Steve Cropley
Time to think the unthinkable
WEDNESDAY
Just back from a wonderful trip to the world’s one-and-only privately owned museum of Mazda vehicles, opened this month in Augsburg, southern Germany. Founder Walter Frey arrived in the area as a refugee at the end of the war, pulling his family’s possessions in a handcart. He decided he liked the area, and that if hard work had anything to do with it he’d never be poor again. Frey became a pioneering Mazda dealer and enthusiast in the 1970s, grew the family empire with the help of his sons Markus and Joachim, and personally restored many of the 120 Mazdas he has accumulated. This many Mazdas might strike you as overkill, but only the prime 45 are on display (in a beautifully restored former tram shed). Besides, people are inclined to forget that, as with Toyota, Nissan, Isuzu and the rest, Mazda produced some extremely innovative cars in its earliest days, the star of which for me is the late 1960s Cosmo Sport coupé, a Wankel-engined Mazda that is now shooting up in value. What a joy to own one of those!
MONDAY
Call this a shameless plug if you want, but can I ask if you’ve yet watched the fabulous Autocar website video Matt Prior has made, testing the new Ford GT? It’s 9min 22sec of utter brilliance – and you’ll have to trust me when I say I’d make the same assessment even if I’d never met the bloke. It’s sort of depressing. As anyone who’s ever watched one of my own (rare) video appearances already knows, I’ll always be better utilised as what we in the trade describe as ‘an inkie’ – a writer of words. And we typewriter thrashers spend a lot of time reminding people that 98% of what you read on the web, especially on supercars, is puerile and unreliable in the extreme. If you want the real story, we say, read the words. As we page-turners know, Matty P can really write, too, but in under 10 minutes he thoroughly and vividly explains the Ford GT’S concept, technology, driving characteristics and faults. It kicks every other cliché-infected Ford GT production into oblivion. Like I say, depressing… Don’t miss it.
SUNDAY
Spent a fine day at Thruxton shadowing British Touring Car Championship supremo Alan Gow for a story elsewhere in this issue. Gow is one of Autocar’s heroes, as you’ll discover on p62, but what I’d forgotten is how absorbing one of these days can be, what with three hard-fought events (75 minutes’ racing) to watch and a whole programme of hectic supporting races chucked in. I arrived before 8am, left at 6pm and there was hardly an unfilled minute.
TUESDAY
Pretty soon, the Steering Committee and I are going to have to face up to something I never thought would become a problem: what to do with our faithful old Citroën Berlingo. It’s a 53-plate 2.0 HDI and thus one of the now-blighted diesels that doesn’t even measure up to Euro 4 emissions standards, when the rest of the world is reaching the second phase of Euro 6. We have a car the world now officially brands as dirty, and some call filthy. But it lives in the country, so it isn’t polluting any cities, and it only does 5000 miles a year. Sending it to the wrecking yard would create more pollution than running it for another 70,000 miles, and lots of people tell us not to worry. I’d always imagined it would live with us into its dotage, like many a venerable Renault 4 or Citroën 2CV. Now, maybe it won’t.
We have a car the world officially brands as dirty, and some call it filthy