Table of contents for April 2022 in Evo

I ONLY DROVE IT BRIEFLY, TWO OR three laps on a circuit in cold, damp conditions and with the piercing eyes of a photographer looking on, tapping his watch to indicate that some of us have a job to do and can you bring the car back. There might have been a please in there somewhere, too. Possibly. They were quick-ish laps. Well, for me they were, less so for my passenger, but they were instructive, informative and above all heart warming. They confirmed my best hopes, suppressed my worst fears and left me wanting more. But photographers wait for no one, not even their boss. Quite right, too. These laps were part of another day that confirmed the right decisions have been made and continue to be, and are…

IT’S A FAIR BET THAT BBR DOESN’T NEED any introduction, particularly in relation to tuning Mazda’s perennial roadster. We’ve driven a number of its conversions in recent years – some tuned but still naturally aspirated, others turbocharged – and generally enjoyed them enormously. More recently, BBR had been working on conversions for the different MX-5 generations using a Rotrex supercharger, when part-way through its development cycle it was approached by another tuning firm, Corten Miller, who had already designed, developed and extensively tested a supercharger installation for the Mk3 (NC) model. As BBR’s own research had already suggested there was no real alternative in terms of how the Rotrex should be installed, and since Corten Miller was moving on to other things, a deal was struck where BBR took over…

‘I DID NOT TAKE OVER A HEALTHY company’ is a strong opening gambit, but Lawrence Stroll has never been one to pull his punches, and you get a clear sense that the 62-year-old hasn’t occupied all those chairmen’s seats without first climbing off the fence. Aston Martin was in a bad place in 2020. Now, 24 months after taking control of the embattled car company following the catastrophic public listing under Andy Palmer, the Canadian billionaire is running us through his plans for the next five years and beyond. That 2018 IPO had seen Aston’s share price crash almost immediately after the bell on London’s Stock Exchange rang out, the money raised going to previous shareholders and executives rather than finding its way back into the business where it was…

THE THINGS YOU WOULD HAVE EXPECTED from Daihatsu in the 1990s were, broadly speaking, a tough Welsh farmer 4x4 called the Fourtrak, a slightly nutty hot hatchback called the Charade GTti, and a load of strangely cute or cutely strange Japan-only Kei cars called things like the Multi Jackson Utility Otter. What you wouldn’t have expected was a lightweight MX-5 smasher called the X-021 and yet, out of the blue, that’s exactly what the company brought along to the 1991 Frankfurt motor show. Officially X-021 was a concept car, yet nothing in its appearance, right down to its modestly sized 15-inch wheels, suggested an insane piece of whimsy. It looked like a production car rather than some outlandish design fantasy yet it attracted plenty of attention, even at a show…

296 GTB. GOOD NAME. A PROPER FERRARI NAME. No nonsense; no overwrought, flowery, marketing-led flourish, just a contraction of 2992cc, six cylinders and gran turismo berlinetta. Should we read this as a sign of confidence, a signal of intent? Perhaps this is what happens when you wade into battle with such a surfeit of power over your nearest and most obvious rivals. Welcome to the world of the 296, an entry-level Ferrari (of the mid-engined range, at least) with a staggering 819bhp. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Maybe just don’t think too hard about the ramifications for real-world, useable performance for the rest of this feature. I am trying to get my head around it all, too, as I sit inside a parked 296 on a deserted Spanish road in…

THIS IS THE MORGAN SUPER 3, NOT JUST an all-new replacement for the 3 Wheeler that first appeared in 2011, but the first product in a new lineage of more modern, more advanced cars from the British manufacturer. That might sound unlikely, perhaps, given this is a three-wheeler and therefore a form of transport that harks back to the roots of the company some 113 years ago, but this is the first Morgan to feature a monocoque chassis. It’s also the first model to be wholly developed under the company’s current owners, who took over in 2019, and the first to benefit from recent investment and expansion, with a much more thorough development programme amongst a whole host of strides for the small firm from Malvern Link. It is a…

MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE I WAS LAST AT HETHEL, but two constants remain. The first is the biting wind that always seems to slice across this former Second World War bomber base. The second is a rare feeling of anticipation. If you love sports cars, driving through the security gates at Hethel feels like coming home. The Emira is a simultaneous first and last for Lotus: the first nose-to-tail product of the exciting and rejuvenating Geely era, but the last model to be powered by an internal combustion engine before the company morphs into an EV-only brand. For an unashamed fan of the marque it’s a bitter-sweet moment. After years of anxiety over its perennially parlous position I feel euphoric at the thought of Lotus having a parent company with…

DEFINE A MODERN-DAY GT CAR. WE ATTEMPTED to back in issue 290 and concluded that Ferrari’s V8-engined Roma delivered our preferred mix of performance, comfort, driver engagement and refinement when lined up alongside Aston Martin’s DB11, Bentley’s V8-engined Continental GT and Lexus’s oft-forgotten, but no less impressive, LC500. But were there others we should have considered? There were, and we did. The performance/luxury SUV, such as Aston Martin’s impressive DBX and the imperious Range Rover, has replaced many a traditional grand tourer in multi-car garages, the practicality, performance and quality they offer being more than a match for anything with two doors and a coupe body. So too the super-estate, the E63s and RS6s of this world now offering the quilted stitching and luxury fixtures and fittings that were once…

SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THERE IS A LOT to say about a car. Other times you end up reading about an event called Entierro de San Genarín or the Burial of Saint Genarin. On Holy Thursday in 1929 an unfortunate alcoholic beggar called Genaro Blanco was run over by the first rubbish truck in the Spanish city in which he lived. Ever since, there has been a procession through the streets to commemorate him. A bottle of orujo (a type of eye-watering pomace brandy) is carried aloft before being placed at the spot of his demise along with two oranges. Inevitably inebriation then ensues. Why am I telling you this? Well, the city is León in the northwest of Spain. The Wikipedia dots hardly need joining. The procession sounds like…

ALAS, THE TIME HAS COME. IT’S GOODBYE to evo’s long-term test BMW M3, and while the nice man who took it away just so happened to drop off an M4 xDrive to take its place on our Fast Fleet, that car soon moved on to a different custodian. Sob. We’ll introduce our M4 to you next month, but I’ll share one early observation on it in a moment. But first, I never felt like I had a fair crack at the Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio, my previous long-termer; it was lockdown, the law said leave it parked, and often there was nowhere to drive to anyway. It was the way it was. But the world had shifted enough by the time the M3 arrived that it could be driven, and the…

WAY BACK IN 2010, BMW CHARGED (yes, it’s a pun I wanted to get out of the way early doors) its Mini brand with developing a line-up of electric-powered cars to hand out to customers so that the company could gather data on how such vehicles are – and would be – used. As a result, BMW’s ‘Project i’ plan was born and led to the marvellously innovative and fit for purpose i3 city car and i8 hybrid sports car. Naturally, being marvellously innovative and fit for the needs of the car-buying public, no one bought them. Not in serious enough numbers, at least, so both are consigned to the history books alongside Audi’s A2 and Honda’s NSX under the heading ‘Cars consumers didn’t get until they were collectable’. But…

IT’S NOT BEEN THE STRONGEST OF RELATIONSHIPS between evo and Porsche’s 992-gen 911. We’ve admired it, been impressed by its capabilities on both road and track, and enjoyed moments that only Zuffenhausen’s rearengined icon can deliver. Yet we haven’t really fallen for it, not in the way previous generations have tugged at our heartstrings and left us craving a 911 hit at every possible opportunity. Why? It’s been hard to identify one single thing that’s left a blemish on our 911 relationship, but neither the Carrera nor Carrera S models have got under our skin as much as their predecessors did. Yes, they’ve grown and put on a few kilos, though so have all modern cars as they succumb to legislation requirements and the need to carry ever more tech…

AN 18-YEAR-OLD DRIVES HIS DAD’S car on the open road. His wide-eyed friend, camcorder in hand, is a willing passenger and fellow prisoner of gravity, head and torso occasionally driven back into the seat as if struck by a palm punch from the Incredible Hulk himself. He giggles and looks slightly scared. The kid behind the wheel of the black Dodge Viper is just playing, though, boost dialled back to mere ‘pre-disorientation’. A bit of harmless YouTube fun. He’s driven his dad’s Viper faster than this. Way faster in the space of a quarter mile. Note to Dominic ‘Fast and Furious’ Toretto: it’s a six-second car, baldie. And, passed down from his dad, the true meaning of ‘family’. The kid owns it. At 18, I had a poster of a…

CHARLY LÓPEZ COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS luck when he got to shoot from a helicopter on his first ever Dakar rally. ‘I was there as part of a team from a motorsports photographic agency and my role was to take pictures for the various teams’ sponsors, the corporate stuff,’ recalls the Spaniard. ‘Another guy was supposed to be riding in the helicopter and shooting the race from the air, but for some reason he didn’t turn up. I was asked to take his place – I was both shocked and pleased to get that opportunity on my very first Dakar. ‘That was in 2019. The Dakar organisers really liked the pictures that I’d taken, so for 2020 they got me back into the helicopter. It’s not the media chopper, it’s the…

GEELY HAS BIG PLANS FOR LOTUS. THAT MUCH HAS BEEN EVIDENT from the very first weeks after it took a 51 per cent stake in the firm, back in 2017, when the old car park at Hethel was immaculately tarmacked. The transformation of the whole site has been fascinating to see; heartwarming, too, as it has demonstrated that Lotus’s owners are in it for the long haul rather than a quick headline or two. New production facilities for the Evija hypercar and Emira sports car dominate the site and, while it’s a poignant moment as you walk through the former Elise/Exige/Evora production halls during their refurbishment to accommodate Emira sub-assembly, there’s also a buzz around the site that finally Lotus is getting the attention it’s always needed and, more importantly,…

@evomagazine @evomagazine @officialevomagazine IT’S FUNNY THE WAY OUR BRAINS work, isn’t it? The Audi RS6 is ‘just an A6’ but it has box arches and you can make hilarious and not-at-all-predic table observations about Fido having his face squished into the rear glass and people absolutely adore it. Even the versions that aren’t that great to drive. The RS6 Avant Vorsprung costs from £115,680. Nobody is up in arms about this. The RS3? All anyone can talk about is the price and the fact it’s ‘just a Golf underneath’. So, let’s deal with the price before anything else. The RS3 Saloon costs from £55,405. This is lots and lots of money. My new RS3 is a bit tricky to priceup as it’s an early car before the various UK-specific packages…

THE BIG NEWS THIS MONTH IS THAT WE have a brand new set of tyres on the Mégane and they have transformed it, improving steering feel and increasing grip in the wet and the dry. The original tyre was the Bridgestone Potenza S001, which I thought an odd choice after years of Renault Sport models wearing Michelins. The S001 is a very old tyre and, finally, this year Bridgestone replaced it with the all-new Potenza Sport. In terms of tread pattern, the new tyre looks more ordinary than the old, but in our most recent tyre test (evo 292) the Potenza Sport came home a strong third. I figured that if the dynamics of the Mégane had been tuned on the old S001, replacing it with the Potenza Sport would…

WHEN YOU THINK OF THE TOYOTA SUPRA, you inevitably think of a muscle-bound front-engined GT car that is Japan’s alternative to the Ford Mustang V8. With a couple fewer cylinders, a couple more turbos, a fair bit more technical sophistication and, in real terms, a good deal more useable performance. My dad owned one of the few official UK examples of the previous, A80-generation twinturbo Supra and it had the all-important manual gearbox. Unfortunately, he sold it before the values went nuts, but he loved that car to bits during the ten years he owned it, having owned all sorts of crazy stuff beforehand, not least because it never really missed a beat mechanically but also because it was quick, well built, practical and categorically not a Porsche. Since then,…

EXTRACTING MORE PERFORMANCE OUT OF the 993 without drastically compromising its usability has always been important to me. This is partly the reason why I have never installed a lightweight RS flywheel, due to the stories of stalling and cold idling issues plus extra noise in the cabin. I know, I’m a wuss… However, recently another flywheel option emerged that I found impossible to resist. It was developed over the last quarter of 2021 by Colin Belton and Peter Robinson, MD and consultant manager respectively at Porsche specialist Ninemeister, with the testing done in Colin’s own 993 Carrera 2. The kit is called the ‘9m lite flywheel’ and it’s designed to deliver the majority of the benefits of an RS single-mass flywheel but with minimal drawbacks. It’s a direct replacement…

DT MIGHT BE TIME TO REVISIT OUR BACK-of-the-mag summary of the 296bhp Mk7.5 Volkswagen Golf R. It currently reads ‘Outrageous but accessible performance’. Outrageous? Those words obviously predate the arrival of the 415bhp Mercedes-AMG A45 S, still the most powerful production hot hatch more than two years on from its launch. Audi’s RS3 gets close, retaining 394bhp in its latest incarnation, but you don’t need to wait for VAG to crack 400bhp if you want to challenge the supremacy of the Stuttgart-Affalterbach alliance. There’s a very healthy aftermarket tuning scene geared to increasing the power of the previous generation Golf R, from simple, plug-in tunes that lift the output of the 2-litre, four-cylinder engine to 350bhp, to more complete conversions costing thousands that promise north of 600bhp. There was even…

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HALF OF US HAVE TAKEN TEABAGS ON HOLIDAY. Well, according to one of those dull surveys the tabloids save their most excruciating puns for. Quite why you’d pack something that reminds you of the monotony of everyday life – on your escape from that very thing – I’m not sure. But as I instinctively press the pale blue steering wheel button and gather up my favourite settings learned from thousands of miles in an i30 N back home (light steering, heavy throttle and suspension somewhere between the two), I feel no less guilty of this strangest of behaviours. Californian sun beating down on its panels, the Hyundai Elantra N might as well be a big steaming mug of Ringtons Gold, even if I’ve not bust my baggage allowance bringing it…

MERCEDES-BENZ RECENTLY DELIVERED A NEW S-class to my door with their equivalent of an Apple Genius at the wheel. His job: to explain the myriad of systems and features in the car, including all those that you can access via an app on your field telephone. While not a complete Luddite, I can’t be doing with all this stuff, and not long after learning how to start it and put it in gear I zoned out and started to ponder whether I should buy a Corvette C3 with a big block or small block and whether a manual or automatic gearbox would be best. It turned out that Alex the delivery man had done a lot of racing, so I managed to segue us off in that direction. During our…

TIMING IS EVERYTHING, THEY SAY, AND our new Alfa Romeo couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune moment. I’m about to be hit with multiple university visits around the country, as despite living in Peterborough, my daughter has selfishly decided that Durham, Newcastle and York are her best options. So the desire for something with space, comfort and the ability to hold my interest was strong, and thankfully our new Stelvio has all of those boxes ticked. What it doesn’t have is the small cloverleaf badges on the front wings that would mark it out as the 503bhp, twin-turbo V6-equipped Quadrifoglio model. We, or more specifically photographer Aston Parrott, ran one of those a couple of years ago (see evo 266 for his end-of-term round-up), so this time we’ve got…

AT FIRST I THOUGHT THE MUSCLE memory controlling my right leg was out of whack, or a misspent youth focused on getting down a black run as quickly as possible rather than as neatly as possible was beginning to show itself in hip and knee joints that no longer wanted to react as quickly or as precisely as my brain was telling them to. But then the decades-younger Aston Parrott, evo’s staff photographer, mentioned it too: KT70 AWG’s nine-speed automatic gearbox is a bit slow and clumsy when left in Comfort mode. It manifests itself in two distinct areas: when slowing to a stop in traffic and when you need to call upon a chunk of the V8’s torque to make progress, and in both scenarios the ’box is too…