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A vintage like the finest wine
Page 68
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Gordon Brown's proposed September increase in the price of fuel will cost the UK about £1bn.The cost of traffic congestion this year is expected to rise by £5bn to a record £25bn. Did! hear mention of a fuel protest or is my hearing defective?
Gordon Brown's proposed September increase in the price of fuel will cost the UK about £1bn.The cost of traffic congestion this year is expected to rise by £5bn to a record £25bn. Did! hear mention of a fuel protest or is my hearing defective?
Gordon Brown's proposed September increase in the price of fuel will cost the UK about £1bn.The cost of traffic congestion this year is expected to rise by £5bn to a record £25bn. Did! hear mention of a fuel protest or is my hearing defective?
Rolls Royce has recently celebrated its centenary —100 years of the very finest motoring. Surely we should all be proud of this great British marque.The magic of this venerable name reminds me of another era, a magnificent chateau, a tilt trailer and — stuck on the front —Britain's finest at the time: a Scammel Crusader. Saved by the engine
I was on a wine collecting trip across France. S a ff and field workers would gather round my vehicle a rarity in France wherever I went and let out hoots of laughter at its lack of a sleeper cab (particularly when! showed them the cut-down pallet between the seats and the piece of foam that made up the bed). It was altogether very embarrassing... untill remembered what the power source was. In my best
pidgin French I intoned, "Here you lot, take a peek" and directed their Gallic gaze towards the engine, one third of which stuck out behind the short cab. Emblazoned across the top of the engine was the famous Rolls Royce logo. Eyes popped and jaws dropped and, to a fanfare of 'Rule Britannia', the day was won.
What a heap ofjunk that Scammel was.You can't say that about the little Daf 85 CF 430 with the big cab which I have been honoured to drive recently.This is a marvellous piece of kit: reasonable fuel economy, terrific bunk, great driving position and a silky smooth gearbox. But when I look around I realise I'm a late arrival at the party— everybody seems to have one. Complaints? Well, a few but none of them Dafs fault.This rental vehicle is highly specced: exhaust stack for tipper work (noisy and intrusive) and super singles on the front (a fashion statement that has spoiled the steering) but otherwise a tidy piece of kit to swan around in for a few days at a time. Any longer and the 95 range does the job well I am told.We have come a long way
since the days of the old Crusader.
If you think our M6 toll road is unpopular for its £10 toll, imagine paying two hundred quid return to travel through the Frejus tunnel (half the distance of the M6 toll route) into Italy. I guess the shock of exchanging their multimillion lira weekly wage packet for a handful of Euros must have been too much for the Italians to bear and prompted this money-grabbing instead. At the entrance to Frejus you now have to drive through a fire detector, and inside the tunnel there is extra security including patrols, CCTV and a 701an/h speed limit. Not that the Italians
do speed limits, of course; that is why the Italian police have just taken delivery of a 190mph Lamborghini Gallardo.
Mama mia!
It's ironic to reflect that here, in the country of the supercar, the drivers cannot speak without using their hands —both hands. Mama rings up her boy, hurtling flat out down the Autostrada in one of Modena's finest, and you have to ask yourself: when he answers, who is steering? I have witnessed this happening in a Ferrari convertible and I know the answer: nobody is steering. Nobody at all.