Like Sore Thumbs

Polish food isn't exactly a culinary wonderworld of delicate tastes and subtleties. There's no light sprinkling of herbs, or rare magic ingredients. Nor are there flamboyant frying pan techniques or bizarre eating habits. In fact, all you need is a couple of root vegetables, and a part of a pig that the pig didn't know it had, warmed up until soft enough not to require teeth and then wolfed down with gusto. Hearty, filling, but never going to earn a Michelin star for services to gastronomy.

The Japanese invasion started with the sushi craze of the mid 1990s, when a few flush businessmen realised that pork and cabbage, breaded pork and cabbage, or pork sausage and cabbage weren't going to dazzle international investors at the working lunch. Now every new office block in the city has a mandatory sushi restaurant inside, serving up raw versions of the fish they catch hundreds of kilometres away.

Of course, it's nothing like real Japanese cooking, in the same way the curries over here are bland watered-down pastes rather than face-searing explosions of spice, because Poles can't stomach anything with too strong a flavour. Hundreds of years of turnips and white bread haven't exposed them enough to the obscure, strange or downright weird. Seeing an old Mazda is therefore an event, if you know a bit about the company.

Most people lump Mazda in with Honda and Toyota as makers of those comfortingly boring boxes that shuttle you from home to work to the shops to home to work to home to the cemetary without requiring anything from the driver in terms of emotion, which seems unfair what with them being, until recently, Ford's experimental test zone for new techonologies. Especially engines.

By the time Mazda had got themselves going as a proper post-war car manufacturer in the 1950s, they took on ideas that would have cowed most Europeans in terms of design. Most importantly they worked with the snigger-inducing Wankel, or rotary, engines. If you don't know what that is, imagine a piece of Toblerone ratting around inside a giant Tic-Tac. No pistons like a regular engine, no up-and-down boxer's-fist motions, just a triange rotating round and round inside a rounded egg, producing (theoretically) THREE TIMES as much power per cylinder, and at less capacity. This means that the 1.1litre 2-rotor engine in the legendary Mazda RX-7 sports coupe was the equivalent of a 2.0 V6, and could kick out 110hp if needed. 110hp from 1.1 litres, at the same time the VW Polo was pumping out 40hp from the same capacity. That is monstrous.

This was scarily advanced for the Americans, who were far more comfortable with pre-war technology like leaf sprung suspension and pushrod engines. Mazda tried to market their motors in the States, but it just wouldn't work; Americans eschewed them on the grounds of, ironically, fuel efficiency and reliability, and thus Mazda (25% Ford at this point) went to work on a more humble machine.

An introduction of this length is something of an apology for the Mazda 626, whose four-cylinder SOHC engine and rear-wheel drive were, strangely, so perfectly suited to American requirements that the innocuous Jap import sold surprisingly well against its competitors the Honda Accord and Toyota Corona. This first-generation 626 was almost exactly like its domestic version, the Mazda Capella; a mid-sized saloon at home but a compact in the States, with plain, unassuming features and a pragmatic approach to motoring. The engine (lowered from 80hp to 75 in the name of cleanliness) was compared in contemporary reviews to BMWs engines for power delivery and smoothness, without requiring a hard Bavarian attitude from the owner. All in all, it was a satisfying mouthful of motoring, but nothing to salivate over.

This 626 sits on knackered tyres with a smashed rear windscreen and a motley selection of rotted seaweed-coloured panels. One original wheel still clings to the rear quarter, but this car is unlikely ever to see road time again. The Japanese's continuous demands for improvements saw the 626 revised year after year, with the first generation facelifted after three years and replaced with a completely new model after five, which makes getting spare parts awkward if nigh-on impossible. Not that its a big loss; I'm a firm believer that Poles need to brighten their lives up a bit, and letting this automotive stodge wallow among the squat '80s blocks it was targetted at seems only fair. As far as tastes go, I'd rather have heartburn than no heart at all.

You've probably heard the word Quattro at some point over the last 20 years; if not slapped on the back of half of Audi's production run from 1980 onwards, then at least on the menu of your local pizza parlour, followed by the word "formaggio." Whether or not you've heard of "Ur-" before is something else, but as a rule of thumb it represents the sound that comes out of your throat the first time you lay your eyes on an Audi Ur-quattro. Whatever else comes out of your mouth is usually unprintable.

The Ur-quattro is the original layout of the driving system that revolutionised driving as we knew it. Prior to 1980, you had the option of a tried and tested rear-wheel-drive option to push you round corners, or rorty little hatchbacks that had their grunt up front. These two styles of power delivery required two very different driving styles, especially when it came to sports driving where power sliding and Scandinavian flicks were used to throw cars around curves at the highest of speeds.

When you do either of those, you're effectively and deliberately losing traction to make the car spin. You upset the car's grip to make the nose face in the direction you want, then floor the throttle and hope your tyres grip to tug you in the right direction. If you hadn't initiated that spin, and just tugged the steering wheel in the direction you wanted, your immense momentum would just hurtle you onward in a straight line and off a cliff; the downside of which means you don't complete the race and all your mates call you a loser. Not cool. Of course, you could have dabbed the brakes or at least eased off the power, but where's the fun in that? This is a race.

But what if ALL FOUR WHEELS were delivering power? What if every single horsepower your engine could muster could be delivered to the wheels all the time? Then you could just point and squirt, and your front wheels would tug your nose whilst the rears followed though the curve, because you've got twice as much surface to grip you to move you along. And if that curve has snow, or mud, or loose sand, and one wheel starts to slip, what if that system compensated by pushing more power to the other wheels? How cool would that be? Maximum power with maximum grip, all the time. That's where the Urq comes in.

Apart from representing the drooling sound you make when you see one of the Giugiaro-penned oblongs, the Ur- component is German for "original" or "the first." True to their nature, the Germans had realised that this car really was something dramatically new. No other series production car (except the Jensen FF which no-one had heard of) had been granted four-wheel-drive, primarily because the complexity of torque-sensing centre diffs didn't seem to add any advantage to the car's performance, instead sucking way too much power from the engine. Audi overcame that by supplanting a 5-cylinder 10V powerplant under the bonnet; a 2,144cc turbo-charged lump which, as a massive coincidence, just sneaked under the 3-litre limit for Group B rallying (once you take the turbo into account.) With 200hp under the bonnet of even the virgin street versions, it was more than competent for the average driver.

In the rallying world it went down a storm, proving that the added weight and power-loss inherent to more complicated transmissions were more than compensated by the enhanced traction needed to hurl around mountain corners and snowy slopes at ball-shrinking speeds. The car was simply phenomenal, and is still remembered as fondly among rally enthusiasts as the heroes who drove it; Stig Blomqvist, Hannu Mikola, Walter Röhrl, and the only driver whose sexiness equalled the machine, Michèle Mouton.

So it comes as a little shock when, on a surprisingly sunny lunch break, you find one of these leviathans of motoring parked up on perished tyres in a back-street Warsaw housing estate. Peering through the glass, I could make out the digital dash and the awesome pair of diff-lock switches, that give you the ability to lock up a pair of axles so that they act like a normal road car and not an off-roading monster. This is especially useful on fast straights like autobahns, where you want equal power to both sides of the car rather than having one slip all the time (such as on corners.) This allows the Urq to make the best of both worlds, Bahn-storming Monday to Friday and then hurling around Scandinavian gravel at the weekend. Also was the flat black panel of the LCD dash, a knicker-droppingly cool green display to show you just how fast you took that last corner. Ahh, you say, ticking off the items on your Beginners Guide To Amazing Cars, so this Urq was made in 1983. Well done, pat on the back.

I was on my hands and knees nosing around underneath this thing when the owner's mother came out asking what I was up to. Now normally in that situation you'd blush, stammer out an apology or try and bluff your way out of the situation in some way. But for a car like this, I asked outright if the car was for sale.

"No." The reply was simple. She wasn't being rude; there was a smile on her face, that motherly smile of tired exasperation and inward pride. She told me there's a note left on the windscreen at least once a week from people desperate to get their hands on the Urq before it's too late. "One more Polish winter outside and this car will be worthless," I tried to coax her, pleading with my eyes for her to give me the guy's number. She just rolled her own eyes back in the way little old women can sometimes. "I know that. You know that. He knows that too, but my son is an idiot" is what that eyeroll said. Still, she took my number and no-one ever called me back. I'm not really surprised.

Owning any Audi of this style makes you feel part of true motoring heritage, whether it's one of the incomprehensively awesome Sports Quattros that the Urq developed into (basically an Urq with 30cm chopped out of the middle, a steeper front windscreen and a blood-curdling 500hp under the bonnet, plus the most impressive set of spoilers ever to grace a car), or the more mundane Golf-engined Audi Coupes, which shared the same outside skin (minus the flared arches) and none of the mechanicals, meaning you can have all the cool factor with none of the running costs associated with driving a Quattro. Or at least, thats what us Coupe owners say, or said, seeing as I sold mine last week. Which means I'm in the market for another car.

Even with a flush of used notes bulging from my pocket, this Urq would be a serious money pit for any restorer. Putting aside the diabolic state of the exterior (yeah, yeah, it'll buff out) the mechanicals underneath are nigh-on unobtainable these days. With only 11,452 cars produced over 11 years, and all of them driven to their limits, the chances of finding enough spare parts to get this behemoth of Group B rallying back on the road would be a financial nightmare. But if you were to throw any amount of money at a car, it deserves to be an Urq; not simple, but simply one of the greatest advances in motoring in the last 30 years.

Cruise around most European capitals, and you'll find some monied district where the local residents comb their hair on Sundays, wear trousers with ironed-in creases in the evenings and drive around in massive, pointless 4x4s to take little Tarquin to his judo classes. I'm not starting a class war, but you'd have to be blind to have not noticed the Chelsea-tractor phenomenon of the past decade; manicured and coiffured individuals snorting their way along perfectly smooth tarmac in a car that thinks it's a truck. Designer dirt, and all that.

Not in Warsaw. Yes, there's a district filled with "gated communities" where your nose has to be raised to a particular angle before you can move in, but the SUV invasion hasn't hit yet. Poles, quite simply, aren't that stupid. For a country that's 80% mind-numbingly dull sandy plains, there's very little justification for balloon tyres and two-foot ground clearances, and seeing as Poles would rather eat horses than ride them, you're not going to be towing many horse-boxes around either. Therefore, driving around in a shiny, sporty alloy-wheeled Tonka toy will not impress anyone, at all. Anywhere.

Which means that if you can get your hands on a proper off-roader, there must be a reason, and in Poland, it's that other 20%. The rugged hills of the Carpathians (or Tatra Mountains, as the hills in these parts are known) are a playground of skiing routes, wolf-prowling meadows and gushing streams - perfect for throwing around an ex-military invasionary jeep in.

The brightly-coloured UAZ-69 here is the perfect example of one of those weekend toys. There's no spray-on mud or silly-coloured brake callipers; the whole thing is garishly painted as if Noddy had been conscripted into the Warsaw Pact forces. Because that's what this truck is for - invading. The GAZ/UAZ-69 was Russia's post-war military jeep, the light (in military terms, at least) off-roader conjured up to mobilise the Soviets' post-war troops.

GAZ and UAZ are a pair of automotive manu
-facturers in Russia; GAZ operating out of the sneeze-inducingly named Nizhniy Novgorod, 200 miles east of Moscow, and UAZ being another 200 miles east of there in Ulianovsk. While GAZ might be the more famous of the old Soviet manufacturers, producing anything from cars to trucks to amoured transports, it was UAZ that churned out the largest number of the formidable 69, which is why, if you stare at the bonnet edge in the picture above, you'll see stamped into the metal three Cyrillic letters. Aside from that, UAZ and GAZ 69s are identical.

It's this approach to status symbols that cheers me up about Poland. The locals will whinge and moan about how poor they are, how much Communism shafted them up, how it's just not fair; then they'll buy one of the old military vehicles that terrorised them, paint like a children's cartoon, and rag it up and down the Carpathian foothills chasing sheep, throwing up clouds of dirt and blue smoke from the sidevalve engine, then getting drunk on homemade alcohol. There's such a delicious sense of irony in using one of the ex-overlord's toys for such wanton abandon that it puts a smile on my face to see a GAZ being used in this way.

When it actually comes to troop invasions, you wouldn't really want to depend on a GAZ-69 these days. For a tonne and a half of motor, 55hp is not really going to see you border-hopping the other side of the world any time soon. And if you really rev the nuts off it, you'll get up to 56mph, which in a canvas-topped leaf-sprung motor can be stomach-emptying at best. But the plucky Russians with their if-it-aint-broke attitude churned them out of the UAZ factory until 1972, when it was replaced with the UAZ-469. That left two thirds of a MILLION of the rugged off-roaders rumbling their way around the world, serving in any military force friendly to the USSR. They were the basis of anti-tank units, rocket-platforms, even amphibious cars like the GAZ-46.

So plenty of modifications were available for the old beast, and it's not uncommon for the run-of-the-mill two-door versions (the ones that trickled down to civilian ownership, at least) to have the more modern Polish S21 engine put it, or even a 2.4D engine from an old Mercedes. But the mods will all be practical - massive wingmirrors from a Scania truck bolted on and a home-made breather snorkel for water-driving, rather than chrome strips and heated leather seats. Indicators tacked to the front wings almost as an afterthought. The brutal honesty of this vehicle is what appeals to me. No-one's trying to impress, or show off, or preach over how safe Quentin is on the school run. A UAZ owner is more likely to harm himself, by dint of being deranged enough to drive one down the side of a mountain. In the dark. In winter.

Further west, an old jeep like this would have been lovingly restored to its drab green paint and driven around historical re-enactments by bearded old men who smell of cheese and onion. But that's just not the Polish way.

One of the biggest general whinges of motoring consumers over the past 20 years, now that cars are reliable and practical and (American cars aside) economical, is that they're boring. It's not an entirely fair comment, considering all the hard work that goes into the modern commitee-designed motors you see trundling around towns these days, but I can also see the flipside. What happened to those cars that were the sordid, twisted passion of one man? Those concepts of really pushing the envelope, daring to be different, trying it upside down to see if its better; where did they go?

An ex-bomb site-turned-car-park in the middle of Warsaw's business district would be the answer to that question; an unfitting grave for that most outre and flamboyant of car manufacturers, Citroen. For a certain period between the '50s and '70s, Citroen could be relied upon to warp your mind in terms of what cars could provide, following that engineeering train of thought that the French are sometimes capable of, and that the rest of us find incomprehensible.

Released in 1974, the Citroen CX was a cornucopia of trinkets and pleasures, wrapped into a sultry sleek lozenge of swooshing curves and smooth flanks. Turning its prodigious nose up at accountancy, target markets and customer purchase profiles, the first series came not just with that famed Citroen suspension (no barbaric springs, just a plumbed network of hydraulic fluid chambers that bulge out to compensate for the wheel bouncing), but power disc brakes and the world's most impressive speedometer - a rotating barrel that lined up your speed with a fixed marker. Clutching your single spoke steering wheel, you could devour the heavy miles of a French motorway as effortlessly as eating your morning croissant.

That's not to suggest that this sumptuous comfort and quirky form came at the expense of performance. If you peer through the grime smeared over the rear of this CX, you'll see a sequence of letters and numbers that, in another tongue, declare this to be the fastest diesel of 1985. Combine that with variable speed-dependant steering and you get a large comfortable saloon which is great on the straights and not unstable on the corners either.

Even the arse end of this languid monster received techno
-logical excellence. Based on the patent of a guy called Baron Reinhard von Koenig-Fachsenfeld (who, you must admit, had one of the coolest names in the business) who worked in the field of aerodynamic developments, the CX has something called a Kamm tail - a slipstream feature named after the German professor who developed the Baron's ideas further. The basic principle is that, once body designers had worked out that a horizontal teardrop shape was the slipperiest, sleekest shape for a car, cost-cutting stepped in and found out that lopping off the bulb end of the drop didn't affect air turbulence at all, and saved materials and manufacturing costs into the bargain. Kamm tails are not that uncommon these days (look at the Ford Focus or Honda Civic, for example) but for a saloon spawned in 1974, it was daring, bold, cheekily rakish.

Now, as with all gimmicks, you again hear the usual tirade; "more gadgets, more things to go wrong." Not so with the CX, which featured as an example a concave rear window; the airstream moving over it created an airwave that auto-cleaned the glass, removing the need for a rear wiper. How cool is that? Well, alright, not very cool in the smoking-Gualloise-on-Champs-Elysees sense, but I'll admit that it impressed me when I heard it.

The demise of Citroen was an unsurprising one; a combination of far too much cash spent on research projects (Wankel engine, anyone?) and not enough cash coming in from regular car sales. Quite simply, Citroen couldn't have made a regular car if they'd tried - it just wasn't in them, in the same way it's just not in a Frenchman's blood to be teetotal. They'd pumped so much money into these projects that, even though the CX itself was an excellently selling car in its class, its class wasn't the type of car people post-oil-crisis wanted to buy. And with little cash left over to develop more models, Citroen went bankrupt.

Which is a shame. Citroen fanatics rate the CX as the last "true" Citroen, as if it were the last bottle of absinthe to contain actual wormwood, before Peugeot came along and took all the fun out of it with their platform-sharing and economy-drives and bloody Talbots, rebranding Citroen as the "budget brand" and churning out the CX, relatively unchanged, until 1991. Tack on Peugeot's slapdash approach to build quality, and all the turbodiesels and GTI badges couldn't save the CX from the reputation that "it looks better with the bonnet up."

There's no fun in seeing one of the last great quirks of European motoring laid up on its haunches in a snow-covered car park; even more so when this particular car park is earmarked for development and should be cleared by the end of the year. Hopefully they'll place something here as innovative and eye-catching as its current tenant. It would be a shame to see another practical but boring apartment block replace a true momument.