Oh Canada

Canada Day

Today is Canada Day, and already a newspaper may be waiting for you on your front doorstep, full of headlines crowing about this year's successes. Truly, so the pundits say, this is the year when Canada stood among equals; the year when we took our place on the world stage; the year when we grew up as a nation. To which I reply, in the patois of my Ulster forebears, “Catch yerself on.”

Admittedly, it has been a good year. The vein of cautious Scots pessimism that runs through our various banking centers and regulatory groups in some ways insulated us from economic collapse. Vancouver's Winter Olympics provided the much-ballyhooed showcasing of Canada to the world, principally in the person of our immensely talented, determined and gracious athletes. Who else but a Canadian gold-medallist would apologize for over-exuberance upon winning gold?

Also, this is the year that our medical system didn't collapse yet, and our robot Prime Minister continues wearing sweaters, which keeps the political cartooning industry busy.

However, what everyone will be pointing to and shouting about as the defining moment for this year is of course Sidney Crosby's overtime goal in Men's Olympic hockey. It clinched victory over the Americans (always particularly satisfying) in our national sport, added a record-breaking fourteenth gold to our medal count, and unified the entire country in a whooping, hollering, lumberjack cheer. Every Canadian, regardless of race, creed, political affiliation, age or stance on the whole Starbucks vs. Tim Horton's debate, threw their arms up in the air like they just didn't care and partied like it was 1867.

Everyone except, and this is the important bit, for at least two people. As the third nail-biting period drew to a close with the promise of overtime, the game and our national pride hanging in the balance, my mother and father got up, switched off the television and went for a walk in their own little corner of heaven.

Their home, the place where my brother and I grew up, is a little country jewel in the Fraser Valley, ringed by snow-capped mountains. The winding, hilly roads are lined with either aromatic fir and pines or sussurating birch and ash. Curious horses and cows will walk over to greet passers-by, and the air is filled with the hum of busy insects and the bright calls of small birds. It is an unutterable paradise.

So my mother and father walked their usual route chatting, I would imagine, about small things: when to invite friends over, what to have for supper. It's not that they didn't care about the hockey, or the electric sense of national unity that was palpably charging the entire country. Very simply, they didn't need to physically participate in watching the event unfold to experience that sense of total belonging, of togetherness. This country, which they had chosen to call home, had chosen them back time and again.

In 1969, a young couple arrived in a wild land, leaving behind a troubled country. With charming naivety, they had drawn a line from their home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, all the way across to Prince Rupert, BC, figuring that, as it was at the same latitude, the weather would be the same. What they found was essentially a frontier town, and within a year my five-foot-one mother, who had lived in towns all her life, was hiking out of the bush with half a dressed moose carcass strapped to a back-board.

But the where and the when is not important. What is important is that Canada welcomed them. The country was wide open. When they tried to return to Northern Ireland several years later, with the intention of buying a small farm, they found intolerance, small-mindedness, and very real danger. The contrast was unlivable. Ireland told you who to be based on who your ancestors were, and what you believed; Canada asked the question, “Who would you like to be?”

And that's why I can't embrace this year as being the year that Canada was elevated to greatness, or the year in which we could finally feel proud of this country, because I have been a proud Canadian since the day I understood what this place truly is.

Mordecai Richler famously said, “Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples,” which is par for the course for that sour old goat. Consider me, then, well and truly gruntled. If my parents had stayed, the course of my life would have flowed down the same old valleys. Here, the rivers are young, and they carve their own way.

I love this country. I would no more emigrate to Australia, or America, or the U.K. than I would cut off my limbs, or carve out my heart. I owe Canada an unpayable debt as not only the safe haven my parents found, but also the land where I grew, was educated, found friendship and love and limitless opportunity. Even though I have not a single ancestor buried here, my roots feel as deep as anyone who can go back several generations; Canada's soil is fertile, and will grow anything you choose to turn your hand to.

In eleven days, it will be July 12th, marching season in Northern Ireland. The old order is dying there, and perhaps this year will be quiet, with the usual posturing and sabre-rattling sounding less like approaching storm clouds and more like the receding footsteps of a retreating army. I certainly hope so. Either way, on the day, my Catholic father will likely receive a phone call from my Ulster Protestant godfather, who usually likes to sing “The Sash”, a marching song that might have been highly inflammatory in its place. Here though, it has no context, and as such, the pair of them will share a bittersweet laugh, both lamenting the idiocy of the conflict, and rejoicing in being well out of it.

Mom and Dad, your sons both thank you. You could not have chosen a better place for us. Canada, this day your son thanks you as well. When we stand on guard for thee, may it be to hold high the welcoming beacon of a better life.

Come on over: it's a really big country.

-Brendan McAleer, July 1st, 2010

The Mustang

All right, stop, collaborate and listen: the Mustang's back in a brand-new edition. Yes, if you're a fan of rolling on by, even though the girlies were on standby (waiting just to say hi), then you'll be happy to learn that the iconic pony car is back in 5.0 form.

And it's not just good news for fans of the worst music white people have ever come up with since electric jazz flute; this new 'Stang rocks. The GT version sports the new “Coyote” V8, pumping out a thundering 412hp and 390 lb/ft of torque, and even the base V6 is now sporting 300+ hp. At the dragstrip, it's more than enough to light 'em up, stage, and wax a chump like a candle.

However, there's a little sadness this month for fans of one of the most enduring cars in history: Donald Frey, designer of the original “'64 ½” Mustang passed away March 5th, just over a month shy of his creation's 46th anniversary. One wonders what Don would have made of the 'Stang's latest iteration, with all that pavement-cracking horsepower, given the weird little mid-engined convertible that was his original prototype.

The date the world first saw the Mustang was at the World's Fair, New York, April 17th, 1964, and if you're a history buff, you'll note that the Mustang predates the official start of the Vietnam War. It's never missed a year of production since.

The first prototype wouldn't be recognizeable as a Mustang to anybody whose blood wasn't filled with blue, oval-shaped corpuscles; in fact, it looked very much like GM's much-later released Fiero. Like the Fiero, it was mid-engined, and like the Fiero, it never really got off the ground. Despite being widely-acclaimed by the racers at its introduction at the '62 Watkins Glen Grand Prix (where even Sterling Moss had a go behind the wheel), the design team was sent back to the drawing board.

Good thing too, as the wedge-shaped, two-seater, 90hp Mustang I prototype was nothing like the rip-snorting image that the name “Mustang” implies. Can you imagine Steve McQueen's “Bullitt” driving around in a four-cylinder doorstop? He wouldn't even have made it up those San Francisco hills, much less outrun the baddies in their Charger.

Round two was much better: taking their inspiration from Maserati and Ferrari coupes, the design team knocked out a second prototype that, with the exception of the bumpers, looked nearly identical to the production model that hit showroom floors in '65. With a long front end dominated by a running horse (rather than Ferrari's prancing horse), the convertible Mustang was a hit with everyone at Ford. Everyone except Henry Ford II.

The Mustang project ended up being cancelled four times before finally being ram-rodded through by those Ford execs who believed in the little car. Having completed the project in just 18 months on a shoestring budget, Donald Frey was told in no uncertain terms: if this car doesn't sell, you're fired. Of course, this being the car business in the early sixties, the exact wording of the threat was a little more, um, PG-13.

Frey needn't have worried. Ford would have considered 80,000 cars in the first year a sales success. They sold over a million Mustangs in two years. The little convertible showed up in Goldfinger, sold 22,000 units its very first day, and became an enduring part of Americana.

Initially powered by a peppy straight-six engine, the Mustang was quick, but not really a muscle car. With the introduction of the V8-powered GT, it really came into its own as a pony car. Carroll Shelby worked with Ford to produce the GT-350, first of the hi-po 'Stangs, and one that would forever tie his name to the brand.

The Mustang continued to be excellent throughout the '60s, most famously as the green fastback “Bullitt” '68 Mustang GT that McQueen piloted. Engines got bigger, horsepower got higher, and the little pony turned into a real musclecar. Most famous of the engines, and just mention this one to any guy in a white t-shirt with a bunch of neon Fords on it if you want to be bored for several hours, was the rare 428 Cobra Jet. This was the king of the Ford big-blocks, punching out an incredible 410 hp, a horsepower figure we've had to wait until now to see again from the factory (excluding superchargers).

And then, predictably, along came the '70s and everything started sucking. Compare the Gimme Shelter 428 Cobra Jet's 410 horsepower with the Debbie Boone power output of the Pinto-based '75 Mustang's 302 cubic-inch powerplant: 140hp. Somebody left the barn-door open at the ranch.

From time to time, Ford gets a bee in its bonnet about replacing the Mustang with something higher-tech or more efficient. So it was in the eighties, when they co-developed a front-wheel-drive turbocharged coupe with Mazda, to be sold under to Ford badge as the Ford Probe, which worked out about as well as trying to sell a colonoscopy to a guy who came in looking for a Johnny Cash record. Admittedly, the turbocharged-4-cylinder SVO Mustang was pretty good, but the public had spoken: they wanted their V8, rear-wheel-drive pony car back, and they wanted it to gallop.

Gallop it did, particularly in the '03 and up supercharged Cobra model. Get a good set of tires and shift fast enough, and one of these could run the quarter-mile in the mid-12s. Aside from that, though, the Mustang of the early 2000s was perhaps a bit too refined, which was why the retro-styled 2005 with its solid rear axle was hailed as a return to the true ideals of the original pony car.

Mustangs being what they are, this new 5.0 model won't be king of the road for long, as the new supercharged Cobra versions will put down even more power, and there'll be more Special Editions variants than the Lord of The Rings DVDs. There'll also be a slew of aftermarket parts to tailor your Mustang into whatever kind of steed you'd like it to be, whether it's a drag racer with pizza-cutter tires up front, an autocrosser with spherical titanium endlinks, or a drifter with a slammed suspension and an unnecessarily large wing on the back that makes it look like you've been rear-ended by a Cessna that was carrying a load of neon vinyl.

But I'd like to think that Mr. Frey would be proud of the new Mustang, as where the Model T brought mobility to the masses, the Mustang brought power to the people. Either way, if you see me on the streets in a dark-green Mustang GT with a six-speed, don't bother to wave.

'Cause I'll be rollin', in my five-point-oh.

Thievery

Last Thursday, I awoke to find that someone had gotten into my carport and made off with some small items like my wife's bicycle helmet and my riding gloves, and they'd also stripped the lights from both our bicycles. Needless to say, I was Not Amused at a level that even Queen Victoria would have considered impressive.

Seeing as this is a family newspaper, I will not directly outline the invective that issued forth from me upon discovering that I had been burgled, but suffice it to say that the air turned blue, a passing flock of seagulls dropped out of the air, stone dead, and God's stern and bearded face peered out from behind a cloud and boomed, “Knock It Off.”

Of course, bleeding hearts might say that no-one sets out to steal unless motivated by personal misfortune, and perhaps the thief or thieves really needed the few small items they took and that we should all be thankful that we have our health and the love of our friends and blah blah blah. Well, to them I offer the pithy retort, “Get stuffed,” and without wishing to have anyone think that I am less forgiving a person than, say, Mother Theresa or perhaps Elin Nordegren, may the miscreant who stole my stuff win a free trip to Sea World where they might fall in a tank and be eaten by Tillikum the killer Killer whale.

But such is life. You work hard, buy stuff, and then other people try to take your stuff away. Sometimes, this is called “government”. The rest of the time, it's just plain thievery.

Here in the Lower Mainland, the rate of automotive theft is the highest in Canada. Sure, there's the bait-car program, and sure, it's a great balm if you've just had your car broken into to log on to the website and see a few luckless buffoons get nabbed by the fuzz. But there's nothing that quite takes away that sick feeling when you come out in the morning to find a broken window, or a jimmied lock, or worse still, no car at all.

Don't expect things to improve either. The widespread use of immobilizer keys has resulted in fewer vehicle thefts, but while there's a great deal of technology put into keeping our cars parked where we leave them, there's just as much tech being developed to steal them.

Take the recently released Electronic Key Impressioner, for instance. This screwdriver-sized device can be inserted in any key-lock and instantly takes a 3D snapshot of the tumblers. It then sends the information via USB cable to an instant key-cutter so a replica key can be created. It's even capable of scanning a database and duplicating the digital signal that passive immobilizers use.

So, whether it's a fancy electronic scanner, or the universal key of A Large Rock, how can we best protect ourselves against thieves?

Well, the first thing to do is the simplest: don't leave valuables in plain sight in your car. Keeping an ashtray full of loonies in your car is the equivalent of rolling in bacon grease and then going for a run in Lynn Canyon, just when the black bears are coming out of hibernation.

Were not just talking money either. It's a pretty lousy idea to keep shopping bags of any description hanging about in the back of your car, and there're all sorts of apocryphal reports of thieves breaking in to cars to steal chocolate bars left in plain view. I wouldn't do it for a Klondike Bar, but somebody might.

But perhaps you think you've removed all the valuables from your car, and you can't imagine what there is in there that a thief might be interested in. Well think again; there's you. Specifically, your identity. Most people chuck the original registration papers for their car in the glovebox and forget about them, but those documents can potentially expose you to identity theft should they fall into the wrong hands.

It's a growing problem, so how do you protect yourself? One possibility is to carry a photocopy of your registration papers with the address blanked out. Should you get nicked for speeding or similar (and I'm sure none of my readership has ever strayed over the legal limit), you're usually given the option to produce the originals within a few days.

At this point, you're probably thinking: “What about an alarm system to protect both my car and the parking meter fund?” Certainly if you own an older car without a passive immobilizer, or factory alarm, it can be a good idea to have some sort of theft deterrence installed. There are multiple types available, the simplest being a shock-detecting alarm that will invariably get set off by a passing friendly cat, and cause your neighbours to despise you. Also, cheap alarms can usually be defeated by a professional thief in the time it takes to read this sentence.

Better yet would be to spring for a two-way pager alarm, which will send you a quick buzz when your car's being broken into. It's only a matter of time before this technology is integrated into the iPhone, so you might soon be sitting through Avatar 2's four hours of eyestrain only to receive a text letting you know your hybrid is being violated, and then you can rush outside and administer justice, West-Coast-style (I'm not sure what that would be exactly. Whack the culprit with a sockeye salmon and then appoint them their own social worker or something).

The bottom line is this: auto-related theft is just part of living in the Lower Mainland, and there's very little you can do to stop it; you can just minimize the risk by making your car less attractive to thieves, but if they want to get in, they're going to get in.

Consider this though, in Johannesburg, South Africa the problem is not so much theft as it is the much more dangerous issue of car-jacking. At the peak of the difficulties, as many as 16,000 car-jackings were occurring every year. Drivers were equipping their vehicles with illegal-but-quietly-condoned anti-carjacking devices like the Blaster, which shot blasts of flame out the side of the car, or a spring-loaded metal bar which sprang out and shattered the ankles of a would-be hijacker.

While it might be satisfying to think of having an anti-theft device that will barbeque the next guy who tries to steal your mp3 player, these medieval-seeming anti-hijacking measures did little to solve the problem.

Aside from taking a few preventative steps to minimize our risk, the fact is, we on the West Coast have to accept that automotive-related theft is going to occur at some point during our car-owning lives, and just be ready to deal with it. After all, blessed are the meek and so forth.

Having said that, if I ever get my hands on the guy who took my stuff, I'm going to put my foot so far up his backside that he'll be using Kiwi shoe polish for toothpaste.

Australia The Hoonish

Well, we did it. Twenty-six medals, fourteen of them gold, thumped the U.S. in both the final hockey games, and (therefore) managed not to have any unsightly rioting. So what now, post-Olympic hysterics? Back to the daily grind, I suppose.

But, as Vancouverites, let's take a moment to salute our partners, the people of Whistler. And by that, of course, I mean the Australians.

It's true, you know. Try ordering a burger or trying on a toque in Whistler, and see how long it is before somebody with an Australian accent wanders over and inquires if they might be of assistance. I managed to get up there last weekend, and every single server, bartender, store clerk, or barista was from down-undah (with the exception of a ferocious gorgon of a Frenchwoman who chased us out of her store for daring to look at wares displayed therein).

Australians are a lot like Canadians in many ways, although they suspiciously always seem to be having a great deal more fun. Having been to Australia, I can understand why. I've got a special place in my heart for the people, with their flavoured salt for your fish-and-chips, their winding white-metalled roads, and their excellent wineries, staffed entirely by cheerful middle-aged women who, despite protestations that you are only a poor student and are certainly not going to be buying a hundred-dollar bottle of Chateau Cuivre Réserve Nuit San Wogga-Wogga or whatever it is, will pour you brimming glass after brimming glass with the instruction, “Now, get stuck into that.”

Currently, the wife is watching an Austalian television show called McLeod's Daughters, a programme of such overwrought melodrama, it makes Grey's Anatomy look like Waiting For Godot. Everybody on it is spouting off about brumbies and jumbucks, pronouncing the word “No” like “Naiue”, getting into tangled relationships generally involving fighting over horses and sheep, and tearing off in a cloud of dust in their modern El Caminos.

Which brings me in a meandering way around to my point. This is loosely a car column after all, and having spent last time chatting about the uniqueness of the Canadian motorist, let's contrast our tight-fisted appreciation for the cheap and cheerful with the sunny Australian driver and their mania for whacking great V8s.

I'll put this out at the start: if your only experience of Australian-style driving up to this point has been watching Mad Max, it's not like that at all. For one thing, there are only two or three mutant cannibalistic biker gangs, and they're fairly easily avoided.

Picture instead a winding tarmac road, freshly laid and curving through the gum trees, around a veranda-skirted pub, and off towards the distant ocean. Imagine the sun beating down upon your dashboard, and lizards skittering off the road at your approach. Imagine semi-suicidal wallabies bounding along beside you and then suddenly dashing out in the road, forcing you to shift a foot to the brake pedal everytime you spot one. Imagine seeing, off in the distance, the shaggy form of an emu: a bird the size of a donkey with the intelligence level of a particularly stupid budgerigar.

Now imagine, and this is the really important bit, that every single car that passes you (as you drive on the left, remember) is infinitely cooler than the lame stuff we get here. Enjoying your Camry? Well how about the Australian option: the supercharged TRD Aurion, perhaps the most powerful front-wheel-drive car available. Yes, it's a family sedan, and yes it has the same horsepower as a Nissan 370Z.

Oh, you've got a nice comfortable Ford Fusion, do you? Well in Australia you might have a Falcon. It'd be rear-wheel-drive and available with either an inline-6 turbocharged engine or a big V8, both of which produce around 420hp. The same goes for the offerings from GM, which in Australia are usually Holdens, and you can get all of these as either station wagons, or half-pickups, or with bare frame rails out the back if you're going to bolt on a flatbed and really terrify your sheep as you drive them to market.

Great big engines are all well and good, but what are you supposed to do with them when you're not outrunning the cannibal bikers or turning cute little wallabies into fine red mist? You go racing, and in Australia that's more fun too. I regard F1 racing as being extremely difficult and technical, but it's not very exciting to the casual bystander. NASCAR is just plain terrible unless you're a fan of turning left and marrying your cousin. Australian V8 racing is like the two previous forms of racing had a baby, and then that baby grew up listening to the Rolling Stones on vinyl and watching The Terminator, and rebuilding engines in the bathtub.

It is sheer, unadulterated awesome, with the demandingly wiggly racetracks of F1 combining with the bullish shunting and rubbing of full-contact NASCAR. The Bathurst 1000 is the big one, Australia's Indianapolis 500, and here's a little tidbit to give you an idea of what such events are like: a police “crackdown” has restricted fans to a limit of no more than 24 beers. Per day.

So, if you have a mullet, move to Australia ASAP. But not everything in Oz is so shouty. Yes they produced AC/DC, but also Dame Nellie Melba. Consider Ford's Fiesta EcoNetic. This small but excellent family hatchback (the Fiesta will be available in Canada later this year) makes use of a 1.6L turbodiesel engine with a little less horsepower than a Honda Fit, but gobs more torque. It will handily trump a Prius for fuel economy, getting a combined mileage of about 3.7 L/100kms, 35% better than the more-expensive Toyota.

Australia also has a much better grey-market import system than ours, so it's even cheaper to get a Nissan Skyline GTR or a Mitsubishi Delica 4x4 Diesel, and the steering wheel's on the correct side. Japanese manufacturers often release vehicles in Australia which are essentially the same as the ones available in the Japanese home market. There are far more engine choices available, including diesel versions of just about everything.

I'll leave you with this little anecdote. After driving from Adelaide to Melbourne and kicking four kinds of hell out of our poor rental car (including me backing it into a concrete mailbox), my wife and I flew up to Brisbane, and spent a few days lounging around with the in-laws before getting a little bored and deciding to drive into the rain forest. We headed for a resort called O'Reilly's, and it was lovely and full of parrots and giant ferns and so forth. However, to get there required the traversing of some seriously narrow roads, with hairpin turns and unguarded drops, blind corners and steep hills, and it took us a good few hours to get there.

When we arrived, slightly seasick from all the corners, we all piled out of the car to go for a recuperative stroll. I wandered around the corner and promptly went back in time a century as there was a man in brown coveralls working on his 1912 Rolls Royce. Turns out it was the semi-annual get-together for the Classic Rolls Royce club of Australia, so I chatted to a few of the nice gents – most near the same vintage as their cars - who had all driven their priceless vehicles up that looping road.

One of them turned out to have driven his Silver Ghost all the way from Tasmania, a distance of 2500 kilometers! When I asked him, with a look of disbelief, what possessed him to drive essentially a rare museum piece all up the Eastern Coast of Australia, he grinned, and patted the flank of his car affectionately. “Well,” he said, with that peculiar Tasmanian pronounciation that's quite like a New Zealander's accent, “It's a great country for driving.”

Indeed it is.

Canadian Cars

I must confess to a certain malaise when it comes to putting out this week's column. Quite simply, I've come down with a pretty bad case of Olympic Ebola, and I'm finding it hard to come up with anything interesting to say about cars. Between Bilodeau's jinx-busting first gold on home soil, hometown hero Maelle Ricker's (once a classmate of my wife's) thorough domination of the field, and the perfection of that first goal from Jarome Iginla, I've got it bad.

Not good for my readership prospects this week then, if even I'm not interested in cars this week; I, who have found myself explaining the inner mysteries of how a clutch works to the entire partry of dinner guests, each of them with the same glazed look on their faces like they just got hit with a lithium-filled blowdart.

Still, my editor relies each week on my small contribution to be tucked away at the back of the paper, filling the weird spaces around ads for lube-oil-and-filter specials, and who am I to disappoint? Also, it's 3 o'clock in the morning and there's nothing new to watch anyway.

Admidst all this Olympic patriotic fervour, it's easy to be a proud Canadian. Yes, we are admittedly deferent and polite nation, and yes, we pride ourselves on a tradition of sportsmanship and fair play, and there's nothing quite like a little winter sports competition to get the (maple) sap rising and the blood boiling. So, I'm certainly proud to be a Canadian when I see the Olympic Women's Hockey team trounce their opponents, but then even prouder when the crowd gives the opposing team a standing ovation.

That's part of what makes us Canadian, that and the fact that Canada's really big, and we have a terrible/amazing healthcare system, depending whom you talk to. But what of our cars?

Oh yes, don't be fooled into thinking that Canada's just the same as our southerly neighbours when it comes to our transportation choices. For one thing, we pinch pennies so hard you can hear the Queen shriek.

Best-selling cars in the USA? The Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. Best-selling cars in the Great White North? The Honda Civic and the Toyota Corolla. We're not going to accept anything of lesser quality than our revolutionary neighbours, but we just don't need quite as much of it.

I'm going to borrow a Russell Peters bit here, and say that when a Canadian hears themselves being described as cheap, they say, “Thank you.” We're not being polite, we just choose to interpret the word differently. “No, no no. He pronounced it, 'cheap', but what he was really saying was 'smart'.”

That's why we get cars you get nowhere else in the world. Companies like Acura take a look at the Canadian market and realize that there's no way in hell we're going to fork over the dough for a great big RL, so they'd better make a Honda Civic with leather seats. Their 1.6 and 1.7 EL and the CSX aren't sold anywhere except Canada, and over here they sell like igloo-shaped Eggos.

In Canada, you can buy a Mercedes B-Class with a four-cylinder engine for under thirty grand. You can also step up to the C-Class without breaking the bank by getting a C230 with a smaller V6 not available in US offerings.

We're not just interested in cheap luxury either. Inexpensive cars like the Hyundai Pony weren't expected to sell more than 5,000 units a year. In Canada, Hyundai sold 50,000 Ponies in 1984 to take the best-seller title, and one need only look at the upswing in sales from Hyundai and Kia to see the trend continuing. Toyota's tiny Echo hatchback was also a Canuck-only favourite whose success paved the way for the Yaris, the Nissan Versa and the Honda Fit. We got the Smart Car here long before it was available Stateside. Why? Because we're “smart”.

Our money may look like it came out of the Monopoly box, but just try prising it out of our hands. It's why our average period of ownership is around seven years, about double that of the US. We spend a great deal more time researching our purchases, and we tend to drive them until the wheels fall off.

Which brings me to the Automotive Journalist Association of Canada's pick for their Canadian Car of the Year award. Down south, they might be making snide comments about the best choice being a snowmobile or a moose on rollerskates, but I think the pick this year is particularly great as a car that embodies Canadian-ness.

It's the 2010 Volkswagen GTI, and it might not be the cheapest car out there, but it's certainly got the highest rate-of-return for smiles per dollar. The perennial hot-hatchback beat out supercars like the Porsche Panamera Turbo and muscle like the Chevrolet Camaro, despite having buch less power and being front-wheel-drive.

So the underdog won. How Canadian. But it's easy to see why, as the little VW is a little terrier in the corners with its fizzy four-pot turbo and the excellent DSG dual-clutch gearbox. It's also quite conservative to look at from the exterior, but there's a little tartan flavour on the inside, a little zip hidden behind a plain exterior.

It's a great car to represent the Canadian driver: heck, it's even an immigrant. For choice, I think it'd look best in red, or white with a big maple leaf on the hood.

Oh, who am I kidding? The only colour we're all interested in these days is gold, eh?

Toyotal Recall

Wer it at all possible, I would be more than happy to not mention a thing about the current imbroglio Toyota's gotten themselves involved in. Unfortunately, after the third worried-looking person stopped me in the street to ask me what I thought about the whole situation, I could keep silent no longer.

First off, let me just point out that there's no need to go flying off the handle (as much of the media has been doing for the past little while) with wailing and gnashing of teeth and casting into outer darkness, and a general attitude that a defective Toyota accelerator pedal is a portent of the End of Days. Well, it's not. Recalls are a fact of life in the motor industry, it's just that they're usually for minor annoying things like window switches and wiper blades. The problem here is how the manufacturer is alleged to have dealt with the recall of a more serious safety-related issue.

Here's the facts for those not already in the know: certain models made by Toyota are known to have a throttle assembly that can stick open under certain wear conditions; the problem seems to be fairly rare, but has allegedly been responsible for several fatalities in the U.S.; Toyota had already issued a recall based on accelerators jamming open due to floormats earlier last year; a stop-sale order was issued on all affected models last month and the fix for the problem (a metal shim) is currently being applied by dealerships working around the clock.

So far, all fair and above board. The throttle assemblies are outsourced from a supplier that also provides parts for other manufacturers (Ford, for example), so really, it's hardly poor little Toyota's fault, and they really are doing their best to fix the problem. Or are they?

Here's where things get a little murky. According to a recent piece of investigative journalism in the Los Angeles Times, Toyota has a apparent history of keeping a tight lid on any safety problems, to the point of appearing to be sweeping them under the rug. There have been eight recalls for unintended acceleration since 2000, which is more than any other manufacturer. The company also is alleged to be slow to to issue safety-related recalls, and is currently being sued by a former company lawyer for engaging in a “calculated conspiracy to prevent the disclosure of damaging evidence.”

Well, of course they bloody well are: they're a company! If you're in business, you don't run around trumpeting every problem that pops up in your products. You get the engineering department on the case, and you try to get things sorted out with minimal expense and minimal bad publicity.

The problem, in my estimation, is two-fold. Firstly, Toyota has carefully cultivated an image of reliability, dependability, safety, and with their Prius, of being a company that cares about the environment and likes fluffy kittens and gumdrops and long walks on the beach. Problem number one is that some people have started actually believing the propaganda, and so are naturally disappointed when Toyota turns out to be just like every other auto manufacturer out there: all about the bottom line.

The second part of the problem is that Toyota managed to become the largest auto manufacturer in the world in a very short time. I don't care how good your quality assurance department is: when product is flying out the factory doors to meet demand, things get missed. Toyota's reputation for build quality and reliabilty was forged while they were a niche player in the market and could afford to take the extra time that GM and Ford couldn't. Now they've taken on all the problems that come with being a big player, including taking a major beating due to the recession.

This is not to say that the unintended acceleration is not a serious problem, and that Toyota can't be blamed for not figuring out the problem earlier and taking care of it before anyone got seriously hurt. But it's a giant company these days, and you can't do handbrake turns in an oil tanker.

Toyota will be punished for their failings, whether they were intentional or not. Their problems are only just beginning. No longer will people just automatically assume that a Toyota badge means unassailable reliability and rock-solid resale. There will be those, of course, who realize that any car manufacturer is going to have a few issues here and there, and that by and large, the majority of Toyotas are trouble-free and built with a high degree of quality. After the dust settles, many people will return to Toyota as the safe option. But there will be a lot of lost sales, and the company's image will never be quite the same.

Personally, and with all consideration for those of you who are struggling with having bought a vehicle that falls under the recall, and of course, compassion for anyone who's been unfortunate enough to be physically hurt, this is good news for Toyota fans. The company can no longer afford to rest on its laurels, and will have to return to its roots: hammering out better products than everybody else is what put Toyota on the map in the first place.

In the meantime, we can expect to see a barrage of lawsuits (and if you want something sorted out quickly and cheaply, let's get lots of lawyers involved), constant media coverage partially spurred on by both competing manufacturers and politicians looking to score points, and about one story a week of someone getting in an accident due to their own inattention and blaming it on their Toyota. Just last week, a Louisiana man repeatedly rammed the dealership where he'd just bought his new Toyota when they wouldn't take the vehicle back. He cheekily claimed that the pedal was sticking.

So get ready for months of this stuff. I've just received an email from a gentleman with a 2005 Prius that's been suffering from unintended acceleration, and that's not a vehicle involved in the recall. He may be interested to know that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, claims that his 2010 Prius does exactly the same thing, and that it's software-related. I just think this whole mess is all Toyota's bad karma for killing off the riotously delinquent Supra.

Land Rover (How did I miss it? One of the very best.)

Over the years, my father’s garage has become an elephant’s graveyard of corroded metal, faded wiring diagrams, desiccated gaskets and various other relics of a lifetime of Land Rover ownership. Buried somewhere amidst the artifacts is an old Punch magazine with a cartoon showing three British Leyland workers clustered around the company magazine, contemplating a picture of an Austin Mini with its speedometer mounted on the hubcap. The caption reads: “Cockup of The Month.” Amen. The Land Rover was the “best four by four by far” ever built by lazy English Communists.

Not many vehicles are as immediately and inescapably iconic as the Land Rover. Its cheerful boxy shape provokes a strong desire to don knee socks and a pith helmet, and go bouncing around the landscape, interfering with the simple quests of Kalihari Bushmen. Alan Quatermain would have driven one. David Attenborough did. It’s British pluck personified, like an all-terrain steak-and-kidney pie.

Perhaps that’s what made Dad buy one: familiarity. My parents emigrated from Northern Ireland to the Wild West coast of Canada in the late ‘60’s. After a brief dalliance with uncouth colonial pickup trucks, they plumped for the Jeep with a plummy accent.

The Land Rover’s aerodynamics-are-a-bloody-Jerry-plot design gave it the drag-coefficient of a 4’x8’ sheet of plywood. However, its simplicity meant that it could be taken apart like a huge Meccano set. No need for doors? Off they come! Mind you, just try and get the confounded things lined up when you want to put them back on again.

Bolting a tire to the bonnet made frequent underhood excursions an exercise in avoiding ending up with Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ fingers, or Charles the First’s haircut. Still, it gave me and my brother, perched on the front fenders, something to hang on to as we hurtled down a potholed logging road.

That's another thing. I don't know what it was exactly, but for some reason the Land Rover brought out the inner eejit in all of its drivers. My mother’s only speeding ticket came at the helm of the ‘Rover, which, considering its rather chelonian turn of speed, was roundly applauded by the rest of the family. My father managed to get it stuck attempting to ford a stream, within twenty feet of a perfectly serviceable bridge.

Performance? Imagine Winston Churchill in a sprint. Cornering? The QEII on wheels. Interior noise? Like being topside in the Blitz. Kit? All your essential mod cons: windows that open and close (sort of), black vinyl seats like the surface of the sun in summer, a dashboard that’d literally dash your brains out, and a steering wheel of a diameter that wouldn't have been out of place on the deck of a man-o’-war at Trafalgar.

Childhood memories of the Land Rover run the gamut from sheer terror to slight nausea. Whether it was teetering on the edge of a narrow mountain path or nearly bisecting me with the lap belt in the rear-facing back seat, the ‘Rover always gave the impression that somebody from the Spanish Inquisition had been hard at work in the design department.

Keeping it on the road was no picnic either. Countless hours were also spent holding the trouble light and passing wrenches to my cursing father (Dad once asked a teenager wearing a “Rage Against The Machine” t-shirt whether he too owned a Land Rover).

After one particularly involved overhaul, we put everything back together - only to be left with a margarine container filled with an assortment of important-looking nuts and bolts. In a fit of genius, my father affixed a masking tape label marked “Spares.” Problem solved.

By the time I got my grubby little paws on it, we were on our second ‘Rover (the first still sits on the driveway, eviscerated to keep the second one mobile). For a developing gearhead, this was a monumental disappointment. Having been taught to drive in my Dad’s mid-eighties 535i, one of the best-handling sedans you could buy at the time, I was informed that all future solo flights would be at the helm of Rosie the Riveted.

I was to discover that the Land Rover had more Achilles’ Heels than a Greek centipede. For instance, there was the day when, late for work, I leapt into my chariot and put the transmission into reverse. Ba-kunk! Off broke a two-foot section of gear lever. Two years later, we were still driving around with a set of vice-grip pliers attached to the stump.

Then, having fixed the throttle linkage’s tendency to fall apart at stoplights with baling wire (Land Rover Aspirin), I experienced the joy of having both half-shafts (their ends crystallized to protect the differential) snap and leave me stranded on a rail-crossing.

The big green monster currently resides on gravel at the ancestral manse, where wintertime duties compel it to sally forth and plow the drive. Unfortunately a recent frame-off restoration has resulted in a driver’s-side door that can’t be closed. Chariot of the Gods? The Gods Must Have Been Crazy.

Bonus: Unpublished 10 Worst List

10 Worst

1.] Chrysler Sebring
There are many things I would rather be driving than a Chrysler Sebring. For example, a ox-drawn dung cart.
Besides being uglier than botched botox, the Sebring has no personality, a rough engine, an flimsy plastic interior like the inside of a chocolate box, and steering which feels like it's communicating with the front wheels by Morse code. Or possibly carrier pigeon.
Worst of all, the Sebring was touted as the successor to the flawed-but-interesting Chrysler 300C, which is a little bit like Ice Cube's change from scary West Coast gangsta rapper into boring cuddly star of straight-to-DVD family movies.

2.] Saturn Ion
Some people have mourned the passing of Saturn. Well, both of you can lay the blame for the company's failure on this excrable econobox. The Ion took Saturn's reputation for making quirky, fuel-efficient automobiles with dent-resistant doors and blasted it from orbit with a beam of pure, concentrated ugly.
The plastic interior in the sluggish, unreliable Ion is of such a poor quality, it makes the previously mentioned Sebring look like Versailles, and the rest of the car is alternately boring or goofy-looking. Good riddance.

3.] BMW 7-Series
Early on, the BMW 7-series was like a Saville Row tailored suit: reserved, stylish, and projecting a sense of wealth and affluence. Then, a man named Chris Bangle came along and ruined everything.
Channeling the pure evil of the Dark Side of designing, Bangle turned the business suit into something Flavor Flav wouldn't wear. It took years for the horrible “Bangle Butt” to wear off, with its weirdly raised trunk lid.
Also complicating things was BMW's abysmal iDrive system, which auto-journos quickly renamed iDriveYouCrazy. Yes, using a single mouse-like controller for all vehicle functions is great, but not when changing the radio station requires a trip through twelve submenus and a skill-testing question.

4.] Pontiac Aztek
I almost feel sorry for the poor Pontiac Aztek. Yes, it's ugly and slow and horrible, but it's like the ugly duckling, always getting picked on; always the butt of jokes.
On the other hand, it is really, really, really ugly, and the only way it's turning into a swan is if someone melts down all that plastic body cladding and pours it into a mold.

5.] Pontiac Sunfire
Is it any wonder they don't make Pontiac anymore? Like a hamfisted and myopic plastic surgeon, GM's “sporty and fun” division seems to take a perfectly bland, slow and unreliable Chevrolet product, and “improve” it by adding non-functional vents, spoilers and other plastic bits. But that's not important.
What is important is that the Sunfire was coarse, ugly, plasticky and uncomfortable, and received a crash-test rating of Certain Death. Do not want.

6.] The Jaguar X-Type
Jaguar may have built itself a reputation over the years for supreme excellence in the field of unreliability, but at least they were also luxurious. When you did get the Jag to run, it purred and roared, and the interiors were lovely places to wait and have a nice hot thermos of tea while you waited for the tow truck.
Then along came the X-Type Jaguar, the Jag that mewed. Everybody knew that a cheap Jaguar was a bad idea, especially with Ford at the helm. No matter, the businesspersons scoffed at the dissidents and cheerfully steered the HMS Jag towards Bankruptcy Rock by releasing a slow, cramped and shoddy product, which didn't sell.

7.] Ford Focus
I'm talking strictly about '05 and up here, as the Focus of the early part of the decade was not that bad. Sharing a lot of its DNA with the Euro version, the Focus was nippy, fun-to-drive, and nearly reliable.
But then those same businesspeople stuck their noses in, preventing the next Focus from being a twin to its European cousin (which, incidentally, sells like pannekoekens overseas) and instead choosing to make the North American Focus, bigger, fatter, and slower. Just like us.

8.] Dodge Caliber / Jeep Compass
Believe it or not, these are the same cars, and they are both deeply, deeply terrible. The Caliber is boring and unreliable, and manages the trick of being a reverse Tardis: huge on the outside, cramped on the inside. It also has acceleration times normally associated with plate tectonics, unless you buy the SRT4 version, which will try to kill you with torque steer.
The Compass takes all these excellent features and adds a facegraft to make it look like a Jeep. It should not be possible to buy a front-wheel drive Jeep that gets stuck if someone spills a Big Gulp on the road, but the management at Chrysler thinks that's what you want.

9.] Kia Amanti
Every well-designed car has a “face”. Just look at the mischievous headlights and grille of a Mini Cooper to get an idea of its playful nature and fun-to-drive qualities. The Kia Amanti looks like a Koala Bear with brain damage.
It's also quite expensive, unless you were to work out the per-pound price, which is the only way the 4100 lb curb weight is helpful. It's a big flobbery idiot of a car, and an embarrassment next to some of the highly improved products Kia's been putting out lately.

10.] Hummer H3
Ever notice how a lot of cars on this list are made by companies who've either disappeared or been sold off? There's a good reason for that.
Witness Hummer, the company that's a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to Mother Nature's face. All three models are pretty bad, although the H1 is at least fairly unpretentious, but the crown of anti-excellence has to go to the H3. Visibility is poor. Fuel economy is poor. Power and acceleration are poor. You will be poor if you buy one, because the resale is poor. Just terrible.

10 Best Cars of The Decade

As the decade draws to a close, we cast a jaded and cynical eye across a vast array of automotive products that were designed, engineered, built and shipped out to be shined up and placed in the showroom, and ask the all-important question: “What the hell were they thinking?”
But then there are the bright spots. Several times I found myself ruminating, “Why don't they make them like that anymore?” and occasionally, “Why do they insist on calling it the 'Noughties'? Sounds like nougat-based lingerie line. Hmm... May have to write a letter to Victoria's Secret.”
Well anyway, the end of any era deserves a good solid Top-Ten list, so here's the 10 Best Cars of 2000-2009.


10 Best

1.] Honda S2000
Some people, myself for instance, aren't allowed to have motorcycles because their spouses know they will be run over by an octogenarian in a minivan, and somebody will end up getting their liver. For those people, there's the Honda S2000.
Granted, the engine has less torque than an electric pencil sharpener, but it redlines at a stratospheric 8300rpm, and the handling dynamics are razor sharp. Not just a coupe with the roof cut off, the S2000 was designed from the ground up, and as such, it's a purpose-built smile generator,
It'll also never break. Unless you hit a tree.

2.] Subaru STI
With a giant hoodscoop and ludicrous rear spoiler, the rumbling offbeat of a turbo flat-four, and the blue and gold livery of a rally champion, Subaru's STI is about as subtly as Spinal Tap's leather pants. On the other hand, there's not many family sedans that can chase down an M3 on the track and then drive straight up the side of a mountain, going mostly sideways.
By essentially taking one of their race-winning WRC rally cars and chiseling off the decals, Subaru created a year-round yahoo: the sportscar with snowshoes.
I'm going to give a nod at Mitsubishi's EVO here for its superior electronic wizardry, and better on-tarmac driving dynamics, but the Subaru is like a big friendly golden retriever: lots of fun, likes to get dirty, goes anywhere, kind of gassy.

3.] BMW M Coupe
What happens when a bunch of lunatic German engineers work evenings and weekends, and have help tricking stodgy management types into funding their mad experiments? You get something very special, and very weird: the M Coupe.
Basically a Z3 roadster with a hardtop and the M3's big straight-six shoehorned under the hood, the M Coupe is one wacky-looking car. Even afficionados call it “the Clown Shoe.” On the other hand, you'd better have big shoes if you're going to kick this much ass. The M Coupe corners like a mongoose and zips down the straights so fast you expect it to say “Meep-Meep”.
Sure, it's got flaws. That long nose means a cramped cabin, and the short -wheelbase/big-power combination means driving in the wet will make you wet yourself. Still, M Coupe owners have reported an easy fix: remove the windshield wipers and move to Death Valley.
If you need any further convincing of the greatness of the M Coupe, which car do you suppose the head of BMW's M division took home for the weekend most often? He could have taken anything, but he always grabbed the keys to the M coupe.

4.] Corvette ZR-1
I'll probably never own a Corvette, in the same way that I'll never own any gold medallions or giant, diamond-encrusted pinky rings, and never have chest hair like a shag-pile skin graft. But the 'Vette's not quite as medallion-y as it used to be. Somewhere along the way it morphed into a real Ferrari-killer, and the ZR-1 is the current king of the hill.
Admittedly, the 'Vette doesn't appear to be the pinnacle of engineering, what with its plastic body and much-scoffed-at leaf springs. Somehow it doesn't make any difference. The Porsche 911 might be a delicate road-scalpel, but the 'Vette is a sledgehammer, and driving one, every other car out there starts looking like a nail.
There's a video out there on the interwebs of a menacing, battleship-grey ZR-1, shot from a camera mounted on the rear of a mystery car. The ZR-1 paces the other car easily, surging foward in a split second every time a gap opens, and even getting a little air time. At the end of the video, it's revealed that the 'Vette just hunted down the new Lamborghini Murcielago LP-640 SV, a car costing half a million dollars.

5.] Dodge Challenger SRT8
The new Mustang might have better sales figures, and the new Camaro might be more popular with Transformer fans, but there's only one car that properly distills that ol' muscle car moonshine. The Challenger is big, wide and dumb, like Moose from Archie. Also, that big V8 puts out a better noise than Three Dog Night ever did.
It ain't a sportscar by any means: y'all kin turn layft, or raight. But get that big nose pointed at the horizon and pull the trigger, and boom, you're in Las Vegas.
With a pistol grip manual shifter for preference, and in Hemi Orange with those big black stripes, it's retro done right.

6.] MINI Cooper S JCW
Speaking of retro done correctly, here's one of the few times where the sequel is just as much fun as the original (probably because Mark Wahlberg wasn't involved). It might be extremely pricey, especially for a subcompact, but BMW's re-imagining of the original Cooper means that the MINI is a hoot and a half.
There's always been some rumbling over the excessively cutesy interior with its cartoon gauges, and a modern MINI Cooper will loom over one of its diminutive ancestor like a Heffalump towering over Piglet. However, the reincarnated MINI seems to shrug off those extra pounds, and the only thing cartoonish about the grippy handling and the go-kart driving feel is the idiotic grin it'll put on your face.
The John Cooper Works version is the best and fastest (and most expensive), but the whole lineup is a pleasure to drive. Up until they bring that ruddy crossover out, that is.

7.] Audi R8
Audi has never had a problem building fast cars or luxurious cars, but no-one expected their first foray into the world of mid-engined coupes to be this good. The R8 isn't the fastest car you can buy, but it just might be the best.
Audi's supercar is as quiet and comfortable as their A8 limousine, but it can dice it up with the 911s at the track, and while the jury's still out on those carbon-fibre sideburns, the styling is at once restrained and futuristic.

8.] Nissan GT-R
But let's suppose for a moment, you think luxurious restraint is like pink fuzzy handcuffs: best avoided. Might I interest you in possibly the most technologically advanced car on the market?
The GT-R is not subtle. It doesn't draw from retro inspiration or make concessions to niceties like sound levels or comfort. It is a weapon, purpose-built for speed, and is the closest thing most of us will get to piloting a fighter plane.
With a hand-built, twin-turbo engine feeding just under 500hp through a multi-clutch transmission and twin carbon-fibre driveshafts, the GT-R needs more computing power than eBay to avoid liquefying the pavement beneath its massively sticky tires.

9.] Bugatti Veyron
There's a good chance you might never see a Veyron. Being so rare and expensive, most of them are bound for the Middle East or Hong Kong, where they will be preserved and polished, but rarely driven.
Volkswagen resurrected the Bugatti nameplate, but lost money on every Veyron they made. The car was the Apollo Mission of automotive engineering, unlikely to be repeated.
There'll probably never be a car like it again, what with the shifting focus towards alternative fuels and greater efficiency. It is a 1001hp, 400km/h, one million dollar one-off.

10.] Toyota Prius
And now, as John Cleese would say, for something completely different. Ordinarily, I have little time for the Prius, with its fairly boring driving dynamics and that faint sense of smugness you get from hybrid drivers, who in most cases should really be using public transportation instead.
But Priuses (Priii?) don't seem to break, and they hold their value, and they get good mileage, and they're a perfectly acceptable four-door family hatchback that just happens to be a high-tech fuel saver. Also, you can sneak up on people in the silent-running battery mode, which is helpful if you're a ninja, or the captain of a nuclear submarine.
Hybrids may only be a band-aid solution to climate change, but the Prius proves both that manufacturers can be innovative, and that consumers are willing to take a risk.

Top Gear

If, for the last seven years, you've been living in a cave, on Mars, with your eyes shut and your hands clapped over your ears while humming the theme to Hockey Night in Canada as loudly as possible, you may just have avoided hearing about the most popular motoring television program in the world: Top Gear. But probably not.

This Sunday on BBC Two, three middle-aged British men will blow things up, powerslide around corners in inconceivably expensive exotic machinery, engage in pointless races pitting cars versus purebred greyhounds and downhill skateboarders, force a celebrity guest to lap a test track in a horrible little economy car, make fun of each other's haircuts and crack wise with off-colour commentary of the kind that usually results in the convening of a Human Rights Tribunal.

At no point will the teensiest iota of useful consumer advice be imparted, and a viewer may be expected to be insulted at least once based on their country of residence or choice of cars. The entire hour will be as bright and noisy as a Saturday morning cartoon and I am looking forward to it with a level of anticipation akin to that of a shipwrecked sailor finally coming home for Christmas to family, friends and a pair of twin Swedish supermodels. Both of whom are also part-time yoga instructors.

I'm not alone. Immediately after broadcast of the first episode of Top Gear's fourteenth series, you should expect the Internet to get a little sluggish, as every single person in the universe without access to BBC television begins downloading illegal copies of it. Regular viewership in all forms is estimated in the hundreds of millions.

That's a staggering number of people for a show about cars, so what's the attraction? Well, consider this recent review of the Ford Fiesta, a subcompact car becoming available in Canada sometime in 2010.
Lead host Jeremy Clarkson, a man recently forced to apologise to the British Prime Minister for calling him a “one-eyed idiot,” begins by testing the practicality of the hatchback by seeing whether a stuffed Zebra head will fit: it does. Then, having answered the questions of, “Is it easy to park?” and “Is it fun to drive?” Clarkson tackles the important issue of, “What if I go to a shopping centre and get chased by baddies in a Corvette?” by doing just that.

Having completed the Blues Brothers-style indoor demonstration of the Fiesta's nippy handling, Mr. Clarkson addresses eco-concerns by pointing out how green the little Ford is (it's painted green) and sums up its affordability by saying, “...if you have eleven thousand pounds to spend on a car, then yes, you can [afford it]. But if you've only got 40p, then no, you can't.” Then, and this is the mark of a truly thorough road test, Clarkson and his bright green hatchback take part in a beach assault with a Royal Marine Commando unit.

That's not a metaphor for something, the review really does end with the tiny Ford being packed with armed men (Clarkson notes that the smoke grenades fit nicely in the cupholders) and placed on a semi-amphibious landing craft. Then with full air support and naval support, the Fiesta storms the beach, driving ashore through two feet of breaking seas admist the crackling of automatic gunfire, the popping of smoke canisters and the triumphant blaring of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture.

So there you are, absolutely nothing worthwhile learned and a good part of the scenery blown into smithereens, but what a piece of television! Can you imagine such a thing being attempted by the CBC? Their complaints department gets deluged by letters every time Red Green uses non-biodegradable duct-tape, never mind putting on an explosive display designed to appeal to eight-year-old schoolboys.

Much of Top Gear is in the same over-the-top vein, although it initially started as a dull factual program. The original series was a half-hour show running from 1977 to 2001 and provided the sort of dry consumer-information fare up until the aforementioned Mr. Clarkson arrived in 1988. Gradually, the focus moved to much more humourously critical reviews, until the old format faltered completely, to be re-launched in 2002 as an hour-long show.

“New” Top Gear has well-established formula: three squabbling hosts, a sprinkling of exotic steel, some generalized mucking about with old beaters and plenty of blowing things up. There is always a guest, and they are always forced to complete a flying lap of the Top Gear Test Track. Ardent fan Jay Kay of the band Jamiroquai currently holds the record, having soundly beaten a smug Simon Cowell, which was pretty satisfying for everyone who's not a self-important music-industry git.

The current host lineup has been the same for the past six years, with James May joining Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond in the second series. The triumvirate found instant chemistry. Clarkson is easily the best-known presenter, and the show has developed around his characteristic boisterous reviewing style. Richard Hammond, youngest of the three, is every bit Mr. Clarkson's equal in opinionated squabbling, although he stands a mere 5'7” next to Clarkson's 6'5”. James May, nicknamed Captain Slow for his cautious driving style, brings a little common sense to the table, but where he lacks the others enthusiasm for reckless speed and noise, he is every bit the iconoclast when it comes to his weakness for ratty old classic cars.

Also integral to the show's success is their “tame racing driver,” a mysterious, white Nomex-clad figure called the Stig, who never appears on film without his helmet. Numerous rumours about the Stig's identity were fanned last year, when a picture of the film crew caught the Stig unmasked. Top Gear's response was to “reveal” a new identity for the Stig almost every other day, claiming at one point the the Stig was actually Barack Obama. In a televised segment, the Stig removed his helmet to reveal that he was in fact retired Formula 1 racing driver Michael Schumacher, but this was also overturned when Schumacher-as-Stig turned out to be completely hopeless on the track, unable even to drive a manual transmission.

Top Gear also features possibly the most highly polished cinematography and editing to be found outside of a summer blockbuster. Think Blue Planet with a snarling V8 soundtrack. There exists no better example of the car as art form, with lingering shots caressing the the curvaceous flanks and swelling hindquarters of a Ferrari 599, even as the throbbing soundtrack of an Italian V12 at full chat fills the oh bugger I've spilled my pint.

Highlights of the past fourteen seasons are nearly too innumerable to list. My personal favorites include the transformation of an early-nineties three-wheeled Reliant Robin into a space shuttle (it blew up); an attempt to cross the English channel in three amphibious cars (one burnt, one sank, one made it); five-man-a-side car football with racing drivers and Toyota Aygo city cars (a full-contact sport); and repeated attempts to destroy a diesel-powered Toyota Hilux pickup truck by dropping a caravan on it, setting it on fire, letting it get swept away by the tide, setting it on fire, and placing it atop a 23-storey-high apartment building that then underwent a controlled demolition (it survived everything and is preserved on a plinth in the Top Gear studio).

It hardly needs saying that Top Gear is not without its detractors. While Jeremy Clarkson is enormously funny with his hyperbolic metaphors and buffoonish on-screen persona, he's also unrepentantly politically incorrect, refutes the idea of climate change, and is outspoken about his contempt for the nanny state's crackdown on speeding. The BBC has endured numerous complaints about comments made both on and off the air by Mr. Clarkson. He has faced rebuke for making fun of the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the Americans, truck drivers, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the British car manufacturing industry, caravan holidaymakers, motorcycling accidents, the blind, the deaf, women, various celebrities, the environmental movement, and pretty much everybody everywhere.

Top Gear itself has been under scrutiny for showing pipe-smoking on air, the destruction of the fragile salt flats of Botswana, and drinking and driving en route to the North Pole. Risky stunts are constantly coming into conflict with workplace health and safety concerns, and the hosts' propensity for setting fire to almost everything has environmental groups outraged with clockwork frequency. Richard Hammond suffered serious brain injury when a rocket-powered dragster he was piloting crashed at over 450 km/h. A common complaint is that the show is a waste of British ratepayers money and that it perpetuates a culture of reckless driving and wasteful consumption.

Certainly, the critics are not making things up. Top Gear's anti-social behaviour is pretty much indefensible on any other grounds other than that it's just jolly good fun to watch. But in these times of shrinking economies, crowded roads and dwindling oil reserves, there's nothing to dispel the blues like a day-glo Lamborghini doing a smoky powerslide, an exploding caravan, and taking the mickey out of ze Germans. See you Sunday, gents.

Love The Beast

Normally, I'm not big on documentaries. There's nothing more disconcerting than going to the movies only to realize, halfway through a bag of mediocre popcorn, that, “Hey! You sneaky buggers are trying to educate me!” No thanks. When I want to learn something, I'll go look it up on wikipedia and get it mostly wrong.

Last weekend though, I watched a documentary that didn't teach me anything new, it just put into words and pictures something I already knew: you can fall in love with a car.

The film (I've donned my black turtleneck of pretentious reviewing) is actor/director Eric Bana's “Love The Beast,” and despite his rural Australian roots, it's not what ewe think. The Beast in question here is a 1974 Ford Falcon Coupe that Bana has owned for over 25 years, and he's completely nuts about it.

Spoiler alert, as they say on the interwebs, but the plot is your usual Boy meets Car, Boy restores Car, Boy and Car get into unfortunate love triangle with large, unyielding Tree. Midway through the Targa Tasmania, a multi-stage racing event on the beautiful, twisting roads of that tiny island, Bana loses control of his painstakingly restored and race-prepped muscle car and has a nasty crash. He then interviews such gearhead luminaries as Jay Leno and Jeremy Clarkson and this Dr. Phil fella, who I think is famous for knowing somebody called Opera and making statements that would be patently obvious to the most blithering of idiots.

But that's not the point of the movie (turtleneck discarded). This flick is about how a inanimate object constructed of steel, glass and rubber, which costs huge amounts of money to insure and fuel, that ruins the environment and makes you fat and lazy: how something like that can have a soul.

And they do have souls, you know. Not all cars, obviously, but some do. They have personalities. They begin to become part of your memories, good and bad.

The appeal of classic cars has never been a mystery to me: I knew they had personalities from a very early age. My dad has an MGB and a Land Rover, both of which have the personality of crotchety old men who hate the thought of anyone with intact knuckles. Even now, with a full restoration done, the MGB requires a great deal of fiddling about with the carburettors to get it to start, and I personally find the brakes to be alarmingly ineffective. But Dad loves it. He keeps talking about selling it. Never gonna happen.

That's why I understand the grins on the faces of people driving deeply flawed cars. Sure, the steering column may come thrusting through your chest like a Zulu assegai if you so much as tap the bumper of the person ahead of you, and sure, the roof leaks like a mid-nineties condo, but it doesn't matter.

It's the same thing when it comes time to shop for a new car. Everyone pretends to make a science project out of it, consulting checklists and safety ratings, fuel economy and features. For most of us, what it comes down to in the end is how the car makes us feel. We love to pretend that we buy cars just using our heads, but most of us end up listening to our hearts.

The car parked outside in my garage right now has a special place in my heart. Sure, she's not perfect, but I love the way there's a little lag to the larger turbo I had installed, and the occasional playful pop from the exhaust when the throttle plate closes. I can count each scratch and remember where we got it, whether it was in a parking lot or barrelling along gravel roads in search of the hot springs south of Pemberton.

I remember my wife and I cramming the back full of camping supplies and driving the coast to Los Angeles, cruising through pitch-black redwood forests and curving coastal roads. I remember a crisp fall morning driving the Sea-to-Sky highway and catching that first view of the snow-covered Chief. I remember catching that pack of M3s on turn seven at Mission Raceways. I remember waking up to toonie-sized snowflakes and rushing out to drive down the abandoned roads to Jericho beach. I remember that the bloody dashboard clock is broken and I have to try and fix it.

I sometimes wonder if non-car people will ever understand the attachment gearheads develop with their cars. It would seem to me that falling in love with a driving appliance like a Corolla would be as weird as feeling affectionate towards your toaster, or becoming good friends with the dishwasher.

But on the other hand, maybe you don't have to be the typical car-guy-or-girl, boring all your friends with talk of camshafts and compression ratios. Maybe it depends how you see your car. If it's just the bus or taxi that takes you on an unpleasantly congested commute to your semi-boring job, then you won't get it. If it's the faithful steed that brought home your first child from the hospital, then maybe you do.

For me, the little wagon out front is a part of the family. It's taken us places, hauled our stuff when we moved, been full of friends and their bicycles. Mostly though, it's just there, reminding me that if I wanted, I could go downstairs, jump in and drive to Newfoundland.

Not that I'm going to, you understand, but I could. If I did, my car would take me there, no complaints, no questions asked. Just don't ask her what time it is.

More Cars We Don't Get

All right, I'll just come right out and say it: I want a Ford Focus. Yes, I'll happily give up the keys to my modified, 300+ horsepower WRX with all the time, effort and money I've spent tweaking it (and all the money I've spent paying professionals to undo the tweaks), and drive away in a Focus.

You're surprised? Well, just to be clear, I'm not talking about any old econobox Ford here. No, I'm talking about the Ford Focus RS, which you can't get here. Not yet anyway, he added hopefully, with an expression of wistful longing and a large measure of pointless optimism.

The RS is at the current top of my list, but idly leafing through any Euro car magazine reveals even more great cars that manufacturers just won't sell in North America.

The Ford Focus RS:

So let's start with this one, shall we? First of all, the RS is based on the excellent Euro-Focus, which is pretty well universally regarded as the most fun-to-drive hatchback you can get across the pond. It makes the VW Golf look as pointless and stodgy as... well... golf, I suppose.

Ford takes this spirited platform and then pumps it full of eight Barry-Bonds-worth of anabolic steroids and four Lenny-Bruce-worth of amphetamines. Its enormous exhaust pipes make the Chunnel look like a juicebox bendy straw. Its rear spoiler creates so much downforce, it can actually move the Earth out of orbit. Its wheelarches are flared in the same way that Bruce Banner's pants are flared when he changes into the Hulk. 300Hp. REVO-knuckle suspension. Terrier-like reflexes and attack-dog savagery.

And what kind of Focus do we get here? Oh look, a fancy iPod dock. Well, that's just perfect for my Anne Murray playlist, but I'll happily go without if you'll just bring the RS here, Ford. Do it. Do it now.

The Volkswagen Scirocco

Don't feel like wrestling with 300 rampaging horses constantly trying to wrest the steering wheel from your hands? What about a nice VW GTI, the perennial favourite for its hot-hatch lively driving, a beautifully-made interior and that Germanic level of precision in the build quality?

No thanks, I'll have a VW Scirocco instead. Why? Well, it's a GTI underneath, but it's lighter, prettier, slightly more powerful, prettier, a little bit faster around a track, and prettier. And it's cheaper too. And prettier.

If VW didn't hate us all so much, they'd bring this gorgeous coupe/hatchback cross over the Atlantic and sell it instead of the 2-door GTI. You could still buy a 4-door GTI if you only wanted a Golf, but the Scirocco is a hundred times better. I'll even stop making cracks about electrical problems if they do it.

The Fiat 500 Abarth esseesse

Another hot hatchback we don't get, although this one is so fashionable it makes the MINI Cooper S look like a sweatshirt with sequins and an airbrushed wolf on it. Fiat's 500 is pure excellence, and probably the best retro-based car you can buy in Europe today.

The Abarth takes that retro-excellence and adds a dash of hot sauce, but not too much. With a 1.4-litre turbocharged engine producing just 160hp, it's unlikely to set any landspeed records. But, with a hummingbird-light curbweight and a sport-tuned suspension, this car should take to the curves like only an Italian can.

Best news yet, we might actually get some form of the 500 as part of the Fiat-Chrysler merger. I, for one, would happily set fire to ten thousand PT Cruisers if we could make just one of these little firecrackers.

The Toyota iQ

Not everything has to have the turbocharging turned up to 11 or be riding around on huge alloy wheels. Some normal people might actually appreciate having a car that's efficient, easy-to-park, and cleverly optioned. If you're in the market for a micro-sized car here, you buy a Smart. If you wanted something a little cleverer overseas, you'd get an iQ.

The tiny iQ (har har) is a four-seater, two door car that has the short wheelbase of a Smart-car, but with way more interior room due to innovations like a flat fuel tank and rear-angled shock absorbers. With a tiny 3-cylinder engine, the iQ consumes just 4.3L/100kms, but it also has a 5-star Euro NCAP crash test rating.

I suppose I'd like to see a modified version of this little car, just to hear someone say, “Hey, I just lowered my iQ!” but really, just bring it here Toyota.

Canadian demand for big sedans is shrinking rapidly. Sure, a lot of us still need a highway car that's going to gulp down the miles and have a trunk big enough for haybales, but that's just the Albertans.

The era of the Small Car is upon us already, and it doesn't make any sense to me why there aren't even more choices for the small car buyer now. MINI's success should have proven that people are willing to pay more for less, as long as it's a nice less.

The real test though, will be the Euro-Fiesta that Ford's currently experimenting with. If that little car can do well, expect to see the Euro-Focus hot on its heels, and then (just maybe) I might be able to get my RS.

On the other hand, if anyone at Ford wants to send me one right now, please be assured that my journalistic integrity cannot be purchased. And I like the blue.

GM's Worst

Want to know what the best-selling car in North America was last year?
Honda Civic? Good guess. Toyota Corolla? Seems obvious, but no.
Cobalt? Not even close.

The car that captured the sales title for 2008 was none other than the
domestically produced Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. Yes, those tiny, bright
red, egg-shaped cars sold a whopping 457,000 units last year, easily
besting Japan's finest with excellent fuel economy and a low, low
price. So why should you care? Because this car, which costs around
fifty bucks and is stamped out in a mould in Ohio, has better build
quality and a less plasticky interior than most GM products.

"Oh sure," you say, "Kick 'em while they're down." But let's face it:
When hasn't the General been down? The company's been a paragon of
poor product and mismanagement since the late 14th century, and as
nice as it is to reflect on the great cars they somehow managed to
build, like a roomful of monkeys bashing out Hamlet, GM has built some
real stinkers over the years.

We're not just talking poor reliability here. We're talking seats
designed by members of the Spanish Inquisition, dashboards made out of
the same flimsy plastic you find in chocolate box trays, engines that
couldn't be any less modern and efficient if they ran on coal, and
styling done by a committee of 400 people who couldn't agree on
anything except that they hated beauty so much they probably went
around on the weekends beating up swans and stomping on butterflies.

Here are the worst offenders (and there's plenty to choose from):

The Hummer H2

Given its Americatastic image, the fact that Hummer has now been
more-or-less officially sold to the Chinese seems poetic somehow.
Sure, they were great off-road, and sure, if you wanted to let
everyone know that you were a drug dealer or the Governor of
California, you couldn't pick a vehicle with a clearer image. On the
other hand, owning a Hummer was a little like going to the pet store
to get a puppy for the kids and coming back with a hippopotamus. With
tapeworms.

I must confess, I have a particular and nearly unwarranted hatred for
the H3 as a badge-engineered excrescence; the only nice thing I can
say about the engineers behind it is that they managed to make the
Chevy Trailblazer even worse, which is quite an achievement. However,
as much as the H2 was actually a much more capable and respectable
vehicle, it's the one that will have to take the lion's share of the
blame.

Not since the Cadillac Escalade has there been such a ludicrous
example of conspicuous consumption, and as the H3's release coincided
with the crushing of the last of GM's EV-1 electrical vehicles, it
pretty much turned the General into a scapegoat for environmentalists.
Not that they didn't deserve it too, but the H3 allowed Toyota to get
on the green-wagon first, despite the Japanese company's own
gas-guzzlers like the Lexus LX-series.

The Saturn Ion

A popular idea in science fiction is the idea of an orbital ion
cannon, capable of delivering a pin-point strike with a destructive
energy beam of unimaginable power. Should one ever be developed, I
propose the first set of targets to be wiped from the face of the
Earth should be all examples of this horrible economy car. That's of
course assuming their owners haven't already set fire to them by that
point.

Released in 2003, the Ion was supposed to be the "New Saturn" that
would take on the Civic and Corolla and run, ahem, rings around them.
Unfortunately, its success was blunted by weirdly confused styling, a
woefully underpowered engine and, without a hint of exaggeration, the
worst car interior in the History of Mankind.

They'd eventually make a Redline supercharged version, but as far as
I'm concerned, the Ion was all Flatline, and if you're a Saturn fan
you can blame it for the death of your favourite company.

Chevy minivans, any of them

Woe is you if you ever traded in your hot little coupe for one of
these things because of a burgeoning family. Uplander, Montana, SV6,
whatever you called them, they were basically purgatory with sliding
doors: sliding doors that frequently broke.

Early models were just barely OK, but they suffered from having a
crashworthiness level slightly higher than that of a cardboard Pampers
box. This did not go over well with those soccer moms who didn't want
their offspring to die horribly (i.e. all of them), so GM glued a
four-foot nose to the front. Crashworthiness problem solved, styling
problem aggravated. On the other hand, it's a minivan. Who cares if
it's uglier than Quasimodo on a bad hair day after being relentlessly
attacked by wasps?

Buyers care, apparently, and what's worse, they surprisingly don't
want unreliable vehicles. A quick search of a consumer-based-reviews
website popped up two representative samples. One began, "We've had
lots of problems with our minivan. Very disappointed and would not
recommend." The next one started, "What could possibly go wrong
next??!?" Uh-oh.

I stopped reading before I got depressed.

The Pontiac Aztec

Here it is: the auto journalist's favourite whipping boy. It takes a
special type of car to be the one that always gets incorporated into
the tagline, ". . . but at least it's not as ugly as the Pontiac
Aztec." As in, "The new 7-series BMW looks like it was designed by
pushing the old one down the stairs and then jumping up and down on
the wreckage, but at least it's not as ugly as the Pontiac Aztec."

Shame really, as the bizarrely-styled trucklet wasn't too terrible
elsewhere. Beneath that weird exterior beat a heart of pure . . .
arthritis, actually. However, on a kinder note, the looks were
something of an anti-theft device, and you could bolt a tent on the
back. That's it, I can't think up any more nice things to say.

The Chevy SSR

I think this takes the cake. GM's built some bad, bad cars and worse
trucks, but the SSR takes terrible to a whole new level:
ultraterrible.

For starters, it's a production convertible pickup truck. What? Who
needs a convertible pickup truck? Cattle ranchers in Malibu? Guys with
really big hats? Elvis's re-animated corpse?

Worse, because it has a folding hardtop, there's no space in the truck
bed. And you can't tow anything with it. And there are only two seats.

Still, it looks cool, in a sort of retro-futuristic way, although the
bifurcated headlamps kind of resemble bifocals to me. But for a
whopping, no, make that insane $80,000, you could just have easily
bought four classic hotrods and your own tow-truck service to take
care of them, and another pickup to carry stuff. It's not like the SSR
was any more reliable than a worked-over '48 Chev. Plus, the hotrods
wouldn't have crappy plastic interiors.

That's not even the worst part. The worst part, and something I can't
abide in a car that claims to be a factory hotrod, is how slow this
thing was. It's a two-door convertible with a 350 horsepower,
5.7-litre V-8 engine. Should be pretty nippy, right? Wrong. This thing
got to 100 km/h in about eight seconds and ran the quarter mile in, at
best, 15.7 seconds. You can do that in a Buick Park Avenue. You can do
that in a Dodge Neon, for crying out loud, and this truckvertible cost
more than $80,000.

I suppose the performance is not surprising when you look up the
curb-weight of the SSR and find that it weighs the same as that
blasted H3 or the combined moons of Jupiter. Still, it's the perfect
vehicle to point out GM's current problems: Bloated, underachieving,
off-target, and far too costly.

Give the Little Tikes people a call, GM. They'll help you out.

Racing Greats

This year's Spanish Grand Prix was touted as being a triumph of pit strategy and clever planning by team leader Ross Brawn. However, aside from one fairly unimpressive accident right at the beginning, the race might have been dubbed the Curious Case of Jenson Button, as it was long, tedious, and predictable.

By now I'm sure rabid F1 fans are foaming at the mouth, racing to their Ferrari-branded keyboards and writing huge tracts about the many ways in which I should be disembowled with carbonfibre wings. Fair enough I suppose, but I would challenge anyone to be excited by Formula 1's chess-like strategies after reading, as I did before watching the race, anything about racing in the '30's-'60's.

In particular, I had been reading about the last variant of Mercedes-McLaren's SLR supercar, a homage to Sir Stirling Moss, and stumbled across this quote from the fabled racecar driver: “Jenks [navigator Denis Jenkison] had given me the signal that it was OK flat and we went over the damn thing [a humpbacked bridge] at 150 or 160 [about 250km/h] and the bloody thing was flying. It was a dead straight road, but I knew it was a bit dodgy. We were airborne for quite a few seconds.”

A bit dodgy indeed when you learn that this was on a narrow, tree-lined Italian road in an open-topped Mercedes with drum brakes, and nobody was wearing seatbelts in case the car caught on fire. Oh, and Sir Moss preferred shortsleeved shirts so he could work on his tan. Next to lunacy of this calibre, Formula 1 is like paintball compared to the Normandy landings.

That's not to say F1 is really boring, it's just been designed to be safer and safer, and rightly so. There's no way that the antics of the past could be allowed, and it's not like there still isn't a great potential for danger. But my fear is that the greatest racing stories have been told, Lewis Hamilton notwithstanding.

Sir Stirling's achievement, for instance, in the 1955 Mille Miglia, a 1600km gruelling endurance race, is nothing short of superhuman. Blasting through narrow, winding Italian country roads, throttle-steering the big Mercedes around blind sweepers with spectators leaping out at you, Moss averaged 160km/h over a ten-hour period, beating his closest rival and teammate by 30 minutes. His time of ten hours, seven minutes and forty-eight seconds would never be beaten.

Epic surely, but for the greatest racing victory of all time, we have to look to the Italians. Tazio Nuvolari was a successful motorcycle racer in the 20's and early 30's but by 1931 he'd decided to move into four-wheel racing. He had some success and engaged in the usual staggering stupidity of racecar drivers, racing once with a broken leg in a car specially designed to be driven with only one leg, but then came the 1935 German Grand Prix.

Every good story needs villains, and who better than the old standbys, the Third Reich. Yep, here come the Nazis in their two state-funded teams with the supercharged 400-hp Mercedes W25s and the rear-engined Auto-Union (later to become Audi) Type-Bs, also with well over 400hp. These enormous silver beasts were to be piloted by the best drivers out there: Hans Stuck, Rudolf Caracciola, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Achille Varzi and the amazingly talented Bernd Rosemeyer.

Nuvolari was in an hopelessly outdated and underpowered Alfa Romeo that looked like a chicken coop on bicycle tires. He was 43 years old, grizzled from years of racing and partially crippled by the injuries he had sustained through his career. The track was the fabled Nürburgring, a course that even today takes a dozen lives every year. The nine big German rocket ships lined up on the wet track in front of 300,000 nationalistic fans, one of them with a funny moustache and a bad haircut.

They're off! And already there's a serious injury as a mechanic rushing to help a stalled Hans Stuck gets clipped by one of the big Auto Unions, fracturing his skull. The slick track is no match for Caracciola, an expert in the wet, and he opens up a significant lead, but here comes Rosemeyer, drifiting his car through the corners at over 160km/h. The two racing greats duel for the lead, while von Brauchitsch and Varzi are battling with Hans Stuck who has somehow caught up after his disastrous start, and in fifth place it's...

It's Nuvolari! Yes, the 5ft 4in Italian in his tiny soapbox-racer of an Alfa Romeo is somehow keeping up to all that German horsepower. He's grimacing, chatting away to the car and patting it encouragingly, wringing every last ounce of speed and handling out of the little Alfa.

By lap nine, the Germans were still leading and the other two Alfa Romeos had predicably broken, leaving only Nuvolari battling alone against eight cars, Rosemeyer having pitted to change out his shredded tires. The little Italian was still hanging on, and then he wasn't just hanging on any more. He was winning.

Recording the first-ever sub-11 minute circuit of the Nurburgring, Nuvolari passed an Audi, then a Mercedes, then another Audi, and then suddenly he was past Caracciola for the lead! The crowd went deathly silent.

But then disaster strikes! Von Brauchitsch sets a blistering 10 minutes 32 seconds lap to catch up, and he, Nuvolari, Rosemeyer and Caracciola all enter their last pit stop at the same time. With military precision, von Brauchitsch's team gets him out first, then Caracciola and Rosemeyer. Nuvolari? Stuck in the pits, with a broken fuel pressure pump. As the mechanics attempted to fuel the car by hand, the time ticked away until he was right back in sixth place.

Sensing victory, von Brauchitsch pushed harder and harder as Rosemeyer and Caracciola fell back, charging to a comfortable lead of one minute 30 seconds. But then that lead started shrinking. And the car in second place, gaining precious seconds? It was the number 12 Alfa Romeo of Nuvolari.

Over the last three laps, von Brauchitsch's lead was cut until the final lap only left him a 30 second lead, not enough time to change the tires he had worn through pushing so hard. The cars disappeared out of sight, and the announcer had become so frenzied and unintelligible there was no way for the crowd to know what was happening. They waited for the winner to appear out of the light mist.

Finally a silhouette emerged. It was boxy, small, and there was a jubilant Italian at the wheel. The crowd sat in stunned silence.

Tiny Nuvolari looked ridiculous in the huge victory wreath that had been designed for the taller German drivers, and the race organizers hadn't even bothered to bring a copy of the Italian national anthem, but there was nothing taken away from the jubilation felt by the Alfa Romeo team, especially by its young leader, who declared that Nuvolari was the best driver that had ever been. The leader's name? Enzo Ferrari.

So you can have your clinical Formula 1, but I think I'll let Sir Stirling have the last word:

"To me now racing is - the dangers are taken away: if it's difficult, they put in a chicane. So really now the danger is minimal - which is good, because people aren't hurt. But for me the fact that I had danger on my shoulder made it much more exciting... And I think with driving a motor car, the danger is a very necessary ingredient. Like if you're cooking, you need salt. You can cook without salt, but it doesn't have the flavor. It's the same with motor racing without danger. For me.”

Me too.

Auto Show

Recession? Perish the thought.

At least, that's what all the crowds at this year's Vancouver International Auto Show seemed to be indicating. Sure, more people were there to find bargains on fuel-sippers, but the throng packed around the new Camaro shows that a gearhead is still a gearhead, even when they're shifting up early to save gas.

With a huge number of new and re-designed cars revealed this year, there's plenty to get excited about, from matte-black supercars to game-changing hybrids.

For cool cars that'll warm up the planet, you've got to head straight to the supercar paddock and check out the gorgeous curves of the Aston-Martin DBS and Ferrari 599 GTB. Maserati and Bentley have put in an appearance too, but the filly that really caught my eye was a black Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4. I don't know why they bother with all the numbers as all the brain remembers is “Lamborghini,” but it's a thing of beauty with its perforated tailpipes and bio-hazard symbol brake lights.

Nutcase of the show goes to Dutch manufacturer Spyker, whose new Calgary-based dealership brought in two of their wild convertibles. These cars are a riot of quilted leather and more chrome than all the rap videos between 2003-2005, and the bizarro double-rod gear linkage is insane enough to make you cut off your own ear. By comparison, the Lotuses looked like sensible econoboxes.

Of course, outside of the latest Gran Turismo game, I'm pretty sure a supercar isn't going to make it into my garage anytime soon. Still, there's performance bargains aplenty to be found over at the Subaru/Mitsubishi corner. I guess now that both companies are out of the rallying game, it's safe to put them side-by-side, but I'm still surprised not to find the reps flinging mud at each other. Subaru has their new 265hp WRX on display, but the crowds were even busier checking out Mitsubihi's newer 5-door Lancer Sportback. The new Lancer is by far the prettier car, and is a great compromise between wagon and sports-sedan.

Over at Nissan, plenty of crowds attracted by the still-popular GTR supercar stayed to paw all over the brand-new Z car: the 370Z. This year, the rear-wheel drive, V6 icon brings more power, better handling and lower weight to the table, and (even more enticing) it has a lower price. If the GTR is a half-price 911 Turbo, then this new car takes aim at the Porsche Cayman S, and Stuttgart should be nervous.

However, when it comes to performance bargains, the show-stopper was definitely Hyundai with their Genesis coupe. The 3.8 litre V6 model is a worthy contender to go up against that 370Z, although it has a little less power than the Nissan. However, the real deal is the 2-litre turbo model that can be picked up with a manual transmission, 210hp and 18” rims for just over $26,000. My prediction: it's going to be nearly impossible to find these for the first year as they'll all be getting snapped up as fast as Korea can make them. Don't be fooled by the V6's greater power output either; that 4-cylinder turbo sports a very similar engine to the one found in the Mitsubishi Ralliart. Expect to see 400hp+ tuner versions in the upcoming months.

However, we can't tear around all the time consuming petrochemicals like a Kuwati oil fire. Luckily, this is one of the best years for providing the eco-concious driver with a wide array of choices. The new Prius is here, somehow sporting more power and better fuel economy through some Toyota black magic. But the Prius had better gird its leaf-loving loins for battle because Honda's new Insight hybrid was garnering all the attention. Both cars seem to be jelly-beans from the same pod, but the Insight is touted as having that classic sharp Honda driving feel. It'll be cheaper too.

Eco even got a bit sexy over at Dodge, where their massively over-engined Challenger was parked next to a little yellow bumblebee of a car: the Dodge EV. Based on a Lotus, this little full-electric sportscar would happily outhandle the big bruiser in the corners, and the ludicrously available torque from an electric engine means it would out-drag it to 100km/h too.

Speaking of electric powertrains, this year's show boasted a whole array of electric vehicles on the upper mezzanine, from mini-dumptrucks to converted Toyota Rav4s. Parked right next to them was the Alé concept, a BC-homebrew that's competing for the automotive X-Prize of 100mpg. The spec sheet on the Jetson-looking podcar seemed a bit far-fetched but apparently it's nearing production.

More practical transportation for the rest of us was provided by pretty much every manufacturer there, but don't equate economical with boring. Nissan debuted their funky little Cube, a box-on-wheels that will redefine cheap and cheerful, Kia's Soul is already selling like hotcakes, and Ford even had the audacity to display a bright green euro-spec Fiesta hatchback. They'd better not be teasing, as this little car could provide serious competition on an even footing with the Yaris, Fit and Versa.

Every year it's tricky to pick a must-see car, but this year I had an easy time finding the star of the show, even though it was tucked away on the mezzanine with little fanfare. In the sparse Porsche booth, right between Lexus and Land Rover, there was a 911 that I just instantly fell for. Sure the Lamborghini was the sexiest car, and sure the Insight will probably be the biggest sales success in the coming year, but away from all the fanfare and fins there was a deep green 911 Carrerra S with a tan leather interior.

I've seen plenty of 911s in red, black and silver, but that particular colour combination immediately transported me twenty-five years into the future, where all our cars are pod-like affairs that whirr along in silence and comfort, connected wirelessly to prevent accidents, with AI-controlled navigation systems and automatic pilot. Somewhere in all that oil-starved sterility, someone is going to open their garage on a Sunday morning and pull an old sheet off this car. It'll fire up with that classic flat-six rumble and its driver will ease it out into the spring sunshine in search of some looped ribbon of lonely country road. I hope that driver is me.