many miles in them. Someone sent me a note,

I must read out about the Focus RS. Is it a hot hatch? It is the first one. But again,

it wasn't made in the 80s, so it can't be. So I'll find this note for you. I must read it out.

It's from someone quite senior at Ford. It's reminding me that I was the second person ever

on the planet to crash a Ford Focus RS. I saw that. Was it in the comments somewhere?

Yeah. We must find it. We must find it. But apparently some engineer fired it off in the same

corner. Was this a lommel? Was it a lommel? A lommel test track has this, I digress, but this

incredible runoff material, because it's a fast sort of, it's like an amazing A-road they built

in their test facility. Goes on forever. But they don't have much runoff. So they want to stop you

very quickly. So when you fall off the road surface, they have this, what looks like pebbles,

thick gravel, but it's not. It's a clay that compresses and cracks. So it stops you even

quicker. It's a brilliant material. But it gives you a neck ache when you stop. And if you get through

it into the barry, it's considered to have done a good job, which of course I did. But yeah,

I think it has that. It's what defines the great hot hatch for me in the 80s style. If you drive one

now, within one minute, you're just thinking, God, why isn't every car like this? And you don't do

that if you get into a 306 GTi6. You just don't. They feel too modern. And it is interesting how

quickly I remember driving one of the very first Clio 16 valves when I had only recently

not had my five GT turbo. And it must have been 1990, 91, something like that. And it felt like

a spaceship, not necessarily a good way. You asked a question earlier or you post something

earlier on, which has made me think we've got to answer that question now. If you were restricted

to Ford versus Vauxhall, hot hatch in the 80s, XR3, Astra GTE, what would you pick? Mr. H?

Vauxhall. But for me, it was only when the red top came in, when they bought that 16 valve engine in,

it was just, it changed everything. Do you remember the top speed and adverts of the

Astra GTE 16 valve? It'd be like 137, 138, wasn't it? It was unheard of.

That was the Mark II Astra. Yeah, the Balboa one. I was reading a leader, I'm going off

a tangent too much today, I was reading a lovely leader in a car magazine from 1984, the year before

that car was introduced. And not unlike the Lotus Carlton issue, there was some, there was almost

some political issues around the increasing top speeds of these hatchbacks. People, even the car

magazine editors are saying, do you know what, we're not sure these hatchbacks should be doing 135

miles an hour, it seems unnecessarily fast. But it was talked of in a sort of, as being a potential

political issue in car magazine that I was reading. It's amazing, isn't it? Now, Polo will do 130

miles an hour and thinking about it. So yeah, sorry, Carol, for me, Vauxhall. Neil? Neil?

I had a soft spot for Vauxhall in the late 80s, early 90s. The Calibra, there was a great looking

car. All that, the Lotus thing, I never had one actually, didn't I? I went straight to sort of

Peugeot Renault. I didn't, I couldn't really click with that Ford thing, even though my first car was

a Ford. The XR3 passed me by a little bit. I got a little bit of a semi on the RS 1600i.

It wasn't till Cosworth, really. I switched. I think that's because the magazines in those days

tried hard, but couldn't quite convince us that the XR3 just didn't really handle.

Yeah, I think, I think when Cosworth came along, it was an instant switch. But I think

that GTE 16 valve, I thought, and the great seats, at the air, it was, I never had one,

but I always, it's always admired it from a distance.

Managed only allowed to answer one brand here, then we'll explain why. What is it going to be,

Manage? XR3, I had to do the XR3. I just thought that was a fabulous looking car.

I know it's slightly out of the remit of the conversation that the most iconic use of a

performance Vauxhall product from that era for me is the, is the GSI pace car in Senna.

When you see that, you forget how good the design was. I just think Vauxhall's design,

or Opel's design in that era, was miles better than Ford's in many respects. What Ford was very

good at was putting body kits and stuff. Ford's body kit department all should be knighted for

what they did. Yeah. XR4, remember the XR4? There's somebody we knew growing up, must have been in

mid 80s. And the dad of somebody we knew, I can't remember how we knew now. He ran the Vauxhall

dealership in Maidstone in Kent. And he, I went in one Saturday, there was a Opel, well Vauxhall

Monza. Great looking car. The Astra, the Mark I Astra GTE is sort of the boxy one. Yeah. There was

a guy at Polytechnic who'd had this extraordinary in the Motor Club when kids in Motor Clubs had

cars rather than just watch stuff on TV. And he had a 1440 CC engine in the front of a mini

Clubman with 12 inch wheels, just to give it some traction. And he left university, got his first job

somewhere. And you swapped it for an Astra GTE. And I thought, he's just sold out. I mean, went in

this Astra GTE to Marshall for the RAC rallying those days. And I thought, I can't imagine wanting

a better car than this Astra GTE, Mark I. Yeah. Those seats. The seats were really good. Good body

kit on that as well. Body kit. Well, note for these body kits. We need to do that. Yeah. Body kits. Forget

that written down. So let's move on, because we've managed to spend 18 minutes on the first topic,

which means we'll be here for seven hours. I don't know who wrote this one, but whoever

wrote it, I want to go first. Two cars, 10 years apart, you TARDIS to be new. So Mr. T, can you

explain what you mean by this and how it's supposed to answer? So a TARDIS is a time machine. So it's

a fucking cool piece of kit. So you don't want to waste it by just getting something from last year.

You've got to use the TARDIS properly. So the idea of a TARDIS is you can go to two different parts

of time, bring them both back, and they're new today. Right. Do they have to be 10 years apart

exactly? That is what's in the question. Yeah. Which means that they don't, actually, because

Chris posed it. Okay. So I'm just going to do a little bit more homework whilst you, and then

I'm going to read the question next time. Manage you can go first. 1971. Maserati Bora. If I could

bring a brand new Bora into the world, I'd be the happiest man in the world. I think that guy's just

just an exceptional beauty. Yeah. So the Bora, 71, I think, to 78. This little baby, the Porsche

944. I think it's 81, but it might be 82. So I may be bending it by a year. But if I could have a

brand new 944, maybe even 944S, I'd be a very, very happy human being. I think that car brand new.

Can you imagine? I'd probably just go forever, wouldn't it? Looked after properly.

I like those. I'm going to go next because I've just done my research in two seconds flat.

So I followed a BMW 3-series when I came up behind one on the motorway earlier. And I had that

shattering moment where I had misidentified the car. I'm doing it more and more because I'm still

shocked to have big cars up. I thought it was a 5-series. And the light was in my face. I hadn't

seen it tell at the time. And I hate this happening more and more. And so I think people like nerds

like us take great security in knowing that we can identify anything from the color of a

bulb at 500 yards. And as that diminishes, it reduces my security as a human being because

part of the whatever spectrum we're all on. So I just thought, oh, that's a 5-series. I've got it

behind me. Flipping. Flipping. It's a 3-series. So I'm going back to 1977. And I'm going to have a

323i E21 because it's the most significant car in probably my life because my father had so many

of them and that was just Dad's car. Not the first. The 75 was the 320 with the car. This was a big

step in performance. The 323i is still a fast car now. What they were like then. Mega thing.

But it's a tiny little car with a big engine, which is what 3-series should be. The 3-series is the

car you go to when you're a bit fed up with hot hatches and you've grown up and you're the next

rung up on the scheme. You should be in a 3-series. And now a 3-series is a massive car. I'm going to

fast forward 10 years after that. I've kept my 323i. And the reason I chose 77 is I wanted my

second car to come from 87 because it's a Ferrari F40. It's the greatest. I've had a week around

very well-resourced people who've got lots of lovely cars. And there's a lot of really

interesting chats come out because you can just pretend that you're one of them when you're not.

I'm not one of them. But they're very knowledgeable people. They always say to me,

you've driven them all. Which ones are the best? And they probably will meet each other later on

and go, there it is. I know. They probably meet each other later on. I love the fact that our

podcasts can pan right to the F40 that's always in the background. But we do talk around this and

maybe I give too many different answers and they all talk to each other and go, he told me this,

he told me that, he didn't tell me that. But the reality is it's an F40. It's just the one,

the look, the drive, the story, where it comes in the company's history. It was, you know,

some people are just made to be leading ladies and leading men. And the F40 is it for me. I just,

what a machine. Thank you, Neil, for showing us a picture of yours. So I'm going E21,

323i and I'm having an F. If Ferrari made a new F40 now, just, right, we just hope we've got the

tooling. We've still got the tooling. We're going to make another 100. I mean, it'd be 10 million

quid, wouldn't they? Yeah. Chris Cooper. Yeah. So this is my question, but I've done this wrong.

I've just realized listening to your answer. The other thing I thought listening to your answer

was, you said something about you try and pretend you're one of them. I think all of them are

pretending they're one of you. That's true. No, I think they all want to be you. They'd love to

be able to drive a car like that somewhere near a limit. A few of them. I'm giving up on the bird.

I'm not in the mood for people being nice to me. So I haven't done this right. Where I started from

was, if you go too far back, and you bring them new, they're still not quite what you remembered

or what you hoped. And if you went too new, you think, well, I could sort of do that without

a TARDIS. TARDIS is pretty special. You don't want to waste it. So you kind of go,

what's the oldest, newest thing that I'd really like that would mean a lot to me?

Do you know what? This is brilliant, because this is just a window into Cooper's mind. I'm going to

stop him here. He's just worked out the question he wanted to ask. Yes. I sent you a supplementary note.

On the group chat, I send this guy a supplementary note. He sends me a definition of a TARDIS.

I was asking you, what does the question mean? You can't be an Indian.

TARDIS stood for anything. I knew it stood for something. I had to remind myself time

and relative distance in space. This is just my best half is walking in the background to go to

our kitchenette and she's just shaking her head, laughing. I went in the original TARDIS. It was at

all his uses. How disappointing. Can you imagine? You must have gone through explaining

to your offspring the concept of the TARDIS, because it's a generic term. I used it and

of course they, when they were younger, what's that daddy? So I explained it to them and I showed

them the clip of the TV show and quite rightly, one of them immediately said, did you believe that?

That you opened the door to this box that's a police station.

It was in Longley. There was a whole Doctor Who thing going on. You went into this box and of

course the telephone box was by a wall, but when you're nine, you don't realise that. So you walk

in there and there's a fucking massive room. It's true. But what's so good is the willing

suspension of disbelief that we were all allowed to work with. And I think it's for a young

imagination, it's so important to believe that, you know, Mr. Ben's fucking shot was real, you know,

because it was cool. It's funny you mentioned Longley. When it just moved from the words or

gummage bloke to the bloke's big scarf. Tom Bacon. Yeah, it was just in that handover period. Exactly.

It was by the way, by my and off you something here, you answer the question you want to answer.

If you want to answer, who's my favourite hope you can. So you get back to 993911.

You probably do. Which was my first 911 when I couldn't afford it. Definitely couldn't afford it.

I look back now and I think, because you do that sort of Bank of England inflation calculator to

say, what would a 993, 911 be? What would it cost today? And you think, that's a lot of money today.

I mean, slightly less than what a 911 costs, because they've gone and outperformed inflation.

How did I think I could afford that way back in 1997? What were they? 58 grand, 58 grand.

They were 62. I paid 62 for second hand one in 1997. Oh, yeah. They're not far off. Yeah.

So you go and get a 993C2, I think, this basic C2, not the S. I quite like the arches at the back.

Didn't quite work so well. And you have to go back from there. And the one,

and this is a two car garage from heaven, really, isn't it? I get a BMW 325i

X Touring. You're right. What a two car garage that would be. Isn't that like a, what, no, 86

would that be? What sort of D is that? I did check and use my usual Blase getting it wrong.

I did find the internet told me there was, it offered me something it was telling me was a 1987

325i X Touring. Yeah, they're normally on a D or an A. Which would be 87 was D. D. Yeah. 86.

I want to ask one thing. I think you can only buy a dealer special order 325i X in left hand drive.

I don't think you get them right and drive. Correct. And I'd live with the fact it's left

hand drive. I want a new one. Okay. I've answered that. You've answered that. Who else has answered

this? Managed to have done his Boree. Yeah. So it's Neil now. Right. I'm going back. I think 73.

I mean, this car is a lot older than I initially thought. It was the car I drew in the back of

my maths book when I should have been doing maths on 73. I wasn't doing maths 73, but 77.

I was drawing the car 365 box. Of course it is. And I'm really, really good at drawing that car

because I had a lot of practice right there. Math lessons. Yeah. I would go 365 only just

because of the six exhaust pipes. I think that in my head of this question, which I know it

doesn't say in the question, it was you were bringing it from the era, but it was going to be a

new car as in you could go into Ferrari and buy it. So Ferrari have launched this car. So it's

got all the modernity of, you know, car play and seven year warranty and all that, but it looks

exactly the same as 365. No, no, no, that's not. I'm just telling you what was in my head,

Manish. It wasn't written in the question. I'm just saying this was my imagination.

And I adore that car. And then I would jump forward, I think to 1994, another car that I

adore, another car that I've owned and I sort of struggled to get on with them. But when I

day that car looks, if that car rocked up, launched at the Geneva Motor Show by Porsche in

2026, September, you'd be like, that's just the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life.

It's the stance of the GTS. We can all argue, as we did with JK, I think the witch nine to eight.

But I think that the arse, those wheels, wheels, I think it's just a spectacular,

slightly disappointing to drive because it's heavy, but that dash, the quality, it's like a

submarine of quality, those switches. How safe do you feel in them as well? They feel so strong.

And you turn that knob for the lights. You don't have to go anywhere. Just

and then you put that central locking button that literally sounds like Fort Knox.

Yeah. Yeah. Is it pneumatic or the central locking? Oh, it was just, it felt like

it's a German engineering that car. I remember being accosted on the Porsche stand in 1993

when I was there to, was that nine, six, eight sport? Was that on the K? On the K.

1992, 1993. And it was when a new guy just taken over Porsche cars, Great Britain, a guy called

Kevin Gaskell, who had a different view about building the brand. So they were nabbing young

people on the stand. Oh, do you want to, we'd like to take your details. And I was really about

thinking, you know, that bit when you're younger and you think, you don't know, it's okay to say,

I really can't afford this. You think you should be trying to say, Oh, yes, I am seriously thinking

about this car. And you haven't got that, that safety and experience of older age when you realize

you can't say that stuff. So I said, Oh, yes, I'd love to. And I got invited to this open day thing

down at Reading. It was for launch the 993. And they had a nine, six, four, three, six turbo on the

dyno, had nine, six, eight. And you could drive all of them, even at whatever I was 20 something

or other. The one I wanted to drive, and I got two goes and I cheated was the 928 GTS manual.

Mega car. I think here's controversial. I'm going to have another one soon. I'm going to have an

auto. I'll tell you why. Long as you don't have your very early three speed, the manual is not as

good as people make out. The pedals are in the wrong place. Yeah, I've had both. And you had a

lovely green one. You did. We have an unspoken rule. We don't talk about past girlfriends on

this podcast. I don't go, Oh, she was fit. Was it Oak Green or Rainforest?

I'll tell you what, you're different. You can

Oxtrot Fox. So here we go. Wanker. Take your carplay with you.

Next one, ride height. Good God. I think you could do an entire season of podcasts on this subject.

Let's start out with ride height. What does ride height mean to you? Does it mean roads?

It means race. What does it mean? I mean, I could talk about, I guess,

F1 and the great controversies in the past about ride height. But I decided to do a

little teeny bit of research on road cars. The broad classification for ride heights for sports

cars is 100 to 150 millimeters. I didn't know this for saloons and compact cars, 125 to 170

millimeters for crossovers and SUVs between 150 and 250 millimeters. And for pickup trucks and

off road vehicles, they say 200 to 300 millimeters plus. I also didn't know that I guess it makes

complete sense that if you're into it, adjust your ride heights between summers and winters

in your cars. In winter, go higher, slightly narrower tires, but with a higher sidewall,

and that gives you better grip, apparently. I had no idea. And I just thought ride height, cars,

citrons, hydropneumatic suspensions, they are, I mean, that was, I guess, as a child, as a young man

sitting in a Citroen CX and seeing the back just lift at the flick of a switch, suddenly you

realize ride height means something. I mean, a whole car can lift itself off the ground like

Arnie Schwarzenegger in Terminator. It's an amazing thing. And my final factor, it is apparently,

Lola has a 135 millimeter ride height. So there you go. And Gordon Murray's favorite ride height

would be six centimeters. And you can ask him why, because he cheated around that to his,

to the cows came out. Please, we don't use the C word here. So he found some creative ways around

some very poorly written Formula One rules. He interpreted some very open, open-ended words.

Right. Okay. So, Neil Clifford, ride height, what does that mean to you? That's all a lot of bollocks.

I don't understand it. I'm not interested in it. What are we talking about? Just how hard the car is?

No, in other words, stance. What do you mean? What do you think it means? That's why it seems

in question. Well, look, you just, you just, you have a standard. We're not engineers. You just,

you go with what the car, the man that designed the car, whatever the car is, that's the ride height,

isn't it? If you say so, you don't want to fucking around with a car's ride height.

It's just absolute fucking therapy. This is, right, let's go back. And what time, what time

you like being let out into society later? I'll go now. Right. So I think when I read that, I thought

this is a bit of a confession one for me, because I'm hideously sensitive to ride heights

on cars. And not in the way that I'd like to project. If I was set right, I'd say that I could

feel profound differences between primary and secondary ride comfort. Ultimately, I've got

quite a well padded ass. And, and I've been beating up enough time to not worry about being beaten

up in the car. But if you give me, I've got an E39M5 I just bought, and it's got adjustable,

adjustable spring plates on it. If you take, like, 10 mil out of the ride height when you

feel the E39M5, it goes from looking cool to mega cool. Just if you can, ride height is all

about getting the shoulders right of the car. It's not so much the knees, it's the shoulders and

the way those rear arches can relate to the, to the tire sidewall, the shape of the wheel,

the dish of the wheel. I mean, the irony is Neil Clifford's there going, I don't get it. It's all

bollocks. And he owns the best example of this of any car. And the reason why this man's a genius

is he obsesses over this particular relationship, tire, wheel, bodywork, and the, and the tensions

between the two is Rob Dickinson and the singer. The singer has the greatest looking rear ride

height of any, any go look at any singer. Rob is a genius at it, right? So, but I do. And so many

road cars, if you just take 10 mil out of them, go from looking ordinary to looking really tough

and cool. I don't know. It's a remarkable thing that you can remove such as on paper, such a tiny

amount of, of, of anything, you know, whatever, whatever denomination of it you want to have,

you know, there's no way you could take 10 mil of windscreen wiper off or fucking 10 mil of,

you know, 10 mil of rubber windscreen surround make no difference. But the ride height,

suddenly, oh, I mean, the racing conversation is completely different. The effect ride height

has on racing cars and the way they drive is always gobsmacking, because you realise how sensitive

an item a motor car is, even a quite a heavy racing car. If you start jacking the back up by

10, 15 mil, you have a completely different motor car. So all that stuff is a bit of a learning

curve when you start racing. But ride height on the road, just take, I just like taking a little

bit, just a little bit. Go on, Chris Cooper. That's exactly how I see this question, which is, I think

ride height is the single biggest thing which affects how you see and regard a car. And it's the

perfect epitome of more is more, more is less, less is more. If you get it wrong,

it doesn't work at all. I'm distinctly remember, it used to be possible on the 911 configurator,

because you never quite really afford a 911. She'd go on the configurator the whole time and just,

you know, fantasise. If you click the PASAM Sports Suspension, and it said in brackets,

minus 10 millimetres, I'm convinced in my mind, the picture on the configurator would drop 10

millimetres, which in that rather pixely sort of thing, you think, how do you never notice that?

But your head tells you, it's gone down a bit, and it transforms how it looks, even on that little

picture on the configurator. It's that different. And I mean, 911 is a classic one, but it's,

and therefore it's interesting why we all love the way the Dakar looks.

Because it's just got, I've dug some pictures out, we'll put them on, Finney will put them up,

when we show it on screen. That little bit of extra ride height, it's not just the wheel arch gap,

it's the ride height, just communicates so much more about the purpose of the car.

An Alpine A110, which I love, and Neil loves, and Chris, you love, and Manish,

you'll love when you get to drive one. If you just squidge the ride height down a little,

little teensy-weensy bit, to me, it transforms how the car looks.

I did that on mine. Did you?

They're in lies, but they're in lies, one of the great aesthetic versus dynamics arguments that

exist in every car company. They all know, for the Alpine, they knew that they could have delivered

the car on that ride height and looked much better, but then you lose wheel travel,

which is what gives that car its genius on the road.

That's why I haven't done that, even though the weak part of me

still thinks, should I? But the one, if I had to choose one that I think

that car, the way it looks, the way it makes me feel, is entirely to do with its ride height.

It would be the 505 Dangle, Persho. Oh, yeah.

It's a 505 Safari, whatever it's called, brake.

The big ride height. We'll put a picture up.

Yeah, that's a great car. There's actually a normal 505 GTI, whatever it is, on classic at the minute.

Don't say that, Neil. But you're being very unhelpful today.

It looks really magnificent. Our original UK car.

Amazing. Okay, so let's move on to stickers on cars. This is good. We'll get through this quite

quickly, but I think we'll, I suspect we might all agree on this one. Manage stickers on cars.

I'm going to answer it with a very simple picture.

I think you just don't put stickers on cars.

When you see these hot rod flames on that SUV, I just, I don't get it. I play it

controversially perhaps for you guys, but even with the Alpenas, I don't love those stickers.

I have to say, I know they've been very well thought through and they're beautifully designed,

and they do this, that, and the other. It's just something about the shape of a car, the size of

the car, the actual idea that someone sculpted this thing. You really don't need too much help.

The closest thing I could get to in terms of an acceptable sticker on a car is perhaps in the

80s when you had a kind of speed line down the side of a car, whether it was somebody who painted it

by hand with a Rolls Royce or, you know, in an old Capri or, you know, just that single thin line

that chopped a car in half and made the car look lower and more purposeful. But anything more than

that, it's just the bloody chagmobile, isn't it, from Scooby-Doo. It just, it's just not happening.

The A team. Let's go to Neil Cippard. It's a really complex one, this, because I don't think there's,

I don't think there's a completely pure answer of no or yes. It depends on what the sticker is.

And that sounds a bit of a fluffy answer, but as soon as, as soon as Manish said about Alpina,

I'm like, oh, I love those stickers. I do like the Alpina sticker. Now, maybe it's about taste,

or maybe it's just about a personal love of a car. I love the old 73 RS Carrera sticker.

You know, it was a, it was a.

Meister. The Veltmeister circle stickers in the windows.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, just the, but the 73 RS Carrera on the side.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, that was always a dream sticker, wasn't it? It always elevated that car to

something more special, even though it took me many, many years to understand what the Carrera

thing was. It was sort of exotic for want of a better word, wasn't it? It was something you

saw in top Trumps. And then when you one day saw one, you know, oh my God, it's a real 73 RS.

It's got the Carrera sticker. You know, I don't like a lot of those not aftermarket. I think Porsche

can get the sticker thing wrong. I suppose we could also move into stripes, but that's another

discussion as opposed to sticker, isn't it? So I think, I think I don't like most of them,

but I like a few of them. And yeah, it's, you know, do I love the Singer sticker?

You know, I went shadow. So the shadow sticker on the singer, you can't see it

unless the car is dirty. And I quite like that about it, because it's only there certain times,

and then it disappears again. So there's a lot of nuances to the sticker.

Very interesting. Because he's given me a little tweak on the 9 to 8. I'll say, well,

how do you get to see that sticker? You don't drive that singer enough. You need to be out

in it more than you can see. I do. You're totally right. This year is the year of the singer for

you. Get out in that car, Neil. No, you're totally right. 100% agree with you. So Chris Cooper.

So I think, Neil, this is your original suggestion of a subject. But when I saw it on Sunday,

it said something different to me. And to me, the first thing I thought of when I saw this

was the stickers you saw somebody had put on a car when we were growing up.

What the artist is making a statement, a slogan, you mean?

And what this said to me was happiness. And you sort of hinted at it earlier with longlead.

Oh, I love longlead. I've seen the lines of longlead.

Yes. Yeah, stickers. Yeah.

People put them on, usually on the back window, occasionally on the side window.

Yes. And when my brother and I were growing up, we had this sort of battle with my father.

It wasn't really a battle. He didn't really think about these things necessarily. But

we wanted to go somewhere where we could get a sticker and put it on the car back window, probably,

just to communicate that we'd use the car to go somewhere and we had a happy day.

Yeah. Cheddar Gorge.

Cheddar Gorge. And those things and loads of stuff from.

Lucky hole.

Yeah. They're not close to each other, aren't they?

Yeah, they are. And there was a safari park, a wildlife park.

More well.

No, up in Scotland, with summer holidays, we were with Scotland going back to my grandparents.

But I've seen the lines of longlead. You mentioned it earlier on with the Doctor Who thing.

And longlead. That's in Wiltshire.

Longlead in Wiltshire.

Wiltshire.

It's up in Kent.

It's where the UFOs are.

It might as well have been on Mars. It's just too far away, never get there.

It's a different part of the world.

So, and you kind of wind that forward.

And 25, maybe cracking nearly 30 years ago now, when, and it feels like, you know,

we're talking about 100 years ago and it isn't really.

It's kind of in our light.

It's easy in our lifetime, in our adult lifetime.

The first time you went to the ring on a track day, on a wheel talk track day.

Remember those, Chris?

Yeah, I do very well.

And you go to the tank stall petrol station.

And you see those little cellophane packets with the ring sticker.

And you think, you're sure they weren't condoms?

If they were, they might not have worked very well.

Those stickers, and do you know what?

They would sell, in the old days, they sold them in exactly the right colors for 9-11.

Lightweight 9-11 or special 9-11.

Yeah.

So they had a red one that was exactly the same pan tone as the red lettering on a

Carrera's club sport.

So it might have definitely.

For Neil's benefit, they probably did flavors as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So I think stickers for me, I think about, I mean, the Alpina one, you're right.

And I think, and I'm finally off on that one.

I've kind of gone, I've kind of gone 180 degrees or not.

I actually quite like the stickers now in Alpina.

Possibly because we know that that Alpina ear is gone.

I don't know.

The stickers for me about.

When I got that car, I was like, right, what am I going to do here?

Am I going to d-badge, d-sticker?

Am I going to d-badge and sticker?

Am I going to sticker and d-badge?

Which, which method of, what's my communication on this Alpina?

Because I think all of it's a bit much.

So I d-badge but kept the sticker.

You see, that's exactly what I've been thinking.

I've been looking at an Alpina.

I can't afford it at the moment.

What do you think I was going to do?

But I've been looking, I think, God, if I don't do it, I'll never do it.

Oh, we're gone on my way.

And it's got all the badges on the back and the stickers, I think,

take the badges off, leave the stickers.

That's why I think, yeah, that's very right.

I did, I actually channeled my inner mannish on the flight.

I've just got off a long flight.

And I watched Blade Runner for the 55th time because you do, don't you?

It's just one of the great films.

And when, in the first interview, when the eye thing comes out,

and there's a story about the turtle, or the tortoise,

it reminded me that that interview situation where you're put,

where you're, as an individual, you're put on the spot and you're asked questions.

And these questions are being used to determine something about you.

I think you can determine where you are in your adult life cycle

by how you respond to Alpina stickers.

Because if you're, when I was younger, I hated the stickers.

I remember I was speccing cars for road tests and I,

and we bought a couple of new ones.

I mean, the sticker, it wasn't even considered that you put the stickers on.

I now think they look shit without stickers.

And I love the fact that our GP diesel ones got the stickers on it.

I just, it's, but it's so weird how you,

you're the same person that you were 10 years ago.

Now you look at this, something that you thought was brilliant then.

And now you make,

Yeah, you totally change.

Yeah.

I know Chris has just proven he is a replicant.

I mean, I think we're like, he's a number six.

So yeah, the Alpina stickers for me are fascinating.

I think you've covered it all really.

I think the great thing about the sticker is, it's your choice.

It's your choice.

And you're, you're doing it for a multitude of reasons.

It might be that you want to remember going through the lines along.

It might be to add some sportiness to your car.

It might be that you're being ironic, whatever it is.

But I do like the freedom of choice that the stickers are in that area

of not giving too much of a FUCK.

I think that's a good thing for all of us.

I'm pretty sure I did see in the ATs, sorry.

I'm going to just say that a white Honda that was in Brazil,

it was in Rio, literally covered in Marlborough stickers

because the person was such a big sort of center fan.

He clearly stenciled the V, put the Marlborough logo.

I mean, can you imagine driving around in that now?

I used to, and I had lots of stickers on cars,

but I think Porsche for the most part, stickers, Ferrari, no stickers, thanks.

Porsche is one of the few fast car brands

that I think can have stickers on the car than it would.

I think French hot hatchbacks from the 80s

should have a more sticker visible than paint.

And also for them, it helped because it covered over the paint jobs

being utterly abysmal.

They're probably actually holding panels together, weren't they, the stickers?

My favorite sticker, and I'll stick at anecdote,

and I'll admit to this now, is that when I was training quite a few cars

and then selling a few, probably 20 years ago,

a bit more, trying to add a few more pennies to the pot,

I was selling a few cars then, and I always, I tried to look at things

that I'd see on other cars that would make me read a story

into that vehicle that would reassure me.

Would that be that a Michelin tyre, or a dealer stamp in a book,

or the fact that the jack hadn't been used,

or all these little things that just make you create a picture,

of, you know, a fictional picture, probably, of how the car had lived.

One of my favorites was a National Trust sticker.

I thought it was a National Trust sticker on the inside window.

That was an adult.

So, I had a load of fake National Trust stickers made,

and I used to put them on the inside of windscreens,

because I think the people would look at the car and go,

well, that's an admission for you there.

That's like you telling me Santa Claus doesn't exist.

That's so dishonorable.

I mean, the original, that's one of the ads, isn't it?

Original dealer's back window sticker.

Even, they're probably all fake,

but you get very excited if it's got original plates,

original dealer sticker.

You do.

Yeah.

Okay, let's move on.

Hold on.

Now, we're going to go to predicting the outcome of Mayzian Cartas.

I mean, where do you go with this?

It's one of those ones that, until I read it,

I'd forgotten that I ever did it, and now I've considered it.

It made up a good portion of my week.

Let's go to Chris Cooper first on this.

If we're all honest, every time a copy of AutoCar or Evo arrives,

and the front cover tells you, and you knew what was going to mean it,

because you looked at next week's contents in the last week's one,

or last month's, you knew what was going to be there.

You knew what the car, the road test, or the comparison is going to be.

All you've been thinking about in the last month, or the last week is,

is it a five-star car?

Yeah.

Is it 0-60 in under three and a half, or four and a half,

or seven seconds, or whatever it is?

You open the magazine, and you go to see where it is,

and you get to the start of the road test, and you always give in.

You always go straight to the results panel at the back,

and you go to where is it, where is it, where is it?

Is it four and a half stars?

Is it five stars?

You've got that prejudice and that emotion about,

I really hope it's, it's just interesting stuff like,

when the Jaguar XFR was first launched in 2009,

I was looking one at the time, I got an Alpina B3 Touring instead,

the only one in the UK at the time,

and I really undone between the XFR and the B3 Touring, E90 Touring.

And you went to AutoCars, and it had five stars,

and the sense of well-being, that they agreed with me that it was that good,

and you hoped it was going to be that good,

because it was a Jaguar, and it looked cool,

and it just, everything about it was right.

And that excitement, and that anxiety, and nervousness,

and all, what if it don't think it's as good,

or what if it's only four and a half, because,

oh, you knew it really, there was something about it that wasn't quite good.

And just all of that excitement about waiting for the magazine to arrive,

it's just one of those lovely, wonderful, if you know, you know,

joys of cars and car mags, I love it, I'll never get bored of it.

Yeah, car mags, anticipated. Manish, this probably didn't affect you too much,

you might have had it with the auto sport though.

But, oh my God, for sure, I actually slightly read the question as

having a look, when you know that they're going to,

a car company is going to, a car magazine is going to test a car that you're a little bit in love with,

you know, what is, you know, what is the objective quality of this car?

And I mean, as you know, I was a little bit obsessed with quintaches,

and you also know that, you know, how quickly they go kind of varied by the week.

There were loads of very reliable people saying,

nah, one of these things can't really go faster than 160 miles an hour.

I remember reading for the first time that Pierre Luigi Martini,

Paolo Martini, drove for Minardi, he had an LP 5,000 s,

that he, they said he would hit 320 kilometers an hour in that car, it's 199 miles an hour,

which I found completely impossible.

And the best thing is, I found Motor Magazine, 17th of March, 1984, did test a 5,000 s,

and I mean, I'm going to put this up, but you know, they had the speed in every single gear,

you know, it was all really rather wonderful. They had, you know, the acceleration figures,

they had, you know, the power that they could bring out.

0 to 60, I managed, what was the 0 to 60 car?

Okay, so the 0 to 60 from rest here, quintaches, 4.8 seconds.

It was just under 5.

Yaston Martin at the time, it was a DBA, 5.2, I don't know which Porsche did have cut this thing out,

was 5.3, so they said the quintache was the quickest for those cars.

Can you imagine, 4.8 back in 1984.

Was that the first under 5 seconds car?

I think it probably was, I think it probably was.

And you can see, like, single distributor, so that is definitely a 5,000.

It just...

Bro, what's the 0 to 100 miles an hour time?

I think it will be 11.3 seconds.

Yaston 11.9, the Porsche 12.3.

That's pretty insane, isn't it?

Yes, fast.

That was my test obsession, that was my test obsession in magazines.

I think, I don't know where to begin with this, it reminds me it's mostly my life for about 15 years.

Neil, you go first.

This is really complicated for me, even that was my little note, because I think I'm able to predict

what they're going to fucking say.

Yeah.

And I don't know whether that's because, A, I'm a genius, B,

I know a lot about these things and therefore I've got so much data

in my head about all these cars that I do sort of, I can get to the conclusion, or C, or whether

this is 100% really the truth.

I'm dyslexic, so I don't really want to bloody read the thing anywhere, I just want to go to the back.

And then, you know, Evo Carr of the year, what's that been going?

It's been going 20 odd years, 99 the first one, or whatever, longer.

25 years.

And when I see that photo on the front, the 10 cars, whatever it is, I would line them all up in my head

and go, okay, we're the mercs, no fucking chance.

That's going to be A, that's going to be A, there's always shit, heavy,

steering, wooden, like you can predict all the, you know, what Harry or Chris or Richard,

you know, all of these amazing legends that we all read, and then you then you get to the reckoning.

And like the last three, and it's 360s to Dali and GT3 and fucking NSX or whatever,

and the Jap car would never win.

And it's normally the Porsche.

I normally can predict.

Now, I don't know whether it's because it's too predictable.

Maybe it's the reason why car magazines are maybe not quite as successful,

because they're all written by wonderful people that we all love,

but they're all too mechanical in their thinking.

They're all a bit too, whatever it is, left brain.

It's all about the factoids and the sort of, you know, one plus one plus one equals three,

therefore three is the best car.

Maybe if we went, maybe for me, I would like this, I'm going off piece.

I want more stories about the driving and the roads and the hills and the sunset

and the emotion of driving.

I don't give a shit about the talks there of the fucking NSX.

None of us are ever going to feel that stuff anyway.

I know that's me going off piece.

But when I get these magazines, apart from, I think it was one or two years ago,

when that Toyota GR86 won car of the year or track car of the year,

that was the one time when I'm on the bog and you turn it over on the reckoning and go,

fuck me, it's not the GT3.

It's very, and I think the Maserati MC 20 won it, didn't it, two or three years ago.

That was also a bit of a surprise.

I agree with that, it's a good spot.

There was a little bit of bribery going on there by Maserati,

because everyone read it as no fucking way, that's the best car.

Anyway, they probably guaranteed 20 points of advertising for the next 18 months.

I never had an out and out.

You need to make sure this wins because they're advertising with us,

but I definitely had quite a few.

Wouldn't it be nice if sort of the less than obvious car won and I go,

but what if it's not the best one?

They go, I'm one of those automotor riders that wants those things to happen.

The car magazine outcomes.

I used to, this was such a deeply important,

yet subtle activity for me that I reckon by the mid 90s, I could open a car magazine,

ignore any sort of leaders, I could go straight,

I could instinctively work out where a sort of test would be within the book.

So I would contaminate the rest of the book.

I could then get to the opening headline,

maybe a bit of the stand first so I could work out who's riding it straight away.

Then I could get to the back of the story and see if they got a full set of performance data

rather than what I'd call the lazy data, which was always 0-60 top speed.

I wanted more.

So whenever, when I got involved with an auto car, the bare minimum was a 60 and 100

because I always wanted to know that the 100 times tells you how fast the car is.

The 60 times tells you how good the guy is behind the wheel of testing the car

because 60 you can use skills.

Whereas 100 is really what the car will do.

But I could do that and look at that data without ever having my drawn down to the last three words,

which would give away.

Then I go back to the beginning of the story.

I mean, really, it's how do you eat a crunchy, isn't it, in Carmichael?

How do you eat a country?

Quite the top off.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the way you look at it.

And I think that it was joyous navigating around the magazine.

You know, you go sometimes, I remember being so excited,

like those seminal magazines like the McLaren F1 road test in auto car,

which I only got to read when I come back from traveling

because I couldn't get it overseas.

And I remember thinking, I'm so desperate to read the McLaren F1 road test

and see what the numbers were and see the pictures.

But I read every single classified advert in the bank,

every single word to just prolong it because I didn't want it to end.

I wanted the magazine to like, I read every news story.

I read a lot of columnist I'd never read before probably.

I thought I'd be leaving that.

That was that roast potato that I'd been looking at all.

It was roast potato perfection.

I had a corner of the plate, there was gravy, bit of horseradish,

and I was going to leave it there to the last moment.

And I did this with two weekly car magazines,

probably 10 monthly car magazines, and I miss it dreadfully.

I've talked to one of the great magazine curators over the weekend,

Pete Stout of Triple Zero Magazine.

Pete is, of all the magazine editors I wrote for one,

I wrote for a lot and I think I wrote for some of the very best ones.

I was very privileged to write for them.

Pete was a very high status.

I think it was quite rare for my copy to come back in those days,

but I'd get red pen off Pete.

And we were talking about just the romance of the magazine

and how the consumer interacted with it.

And it is a lovely thing, very difficult to describe to young people.

They just don't get it.

And I understand why, in the same way that I didn't understand

a lot of the shit my parents said.

But I hope we all know, there's people who listen to this thing,

that what you did with that magazine,

when it came through the letterbox, or maybe even more fun,

where you went to get it.

If I was a day late fraud car, I knew exactly where I lived in Oxford,

which what my best chance of news agent was of getting one,

because it would always be a good one.

They probably had an extra copy.

I knew down to that level, that binary level of where you could get what you wanted.

No, I'm amazing.

It's just amazing times.

And I love hearing you guys talk about how you'd looked to the end of the test

and you could predict what was going on.

As a writer, sometimes you were thinking,

I might just change it up a bit here.

I might just say that the Subaru is the best,

because everyone expects me to say the Evo is best.

Let's see how they react.

But you would always, almost always not be controversial.

I think the question for me was always those Evo stars.

That for me, I wasn't really interested that much in the numbers.

When I was a little kid in car magazine of the 70s, I was.

But then I lost interest in the numbers.

It was more about maybe aesthetics,

or just reading about how they enjoyed to drive it.

And Barker behind Mead and over the Lake District,

or wherever they was going, and there's going into dusk,

and I could see the flames popping out of the Subaru.

It was that bit that was the most wonderful.

Car magazine changed all of that.

That was the style of writing and journalism

that they bought in the 70s with the Australian invasion.

And it's very interesting watching or experiencing that style now.

I'm obsessed with my old copies of car magazines,

and I bore you all with them, but I'm sort of mid-80s still at the moment.

But what's fascinating is when that world,

the world of subjective writing, of storytelling,

and skilled writing, deliberately self-conscious writing at times,

but really enjoyable when that meets a sort of group test.

So I always thought car magazine was flawless in that area, but it's not.

The group test stuff is really funny,

because what you've got is the subjective sort of floral world of car writing,

butting up against numbers that you can't ignore.

So basically, objectively, there are some cars that are just better.

And it always comes crashing down in that area of a car

when you come to the XJS normally.

But you've got, on every level, it gets shat on by whatever it's up against.

And the last paragraph, it always wins the test,

because they go, there's something about the XJS.

Which I love.

I love it, but the core friction of those magazines when you worked on them

was this, was the objective versus the subjective.

People would walk in and go, yeah, that is better, but I'd have that one.

Well, tell us how, write that story.

And if you can persuade someone that you've not done that

because you were paying to do it, then you're probably quite a good journalist.

That's probably the test.

What I can tell you is that working on those things

was the greatest pleasure of my working life.

You can keep television.

It's utterly shit compared to working on a car magazine.

They just rock.

We need to start a magazine.

Oh mate, honestly, the best way to lose money ever, I'd do it tomorrow.

Right, let's do, I want to do a bit of F1.

Manage, can you give us an update on what's going on?

There's one big story that we won't be able to avoid.

Go on.

I think just, you know, in a nutshell, it does look like it's going to be

a sort of slight Aston Martin bloodbath.

Today's big story is that they are going to enter the race

and they're going to retire the car as quickly as possible

because, you know, the Concord Agreement, you know, which dates back to 1981,

basically the teams have to turn up.

If they sign up for a season, they can't miss races,

so they're going to have to go.

And it just, it is, it's really, really heartbreaking reading this.

And they're laying most of the blame at Honda.

There's a little bit of, did Adrian ask them to do some things

which were almost impossible in the, you know, in the time frame.

It's to do with the battery packing.

And I don't know if that's true.

I know that I'm, I remember making Grand Prix driver in 2017.

Ron Dennis had some big asks of Honda.

Ron had left just before we started making that.

The Honda engine arrived.

It didn't physically fit onto the chassis.

You know, they've got some basic measurements wrong.

And you just, you do wonder, this should not be happening in 2026.

What is actually, what is the issue?

The car doesn't work.

The engine is really, some people say it could be 80 horsepower down.

Right.

And if it's that sort of level of power that's missing, you just can't,

it's just, you know, 30 horses is massive and a thousand horsepower.

Do you think Manish, just so, because I'm playing catch up as well.

Because I haven't a chance to do anything, read anything today.

Even stuff I'm supposed to be reading.

Do you think, is there any suggestion that Aston Martin have said,

they said we're going to start but then retire the car?

Is that what they've said?

That the autosport article kind of implied that.

So what do you think they do?

I mean, because you'd imagine, we'll just run it until it breaks.

Problem is, with an engine, if you do that, it's very difficult to work out what's happened.

If you just detonate something, you just got a load of bits and the forensic

afterwards can be so time consuming.

You don't learn anything.

I just wondered whether there was some suggestion here.

Because I can only imagine how frenetic and emotional and highly charged

relationships in the atmosphere is behind the scenes.

Do you think part of this is Aston Martin almost making a deliberately provocative

public statement to say, we're going to retire the car.

When we're actually going to cease to compete, the troubles are so big.

As some sort of either FU to Honda or some sort of, unless we make it really dramatic,

somehow the penny is not dropping.

Because it feels almost overly dramatic and already impossibly dramatic.

I'm going to answer it if I manage to answer it better than me.

What more dramatic position can you be in than a Formula One team that's got a new

reg change car and you've already been found out in the quite public test situation that

the engine doesn't work?

I think it's the only thing they can do.

Because they have to forewarn people what's going to happen.

If there is a subtle message there, it's probably when we have big changes like this,

is the Concorde agreement fair.

Because when we famously, the lovely part of the Lucca film when the cars are withdrawn

from competition from after Brandt Hatch, you can't do that now because you have a contract

with the race organiser to turn up.

Really, if it was a kinder sport, you'd be able to say, even though it's humiliating,

stay at home, spend the next round your homework and you can bring it in tomorrow.

But they can't do that.

We've also got to remember that we do, we're a very funny subgroup.

We read about testing, we've watched a bit of this.

The general public don't really do that.

They watch the race.

And I think this is almost forewarning the general public.

It's sort of getting it out to the pundit who are reading sports magazines.

There is going to be a problem for us.

If you look at that time, and I remember when the car came out all black,

it was just so different in so many ways to the other cars.

And these are very prescriptive rules.

There's not a huge amount of interpret.

They're all the same length.

They're all the same width.

They're all 40 centimeters short of track, this, that, and the other.

Adrian's mind is just so incredible.

He's interpreted this car.

The car just looks so different to the other cars, even just in black.

And it would be a dream if they can get...

I mean, what I'm hoping is that they'll change the token system in some way.

They'll do something clever to allow Honda to catch up.

And I think if that happens, then we could have a pretty competitive car,

maybe in the second half of the season.

Because it's not good for anyone to have a team this big and accompany this.

As we all know, Aston's having a lot of problems on the road as well.

And it's just depressing that this is a bad new story,

rather than, wow, we've got these beautiful Green Aston Martins copies saying

they bought in a major petrol company.

They bought in a major Aston Supply and they bought in a major lubricant partner,

from our past, Valvoline.

It should just be a fantastic new story, but it shows you you can still get stuff wrong.

I think there's any part of this, Manish, I mean, it's almost a cliché to say it,

but if you start digging, you find lots of stories and evidence going through the years of the...

One of the peculiar aspects which has been regarded historically about Japanese corporate culture.

And they're sort of overly deferential upwards, so don't tell them bad news.

It was going really badly.

You know, we don't like telling up.

They don't want to hear and we don't like telling them.

You said it's another one of those.

That's got to be a fact.

But I think you said it very well last year that this new formula was created to placate

and keep manufacturers, you know, in the fold.

And I think, I can't remember if it was a race today, just said something like, you know,

these are confused regulations which have percolated down from an industry that has been confused.

And there has just been confusion about electric versus ICE.

And this confusion has found itself, you know, in this formula.

Unfortunately, I mean, just putting Aston aside, you know, there is genuine worry

that the racing is not going to look good when we watch it on TV.

And Albert Park, you know, it's not a very forgiving circuit for these new rules.

In the morning, we've got to get up.

That's normal.

That just makes it a Monday for you, Neil.

I know, but I'm not bloody how to in the morning.

I think, I think the sport will deliver something unexpected.

We'll see what happens.

There's always, there's always something comes out of it.

You can't have so many clever people and so many cool objects,

and then not to be something funky that comes out of it.

But I do, I do feel sorry for them.

It doesn't sound really tricky.

But you too, I mean, if you too, you know, that's Chris and Chris go to the Nürburgring

and you get told, you know, in some of the faster corners,

you've just got to lift for about third of the corner.

I mean, how much enjoyment would you, I don't think you guys would do that too many times.

I'll defend that side of the sport a bit.

If you do, I've never driven a racing car that doesn't degrade in some way

over the period of the stint that you're driving in.

And in many ways, it's not a sexy side to the sport,

but how you manage that degradation is really what defines you as a driver,

whether you're good or bad.

So, you know, the most basic level, it's most people's experience,

it's just tires, you know, you've got a choice.

You either go out of the stocks like a lunatic and you can,

and you make a lot of positions, then you've got to manage a nightmare car,

or you're that slow burner that looks after his rubber, sort of Jensen style,

nice and delicate.

And at the end, you've got more performance than anyone else,

and you win with two corners to go.

That's those are the two stories.

What I hate is that that's quite a simple way of approaching the sport

with simple outcomes.

This is just so complicated now.

And as you've pointed out, I don't think the public has got any idea.

It's the same as someone saying, right, what you didn't realise in that football game

was that the ball has got a lead pouch on one side and it doesn't roll straight.

But we didn't tell you, and it's really difficult for the players,

really difficult for the players, but we don't give a shit about that.

I just want to stick it in that net.

So we were all very busy.

Some of us jet lagged, and we've run out of time for the two car garage.

But of course, the two car garage is a very critical, important part of our lovely little podcast.

So I've been given the responsibility to ensure that we do deliver a brilliant two car garage this week.

So I'm going to present it all on my own, which is all good fun.

Two car garage was written by Manish.

And of course, it's sexy and it's in the 70s and it's probably based in the south of France.

Let me just read it out.

You are a production designer for pop videos.

A huge contemporary star is going to shoot a pop video at Pinewood Studios.

But the story is that he steps into a TARDIS and finds himself,

I think that's two TARDISes for this week, and finds himself in Cannes, 1988,

where he's desperately trying to impress a local supermodel, not supermarket, supermodel.

He needs to woo her on the Quazette, wherever that is, probably a lovely sexy road that runs along to

Nice or something with something sexy and then drive off with her into the hills with a convertible.

No budget, but these cars have to be seriously photogenic from all angles.

Brilliant two car garage there for Manish.

I'm going to start with mine, all from Khan Classic.

My favorite, as always, is the beautiful Ferrari 365 manual, wonderful car.

Finley's going to put the photographs up.

I always look back at those cars.

They're absolutely tremendous.

And then we are going to the Porsche 928,

another one of my favorites from a photogenic perspective, absolutely fabulous.

I'm then going to talk and give you all of the other choices, if you don't mind.

Bear with me one moment.

Let me just find Finley's fabulous little WhatsApp message.

So Manish has chosen, no surprise, a Lamborghini.

A Lamborghini Uraco.

I've always been a bit unsure about the Uraco, whether I like it or not, to be honest.

But anyway, it's yellow.

It's manual.

It's five speed.

It's on Khan Classic.

It says £134,000, absolutely wonderful thing.

And it looks like that.

Look at that.

Never totally convinced with that car, but anyway, Manish is.

And I think he's right to then choose, secondly, a Dino.

A lovely yellow Dino, GTS convertible.

POA, unfortunately, we don't really love POA, but never mind.

I'm sure someone doesn't mind POA.

We're then going to Dad's two car garage.

I think that means Mr. Cooper.

Ferrari Testarossa in the auction, because Mr. Cooper is the most diligent

and law-abiding member of the podcast.

Testarossa 1987, red, obviously, bit of a shame.

Wish it was posy blue.

Fabulous, bloody thing.

And of course, then the Aston Martin Vantage V8 convertible.

He's followed the rules explicitly, which I didn't.

Gorgeous little, it's probably at Nicholas Me,

because all the best Aston Martins are at Nicholas Me.

£350,000 bargain.

And then lastly, I'm going to do Chris Harris' myself.

He would choose, okay, what is he going to choose, 1988.

I think he might choose a Dino.

I think a Dino will be, I know the engine's a bit gutless,

but you know what, they are so pretty.

If you're going to woo not only yourself, but going to woo a young lady,

I think the Dino is the one, if not a 356 Speedster,

because those two cars attract men and women.

Everyone loves them.

No one hates a Dino.

No one hates a 356.

What is he going to choose as a muscular car?

I think he will probably go Aston.

Coupe, James Bond star, not DB6, not DB5.

They're all a bit rubbish apart from looking at them.

He's going to go 1987 Vantage with the, yeah, Vantage upgraded engine.

Take it to RS Williams, seven litre, straight through exhaust.

We can all pretend we're Simon Kitson.

I mean, what a fabulous thing.

Next week, we're coming back at the two-car garage even more,

and we're going to be doing a four-car garage,

but Finley is going to embed this little quick little five-minute video

within the podcast.

So everyone is very happy that we've created a wonderful two-car garage.

Thank you very much, and see you all next week.

So we'll just do a bit of music if that's all right now.

I'll go to Chris Cooper first.

Can I just show you, first of all,

because since we mentioned them earlier,

I spent most of this recording looking at Peugeot 505s on car and classic.

Yeah.

I found, I think, Neil, the one you were mentioning.

Good. No, mine's a saloon.

Oh, it's a GTI?

Yeah, it's a GTI saloon.

So I think I found the GTI.

Yeah.

Hang on, I've got to show you this one.

Is it that one?

Yeah, that's it.

It's parked in like a garage is on the street.

It looks like some Wiltshire version of Nito Engineering.

23 grand?

No, 11 grand.

Oh, Christ.

It's somewhere in Kent, just actually,

near where I grew up, actually, between Headcorn and Harrietchum.

Car and classic, it's 78,000 miles.

Fantastic car.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

So my music this week, Neil's probably chosen this before.

Peugeot Boys, it's a sin.

Oh, we love the Peugeot Boys.

I always thought they were early 90s, but they weren't.

They were mid-80s.

Mid-early 80s.

Please, about 85, I think, actually.

God.

Neil Clifford.

Neil Sardarka died.

Yeah, I know.

And not only has he got my name,

but he was always slightly in the shadows of the other Neil,

which is Neil Diamond.

But they always, in my word of Neil's,

sometimes the same person.

My mum told me that I was named after Neil Armstrong,

and then I realised it wasn't till 69 that he went on the moon.

I was born in 67, so she was always a bit of a blagger.

So he was famous, though.

He was famous before that.

I don't think he was.

In Portsmouth, I don't think you've heard of Neil Armstrong

two years before.

Neil Armstrong was ahead of a time.

She was always a bit of a blagger.

Anyway, Laughter in the Rain, Neil Sardarka.

There's a blast from the past.

There is, yeah.

Manage.

Does anyone lick a crunchy?

It's just hit me.

How else can you eat one?

Well, you lick a crunchy.

No, I'm not sking.

You said, you know, the only way to eat a crunchy,

presumably, is to bite the top off.

Some people take the chocolate off the top

and nibble round to get the honey comb.

There's a lot of people out there.

There's a lot of weirdos out there.

They do the tongue thing to try and hollow it out.

We're not going there, Neil.

Right, come on.

Devolting.

Yeah.

Okay.

I was a bit of a Durrani and once in a while,

a sort of Durran-Duran song would come out

and it would just leave me pretty enthralled

for weeks on end.

I'd just listened to it on repeat,

back in the days of records.

Well, this just happened last week.

My totally randomly Spotify threw up something.

It's called Leave a Light On by Durran-Duran 2011.

What a beautiful song.

I've just been waiting for it.

Random album they bought out, wasn't it?

It's good.

But it's very nice.

Yeah, he's got a great voice.

Come on, yes.

Yeah, very nice.

So about a couple of nights ago,

I've been in Montana at this ice race.

I'll talk about it on the next episode a bit more.

It was a really, really good fun,

but we were very lucky and privileged

to be taken to the Yellowstone Club,

which is this private ski mountain,

full of amazing things.

We had a meal and they had a...

Someone said,

yeah, there's a concert tonight.

You're going to.

I went, oh, okay.

I wasn't doing a sort of more car-y thing than concert.

And we had a very intimate

hour with a guy called Noah Kehan playing to us,

who is extraordinarily talented.

I don't think I've ever seen so much talent in a room,

really, just a bloke with a gob and a guitar

making extraordinary noises.

So his sixth season is his most famous song,

but all my love live with him firing it out

with some emotion was absolute tingles down the spine for me.

And I've been listening to it most of the way back

on the airplane.

Live music, when it's done well, is unlike anything else,

isn't it, in its impact.

So two bits of housekeeping.

The first is all of us will have people

that have caught up in the Middle East.

I've got some people that are very close to me

and from the car world that are there,

so A and K, I hope you are okay,

and they're trying to get out and get home.

So we're thoughts of all of those people.

Another one, randomly, Sandro Menari died.

Yes, very sad.

Poor boy.

And I just think Sicilian rally driver,

is there anything cooler to be on the planet

than to be a Sicilian rally driver

with the name Sandro Menari?

When he just walked around there rightly like a god,

him and Nino were basically gods, rightly so.

So go and find yourself some Sandro footage.

I go probably Stratos was his peak era,

but he was bloody good and a very sad loss.

I just, one of those heroes that you read about,

read about more in the old sport than you would see on telly,

Sandro Menari, RIP.

And I think that's it for episode 77.

So thank you very much for joining us.

Sorry it's gone on a bit too long.

It's an hour and 24 minutes.

We've wasted your lives there.

See us for episode 78, the week after.

Bye-bye.

Best Hot Hatch? | The Car Podcast #77

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