Could the Geely Emgrand EC7 be 2012's most boring car?

FORGET counting sheep, slurping cups of hot chocolate and coaxing yourself into warm baths. The cure for insomnia now comes in handy automotive form.

I am, for all sorts of reasons, someone who can't drift off easily, spending the small hours of the morning wondering why everyone else is snoring away. However, I'm hoping that by sticking a poster of the new Geely on my bedroom wall that I'll be granted an express season ticket to The Land of Nod.

The Emgrand EC7 will be the Chinese carmaker's first UK offering when it arrives later this year, and while I haven't driven one I'm sure there's plenty going for it. It does, for instance, offer you a roomy four-door saloon at the £10,000 entry price for most superminis, along with a five year, 100,000 mile warranty and generous equipment levels. It might even be fantastically good fun to drive.

But I can't see myself joining the queue of potential buyers because it is - for want of a better word - boring. It is about as memorable as a cloud on a cloudy day or a witticism delivered from the lips of Iain Duncan Smith. Aesthetically - and remember, lots of people do buy cars on the way they look - it is just a grey shape on some alloy wheels, livened up only by a styling slash in the front doors. I've been looking at a picture of one for most of the past week, and I still can't remember what it looks like.

I can see the Geely selling strongly, but to boring people who “only buy a car because they want something that'll get from A to B”, which is motoring shorthand for “I couldn't be bothered to check anything else out”. You know who you are.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be one of those people with a downer on anything Oriental who begins every dinner party conversation with the words “I don't want to sound racist, but...”. There are all sorts of interesting cars which come from the Far East, like the Toyota IQ, the Hyundai Coupe, the Honda Jazz and the Suzuki Kizashi.

It's just that the Emgrand isn't one of them.

2012 Ormskirk MotorFest: the latest

WEST Lancashire councillors will next week decide whether to give plans to revive the Ormskirk MotorFest a £17,500 boost.

Last month The Champion revealed that members of the borough council's cabinet will discuss whether the Ormskirk MotorFest, which attracted thousands of visitors over the August Bank Holiday last year, should be held again in the hope of repeating the economic boost the market town enjoyed as a result of last year's inaugural event.

Now a report presented to cabinet members is recommending that the local authority gives organisers Aintree Circuit Club £17,500 to help cover the costs of a repeat event, with a decision set to be made on holding another event next Tuesday (January 17).

The report, which also suggests using commercial sponsorship to help offset costs, reads:

"The recent MotorFest helped significantly raise the profile of Ormskirk both regionally and nationally. The MotorFest presented the opportunity for the Council to be involved in a ‘good news' event that was well received by both the local / business communities and the event participants.

"If the event were proposed to be held again in 2012 then negotiations, decisions and appropriate funding would need to be in place fairly quickly in order to give a workable lead in time for good event planning. The successful running of the
first event has helped provide a good template for the organisation and delivery of any future events."

The first Ormskirk MotorFest event, which was held on August 28, was hailed ”an outstanding success“ by the borough council after an estimated 10,000 people visited the town to see more than 200 classic cars and motorcycles in a series of parades and displays, but while the cabinet report recommends giving a repeat event the green light no firm decision has yet been made on whether to repeat the event.

The decision is expected to be made by cabinet members next Tuesday night at the council's headquarters in Ormskirk.

How to spend £100 to stay alive

A GIRL I USED to go out with a long time ago had a very particular aversion to chocolate.

She was - for someone not even remotely interested in cars - a lovely lass, but presented with even the smallest, crumliest smidgen of Cadbury's Flake she'd always retort the same mantra, which I've heard countless women retort since. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

I reckon anyone into cars should adopt a similar chant when it comes to cornering; a moment on the bend, a lifetime on the mend. In other words, skimping on the right tyres can be the difference between being a master of the mountain roads and being the sorry soul who ends up in a field. As I've just discovered with probably the wisest £100 I've ever spent.

Until yesterday I had a set of Camacs - possibly the worst tyres ever made, despite being completly road legal, officer - performing the not-at-all daunting task of getting the power from my Mazda MX-5's rear wheels onto the road, and they were at best hilariously hopeless and at worst life-threateningly dangerous. For barely controllable oversteer at 15mph, just add water.

You might think tyres are just boring rings of rubber that you reluctantly slap on every 15,000 miles or so but the difference between my old ditch-finders and the brand new Toyos I've replaced them with is profound. It is, in non car speak, the difference between venturing up Snowdon in trainers and doing the job properly in a set of walking boots.

Despite being the same size, shape and material, the Toyos find grip where the Camacs wouldn’t, particularly in the greasy, wet, muddy conditions you’re likely to encounter in most corners at this time of the year. You can, courtesy of your right foot and a healthy dose of foolhardiness, still get the MX-5 seriously sideways if you want to, but no longer does it threaten to kill you every time you approach a damp roundabout.

Nor, by the way, are the benefits of pukka tyres restricted to the world of powerful rear-wheel-drivers; last year I swapped the ancient Dunlops on my old Mini for a set of sticky new Yokohamas, and in an instant it pulled away, handled and stopped better. I reckon if all blokes took tyres as seriously as a certain other type of rubber, there'd be far fewer instances of cars spinning off into lamposts and ploughing into ditches.

If there's one thing in motoring that's emphatically not worth skimping on, it's tyres. A moment on the bend, remember, is a lifetime on the mend.

Fire up the... Suzuki Kizashi

THERE is, thanks to mankind's obsession with pigeonholing absolutely everything, a distinct heirachy when it comes to buying a new car.

Whether it's the new Mclaren at the very top end of the motoring marketplace, or the parsimonious Nissan Pixo at the bottom, everything is divided up into convenient classes and segments, so that any particular car is roughly the same size and shape as the ones it's competing against. Anything that breaks the rules just confuses Britain's notoriously fussy buyers.

So can Suzuki's Kizashi, which the Japanese are considering bringing to our shores, carve a niche? It is, after all, an unusual prospect; a Mondeo-style saloon that's smaller than a Mondeo, or an Insignia, or indeed any of the mid-range repmobiles usually found lurking on the outside lanes of Britain's motorways. It honestly could go either way, being either usefully smaller when it comes to parking and navigating the urban jungle, or not as capacious when you call on it to be a cargo freighter. Whatever you make of it, it's a bit bigger than, say, Volkswagen's Jetta but not quite the full Passat.

What it does do though is a passable impression of Doctor Who's TARDIS, because while its smaller exterior does translate into an air of agility from behind the wheel, your passengers in the back seats will swear they've stepped into a larger car. The interior might be a little darker than I'd like, thanks to the black materials used throughout, but boy is it spacious.

It also carries off the clever trick of looking a bit like every other contemporary saloon you've clapped eyes on - the front's got a hint of Golf to it, and the side profile a hint of Mondeo, but again that's not a bad thing.

Expect to pay £21,995 for the automatic, four-wheel-drive version they're bringing to this country's roads, and while I can't see it wiping out the Mondeo's dominance there's definitely a gap in the marketplace for this kind of car.

If you're looking for a sturdy saloon which is a smidgen smaller than the rest of the pack, go and start pestering your local dealer for it.

Why the little Austin Seven is worth celebrating in 2012

THE Austin Seven - and I know I'm going out on a limb on this one - is the most significant motor ever made in a British factory.

It's officially now 2012 which means people with boiler suits and beards will be getting the party poppers out for a couple of cars celebrating significant anniversaries this year; everything from the AC Cobra, which reaches its half century, my own MGB GT, for which life begins at 40, and even the Ford Cortina, which first rolled out of the showrooms 50 years ago this year.

But it's the curious little Seven- a creation that'll be a staggering 90 years old this year - that I reckon should be the one worth celebrating, because the impact it's had on British motoring is still being felt to this day.

It's well documented that it effectively did for us what the Model T Ford did for the Americans, but did you know that it was the first small car that had all the controls where we'd expect to find them today? No messing about with two gearlevers or four pedals for your feet - just good, honest and easy to drive, like a Polo or a Fiesta.

Austin might be long gone but the car companies it inspired aren't; a lavishly-trimmed version, called the Swallow, eventually proved to be the ancestor to all of today's Jaguars, Lotus founder Colin Chapman cut his teeth by modifying old Austins, and Alec Issigonis - the man behind the Morris Minor and the Mini - first wowed the motoring world with a racing car based loosely on a Seven.

I know it's hard to imagine in 2012 a boxy, cramped, noisy and slow old vintage car being particularly good at anything but then in the old days, when everyone had TB and lived in black and white, Austin wasn't up against other cars. You either bought one of those or you bought a horse, and it's because of this that the Seven got oridinary Brits off their saddles and behind their steering wheels for the very first time.

You might not be that impressed with the Seven, but you can bet your great grandparents were.

Video: MGB GT

I COULDN'T help but smile when one my favourite cars - my 1972 MGB GT - got some fan mail earlier today.

The car's previous owners sent an email to The Champion office to let me know they regularly read the updates on a thoroughly traditional and very British sports car I've been proud to own for the last 18 months, and it's for them that I include a video of the car in action.

An extract from their email reads:

Mr Simister,

You will be surprised, and I hope, pleased to learn that we follow your reports of "our" MGB and have compiled an archive simply because we are delighted that you gain so much pleasure from the car.I could not have wished for a better outcome; passing the car to someone who is really thrilled to own it.

Our friends look out for it and report "sightings". The previous owner, Alison, thinks we are mad...........but then she did not have the car as part of the family for 20 years!!

To which I've replied...


Thanks for your kind email and hope you had a good Christmas and an enjoyable New Year.

I'm delighted that you're still following the progress on the MGB. I am, as I'm sure you've probably gathered, absolutely smitten with it. Since its return to the road it's been on numerous runs into the West Lancashire countryside and was an entrant into the Ormskirk MotorFest last August; at the moment it's being treated to a new exhaust, fuel tank and stereo system, but when it comes out of winter hibernation one of my aims is to take it on the official MGB 50th anniversary run in Gaydon this April.

I'll have a look for a back copy of the magazine for you but in the meantime I'm happy to enclose a copy of the video, which I filmed a few weeks ago (before I fitted the new exhaust, incidentally). The video can be seen here:

The MGB will be back on the road once the sun comes out again, so I'm sure your friends will report plenty more sightings in the coming weeks!

More updates on Bridget, as I call her, to follow soon...

It's back! Part Two

WAY back in 2011 my Mazda MX-5 returned to the road, after being treated to a series of fixes and upgrades.

Unfortunately, the only problem was that the closing days of last December were too dark, too wet and too cold to get any decent pictures, but with it being 2012 I've managed to take a few snaps of my newly-improved Mazzer.

Admittedly most of the bits you can't see, but I'm particularly proud of the traditionalist wooden trim I've had fitted...