Evo

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO I STEPPED into a small, very small, hot and sweaty room that was masquerading as an office to see three lads sticking mock-up magazine covers with a variety of different logos on them to a wall. I was there for a job interview; they – John Barker, Dickie Meaden and Damian Smith – were in the first throws of creating the evo DNA, encapsulated by a tagline that’s stood the test of time for everything this magazine stands for: The Thrill of Driving. Yes, what was possible in 1998 in terms of experiencing that thrill has evolved considerably over time, but as we have commented since, those thrills are still there to be had, albeit requiring a little more effort to seek out. Yet because of this they…

IT’S BEEN A BIG YEAR FOR BMW M already. You might think the return of the CSL badge would be enough to mark its 50th anniversary, but with the M3 Touring and XM SUV – the latter only the division’s second-ever standalone model – the engineers have been kept truly busy. Which makes it all the more exciting that the M2 has been completely reinvented for its second coming. ‘We wanted to create something now which is already on a similar level to the M2 CS,’ says Markus Schröder, the project lead on the new M2. His team haven’t been feverishly benchmarking rival sports cars, I’m told. They’ve used the outgoing CS as a ‘jumping off point’ instead. The car as a whole sounds much more sophisticated than its predecessor. Its core…

LET’S START WITH THE GEARKNOB and work back. Key statistic: it weighs a chunky 200 grams. There’s a reason for this. Having done all the hard work in devising and installing a bespoke six-speed manual gearbox for a car with BMW-sourced mechanicals probably only ever intended to be used with its perfectly fine eight-speed paddleshift auto, the TGR engineering team hit one final snag. The feel of the gearchange wasn’t quite right. Nicely weighted but just a touch sticky. Back to the drawing board? Not really. They tried a heavier gearknob. Things improved but hot-knife-through-butter still wasn’t happening. Finally, the full 200g job for optimum ‘inertia effect’. Actually, forget hot knives… the stickiness had been erased by the extra moving mass of the definitive gearknob iteration. Good enough, job done. The…

THIS IS THE HENNESSEY MAMMOTH 1000 TRX. ‘Mammoth’ because, well, it’s a big hairy beast, ‘1000’ because it has 1000bhp and near-as-dammit 1000lb ft of torque, and ‘TRX’ (T-Rex, geddit?) because it’s based on Dodge’s hottest Hellcat-powered Ram TRX 1500 pickup. As an evo reader, you’ll know the Hennessey name from more than three decades of tuning muscle cars and pickup trucks from its base in Sealy, Texas. Not forgetting the Venom GT and Venom F5 hypercars – the former being one of the most exciting cars I’ve ever driven, and the latter being one of the handful of wildly fast and powerful cars targeting a V-max of more than 300mph. The Mammoth 1000 is the latest monster to leave Hennessey’s workshops. With 1012bhp and 969lb ft, this 3-ton truck has outputs…

THERE ISN’T MUCH THAT THE HEALEY BY Caton and the Ferrari SF90 Spider over the page have in common. They both have four wheels, seating for two and burn the highest octane fuel available (although the Italian has a sizeable battery to help with propulsion, too). They also share a similar price. Although it may surprise you to learn that the Ferrari is the cheaper of the two… Okay, so while the prospect of a restomod Healey that’s based on the 90bhp 100/4BN1 built between 1953 and ’55 and costing more than a near-1000bhp Ferrari hypercar sinks in, here’s what the best part of half a million quid gets you. It allows you to hand over a Healey 100/4BN1 to a company called Caton, which is part of the Envisage Group,…

IT’S NOT YOUR STOMACH THAT WANTS you to back off when you launch an SF90 Spider – well, any SF90 for that matter – it’s the soft squidgy bit between your ears. Its immediate response to you being carefree with your right foot and first gear engaged is to immediately stop it. Just lift, bring the car to a halt and have a word with yourself. But you can’t because you’re already well through second gear and the shift lights are illuminating as quickly as the numbers on the digital speedo are becoming a blur before your eyes. Then third gear arrives and by now your right foot is at last beginning to listen to the sensible advice from above. Enough. Nine hundred and eighty-six bhp has that effect on you,…