The other day, driving to work, I overtook a Mazda MX-5. Going up a hill. On a motorway. In my Renault 5. (incidentally, if you don’t immediately see what’s so wrong with this picture, you might as well stop reading now).

Now, I’m not advocating the kind of behaviour typical of the owners of most sports cars – tailgating, weaving in and out of lanes on motorways, going double the speed limit, just because they can – and, okay, I tend to rag my little car quite hard – but there is something fundamentally wrong about someone driving a Porsche 911 or BMW M3 so slowly that I get annoyed if I’m stuck behind them.

The problem round here is, as with so many things, the Cheshire Set. These cars aren’t being driven by your normal sports car owner, oh no – they’re being driven by bleached-blonde, fake-tanned forty-something women who are married to millionaires, living in mansions in Wilmslow and Alderly Edge. And they use them to go shopping and do the school run. They keep them on a gravel drive in front of their country houses most of the time, and would never, ever consider taking them on a racing circuit. And they probably chose the model they own because it came in a colour they liked. It’s absolutely criminal.

Maybe they could do a trade in scheme: they could have my Renault 5, get to their destination in exactly the same amount of time and have stacks more boot space for their Waitrose ready meals, and I can have their sports cars, and drive them like they’re meant to be driven for a change. I’d even pay the petrol costs. You can’t say fairer than that, now, can you?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2004 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.