Oh baby, you’re just a rotten teaseby Jeremy Clarkson
When I was 18 years old, my bank manager wrote to say he was disappointed that I had a £3,000 overdraft. This made him look like an idiot, because opening an account for an 18-year-old boy and then being “disappointed” when he runs around town vomiting cash into various pubs and clubs is like going to see a film starring Steven Seagal and being “disappointed” that it’s terrible.
If an octogenarian billionaire comes home from work to find his pneumatic 22-year-old bride playing hide-the-sausage with the handyman, he cannot claim to be “disappointed”, because surely, if he had any brains at all, he’d have seen it coming. If you employ a man who knocks on your door asking if you’d like a new tarmac drive, you cannot be disappointed when he sets your precious roses in 3ft of solid concrete and then sends a nightclub bouncer round with a bill for £400m.
I once went on a holiday to Tuscany and was annoyed to find when I got there that the villa I’d booked had an American family living in it, and that I’d have to spend two weeks in the spare room of a house two miles away. And then I was very annoyed that the owner turned out to be the head of the local Communist party and that he’d decided I needed to be lectured from dawn till dusk on the failings of capitalism. In Italian.
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“Voglio uccidere i cestini di Thatcher di Signor e la marca fuori dei suoi capelli pubici,” he would rage endlessly, as I trudged up the road to the house where I should have been staying to ask the Americans if I could make use of the pool I’d paid to use.
But was I disappointed? No I was not. Because thanks to my bank manager’s disappointment, I’d booked the holiday on the cheap through an east London PO box that I’d seen in a small ad. I therefore knew before I set off that it couldn’t possibly end well.
Disappointment is a word for people who don’t think ahead; people who get themselves into fool’s mate when playing chess, people who buy a Hyundai Accent. It’s why I’m loath to use it.
And yet, in the motoring arena, I have to use it all the time because there’s no industry in the world capable of building up so much hope and then failing to deliver. You look at a company’s background, its expertise, its finances and the ingredients that are available to it, and you assume it cannot possibly produce a bad car. And then it comes up with the BMW Z8.
How did that happen? It had the underpinnings of an M5 and a body so beautiful I had an ache in the pit of my stomach when I first saw it. But it drove like everything had been attached to everything else with spit and two crossed fingers. It was awful.
Then there was the Ferrari 360. This came after the glorious 355 so we were all expecting more of the same, only better. But what we got was a twitchy little bastard with the face of a gormless frog.
And now we have the new Audi S6 Avant, which is fitted with the V10 engine from a Lamborghini Gallardo. When I first heard that this was being planned, I was — I’m ashamed to admit — priapic with anticipation. Audi had recently demonstrated with the RS4 that after years in the suspension wilderness, it had finally got to grips with the twin peaks of ride and handling.
Ally this to the traditional Audi qualities of good, understated style, exemplary quality, tons of estate-car practicality and that Italian supercar engine and you can see why I’d become a human tripod.
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Oh baby, you’re just a rotten tease
