Steve Cropley
MONDAY
Big stuff. As the Bentley departs, a new car has arrived: a dark blue Audi S5 Cabriolet. It’s the first Audi and the first convertible I’ve run in 30odd years, and the early signs are encouraging. The S5 is one of those cabrios whose hood, when erect, is utterly silent at motorway speeds, and when it’s down, the cabin is devoid of buffeting.
As with most Audis, you get into this one and wonder how much better finished a customer could reasonably expect a car to be at any price. The paint is lustrous, the panel-fit is immaculate and the switchgear has an operating-theatre precision. It gets going, too, with a 300bhp petrol V6. Now all we need is a top-down summer.
The key to enjoying museums is being guided to significant stuff by curators
Another fascinating book has arrived: British designer Oliver Winterbottom’s 48-year story, A Life in Car Design, discussing his unique career at Jaguar, TVR and Lotus. Back in 1961 when he began, the car creation process was imperfect to say the least. Company politics rather than product excellence often decided what appeared. Winterbottom – who I remember chiefly from his Hethel period, taking me on suicidally fast trips towards the pub in a Talbot Sunbeam Lotus – is refreshingly frank about his highs and lows. In particular, he spills the beans (along with plans and drawings) about the superb Lotus M90 from the early 1980s. Developed in parallel with the front-drive Lotus Elan, it was ultimately killed.
WEDNESDAY
Autocar’s schedules required us to prepare last week’s Awards issue before the actual event. We were all anxious about it, of course: it’s not much fun standing up in front of 250 industry luminaries who are all better at speechifying than you are. But it went brilliantly – and until we clocked the galaxy of heroes in the room, we didn’t appreciate how many of the great and good had come to honour the mag. Autocar is 122 years old this year, and demonstrations like this show how unique it continues to be, despite the reprobates that run it.
Talking top-down motoring, one of my pals has a Mini convertible as the family runabout and has discovered a log in the infotainment stack that keeps track of the time he’s driven with the lid down, compared with his total driving time. In a year he’s motored for 70 top-down hours in a total of 263 hours of driving. That, for your info, is 27%. Didn’t know we had so much good weather…
SATURDAY
To the British Motor Museum, just off the M40 at Gaydon, near Warwick, to enjoy a fascinating new exhibition called The British Motor Car in 50 Objects. Most important (for me) is an original Alec Issigonis sketch from 1944 proposing a post-war economy car called the Mosquito, which became the Morris Minor. Herbert Austin’s first model, an 1899 Wolseley, is one of three cars displayed, and there are other fascinating curios, such as menus from the 25 staff canteens at the mighty Longbridge plant, with each dish colourcoded to indicate its nutritional value. It’s great, especially since visitors get a chance to choose their own 50 objects. I’ve always reckoned the key to enjoying museums and galleries is being guided to the significant stuff by imaginative curators. That’s exactly what happens here.