Sheriff
3rd January 2006, 02:23 PM
www.guardian.co.uk
Date: September 21, 2004
By: Giles Smith
The Monaro is the sort of car that suddenly fills your rear-view mirror and stays there until you let it through. Can it really be a Vauxhall?
The new Vauxhall VXR Monaro doesn't take any prisoners. It doesn't take many people altogether, in fact, holding two front passengers in butch, hip-hugging rally seats and just about accommodating another pair of grown-ups in crick-necked discomfort in its virtually inaccessible rear cabin.
But this isn't a people carrier: it's a "performance" coupe and thus, pretty much by definition, only really has in mind the comfort and pleasure of its driver. Coming along for the ride? Then you'd better grab hold of whatever's available and try not to be sick as we storm into the corners.
VXR, incidentally, is Vauxhall's new "performance" brand - a new badge, ready to be bolted on to a new generation of Vauxhall motors sharing some of the exhaust-pipe know-how from Vauxhall's rather successful sports department. (VX Racing wins a lot of trophies with its souped-up Astra Coupes.) For launch purposes, they've taken the old VX220 - a turbocharged rollerskate aimed at hardcore speed freaks - and redressed it as the VXR 220.
And then they've thrown in this new VXR-rated version of the Monaro, which, we learn from the accompanying literature, is aimed at the kind of people who "get up in the night for a blast, just for the hell of it". Which, I suppose, distinguishes the Monaro from other, tamer products in the Vauxhall range, which appear to be aimed at the kind of people who get up in the night to go to the bathroom, just because they have to.
The car industry, we should be clear, uses the word "performance" in a different way from the rest of us. "Performance", after all, is not an unreasonable thing to expect from any car. It might even be the first thing you expect from it. We all want our cars to perform and are cross when they don't, so even a bog-standard Vauxhall Corsa should, in an ideal world, be a "performance" car.
In the car industry's helium-injected version of the word, however, "performance" denotes something in excess of mere function. It's a synonym for unusual and possibly even alien levels of speed and power. Also for "unnecessary", "threatening" and "a teensy bit silly, really, if we're going to be honest about it".
My Monaro came, appropriately enough, in lad-pleasing, did-you-spill-my-pint? red, had some vaguely medieval, five-spoke alloys, which were as high as an elephant's eye, and was tricked out with more ankle-height skirts than you'll see this side of a Merchant Ivory production.
The little marine details were a further giveaway. Check out the shark gills scored into the sidesills. And check out that thick lower lip at the front, hanging open like the mouth of some gruesome fish. It's the kind of car that, on a motorway, suddenly fills your rear-view mirror with its honeycomb grille and stays there until you meekly pull over - a predator, in other words, converting other cars on the road ahead of it into a panicked mass of terrified plankton.
Inside, the oil pressure and voltage gauges are mounted high and proud in a binacle above the centre stack, rather than tucked away where they can be safely ignored for the most part, as tends to happen in ordinary, non-performing cars. This is something of a performance motor trait, the underlying assumption being that you will be driving the car at such white-hot intensity that the threat of an electrical storm and, simultaneously, an oil rupture is ever present. Other performance cars achieve the same effect by sporting a prominently mounted, industrial-sized fire extinguisher, though the Monaro passes on this one.
To some extent, the interior's silky plastics betray the car's origins at the home of the repmobile. But highly motivated indeed would be the rep who could spend all day, every day at the wheel of the Monaro, with its slippery stick-shift, its unhelpful thirst for petrol and its 5.7 litre V8 engine thundering away under the bonnet and moaning out of the exhaust.
Whether the VXR Monaro is in a position to offer its driver the knuckle-whitening thrills and spills and the all-over bodily pleasures that its manufacturer promises was something that I came to doubt in the course of my week thrashing one up and down the A3 and being mean to other drivers in it. It's quick and tuneful and you can fling it around like a fairground ride, but I also found it a bit too cumbersome to be properly racey and a little too softly padded and acoustically enhanced to achieve the nerve-jarring, through-the-seat and up-the-steering column sensations that many petrol-nuts would expect from a performance vehicle.
On the bright side, though, it most definitely has a humungous rear wing. It's thick enough that you could snap it off and beat a rhino to death with it, if the circumstances ever arose. Plus it has some sexy circular tail-lights. And it travels so fast in bus lanes that the cameras don't have time to register it. Possibly. Conditions may vary from city to city.
Date: September 21, 2004
By: Giles Smith
The Monaro is the sort of car that suddenly fills your rear-view mirror and stays there until you let it through. Can it really be a Vauxhall?
The new Vauxhall VXR Monaro doesn't take any prisoners. It doesn't take many people altogether, in fact, holding two front passengers in butch, hip-hugging rally seats and just about accommodating another pair of grown-ups in crick-necked discomfort in its virtually inaccessible rear cabin.
But this isn't a people carrier: it's a "performance" coupe and thus, pretty much by definition, only really has in mind the comfort and pleasure of its driver. Coming along for the ride? Then you'd better grab hold of whatever's available and try not to be sick as we storm into the corners.
VXR, incidentally, is Vauxhall's new "performance" brand - a new badge, ready to be bolted on to a new generation of Vauxhall motors sharing some of the exhaust-pipe know-how from Vauxhall's rather successful sports department. (VX Racing wins a lot of trophies with its souped-up Astra Coupes.) For launch purposes, they've taken the old VX220 - a turbocharged rollerskate aimed at hardcore speed freaks - and redressed it as the VXR 220.
And then they've thrown in this new VXR-rated version of the Monaro, which, we learn from the accompanying literature, is aimed at the kind of people who "get up in the night for a blast, just for the hell of it". Which, I suppose, distinguishes the Monaro from other, tamer products in the Vauxhall range, which appear to be aimed at the kind of people who get up in the night to go to the bathroom, just because they have to.
The car industry, we should be clear, uses the word "performance" in a different way from the rest of us. "Performance", after all, is not an unreasonable thing to expect from any car. It might even be the first thing you expect from it. We all want our cars to perform and are cross when they don't, so even a bog-standard Vauxhall Corsa should, in an ideal world, be a "performance" car.
In the car industry's helium-injected version of the word, however, "performance" denotes something in excess of mere function. It's a synonym for unusual and possibly even alien levels of speed and power. Also for "unnecessary", "threatening" and "a teensy bit silly, really, if we're going to be honest about it".
My Monaro came, appropriately enough, in lad-pleasing, did-you-spill-my-pint? red, had some vaguely medieval, five-spoke alloys, which were as high as an elephant's eye, and was tricked out with more ankle-height skirts than you'll see this side of a Merchant Ivory production.
The little marine details were a further giveaway. Check out the shark gills scored into the sidesills. And check out that thick lower lip at the front, hanging open like the mouth of some gruesome fish. It's the kind of car that, on a motorway, suddenly fills your rear-view mirror with its honeycomb grille and stays there until you meekly pull over - a predator, in other words, converting other cars on the road ahead of it into a panicked mass of terrified plankton.
Inside, the oil pressure and voltage gauges are mounted high and proud in a binacle above the centre stack, rather than tucked away where they can be safely ignored for the most part, as tends to happen in ordinary, non-performing cars. This is something of a performance motor trait, the underlying assumption being that you will be driving the car at such white-hot intensity that the threat of an electrical storm and, simultaneously, an oil rupture is ever present. Other performance cars achieve the same effect by sporting a prominently mounted, industrial-sized fire extinguisher, though the Monaro passes on this one.
To some extent, the interior's silky plastics betray the car's origins at the home of the repmobile. But highly motivated indeed would be the rep who could spend all day, every day at the wheel of the Monaro, with its slippery stick-shift, its unhelpful thirst for petrol and its 5.7 litre V8 engine thundering away under the bonnet and moaning out of the exhaust.
Whether the VXR Monaro is in a position to offer its driver the knuckle-whitening thrills and spills and the all-over bodily pleasures that its manufacturer promises was something that I came to doubt in the course of my week thrashing one up and down the A3 and being mean to other drivers in it. It's quick and tuneful and you can fling it around like a fairground ride, but I also found it a bit too cumbersome to be properly racey and a little too softly padded and acoustically enhanced to achieve the nerve-jarring, through-the-seat and up-the-steering column sensations that many petrol-nuts would expect from a performance vehicle.
On the bright side, though, it most definitely has a humungous rear wing. It's thick enough that you could snap it off and beat a rhino to death with it, if the circumstances ever arose. Plus it has some sexy circular tail-lights. And it travels so fast in bus lanes that the cameras don't have time to register it. Possibly. Conditions may vary from city to city.