Hommage to Jeremy Clarkson

I have never been a person who bought car magazines or really read through car reviews. Generally here in the German speaking world, both of them are pretty dull and boring and most reporters try to get past it like as if it's writing a user's manual. It's a real shame to read the reviews and articles, it's an even bigger shame that those people call themselves journalists.
That's why Jeremy Clarkson is such a breathe of fresh air. At work, I've gone through most of his reviews by now and they are simply..amazing. He not only gives his articles soul, but also the cars. He doesn't take the political incorrectness too far, his articles are full of wit and he is in full control of both language and knowledge on his field.
Take this as an example from his review on the Lexus GS:

Cars sit in the Japanese psyche along with spoons and mashed potato. They don’t come naturally. Oh sure, they can copy a Mercedes and use it to earn vast lumps of foreign currency, but how do you copy flair and panache and feel? The simple answer is: you can’t, so you end up with a completely soulless driving experience.

It’s a bit like those vegetarians who insist on eating hamburgers that are designed to look, feel and taste like the real thing. But they’re just not.

Technically, this new Lexus is probably better than a Mercedes, in the same way that a golden egg made by laser is going to be technically better than one of Karl Fabergé’s originals. But which one would you rather have?

About the Jetta:
t my old school, detention usually involved being asked to write a 1,000-word essay about the inside of a ping pong ball. So I’m well qualified to write about the new Volkswagen Jetta. Because I spent every Saturday afternoon for five years writing about the precise chemical breakdown of air, it’s a breeze to fill these pages with prose about what is unquestionably the most boring car in the whole of human history.

His review on the M3 CS starts with a brilliant rant about car clubs:

Many thousands of years ago, I was a member of the Ford Cortina 1600E Owners Club (South Yorkshire branch). We’d meet once a month, in a car park, and would mooch about in the rain looking at one another’s cars. Looking back on the experience, I really can’t see why this should have had any appeal at all. I mean, yes, my car had a picture of Debbie Harry in the centre of the steering wheel, but other than that it was pretty much the same as everyone else’s car.

Perhaps we thought that because we all had the same type of car we had a common bond, a platform on which lasting friendships could be built. But they were all miners. And when they lost their jobs a few years later they had to burn their cars to stay warm. So the bond was gone.

Today I loathe, with a furious passion, all car clubs. The notion that you’re going to get on with someone because he also has a Mini is preposterous. Clubs are for people who can’t get friends in the conventional way. They’re for bores and murderers.

The Ferrari Owners’ Club is particularly depressing because they all have carpet warehouses in Dewsbury and creaking £10,000 rust buckets from the Seventies and Eighties.

Most turn up at events in Ferrari hats, Ferrari shirts, Ferrari racing booties and Ferrari aftershave and you can’t help thinking: “For heaven’s sake, man. You’ve spent more on your apparel then you have on your damn Mondial.”

Anyone with the wherewithal to buy a proper, important Ferrari from the past 60 years is going to have better things to do with his time than drive to some windswept motor racing circuit no one has ever heard of and spend the day watching a bunch of Dewsburyites going off the road backwards in their botched and bodged 308s.

Mind you, I’d rather swap saliva with someone from the Ferrari Owners’ Club than go within 50,000 miles of someone who turns up to Aston Martin events. Because there are no cheap Astons in the classifieds — well, none that will actually get you to an owners’ club meeting, or even to the end of your road — the members are a lot more well-to-do than their oppos with Ferraris. There are few regional accents, and lots of green ink.

All of them are stuck in the 1950s when for a few glorious years Aston Martin did manage to win a couple of not-very-important racing events. And all of them, you know, were attracted to the brand not because Aston made the best cars — it really, really didn’t. But because they were made by British people and not “darkies”.

The worst thing about an Aston Martin Owners Club member, however, is not his politics, or his still burning flame of hatred for Harold Wilson. It isn’t even his shoes, or his trousers. No. It’s the way he refers to all previous Astons by their chassis numbers. And to the people who raced them by their nicknames.

“Do you remember when Pinky and Lofty drove xvr/ii-2? Course that was before bloody Wilson.” Sometimes, when they talk to me. I find myself wondering what they’d look like without a spine.

You can read the reviews here and frankly, there's nothing better to read during 5 minute breaks than these small pieces of brilliance.