Reassuringly, the more cars I test drove, the more pleased I was with our Suzuki. I have been driving all manner of Japan and Britain’s most rugged vehicles, and none has felt as good or as useful to us as the Escudo, and for a while I thought I’d just get a second. Then I found a decent and cheap Hilux; thirsty and bulky but rugged, with lots of luggage space, and much safer than walking in a country with some of the most dangerous roads in the world. A close contender (briefly) was the Landrover Freelander, but I have now driven two and no matter how much I want to like them, they suck. I assumed the first one just had dodgy brakes and no power as it hadn’t been maintained, but that seems to be how they build them. I also wondered about a low-mileage Subaru Impreza on the basis that it’s a fine rally car, manual, 4WD and a car with two turbos must be twice as good as a car with one?! But that was the mid-life-crisis talking again. As one customer apparently said of the MacLaren F1, until recently the most expensive road-legal car, “Three seats? I won’t be driving with my wife and my lover.”
Which leads me (sort of) into one reason why a bike is a massively superior invention to a car. The aforementioned MacLaren generates about 600bhp and is capable of around 300kph. That’s ½ kph achieved for each brake horse power employed. I am approximating and you are welcome to repeat the maths with exact figures, if you care. Eddie Merckx – the cyclist nicknamed “The Cannibal” and usually the first answer in a game of “name 5 famous Belgians” – was measured as capable of about 0.66bhp. I’d assume that modern pro’s might go slightly higher, but without false modesty I doubt that I could produce even 0.4. Still, I recently broke my personal cycle speed record when I hit 73kph in our bike race in South Africa. That makes me and my titanium bicycle (with wheels built by myself ‘cos I couldn’t afford a pair of Zipp 404’s) about 360 times more effective at turning power into speed than a million-dollar sports car. Yeah, I rock. OK, that was downhill, but Britain’s Mark Cavendish was clocked at the same speed on a flat finish line of a stage of the Tour de France, i.e. after about 150km in the saddle.
And finally I’ll mention, mainly as it scares me, there was a TV cameraman (on a motorbike) who was filming our South Africa bicycle race. He and I did a short interview regarding the British Lions’ chances vs the Springboks in the rugby, while I rode uphill, which didn’t make the final cut. He says he also recorded a man grinning like an eejit on one of the tandems in the race, while doing 105kph downhill, which is pretty impressive although, as I say, scary. We don’t know whether it was his wife or his lover on the back.
This blog is a little old now, but I realised it didn't get posted until now. Merry Xmas to one and all, look forward to seeing some of you in GB in a week or so.
