Steve Cropley
MY WEEK IN CARS
SATURDAY
Isn’t it amazing how disconnected events form themselves into unexpected sequences? For a few miles today, I followed a lovely late-1990s Honda NSX in gold and black, identical to one under whose wheels I put 30,000 miles back in 1998. Later that day, out of nowhere, a friend started talking about Doug Nye’s superb 1986 book Cooper Cars, important to me because I grew up with the legend of Charles and John Cooper and their rear-engined racers. The father-andson duo won 16 championship grands prix, took two constructors’ titles, won two drivers’ titles through Sir Jack Brabham and changed Formula 1 cars forever.
The strange thing is it was John Cooper himself who delivered that NSX to me. In his later years, he had a Honda dealership in Ferring, West Sussex, from which I collected the car. He even put his famous signature (seen on a million Mini bonnets) inside the front bootlid. He was proud and deeply serious about the way his cars had changed racing but also famous for practical jokes. Once he allowed himself to be seen surreptitiously adding Ribena to an F1 car’s radiator and whispered to a few confidants that this made the engine run cooler. Soon everyone was doing it.
TUESDAY
It was time for our Duster’s 15,000-mile service, so I headed for my local Dacia dealership, Fish Brothers of Swindon, where the work was done for £220 in a couple of hours. I waited, writing this on my laptop and enjoying the coffee, the swift customer service and the smell of all the new cars. On the way home, the Duster drove better, probably because they had reset the tyre pressures to exactly suit the sub-zero weather. I can’t understand people who don’t like hanging around dealerships. There’s a service coming for my Alpine, and I’m looking forward to that too.
❝ He whispered that Ribena made the engine run cooler ❞
WEDNESDAY
Fascinating scuttlebutt from my pal Peter Robinson, Autocar’s former European editor, now in Sydney, Australia, about a relationship between the Jaguar I-pace (launched mid-2018) and Ford Mustang Mach-e (launched early 2021). The story goes that Ford made detailed scans of the original I-pace concept on Jaguar’s Los Angeles motor show stand at the end of 2016, then built a full-size replica in its own studio to ‘inform’ the packaging of its own electric SUV.
A relationship is clear: the cars are just 6mm apart (the width of your smallest fingernail) in wheelbase and within 57mm (or 1%) of one another in length. The I-pace is a shade wider (16mm) and 56mm lower, but realistically speaking, their road footprints are identical.
THURSDAY
The Hyundai i10 has been a favourite of mine ever since 2010, when my son bought one of the many mid-range red examples that arrived by the boatload to take advantage of the 2009 scrappage scheme. His car bills didn’t just decline, they stopped, which is why he still has the i10, which works perfectly at 100,000 miles.
Anyway, I was thinking these fond thoughts while following a newish i10 through outer London – until I started noticing that nearly everything that could be wrong was wrong. The passenger front door wasn’t fully shut. The owner clearly couldn’t fathom the ventilation, because every window was fogged. The rear seat was piled with stuff so the central rear vision mirror was obscured. The undertray was hanging off, fluttering in the wind.
Its elderly driver couldn’t hold a straight course on a straight road, but his speed control was perfect: he dawdled at 44mph on 60mph dual carriageways, maintained 44mph perfectly into a 30mph town and was last seen doing 44mph through a 20mph school zone. If stopped, he would have been mortified, I’m sure. How do such people get away with it?