Slightly off the topic but relevant nevertheless. As we all know, he is both a writer and a presenter. So what do we think he does better? Write or Present? Personally, I rate his literary skills much higher than his presenting ones. I am yet to come across another automotive journalist who manages to capture the romance behind a deserving car the way Clarkson does. Just read the last couple of paragraphs of his review of the Ferrari 275 GTS (and the paragraph in which he compares a soul stirring car to a book/painting) and you would understand what I mean:
When you drive into a village these days there is often an electronic sign that flashes on to tell you how fast you’re going. That’s very useful . . . but not half as useful as a sign to tell you how much of a berk you look.
I even have a name for such a device: a cock-o-meter. The idea being that it would process an image of your face, your hair and your clothes, and marry this information to the sort of car you’re driving. You’d then be given a score out of 10.
BMW M3s driven by people with shaved heads would get 10. Saabs driven by people in linen jackets would get maybe one or two.
And anyone in a Ferrari 275 GTS – even if they were a curious mixture of Bill Gates and Kim Jong-il – would get zero. In this car it is impossible to look like a cock.
Even if you are one.
This is not one of the great Ferraris. It is not a 250 GTO or a Daytona. It’s not a shark-nose racer or an F40.
Many car enthusiasts have never heard of it. Even among the Ferrari cognoscenti it’s a little known oxbow lake, Tim Henman with wire wheels.
If you liken Ferrari to the Who, it’s not Baba O’Riley or My Generation. It’s more like Happy Jack.
Part of the problem is that even by the contemporary standards of 1964 it really wasn’t very good.
The best thing is that it had an unusual fixed propshaft which, because the engine moved around on its rubber mountings, would wear out in moments. This meant owners never really had a chance to discover that the braking system was made out of what appeared to be veal. For stopping a GTS you’d have been better off opening the door and running your shoe along the road.
For reasons lost in the mists of time, the 275 was fitted with 14in wheels, which meant the discs had to be smaller than the engineers would have liked. They were fine for popping to the shops for milk, and at speed they’d work once or maybe twice. But after that I’m afraid you were going to meet your maker with a rather surprised and annoyed look on your face.
There was another interesting issue, too. Ferrari decided to fit a small two-man sofa instead of a passenger seat, saying they’d made a 2+1. And indeed they had, but woe betide the man who put a girl in a skirt in the middle. Because every time he went for fifth he’d get a slap.
None of this matters though, because, and I’m afraid I can’t take any argument on the matter, this is the prettiest Ferrari ever made. And that would make it the prettiest thing ever made, including Raquel Welch, who owned one.
I worry about modern Ferraris. They are deeply, deeply impressive and my respect for the technological abilities is boundless. They really do feel very far ahead of all other cars on the road. But emotionally they leave me unaffected: cold.
The 430, the 599 and to a lesser extent the 612 are as brilliant as laptop computers. But what I want from a Ferrari is not science and maths. I want heart and soul. I want love and affection. I want them to be less like a laptop and more like a book or a painting.
Perhaps this has something to do with the company’s current, and misguided, obsession with putting as much Formula One trinketry into the road cars as is humanly possible. Square steering wheels with gearchange advisory lights. Flappy paddle gearboxes. Five-way traction control. Look under the bonnet of a 599 and you’ll find the plastic sheet fitted to shroud the radiators has been sculptured to resemble the nose of an F1 car. That’s not clever. It’s naff. Drive past a cock-o-meter in a car like this and it will explode.
In the early days Ferrari road cars were not designed or marketed to exploit the company’s track stars. When the 275 came along in 1964 it had nothing in common with the V8 F1 car that John Surtees used to win the championship that year. And there was no attempt to pretend it did, as there is now with the grand prix tinsel and traction control malarkey.
Back then, yes, Ferrari’s racers kept the name in the headlines, but the road cars were made for playboys. People like Porfirio Rubirosa, who at 3am in a Montparnasse nightclub called New Jimmy’s suddenly remembered he was due to take part the following morning in a tennis tournament in Monte Carlo. Giddy, shall we say, after an evening in Paris he roared off in his Ferrari and did well, making it as far as the Bois de Boulogne before he veered off the road and into a tree, dying instantly. The 275 came from the days when Ferraris were bought by the white knights, the people who invented the jet set, not a bunch of IT consultants who want a flappy paddle gearbox so their stupid friends might think they’re Michael Schumacher. See a 599 and who comes to mind? Gary Neville? Philip Green? See a 275 and it’s a different picture that fills your head. It’s Grace Kelly in a headscarf cruising down the Promenade des Anglais. It’s Gianni Agnelli stepping off a Riva speedboat in St Tropez and screaming down the Riviera for a dinner date in Portofino. That’s why the 275 is a cock mask.
When I saw one in the flesh for the first time last week I didn’t really want to get in it and go for a drive. And not only because I knew the brakes wouldn’t work and I’d end up all dead. No. I didn’t want to get inside because then I couldn’t look at that gasp-inducing Pininfarina styling any more.
In some ways, I suppose, it’s a bit like the old Fiat 124. But because of the 72-spoke wire wheels and the four exhausts you just know it’s a bit more special than that.
And it is. Under the bonnet there’s a 3.3 litre V12 engine. We forget these days that to the Ferrari purist the V8 is a coarse aberration, an American import which has no place providing the propulsion and the soundtrack in a real car. A Ferrari must have a V12 in the same way that a real guitarist must have a Fender Stratocaster.
Of course by the standards of the 21st century it’s a woeful engine, drinking enormous quantities of petrol through its six carburettors and only handing 260bhp back in return. You get nearly as much as that from a Vauxhall Astra these days, and the same sort of performance. Zero to 60 in around seven seconds and a top speed of 149.
The handling is similarly out of date. This may have been the first car in the world to be fitted with independent rear suspension – not a lot of people know that. Not a lot of people care. But you need to be a brave man to find what it feels like at the limit. I wasn’t. Not with the owner watching.
All I know is that at surprisingly moderate speeds the wheels feel like they’re not really connected to the car at all, flopping over in the arches as the suspension fails to keep the tyres in flat contact with the road. At 50, in a gentle bend, the rubber was howling in protest.
This was fine by me because the slower you drive this car the more time it takes to get somewhere and the longer, therefore, you are in it. If it had had a stereo, rather than a medium-wave radio, I’d have slotted Matt Monro into the CD, and with the strains of On Days Like These filling the cabin I’d have set off at 30 and spent a month driving to the south of France.
Sadly it’s very difficult to buy one. Just 200 were made and only 14 had right-hand drive. They come onto the market from time to time and go for around £200,000 – roughly what it would cost to buy a new 599.
I’d go for the old car in a heartbeat. It’s not big and it’s not clever and it’s certainly not fast. But possibly, just possibly, this is the most exquisite car I’ve ever driven. Because here, wrapped up in 14 feet of steel and glass and wire, we find everything – everything – it was that made me fall in love with cars in the first place. A ton and a half of style, heart, and soul.
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They have violated a whole lot of laws even. Just that you might not have noticed.