Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [33]
On the other hand, it still means that there were 100 fewer Lambos ushered out on to Britain's roads last year than there were in the year before, and that means 100 cars not available for small boys to point at and chase on bicycles. And that's not right.
My experiences with Lamborghinis have not been good. After 25 years of waiting, I finally drove the legendary Countach, pin-up of my boyhoood bedroom wall, and hated it with every fibre of my battered buttocks and bleeding eardrums. My Uracco disintegrated. The Diablo I borrowed was pink and became stuck in a side road. By the time we arrived at the Murcielago, Lamborghini had become the geography homework of my motoring education, and I simply didn't bother.
Nevertheless, a Lamborghini remains my favourite of all the supercars I wouldn't buy. Nothing brightens up my day quite like spotting a Lamborghini, not least because it will probably be orange or lime green.
I can't help but have a sneaking regard for the sheer effrontery of these things. Ever since the 350GT of 1964, Lamborghini has been baring its bottom at Ferrari and singing nah nah nah nah nah, and has become the perfect antidote to all that tiresome old toot about race breeding and passione.
Everyone knows Feruccio Lamborghini was a tractor maker turned bad. There's an apocryphal story that he bought a Ferrari and thought he could do better; the truth – and I heard this from someone who knew him – is that the clutch burned out on his Ferrari and he asked one of his tractor mechanics to replace it. The spanner man later entered his office with the new component, pointing out that it was exactly the same as the one in their tractors but cost 10 times as much. Lamborghini then realised that he'd make more money from selling supercars to playboys than he would flogging mechanical horses to horny-handed sons of honest agrarian toil.
So a Lamborghini is an upstart, a pretender. But it's a bit like Charles Kennedy, in that we're obliged to disapprove but, secretly, we quite admire him. Ferraris are too often owned by uptight people who attribute great significance to some overtaking manoeuvre that occurred in a grand prix back in 1969. Rod Stewart bought a Lamborghini, just as soon as he'd finished shopping for some leopard-skin trousers and hair product.
There are 100 like-minded people out there who didn't do the decent thing in 2005. Shame on you. I don't want a Lambo, but I want you to have one so that I can see it and smile.
I feel about Lamborghini the way I feel about the Salvation Army. I'm not a member, and I don't especially want anything to do with them. But I still like to think all that stuff is going on.
PIOUS PORSCHE PEDDLES PATHETIC PEDAL-POWERED PRODUCT
Once upon a time, you rode a bicycle because you were either poor or still 12. Cycling was a simple matter back then: you bought a bicycle because it was the only way of getting around.
Today, of course, things are much different. Cycling has long since been hijacked as a socio-political movement by militants, and I know this because I was sitting in my local Chinese the other day, watching the stream of bicycles going past the window.
They were all being ridden not so much by people who needed to be somewhere but by people who wanted to draw attention to themselves. How can I be so sure? Because they were all in fancy dress, and you only appear in public in fancy dress because you're trying to make a statement. It's why the Fathers for Justice always turn up as Spiderman.
Unfortunately, the cyclists' statement seemed less compelling than the fathers'. It seemed to be either (a) I am an eco warrior of greater moral rectitude than you or (b) I'm stupid enough to