Inhaltsverzeichnis für December 2020 in Evo

THE BEST DRIVER RACES THE BEST CAR. YOU MIGHT have seen this quoted in press reports and across social media after Lewis Hamilton recorded the most Formula 1 race victories in history. Naturally it sparked the tiresome debate that Hamilton’s achievement was down to the car rather than his ability behind the wheel. Hamilton is undoubtedly in the best car, but he has also been instrumental in making the Mercedes an unbeatable car. Technology may dictate the motorsport rules but you still need a driver to work with an engineering team to determine what does and doesn’t work. And to also make those split-second decisions when they are three abreast heading into turn one. But to denounce any driver’s achievement and put it all down to the car they have…

IT’S UNLIKELY VOLVO WAS TOP OF YOUR list to be the first to build a rival to the Tesla Model 3, but that’s exactly what it has done with its Polestar 2, its first all-electric car. Built in China by Volvo’s electric car offshoot Polestar, the 2 is based on the Swedish-built XC40, using the crossover’s all-steel chassis, adding 150kW electric motors on the front and rear axles and installing a 78kWh battery pack in the transmission tunnel and under the rear seat. Despite its Far East birthplace, the 2’s design has a clear Scandinavian influence, which is no bad thing for attracting customers on the cusp of transitioning from an ICE car to an EV and who aren’t bowled over by the designs that leave Franz von Holzhausen’s sketch…

DUTCH BOUTIQUE SPORTS CAR manufacturer Donkervoort has revealed its most extreme model yet: the awkwardly named D8 GTO-JD70 R. Designed to be a track-only version of the JD70 that was built to celebrate the 70th birthday of company boss Joop Donkervoort, the R, like all Donkervoorts, finds its origins in the Lotus Seven, and like Caterham, Donkervoort has created its own variation on the theme – but with a rather more eccentric twist. The numbers are suitably mad, partly down to the Audi-sourced 2.5-litre in-line five-cylinder engine under the long, louvred bonnet. Producing 409bhp and 413lb ft of torque, the engine hasn’t changed markedly from the units found in the RS3 and TT RS, but the 725kg car it’s attached to here is rather different, being based on a tubular-steel…

HAS LEGISLATION MADE CARS HEAVIER OVER THE LAST 10-20 YEARS? IF SO, WHICH REQUIREMENTS HAVE ADDED MOST WEIGHT? Steve Fletcher, director of body/trim/chassis and CAE (computer-aided engineering) at Group Lotus: ‘Most notable are crash test requirements. In the last 20 years there has, quite rightly, been an uplift in global technical safety standards and a huge campaign of consumer safety testing.’ Ryan Vann, chief engineer of vehicle performance and technology at Prodrive: ‘Safety has contributed, particularly with increased side impact testing, roof crush loads and small overlap impact testing. Deflection of the car body structure into the occupant area needs to be minimal, so the body is physically bigger to provide the space. Multiple airbag systems add more weight. Compared with the 1999 original, the 2019 Focus is 200mm longer,…

OFFICIALLY THE RENAULT CLIO RS16 WAS a concept car, created by Renault Sport as a 40th birthday present to itself. But while most concepts are made of spit and tissues, this swollen Clio was capable of being used hard, as it proved at its reveal in May 2016 when Heikki Kovalainen thrashed it around the Monaco Grand Prix track. The following month the same stridently yellow ‘concept’ appeared at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where it spent a long weekend zooming repeatedly up Lord March’s driveway for the amusement of onlookers. Plainly this wasn’t a concept at all, as was later confirmed to members of the media invited to a Renault test facility to meet the black RS16 engineering mule and hear more from the small, self-described ‘commando’ team who…

HERE’S AN AUTOMOTIVE PUB QUIZ FACT OF the type guaranteed to have your significant other downing their chosen tipple with a look of abject despair. Did you know the 2020 Civic Type R has a more densely packed sequence of fins in its radiator core? The gap between each row is reduced by 0.5mm down to 2.5mm. You want more? Don’t worry, there’s plenty. Possibly every mid-life facelift of a performance car has the same miniscule improvements made, tiny advantages eked out by world-class engineers, sometimes offset by increasingly stringent emissions or safety legislation, or input from marketeers. It is, however, a level of scrutiny and microscopic development deeply associated with the Japanese marques, which are, at the very least, unmatched at letting us know about the whole process, whether…

NUMBERS DEFINE THE GT-R, A LWAYS HAV E and always will. It’s that kind of car, one engineered and developed to the kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement. But also one that Hiroshi Tamura, Nissan’s GT-R chief product specialist, feels will never result in a ‘perfect’ GT-R. Not that this should be of concern, because while continuously improving the R35 Godzilla family we get to experience the likes of the latest Nismo interpretation of a GT-R. Technically this is the 2020 model year Nismo GT-R, a car announced at the tail end of 2018, that we drove at the Lausitzring in the summer of 2019… and then 2020 did its thing so now it’s late autumn as the latest Nismo finally lands at evo Towers v2.0 to scare the neighbours. GT-Rs…

IT’S THE TURN OF THE 19-INCH ULTRA HIGH PERFORMANCE (UHP) TYRE this year, in the best-selling 235/35 R19 size, a size that’s the most popular partly because it’s used by many of today’s high performance hatchbacks. Most of the premium tyre brands are represented in our test, including Goodyear with its all-new Eagle F1 SuperSport, the notable exception being Bridgestone, which has a new Potenza set for launch in 2021. Of the other absentees, Yokohama couldn’t meet our request in time due to Covid-19 related staff layoffs, Hankook, Toyo and Falken all have revised tyres on the way, and Maxxis, which we included unofficially in last year’s test of 18-inch UHP tyres, unfortunately did not have any stock for this test. As always in the evo test, the results are…

LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF THE RS6 CAN’T be easy for the RS7. The former is the king-of-cool über family car, worshipped far and wide and an ever present in numerous three, five and even ten-car fantasy garage lists as the ‘daily’. With good reason, because few cars manage the duality of being a practical family car that can also cause its driver to raise a smile when they find themselves alone on a road more interesting than those often taken with the family on board. In theory the RS7 should offer the same, albeit with no room for the hound in the boot. But in the past it has been a close relative to the RS6 in name only, feeling flat-footed, a little dull to drive and performing to…

REMEMBER THE HONDA CR-Z? SURE YOU do; it was the small coupe that looked like a sci-fi CRX and thrummed along courtesy of a 1.5-litre four-cylinder, with a manual gearbox and a snip of hybrid assistance. Sales were never particularly high and the reviews were gently positive rather than glowing, but it really seemed like the future for a bit. Inevitably, Honda pulled the plug on the slow-selling hybrid in the UK in 2013, and the factory in Suzuka stopped building them for the domestic market in 2016. This was also the year that Bowie, Ali and Prince left this mortal plane, and if there’s any silver lining to losing so many of the greats that year it’s that they’ve not had to endure the coronavirus pandemic, TikTok, and perhaps…

WITH SCALED-DOWN i30 N LOOKS, 201BHP AND SUPERB handling, the i20 N has the Fiesta ST slap bang in its cross hairs. Having muscled in on the hot hatch market with the capable, polished and well-equipped i30 N, Hyundai is now looking to do the same in the junior sector. And having driven a near sign-off spec i20 N on road and track, I reckon it’s pretty much got everything it needs to do the job. The standard i20 isn’t a car we’re familiar with at evo. Hyundai’s WRC challenger is an i20, but that’s based on a three-door that’s no longer sold in the UK. The standard five-door is a sharp-looking thing though, with crisp lines and distinctive ‘Zorro’ rear lights, and it looks good given the full N…

THE BUGATTI CHIRON HAS SPAWNED countless special editions since its launch, from the retro-rehash Centodieci to the record-breaking Super Sport 300+. Now Bugatti has taken things a step further by creating the Bolide, a track-orientated model that wraps a bare-bones, lightweight body around the Chiron’s mighty W16 powertrain. Beyond the marque’s trademark horseshoe grille the result bears little resemblance to its road-going siblings. Sitting just 995mm tall, the design is intended to be reminiscent of the Bell X-1 aircraft in which, back in 1947, Captain Charles ‘Chuck’ Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier. A complex, stacked wing set-up can be found at the rear, with a central fin mounted on the engine cover for increased stability, while mammoth 400-section Michelin slicks are also clear to see;…

VOLKSWAGEN HAS BROUGHT BACK the Clubsport name for a high-performance, front-wheel-drive Golf GTI designed to tackle the Renault Mégane RS and Honda Civic Type R head-on. Sitting beneath the slightly more grown-up four-wheel-drive, 316bhp Golf R (unveiled after we went to press – visit evo.co.uk for details), the new Clubsport promises to be the most focused of all performance Golfs. It packs an uprated version of the latest GTI’s evo4-generation EA888 engine, with 296bhp and 295lb ft of torque thanks to a larger Garrett turbo and higher-pressure injection. This puts it 54bhp and 23lb ft ahead of the standard Mk8 GTI, and 10bhp and 15lb ft up on its closest equivalents from the previous generation Golf, the Mk7.5 TCR and Mk7 Clubsport Edition 40. As with the aforementioned TCR, a…

‘I’VE HAD HARDER JOBS!’ JOKES COLIN McMaster over the phone as we talk five time zones apart. McMaster is in Barbados, on a job for spectacular American rally driver Ken Block, awaiting the obligatory Covid test results that will allow him to leave his villa… and the pool… by a beach. Rallying certainly isn’t always that glamorous, but it was the joy of travel that played a big part in why McMaster made the switch from his initial career path shooting Formula 1. ‘I really liked the freedom of rallying and the photographic opportunities it presented,’ he explains. ‘When you work at circuits, you fly to the country, pick up your hire car, and then you’re hotel, track, hotel, track, whatever, back to the airport – you never see the…

I’M GOING TO KEEP YOU GUESSING FOR at least another month. The 996’s rebirth is making great progress at Litchfield but until the engine choice is up and running, all the bugs are ironed out and I’m confident the plan has been a success, my lips remain sealed. All I will say is that if things go as intended the 996’s power-to-weight ratio should eclipse those of the first two GT3 models, and my little old Carrera will punch like a car developed by the good people of the Motorsport department. Before the big reveal I wanted to talk about some of the cool little details I’ve accumulated for the rest of the, ahem, reimagining. I only use that word in case it adds £200,000 to the resale value. Anyway,…

IT’S BEEN A LITTLE WHILE SINCE I drove a new Supra, and although this yellow example has been with us for a number of months now, all things Covid have meant the Fast Fleet isn’t quite as promiscuous as it usually is. The Supra is a car I feel I should be more excited about than in reality I actually am, especially when it’s painted in a yellow that’s so deep and lustrous it’s almost luminescent. For me it’s one of those designs that has angles of extraordinarily strong appeal, and others that just don’t work at all, leaving me somewhat perplexed as to my definite opinion. And driving Ev’s long-termer initially fails to provoke a different reaction over and above the cars we originally drove last year (evo 263…

THIS IS NOT A DRIVER’S CAR, DESPITE it being the only Rolls-Royce saloon designed and engineered ‘for being driven in’ and ‘for driving’, but the new Ghost is the nearest Goodwood’s only car manufacturer gets to building such a thing. And quite a thing it is too, at over five and a half metres long, more than two metres wide and crushing the scales at 2490kg, although compared to some luxury SUVs that last figure doesn’t sound that bad. Well, obviously it is an obscene weight for a car, but considering what goes into constructing a Rolls-Royce Ghost you might expect that number to start with a three. I mean, there’s 100kg of sound insulation alone… This new Ghost is the first ‘post-opulence’ Rolls-Royce – a philosophy that matches the…

FRANCE HAS TAKEN ANOTHER SWIPE at the performance car, with its already-severe CO2-based taxes in some cases more than doubling for 2021. The increases will result in a new Renault Mégane RS costing its first owner as much as €10,488 in CO2 tax on top of its €40,700 price tag. These latest increases will most certainly kill off the hot hatch and the wider performance car sector as we know it in France, with the ramifications possibly impacting other key markets within Europe, too. With France essentially shutting its borders to current performance cars, this once strong market will no longer be able to support any business cases set out by manufacturers to produce performance derivatives of more mainstream models if they are powered by petrol alone. In a global…

FROM ITS ORIGINS AS AN OPEN-TOP, road-legal rival to Caterhams and Ariels, the KTM X-Bow has now evolved into an extreme closed-cockpit track-only machine. Called the X-Bow GTX, it uses the familiar carbonfibre-tub chassis engineered and built by Dallara in Italy, but from there the package gets significantly more serious with a 523bhp version of Audi’s 2.5-litre turbocharged in-line five-cylinder engine and motorsport-derived drivetrain components. The extra performance from the engine – which produces 394bhp in Audi RS applications – comes from a new injection system, intake, wastegate, exhaust and ECU. No internals have been significantly changed. Torque peaks at 479lb ft and is sent to the rear wheels through a six-speed sequential transmission with an electronic shift mechanism that helps strip 7kg from the package’s weight. The clutch has…

THESE ARE THE ELITE OF HOT HATCHBACKS. Not necessarily the fastest in a straight line, but the warriors ruthlessly trimmed down to their optimum fighting weight, with months clocked up in the gym and superberry smoothies in their tanks. Consider today, then, a welcoming party for Mini’s latest and third entry into this, the slenderest of market segments. The company’s 2006 Cooper S Works GP was arguably the initiator of this breed of trackday-focused hot hatch, vehicles with two seats and scaffold bars of some description that owe their raison d'être to non-competitive driving on track, rather than an outright mission brief for motorsport as once epitomised by Rallye-model Peugeots, or indeed Rallyes from Volkswagen. Of course, the car we all instantly think of when it comes to such a…

THESE ARE ENTRY LEVEL MODELS. The first rungs of Aston Martin and Bentley’s respective ranges. While you let that sink in for a moment, let’s pause to ponder their objectives, specifications and vital statistics. Superficially these are two very similar cars. Both the product of storied British brands (OK, British so long as you ignore the mix of German, Middle Eastern and Canadian ownership…), each boasts a 500-plus bhp 4-litre, twin-turbocharged V8 engine mated to an eight-speed torque-converter automatic transmission. Likewise, each promises to be the sportiest and purest driver’s car in their marque’s model portfolio. Scratch deeper beneath the surface, however, and the differences in approach are more significant than the similarities in brand and hardware, the Continental GT V8 being a luxurious all-wheel-drive 2+2, while the Vantage is…

NINO VACCARELLA CLOSED THE DOOR ON HIS classroom for the last time that week. His students had long since ran outside into the baking Sicilian sunshine, excited about playing football in the streets of Palermo and, no doubt, the spectacle of the Targa Florio road race that weekend, which would allow them to get literally within touching distance of the world’s fastest racing cars as they passed by their front doorsteps at speeds of 150mph and more. Unfathomably, given the magnitude of the challenge and its correspondingly gruesome dangers, in 1970 the race formed part of the then WEC-equivalent World Championship of Makes, and moreover, their teacher Signor Vaccarella was in with a chance of winning outright at the wheel of a factory team Ferrari. Anyway, where was I… Ah,…

IT REQUIRES A RESET TO LIVE WITH THE Duster. Not so much due to the way it drives – though there is an element of performance recalibration required, more of which later – but what it says about you. It’s a vanity thing, of course. One fuelled by society’s increasing and unhealthy obsession with the image we project to others. This probably sounds rich coming from someone who has spent the vast majority of his adult life driving cars he can’t afford, but it’s the truth. The funny thing is, the Duster has so far garnered universal praise from everyone I’ve come into contact with. Yes, I get ribbed from time to time with ‘What did you do to upset editor Gallagher?’ but such comments are always at my expense,…

THE OPPORTUNITY FINALLY CAME TO take the 993 out on some proper driving roads after a hectic return to work post lockdown. The plan was to meet up with a bunch of industry mates for breakfast and then go for a drive in our own cars, leaving any press cars behind for once. The mix of metal was brilliant, including a BMW 2002, a Honda Integra Type R, a Lancia Delta Integrale, a Peugeot 106 Rallye and my 911. The roads we chose included several that are well known to evo for testing and photoshoots. Much as it’s fun to explore new or rarely visited territories, there’s a lot to be said for driving on familiar routes, as they enable you to focus more on the car and assess it…