Week Forty And I Had A Flirt With A T5
My name is Adam Rayner and I drive by the seat of my pants. I like to extend out into every corner of my car, feel the tarmac beneath tautly inflated tyres, as your feet feel branches on the forest floor through a moccasin. I like the feel of the engine through the pedals, as that’s what you lose last with big sounds. For most of all I like the music to drive me. What I like at exactly how loud I like it. Selected by me, since the DJ matching my mood happens rarely. Granted, I am on record over and over as saying that the greatest moments in your musical life may well be when a radio station happened to harpoon your heart. But the right road and the right tune are what matters most.
I am an instinctive driver, my forebrain is too easily distracted to be good, like my chum John Royce, at driving ‘any forking thing’ (Smokey & The Bandit) so I tend to keep cars for ever, until they die. It means, that like touch typists, I reach for every control, key or button without needing to look at it. Keeping my eyes on the road. So, I am terrible at test driving new stuff.
And I saw this car. It was red and I have lusted and longed at models of my one in a nicer colour, like always. Except this one wasn’t like my one. It was a later model and had small T5 badge on the back. Now unlike my VW chums, for whom this means the basis of a full campervan conversion that will last and last, to Volvo people, T5 means the ones the police use.
I even went to go see it and was champing at the bit. Had a very serious look through the fixtures and fittings, to find one tiny bit of damage to a seat release button. But for a 106,000 mile car, she was immaculate. No door dings, no scruffy sills and the seating was half leather and was the right nick, so neither previous owner had been a fat bastard like me. My own seat is disintegrating after a thousand bum shuffles from MY bum! The front of my 940 has stone chip evidence of rapid progress, the T5 had none. She was clean of nose. I took it out for a test drive with the nice chap from the car dealers in Huntingdonshireness and immediately found that the foot well was a squeezed-up, cramped space in the front wheel drive V70 T5. It’s ample in the rear wheel drive 940 and the first time the engine revved as I went for the brakes, the poor fellow nearly had a kitten! My size 13 UK feet were occluding the pedals versus what I was used to.
Muscle memory.
So, could I learn to drive that narrow footed pedal array? More to the point, could I stop the happy habit of a lifetime and stop rubbing the corners of the big sticky-out bumpers on things when parking, as the T5 has colour coded ones? Well, the engine was five cylinder and thus way revvier than my four pot of the same capacity. Plus the snaily wooo-wooo is bigger on the T5 than my own low pressure turbo. This gives mister red T5 260bhp instead of the 221 mine has. The difference was that a brief fenland straight had no way to really let it out but it was jolly zoomy, let me assure you. (It’s a 155mph car.)
I have spent the whole weekend agonising. And what made it worse was that my old car just sailed through its MOT, first go. I fixed a bulb last week and I reckon the brand spanky new wipers I got from Halfords did the trick. One whoosh and a sweep and my ahem FIFTH windscreen, which is also new, would have looked really posh to the MOT tester! Thus, with heavy heart and with one of the better decisions I ever made, I decided against it. It’s very red and has a wing on the back and badge that says T5. Were I by some mischance stopped for going too fast in it, there would be no doubt that I was doing it on purpose.
I have loved my untrendy low-suss Volvo-With-A-Towbar that I never ever hitched a damn thing to, despite the MOT demanding that the electrics function for a pass. She has just done 260,000 miles and still goes like a damn train. And while I was fretty that I might have had to scrap her, dammit, I am going to keep her, at least until she needs another MOT! I have twice had folks ask to buy her from me, as well!
Sorry, sexy T5, my DaddyBus with its sticky out bumpers and silly small turning circle is staying. Which means it IS time to get that Target Blu-EYE fitted!
Take care and pay attention to your driving first.
Adam Rayner On Line Editor