Table of contents for COTY 2020 in Evo

‘The Super 220 improves upon the standard car in virtually every way’ IT TAKES, OOH, A GOOD HALF MILE OR SO in BBR’s latest evolution of the Mazda MX-5 before a wide grin spreads across my face, and less than a day later I’m mentally scheming as to how I might put a Super 220 of my own in the garage. BBR is best known for endowing Mazda’s diminutive roadster with muscular forced-induction motors, the appeal of which recently spread overseas as Colorado-based specialist Flyin’ Miata began to offer BBR kits alongside its V8 conversions. But naturally aspirated tuning is even more intriguing, because it matches how Mazda chose to power the MX-5 out of the box. In a car all about simplicity, high revs and light weight, the idea…

‘THE DBX WILL COMPETE IN A NEW SECTOR FOR ASTON, AND A FEARSOMELY COMPETITIVE ONE AT THAT’ IS THE DBX THE MOST IMPORTANT CAR IN Aston Martin’s history? The analysts who pore over the company’s share price will say it is, so too those from within the company who are acutely aware of how and where the DBX fits within Gaydon’s second-century plan. When it arrives in 2020 Aston’s first SUV will undoubtedly be the most important model in the firm’s line-up, but more so than when the DB7 arrived 25 years ago or the V8 Vantage in 2005? At those moments in time those models were key to the company staying solvent and viable. The DBX’s significance is nothing new to Aston Martin. But the DBX will compete in…

INITIALLY THERE IS SCEPTICISM. Should this really be in eCoty? Then comes the first drive; a mere five minutes behind the wheel to help with some photography. Scepticism is instantly replaced with surprise. Surprise at the lovely, lucid steering and fluid ride. This is nothing like the previous iterations. Surprise then gives way to doubt. Surely it can’t be that good? You try to get another go, but Antony and his white trousers get there first. Off to play tennis perhaps. Then it’s the end of the day, Antony is back from playing polo and miraculously the Mercedes is free. You set off first, keen to get a clear bit of road. The splitter of a Barker-driven Jag looms large in your mirrors to keep you honest, but from the…

FIRST TIME FOR ME AT AN ECOTY EVENT, and it really did feel like a rare privilege. Seriously. I mean, I’ve been in this business for a while now and have done many similar sorts of things on all sorts of circuits for all sorts of other magazines. But to attend a full-blown eCoty – with all the resident evo superstars present, plus an entirely nice bunch of people from evo Spain to help oil the cogs as well – I have to be honest: it was something else. And what I liked most about it was the banter, the discussion, and the balance between basically just arsing about in cars and having a laugh about it, and the sincerity of the debate afterwards. Often involving at least one small…

1998 North Wales 1st: Porsche 911 Carrera (996.1) 2nd: Lotus Elise 135 3rd: Ferrari F355 F1 1999 Cairngorms, Scotland 1st: Porsche 911 GT3 (996.1) 2nd: Ferrari 360 Modena 3rd: Subaru Impreza RB5 2000 North Wales 1st: Porsche 911 Turbo (996) 2nd: Lamborghini Diablo 6.0 VT 3rd: Subaru Impreza P1 2001 Tuscany, Italy 1st: Pagani Zonda C12S 2nd: BMW M3 (E46) 3rd: Lamborghini Murciélago 2002 North Wales 1st: Honda NSX-R 2nd: Porsche 911 Carrera 4S (996.2) 3rd: Ferrari 575M Fiorano Pack 2003 Liguria, Italy 1st: Porsche 911 GT3 (996.2) 2nd: Lamborghini Gallardo 3rd: Renault Sport Clio V6 255 2004 North Wales 1st: Porsche 911 Carrera S (997.1) 2nd=: Lotus Exige (S2) & Renault Sport Clio 182 Cup 2005 Route Napoléon, France 1st: Ford GT 2nd: Ferrari F430 3rd: Renault Clio Trophy…

DO NOT CONFUSE THIS CAR WITH THE other bright yellow AMG A-class in this issue. This is not another A45, but an A35. You can tell one from the other by their different grilles (the 35 has horizontal central bars, the 45 ‘Panamericana’ vertical spars), the slightly different front bumper treatments, the subtle powerdomes on the bonnet of the more powerful car, and also its quad rather than dual exhaust exits. And yes, I did have to intently study photographs of both models side-by-side to notice most of those. The A45 S has been grabbing lots of headlines over the last few months, thanks almost entirely to its near incomprehensible 415bhp output – from just two litres, in a hot hatch – and this could trick you into thinking that…

A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, far away (well, early ’80s West Yorkshire if I’m being strictly accurate) my dad brought home a brochure for the Rover SD1. He must have been doing OK financially, judging by the fact we went to tropical Torquay for our holiday that year instead of Bridlington, and a new car was on my dad’s radar. I’d failed miserably to convince him that an Audi Coupe was a perfectly sensible mode of transport for a family of four. He ignored my more practical backup suggestion of a Talbot Tagora, too. Wise choice. Instead, his head had been turned by British Leyland’s finest. I took the brochure to school with me in the hope the other kids would be impressed and I would be…

TWINKLING LED HEADLAMPS ARE GAINING fast in the door mirror. Out of the golden glow that bathes California’s Pacific Coast Highway early on a Sunday morning, a trio of fast Audis have clearly just spotted the lodestar of their chosen doctrine. The first, a Nardo Grey S4 saloon, urgently pulls alongside, the side window drops, grins and thumbs up are exchanged, and then its driver clogs it off to the horizon. The same happens again with the next S4, and then with the TTS bringing up the rear. As fellow car enthusiasts I don’t blame them for being so excited – not only does the new RS6 in Tango Red look positively outrageous on the road, this will also be the first time that Ingolstadt’s high-performance ‘station wagon’ is to…

‘The car just hooks up and slingshots down the next straight, torque vectoring keeping the nose tight’ THERE WERE SOME IN SWEDEN HIGHLY sceptical of Geely’s ownership of Volvo, so Polestar CEO and ex-Volkswagen Group design director Thomas Ingenlath tells me over dinner. Their anxiety was understandable. China’s industrial juggernaut is a very different beast from those in the west. It wouldn’t have been outside the realms of possibility to have stripped Volvo to the bone, consuming decades of talent, experience and innovation like a kind of automotive Dementor before moving on to other victims. Clearly, this hasn’t happened. The relationship has been mutually beneficial. Geely does indeed draw from Volvo’s greatest minds and talents, but in turn it has granted Volvo more creative freedom than it’s enjoyed for decades,…

IN 2019 FERRARI SET OUT TO DISRUPT, confound and surprise. ‘We were becoming too predictable with our new models,’ said a spokesman. ‘People could work out that a V8 berlinetta would be followed in a year by the convertible and in another year by the special series model.’ So launching the F8 Tributo Spider so soon after the berlinetta version was a surprise, as was the drop-top version of the 812 Superfast, the 812 GTS, and no one saw the near-1000bhp SF90 hybrid or the barchetta-style SP1/2 coming. But the last of the five new models that Ferrari promised to deliver during 2019 was one that some had predicted: a coupe version of the Portofino. Only the Roma is not a Portofino with a hard-top, in the same way that…

JUST OCCASIONALLY, MOTOR RACING THROWS UP A one-on-one contest so raw, so brazenly gladiatorial, it’s as though just two cars are on track. Villeneuve versus Arnoux at Dijon in 1979. Mansell hounding Senna at Monaco in ’92. And Brands Hatch, July 1988, when two giants of touring car racing clashed in their Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworths. Britain’s Andy Rouse and Steve Soper were arguably the pre-eminent touring car drivers of their era. Rouse, a talented engineer, began in grasstrack racing, and worked at the famous Broadspeed team before going it alone. By 1984 he was BTCC champion in a Rover V8 engineered and run under his name, at which point his and fellow Rover driver Soper’s paths first crossed. For Soper, 31, this was his first year as a works…

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME we didn’t have a bone fide supercar in the final selection. Can eCoty truly be eCoty without at least one slice of exotica? I’m sure some of you will tell us, but if nothing else it made for a different vibe this year. We could have had any number of McLarens, Ferrari’s F8 Tributo or Lambo’s Huracán Evo. Any one of these would have been a glittering addition, but I can’t help thinking it would have felt like revisiting old ground. Instead we had a select but diverse group to compare. One with an obvious favourite and an equally obvious outlier, but which collectively amounted to an appealing and intriguing bunch of cars. Not long ago the advent of the 400bhp hot…

IT’S NOT UNUSUAL FOR ECOTY TO turn an underdog into a contender, but it is unusual for it to do so with three cars. And yet the Mercedes-AMG A45 S, Jaguar Project 8 Touring Edition and Morgan Plus Six all surprised and delighted during five days under a glorious Andalusian sun. The Morgan was a breath of fresh air, literally and metaphorically. It’s never going to make a global player stop and rethink its sports car strategy (more’s the pity), but on every drive throughout eCoty week it was a sliver of silvery-blue brilliance, reminding us that driving remains one of the greatest privileges and shouldn’t be taken for granted. The Plus Six makes you focus on every curve and dip in the road. It makes you plan every gearshift,…

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ISSUE 003. THE VERY FIRST CAR OF THE YEAR back in 1998 was just the third go at this thing a group of guys – Harry Metcalfe, John Barker, Dickie Meaden, art editor Damian Smith and publisher Allan Pattison, plus Peter Tomalin, current editor Stuart Gallagher and a host of freelance photographers – called evo. I don’t want to pat them too heartily on the back, but you’ve got to admire the blind ambition, the tenacity to secure the cars and the commitment they showed to the cause, even when the future of this experiment was uncertain at best and downright precarious in the cold light of day. That week in drizzly Wales set the dye for eCoty as we know it today: the best cars, the best roads the…

AS I ALLUDED TO LAST MONTH, AND AS YOU can plainly see from this month’s statistics, the Mini is quickly becoming an unlikely grand tourer. In under two months it’s covered more miles than my recently departed Kia Ceed GT longtermer managed in six, and thanks to last month’s jaunt to Monte Carlo and back, I spent around 45 hours behind the wheel in just a single week. While pretty much every car on sale today would be objectively capable of such a taxing few weeks, fewer would come out the other side without some black mark against their character. Impressive, then, that not only am I not completely sick of the sight of our Cooper S, but have actually warmed to it more than I was expecting. It helps…

SO THERE’S THIS CORNER AT THE Nürburgring, about which the engineers at Hyundai are kind of obsessed. If you’ve ever been to the Ring you’ll know it all too well. It’s reasonably terrifying and it’s called Schwedenkreuz. If you haven’t, it’s not so much a corner as an event you get beyond early in the lap and then think, ‘Excellent. Survived that somehow. Now let’s move on.’ Except, of course, it comes round again approximately 12.9 miles later. And the thing about Schwedenkreuz is that every time you go through it, you think you could have gone a fair bit quicker. Until eventually you discover how good the airbags are, I suppose. It’s a gentle downhill left-hander that’s almost but not quite flat in a horrendously high gear in pretty…

IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT EVO’S RELATIONSHIP with the current, F56-generation Mini has been strained at best. Too much BMW, not enough Mini is the common complaint, with carryover parts from and proportions set by BMW’s rapidly expanding front-wheel-drive range on which it’s based. The result may be a more comfortable and spacious Mini, but it’s also one that’s failed to capture hearts and fully entertain as a driver’s car on account of its bloated proportions and softened responses. The new, third-generation Mini John Cooper Works GP, then, has the unenviable task of not only living up to its exceptional predecessors, but also doing so from a less-than-ideal starting point. To this end, the latest GP has received the biggest set of upgrades over the standard Mini yet, with a…

IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE McLAREN launched a new model; at least a full 24 hours… So here is the latest addition to the Woking fleet, destined to cause the speculators and flippers sleepless nights, the internet to debate residual values, and the rest of us to ask when we can drive this 804bhp, two-seater-roadster, rear-wheel-drive supercar that appears to come without a windscreen. The answer is late 2020, possibly early 2021, when the first of the 399 customers will take delivery of their £1.4million Elvas, although we have been driven in a prototype to experience what life without a windscreen feels like, but we’ll come to that later. The Elva is the latest model to emerge from McLaren’s Ultimate Series garage and will head into production once the last…

IN THE ’80S, JAPANESE COMPANIES usually showed off their new cars at the Tokyo motor show. So for Nissan, maker of unexciting mush such as the Micra and Sunny, to fetch up at the 1985 Frankfurt motor show, bang slap on Europe’s doorstep, with a surprise new model, and for that surprise new model to be a mid-engined supercar, was a punchy move. And though its spec, including a 3-litre, quad-cam, 24-valve V6 with throttle-by-wire, plus four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering and anti-lock brakes sounded like concept car material of the time, Nissan proudly made clear this was a production car in waiting and would be on sale in Europe before the end of 1987. It even invited journalists to Japan and let them loose in hard-used engineering cars to show…

THE ROAD SEEMED TO GO ON forever, looping and twisting, climbing and falling between shady trees, the surface mostly superb, sometimes gnarled. There were corners that tightened unexpectedly, stomach-churning dips that bore scars and – very occasionally – a sequence of well-sighted wiggles that you could straight-line. Prime, 100 per cent hot hatch territory, and I was in a near-600bhp supersaloon, the Project 8, sandwiched between two prime hot hatches, the A45 S and the RS Trophy-R. Amazingly, the Jaguar was up for it. That it had the pace was no surprise. What was astonishing was that it had the poise to exploit it. But should I have been astonished? Arguably not. Project 8 was one of the last cars I worked on during my recent, six-year stint at Jaguar…

MY SIXTH YEAR AT EVO SEEMS as good a time as any to take part in my first evo Car of the Year, particularly when it’s the first one to venture outside of the British Isles since I started here in September 2014. You might have a few questions about it, so I’ll try to address them in order of importance. Yes, I did indeed bring along a pair of pristine white jeans. Yes, I was mercilessly ribbed for it. Yes, I did put the Cayman only second. And yes, taking part in eCoty is every bit as fun as it looks. I lost count of how many times Adam had to stress, as you’ve already read, ‘I promise eCoty isn’t usually like this,’ as we variously strolled through the…

‘LIKE THE SUPRA, THE 911 IS ALMOST TOO GROWN-UP, FORCING YOU TO PUSH HARDER TO UNEARTH ITS QUALITIES’ TOYOTA GR SUPRA & PORSCHE 911 CARRERA S TWO NAMES THAT RESONATE MORE WITH CAR enthusiasts would be hard to find. 911: the de facto sports car, heritage stretching back to 1964, innumerable race wins, some of the best driver’s cars of all time. Supra: darling of a newer generation of enthusiasts, iconic on the silver screen, Castrol, drifting, staggering horsepower. As it turns out, neither is eCoty material in their latest iterations. For the Supra, that’s perhaps not too surprising – for all the bluster and hammering of keyboards, older Supras were, in standard form, never all that. The Porsche is probably more surprising, at least if you subscribe to ‘brown…

EVO REGULARLY REMEMBERS THE CARS THAT won its Car of the Year gong and gently prods them to see if they’ve stood the test of time. But what about the opposite end of the scale? What about the stuff that came stone cold last? Were these hapless losers as disappointing and dismal as their poor scores might imply? Well, with the help of evo founding fathers John Barker and Richard Meaden, plus hirsute whippersnapper Henry Catchpole, we’re going to look back at 21 years of last-place entrants and ask, were they really so bad? We begin with 1998’s lowest ranker, the Alfa Romeo GTV V6, which Barker is quick to defend. ‘It’s often said there are no losers in eCoty because the chosen cars are the cream of that year’s…

AFTER NEARLY 11 MONTHS TOGETHER, IT’S goodbye to VX68 HGK. The red roadster was faithful in its task – part daily driver and urban transport, part palate cleanser and part trackday toy. In fact, let me be frank: the current ‘ND’ generation MX-5 is brilliant. Delicate, involving, free of excess pomp and circumstance, and yet never dull. It’s also a package that is something of a throwback. Other roadsters have piled on the pounds, yet in 2019 Mazda’s MX-5 still weighs around 1000kg, is still powered by a naturally aspirated four-cylinder engine and is still free of the superfluous elements that so often run contrary to the very point of a car such as this. But there were a couple of elements that didn’t sit quite so well. Not the…

WHEN WE’RE AWAY ON A TEST TOGETHER, it doesn’t take long for deputy editor Adam Towler and me to spark up a conversation about our Fast Fleet 911s. On the latest occasion the topic was how to cut even more weight from my 993. It began with the extremes – ‘Why don’t you get rid of the sunroof, maybe strip the interior, or how about lightweight body panels?’ – but eventually the more sensible subject of wheels came up. We both agreed the Ruf wheels currently fitted to my 993 look the business, but Adam pointed out that they are on the heavy side. Question was, could I find a lighter set that looked just as good? The obvious choices for a 993 are BBS E88s or Speedline wheels –…