► Santander to England entirely by Honda
► Bike, quad, car, boat, lawnmower all involved
► ‘Ashclouds have silver linings too…’
The Royal Navy brought Brits home from the volcano crisis aboard HMS Albion – a 30-hour trip from Santander to Portsmouth. Mark Walton bets Honda that he can beat that time… using only vehicles from the peculiarly versatile Honda stable
Ash clouds have silver linings too. When the now infamous volcanic dust first drifted south from Iceland to shut down European airspace last month, it was like some deadly, invisible menace from a 1950s B-movie (Be Afraid! Be Delayed! It’s The Night Of The Eyjafjallajökull).
But there was also a positive side to this unprecedented crisis. I’m sure we all know friends and relatives who were stuck out in France or Spain, who ended up using whatever means possible to get back to the UK. Trains, cars, buses, taxis, donkeys, tricycles. Some families packed their things into little cases and literally marched over the Alps, just to escape the Nazis. Or maybe that was The Sound Of Music. Anyway, the point is, these people had adventures, real road trips that they’ll talk about for years. To turn your back on cheap Ryanair flights and find other means of getting home is to reconnect yourself with the Earth, to feel the miles under your wheels, to see strange cultures, meet new people. Yes, it takes three times as long and costs a fortune in roaming mobile charges, but memories are made of experiences like these.
Which is why CAR would like to offer some advice. Should the ash cloud descend again – and I mean really descend, like the dark, sulphuric clouds of Hell, full of lightning flashes and whirling monkey-bats with glowing red eyes – then why not plan ahead, and get your adventure booked up in advance? I mean, ad hoc road trips are all very well, but next time, if you’d like to avoid a 700-mile journey home in the back of a wheezing Citroen Xantia minicab that stinks of vomit and Magic Tree, then maybe you should consider our following suggestions.
Oh, and to give our journey an extra twist, we’ve decided to add a deadline. Most folk returning home during those frantic few days were under some kind of time pressure – a work meeting to attend, perhaps, or childcare issues. So what about ours?
Remember the warship, HMS Albion, picking up all those stranded Brits at Santander? You must remember – it was all over the news. Like some reverse Falklands War armada, with hundreds of holidaymakers in their flipflops, crammed on the decks as the ship pulled out, and all the soldiers left on the docks waving Union Jacks. Anyway, it took the Albion 30 hours to get back to Blighty from Santander; could we beat that time, going mostly overland, using a variety of methods of transport – bike, ATV, car, powerboat and… lawnmower? I know Honda has the most varied portfolio, with all this stuff in it, so I bet them I could do it. I was kind of joking; but somehow I appear to be in Santander…
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The bike: escape from Santander
If you’re not already a biker, I’d imagine the idea of going on a long journey riding a dangerous two-wheeled vehicle that runs out of petrol every 100 miles must seem a little strange. There’s no radio, no-one to talk to, no chewy mints, your head is bombarded by suicidal bumble bees and you have to sit on your own testicles.
But let me tell you, riding a bike over a long distance has numerous charms that might not be immediately apparent to the car driver, and that’s why we chose it as our first mode of transport to get home.
We set off from Santander at 7am, as the sun is rising over the docks where the HMS Albion loaded up like a Thomas Cook Noah’s Ark. We head east along the amazing Cantabrian coastline, flying towards Bilbao on a motorway that resembles a swooping, empty, two-lane race track. One of the things I love about bikes is the way you feel your environment – the windrush through my leathers at 7am still has a sharp, night-time coldness to it, but occasionally I pass through warm pools of air, as if I’m slipping into a bath.
I’m riding the VFR1200F, Honda’s new sports-tourer with a 1237cc V4 engine and a shaft drive. There’s been a bit of controversy about the VFR in the bike press: sceptics say Honda hyped it up, and it hasn’t quite lived up to expectations. But as a car journalist, I’m not disappointed: it feels beautifully put together, and everything from the clutch action to the brakes to the fly-by-wire throttle feels polished and precisely engineered. It’s surprisingly agile too, given it’s a pretty big engine, helped by a deep seat that makes you feel like you’re sitting ‘in’ rather than on it.
And to any car driver, the speed and acceleration of a bike with 172bhp is mind-blowing. The VFR isn’t shrill like an inline four (a Fireblade, for example); instead the V4 grumbles its way to the 10,000rpm redline, with a supercharged, surging, VTEC sensation from 5000. It is proper supercar-quick, overtaking slower cars with a casual, dismissive flick, and revving within seconds to an easily achievable 160mph.
My main gripe is the stupidly small fuel tank. It takes 55 miles for the graphic display to even register I’m using any petrol at all, then in the next 55 miles it shows I’ve practically emptied the tank. I start looking out for petrol stations at 120-mile intervals, which is hardly relaxing, especially when I turn off the motorway and head into the hills.
Into the hills? Yes, although I’m trying to do this as quickly as possible, I want it to feel like an adventure (though preferably not the running-out-of-petrol-miles-from-anywhere kind.) So I swing south-east, and head for the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Here, the VFR is just brilliant, as I experiment with getting my knee down on the wide, long hairpins. Touching the ground with your knee while riding along probably seems an odd activity to a car driver, but it’s strangely compelling and deeply satisfying when you get it right. To feel the hard plastic slider brush the rough asphalt with a sudden ssckkk noise is like dipping your finger in the water as you glide along in a rowing boat – it’s confirmation of your progress, a sensory hit of movement.
Precise, controlled and elegantly choreographed. Everything our next mode of transport isn’t.
The quad: over the mountains
The Pyrenees are massive. I know that’s an obvious thing to say, but I’ve never been to this part of the world before. I’d always assumed the Swiss Alps were your Premier League mountains, while the western Pyrenees were more of your Huddersfield-Town-in-the-Carling-Cup sort. Anyway, I soon discover they are in fact proper pointy peaks covered with snow, towering above high pastures and criss-crossed with gravel tracks.
What better way of reaching France than over these high-altitude trails, riding a quad? Despite being a farmer’s son, I’ve never ridden a quad before, so I was curious to find out how much fun all those Border Collies are having these days.
The Honda TRX420 has only a single cylinder, a sweet little fuel-injected 420cc with an unthreatening pub-pub-pub sound when it’s ticking over. Throw your leg over the high seat and frown at the surprisingly complex controls – there are auto and manual gearchange options; two and four-wheel drive; a fiddly three-stage way of finding reverse; and an odd handbrake lever… ignore all of them. The only control you need is the thumb-operated throttle, because the quad is – initially – a doddle to drive. In four-wheel-drive auto mode, you just press your thumb forwards and putter off; within minutes you realise, not only is it surprisingly fast (despite an engine capacity little bigger than a can of Coke), it’s also fast over any terrain. Over tracks, over grass, over rocks, mounds, cliffs, cattle if they stand in your way, this thing is like the VFR crossed with a Sherman tank.
Problem is, its ground-covering skills lull you into a false sense of security regarding the handling, and while it may have all-independent suspension, just look at those tyres. It’s like trying to steer a 100bhp Space Hopper – flat-out it needs constant correction to keep it in a straight line, and if you chuck it into a turn you have to hang off the side like an orangutan to stop it toppling over. It’s crazy, adrenaline-fuelled madness, spearing down a track with a huge cloud of dust behind, aiming for every jump, lump, steep drop and sharp climb I can find. Great fun. Always knew sheepdogs were intelligent.
The car (CR-Z): onwards into France
We cross the border into France, and find our third form of transport, the new Honda CR-Z. Climbing into a car after the insanity of the quad should seem like familiar territory, but in the case of the CR-Z, not quite. It looks a bit odd from the outside, handsome and rather rakish from the front, a bit pinched and chopped at the back, generally like two distinct halves stuck together in the middle.
Inside is even more unconventional. The dash is clustered around the main binnacle, with switches just beyond your fingertips on both sides. Inside the binnacle is a strange, holographic-looking speed-counter, in the centre of a black disc, which is ringed by a coloured aurora, surrounded, in turn, by a rev counter. Altogether it looks extraterrestrial.
The colour of that aurora changes depending on how you drive – the CR-Z is a hybrid, though not in the sense we’ve got used to. It is never completely electric; instead it uses the 14bhp electric motor as a background boost to torque when you’re accelerating, and given this is a 1.5-litre, high-revving VTEC engine, that’s a good thing. Many VTECs can be disappointingly sluggish until they come on-cam, and the battery back-up gives the bottom end a push before the top-end, high-revving finale.
So push the ‘Econ’ button and use a light throttle and your dash goes green; ahhh. Press ‘Normal’ and drive a bit harder and it goes blue; ooooh. Choose the ‘Sport’ button and rag the nuts off it, and it’s red. It was red the whole time I had the car.
It’s not fast. Even with the battery boost, it produces just 122bhp at 6100bhp – a lot less than the bike – so I was glad I was going downhill, not up. The groovy sharp coupé shape promises performance that the engine just can’t deliver, and a Mini Cooper S driver (after spending the same £17,000) would feel seriously short-changed if he switched to the CR-Z. But what the Honda has is a high-quality feel that genetically links it with the VFR: a smoothly engineered, carefully weighted texture to the controls. If the CR-Z were a pebble, it would be one of those smooth ovals that feel good in your palm.
That makes it easy to stitch corners together, blending gearchanges, thottle and brake – and we have a lot of corners to tackle, coming out of the Pyrenees. The Col de Tourmalet, the famous stage on the Tour de France, is closed with late snow when I come over the top, so I descend down a nearby valley, all tight switchbacks and steep drops.
Even though it’s not quick, the CR-Z is still surprisingly satisfying on a road like this. Sport mode not only perks up the throttle response, it quickens the steering, turning each hairpin into a single movement of elbows and hands. With really supportive seats, that makes it a pleasure, if not a thrill to drive.
The lack of sheer grunt is harder to forgive on the motorways though. As we leave the foothills behind at Lourdes and head north to Toulouse, Limoges, Orleans, and ultimately Calais, that 1.5 suddenly feels properly underwhelming, and on long, three-lane slopes I find myself changing down from sixth to fifth just to maintain momentum.
Clearly, for a long motorway slog across France, you need a bigger engine.
The car #2 (Civic): Race to Calais
The Civic has a 1.8-litre VTEC engine with 138bhp.
Time is on our side now. After a stop-over in a cheap hotel we set off again early the next morning, aiming north. France is a pretty easy country to cross, apart from the radio stations, which seem to host permanent talkshows discussing existentialism.
So I focus on my latest mode of transport in our quest, instead. Amazing, how quickly the Civic has become ‘normal’ on British roads. When it was launched in 2006 it would have been a radical overhaul for any familiar badge, but for the conservative Civic, typically a bastion of sensible, retirement-age driving since 1972, it was a serious psychotic episode that should have seen Honda sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Now it seems rather ordinary compared to the oddball CR-Z.
Likewise inside: the dash has a kind of two-tiered feel with another wrap-around binnacle smothered in alien blue light, yet after the wacky CR-Z interior, the Civic seems relatively understated.
The miles, and the hours, and the boredom roll by. I start to wonder if a game of cards and a nice hot stew on the HMS Albion might have been a better idea after all. The only conundrum still taxing me is our route. Every sat-nav I’ve ever used in France is convinced that the fastest way to anywhere is via the Peripherique around Paris. Those 22 miles of chocablock congestion are like a sat-nav magnet. However, being savvy to the computer’s wayward tastes, we find our own way, keeping west via Chartres, and skirting by Le Mans. This slows us down a little, and builds the tension – we need a clear run and a fast crossing to ensure we reach Blighty in time.
We arrive at Calais just before midday, and skirt around the huge road-funnel that feeds returning holiday makers into the Dover ferries, and head instead for the Calais Marina. Inhaling diesel fumes for an hour and throwing up on your shoes might be adequate for your average summer holiday, but we’re looking for a more adventurous journey home.
The boat: crossing the Channel
Crossing the Channel on a speedboat. It’s a schoolboy dream come true, like a scene out of a James Bond film. And James Bond was almost involved too. Unbelievably, CAR’s plan to bring a journalist and a photographer across the Channel in a power boat caused deep consternation amongst the authorities. The police got involved. So did Border Control. And immigration. Oh, and Special Branch too. Quite why East European people-traffickers would not only try a Dover-Calais crossing in broad daylight in an open boat, but ring the police beforehand and let them know their entire itinerary is beyond me; but the authorities seemed to think we were deeply suspicious.
Still, I suppose we do have the perfect boat for drug-running. You don’t have to be a RIB enthusiast to get off on our RIB, or ‘Rigid Inflatable Boat’. With 450bhp on tap from its two outboards, it’s capable of over 100mph on water, which means the Calais to Dover crossing can be easily dispatched in half an hour. It’s quite a weapon.
Andrew Norton is my captain today, an RYA instructor. We pull out of the harbour at a slow trickle, then Andrew pushes the twin throttle controls forwards. Acceleration isn’t brutal, but the sensation of speed is unreal, just because your brain is so unused to such velocity on water. High performance RIBs like this are designed to be fast not in the water, but by staying out of it as much as possible, to reduce drag on the hull. So the boat very quickly starts bouncing over the crests, skimming over the water like a flat stone. The most amazing thing is how comfortable the bounces are: it reminds me of a go I once had in a WRC car, over deep ruts that looked like they would demolish the car in less than a mile. Yet the suspension absorbed everything – just everything – leaving the driver with a remote, floaty feeling, and a delusion of invincibility. Likewise the RIB seems to be flying over crests, rather than pounding through them.
We’re definitely not invincible though. Andrew lets me have a go, but it’s not as easy as it looks. He constantly modulates the throttle and uses his thumb to press the trim buttons, changing the angles of the two massive motors. The idea is to keep the nose of the boat up as you leap, so it doesn’t dive nose first into the next wave. And the steering. It’s about 18 turns lock-to-lock on the little boat-wheel, and the first few spins have no effect whatsoever. I ‘drive’ for ten minutes then hand back to Andrew. ‘Can we go fast again, dad?’ It’s much more fun when he’s driving.
We arrive in Dover harbour, which is a lot like Heathrow airport – a massive, sprawling mess of lanes, terminals and channels, that seems to be in a permanent state of development. We arrive 29 hours and 45 minutes after setting off, and to celebrate we’re welcomed at the jetty by an officer from Special Branch. Passports, please!
The lawnmower: the final yards
It’s hard to draw a serious conclusion when you’re sitting on a lawnmower. I’d like to say that I could feel the Honda DNA in the grass-cutter’s engineering, but I’m not sure I can. Still, it’s another means of transport, a last twist to our adventure over land and sea back to our sceptred isle. Those weary holidaymakers would just be wobbling down the Albion’s gangplank now, into Dover’s grey drizzle, suddenly regretting that Mexican hat and Hawaiian shirt. What would they have seen, other than the inside of a midshipman’s bunk for the last two days? Whereas we have scaled dizzy heights, reached new speeds, eaten lots of motorway food, and spent an absolute fortune on tolls.
So as I turn my lawnmower north and chug home, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the moral of our tale: next time Europe gets closed down by a rogue volcano and you find yourself stranded thousands of miles away with no means of getting home, don’t panic. It’s an adventure getting back, by hook or by crook. Or in our case, mostly by Honda. Either way, I win the bet. I’ll accept the Quad bike as payment.
Watch the behind the scenes video of Honda vs the volcano here