Audi Range Review

Audi overtaking Mercedes-Benz is no surprise. Before the end of the year Audi will be second in world sales of premium cars behind BMW. It’s no reflection on Mercedes-Benz, the most aspirational brand after Rolls-Royce or Bentley. Its medium and high-priced cars are beyond reproach but it has failed to match the smaller Audis or mid-range and Mini BMWs. Audis are so well made, the range so wide and so professionally presented to seem unstoppable.
Executive spaceship: Audi A8 L
My classic-in-the-garage is a BMW – I like rear wheel drive and there is nothing like a straight-six for perfect smoothness – but an Audi range review this week was a revelation. I have driven Audi press cars for years, invariably complaining about road noise. This time the cars had winter tyres and were decibels quieter. You could appreciate all their finer points without getting irritated about low-profile tyres that are only fitted to look better in pictures.

Mercedes-Benz sold 1,136,525 of its splendid first-rate cars in the first 11 months. This was up 7 per cent and in November better than Audi. Sales of Audis rose 18 per cent to 1,190,110, and it looks as though it will end the year on 1.3 million against Mercedes’ 1.27 million. However BMW, including Mini and a handful of Rolls-Royces, has sold more than either. In the 11 months it has done 1,510,862, more than in the whole of 2010.

Audi is best in breadth. It has no weak models. Mercedes’ smaller cars don’t do well and although the BMW 1-series is doing better now it was disappointing on launch. Audi’s A1 is more than a match for anything; so much so that we have thought about replacing Ruth’s Puma with one if she thinks it worth the premium over a VW.

Accordingly I tried two A1s, a 1.4 TFSI, 185PS S line S tronic, not quite the base 99g/km one we could use without paying the London Congestion Charge, but we have been tempted by some good dealer deals. This A1 had a technology package at £1375, DAB radio at £305, a Comfort Package with acoustic parking and cruise control at £605, BOSE surround sound £690 and fancy alloys at £410. With delivery at £590 it looks a lot at £25,160.

A 1.6 TDI S Line of 99g/km costs a basic £17,220, but once again it was so laden with extras that it came out at £22,545. There is no Road Fund licence and it did have the feel of a much larger car but it isn’t quite bargain basement. Ruth’s jury is still out.

Audi makes changes subtly. The newest ones don’t look a lot different from the old ones. Cosmetic changes have been kept to a minimum, a corner tweak on the grille, different LED patterns on the headlights, grey instrument dials with white pointers and you can get some sat-nav refinements such as Google Earth that works in 3D or aerial photographs. Powertrains are usually carried over, which means seamless gearshifts and quiet engines. I usually ignore paddle-shifts. They’re pure affectation. S-tronic gears almost always does the job better than I can, and since I brake automatics with the left foot I drive more precisely than I would pretending to be snatching pole ahead of Sebastian Vettel.

Audi interiors are well proportioned and superior. There is no faux woodiness. I used to love walnut veneers and suchlike but now I guess it looks pretentious unless done with real craft skills at Crewe or Goodwood. Nobody can match it and everything else risks looking ostentatious. Revel instead in comfort and security. Tried an A8; a touch gloomy inside but what space. I could happily live with an A7 or S5 Sportback now that they have refinement and quietude to match their good balance and swiftness.

Four Great Jaguars

Not many people in the 1960s ran to more than one Jaguar. A day at Oulton Park with four of them was a heady prospect, especially when they were all such landmarks in Jaguar history. This Autocar jacket celebrated Jaguar’s first post-war sports car, first Le Mans winner, TKF 9 Jim Clark’s Border Reivers’ D-type, and the latest E-type.
Bryan Corser of Shrewsbury had an XK120, a C-Type, D-Type and a 420G, replaced with an E-Type for a memorable test day. Archetypal Jaguar PRO, the matchless Andrew Whyte arranged it. Corser’s enthusiasm was boundless and Andrew knew he would trust us with his cars for a day, so long as he could join us. Corser, I wrote, was not collecting Jaguars for profit. Not then anyway. “Selling them never entered his head. You don’t expect to make a profit from your Hardy rod or Purdey gun or Dunhill pipe. You expect to fish with it, shoot with it, or smoke it*. Bryan Corser’s pleasure in his Jaguars came from driving them. They were all taxed and used on the road, the XK most often.”

From the original Autocar feature of 20 June 1968, reproduced in Sports Car Classics Vol2:
Each (of Corser’s cars was) in keen mechanical trim, faultlessly maintained and polished to the hilt – everything is polished, burnished, painted or chromed. Even the hydraulic piping on the D and the screen wash jar top gleam with chrome. But the cars are no museum pieces.
The XK 120 is, if you can apply the words to a car in such superb condition, a perfectly ordinary XK 120. Its only divergence from standard is 2in SU carburettors instead of 1½in, and XK150 tail lamps which are slightly too big. Otherwise it is much like the original XK 120, introduced 20 years ago to test public reaction to a twin-overhead-camshaft 6-cylinder engine. Jaguar thought this might be a useful engine for their Mark VII if people liked it. The sports car was to gauge reaction but created such a sensation that the initial plan to run off a modest 200 was quickly abandoned. The first cars had aluminium bodies but Pressed Steel was quickly recruited to make lots of steel bodies for the orthodox box section chassis. It seems almost a quaint idea now that you could remove an XK’s body, laying bare a sturdy frame that kicked up over the live back axle. The front independent is by torsion bars and the steering Burman recirculating ball.
The heart of the XK 120 is the thread that holds this Jaguar story together - the XK engine. Six cylinders, twin-overhead cams, a seven bearing crankshaft, 83 mm x 106 mm and a curious stroke-bore ratio of 1.28:1. This was probably on account of the change from the original XJ design, which suffered from poor low speed torque as a 3.2litre and had the stroke summarily lengthened. Capacity was 3442cc, the bhp 160 at 5200 rpm and you could specify 7:1 or 8:1 compression. It was a sophisticated power unit for Pool petrol. Rationing was still in force when it appeared. Polished cam covers came only on racing cars and125 mph was for aeroplanes; yet here these were on sale at £988.
Nine hundred and eighty-eight pounds. If you could reintroduce it as a reproduction antique today, you might be in business.

Memorable moment: The author drives TKF 9 for Autocar's feature.
Re-registered SVM 972, Bryan Corser’s XK120 was built in the early part of 1953. He is the fourth owner and has fitted a brake servo, modified the cooling system, overhauled the suspension, rewired it and “tidied” the engine “with a little chrome”.
Climb aboard the XK and you are surprised to find such a low car really has quite a high floor. One is unaccustomed nowadays to sitting on top of a chassis, with your legs stretching forward horizontally to long thin pedals on stalks, which come up through the toe-board. The enormous wheel is close to the chest, the right arm overflows the cutaway door and one realizes what a revolution the unitary hull has created. By contrast, the hump for the gearbox seems modest, because most of it is decently buried in the chassis. The shallow boot is testimony to Jaguar’s indifference to the baggage needs of sports car owners, which persists even with the open E-type. Here the reason is different, the rear axle of an XK needs space to bump up and down; it is the bulky independent rear on the E that steals the volume.
When you think that the XK120 was conceived half a generation ago, it is chastening to reflect that you can almost reach the limit of speed laid down by our legislators, without getting out of second gear. Third is good for 90mph (144.8kph), which came up easily on the back straight at Oulton. The acceleration is progressive rather than swift. A contemporary magazine’s 0-100mph time on a new XK120 was 27.3sec, its top speed 124mph (199.6kph), and standing quarter-mile 17sec.
At Oulton the steering felt heavy. You were almost glad about the closeness of the wheel so that you could pull from the shoulders and there was some kick-back reaction from the road. Elegant “long arm” driving positions arrived only with much lighter steering than this. Likewise the brakes need a firm push although they pulled the car up well. The axle is firmly located—it doesn’t jiggle over bumps. Even accelerating hard in second round Esso Bend, it sticks to the ground without spinning the inside wheel. There is little body roll, perhaps emphasised by the (for a sports car) comparatively high driving position. With such basic understeer, you can poke the back round with the throttle, although it is not the sensitive modern sort of car you can set sliding and catch when you want to. The borderline between keeping on the rails and a sharp, rapid breakaway was close. The ride is firm but fairly level; there is very little pitching, and the structure feels stiff with hardly a suggestion of scuttle shake.
Mercifully, the old gearbox has been abandoned. Drive an XK and you wonder how it survived for so long. You need the old Jaguar ‘pause-one-two’ between changes to prevent clashing the gears. Not because the mechanism was worn but because the constant-load synchromesh was never very strong. The clutch helps compensate, with a light, short travel. Drum brakes may have been a weakness of the car and the addition of a servo seems to have helped matters. They stood up well to some fairly brisk work at Oulton; smelt a bit, but that could have been due to the linings having recently been renewed.
Start up the XK 120 and there is no mistaking what it is. The characteristic ‘thrum’ must have helped create the Jaguar mystique. It is not high-revving and in XK 120 form the power won’t jerk your head back, but it does produce energy all the way up the range.
The XK 120 was a classic. Elegant and gentlemanly, the flowing lines were spoiled with the XK 140. The 150 restored some of the panache although the crisp silhouette had gone. It was well mannered, docile and quite, quite unlike the car that really established Jaguar as a racing marque, the XK120C.
Bryan Corser’s was the last production C-type to leave the factory. It has chassis number XKC 050 and (like the 120) was completed in 1953, to be followed only by the 1953 Le Mans cars. With 220bhp and those historic disc brakes Rolt and Hamilton won, raising the race record by 9mph and making the first ever 100mph race average. Moss and Walker were second, Whitehead and Jimmy Stewart (Jackie’s brother) fourth behind a Cunningham… Continued in Sports Car Classics, a full length reproduction in Part 2; Jaguar to Yamaha

Kindle ISBN 978-0-9569533-1-5. £4.80
Ebook ISBN 978-0-9569533-2-2. £4.80
*Hardy, Purdey and Dunhill appeared in an advertisement for the AC Ace in 1961, under a heading, “Yes, there’s a best in everything.” It declared “He smokes a Dunhill pipe, fishes with a Hardy rod, shoots with a Purdey gun and drives an AC car.” The implication was that an AC was suitable for nobility and gentlemen of impeccable taste. I used the phrase again later, changing “Purdey” to “Holland and Holland” on Jackie Stewart’s say-so.

What Jaguar owes The Standard

A long way from Canley. Jaguar XJ Supersports

“Jaguar owed a lot to The Standard.” Comment from an old Midlands car man, recalled the other day when I was given the engaging Review of the Standard Motor Club. Hard to believe it’s an all-but-forgotten make that used to be one of the biggest motor manufacturers in Britain. It was, literally, a standard-bearer in Coventry. So as a reminder of what Jaguar owed Standard, here is a reminder from Dove Digital's

https://dovepublishing.co.uk/jaguar.

William Lyons, still only 28, negotiated a lease at £1200 a year with the option to purchase, of a former shell-filling factory at Holbrook Lane, Foleshill on the Whitmore Park Estate Coventry. It was signed up on 8 October 1928 and 30 of his Blackpool employees joined in a move completed by November. Less than a year later, on 29 September, the firm confidently took up its option, with a mortgage on 80,000 square feet (7432 square metres) for £18,000 with the Coventry Permanent Building Society. It looked like bravura, after the Wall Street Crash a month later endangered small specialists but Swallow, still cocksure, started cars of its own design with chassis frames and engines supplied by Standard Motor Company. At the Olympia Motor Show it flaunted coachwork on Fiat, Standard and Swift.

For Standard Motor Company it was good business. From 1931 it supplied unique items for the 6-cylinder SS1 and 4-cylinder SS2, including a specially lowered chassis frame Standard never used itself. The 6-cylinder had a strong seven main bearing crankshaft, which became the basis for SS and Jaguar engines for many years. Swallow took the sidecar business to Coventry in autumn 1928, dropping “sidecar” from the title, and in 1931 relegated manufacture to a mere department at the new Swallow Coachbuilding Company. Lyons had few regrets, admitting later that the firm had never made much of what he called ‘real money’ from sidecars.

The relationship with Standard prospered. Captain John Paul Black (1895-1965), who had taken charge from founder Reginald William Maudslay (1871-1934) in 1929, had machinery to make engines and chassis frames but no premium-priced model of his own. The arrangement improved Standard’s economies of scale and Black privately believed he would be able to buy Swallow out in due course. On 9 December 1932 Swallow bought two more blocks of factory and a sawmill for £8000 and changed its banker from William’s and Deacon’s to Lloyd’s. The first SS range was introduced, and in 1933 an SS took part in the Monte Carlo Rally, its first international competition. On 26 October SS Cars Ltd was incorporated and registered as company number 280990.

Lyons’ rationale for the SS name was obscure. He maintained it did not mean Standard Swallow even though SS1 was effectively a Swallow-bodied Standard Sixteen. Nor did it mean Standard Special, although it may have suited him to foster the confidence of the outgoing ageing Maudslay. George Brough, who made the Brough Superior SS80 and SS100 motorcycles, claimed he thought of it first.

To the stuffy Brooklands set, however, Jaguars remained a bit infra dig, derided for a feeble engine under an imposing bonnet. Industry insiders knew Standard manufactured a good deal of it and two-tone paint, a low roofline and dummy knock-off wheels deceived nobody. A quality car at the price was inconceivable, so suspicions lingered that a Jaguar could not be as good as it looked. Buyers were not to know how stringently Lyons kept control of expenditure. Even Bentley acknowledged there was no skimping on production or materials. Lyons drove bargains with suppliers, costs were held down and it was another 20 years before more than a handful of Jaguar staff got a Jaguar with the job. Lyons regarded that as a privilege earned only by the most senior executives. Cost-consciousness was a company culture.

In October 1942 John Black unexpectedly offered the production facilities on which Standard made 6-cylinder engines for sale. Lyons seized the opportunity and, although valued at £16,351 in Standard’s books, managed to buy the machinery for £6000, making sure it was safely at Jaguar before Black could change his mind, which in due course he did. In 1943 Motor Panels was reluctantly sold to Rubery Owen to cover an overdraft but Lyons had secured autonomy in engines and regretted many times over that he had not achieved the same with body building. In November 1944 Standard bought Triumph from the receiver and the Swallow sidecar business was sold to the Helliwell Motor Group, which sold it in turn, so by the time Jaguar Cars Ltd was established in March 1945, Swallow was no more than an associate of Tube Investments Ltd (TI).

Standard waterfall grille; a standard-bearer of Coventry

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Beware Greeks - or Chinese

If the Greeks had been smart they would have built their Trojan Horse inside Troy. No need to get the Trojans to wheel it in. They could have taken over a workshop and the siege would have been over in minutes. The Chinese are cleverer. They are getting cars into Europe using old factories and Trojan soldiers. An Italian car dealer, Massimo di Risio, plans to make cars from China's Chery Automobile at a Sicilian factory Fiat abandoned. In Britain China's SAIC Motor Corporation is building MGs at Longbridge in the old Austin plant bought from MG Rover. The Chinese are desperately negotiating a takeover of Saab, with a splendid factory in Sweden, which is being resisted by its former proprietor General Motors. In Bulgaria, according to Automotive News Europe, Great Wall Motor will have three locally made models ready next year. In China, Chery Quantum, a joint venture of Chery and Israel Corporation, is going to ship compact cars and a Sports Utility to Europe under a new brand called Qoros.

This aims at 300,000 a year, about three times what Saab was making. The Chinese have found it difficult to meet Western standards for quality, safety and fuel economy, so Chery Quantum has got respected Magna Steyr in Austria to develop prototypes. AVL, also Austrian, is creating engines.

The Chery Quantum Trojan Horse will be manned by Volker Steinwascher, former head of Volkswagen North America. He has already recruited German executives, notably a former designer of BMW Minis, Gert Hildebrand. Steinwascher says Chery Quantum won't match Western driving dynamics and technology, but will use more basic technology to make cars between €11,000 and €15,000. The company will be exporting by 2013, by which time Great Wall in Bulgaria will have come on stream and di Risio's factory in Sicily could be sending rebadged Chery models outside Italy.

In the 1980s the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (JAMA) came to a gentleman’s agreement with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), which limited Japanese imports to roughly one car in ten sold in Britain. The Japanese set up joint deals, for example between Honda and British Leyland, but in due course it was easier to establish manufacturing. Britain and Europe is now replete with Japanese car factories. One of China’s fastest growing manufacturers, Geely, will be selling in Britain by the end of the year. It will operate from an office shared with The London Taxi Company through its distribution arrangement with Manganese Bronze Holdings plc (MBH). Geely already owns Volvo, but with MBH it will sell £10,000 Emgrand EC7s through a dealer network Geely Auto UK. MGH and Geely are partners, building London black cabs in Coventry. The Chinese have been quick to notice that there are no longer any frontiers. Troy should, once again, brace itself.
(Below) Saab Phoenix waits to rise from the ashes.

Maybach: Mercedes' Mistake

Creating a prestige brand for Mercedes-Benz placed a fake jewel in its crown. Maybach was ill-advised and it is no use blaming its failure on 2008 And All That. It was a vanity project invented when BMW and Volkswagen outflanked Dainler-Benz AG in 1994.
Mercedes-Benz had made a bid to supply engine technology to Rolls-Royce, strapped for cash to replace its old V8. The proposals were well received but BMW enjoyed backing from Rolls-Royce’s owner, Vickers, in view of a joint aero engine project. By the end of the year Rolls-Royce’s board was in bed with BMW.

More bordello than boudoir, interiors were tasteless.
Autocar asked Vickers chairman Sir Colin Chandler: “Why select BMW ahead of Mercedes?” He claimed it boiled down to price. BMW offered a more competitive deal. Vickers exploited the competition between the German firms to get the best. “In the end we got what we wanted for less and didn’t give away any equity in Rolls-Royce.” Chandler claimed they went a long way towards drafting a deal with Mercedes-Benz, but “They took the loss philosophically.”

In January 1995 Peter Ward resigned the Rolls-Royce chairmanship, having favoured the Mercedes-Benz engine option, disagreed with the BMW contract and the measure of control given up to secure it, but had been over-ruled. Bernd Pischetsrieder of BMW arranged for more BMW involvement, drafting in suppliers for suspensions, air conditioning and electronics, with the aim of making the relationship secure. BMW drew up a long term contract for the supply of engines for the Silver Seraph and Arnage.

Fine craftsmanship but poor judgement of the market.
In the end it didn’t work. VW got Bentley, BMW Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes-Benz far from being philosophical about it, decided it wanted its own upper-class title and revived Maybach. Driven by pique, it appropriated a marque that hadn’t made a car since 1941.

There were two Maybachs, Wilhelm (1846-1929) partner of Gottlieb Daimler, and Karl Wilhelm (1879-1960) who set up the car factory in the 1920s with his father. The younger Maybach was principally an engine designer, responsible for power units in Count Zeppelin’s airships, a V12 diesel that sped the 1933 Fliegende Hamburger along the tracks at 112mph, and a mighty petrol V12 for the Königstiger tank of 1944.

Maybach cars were for ambassadors, such as Joachim von Ribbentrop, who wanted something more upper-crust than Horch or Mercedes. Only a Grosser Mercedes cost more and the Maybach boasted an overdrive transmission, providing eight gears and known as the Doppelschnellgang. The 1935 model was the SW35 (for Schwingachse 3.5 litre). Maybach made about 25 cars a year, perhaps over 2000 in all of which maybe 135 survive. The Reichsminister of Transport Dr Dorpmüller had a Maybach cabriolet with a voluptuous body by Erdmann & Rossi.

Maybach survived the war as an engine-maker MTU Friedrichshafen and was bought by Daimler-Benz in 1960. It was thus able to reinstate the Maybach name although still had to spend €1billion recreating its reputation. The cars were big, brash, exclusive and beautifully made but never got near the 1000 a year expected. Last year only about 200 Maybachs were sold, making some 3000 since the resuscitation of 2002. Rolls-Royce sold 2711 in 2010, Bentley just over 5,000. There was talk of Aston Martin producing a new generation of Maybachs on Mercedes’ behalf, but now Dieter Zetsche has said sales will end in 2013 and the S-Class widened from three to six to compensate, or save face depending how you look at it.

Mercedes-Benz is awash with gems. It didn’t need an ersatz Rolls-Royce.

Goodbye Maybach

Red Bull and the Gearbox

Like no-balls from a Pakistani cricketer, Sebastian Vettel’s gearbox trouble in Brazil somehow didn’t ring true. Eddie Jordan predicted on Saturday that Vettel would concede to Mark Webber on Sunday. Red Bull’s entreaty on the team radio, “Remember we have a gearbox problem,” sounded like, “Remember what we said about Mark winning, slow down.” The Australian (above) gained an extra point to move one place up the world championship.
No oil in Vettel’s gearbox? Who was ever going to know? Calling on the intercom about feeling like Ayrton Senna in 1991 was a surprise. In 1991 Sebastian Vettel was four. Even the brightest driver (and Vettel is very bright) doesn’t have such recall in the heat and concentration of a grand prix. It sounded like a recent recollection. And although Peter Windsor’s cool analysis in Grand Prix Week that Vettel could (like Windsor’s hero Jim Clark) have been merely adjusting his driving and short-shifting gears, his lap times were so unaffected as to stretch credulity. Except for an uncharacteristic excursion at a late stage he looked perfectly capable of going faster and showed no sign of letting Jenson Button (below) catch him up. David Coulthard conceded that what he called the twitterati were sceptical about Red Bull’s gearbox crisis. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? A paid-up member of the grand prix circus, short of accusing Red Bull of being untruthful, he couldn’t do much else.

There’s nothing wrong in the brilliant bright-eyed Vettel allowing brave, skilled Webber past to go up a notch in the championship, securing his place in next year’s circus, not that there would have been much doubt about that. When Stirling Moss won from Fangio in the first grand prix I was at, (Aintree British in 1955 if you want to know) they were driving for Mercedes-Benz. Fangio had won all season, more or less as he pleased. Moss younger, newer, was content to drive in his shadow.

They were always within yards of one another, demonstrating the supremacy of Mercedes-Benz under team manager Neubauer. At Aintree Moss led quite a lot of the 90 laps but the expectation was that in the end Fangio would, as usual, win. On the last lap Moss slowed after Melling, slowing more after Tatt’s to provide the customary near-dead-heat. But this time Fangio did not quite draw level. Moss won a historic victory. Neither driver ever claimed the result was pre-ordained; certainly Mercedes-Benz wanted to sell more cars in Britain. But in 1955 the solidarity of the grand prix circus was as tight-lipped as ever it is now.

Sebastian Vettel, 2010 and 2011 world champion driver. Pictures National Motorsport Week.
For the record, in 1991 Senna (McLaren) lost fourth gear in the closing stages of the race, then third and fifth. Riccardo Patrese (Williams) was catching him and the gap came down from 20 sec on lap 65 to 3.6 on lap 70, the penultimate. Senna chose to remain in sixth, just as the rain started, and won by less than 3 sec but the strain was too much for the car. He stopped on the slowing-down lap to pick up a Brazilian flag and it would not restart. He was towed in and had to be lifted out of the car, totally spent by the struggle.