Spanish fishermen. What two words bring such cohesion to the rest of Europe? Whatever the problems elsewhere we all hate them and their huge floating vacuum cleaners. They’ve Hoovered up their own coastline and now they’re using a billion pounds of our money to Dyson the shores of every other member state. Turkey probably thinks that if it joins the EU the biggest change will be the abolition of its death penalty. Not so. What they don’t realise is that they will be taxed an extra £1.50 in the pound so that Manuel can rock up and catch everything in everyone’s garden pond. Live in Ankara? Got a goldfish in a little bowl in the kitchen? Well, be afraid. Be very afraid.
And yet when that oil tanker, the Prestige, went down the other day suddenly Manuel and his merry band were no longer pirates raping the seas from the Faroes to the Falklands. Television reporters stopped calling them “Spanish fishermen” and went for the sympathy jugular, calling them “local fishermen”. This, of course, conjures images of some silver-haired old walnut tending to his nets while his creaking old boat gently tugs at its moorings. “Oh no,” we’re all supposed to think, “all of his catch will be ruined. He will starve. His children will die.”
Pah! I’ve been to this part of Spain. It’s full of trawlers the size of South America. They never fish off their own coast — that’s been barren for years — and they only ever return to base for the next subsidy cheque. And there’s another thing: oil floats, so quite how it impacts on the nonexistent fish I have no idea. The only creatures that could possibly be harmed are sea birds but, I’m sorry, this is not Britain. Here you only need to spill a gallon of diesel and Rolf Harris is there in a jiffy with a team from the local puffin parlour. Every bird is given a treatment that would cost Tara Palmer-Tomkinson half a year’s salary. I can’t see this happening in Spain. If you live in a country that stabs cows and throws donkeys from the top of churches, how can anyone be genuinely blubby over the fate of some blackened guillemots. Oh they might act a bit, but all they want out of this is EU cash. That’s all the Spaniards ever want. If I were in charge, I’d simply point out that crude oil is 3m-year-old seafood that died and rotted. Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant’s foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet’s ability to self-heal. And they were spectacularly wrong again with the Prestige.
When it was first holed they said it should be bombed. A couple of points on that. Heavy crude will not burn unless it’s been heated first, and if it’s in water it won’t burn at all. But if by some miracle it had caught light, think of all that smoke. Why not just let the ship sink to the bottom where the oil would solidify in the cold water and be as benign as sand? But enough on the trouble with Spain, let’s talk about its cars.
Spain is not a big manufacturing country. In fact, if you went through your house you probably wouldn’t find a single thing that was made there. But they do nail the odd car together, which are called Seats. From memory I could tell you who makes almost every car on the road, roughly how much it costs and vaguely what it’s like to drive. But without using reference books I have no idea what Seat makes. I believe there’s a car called the Ibiza and possibly one called the Toledo.
There’s a people carrier too, and I think that’s it. What I do know is that they’re all VWs for less money. But if you want a cheap Volkswagen and really don’t care about the badge, why not buy a Skoda? I have even considered borrowing a Seat to see what’s what but then thought, what’s the point? In 15 years of writing about cars nobody has ever stopped me in a petrol station and asked me about them. I get paid to notice them and I don’t. So they’re like the Prestige: harmless but about 7,000ft below our radar screens.
Apparently, Seat is the fun side of Volkswagen. It’s the slightly wayward son who sleeps all afternoon and nicks a fiver occasionally from his dad. But everyone forgives him because when the sun goes down he’s quite a laugh. A Volkswagen, then, with a sense of humour. That’s the theory, but to find out if it works in practice I borrowed something called a Leon Cupra R. It’s trumpeted as the work of Seat’s motor sport department. What motor sport department? I have racked my brains for 40 minutes and I cannot think of a single area in which Seat takes part. It used to be in rallying, but not now. Perhaps it does canoeing or something that’s not on television or in the papers.
That would be a very Seat thing to do — something invisible. The Cupra R is billed as the fastest car ever built in Spain. But that’s like being the best chocolate maker in Egypt. I’m sure Seat’s canoeists were jolly pleased to have squeezed 210bhp out of VW’s 1.8 litre turbo but this colossal output doesn’t translate into particularly scintillating performance.
Zero to 60mph in 7.2sec was par for the course in 1985 and though a top speed of 147mph sounds good, especially in Iberia, where it’s actually faster than the speed of light, it’s ho-hum in the first world. VW’s Golf R32 and Alfa’s new 147 GTA will both climb past 150mph. The Seat fights back by being a mere £16,995. That’s way cheaper than the VW and the Alfa, and significantly less than Ford asks for a Focus RS or Honda for a Civic Type-R. To find out what it feels like on the road, I deliberately set off 15 minutes late to see my daughter’s school play. There were 70 children, 68 speaking parts, and she was one of the two, but I still had to be there and on time. Things started badly.
In fact, I never even got out of the drive before I crashed. Seat talks about the pinpoint active chassis and the four-pot brakes but neither stopped me understeering off the gravel into my new curly wurly tree. I don’t know its proper name. We now simply call it “broken”. On the proper road it really wasn’t bad. Third gear acceleration is particularly strong, which is good for overtaking, and it is grippy without being uncomfortable. The long wheelbase probably helps here. It helps with interior space, too.
Even with a pair of Recaro seats the size of Devon in the front there was still a deal more space than you get in most hatches. A decent-size boot, too. As for quality, well I don’t know. Underneath it’s a Volkswagen, which is a good thing. On top it’s Spanish, and that’s not. I wouldn’t buy one. When it’s good it’s quite good, and that’s not good enough. When it’s bad it’s not bad, which isn’t good enough either. Other than that, what can I say? It’s from Barcelona. Just like Manuel.
Vital statisticsModel:
Seat Leon Cupra REngine type: Four cylinders, turbocharged
Power: 210bhp @ 5800rpmTorque: 199lb ft @ 2100rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manualSuspension: (front) independent
MacPherson struts, coil springs, anti-roll bar; (rear) twist beam rear axle, coil springs, anti-roll barTyres: 225/40 R18Fuel: 32.1mpg (combined)CO2: 211g/kmCO car tax: £1,560 for a higher-rate taxpayer
Top speed: 147mphAcceleration: 0 to 62mph: 7.2 secInsurance: Group 17Price: £16,995
Verdict: Quite good and, in this class, that's not nearly good enough .
Source : http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article803781.ece
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