Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2023 in Evo

IN 1998, TEN CARS LINED UP IN THE Anglesey pitlane ahead of some hot lapping before we headed along a trio of roads that all linked up nicely before eventually arriving at a beach. In November. You always remember your first, and both mine and evo’s first eCoty was a cracker. Harry even bought us some nice embroidered fleeces and hats (he wouldn’t splash for bobbles). Of those ten cars, the most powerful (the F355) had 375bhp and was also the most expensive at £105,000. It wasn’t the heaviest, because that was the Jaguar XKR at 1641kg, with the Caterham Seven Clubsport requiring sandbags to keep its 510kg on the ground when the wind picked up. The average weight was 1209kg, the average price £42,376. The cheapest was Mazda’s MX-5…

WE SEEM TO BE DOING A LOT OF THESE LAUNCHES LATELY. Farewells, that is. Be it to some of our favourite sporting models, or the engines that power them. In the case of the R8, this isn’t a goodbye (yet) to Audi’s mid-engined supercar, but it is a somewhat melancholy adieu to the howling 5.2-litre V10 seen in the back (and front) of numerous quick Audis since 2006. With time running out for the ten-cylinder engine, the new V10 GT RWD is Audi Sport’s last hurrah. Limited to 333 individually numbered units worldwide (15 of which will come to the UK) and priced at c£200,000, it’s a lighter, more powerful, more focused model with sharpened responses and track-honed options aimed at elevating the R8 driving experience to a whole new…

Q Timex Chronograph From £180 timex.co.uk Timex’s vintage-inspired Q range continues to grow with the addition of this, the lineup’s first chronograph. With a very ’70s cushion-style case as its foundation, it’s powered by a quartz movement and is available with a black or cream dial, each with contrasting subdials and chrome indices and hands. There’s also a choice of a leather strap or a steel bracelet. Longines Record £2730 longines.com Longines has looked even further back for inspiration for its latest chronograph, which sports a distinctly 1940s aesthetic. Behind the matt black dial and gilt details is an automatic movement certified for its accuracy by the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute (or COSC, for Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres). The model is available on a stainless steel bracelet or…

8th MERCEDES-AMG SL55 4MATIC+ We went on a hunch with the new SL55, based on AMG’s track record and the fact this is the first SL to be designed and developed wholly by Mercedes’ go-faster division. We were hoping for the dynamism and engagement that marked out the old AMG GT, with perhaps just a little more polish. But the SL isn’t that car. ‘It can’t seem to decide if it’s an SL cruiser or the fired-up supercar replacement for the AMG GT,’ said Gallagher, ‘and as a result it fails at being either. Its damping impresses, so too the four-wheel-drive system, but you feel distant from everything that’s going on and it lacks the punch and spark of a pure-bred AMG and the sophisticated confidence SLs have always delivered.’…

THE ECOTY FRISSON BEGINS WITH AN EMAIL FROM STU detailing the where, the accommodation arrangements and, crucially, the car you’ll arrive in. For me, it breaks down to this: 368 miles door to door, an unnecessarily large bed and a Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS. I need a moment. Is he serious? The best part of 400 miles under the wheels of the most predictable eCoty slam dunk in years? It’s all over before it’s started, surely. Absurd thoughts breeze through. Is there any point in the other cars even turning up? Could it all be one enormous anti-climax of a week? Maybe it’s a job for this year’s scribe, Peter Tomalin, to phone in from home beside the log-burner after taking the dog for a walk. But then, with…

BEWARE YOU LUCKY ONES WHO OWN, OR WILL SOON own, a Ferrari 296 GTB. Should you leave the ignition on, the car will deplete its 7.45kWh battery completely. The battery that powers the electric motor. The electric motor that spins up the internal combustion engine when you press the button marked ‘Start’. Or doesn’t, if you’ve left the ignition on and flattened the aforementioned battery. This can happen pretty quickly if you’ve done so on a freezing cold hillside in the Pennines. To be fair, knowing whether the 296 GTB is ‘on’ or ‘off’ or somewhere in between is remarkably confusing. Even after five days we’d all jump in, stab the Start button maybe a dozen times and, eventually, pull away in the near-silent eDrive mode. Swearing so loudly that…

Maserati-led procession by Andy Morgan This was a contender for the final shot of the main part of the test, and had the Maserati not won it probably would have been, but the MC20 is prominent here and not so much on the pulled-back version we went with. You have to be mindful of telling a story and not over-exposing certain cars, so for that reason alone it missed the cut. On the initial edit, I earmarked this as a potential ‘poster’ shot and it was one of those to which my preediting gut gave a five-star rating on Adobe Bridge. It looks like a painting, it’s got an aggression about it, and it shows the MC20 leading. It’s the sort of instinctive shot that Andy Morgan is very good…

AS YOU MIGHT HAVE ASCERTAINED from reading my sporadic reports on my 996 Carrera over recent years, I’ve struggled to feel satisfied with the way it drives, felt underwhelmed with the modifications I’ve carried out to it, and then generally moaned about it afterwards. It has given me more satisfaction through knowing I own a 911 than I’ve gained from actually driving it – and that’s an approach I can’t abide. To briefly recap, I purchased my 2002 second-generation 996 back in 2016, and after a honeymoon period driving to the Scottish Highlands and spending over a week there, putting on nearly 1500 miles, I made the discovery that many a 996 or 997 owner has made: namely that once these cars reach 70,000-odd miles and advanced age, there are…

I REALLY LIKE THIS CAR. IN FACT, I CAN’T think of a car that’s changed my mind so completely in such a short space of time. When it first arrived, the M240i xDrive seemed too complex, too stiff yet simultaneously lacking clear focus, and just a bit of a muddle. GT car? Sports car? 3-series cut down a bit and pretending to be a bit of each? That seemed more like it. Almost cynical. However, I was dead wrong. Yes, it looks a bit gawky. Yes, it’s a very dense little car (1690kg!?). But… it’s a lot of fun and feels really special on every drive. Much of that stems from the six-cylinder engine, which is so strong, so sweet and feels expensive. The eight-speed automatic isn’t as good as…

YOU CAN TELL AN AWFUL LOT ABOUT the Rimac Nevera in the first 200 yards. Not how barkingly fast it is or how far it moves the game on in the rarefied world of the hypercar; those realisations come later. But instead how polished it is purely as a product. How well built it is, how sweetly matched the weighting and gearing of its steering seems, how synchronised its throttle and brake pedals feel, how easily you can climb in and out of it, how clearly you can see out of it, how beautifully damped it is and just how refined it feels purring along the road at everyday speeds. Even after 20 seconds, you can tell that the Nevera rides perfectly for a car of this type. You can…

WE LIKE THE MASERATI MC20. A LOT. From a standing start, the boys and girls from Bologna have designed, developed and produced a clean-sheet supercar that competes with McLaren and Ferrari and needs no excuses. It’s an unlikely and heart-warming story and, perhaps, a sign that the lustre of the Trident will survive for another generation or two. However, Maserati can’t survive with the MC20 alone. In fact, this is a company that needs and wants volume. Hence the Levante, which has been moderately successful since its launch in 2016 but isn’t exactly denting Cayenne or Range Rover sales. Hence the Ghibli saloon, which has hardly troubled Mercedes or BMW dealers as they shift E-classes and 5-series with great success despite the market dominance of SUVs. The latest model that…

A REVOLUTIONARY TRANSVERSE-ENGINED, front-wheel-drive little car that stunned the world and set a new template when it was launched in the late 1950s. We all know that one. But in a parallel universe, the company behind the revolution was Alfa Romeo, not BMC. It was 1952 when Alfa came up with its first design for a compact car with a crossways engine driving the front wheels. Codenamed Tipo 13-61, this model was engineered by a team under Giuseppe Busso, later famed for the glorious V6 often associated with his surname, and used a 750cc two-cylinder created by splitting the twin-cam four from the forthcoming Giulietta saloon. If it had reached production, 13-61 would have been years ahead of the Mini, but it wasn’t to be. The costs involved in developing…

HAS THERE EVER BEEN ANOTHER YEAR LIKE it? A year when so many mid-engined supercars and sports cars have been launched and/or updated that we could fill an entire evo Car of the Year shortlist with them? We very nearly did, too… We had eight on the list and five made it to the north of England for a week of driving on one of the toughest UK-based eCoty routes we’ve devised. The three that didn’t make it weren’t victims of a brutal judgement cut made by your judges, rather they were all tripped up by their respective manufacturers. Chevrolet tried damned hard to get us a C8 Corvette Stingray. Their UK press demo is in the country (see issue 303) and it’s a model that started to eat away…

The MC20 wasn’t the most flawed car at eCoty – the CSL and GT4 RS could fight it out for that title – but it was very far from perfect. Its brakes came in for particular criticism; it seemed absurdly heavy for a carbon-tubbed, non-hybrid, two-wheel-drive supercar, and it didn’t look or feel as beautifully put-together as the other Italian in the test (despite costing almost as much, once options had been added to the list price). As Meaden commented: ‘To someone who didn’t really know these cars, the Ferrari would appear so much more sophisticated and impressive. The Maserati… they wouldn’t get it. But in fact that’s why we love it; it’s more a car person’s car. You find yourself falling in love with it despite the flaws. It’s…

BIGGEST SURPRISE? JUST HOW SHORT of greatness we found the GT4 RS to be on so many of the great roads of Northumberland. Not on all of them, true, but on too many of them, to a point where in the end the RS became a fully paid-up member of The Others Club, even after just two days on the road. After four days we’d all pretty much had enough of it, frankly. Yet this was a car about which I’d eulogised on its international launch in Portugal, the day after Putin invaded Ukraine. So yes, I did feel a bit strange about its demise on eCoty, even if it did come good when the roads eventually turned smooth. What was less surprising, perhaps, was the even worse performance from…

THIRTEEN YEARS. THAT’S HOW LONG it’s been since I was last invited on eCoty. Clearly I must have behaved appallingly on the Isle of Skye in 2009, for which I can only continue to apologise; I just wish I could remember the evening in question. But here I am, brought out of cryostasis like Austin Powers with less hair but slightly better teeth, and thrown right into the thick of eCoty 2022. So what’s changed in the interim? Almost everything – and, in one important sense, nothing at all. The first thing that hits me when I look back at that 2009 contest (issue 138 if you fancy joining me for a quick blat down memory lane) is the sheer number of cars (13!). There were many more judges too,…

@evomagazine @evomagazine @officialevomagazine IT’S ALMOST 20 MONTHS SINCE I first sat down at my laptop to explore Jaguar’s configurator and spec the F-type that would become KN71 LWR. Now, a little over 12 months after I was first handed its key, my time with the fastback Jag is up. Having loved every mile of a drive to Switzerland and back in the summer, I’d hoped to give it a decent send-off with one last road trip, but work commitments conspired against that plan. Not that this has got in the way of me enjoying my last few weeks with the F-type, for it’s one of those cars that makes even the shortest journey feel a little bit special. The great thing about running a long-termer is you don’t have to…

IN SOME RESPECTS THE 508 PSE WAS an instant hit, in others a slow burner, so that after seven months and nearly 10,000 miles I admired and enjoyed the handsome hybrid Peugeot. In Selenium Grey with metallic lime highlights, it sat perfectly on its big wheels and Peugeot Sport Engineered suspension and was often admired. Everyone in my Sunday-morning mountain-bike group – all middle-aged men – thought it was a cracking bit of design. ‘Beg your pardon?!’ usually followed when I told them how much it cost. No question, £56k is a lot for a Peugeot, even a sleek one with a 4wd, hybrid drivetrain delivering up to 350bhp, with about 200bhp of that from a 1.6-litre turbo ‘four’, the rest from electric motors, one on each axle. Hybrids cop…

THE 911 RANGE WAS ONCE SO SIMPLE. Go back 25 years to when the 996 first landed (yes the water-cooled 911 really is 25 years old; makes you want to say ‘I remember when they were new’ but then you realise how old that makes you sound) and you had the Carrera and the Turbo. Oh, and there was something called the GT3, soon followed by the GT2. Then four-wheel-drive Carreras appeared alongside their rear-driven brethren, cabriolet models followed the original coupes, and the Targa-cum-hatchback arrived soon after. And that appeared to be that – until the Carrera 4S arrived and Porsche plugged itself into the derivatives mainline, something it’s been hooked on ever since. The latest round of ‘which new 911 should I pick today?’ has recently gained a…

TWO WEEKS TO GO TILL THE START OF ECOTY 2022 and emails are flying hither and, indeed, thither. Most are from Mr Editor Gallagher and they concern the latest runners and riders. A couple of cars that were on the original list have dropped out. Lamborghini is unable to supply a Huracán Tecnica, which is a shame, but then a Huracán figured prominently in last year’s contest, the STO finishing second behind the truly remarkable M5 CS. The other absentee, and the one car we’re truly sorry not to have for this eCoty, is the Lotus Emira, but then we’re not alone in our frustration here. Delays in getting cars to customers have been well-documented. Still, there’s always next year (which may well be the latest communication from Lotus’s customer…

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE I’VE enjoyed driving as much as I did on this year’s eCoty. From the anticipation of heading north to join the rest of the evo team to the satisfaction of heading back home again tired but fulfilled after a brilliant week, pretty much every drive I had was a corker. It was a vintage eCoty. Absentees Barker, Catchpole and Towler were missed, but the location was fresh (at least as a backdrop for this test) with awesome roads and little traffic. The weather was unseasonably kind, with a perfect mix of sun and rain to build a detailed picture of each car’s capabilities. Most importantly, the epicentre of our road network was a café with apparently limitless supplies of cake. Rather than blowing the…

FROM THE MOMENT I SAW THE SL55 in Northumberland, I guessed it would be in trouble. It was the fear that here was a car that would drive how it looked: undistinguished, cumbersome and unsure what it wants to be. And, indeed, the first time you wound up the driver modes to experience the first AMG-developed SL, it quickly became apparent that we, or rather I, had made the wrong call to include it. Beyond the unobtrusive but intuitive four-wheel-drive system that could apportion grip and control like some guardian angel with a sixth sense, it felt as heavy as it looked, lacked the punch you expected and was flat-footed and aloof in almost everything it did. Previous SLs weren’t benchmark driver’s cars, but they were a benchmark in effortless…

SOMEONE IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE DISAPPOINTED WHEN IT comes to the cars that don’t make it to eCoty. Absentees include the cars that we wanted but weren’t available, as already explained, but what of the cars that were ready to go, the ones that we’ve driven, tested and recommended throughout the year? Cars such as Audi’s latest RS3 or Caterham’s 420 Cup. For the Audi it came down to a couple of key things. Firstly, while it’s arguably the most impressive RS3 we’ve yet seen from Audi Sport, it’s not a car that we absolutely yearn to drive. Yes, it’s more engaging than those that have come before, its straight-line speed no longer the dominant factor. There’s some genuine feel and engagement when you start to get into a…

AFTER THE RECENT HANDLING, BRAKING and ECU mods, it was time to introduce more mechanical grip to my M2. For this I have downsized the wheels from the standard 19s to 18-inch items, specifically Protrack One alloys in 18 x 10 (front) and 18 x 11 (rear) fitments (£1440 in total). These are an inch wider at both ends of the car, allowing me to run Michelin Cup 2s in 265 section on the front axle and 295 on the rear, up from the standard 245 and 265 widths. I wanted the wheels in a matt gunmetal finish that isn’t offered by Protrack, so for this I turned to Kerb Safe in Aylesbury, who colour-matched them to a set of McLaren wheels they had recently repaired. The cost was £360…

TT’S TAKEN A WHILE, BUT I’VE FINALLY had a properly soul-stirring drive in the TT RS – one that will be lodged in the memory banks for years to come and is primed to be recalled every time I drive along the stretch of road where it happened. The road where it happened came as something of a surprise too, as it was a long way from the type I would have predicted the RS would feel at its best on. You see, up until that point I had been formulating a theory that the top TT was a car for big roads. It may have a relatively modest, hot hatch-size footprint, but so prodigious is the performance of its 394bhp five-cylinder engine, and so capably delivered is it by…