Richard Hammond’s icons
RICHARD’S FAVOURITE POISON
Yee and indeed haw. TG’s resident Yankee gets a Viper GTS muscle car to play with
You can judge a lot about a person when you walk into their ofce or, to use a more current term, their ‘workspace’. An old kettle, family holiday pictures, a squash racquet – they’re each revealing in their own way. But the thing I dread fnding more than any other – the terrifying window into someone’s soul that triggers more panic klaxons than the squash racquet, even – is a rank of those fancy car models that masquerade not as toys, but as genuine ‘replicas in miniature’.
They sit there, dull-eyed and impotent, trying somehow to signal the depth and sincerity of their owner’s interest in cars, when all they reveal, in fact, is that, like most people, their owner can’t aford a real Ferrari, and even if they could, would lack the joy in their soul to properly engage with any sort of toy, be it full-scale or in miniature. I’ve been given them, inevitably, over the years, and they’ve all ended up in boxes in the loft. Apart from one. It’s a Dodge Viper. I was given it in 1992, when the car was frst launched. It’s, oh, I don’t know, whatever scale it is, and it’s reasonably realistic. And it has survived 12 or 13 house and fat moves, to perch on desks, mantelpieces, sideboards, kitchen tops and window sills. There must be a reason for this.
The car it represents was frst seen in prototype form as early as 1989, and right from the start, had at its heart a monumental 8.0-litre V10. And here was the best bit – if you were me – it was actually the engine from a truck. Lamborghini, then owned by the Chrysler Corporation, was charged with taking Chrysler’s cast-iron V10 truck block and remaking it and the heads in aluminium. Weight was saved. But that’s as far as the sophistication went; the pushrod two-valve head design stayed. It was just as basic throughout. No traction control to tame the engine’s 400bhp, no ABS, some of the suspension parts came of a Dodge Dakota pickup, it had no doorhandles on the outside, no roof or side windows; it was an engine with a bit of car stretched around it.
And it was awesome – yes, I said “awesome”, and I said it out loud too. It was a four-wheeled Harley, a massive cowboy hat; a pair of silver spurs jangling on handtooled cowboy boots. It was also rather
good. And the second-generation Viper Coupe, the GTS that arrived in 1996, was better. Stifer chassis, revised suspension; it was as though the Americans were actually trying. And here it is in front of me now. And absolutely best of all, beyond all doubt, it’s got a DOUBLE-BUBBLE ROOF. Ostensibly to give increased head room for helmeted track-day charioteers, but I don’t care if it’s there to make space for clowns or Elizabethan wigs, the fact is, it’s a double-bubble roof. Enough.
And, yes, it does everything you would expect. The engine, now making 450bhp, is a living, physical presence – it rocks the car... in every sense. They were never easy to drive, something that only added to its appeal to me, but the GTS made things a bit more manageable. In its day, it could keep up and even outpace the contemporary Italian and Japanese exotica, until it came to a corner. Grip is there – you can feel it through the massive tyres – but the brakes are way behind the rest, letting it down badly. By 1996, the side-exit exhausts had gone – I wept – but the noise is still fruitsome and burbly and bellows joyfully while you wrestle with the hefty Borg Warner six-speed manual ’box.
There’s no point trying to make a serious, critical assessment of its handling characteristics – you’d crack up laughing. Despite the doubtless serious intentions of Chrysler at the time and since, the thing is a cartoon, a wonderous, hilarious joke. It’s about excess: of cubic capacity, bonnet stripes, tyre areas and roof bubbles. It’s not the car to drive to a relative’s funeral or a divorce court, but it is still what it always was: a full-size, full-on, laugh-a-minute, play-with-it-till-the-wheels-come-of toy. I’d love one in my workspace.