Inhaltsverzeichnis für July 2022 in Evo

CARS ARE GETTING TOO HEAVY, TOO powerful and too fast for the road. We can’t enjoy them for fear of being papped by a camera poking out from the rear window of a Ford Transit or the self-appointed public police force submitting dashcam footage of us doing something they don’t approve of despite it not being remotely dangerous, reckless or illegal. Yep, driving in the UK hasn’t been much fun for a while now and conditions aren’t improving anytime soon. Actually, that’s not strictly true. It’s still possible to gather a (small) group of friends and enjoy a few days away in each other’s company on the road and in the restaurant later that night. Such trips might take more planning than they once did, but from our own experience,…

WHEN IT COMES TO ITALIAN EXOTICA few cars boast a more evocative name or more mythical status than the Bizzarrini 5300 GT Corsa. Born out of a beef with Enzo Ferrari – boy did that man have a knack for making enemies – this low, lithe and lasciviously curvy machine was the brainchild of a dazzlingly talented engineer by the name of Giotto Bizzarrini. To understand the car you have to understand the man, so before we get under the skin and behind the wheel of the 5300 GT Corsa Revival, let me offer a bit of a history lesson. Bizzarrini made his mark well before embarking on his eponymous venture; first at Alfa Romeo, where he worked as a test driver and engineer in Alfa’s skunkworks, before being headhunted…

THE EVO TRACKDAY CALENDAR HAS burgeoned in recent years, with brilliant British circuits such as Goodwood, Brands Hatch and Oulton Park joining our ‘home’ venue of Bedford Autodrome. But now we’re taking things to another level for what promises to be our most exciting track event yet: the evo Spa-Francorchamps trackday! Held in association with RSR, we’ll be joining one of their Premium Trackdays on 18 October at arguably the world’s finest circuit. So you get full access to everything RSR offers, plus a Eurotunnel crossing, one night’s accomodation and dinner with evo the night before the event. The Spa-Francorchamps circuit needs no introduction. A current F1 venue, it has managed to keep the challenge, atmosphere and aesthetics befitting its elder statesman status in the world of motorsport, and hence…

ARGUMENTS RAGE. TO WING OR NOT TO WING? To change or not to change? Proponents of either camp fiercely extol the virtues of their chosen philosophy. The question of GT3 vs Touring and manual vs PDK is not something, realistically, one should lose sleep over. However, I love how it’s come to symbolise some sort of philosophical war that purists and enthusiasts can wage over pints in the pub, on Twitter or internet forums, and – for the lucky ones – in their own minds before speccing their new Porsche GT3. A sane person with no real skin in the game would surmise this handwringing is absurd. Of course, there’s no time for sanity here. So here we have two GT3s that represent each side of this dilemma. In the…

SOME CAR PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE rabid car enthusiasts. Tom Salt, not so much. For most of his career he’s made a living from shooting everything from Abarths to Yugos, but his fascination is not with the cars themselves, rather with the places they can take you, the people you can meet in them and the adventures they can take you on. He refers to this cocktail of opportunities as the ‘potential’ within the car, and during his career he has actively sought out jobs likely to unlock that potential. ‘The cars themselves are merely a vehicle for your imagination,’ remarks Salt, ‘and what they are is unimportant. I was walking back from town today and there was a Citroën Berlingo parked around the corner, and I can honestly say I would…

WE ALL KNOW THAT IT’S SOMETIMES fun to set arbitrary parameters when searching for a car. And if you were trying to spend under £100,000 on a red car with a power-to-weight ratio of between 287 and 288bhp per ton, then you might find yourself comparing a new BMW M4 xDrive with a Ferrari 550 Maranello. Stranger things have happened. Until this month I hadn’t driven the car that was crowned evo Car of the Decade in issue 066, but, thanks to Bell Sport & Classic and a generous owner, the situation was rectified on a sunny spring day in Buckinghamshire. Now, I’m not about to launch into a retrospective road test of the 550, but a couple of things struck me in relation to my long-termer. The first is…

AFTER SIX MONTHS IN A SKODA OCTAVIA vRS (see evo 295 for the end-of-term round-up) I was looking forward to a new driving experience and had been wondering what, from all the possibilities available, might come my way. And now here it is, my new longtermer: a Skoda Kodiaq vRS! OK, so it’s another Skoda, but this might actually be the perfect photographer’s car. It will also be the first SUV I have driven from the Skoda range, but it’s not the first we’ve had on our fleet. You may recall that evo art ed Rich Browne ran a Kodiaq vRS back in 2019. That one was the 236bhp diesel version; this time we’ve got the 242bhp petrol, which mates its 2-litre TSI unit to a sevenspeed DSG gearbox and…

I’VE NOW PUT ALMOST 3000 MILES ON the 508 and in many respects it fits my life very neatly. It’s plenty roomy enough running a couple of 6ft-plus schoolboys around, sometimes with a couple of black Labs in the back, and it swallows my mountain bike with ease. Many of the runs I do can be accomplished on electric, or very nearly, even though the range on a full charge has settled at 23 miles against a brochure claim of 26. It’s refined and comfortable on longer journeys too, and also returns good mpg. In fact, it was a surprise to find that the tank of this big car only takes 43 litres. What of the dynamics? It’s not a car that gives up its abilities freely. I find the…

SILENCE. NOT SOMETHING YOU EXPECT when you’ve just fired-up Porsche Motorsport’s hottest new development prototype. But then there’s never been a Porsche Motorsport product quite like the 718 GT4 ePerformance. This full-EV machine – which packs a 1073bhp punch and can lap most racetracks faster than a 992 Cup car – is billed as the future of Porsche’s one-make motorsport business. This makes the GT4 ePerformance a Big Deal, both for marking the moment Porsche took another emotive step away from internal combustion, and for the company accepting that its motorsport customers (of which there are thousands) will expect and want to go racing in EV machines. Crucially, it’s also a pointer to what we can expect from Porsche’s future EV sports cars, as everything learned in the development of…

YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE FASTEST BMW EVER. ON A NUMBER of parameters, too. Which is something of a relief, because the M4 CSL has a lot to live up to. Headline billing in M Division’s minor product onslaught during its 50th year, for one thing, counterbalancing the wildly controversial XM plug-in hybrid SUV while it’s at it. But those three letters – standing for Competition (formerly Coupé), Sport and Lightweight – put considerable heft on its shoulders. Somewhat ironic given the model’s intense weight saving. Much like GTO Ferraris, the CSL lineage makes sporadic, infrequent appearances, perhaps putting all the more pressure on the spec sheet of each car deemed worthy of the badge. Luckily, the M4 CSL’s doesn’t disappoint, and its headline figure is an almost suspiciously neat 100…

IF A EUROPEAN ROAD TRIP IS A PETROLHEAD rite of passage, then a road trip to one of the world’s greatest race circuits is about as good as it gets. With overland travel back to normal and the trackday season in full swing, we’re hitting the open road. Destination Spa-Francorchamps. Finding track time at Spa isn’t difficult. Many of the UK’s best trackday companies have slots in their calendars, but on this occasion we’re attending an open pitlane day organised by RSR. With an impressive base just outside the circuit gates and a fleet of track-prepared cars available to hire – from Hyundai i30 N to 991.2 GT3 RS – RSR offers more than a dozen dates spread evenly across the year. So, you’re heading to Spa, but what do…

IT’S THE FERRARI’S DAY. THE ITALIAN CREW BUZZ around the SF90 with tyre pressure monitors, and leaf blowers to cool the brakes and reduce heat soak into the hubs, and they hoist it into the air for new carbonfibre wheels (£14,000 a set) and Cup 2 R tyres after every session. It’s fascinating and the commitment is admirable. Ferrari is a car manufacturer, but at its heart it’s still a race team. Enzo would approve. By comparison, support for the Lamborghini Huracán STO and Caterham Seven 420 Cup is more understated. Each car has two handlers but they’re present to answer questions and just in case there’s a mechanical or electrical gremlin. Neither car is plugged in, jacked up or taken into a shuttered garage at any point. In many…

THE RIBBLEHEAD VIADUCT AND THE Bentley Continental R. One dominating the landscape with its sheer scale, a colossal feat of engineering, a towering monument to a bygone age… the other a Victorian railway viaduct. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But there is something reassuringly substantial and undeniably last-century about this Bentley. From doors that shut like those of an Edwardian railway carriage to the solid metal eyeball vents in the dash, to the magnificent 6.75-litre V8, the origins of which can be traced back to the 1950s, this is a motor car heavy with old-school engineering and craftsmanship. Just how heavy? Two thousand, four hundred and fifty kilos. That’s a lot of Bentley. To propel it briskly down the road requires considerable motive force, hence the single, very substantial Garrett AiResearch turbocharger…

THE GT HAS BEEN CALLED THE Goldilocks model in the Alpine lineup, combining as it does the more powerful engine from the A110S with the softer suspension from the standard car. It’s been said many times before, but that non-S chassis really is refreshing when you’re tackling a typical British B-road, allowing the car to breathe with the surface passing beneath it and clearly feeling set up for road driving rather than lap times. To experience it is to be reminded how so many other modern performance cars pummel their way along the asphalt as their suspension attempts to provide maximum control while managing excessive weight. That said, from what I’d read and heard about the basic A110’s ride, I had expected our similarly suspended GT to be even smoother…

THERE’S SOMETHING ABSURD about an Audi A3 fitted with carbon-ceramic brakes, but I love the geekiness of it. They’re part of the RS Dynamic Pack, a £5500 option that also adds RS Adaptive Suspension with Audi Drive Select (including the additional RS Individual, RS Performance and RS Torque Rear modes) and the RS sports exhaust system. In case you hadn’t realised, the RS3 is an RS and all options must be prefixed with RS. Oh, it also includes a top speed increase to RS 180mph. I am generally a huge fan of ceramics, not just for their durability but also because the huge savings in unsprung and rotational mass really do enhance steering feel, ride quality and roll-on acceleration. However, I would love to try an RS3 on standard discs…

OUR URUS RETURNED TO LAMBORGHINI before we headed to Anglesey this month, which meant it missed its weigh-in and an opportunity to kill its set of Pirelli P Zeros. Then again, the Huracán STO we did have was the far more suitable attendee for a track session, and what would we have learned from throwing a (claimed) 2200kg around Anglesey’s Coastal Circuit, other than that the Irish Sea looks perilously close when you’re sitting up high, and that 641bhp and that much mass takes some stopping? Not much more, I suspect, because during its time with us Lamborghini’s take on the VW Group SUV never felt like a machine you would dial yourself into, rather it’s a blunt instrument to crack as many nuts as you can find. But isn’t…

CHANGE PETRIFIES US; REMOVES US from our comfort zone; whips away the security blanket we’ve clung onto oh-so-tightly to for oh-so-long; leaves us feeling vulnerable and afraid of what comes next. We liked it just the way it was. Why did someone have to change it? Progress is the answer (or the justification, depending on your level of cynicism) and, in our automotive world, fear-inducing change comes in many forms. When Porsche announced in the mid-90s that the 911 would no longer rely on the atmosphere to keep its flat-six cool, the hand-wringing was so severe it could strip the skin from the gnarliest of knuckles. The switch to automatic or double-clutch gearboxes at the cost of the manual gearbox? Less of a polarising change, more of an answer to…

OF ALL THE UK’S SPECIALIST CAR MAKERS, MORGAN IS FAR and away the oldest and most celebrated. It was founded in 1909 by HFS Morgan, a motoring pioneer who designed a light and inexpensive three-wheeler as transport for the masses that sustained the company well into the 1930s. By then, HFS recognised it was time for change and in 1936 introduced the 4/4 (four cylinders/four wheels). It was an immediate hit and the handsome Plus 4 derivative has set the style for most subsequent four-wheel Morgans. Change comes slowly; HFS’s sliding-pillar suspension was still in use until 1975 and the third-generation three-wheeler has just been launched (see evo 296). Meanwhile, the current Plus Four and Plus Six share the look of the 1950s Plus 4 and, although based on a…

‘Chrysler had added another couple of turbos for good measure’ IN THE 1990s CHRYSLER DEVELOPED A conspicuous desire to create more than mumsy minivans and milky rental fleet fodder. It made this clear through ritzy concept cars such as the Phaeton of 1997, an upmarket four-door convertible, and the Chronos of 1998, a huge luxury saloon running the V10 from a Dodge Viper. Also in 1998 a merger with Daimler-Benz gave Chrysler access to German-engineered rear-drive parts that allowed the creation of the more upmarket Crossfire and 300C. But even though the company had been telegraphing its social climbing desires for years, its centrepiece for the 2004 Detroit show still came as a shock because it was this: a Chrysler supercar. To look at, this concept certainly had the heads-wivelling…

THE ANTICIPATION HAS BEEN HUGE. That combination of excitement and slight trepidation bringing a tight knot in the stomach as the time approaches and you wonder how good it will be. It has seemed like an age since first reading all the various, mouth-watering options available. And now it’s here and it looks even better than I expected. The crisp edges, the soft interior… it’s a pizza good enough to make a statue salivate. We’re sitting outside Chalet Reynard, about two-thirds of the way up Mont Ventoux, and parked across the road is something equally anticipated and equally spectacular to behold. As I tuck into the circular cuisine of champions, I glance at the new Lotus Emira for the umpteenth time. ‘It really does look good, doesn’t it?’ I mumble…

RSR HAS BEEN RUNNING EVENTS AT SPA AND the Nürburgring for more than 20 years, ever since owner Ron Simons (pictured bottom right) started making the trip from his native South Holland to the Ring in one of his Alfa Romeo 75s and began offering trackday hire and tuition. These days his business has grown into a leading proponent of the trackday scene, with bases at Spa, the Ring and elsewhere, an impressive fleet of rental vehicles and a client base from all over the world. Which makes Ron and RSR operations manager Jonathan Chan ideally placed to give anyone new to trackdays some top tips on how to look after your car, your own well-being, and your wallet. Let’s start with you, the driver. ‘If you’re coming to Spa…

FOR A MAN WHO CYCLES UP MOUNTAINS OF HIS OWN FREE will and lives on a diet of chocolate chip cookies and double chocolate chip cookies, Henry, at times, shows remarkable wisdom. Towards the end of his Emira road trip (p64) he said: ‘The whole car rewards smoothness and feels best when you stop just short of trying to really wring its neck.’ You can decide for yourself if that sounds like your sort of sports car, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a recommendation for a new trackday hero. Even so, I’m excited as the Emira emerges from Anglesey’s pitlane and the track unravels ahead. It’s a new Lotus. It has to be good. The feel-good factor is high. Lotus has nailed the overall look and feel of the…

‘THIS ISN’T PANNING OUT QUITE as expected,’ I think, as I wind on a bit more opposite lock to correct the MX-5’s trajectory and ensure that its rear wheels kiss the yellow-and-blue kerbing on the exit. The rain is properly lashing down now, but I’m comfortable with how the little Mazda responds, happy that its nose stays hooked up while the rear doesn’t, even in one of the fastest corners. The unexpected bit is that this is the standard MX-5, the current ‘Sport Tech’ model with 181bhp, rather than the previous-generation BBR GTI tuned car with a supercharged 250bhp that we’re comparing it with. Interesting… Tuned cars exist for a number of reasons, and in the case of the MX-5 it’s because from the very first model in 1989 it’s…

FORD’S 2019 CROSSOVER REBOOT of the Puma was met with a fair amount of scepticism, and although an ST variant helped matters, it’s always been overshadowed by its more lithe Fiesta counterpart. But does the Puma ST deserve more attention? To give us an opportunity to better understand its blend of crossover practicality and hot hatch underpinnings, this month we’ve welcomed one onto our long-term fleet. With the arrival of the three-cylinder Fiesta ST, Ford Performance demonstrated that a reduced cylinder count needn’t mean reduced fun. Said Fiesta mated a potent and characterful turbocharged 1.5-litre triple with some of the most engaging dynamics in the supermini segment, and the Puma ST aims to replicate that formula in its own class. It starts by using the same engine, with identical outputs…