Why I never pre‑judge a car | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

It was pivoted around the arrival in the UK of the new BMW 850i, complete with its 5.0-litre V12 engine. What could we assemble to rival it? Well a Porsche 928GT obviously but was there anything a little less predictable? A Ferrari Mondial t perhaps. That would do nicely. And to cap it off, how about a little bit of domestic interest, just to make up the numbers? It was old and out of date, but the Jaguar XJR-S was the only thing that seemed to fit the bill, so we asked one along too.

We started at Castle Combe, as you do, where the BMW bored me, the Porsche enthused me, the Jaguar impressed me and the Ferrari? Well that just scared me senseless. It oversteered absolutely everywhere, and this was the old Castle Combe before they put the chicanes in. You’d aim for one apex, it would aim for another entirely, leaving you with armfuls of opposite and a heart about to burst out of your throat.

So we cut our losses while we could and took a route across the old Severn Bridge (the new one not having been built yet) and then up through the heart of Wales. Memories? The BMW’s ASC light (Automatic Stability Control, still a major novelty back then) blinking almost without cessation. Discovering the Ferrari to be as good on the road as it had been awful on the track, being blown away by how composed the old Jag felt, and watching Howard Lees in the Porsche come as close to having an enormous accident on a public road as I’ve ever seen without it actually happening.

It was a downhill right handed curve and I was following in the Jaguar. We were going ridiculously fast. And then I saw the Porsche’s white tail just slowly step out of line. Interesting, but not yet terminal I thought. Then it just kept going, enough for me to already be figuring out how best to shed speed so as not to get tangled up in what was to follow. The car was now at about 45 degrees to the intended direction of travel and Howard, my boss and a capable racer of cars and motorcycles, was doing all the right things. But none seemed to be working. It got to the stage where I concluded where this was now absolutely an enormous crash which just hadn’t quite happened yet.

Somehow, it never did. Howard clung on, Porsche on the lockstops, until the road straightened out and the 928 went with it. We stopped for a driver change about ten minutes later and as he moved to take over my car he was still beyond speech, wearing on his face that grin only bequeathed to those who thought it was all over then somehow got away with it. Tragically he was killed two years later in a stunt plane crash in which he was the passenger.

Back in Wales, on we thundered at speeds I’ll still not own up to until, somehow, we all made it to our overnight stop unscathed. We drove for another day after that, but I remember nothing of it. I think we all sensed we’d dodged a few bullets the day before and moderated our pace accordingly.

Besides, by then I had learned a couple of valuable lessons. First, you can take an educated stab at whether one car might be better than another if you’ve driven both extensively, but nothing beats having them side by side. Second, a badge is just that. It means nothing. If you’d asked me to rank their likely order in the test before it started, I’d have said the Ferrari would have won, because it’s a Ferrari, followed by the Porsche, then the BMW with the Jaguar trailing behind.

In fact it was the BMW that came last, proving an adept motorway tool and very little else. Then, in third, came the Ferrari: great to drive on the road but in this test of GTs, far too difficult to live with the rest of the time. On pure ability, the Porsche and Jaguar would have tied for first place but there was one more factor to consider: at a nice, round £45,000 the XJR-S was almost £20,000 cheaper than the 928GT. The old stager with its ropey interior and three speed gearbox (yes, really) upstaged the cream of the European GT scene. I have never pre-judged a car since.