In his weekly column for the Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson said supercars like a Ferrari are admired in every other country on earth except for Britain, where jealousy and insecurity is rife. “If I drive a normal car to work, I pull up to the junction at the end of my street, and people let me into the slow-moving crawl on the main road. But when I’m in a Ferrari, they don’t,” he wrote in his review of the Ferrari 488 GTB.
“In Britain, Mr Normal sees a Ferrari as a reminder that his life hasn’t worked out quite as well as he had hoped, and he sees its driver as a living embodiment of the good-looking kid at school who got the girls, and the sixth-former who nicked his packed lunch on a field trip. He believes that if he can inconvenience a Ferrari driver, just for a moment, it’s one in the eye for the rich and the privileged. It’s ‘score one’ for the little man. A Ferrari in America is a spur, a reminder that you need to get up earlier in the morning and try harder. In Italy it’s a thing of beauty to be admired. Elsewhere it’s a dream made real.” – Jeremy Clarkson
Clarkson went on to suggest that cyclists react even more strongly than motorists. “They see all car drivers as an unholy cross between Margaret Thatcher and Hitler, so they spit and they yell and they put footage of you on their bicycling websites when they get home,” Clarkson says. “If, however, you are in a Ferrari, they go berserk because now you are an ambassador for the devil himself. You used child labour to make your money. You were responsible for Bhopal. You may even be a Tory. So it is their duty as a comrade to bang on your roof and scream obscenities.”
It must have been a busy week for Clarkson, who recently partnered and invested in the automotive community start-up ‘DriveTribe‘, while also continuing to struggle with Richard Hammond and James May to select a name for their new Amazon motoring show.