I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves. Atop Centrepoint Carpark, I had a lot which had a nice beam showering down upon the car and decided to seize the moment. What better way to showcase her new R32 shoes too? Just need to find more cosy spots to play with my camera’s aperture and shutter speed…
A long overdue shot of my sayang, after PPS and waxing. My goodness, are apolocalyptic changes going to be done unto her soon. The Eisenmann Sport Exhaust is coming in this week, as will the Bilstein PSS10s. Modifying this car is like playing Diablo; you just won’t be satisfied till you have a level *** [insert class] with all the best weapons and stash. But despite all the hoohaa, I have embarassingly lost out to ricer-boy Touaregs, Subaru WRXs egging me on to 180km/h, and the occasional showboating Mini Cooper Asses (S), all driving without regard to the hefty price they paid for their rides.
Anyway, after having clocked about 5000km and doing an Engine Oil change, I’m so pleased with her performance. Unbridled when provoked, yet docile as a family Labrador when I want it to be. Lovely, absolutely lovely car…
I always like reading Jeremy’s Clarkson’s reviews on cars, his latest being the one on VW’s reincarnation of the Scirocco. It was feisty, opinionated and had little on the car’s real driving dynamics and real-world performance but there was a little phrase I did like especially. Me having just written something blurry eyed on nostalgia.
The new car is like an old girlfriend you meet after hooking up on Friends Reunited. To everyone else she’s just an ordinary middle-aged woman, but to you she’s a bit more than that . . .That’s the new Scirocco. To most people it’s just another car. But for those of us who had the old one, it arrives on the scene, after a 15-year period of nothing but grey skies and drizzle, like the warm, fast wind from which it takes its name.
Sure, I’m not old enough to have driven the old 1.8cc Scirocco and I was actually trying to convince myself that the new model, looked in fact, like a toad – a squat but stylish toad. I didn’t like its preposterous storm-trooper helmet looks and felt that it wouldn’t look out of place as a golf caddie in the death star. But who was I really kidding? I love the way it looks after glancing at it a couple more times. It’s like taking an instant dislike to Toni Collette, only to discover that she is really blessed with good looks. And now instead of “the Scirocco looks all squat and beastly” running through my head, I agonize daily: “Why, oh why, didn’t I wait another half a year more for this beauty?”
Every once in a while comes my mother’s injunction for her son to mind the less fortunate , “Don’t forget the starving and poor in the world!” she would say. This would be followed by her pleas to say the rosary for the fettered, harassed and downtrodden.
But on days like these when you visit the austere Mercedes Benz showhouse, empathy flies out the window. Today, I was blessed with the chance to test drive the new Mercedes SLK 200 Kompressor, and of course there were the assessing looks by the bemused salespeople. (Was I wearing the right clothes, the right shoes? Did I reveal that haughty nonchalance?)
I didn’t have to survive the mean gaze of those bureaucrats long, because my friend Dion quickly ushered me to that gunmetal beauty on the second storey. It’s a two-seater of course, and we joked that you’d only need to send the girl back. Hang the other friends and prospective parent-in-laws! They could suffocate in the boot with the golf bag for all we cared.
The interior of the SLK is breathtaking. No, it’s not the F-22 cockpit but all the impressions of being in a good sports car hits you instantly. The finish on the panels, the amazing HUD, those immaculate buttons, the gear-stick. I take an eternity to savour the details, grinning like an idiot.
We set off from Alexandria to Tuas, a necessarily long distance to put the car through its paces. The first thing you feel is that the SLK’s not torque laden. Its in-line 4 cylinder power plant churns out only about 181 horsepower; its supercharged compressor engine kicks in on the highway when you floor the pedal, and everything’s going hazy because it doesn’t seem to let up after that! I mean, look at the length of the bonnet, it’s as long as South America; There’s certainly oodles of power to utilize, even at 130km/h! Slopes, undulating surfaces and even pasty little Subaru WRXs don’t deter it…
So we tried all sorts of fun along the way, cruise control; taking off the folding roof, ramming the accelerator with abandon etc. The handling also seems just about right, (I did not test the heavier 6-cylinder SLK350) and the SLK experience just seems to be richer the further you drive. And all this while, my heart is just a butterball of desire and speed…
So imagine the dismay when I had to turn in the keys to this piece of heaven, which at the cost of $196,000 for the entry level, is way beyond my meager reach, unless I plan a diet of Colgate and Darlie for the rest of my life.
Oh yeah, for those with infinite pockets with an eye to this blazing car, please contact my good friend Dion Yong, official Cycle and Carriage dealer, and destroyer of peace in mens’ hearts: Dion.yong@cyclecarriage.com.sg
Motor advertising is tough. I haven’t seen any really outstanding advertisements on cars that I love for eg. the Audi R8, but they had a nice tagline of “the slowest car we’ve ever built”, with an assemblage of all 3000 odd mechanical parts coming to fruition.
Not bad. But here’s one that really caught my attention. The boy is a bigot and a bully. He rolls over his dad, crushes old bicycles, leers at women on the street, and finally owns a GTi. But the way the car reverses at the end is really something. Kudos to the advertising minds who were spot on masculinity.
There are many visions of happiness as there are of love, riches and sex. But my favourite reverie rests on Henry James’s idea of paradise as a “perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth century cathedral”.
But take that perfect car, outfit it with the Grille of the Peugeot 207 Gti, and you have the most consummate grimace mounting the frontal intakes. It’s the grimace of high pressured winds buffeting against one’s face. The grimace of Ugolino gnawing upon Archbishop Ruggieri in Hell – “ La bocca sollevo dal fiero pasto quell peccator”
Then there is also the Audi R8’s twinking succession of 24 Light Emitting Diodes below its headlights, applied like tearful mascara beneath its eyelets. Nothing Moulin-Rouge about its appearance. Just pain, speed and tears on a smooth road…the perfect start to that paradise.
Why am I still hounded by the Audi R8 ? It’s an unattainable dream even if I saved enough from 3 lifetimes for Audi’s Magnus Opus. Blame it all on Dan Neil, whose one-of-a-kind reviews of cars, blended with oh-so-funny astute cultural observations, have poisoned me further.
Congratulations (and damn him) Dan, for winning the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism! 
Here are some excerpts:
“Despite the R8’s evident exoticism — the car is low, wide and mirthless, its gimlet eyes fixing you with white-hot LEDs like it was brooding on ways to wreck your marriage“
“Only when you start wringing it out, teasing the 8,250 redline in the lower gears, does the full shove-in-the-back aggression make itself felt. And then, oh the sound: a molten-sugar contralto that dances on wending treble clef, a sound to make angels grab a hanky.”
“With its wide-track posture, low center of gravity, mid-engine layout and gluey, 19-inch Pirelli tires, it’s no surprise that the R8 has formidable lateral grip. Antaeus doesn’t hug the Earth like this”
“the R8 is a fistful of weaponized cool thrown in the face of the sports car status quo: seductively styled, comprehensively engineered, flawlessly executed. Needless to say, Porsche and Aston Martin’s life just got a lot more complicated”
Let’s start with 2 odd and unrelated facts: Did you know that there is a twinkling string of 24 LED lights underneath the Audi R8 frontlights, which were supposedly modeled after the Sydney Opera House? Second: did you also know that Toad from Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows is really a car connoisseur? In one passage, Toad fantasizing about driving, bends forward over a mock car, “making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when . . . he would lie prostrate . . . apparently completely satisfied for the moment.”
What is it about cars and allurement? I keep reading the pages of autoblog.com, red with desire. For all the hype, cars seem much more the source of restless envy than of pleasure. Owners of exotic and expensive models, like the R8 below, rarely keep them long: they tire of them, then change them. The car is just one of many ‘desirable’ objects which disappoint desire even as they ensnare and incite it; not the end of envy, but its vehicle.
And after playing with the Audi R8 configurator for almost an hour, I’ve concluded…
That envy, the worst of all the 7 sins, clouds thoughts, clobbers generosity, puts a dent in your serenity, and more or less shrivels your heart…
And for that, Damn You, Audi.
Nothing conveys the frictional violence of speed better than the car. It’s an epochal icon and it’s a surrogate for masculinity. And soon we’ll have F1 street racing in Singapore. Racing… isn’t that the most fantastic outgrowth of our fascination with the car? Drivers hurtle around in circles, at the limits of adhesion. Some lose control and end up dead, mutilated or crippled. And yet it’s one of the most fanatically pursued of all sports: at an amateur level, enthusiasts spend everything they have on it, and more. (I’m glad to report I’ve only spent $2000 modifying my little Suzuki Swift.) But really, morbidity, health and sex don’t even begin, however, to elucidate the human fascination with speed.
But on a different tone, man I do love cars. Signs that you’ve been completely possessed by tuners, muscles and exotics:
1. When you’ve played Need for Speed: Carbon for a relentless 5 hours straight.
2. You’ve bookmarked all the famous “zhng-ing” garages like Fong Kim and Jeep Chee in your browser.
3. You’ve downloaded the .pdf order form for the million-pound Bugatti Veryon and have chosen your colours already. (Please get the form here)
4. You don’t mind compiling the exhaust sounds of different Ferraris on an MP3 track.
5. Your mind is actually engaged watching that silly underground car scene in Tokyo Drift whilst enjoying an inane song from Teriyaki Boyz. But hang on, are the following present and accounted for in that film: Car chases? Check. Fancy pop sounds and pimp music? Check. Nubile females in short skirts? Double Check!
Poison, I tell you…And here’s hoping that in the midst of this madness, I don’t succumb to gridlock and road rage whilst driving.
A Q4 4-wheel drive system? Rear Multi-link suspension system? A 3.2 V6 Monster? Oh My!
There’s this adage that says when dealing with recovering alcoholics, never believe the promises, only the evidence. Personally, I don’t care if Alfa Romeo has had a history of alienating its customers with teethy unreliability issues. The previous Alfa 156 series was meant to usurp BMW’s 3-series, and for a while sucked in the supposedly gullible only to be spat out indecorously (due to dodgy electronics).
However, the Alfa is a serious Italian underground film, not without its flaws, as the BMW is to a conventional summer blockbuster. And if you are the eternal optimist, you can waive these grievances aside the way you soon learn to shrug aside chronically poor relationships.
But I digress. What do I love about the 159? Firstly, its feral cadamuro grille and 6-pronged headlights; lighting the journeys to work, town, the heart of darkness and back again. Alfa designers have put together an improbable cocktail of slight chunkiness with curvaceousness. Think of the car as a liaison between Ray Liotta and [insert dream woman's name] or masculinity and desire. Sure, my reasons for love are entirely superficial and I’m sure the V6 produces the most immaculate sound of thunder at 4000 rpm. But what can you expect from a car maker that wears its motto as La Bellezza Non Basta?
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