I called it the world's worst car, then the fans came for me
The younger Porter would have loved today’s supercars; the current one’s not so sure
Just over 20 years ago I wrote a book called Crap Cars, which rode the early ’00s boom for being mean about stuff by listing 50 models I believed to be the epitome of cackness. In the number one slot, because it seemed more interesting and unpredictable than the usual Marina, Robin and Riva suspects, was the original Volkswagen Beetle.
Putting this as the crappest of the crap understandably angered a lot of Beetle enthusiasts, to the extent that one threatened to drop a crankcase on my throat while another told me to ‘expect the worst’, causing me to spend several months awaiting the release of an alligator into my kitchen. In 2004 I really did hate the Beetle and I was happy to risk the wrath of Run To The Sunners to express this opinion in print. Yet today I couldn’t summon up this level of bile towards the Bug. A Beetle would be very, very far down my list of things I’d like in my garage but I sometimes see a tidy one and think, well, they’re meant to be quite nicely engineered aren’t they, and in the right spec they do look pretty cool.
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I also can’t find much bile in my system for another car I used to despise, the MGB, which I put at number 10 in my Crap Cars rankings. I used to scoff at those things. The four-cylinder engine sounded wheezy, the chassis seemed crude, the design looked twee, and I couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped in the backroom of a pub having a noggin and a natter, whatever the lever-armed frig that is, with some regional sub-branch of the owners’ club. I’d have felt happier being forced at knife-point to eat a tweed cap.
But now I see an MGB in a good colour and not on wire wheels and I think, that’s alright. You could probably do some tweaky stuff to the mechanicals and some restomoddy things to the interior and bask in the glow of knowing you can still get all the bits to keep it going forever. If you decided to pass on finding a rot-less Mk1 MX-5, I bet a B would make a very useable classic.
There’s a very simple explanation for these changes in attitude and it is, of course, that I’m getting old. I wrote Crap Cars when I was in my 20s. Now I make noises every time I sit down, think small typeface on menus is a crime, and find myself saying things like ‘you know, we didn’t have Wi-Fi when I was your age’ to my children. Which brings me, in a strange way, to modern supercars.
The paddock at Goodwood Festival of Speed is a fine place to assess the supercar state of play and you can’t say it’s an under-served section of the car world. Lots of them still have petrol engines too, though in many cases bolstered by a couple of electric motors on the front axle and another stuffed between the gearbox and the engine. As a result, power outputs are getting really silly. The Aston Valhalla has 1064bhp. The Ferrari F80 makes 1183. The Zenvo Aurora with its home-grown 6.6-litre, quad-turbo V12 and some electrical assistance is claimed to generate a total output of 1850bhp.
Perhaps most nutty, philosophically if not in total output, is the Lamborghini Temerario, the entry-level car, the baby of the range, the gateway drug to going full Revuelto. It packs 907bhp. For context, the original Gallardo had 493bhp while its grandson now makes just 80 horsepower less than another ’00s pin-up, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4. Of the current supercar pack, the Temerario interests me more than most, what with that nutty twin-turbo V8 that revs to 10,000rpm and mountings designed to permit certain tingles and vibrations to enter the cabin so the car feels more exciting and alive. I’m sure it’ll be great. I’m also sure that 20-odd years ago I’d have been leaping about with excitement at the thought of it, but today I find myself getting more enthusiastic about a recreation of an old Escort.
You probably know about MST, the North Walian creators of brand new Mk1 and Mk2 Escorts decked out like your every ’70s rally fantasy. Earlier this year they announced their new ‘entry level’ car, which is called the Mk1 Sports and runs a modern 2-litre 16-valve four with fuel injection and ITBs rasping around 180bhp to the road through a five-speed ’box and slippy diff, topped with a narrow-bodied shell dolled up like an in-period Escort Mexico. Sure, you could get a fully restored 1974 Mexico for less than the 90 grand MST will charge for their recreation, but this is a brand new car with brand new bits, intelligently modernised in the places where it counts. If you like driving, it seems to have everything you need and nothing you don’t. Because, come on, no one really needs 907bhp. Once upon a time I might have disagreed. But then once upon a time I’d have scoffed at Beetles and MGBs and now I don’t. Because the best thing about age is that it comes with wisdom.
This story was first featured in evo issue 337.
