My dad has a friend called Chris. Chris is a partner in a firm called Halliwell Landau and Chris just bought a new silver Mercedes CLS500. In my dream Chris gave me his car for the evening.
So you can imagine that on following Saturday afternoon when my dad called me and said, “Mark, Chris says you can have his car tonight if you want it,” I was overjoyed. To thank him I offered him my ride in exchange, but he said no. He probably knew he couldn’t handle my dope whip’s raw power, but that's ok.
I went to my dad’s house to reintroduce myself to Chris. I’d only met him once, about five years ago for a few minutes after he’d had a few, but I remembered him as a top bloke and this gesture was magnifying that memory. It turns out he’d read my musings on the 6 Series in The Independent and wanted to know how his car compared. Well, that’s what he told me, but my dad had shown him the article and he probably just wanted me to have a good time. Like I said, top bloke. I remarked that I’d known my dad for 27 years and he’d never let me anywhere near his cars, and out we went.
He took me out to talk me through the features, like the voice activated DVD player and sat nav, heated vibrating leather seats and 7-speed automatic tiptronic gearbox with a ‘start/stop’ button on top of the shifter. Oh, and to tell me that it had a 5 litre V8 and I should push it a bit to see how it went.
To be honest, though, as amazingly impressive as it all was, I was slightly under-awed as he was taking me through the stuff, even though I was about to drive a car with a £52,000 list price and every option box ticked on top of that. Nicola, on the other hand, was not. In fact, she was so gobsmacked that fear filled her from the moment she sat inside the thing, terrified that I’d prang it.
As Chris walked away, I realised that the one thing he hadn't told me was where the handbrake release was, which was a bit embarrassing as I contemplated running up the garden after him so he could show me. Fortunately I remembered that my dad’s old Merc had a foot-operated handbrake and I found the release. This could be a disaster, I thought, but I kept that to myself.
Nicola was just about shaking as I reversed away. So, for fun, as I turned out the drive I floored it.
Yes. It was like falling down Mount Everest inside a marshmallow, if you can imagine such a thing, except you could watch the telly while having your behind gently massaged at the same time, which I'm told you can't do even in the most modern Marks and Spencer marshmallows.
It only took about 500 yards for any sense of grandeur missing from my introduction to the car to slap me in the face harder than Balboa on Christmas day in Moscow. I've always thought the CLS looked a bit goofy, a bit confused, like it didn't know what it was supposed to be. I mean, Mercedes call it a 'four door coupe', which is a bit like calling your house a 'three tiered bungalow', and I've never really understood who it's supposed to appeal to. But, when I asked the journalist who took me out in the 6 Series if any car had really surprised him lately, his answer was the CLS without hesitation. And now I could see why.
It had an X factor that I couldn't quite put my finger on and it looked absolutely stunning from the outside. Pictures of this car don't get across how good it looks in real life at all, because in print it looks like someone's tried to fold it in half and bent it from side on.
I think that what I liked about it was how different and weird it was, much like the 6 Series, except the Merc is more practical. Personally, I'd still take the BMW, but if I was a bit older and needed the space, I don't think there's a better looking or cooler saloon (it's NOT a coupe) than the CLS. Granted, I haven't tried that many £50,000 plus saloons, but really, they're probably much the same at this end of the market and are largely selected based on one question: 'Which one will detract from my middle-aged spread best?'
The only disappointments were that it seemed slightly cramped for such a big car because the roof line's quite low, and the gearbox was a bit lazy when it wasn't in sport mode. That said, one man's lazy is another's comfort, and there was still plenty of room, just not as much as I expected. Most of all though, I loved it a shocking amount.
But you know when you’re doing something you really enjoy, say, watching a new episode of 24, and the phone keeps ringing so you have to keep getting up just as Jack Bauer’s about to lay the smackdown on some perp who he’s just discovered has been hiding a nuclear weapon in his shed that he bought from someone who works at the CTU? Well, Nicola was that phone. Every time I prodded the throttle, she rang. See, in her mind this was a disaster waiting to happen, and no amount of German precision safety engineering, active or passive, was going to prevent us from spinning out of control and onto the nearest cow the very moment I tickled the pedal under my right foot. So I decided to get rid of her.
In fairness, it must be quite scary being out of control in a car that is over four times more powerful than your normal ride. I had a similar experience in an Impreza RB5 with my brother’s mate ‘Big Bad Dave’. The name should tell you everything you need to know.
I dropped Nicola off at her mother’s place so I could have the car to myself for a bit, but to be honest I didn’t really know where to go, so I just drove around for half an hour, taking in the confused ‘you’re not a footballer so what you doing in that?’ looks from other road users. Then I picked my sister up (who also likes her cars) and scared the crap out of her too.
Unlike my 6 Series foray though, this time I was to experience one of the sad realities of owning a pricey car. I realised, or rather the car told me, that petrol was low, so I made my way to a petrol station to do something about it. I only had a tenner on me, so I put that much in, which I admit I was a bit embarrassed about because it’s the type of thing my mam does and I rib her for. Mind, filling this bad boy would probably cost the thick end of 70 quid, and although I’d be trying my best to keep the MPG in single figures, I wasn’t likely to use a full tank over the remaining half an hour I had with the car.
Anyway, that’s not the point, but rather what I heard when I returned from paying for said petrol. When I’d pulled up at the pump there were two chav-mobiles demonstrating, strangely enough, both the upper and lower echelons of the chav car game. One chav was in an ancient battered Ford Fiesta, the classic chav-wagon, but the other was rolling in the brand new Focus ST. Quite a motor, to be honest. Clearly fresh from tearing through town with their bass bins rattling the fascias of alco-pop riddled youth clubs on both sides of the Bigg Market, these boys had taken their lady friends to the petrol station for the after party. There was no re-fuelling being undertaken, they’d just parked up near the pumps. Classic.
But when M Dawggg rolled up in the CLS500, jaws dropped. I was genuinely embarrassed about it, because I knew that I’d stolen ST Boy’s thunder from him when all I wanted to do was put a tenner in my dad’s mate’s car. So, how does one react when he can no longer impress a girl even in his cousin’s uninsured Focus ST?
“Is that daddy’s car?” was the cry.
To be honest, it was so quiet that it didn’t register properly until I drove away. I think that might be because I was concentrating on not bunny-hopping or reversing away like Arnold in Twins, but when I glanced to my right as daddy’s 19s skimmed past the party at pump two, the look of pure hatred I got from ST Boy, all decked out in pink Top Man splendour with a haircut that said 'this party’s never going to end,' suggested he desperately needed a reason to feel better about himself at that moment. The funny thing was, if he knew the truth, that it wasn’t even daddy’s car but daddy’s mate’s, he’d have slept easy that night.
But he better make the most of it, because daddy says he’s buying the CLS in a couple of years.
Mind, I won’t get anywhere near it then.
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