A lament to the passing of the pipe

So, that expiring croak you’re hearing is the death of the exhaust pipe, like the cracked reveille played by corporal ‘Radar’ O’Reilly in M*A*S*H. Gone will be a litany of names: Peco exhaust; Brooklands Cans; megaphones; two-stroke expansion boxes; pea shooters; Lafranconi Competizione; Cherry Bomb; Akrapovic; Mike the Pipe; Borla; Corsa; Walker; American Thunder, they all have had their place.

And it’s not just a blackened old stub sticking out of the side or rear of the car. Lift the bonnet of a tuned-up car in the days of peak petrol and you’ll see a curving piece of art, the tuned extractor manifold (or banana bunch), designed to increase the speed of gases out of the engine by using the energy of the exhaust gas coming out of the neighbouring cylinder.

Jim Claridge, a former Lola fabricator, used to make the exhaust headers for Grand Prix racing cars of the Fifties and Sixties. Bending and knitting together a load of equal length headers in a tight space was a work of art.

‘I used to get £1 a pipe’, he told me as he packed another steel pipe with sand and started the gentle process of heating and teasing it into shape. ‘When they introduced the V16 BRM, we ate steak for breakfast…’.

Even the shape of them, from the blackened, race-worn exhausts depicted by Gordon Crosby, or Russell Brockbank’s drawings that always had a jolly puff from the exhaust, whether it was a fish-tail from a vintage car, or the jet engine-like exhaust of his imagined Lotus fuel tanker, which foresaw the top-mounted exhausts of the Porsche 918 by at least 50 years.

Or what about the blown diffuser exhausts of Formula One cars, where the car’s exhaust gas actually contributed to the car’s downforce, which was aped by Renault for its Clio without much effect. Remember the stacked exhaust look of BMW, Lexus and Mercedes, the centre exhaust of the second-generation Lamborghini Murcielago, which quickly entered the car designer’s gotta-have catalogue, similarly the triple-centre-exhaust look of the Honda Civic Type R or for that matter the quad exhaust of the Pagani Zonda?

Being a child of the Sixties, side exhausts hold a special place in my heart. There was a Modsports Jaguar E-type that used to contest the Brighton Speed Trials and had a set of hand-made side exhausts that virtually ran the length of the sills – the car was sponsored by Redex, but it oozed sex appeal rather than upper cylinder lubricant. The AC Cobra and the Caterham Seven spring to mind as the acme of side exits, although as ever TVR went one further with the Sagaris and pushed the exhaust gas out fully sideways on each side of the back of the car. Not quite so successful was the McLaren-Mercedes SLR, where the exhausts had to be folded up and exited quickly from the car to avoid melting the resin-based carbon fibre bodywork.

Most spectacular has to be Chris Williams’ 42-litre Packard-engined Bentley, which I road tested some years ago. At idle speeds this motor torpedo boat-engined car had a troupe of flames dancing around its 18-inch-long open exhaust stubs, which made it a uniquely threatening thermal event for onlookers wearing polyester trousers.

Yet some of the most famous exhausts were the least effective. Those ungainly Twenties Brooklands cans were built to muffle the sound of highly-tuned machinery racing round the Surrey concrete banking in an effort to placate the sensitive ears of those who’d moved close by the world’s first purpose-built motor racing track and found the noise offensive. Yet the strange concoction of triangular silencers wasn’t that effective at suppressing noise in the first place and they would often have holes drilled in them anyway to ease the passage of gas. If anything, Brooklands cans had the effect of making all the Brooklands cars sound a bit like each other.

Drive-by noise restrictions have strangled the full-throated, full-flow exhaust in recent years, to be replaced by artificial noise symposers piping a facsimile of rising exhaust note into the cabin. Very few of them are fit and proper replacements.

Despite much hullabaloo from PR offices, car makers have struggled to replace a well-tuned exhaust as a source of excitement in a battery-electric car. Full marks to Lotus in its new battery electric Eletre for not even trying, allowing the big, fast SUV to provide its own quiet-but-purposeful soundtrack.

Silence is not golden here and even Rolls-Royce had to dial back on the sound deadening in the new battery electric Spectre as the eerie silence of the early prototypes gave test drivers little aural indication of speed and passage. You need something, but what?

An over excited e-mail I frequently get in my in-box runs along the lines of how car maker X has employed the services of pop producer Y to give EV car Z  a ground-breaking new note. Climb inside said model, however, and what you tend to get is a sub jet-engine whirr (hum and whistle at the same time and you’ll get the picture). Christ on a bike, did they ever think of contacting the estates of Fela Kuti, or J Dilla? Similarly, the waterproofed loud speaker fixed underneath the rear end of the new Abarth 500e, which attempts to replace the stentorian exhaust notes of one of Carlo Abarth’s tiny bolides. Believe me, it doesn’t.

So, while we’re starting the process of mourning the old exhaust pipe and its note, the early attempts to replace it seem as ungainly as those Seventies rubber bumpers bolted to cars to pass America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) low-speed impact regulations. Or the equally beaky cars that appeared in the Nineties to pass new European pedestrian impact regulations. In other words, EV noise is all work in progress and, for the moment, it’s our ears that are taking the strain. And if thine ears offend thee, well, you can always just turn up the stereo…