Motoring journalists

Oiling the wheels

Eric Bailey

THEY are still cluttering up the house, the gifts the motor industry gave me when I was a motoring writer — or `muttering rot- ter' as the in-joke has it: my superfluffy towelling dressing-gown, monogrammed, from Mitsubishi; my silver — mono- grammed — Rolls-Royce letter-opener, with Spirit of Ecstasy atop its elegant sliver of blade; my Alfa Romeo magnifying glass; my Mercedes-Benz watch; my Mercedes- Benz clock; my Bentley silk scarf and Bar- bour coat, my Rover Gucci wallet, my Renault leather document case, my scale- model Aston Martin DB7, my . . . yes, well, you get the idea.

These are, in the muttering rotter's argot, blags: the little tokens left discreetly in the flashy hotel rooms reserved for those journalists invited away on car launches, and instantly trousered. For the apprentice rotter they might at first cause a flush of embarrassment — should you take it? Should you thrust out your chin and refuse to be compromised? Should you make it clear that your opinions on the latest Prong Gti are independent and uncorruptible? Well, let's see: here you are in some exotic location, reposing in a junior suite of the Hotel Plusho, ferried there in a club-class throne, all paid for by them . . . Nah, just trouser it and say nothing.

Once, it is said, a rotter scoured his hotel room in Paris for the blag and, finding nothing likely, assumed it must be the smart but largish bowl glowing and promi- nent at his bedside. Perhaps the location of the press-information pack — usually placed in proximity to the blag to aid iden- tification — confused him. Staggering downstairs to the coach with his trophy, he struggled aboard and scanned the faces of the other passengers, suddenly turned towards him in horror. `But,' he stuttered, where have you put yours?'

The blag is certainly part of the general greasing which goes on between the indus- try and the journalists. But corruption? Sorry, no. Not because there's no one who would, but because there is no need any more — `You cannot hope/to bribe or twist,/thank God! the British journalist/ But, seeing what the man will do/unbribed, there's/no occasion to.

Pressure is sometimes applied — not usually in the specialist motoring press, where manufacturers and rotters under- stand the game, but in the glossy mags, all of whom have their oddball motoring cor- respondents. Most are chosen for their looks or their faddish prose, and, when a bit of criticism of a big-time motoring advertiser seems possible, the marketing manager might just ring up and remind the magazine's ad manager of how much his bonus depends on their continued patron- age. Well, big deal; what matters more is that there are no bad cars left in Britain to criticise and, if there were, and they were sufficiently cheap, people would buy them anyway. This makes the art of the modern rotter a bit tricky.

The car business is the greatest ever advertisement for the efficacy of competi- tion. Pale and nauseous from their ride on the economic rollercoaster, burdened with the task of making a product which is

THE JOY OF MOTORING

incredibly complex and difficult to sell, obliged to add ever more technology while ruthlessly cutting costs, the manufacturers now make better cars than ever before.

The evidence is everywhere. Fifteen years ago you could not buy a mainstream two-seater sports car; now you can choose from half a dozen. Because it's possible to build different cars on the same underpin- nings, the variety and shape of cars have never been richer. And, because electronics now do what vacuums, sparks, rotors and points used to try to do, your car is unlikely to break down.

The badness of cars nowadays is not in their engines or suspension, which have all reached a plateau of acceptability, but in the petty annoyances which are sometimes built-in. Someone recently told me he liked the tick of his BMW's indicator, but the deafening tock was driving him nuts. And on the extremely rare occasions when there is a genuine horror story — as recently with Audi's apparently crash-prone TT — it is not the rotters who spot the flaw, but the poor public who end up (to use another bit of rotterese) 'visiting the scenery'.

So the rotter has nothing much to say, bar commenting on the colour of the seats, the configuration of models and the prices. Fed all this information at the Hotel Plusho, along with plates of truffles and buckets of fine wine, he picks up his blag and returns to copy it all out, adding a few flourishes of his own.

The disparity of effort between the man- ufacturers, who struggle to make good cars, and the journalists, who can smear them with a careless word, is sometimes enough to drive the PR men to distraction. Few rotters actually behave badly now, but they used to — oh, yes. A PR once told me that his worst job had been to hire a diver in some foreign port after a reception for rot- ters aboard a boat. Having imbibed too freely, one rotter was sick while going down the gangplank, ejaculating his den- tures into the sea. The poor PR man was obliged to hire the diver to retrieve them.

For the modern ratter, it is not an unpleasant life. He (few women bother with this trade) really does enjoy a constant supply of cars to drive, usually delivered and picked up from wherever he chooses. Sometimes, the fabled `long-termer' is made available by the manufacturer — a car which remains for months or even a year. A big estate for a family holiday or a people-mover over Christmas can usually be wangled. Occasionally, of course, a rotter crashes. The most spectacular crash I ever saw involved a £210,000 Bentley Arnage, which I was following through the south of France. The two journalists who were shar- ing the driving pulled over to change places, then the car pulled out again — on the left-hand side of the road. Before a blind corner. Round which was coming a camion. Full of rocks. I saw the driver, an amiable old chap, stagger from the wreck- age. 'How the hell did that happen?' he wailed.

And my own crash? It was in a valuable prototype of the new Jaguar XJ8, on a test track in Italy hosed down with water to make it especially slippery. Fancying myself, like many rotters, as a bit of a driv- er, I took the bend approaching a bridge too fast, lost control on the bridge, and drove over the edge. There was an excruci- ating freezeframe as I and my unfortunate passenger looked at each other in the cer- tain knowledge that soon we would be upside-down. But I could later report that Jaguar roofs are satisfactorily strong. I took home a blag too: an X-ray of my head.

Eric Bailey is Associate Editor of The Mail on Sunday.