Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Happily, you cannot take this car on the road. But you are allowed to drive about on Britain’s highways and byways in a V8-powered Ariel Atom. This is like being licensed to drive a horse that is propelled by a Saturn V rocket. You accelerate. You hit a tree. Your head comes off.

And it’s not alone. A modern Ferrari comes with a telephone connection and iPod connectivity and electric windows. So it’s like the perfectly reasonable-looking man at the school gates with a bag of sweets. Apparently harmless. But if you make the mistake of getting inside? Well, it’s going to be ugly.

I cannot think of one yard of British tarmac where you could sensibly put your foot down in a modern Ferrari. Not one. Because by the time it’s gone through second gear, it’s broken even our most relaxed speed limit, and by the time you’re through third, your head is in the boot.

A lot of people wonder why Top Gear films these really fast cars on an airfield. The reason is simple. On a road, almost all of them are borderline idiotic. And that’s why I was so pleased to climb on board the BAC Mono this morning. Because it isn’t.

BAC is the world’s newest car company. I first heard about it last year and I must confess, I smiled. It had based itself in Cheshire and I thought, I see. So, soon we will be treated to the first car made entirely from onyx. I expected it to have gold fixtures and fittings and a stone dog by the door.

It didn’t turn out like that at all. To get inside, you remove the steering wheel and then lower yourself into the single seat until you are completely wedged. All you can move are your feet and your hands. It’s like you’ve been tinned. You then pull on your helmet – it would be silly to drive it without one because you might be hit in the face by a bee – and start it up. It all feels very racy. And a bit scary.

This car was designed to look like an F-22 Raptor and it’s festooned with all sorts of imagery and branding from the world of motor sport. The F3-spec gearbox is from Hewland. The brakes are from AP Racing. The pushrod suspension is from Sachs. You fear that if you even go near the loud pedal, you will die, terrified and alone.

Its maker claims it can get from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds and onwards to a top speed of a billion. So, with much trepidation, you start it up. There’s an explosion of noise behind you and the steering wheel comes alive with readouts that you don’t understand. You push the neutral button with your left hand and pull a paddle with your right to engage first. There’s an almighty clunk. You have just booked an appointment with your executioner.

You engage the clutch. The car moves. You change into second. There’s another enormous clunk. The executioner is on his way. So you think you may as well get it over with and open the taps.

What happens next is odd. You know you are moving very quickly indeed but you feel like it’s a speed you can handle. Perhaps that’s because you are always aware that while the 2.3-litre engine was made by Cosworth, it is basically the same four-cylinder unit Ford uses in its Galaxy. And there is nothing on God’s green earth less scary than a people carrier.

Still, there’s a corner looming and you know what happens when you try to do one of those in a car that weighs about the same as a hot-water bottle. It goes straight on. So you brake, and you notice straight away that the Mono doesn’t pitch forwards. Then you turn the wheel and it doesn’t roll, either. It stays level.

In the next corner, you try a little harder and it’s the same story. This gives you the confidence to really push and there are no unpleasant surprises at all. Because the engine and the gearbox and you are all in a line, low down, right down the middle of the car, it handles absolutely beautifully. There’s a whiff of understeer to let you know that you’re getting near to the limit, but a little more power corrects this and you end up cornering like Fangio, in a controlled four-wheel drift.

And because the speed of the thing feels manageable, you can concentrate on what you’re doing rather than not dying. With most cars of this type – the Caterham 7 Superlight and the Atom, for example – you need to know what you’re doing or they will kill you. But in the Mono, a complete numpty could manage, no problem at all.

There’s more good news, too. It is designed so that it can handle speed bumps. It has lights and indicators and there’s even a boot that is big enough for your helmet. It’s a road car. Of course, if you use it on the road, where there are other people, you will look a bit foolish. But the fact is you can.

Of course, it’s not cheap: £79,950 is a lot for a one-seater car that has no radio, windows, satnav or even carpets. But that said, a similarly specced V8 Atom is £146,699.

Sadly, though, there were a few flies in the ointment. First of all, I experienced a small fire. And then the gearbox broke. And then the engine decided it wouldn’t work at all below 4000 rpm. All of this was very bad, but in BAC’s defence, this was a prototype, work-in-progress car. Deliveries don’t start for a little while so it still has time to, I dunno, move the carbon trim a little further away from the hot exhaust tail pipe.

If BAC can get it all working properly, it’ll be great. The only really fast car that isn’t actually too fast.

Neill Briggs, the engineering director of BAC, said, ‘The exhaust trim that started smouldering when Jeremy pushed the prototype car to its limits – and watching Jeremy put a car through its paces is an impressive thing – was temporary. It will be replaced in the final version of the car and we’re confident that the minor problems he experienced will be sorted out.’

Don’t you think it’s strange? You buy a BMW one day and you are told that it is the ultimate driving machine, that it is all about balance and grip and immediacy. Whereas the very next day you are told that exactly the same car is all about joy. It was designed and built to be happy and to make you happy as a result. Welcome to the world of advertising.

Volkswagen’s advertising agency told us for years that its cars were very reliable. But then the agency decided that actually you don’t buy a VW because it’s well made; you buy one because it’s cheap. Right? So. Has there been a philosophical sea change at the factory in Wolfsburg? Or has there been a meeting in Soho?

In the olden days engineers would tell advertisers what they had made and advertisers would pass the message on. Now it’s the other way round. Advertisers tell us what the engineers were thinking. Even when it’s plainly obvious they weren’t.

Do you really think for a moment the new BMW 5-series was built with ‘joy’ in mind? It’s German. And in Germany the word for ‘joy’ will almost certainly be 16 miles long and mean, literally, ‘the unusual and unexplained phenomenon that occurs in your inner being when someone of your acquaintance accidentally slips on a banana skin’.

All things considered, the current BMW 5-series is possibly the best car on sale today. It is handsome and well made and spacious and economical and comfortable and fast. It is a brilliant driving machine. But it is about as joyful as a technical lecture on the inner workings of a telephone junction box.

Things on the advertising front are particularly difficult for Mercedes. It knows that its two-seat convertible models are particularly popular among women. This seems to annoy the marketeers. So with the SL we had Benicio Del Toro hammering through the desert, and with the SLK we had a good-looking chap being chased by what appeared to be the god of thunder. And neither worked. The cars remained very popular with girls. I shouldn’t be surprised if the next ad showed a docker spitting and scratching his backside. Before we cut to the pack shot: an enormous scrotum.