Table of contents for February 2026 in Evo

WE ARE NOW IN THE NEXT STAGE of legislators doing their utmost to destabilise the European car industry, with the announcement that the total ban on the sale of internal combustionengined cars, which was due to take effect across Europe in 2035, will no longer go ahead. So that’s just several billion euros spent by manufacturers on projects that are no longer required to the same extent that they were when they first embarked on them. You couldn’t make it up. Although clearly that’s exactly what Europe’s legislators did just before going for a nice lunch. The decision isn’t a straight scrapping of the ban on the sale of ICE vehicles, though. From 2035, 90 per cent of all new cars sold must be zero-emission vehicles, which is down from…

THE ALBUFERA NATURAL PARK ALONG THE coastline south of Valencia is strewn with, of all things, rice paddies, feeding the voracious local appetite for paella. Between the vast expanses of shallow water are dirt-tracks that, save for the risk of pitching into the drink, provide the perfect environment to explore the new Skoda Fabia 130’s rallying heritage and handbrake-on balance. Oversteer, in other words. Now this wasn’t part of the prescribed plan, but since the Fabia is one of the first pretenders to true petrol-powered entry-level hot hatch status that we’ve seen in a while, a bit of off-piste mischief feels appropriate. Indeed, the small hot hatch market has been looking a little barren of late. Ford’s Fiesta ST and Hyundai’s i20 N have followed the Renault Sport Clio and…

IF YOU’RE A DRIVER WHO VALUES feedback, removing the rod that connects the steering wheel to the steering rack feels like a move that can only end badly for your sense of connection. This BMW 5-series is such a car. It’s fitted with steer-by-wire: there is no intermediate shaft, the connection between wheel and rack is only electrical. Yet lapping this short circuit in the rain, through the wheel I can feel the coarseness of the surface on one corner and the squeaky smoothness of the new asphalt on another in what seems to be authentic detail. Just to be sure, I’ve had a look under the bonnet and can confirm there is nothing connected to the stubby input shaft of the steering rack. Why would you want to disconnect…

ARMS DON’T GO FLYING SKYWARD in the evo office when volunteers are needed for a comparison between two Volkswagen Group MQB Evo-based machines. Especially on a slightly gloomy autumnal Wednesday morning. In the six years that the platform has been around, few cars that have MQB Evo at their heart have set ours aflutter. Doesn’t matter whether all or just the front wheels are driven either – both the Mk8 GTI and Golf R, to our great regret, leave us a little cold. There are exceptions. Audi’s RS3 has levelled up in its latest (and soon to be discontinued) generation, its Torque Splitter differential combining with the fivecylinder engine’s 394bhp to unlock appreciable throttle adjustability. Quiet though its rise has been, Cupra has also elevated its hottest Leon as a…

THE 911 GT3 RS AND GT3 RS MR WEREN’T THE ONLY pairing from the same manufacturer we timed around Anglesey in 2025. Since we last put a stopwatch on an Ariel, the Crewkerne craftsmen have created both an all-new Atom and an all-new Nomad, so where do the company’s fresh portfolio place on our leader board? The Atom is in the perfect spec for track work. It’s the more powerful Atom 4R, which starts at £77,940 but here has some choice options including front and rear wings, ABS, traction control, sequential paddle shift and three-way adjustable Öhlins dampers, plus a brand-new titanium and carbonfibre exhaust system. Meanwhile, the £68,970 Nomad 2 is here as a just-for-fun exercise, since this particular car is in full off-road spec: raised ground clearance, underbody…

IT’S BEEN ANOTHER BUSY MONTH behind the wheel of the Skoda Superb Sleeper, which has once again proven that it’s more than capable of hoovering up miles like a motorway-addicted Dyson. As usual, I’ve been darting around the country for shoots, but the standout trip was a run to north Wales for this issue’s Audi RS6 GT v BMW M5 CS twin test. Both cars were, unsurprisingly, utterly magnificent. The M5 CS in particular is still a personal favourite of mine: a glorious mix of menace, refinement and raw energy. Seeing these two monstrous performance machines sprinting through the Welsh countryside in wet-weather season (or, as it’s known in Wales, Tuesday) was nothing short of spectacular. Meanwhile, the Sleeper trotted along happily in tow, looking positively petite next to the…

‘STOP!’ YELLS ASTON PARROTT FROM the passenger seat. ‘Stop stop stop.’ That means either something terrible has happened or – as I’m hoping – his photographer’s eye has spotted something too good to miss. We swing left and the tyres crunch to a halt in a gravel layby, V8 timbre falling to an idle hum. ‘That’ll be a cool shot,’ he says, looking at a derelict manufacturing complex over the road, strewn with graffiti and crumbling to bits. It’s a beige, featureless building that looks like a prime spot for underground crime. Hmm. I’m struggling to see the vision. Nose lift up, we teeter through the entrance and past an empty security booth, carefully dodging nails and debris. It’s an eerie place, the building’s internals stripped bare and acting like…

THE AUDI RS Q3 NO LONGER IS AND, BY all expectations, shall never be again. So now Cupra is stepping in to sate what appetite is left for five-pot crossovers with a 2.5-litre ‘VZ5’ version of its Formentor. It’s the kind of multi-cylinder heart transplant that rarely happens these days and that legislative constraints will soon make all but impossible. The VZ5, then, feels like a last hurrah for a brand otherwise backed into a corner to deliver as compelling a range of electric cars as possible. This isn’t the first time this car has received this engine, though. The pre-facelift Formentor got the VZ5 treatment back in 2021, but while that car’s 7000-unit run was almost double the 4000 units of this new one, it was exclusively a left-hooker.…

THE ROADS AROUND THIS part of Italy aren’t great, so it’s quite a while before we find one suitable for a decent slug of wide open throttle. There have been hints, glimpses of potential, but when the throttle finally goes to the stop and stays there, the Temerario shocks. A staggering burst of acceleration launches us up the road with ever-increasing intensity, and just to add to the thrill, when full boost hits, the back end overspeeds and steps a few degrees out of line, as if the car itself is surprised by how much torque it’s got – and that’s with traction control on. Gets the pulse racing, I can assure you, and we’re still a couple of thousand revs off the heady 10,000rpm limiter. The magnitude of the…

THINK RESTOMOD AND INEVITABLY US-based Singer springs to mind, its Porsche 911s having cemented themselves at the top of the resto-tree for more than a decade. There are others, of course, from Kimera’s rather lovely Lancia 037 tribute to pretty much everything that Alfaholics produces, not forgetting Eagle’s fabulously reimagined E-types. And now there’s a new contender for a place in the top flight of restomods. Introducing the Encor Series 1, an update of a late-1990s modern classic, inspired by an ice-cool 1970s icon. This lithe, light wedge – under 1200kg is the target weight – is a homage to the original S1 Lotus Esprit. It’s designed and manufactured by Encor, a UK start-up with backing from a company you’ve never heard of, Skyships, though if you’re fortunate enough to…

STANDING IN THE HEAT OF THE SPANISH SUN, the idyllic sounds of nature are shattered by what sounds like an approaching A-10 Thunderbolt aeroplane firing its Gatling gun. But, thankfully, it isn’t. It’s actually the sound of the antilag on a Dacia; more specifically, the company’s Dakar contender, the Sandrider. Beyond the one-make Dacia Cup series and oddities such as the N24 Logan, ice-spec Lodgy Glace and a wide-bodied Logan designed for the Swedish Touring Car Championship, Dacia hasn’t spent many of its 59 years creating motorsport contenders. The Sandrider, developed in collaboration with Prodrive, is without doubt its most significant yet. It first broke cover in 2022 as the Dacia Manifesto concept, and you would have been forgiven for thinking it was just another show car created purely to…

@evomagazine @evomagazine @officialevomagazine IT’S GONE. KY74 EGJ HAS DEPARTED EVO’S FAST Fleet, leaving not only a significant physical gap in the car park but also a notable mental one in my grey matter. There are faster, more exotic, more powerful, more expensive cars that flow through our hands, but after 50 weeks and 22,000 miles an RS6 Performance is an impossibly tough act to follow when it comes to the everyday performance car. No, you don’t require 621bhp in an everyday car. A four-wheel-drive system is also overkill if we’re being honest. And 22-inch wheels and Continental SportContact 7 UHP tyres? Not really necessary. Brakes the size of dinner plates that generate enough heat to warm a three-bed semi when you’re hauling this Audi’s 2220kg (on our scales) kerb weight…

OUR HEATED DISCUSSION ABOUT OUR son’s university maintenance loan was suddenly cut short by a sharp, violent thwack! – a sound like an assassin’s bullet striking the windscreen. This wasn’t the tiny tap of a rogue stone flicked up from the asphalt. It felt deliberate, targeted, and like it had come from above… Perhaps kids messing about on an overhead bridge. Two seconds of stunned silence followed before my wife finally caught her breath. ‘It’s alright – it’s just a chip,’ I said, trying to reassure her. And possibly myself too. Thankfully modern windscreens are a far cry from the fragile panes of yesteryear, when a single stone could shatter the screen in an instant, bringing your journey to an abrupt halt. Even so, something about this impact didn’t sit…

ALPINE DODGES THE QUESTION OF WHICH RIVAL the new £61,390 A390 GT is aimed at, but does point out that its latest EV is deliberately smaller and attempts to be more elegant than Porsche’s £71,900 Macan 4 Electric. Its position within Alpine’s line-up mirrors that of Stuttgart’s SUV too – that of a product quite apart from the cars for which its maker is largely beloved, but one that is necessary in order to meet punitive emissions targets. However, the A390 doesn’t exist at the expense of authenticity, says Alpine, insisting that it has worked hard to instil a delicacy and agility into the model, mixing some expensive bespoke componentry with the inevitable partsbin plunder to achieve its goal. It’s certainly a bold design, though the slightly fiddly triangular detailing…

PERHAPS THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE water at Ingolstadt. In Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein novel, it’s there that Victor creates his monster through a mysterious mixture of chemistry and alchemy. And it’s there that the Audi board signed off the monstrous RS6 Avant GT. From evo’s very first test in 2024, it was clear that some kind of similar alchemy was at work. This was more than an RS6 with stickers: it was blessed with a colossal turn of pace but also remarkable precision. It was very much alive. In his first drive of the GT (evo 327), Richard Meaden commented that there was something of the BMW M5 CS about it. Praise doesn’t come much higher in the corridors of evo Towers: the CS is still talked about in hushed…

‘WEIGHING LESS THAN 900KG, IT EMBODIES THE ANALOGUE DREAM’ CONCOCT A RECIPE FOR THE MOST EXCITING ROAD-LEGAL sports car you can imagine and you might just come up with the Nichols N1A. Smaller than a Lotus Elise and weighing less than 900kg, it is powered by a mid-mounted 7-litre V8 good for 700bhp. Manual, rear-wheel drive and wrapped in curvaceous composite bodywork harking back to an age before huge spoilers and the obsession with downforce, it embodies the analogue dream. How did the project come about and who’s behind it? As with the origins of most small sports car companies, an idea existed in the head of its founder for many years before the dream became reality. In the case of Brit John Minett, that idea was to capture the…

‘EXTRACTING THE BEST FROM THE MANTHEY RS REQUIRES A LEAP OF FAITH’ YOU DOUBTLESS KNOW THE 992 GT3 RS MANTHEY KIT by now, so we won’t spend too long running through what distinguishes a car such equipped from the standard model. It’s quicker to cover what hasn’t been touched: the engine and gearbox. In truth there’s very little juice left to squeeze from the 4-litre flat-six, which is already something of a masterpiece. An independent tuner might decide to bore it out by a few hundred cc and lose some of the restrictive emissions kit, but being part of Porsche means whatever Manthey does must remain within the series production car’s homologation approval. So 518bhp and 343lb ft it is. The powertrain may be off-limits but pretty much everything else…

IF YOU READ LAST MONTH’S ECOTY feature you will have seen the Octa in all its pomp, rocking the knobbly tyres while all around it sat on sticky Cup 2s. These 20-inch ‘POR’ or Professional Off Road tyres – Goodyear Wranglers – are what the Octa was born to wear, but back in September I tried EUZ back-to-back with another Octa fitted with the 22-inch all-season alternatives at evo’s season-end trackday at Goodwood. I also had a quick run out on the Sussex lanes. I’d been curious to feel what it was like on more conventional rubber for a while, but having decided the Octa would be included in eCoty it was important we could make an informed decision on which tyres it should wear for that test. Not least…