Table of contents for June 2022 in Evo

McLAREN’S APPOINTMENT OF MICHAEL Leiters as a replacement for former CEO Mike Flewitt should be welcomed for the significant news that it is. In the former Ferrari chief technical officer, McLaren has recruited an engineer with one of the most polished CVs in the industry, Leiters having worked with and learned from some of the best automotive executives in the business. At Porsche he played an integral role in the Cayenne’s development under the watchful eye of the company’s head of development, Wolfgang Dürheimer, and current McLaren non-executive director and acting CEO Michael Macht. Then there are the cars that left Maranello under his watch from 2014, where he answered to Sergio Marchionne and oversaw the successful transformation of Ferrari’s naturally aspirated mid-engined V8 cars to today’s award-winning turbocharged V8…

TALK PORSCHE AND EVs AND ONE NAME dominates the conversation: Taycan. For good reason: it’s one of the very best electric vehicles from a legacy auto manufacturer and more than a match for the EV startups raising billions of dollars every time someone posts about them on social media. But Porsche’s current electrification journey actually started with hybrid versions of the Cayenne and Panamera, though neither set any records for their purely electric range, double figures being cause for the sort of celebration usually reserved for an Italian win in the Six Nations. However, during ‘you know what’, Porsche went through the Panamera line-up and instigated a range of updates and mechanical changes. The updates were modest – mostly external nips and tucks, plus interior tech upgrades including Apple CarPlay.…

IN THE WEIRD WORLD OF CAR connections there are few more improbable tales than the one about the ill-fated baby Boxster that owed its existence to the original SEAT Ibiza. This stranger-than-fiction story starts with SEAT’s lofty plans for the ’80s, hatched after the split from its sugar daddy, Fiat. To help achieve these dreams and deliver the first-gen Ibiza of 1984 it hired the finest car consultants from across Europe, including Giugiaro for styling and Karmann for body engineering. Porsche was signed up to take care of powertrains and duly delivered a new engine and gearbox package before boldly pitching an additional use for it: would SEAT be interested in going splits on a mid-engined sports car? Amazingly, the Spanish said yes and design work started under the nickname…

ASTON MARTIN’S HEAD OF DESIGN, MAREK Reichman, says he’s ‘seriously inspired’ by the EV era that we are all now inexorably heading towards, ‘because it will enable us to start all over again, with a genuinely clean sheet of paper.’ How so? ‘Because from now on we will be able to put the “engine” of the car anywhere we want to, which is something we’ve never been able to do before,’ he explains, pointing out that cars with big V8s and V12s in their noses might look great in isolation but are always destined to appear broadly the same as one another, ultimately. Which is all well and good until you look at his team’s latest creation, the unfeasibly dramatic but also very obviously front-engined/rear-driven V12 Vantage, because despite the…

‘WHAT’S IT REMAPPED TO? I’M GOING FOR a thousand on mine next.’ Is this what life is like as a GT-R driver? Either way, a truly melancholic moment has been shattered. Perhaps it’s for the best. Standing on Porthmadog beach, the sun dipping towards the scenery as it casts a golden glow over a pair of true evo heroes, I’d been in danger of becoming far too poetic. Luckily a clingy onlooker possessing both an open bottle of Smirnoff and a thick Yorkshire accent has stopped anyone getting too morose. Shaky phone videos of his heavily modified Nissan performing some questionable launches put paid to the seriousness of the occasion entirely. Why are a thirty-grand Renault and a supercar-baiting Nismo having a romantic rendezvous, anyway? Well, both the Mégane RS…

FOURTEEN YEARS – THAT’S HOW LONG AGO IT WAS that we crowned Nissan’s R35 GT-R evo Car of the Year. Blending muscle car with supercar, the GT-R triumphed over a line-up that included an Aston Martin Vantage 4.7, Gallardo LP560-4, Alfa’s delectable 8C Competizione, Porsche’s 911 GT2 (997) and Renault Sport’s unhinged Mégane R26.R. The GT-R took them all on and strode to the podium. It was the car’s one and only appearance at eCoty, though with hindsight the latest Nismo edition that we have just said goodbye to should have been at eCoty ’21. In fact a few of us could probably make a case for a GT-R being present at every eCoty since its 2008 debut – that’s how highly regarded Nissan’s monster is. There are some who…

IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, A V12 LAMBORGHINI IS not a purchase for the faint-hearted. This is purebred supercar territory, with bills as alarming as the thrills are exciting. In today’s world of excess-all-areas styling, Luc Donckerwolke’s Murciélago design remains as fresh and clean as it was in 2001, a simple look that still manages to deliver a head-turning, necksnapping reaction two decades on. It has it all, from its low stubby nose to its never-ending rear deck, the drama of its scissor doors and a footprint to make the jaws of a width restrictor salivate. It’s supercar theatre at its best. And it continued with the Aventador, a wedge of exotica that unashamedly stuck to Lamborghini’s iconic supercar DNA to deliver a unique driving experience that only a car…

THE FOCUS ST IS NOT A CAR TO WIN group tests and appears to be caught in a strange hinterland. It’s not as hardcore as most rivals, nor as powerful in many cases, but it still commands a high price. However, specify the ST as an estate (and hence automatically without the hatch-only Performance Pack that includes adaptive dampers, a Track driving mode, launch control and rev-matching for the six-speed manual gearbox) and there’s a subtle change to what this car is all about. Suddenly, the mighty Civic Type R and entertaining i30 N don’t really figure. And perhaps the rather handsome, relatively understated and refreshingly simple formula could be a winning combination once the loan period extends from a mere week on dreamy, challenging roads to a full year…

IT’S CALLED THE LUCID AIR. A PURE EV from a Silicon Valley start-up with huge ambitions, motorsport pedigree (they supply batteries to Formula E) and personnel who know what it means to truly turn the world upside down. CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson formerly served as vice president of vehicle engineering at Tesla and was chief engineer on the Model S project, the clean-sheet design that established Tesla and set it on the path to becoming the most valuable car manufacturer on the planet. In what must feel like a previous life, Rawlinson was also chief engineer at Lotus Cars and principle engineer at Jaguar. It’s quite the journey. Now, imagine if Lucid could create a car with as seismic a shift in technology as the Model S, coupled to…

ON THE FACE OF IT, A GIULIA VELOCE upgraded with the chassis and looks of the Giulia Quadrifoglio sounds like an excellent idea. Alfa Romeo in the UK certainly needs something appealing to help prop up its dismal sales figures (just 1574 cars last year), and the combination of the Quadrifoglio’s wonderful dynamics with a powertrain that’s much cheaper to buy – and then run – could expose the model’s sparkling qualities to a much broader audience. Step forward the Giulia Estrema, the first ‘global special series’ Alfa Romeo, which at first acquaintance appears to be exactly the above; a halfway house between Veloce and the big Q. How exciting! Alas, it transpires that the reality is rather different… In fact it takes quite a while to drill down into…

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OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS WE’LL BE SAYING ‘au revoir’ and ‘sayonara’ to plenty more iconic evo cars as their makers turn off their fuel pumps and switch on the chargers. Icons that have thrilled and fascinated, excited and engaged us. Heroes that some have loved and lost; for others an itch that still needs scratching. Whichever cliché applies, there’s an evo hero that meets your requirements. Over the following pages we’ve selected a handful of performance cars that have been issued their last rites and will be replaced by models that will deliver an altogether different driving experience when they debut with a bootful of batteries and an electric motor. So stop fantasising; now is the time to live that performance car dream.…

WHERE TO START WITH WHAT COULD ARGUABLY BE the greatest sports cars of all time? Not only did the Elise and Exige save Lotus from extinction, they have inspired generations to experience the thrill of driving in its purest form. And they continued to do so right up until Lotus finally called time on the Elise-based family of cars last year. As a used proposition, the problem is which to choose. A Series 1 Elise feels a default choice: it’s the original and for many the purest. There’s a marvellous simplicity about everything it does, pure in its approach to driving and rewarding the driver across every mile. Those early cars, with their 1.8-litre K-series engines complete with soggy bread for a head gasket, might have had lowly outputs, but…

IF YOU PHOTOGRAPH DRAGSTERS and NASCAR racing for a living, you might imagine that your hobbies would entail doing something more relaxing and tranquil. Not Phoenix-based Mark J Rebilas. The American pro-sports, action and ex-US Navy photographer prefers to keep his adrenaline spiking in his downtime. ‘I might go tornado chasing next week,’ he reveals as if it’s just another everyday activity. ‘Tornado chasing is a hobby of mine. One of my good friends, a fellow photographer, he’s one of the top storm chasers in the country, so I tag along with him and there’s some really wild stuff.’ The pursuit of ‘wild stuff’ is in Rebilas’s genes. His father, Gil, was a motorsport photographer, too. ‘My father grew up being a big fan of drag racing and he would…

YOU MIGHT RECOGNISE THIS LATEST BMW to join the Fast Fleet from our four-wheel-drive group test a few issues ago. Before I had so much as clapped eyes on it, this M4 Competition with M xDrive had been to Scotland and back, doing battle with various other turbocharged, all-wheel-drive performance cars in the hands of Messrs Bovingdon, Barker and Towler. As such, reading issue 295 felt to me a bit like a new girlfriend presenting you with a photo album of her last holiday with a previous boyfriend. Anyway, as I walked up to the M4 in the evo car park I decided I was going to pretend that test never happened, ignore the odometer and start over. And it was a good start. Not every drive leads out of…

YOU HAVEN’T HEARD MUCH ABOUT THE Towler personal fleet in recent months. Years even, to my eternal shame, in the case of the little red French one. But we had a chat in the evo office recently where it was decided that, in the spirit of ‘keeping it real’, it was just as relevant to talk about what hasn’t happened to our own cars as it was to discuss what actually has. And in the case of the former I am certainly not short of material… First, the 911. Recently my 996.2 Carrera has done little more than hide from the frost and salt in a garage, but I can’t blame the inactivity on the weather alone. Firstly, I finally traced the knock from the front suspension to the Eibach…

NEW RANGE ROVERS DON’T COME around very often, so when they do you can be certain Land Rover will pull out all the diff locks to ensure its flagship hits the spot. Here we are, then, with the fifth-generation car, built on a brand new platform that will also see service under the next Range Rover Sport (and, it’s safe to assume, other future Land Rovers). Like its predecessor, the new Range Rover is built around an aluminium monocoque, but in this case there’s more steel in the mix, forming transverse rings around the shell at the A-, C- and D-pillars and looping the front door openings, boosting rigidity to the benefit of suspension location and refinement. The new car is 53mm longer than the old one with an extra…

Lilienthal Berlin Chronograph Remix II €379 lilienthal.berlin Since it was founded in 2015, Lilienthal Berlin has won several design awards for its Bauhaus-style watches, but it also offers those designs with an impressive number of colour and strap/bracelet variations. This Chronograph model, for example, is currently available in 63 different combinations, including the particularly arresting green-yellow theme pictured here. Bell & Ross BR 03-94 Multimeter £4900 bellross.com As befits its Multimeter name, this new Bell & Ross squeezes no fewer than five separate scales onto its dial. Three can be used to calculate speed over different distance units, while for athletic types there are pulsometer and asthmometer registers too. A black ceramic case and rubber strap completes the look of this limited edition, of which just 500 will be made.…

THE SAFETY CAR IS OUT AGAIN AT BATHURST. Not for a crash or a breakdown. Not for a spin or an oil spill. Nope, there’s an echidna on the track: think large hedgehog. The field bunches up, the spiky mammal is returned to the bush, and the race essentially starts afresh. Only in Australia. Also only in Australia, V8 Supercars, the star attraction at the Bathurst 1000. Like kangaroos and koalas, these indigenous racers are peculiar to the land down under. A sort of silhouette series, V8 Supercars have a common chassis, roll-cage, basic suspension design, brakes, tyres, wheels, clutch, ECU, transaxles and axles. As implied by the championship’s title, motive duties are performed by a V8, the block of which can be sourced from Ford, General Motors or, bizarrely,…

THE RAW APPEAL OF A PUREBRED V12 BEGINS way before the moment it barks into life. If you’ve ever been the one to turn the key or press the start button, you’ll know the mix of excitement and anticipation that fizzes through your gut. Likewise the adrenaline that sparks around your central nervous system when you squeeze the throttle to its stop. An experience that transcends driving mere mortal machinery, uncorking a V12 is something you never forget and will never get enough of. Lamborghini knows this better than anyone. Even better, dare I say it, than Ferrari. Both company’s founders understood that having V12 engines with their names cast proudly into the cam covers bestowed their cars with status, technical prowess and abundant performance. Today, some 75 years since…

CARS AND POLITICS DON’T MIX, THEY say, but when you’ve got a Lightning Yellow Toyota Supra on loan and a roll of blue gaffer tape in the cupboard, well, I couldn’t resist showing my support for the people of Ukraine. So I went outside, thought about putting two massive blue stripes up the bonnet, then thought better of this and applied two small strips of tape beneath the tailgate instead. And – tada! – the Toyota Ukra was born. Since when, our Supra has attracted even more attention than it normally does, all of it 100 per cent positive. I, too, am learning to like our small-engined Supra more and more as the miles go by. I like its size, its relative simplicity, and the fact that its cabin is…

NUMBERS RARELY LIE IN THEIR impartial delivery of hard data, and despite the Urus being so far removed from what you and I think a driver’s car should be, last year 5021 people considered it the car for them. Some 1547 have bought one during the first quarter of 2022 already. At its launch in 2018 the Urus was one of those cars that despite everything about it – from the way it looked, to the weight and size of it and what it stood for – still left you impressed by how capable a beast it was. Its 641bhp and 627lb ft was, as you’d expect, more than ample to overcome its 2200kg kerb weight, and it still is today as it shatters your senses when you wind its…