JEREMY CLARKSON on Sportscars

[Niko]

Pinched with thanks from the GIPPSLAND SPORTING AND CLASSIC CAR REGISTER Newsletter 

 

JEREMY CLARKSON on SPORTS CARS
So, does a sports car have to be fast?
Sport implies speed and excitement, but let’s not forget shall we that a sport is any game which requires specialist clothing. If you can do it in jeans, it’s a pastime.
However, let’s not forget, that you need specialist clothing to play that symphony of tedium and sloth called cricket. So even though it moves with the vim and vigour of a Jane Austen plot, it’s a sport.
Perhaps sport, in the case of cars, derives from ‘sporting’. And a sporting car is one which can be used on a track, in some kind of competition. So on that basis, yes, unless you want to be last, a sports car has to be fast.
And yet if we look back through the history of MG, which is like reading Emma in slow motion, we find an endless succession of cars which couldn’t have pulled a greased stick out of a pig’s arse. The TF, for instance, could only do 80mph, whereas its rival, the Triumph TR2, could do over a hundred.
Then we find the MG Midget which waded into the gunfight with a small butter knife under the bonnet. It had a top speed of 86mph and took more than 20 seconds to get from 0 to 60. But was it a sports car? Yes, and so is the Mazda MX-5, which isn’t exactly a streak of lightning either.
Maybe looks have something to do with it. And now the Daimler Dart has just popped into my head, so maybe they don’t.
Then there’s the Triumph TR7. That was a fairly speedy two-seater convertible. But not a sports car. And yet the tin-top GT6 most definitely was. Curiouser and curiouser.
Strangest of all, however, is the Mercedes SL. It comes with a big engine, bundles of power, two seats, two doors and a folding roof. It’s even known at women’s lunch groups from Houston to Harrogate as the Mercedes Sports. But it isn’t a sports car.
Indeed, if I were to make a list of the five least sportiest things in the world, it would go something like this:
5. Me
4. The monkfish
3. A gate-leg table
2. The Mercedes SL
1. Terry Wogan
I think it’s mostly a question of attitude. A sports car does not have to be fast or pretty. It need not have a folding roof and it can have seats in the back. But it does need to be uncompromising in some way, shape or form. It needs to be hard riding and noisier than necessary. It needs to remind its owner every single yard of every single journey that he or she bought the car to be exciting.
“Every single woman from the salons of Wilmslow to the fashion pages of Vogue magazine will kill to buy one”
It needs, therefore, to transmit its interaction with the road with a series of semaphore signals in the driver’s pants. It needs to telegraph every burp of its engine, every squeak of its tyres. A sports car is a state of mind.

[tazzieman]

I would add , it's a car that 95% of women won't consider driving, petrol smells or not.