Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars

Seething, therefore, with those compound humiliations, I sought a kind of revenge in this the latest and most gizmo-encrusted Alfa 156 2-litre T Spark saloon; and you could feel the life-giving, baby’s-brain-enhancing lead-free petrol surging hormonally into the cylinders, or possibly the carburettor, or wherever it’s meant to surge. And soon that blonde was right back in front of my gorgeous, gouged-out snout, which looks a bit like a halloween lantern with a harelip.

And now we were coming into the Box Hill death run, where bonkers bikers yowl up and down from dawn till dusk on the dual carriageway. On any other day I would be tensed, white-knuckled in the slow lane, but today we were both giving those motorcyclists the humiliation they deserve, carving up the Kawasakis, and arum arumarum araaaagh, she took one and I took him too, our exhausts breathing contemptuously into his astonished face. Then we took another, and araaagh went the Alfa with the bubbling moan of lava in some volcanic pool of Etna, and now there was a clear stretch.

Whether this blonde knew she’d been

engaged in a test of a man’s waning

virility, I neither know nor care.

It was her or me. There was no excuse. There was no competition, not when the Selespeed contraption ensures that the interval in which you can move from third to fourth is tinier than the interval between a traffic light turning green on the Via Veneto and the man in the Fiat behind parping his horn, slapping on his door and shouting at you to move. Whether she saw me I do not know; and whether this blonde was aware that she had been engaged in a test of a man’s waning virility I neither know nor care.

But I tell you this. My Alfa took her from behind, and I fairly thrummed it down into Dorking—‘Now you’re Dorking,’ I congratulated myself. And by making use of the high double-wishbone suspension system I was able to make a kind of genuflection to the speed limits, then round the cyclotronic roundabouts, and ho for Horsham and victory…Or so it should have been.

Perhaps it was complacency; perhaps I just forgot to look in the mirror. Whatever it was, we came to a roundabout a couple of miles later, and—testa di cazzo!—there she was, up there on my right shoulder as we came into the ring. She had the drop on me. She was pulling away and plick my thumb twitched reflexively on the Selespeed button to bring the engine down into first and turn the car into a monstrous uncorseted roaring of kinetic energy…

And plick I clicked again, plick plick plick and—stronzo figlio di cazzo!—the sodding thing stayed in second and there we were, wallowing on that roundabout, with as much élan as a piked porpoise. And as the tears started from my eyes, suburban Beemers flashed and honked, and her rump wiggled away for the last time…

Perhaps I might have caught up with her eventually, except that just then, without warning, my five-year-old child vomited all over the back seat, including the magnesium structure and submarining beam. Next time, give me a gear stick.

Vital statistics

Engine 2-litre, 16V Top Speed 134mph Acceleration 0–60mph in 8.6 secs Mpg 33.2 Price (1999) £21,993

INHUMAN TRAFFIC (#u5d6a7515-d9ea-5b05-b281-844d808d2221)

The war is over. Now all you have to

do is get out of Kosovo in a Fiat Uno,

without attracting the attention of the

retreating Serb forces.

‘OK Vuk,’ I said to the cream-faced Serb as we nosed out of Pristina into bandit country, leaving the last Irish Guards Scimitar in the rear-view mirror of our Uno. ‘Let’s get the Vuk out of here.’

And let me tell you, that gibbering Serb needed no encouragement from me. Vuk was 29, with a head that tapered like an anvil from his rippling thorax. If I understood him correctly, he’d narrowly missed selection for the all-Serbia basketball team.

He could run a hundred metres in slightly over ten seconds. He didn’t smoke. He drank nothing except Coca-Cola, to which he attributed properties of a barely credible order. Vuk was the kind of clean-living, God-fearing Serb that Arkan, the war criminal, used to recruit to his Tiger militia. In fact, it seemed Arkan had tried it on just the other day, at some rural wedding. When someone called Vuk a ‘Serb maniac’, he was delighted, flexing his muscles for days and saying, ‘I am Serb maniac.’

Except that at this particular moment he was Vuk Funkovic, banjaxed with the terror of a man who knows that his people have done something very nasty, for a long time, to some other people…

…But those other people had now got the upper hand, they’d got their AK-47s, and they were swarming all over the northern suburbs of Pristina, setting up illegal checkpoints on this dusty winding road, and winkling the fugitive Serbs from their Yugos and popping them like cringing molluscs; and there were 40 kilometres between us and the relative sanctuary of Serbia.

Which is why he was pedalling that throttle fortissimo and why, as I looked at the windows of his maroon Fiat Uno Testadicazzo 1.4 with bodywork about as bullet-resistant as a can of Diet Fanta, I said a little prayer.

Call me a sissy. Call me a wimp. But I felt the faintest frisson of apprehension to be driving through the retreating Serb army, past soldiers drunk on Slivovitz and hatred of Nato, when they had just shot three journalists on the suspicion (well-grounded, it turned out) that they were German.

As for Vuk: Vuk was normally brave. On the morning Nato came in from Skopje, and the other Serb drivers were cowering in the lobby of the glorified ashtray that is Pristina’s Grand Hotel, saying ‘I not go’, it was Vuk who took me and Ivana, my gorgeous clean-living interpreter, down south to see the joyeuse entrée of the Gurkhas at the Kacanik pass.

Vuk had the guts to get out of the Uno and stand with me by the first mass grave the Paras found in Kosovo. He gulped but stood his ground when the black-bereted Albanian guerrilla appeared and started explaining how beneath the 89 numbered stakes where the flies buzzed, were the families that had been put in a tunnel, grenaded, and shot—shot by Serbs like Vuk.

He didn’t mind when we flagged down a lurching Merc-ful of KLA, wizened gaffers in brown and yellow fatigues who flashed their gums and waved their Kalashnikovs like rattles. Neither Vuk nor Ivana showed the slightest fear of the American Rangers, backed up for miles in silence. They crouched behind their Humvees, guns trained, as motionless as the Iwo Jima memorial—apart from their rolling eyes and their trembling trigger fingers.

‘What’s up?’ I asked one, tapping him on the shoulder. He pointed to the field, where the inky crows were flapping over the stooks and the poppies. It seemed someone had heard a shot. About half a mile away. You could tell the Americans had only just arrived.

Vuk even went to the headquarters of the KLA in Pristina, and he stuck it for a full 15 minutes while the youths in red armbands sidled up to him and asked him questions—first in Albanian, then more pointedly in Serbo-Croat. And now this self-styled Serb maniac was a pusillanimous pussy, and his hands were clenched on the clammy wheel in a kind of rigor mortis, and I found myself moaning, ‘Not so fast.’

You soon understand the risks of driving in a war zone. Bombs? Phooey. I’d been bombed in late May, a couple of hours after arriving in Serbia, while driving down the deserted highway through Vojvodin. Wumpwump wump wump went the precision munitions 300 yards away on our left, and the clouds wagged to heaven.

As I looked at the windows of his maroon Fiat Uno Testadicazzo 1.4 with bodywork about as bullet-resistant as a can of Diet Fanta, I said a little prayer.

Guns? OK, there had been one Pinter-esque pause when some Serb soldiers found out I represented the Daily Telegraph; and it was certainly my habit, going through the bosky bits, to balance my A4 Niceday pad on my head and cower behind the dashboard.

But the real risk was, of course, a car crash. ‘I very good driver. You see,’ said Vuk that morning we left Belgrade for Kosovo, in our Wacky Races-convoy of hacks. ‘This very good car,’ he said, showing off the Uno’s finer features: its ability to carry five jerrycans of petrol; the way it could accelerate in fifth.

Just to prove the Uno’s durability, he then reversed without looking and wham, our necks whipped as he crunched the bonnet behind us, a Golf belonging to Reuters. Luckily we sustained nothing more serious than a slightly squeaking door, which Vuk cured by anointing it with Coca-Cola, the drink he swore by and which expressed his rejection of Milosevic.

That is why I wasn’t so fussed by the sight of the burning houses, or the sad-eyed Serb soldiers, or the KLA sharpshooters. We smiled and waved at everyone indiscriminately, and, alarmingly, they waved and smiled back—the Serbs assuming that Vuk was a Serb heading home, and the Albanians spotting a western journalist.

‘This very good car,’ he said, showing off the Uno’s finer features: its ability to carry five jerrycans of petrol; the way it could accelerate in fifth.

No, what freaked me out were the signs of previous crashes—one car flattened like a can; that’s what happens when you hit a T-55—and trying to remember my blood group. With each fresh horror Vuk put his foot down harder, and cee-ripes, my fingers bit into the attractive leatherette Uno upholstery.

‘Jesus H Christos,’ I was murmuring when, with a rubber wail, the Uno stopped. ‘Srbija!’ shouted the Serb, and poured himself a joyous libation of Coke. So we went on, bathed with relief, until a couple of miles on he spotted one of those purple-pyjama’d military policemen—the real bastards of the Kosovo purges—lounging unshaven by the road.

He waved us down. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I whispered to Vuk. ‘Don’t stop!’ Too late. The Serb maniac grinned as that unshaven, flat-eyed gunman got in the Uno’s spacious rear seat, and stuck his Kalashnikov near my left ear, and I did my routine of pretending to be Boris Jonsson of Svenska Dagbladet for a couple of miles. ‘It was your turn to be afraid,’ said Vuk, as the militiaman got out.

As for the Uno, it’s just the job for Kosovo; particularly if, like Vuk, you’re smart enough to carry Czech plates.

Vital statistics

Engine 1116cc, 4 cylinders, 58bhp Top Speed 92mph Acceleration 0–60mph in 17.9 secs Price (1999) £150

DUDE TALKS LIKE A LADY (#u5d6a7515-d9ea-5b05-b281-844d808d2221)

Lexus have pitched the IS200 against the luxury car big boys. So why have they given it the voice of a girl?

Come on, baby, I say tersely to the girl, speak to me for heaven’s sake. You know how it is when you’re relying on some chick to map-read and they go all silent and sulky? We are coming down New North Road and some key decisions are in prospect. I’m not getting the help I need so I give Carol a poke with my index finger, because that’s the kind of relationship we have.

Come on, darling, we’re dawdling here in the middle of the road and there’s a gravel truck behind us that wants urgently to deliver its gravel. Is it right or left? And I jab her again, harder, because that’s the sort of guy I am, and then Carol speaks: so cool, so low, so scrotum-tighteningly thoughtful.

‘In a quarter of a mile,’ she says, ‘turn right.’

Ah, don’t you love her? She’s somewhere in her early thirties and her voice is perfectly pitched to mesh, to blend, above all not to offend the turbulent emotions of a guy lost in the sweltering Palio of the London traffic.

They’ve done tests on your average, red-blooded, Lexus-buying British male, and they’ve found that he’s a tricky customer. Give him a man’s voice telling him what to do—some jerk with a plummy accent—when he’s trying to do a U-turn in the middle of the Strand, or tax him with some toffee-nosed git correcting his choice of route, and what does he do? Under laboratory conditions your red-blooded, Lexus-buying male feels the veins in his neck become so engorged with incontinent rage that his collar button pops and, pow! He lets it all out with one savage blow of his left fist.

Crunch. Tinkle. Voice silent. Which is a pity, since Carol is the cleverest thing on four wheels. For a paltry £2,100 extra your IS200 Lexus is fitted with a GPS satellite guidance system, a gizmo of such mind-bending sophistication that to see her for the first time is to feel like a South Sea Islander seeing his first aeroplane, or stout Cortez gazing at the Pacific. Imagine a talking A–Z, bashfully unfurling herself on the dashboard every time you turn the ignition. Imagine maps, gorgeous colourful maps of every corner of the British Isles, with the one-way streets helpfully marked out.