Lost in planet Devon with this big dope 
The director was most apologetic. But since we were filming the end of a moving documentary about some soldiers in the second world war
it would be best if I was actually on location. Which was in Falmouth, which is in Cornwall, which is as far as you can get from London without being in space. Choosing what car to take was easy.
I’m a huge fan of the Volkswagen Golf GTI and parked outside was its brand new baby brother, the GT TSI. This may only have a 1.4 litre engine but
it’s boosted with the fitment of a turbocharger and a supercharger.
It sounded intriguing.
It sounded like fun.
Choosing how to get there was not so simple. The M4, everyone said, is the easiest route. This may be so, but
it sure as hell isn’t the fastest. These days
it’s a car park all the way to Maidenhead, and then afterwards, as the traffic begins to ease, you have to slow down even more because they’ve littered the hard shoulder with cones to make
it look like there are some roadworks under way. Pah!
It’s just a ruse so they can impose a 40mph speed limit, which they can then police with “safety” cameras.
By the time you get to Bristol you are either dead from old age or you’re on foot because you’ve amassed so many points they’ve taken your licence away. I therefore opted for the A303, but this quickly became boring so I started to play with all the buttons. There’s one, near the gearlever, which is marked with the letter W. Push
it and a small light illuminates, but that’s all.
All the way to Salisbury I prodded
it, trying to find out what
it did, until I became so desperate I actually pulled over and broke the first rule of manliness. I opened the glove box and — take a deep breath — took out the handbook.
You want to know something weird? There was no mention of the W button in there. I think
it’s just been fitted to keep people occupied on long journeys. So having decided there was no point trying to fathom the wilfully unfathomable, I started to delve into some of the sub-menus on the satellite navigation system.
There’s one that baffled me.
It’s a compass, so you get an arrow that tells you your direction of travel. Fine. But then you also get a dot that shows the direction of your destination. What’s the point of that? In a plane
it might be useful because you can fly in a straight line. But in a car you sort of have to go where the road goes.
Still, after approximately 14 weeks I arrived in Exeter, and that, psychologically, is the end of the journey.
It isn’t, though, as people down there are only too happy to tell you. For some reason, all petrol-pump attendants in this part of the world ask where you’re going and then, when you tell them, they explain with a huge grin exactly how long
it will take you to get there. “Falmouth?” said the man at the till, gleefully. “That’s another five hours!” Why do they do this? Why does my misery make their day that little bit better? Small wonder they all vote for the Liberal Democrats.
To make matters worse, I had one small stop to make in Dartmouth, which — said the petrol man, before I punched him — would mean a three-hour detour.
He wasn’t joking. Devon, if
it were a nation state, would be the biggest country in the world. If
it were a planet,
it would dwarf Jupiter. And . . .
it . . . has . . . no . . . motorways. You wiggle about in single file, behind a Liberal Democrat in a Rover, until you reach Torquay, which you always thought had a New York postcode. And then you wiggle about some more until the road goes straight into what is undoubtedly the sea.
It turned out that my stupid satellite navigation system had brought me to Kingswear, which is on the way to Dartmouth, but only if you happen to be driving Chitty Chitty Bloody Bang Bang. And I wasn’t, so I had to get a ferry.
God, Dartmouth’s pretty. And so was the girl in Alf Resco’s who made me a great breakfast, for lunch, and then, after I’d stared wistfully out to sea — which is what you have to do when you’re making a moving documentary for BBC2 — I hopped back in the Golf for a six-light-year thrash to Falmouth.
Falmouth,
it turns out, is the only town in the whole of Cornwall that isn’t called Coombe. I don’t know how many are listed in the atlas but I went through 26 before reaching a place called Coombe, where an old lady reversed into my car.
That livened things up a bit, but not as much as the sign I encountered on one of the endless moorland roads between Coombe and Coombe.
It was a red triangle and in the middle was a picture of a bicycle. What does that mean? That I should look out for bicycles? What, now? Specifically here? At nine at night? And does this mean that in 10 miles, if I run over a cyclist, I can sue the council for not warning me that he might be there?
It is the stupidest sign in Britain.
It’s even more silly than one I pass on the M40 most days that says “Spray possible”. Well yes, in heavy rain, maybe. But in July? In a heatwave? What
it should say then is “Spray not possible”.
It turns out that Cornwall is full of signs, warning of your proximity to all manner of things, none of which is Falmouth. And none of which makes any more sense than the infernal W button in the car.
Ah yes, the car. Well, I was most impressed with the ride, but this, I think, has more to do with the quality of the roads down there in the West Country. Here, in England, we have to spend our money housing Albanian families while their breadwinner is away in a prison that we also paid for. Whereas in Cornwall they think Albania is some kind of skin disease, so they can afford to iron every ripple in every road every morning.
On roads as good as this, the GT handles well too. But that’s
it, I’m afraid, so far as good news is concerned. The rest of
it is rubbish. The headlamps were set too high, so everyone coming the other way flashed me. The handle that you pull to move the passenger seat fell off, and then there was the truly woeful engine.
It’s all very well having direct petrol injection and a supercharger to fill in the black hole while the turbo girds its loins: this is clever, but my God
it’s jerky.
I like the power delivery of an engine to be smooth, like a ball bearing rolling down a child’s playground slide. In the GT
it’s delivered with the smoothness of someone in a wheelchair falling down some stairs.
And where’s the power? If you’re going to stick GT badges on a car and claim
it delivers 168bhp, then kindly give us some oomph to match. Time and again I had to change down on hills, and once, with my foot welded to the floor, I was overtaken by a Mercedes van.
The worst thing, though, is that the GT TSI fails to do any of the things that you might reasonably expect from a car. It doesn’t make the journey fun. It doesn’t isolate you from the sensation of travel. And it isn’t especially cheap. By the time I arrived in Falmouth I was fairly ready to push it into the sea.
The following day, after a seven-hour drive back to London, up the M5 and along the M4, I decided that
it was one of the five worst cars I’d ever driven. Yes, the journey, in the middle of the week, in the middle of winter, was horrid. But
it’s the job of a good car to take a trip like that and make
it better.
The Golf made
it much, much worse.
Vital statistics Model Volkswagen Golf GT TSI 3-door
Engine 1390cc, four cylinders
Power 168bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 177 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Fuel/CO2 38.2mpg (combined) / 178g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 7.9sec
Top speed 136mph
Price £18,095
Rating 1/5
Verdict One of the five worst cars ever made
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Golf GT TSI by Jeremy Clarkson
Originariamente Scritto da www.timesonline.co.uk
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