Evo -julkaisun June 2017 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

WHAT DO YOU PRIORITISE IN A PERFORMANCE CAR? I ask simply because this month the industry seems to be back to chasing horsepower (and with the onslaught of turbocharging, obscene torque, too), with a hot hatch from Audi now generating as much shove as a 5-litre V8-engined E39 M5 and a hypercar that produces near-enough 1500bhp without an electric motor in sight. Power is a corruptive force. Addictive, dangerous, adrenalinfuelling and at times scary. We can’t get enough of it. Whether we’re behind the wheel of something genuinely powerful – McLaren’s 570S Track Pack (driven on page 32) springs to mind – or standing behind the catch-fencing watching a 7-litre Cobra being muscled, drifted and encouraged through Goodwood’s Madgwick corner, inside wheel hanging in the air, driver wrestling with give-or-take…

TOWARDS THE END OF 2016, ASTON Martin bought 90 acres of the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales following a deal struck between Aston CEO Andy Palmer and Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones. The land, just to the west of Cardiff Airport at a place called St Athan, came with buildings that had been occupied by the Ministry of Defence, including three enormous aircraft ‘superhangers’. Beginning with reception areas, offices and a staff restaurant, these are now being ‘re-purposed’ as Aston’s St Athan production facility, where its first SUV, based on the DBX concept, will be built as part of a £200million investment programme. We asked Palmer, why here, why now? ‘Why Wales? We actually went to 20 different sites around the world – a number of them in the…

T HE CLIPSAL 500 IS THE FIRST STOP FOR THE AUSTRALIAN V8 Supercars series. This year the event, held in Adelaide in March, returned to its traditional format of a brace of 250km races run over two days, following three years with the 500km total split over three races. Reigning champion Shane Van Gisbergen won the first race in his Holden Commodore with relative ease and set a new race lap record of 1:20.9 – no other driver managed to dip below 1:21.0. Despite his best efforts, Van Gisbergen’s teammate Jamie Whincup – pictured here working a kerb in true touring-car style – finished back in sixth place. The Red Bull drivers completed race two in exactly the same positions – first and sixth – although things didn’t go quite…

McLAREN 570S TRACK PACK // MERCEDES-AMG GT C ROADSTER // VW GOLF R // TECHART GTSTREET R // BENTLEY MULSANNE SPEED SOON ENOUGH, McLAREN will realise that the model we’re all waiting for is a Longtail based on an entry-level Sports Series car. Like the 675LT, it’ll get more power, more aggressive aero, super-sticky tyres and a more focused chassis. It could well be the best car McLaren has ever made. Until they see sense down in Woking, though, we’ll have to make do with this: the 570S Track Pack. Despite the very promising naming strategy, the Track Pack is not a fully re-engineered version of the 570S in the way a GT3 RS is a comprehensive re-imagining of the Porsche 911. Instead, it’s a box on the options list,…

TO WRITE OFF TECHART’S GTStreet R as just a conspicuous, almost grotesque tool with which to attract attention would be a mistake. Its carbonfibre bodywork, massive double-decked rear wing, GT3 RSstyle front wheelarch vents, wider arches and the new intake scoop atop the engine cover may all look exuberant, but this car has substance to back up its wild appearance. It’s based on the Porsche 911 Turbo S, and keeps that model’s 3.8-litre flat-six, seven-speed dualclutch transmission and four-wheel drive. However, a remap, new turbos and a new exhaust liberate an extra 138bhp and 125lb ft of torque, pushing the totals to 710bhp and 678lb ft. The result is a claimed 0-62mph time of 2.7sec – 0.2sec quicker than Porsche’s figure for the Turbo S – and a top speed…

‘IN MOST CASES MANUFACTURERS VIEWED THE 200 ROAD CARS AS A NECESSARY EVIL’ THE BIRTH OF GROUP B The early ’80s saw major change sweep through international motorsport, with new Group N, A, B and C rules replacing the Group 1-6 regulations that had held sway for decades. Suddenly teams and manufacturers faced new challenges – and new opportunities. Group N and A cars had to be built in 5000 units or more, with the former in particular allowing very little scope for performance modification and the cars having to adhere to certain interior measurements and have at least four seats. Group B was very different. It was intended as a replacement for both Group 4 in rallying and the Group 5 silhouette formula used in circuit racing, the latter…

It’s the speedo that gets you. For a moment you can’t quite believe your eyes. Do those numbers really read all the way round to 500kph? The audacity and absurdity of it truly takes your breath away, but then that’s always been VW’s 21st century mission for Bugatti. To create cars that force you to reappraise what you thought was possible. To rewrite the rules. If I’m honest, I always struggled with the Veyron. It was expressly created to chase big numbers and appeal to ultrahigh- net-worth individuals; people with more money than they know what to do with, buying cars they don’t know what to do with. This said, of course I was excited when I got the chance to drive one. And yes, it was madly powerful, rampantly…

HERE’S A GREAT GAME FOR ANY EVO reader to play – from a source of heated discussions in the pub to effective anaesthesia on a gridlocked M25, or the antidote to an interminable wait at an airport gate. It’s even better if you have the cash to spend for real – yours, or a finance provider’s, of course. Quite simply, you have £50,000 – and not a penny more – to spend on three typically evo cars. Although there’s nothing to say you can’t skew your selection dramatically towards one particular car, there can be no cheating on the numbers. It also has to be three working cars – not a Ferrari and two mossfestooned fifty-quid sheds. ‘A hot hatch is a great staple for any collection, and offers an…

UNSURPRISINGLY, THE car I spend the most amount of time driving is our Skoda. It’s a key element in my work as a car photographer and is one of our fleet’s true workhorses. However, when the weekend arrives, the Octavia is the last car on my list to go driving in for fun. Maybe that’s because I’m lucky enough to have other options or maybe it’s because I want a change from my daily drive. Either way, it got me thinking about which other fast estates I’ve driven that I would choose for a weekend blast. I certainly enjoyed the Mercedes- AMG C43 that I tried recently. It has more personality than the Skoda when it comes to interior design and also sounds great thanks to its 362bhp 3-litre V6.…

THE C63 S COUPE IS A BIT of a sleeper. Or at least it seems to be as far as the general population is concerned, which is odd, as geeks like us seem to spot it a mile off. Perhaps that smooth shape doesn’t give off lookat- me vibes to all and sundry (yet another reason why I love this car). I’ve mainly been ploughing up and down motorways lately, which is fine as the Merc makes a great companion. One thing I have noticed is that the speedo increments rise in 10mph steps to 60, then 20mph steps thereafter. Don’t worry, I haven’t turned into Rain Man. But I have realised why it’s so easy to find yourself doing 80 when you meant to be doing 70. I’ve taken…

LONDON IS THIS SUMMER to play host to an all-new event showcasing ‘some of the world’s most incredible cars’. Held on 8-9 June, the City Concours will see the immaculate five-acre lawn of the Honourable Artillery Company (a short walk from Liverpool Street station) flooded with glamorous road and racing machinery from bygone eras to the present day, and there will also be a selection of sports cars for sale from specialist dealers. The show, organised by the same team behind the annual Concours of Elegance (this year at Hampton Court Palace), is presented in association with evo’s sistermagazine Octane. Assuming the fickle British weather holds, guests can expect to get up close to F1 cars from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s as well as the beautiful but viciously challenging…

THE GT BADGING IS misleading. It suggests a floaty ride and a longlegged gait, the sort of lolloping stride that you get in a Bentley or a big Aston Martin. It certainly doesn’t hint at rock-solid body control and darting, snappy agility. But the Mercedes-AMG GT has always felt more like an apex-to-apex sports car than a refined grand tourer, that distinctly athletic character best summed up by the car’s very responsive steering. Truth to be told, when the AMG GT first appeared, its steering was so responsive that it felt hyperactive. It was light, unnaturally quick and very difficult to read. With that endless bonnet, the GT’s front wheels already felt about half the length of a football pitch away from where you sat, but that flighty steering made…

IT ALWAYS FEELS WRONG to hustle a Bentley, even when it’s fitted with the most potent version of the company’s legendary six-and-threequarter- litre twin-turbocharged V8. There’s something not quite right about asking 2610kg of aluminium, timber, bovine skin, shag-pile carpet and a champagne fridge neatly installed between its two rear seats to adopt the attitude of a McLaren. It’s just not the done thing. Clearly Bentley feels differently or it wouldn’t go to the trouble of spending 400 hours building each Mulsanne Speed. That includes 5800 individual welds and 37 hours spent stitching the interior trim together. Oh, and the ten-and-a-half hours set aside to bolt together its fabulously fearsome engine. The bald stats are 530bhp and – rather more tellingly – 811lb ft, delivered via an eight-speed ZF auto…

As cognitive scientists Are fond of reminding us, memories are unreliable. They’re also a measure of experience: the stronger the experience, the more vivid the memory. So, to begin, I’ll share these stripped-back recollections with you. Over the thousand or so miles between Florence airport in Italy and my house in Kent, the DB11 that I drove last summer left me in no doubt that GT perfection had been recast in the image of Aston’s sharp new platform, powertrain and design language. But a few months later, on the challenging Clun section of Motor magazine’s old group test route in Shropshire (a place of putative terror in my youth that I hadn’t visited in decades), Aston’s latest self-styled ‘super-GT’, the Vanquish S, gave me goosebumps; an old-school adrenalin shot and…

IF THE INTERNET ONE DAY BECOMES FULL and there’s no space left for anything new, all we have to do is delete every video of an electric car outrunning a petrol-engined car on a drag strip. More often than not, the electric car in question is a Tesla, most likely the twin-motor Model S P100D. If you looked no further than these videos, you’d have to conclude that the P100D is the quickest motor vehicle ever to be sold to the public. But let’s look a little further. Are electric cars really as fast as the clips suggest? What’s more, in a contest like this, can an EV ever be as thrilling and dramatic as a conventional performance car? Tesla claims the £129,400 P100D is the fastestaccelerating production car currently…

STUART GALLAGHER 200bhp Escort RS Turbo Someone on Performance Ford thought it was a good idea. Take one Mk4 Escort RS Turbo and tune its crude 1.6-litre CVH engine to within an inch of its life. The goal was to add 70bhp to the rather weedy 130bhp standard figure. For today’s turbo engines this would require little more than some beefier injectors, additional cooling and an ECU remap. In 1997 it took six months of engine-building, many broken parts (cams and pistons, mainly), a turbo you could rent out as a bijou flat in London, an induction kit you’d struggle to fit in a dustbin and an exhaust to rival the Dartford Tunnel for girth. The result? We hit 200bhp and it was awful. Driveshafts snapped, engine mounts broke, and…

WE’VE SAID IT BEFORE AND we’ll say it again: whatever your thoughts on the V8-engined M3 in period, the standout qualities of a high-revving, naturally aspirated V8, particularly when combined with a manual gearbox, make the E90/92 M3 an increasingly appealing car in the current used market. And what an engine it is, producing 414bhp at a screaming 8300rpm, with a soundtrack that’s pure race-car howl. The first of the family to arrive was the coupe, the E92, at the 2007 Frankfurt motor show. With a carbonfibre roof, power-dome bonnet and suitable modifications to the front and rear bumpers over the standard 3-series, the new M3 certainly looked the part. But purists were predictably alarmed at both the increase in size of the car overall and the loss of the…

FIRST ACQUAINTANCE with a new long-termer usually involves walking out to the car park, giving it a cursory once-over and then driving it home for the evening. Which in my case is about 25 minutes away down an A-road or, if I’m feeling flush, taking in five or six half-decent corners of the nearest semi-convenient B-road. If only more introductions could be like the one I had with our newly acquired Mazda MX-5 RF. This car I met outside a quaint country hotel in north Wales for last month’s twintest with the Toyota GT86. I spent the day on some of the region’s best driving roads, roof-down in the unseasonal sunshine. From our test location I then drove the four-hour journey to Heathrow (roof firmly up, heater on, radio cranked),…

FANS OF SMALL, CHEAP Japanese roadsters will be pleased to learn my Eunos S-Special is still very much with us. Its absence from these pages since my on-track report in evo 226 can be attributed to two things. The first is that I’ve been jolly busy. The second is that I let the battery run flat. I’d have sorted the latter much sooner if not for the former, but I have now slotted in a new, Mazda recommended Panasonic gel battery, and have been taking the Eunos out each weekend to keep everything running as it should. Its impending MOT also prompted me to get the car serviced and have a few niggling faults fixed. I used a local garage: Meerkat Tyres and MOT near Bedford, recommended by David Lillywhite,…

AS YOU’LL HAVE READ earlier in Fast Fleet, I’m now the keeper of a shiny new Mazda MX-5 RF. And as running two Mazda roadsters (the Eunos is also mine) and a hot estate would be a bit extravagant – not least because I only have one parking space at my flat – the ST is moving into someone else’s tenure. As you might have guessed from my previous two reports on the ST, I’m not entirely unhappy about this situation. The nature of magazine long-termers means you sometimes run a car that doesn’t necessarily fit your lifestyle, though the estate body wasn’t really an issue, even if I wasn’t likely to use it to its full potential. For me the ST’s problems are more fundamental, and with its front…

REMOVING WEIGHT FROM SOMETHING as ethereal as the Elise can’t be an easy task, but the engineers at Potash Lane have managed it with the new Lotus Elise Sprint (1), trimming an already insubstantial car down to a 798kg dry weight. “Toyota’s Gazoo Racing chief is keen to bring back an MR2- sized sports car, with a mid-mounted engine still an option” It’s the first time the Elise has dipped into the ‘sevens’ since the flyweight first-generation model, (which still mocks the Sprint’s middle-aged spread with a 731kg with-fluids figure) and is the result of the use of carbonfibre for the seats and engine cover, a lithium-ion battery and other improvements borrowed from models such as the Exige. It gets that car’s intricate exposed gearlever assembly, too. Heavier is the…

ALL NEW CARS SOLD IN THE UK ARE now subject to revised Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) rules. In short, while owners will still pay their first year of VED based on a car’s CO2 rating, the rate for subsequent years is now fixed at £140. The exceptions are cars using an alternative fuel source (e.g. hybrids), which get a £10 discount, zero-emissions cars, which attract a £0 rate, and cars with a list price of over £40,000, which incur an additional £310 charge in years two to six. It’s worth noting that the £310 surcharge applies to zero-emissions cars, too. Bad luck, Tesla owners. So if your purchase is middling in terms of its price and CO2 rating, you’ll not be too badly affected by the changes. For example, a…

IN MY USUAL CUSTOM, I FLICKED THROUGH THE PICTURES first in the latest issue of evo (234), so I could return to read the features by preference. While doing so, I could not help being struck by the abundance of new road-going metal with outrageous wings attached. We are all generally used to Porsche’s GT models having substantial rear wings, so the pictures of the latest 911 GT3 were not really a surprise. The new Honda Civic Type R is designed for a particular taste, so again, no shocks there. But the Bentley Continental Supersports? Surely that is a wing too far. It would be very interesting to see just how some of these cars, especially the Bentley, would behave with their wings removed. If the 500bhp Mercedes-AMG C63 S…

Ten brake horsepower. Ten. Doesn’t sound a lot, does it? and, truth be told, I’m not sure I can tell the difference on the road – not without driving old and new Golf rs back-to-back. but that 306bhp headline power figure subtly but assuredly elevates the latest r above the recently revised seaT competition. It’s also now a hot hatch with a power output that begins with a ‘three’ – even in old money – which is very much à la mode. There are no changes to the chassis setup with this ‘Mk7.5’ Golf r, but there is an all-new twin-clutch DsG gearbox, now featuring seven (not six) gears. other than that, it’s a case of the usual slight evolution of the styling front and rear, a new design of…

SOME WHERE between the trickle of cardcarrying petrolheads who reel off acceleration times and waste entire lunch hours poring over classifieds, and the white-water torrent of reluctant motorists who drive only because they must and care less for their cars than for their lawns, there exists a third group. They are the inbetweeners. They are not enthusiasts, but neither are they so indifferent that driving is a chore, or that cars are mere appliances that cost too much. They care about what they drive; beyond that it’s all meaningless, uninteresting guff. For years the Audi RS3 has been the darling of these inbetweeners. They’ve enjoyed the prestige of that four-ringed badge on the nose and the distinction of the ‘R’ and the ‘S’ on the rear. They’ve liked the looks…

THE FIRST HUNDRED metres down the road in an Elise is rather like hearing the opening bars of a favourite song on the radio; it’s hardly begun but already you know you’re going to be entertained. Sure, the intro is a bit wobbly (think the opening chords of The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now?’) because the steering is disconcertingly light and the floorpan clatters noisily over bumps, but you know that once it hits its stride you’re going to be right into it. When the Elise appeared in 1996 it seemed almost to have come out of nowhere. Three years earlier, GM had sold Lotus to Italian businessman Romano Artioli. It’s unclear why Artioli acquired Lotus for £30million at a time when his gloriously ambitious resurrection of Bugatti with the…

ROGER WILSON’S MOTORING LIFETIME began, as have so many, with a Mini 850 – the result of a bribe from his father not to buy a motorbike, aged 17. That soon gave way to a genuine performance car in the shape of a Mini 1275 GT, followed by a line of less inspiring cars as the realities of bringing up a family took hold. The 1990s heralded a return to enjoyable motoring, with a succession of sporting BMWs and some classic hot hatches, including the riotous fun of the Renault 5 GT Turbo and the uncouth Ford Fiesta RS Turbo. An interloper during the 2000s was a Mercedes C55 AMG, a car Roger describes as ‘wonderful’ but with ‘the worst reliability ever’. Nevertheless, its combination of big power and an…

IN THE SUPERCAR GROUP test in the previous issue of evo, I described an Audi R8 V10 coupe as feeling very modern. It’s a glib description, but a fair one. Ignoring for a moment the fact the R8 still uses a hulking great normally aspirated V10 rather than some joyless downsized turbo thing or, heaven forbid, a hybrid powertrain, Audi’s supercar really is at the apex of very-high-performance-car development in 2017. I compared that hard-top R8 to an Apple product. Slick. Everything just works. The remarkable twin-clutch transmission, the infotainment system and all the minor controls. In all of that stuff and much more besides, the R8 really does give the impression of having a vast multinational corporation behind it. Which it does, of course. Ferraris, McLarens, Aston Martins and…

= new entry this month. * = grey import. Entries in italics are for cars no longer on sale. Issue no. is for our most recent major test of the car (D = Driven, R = Road test or group test, F = Feature, FF = Fast Fleet). Call 0844 844 0039 to order a back issue. Price is on-the-road including VAT and delivery charges. Engine is the car’s main motor only – additional hybrid tech isn’t shown. Weight is the car’s kerb weight as quoted by the manufacturer. bhp/ton is the power-to-weight ratio based on manufacturer’s kerb weight. 0-60mph and 0-100mph figures in bold are independently recorded, all other performance figures are manufacturers’ claims. CO2 g/km is the official EC figure and EC mpg is the official ‘Combined’ figure…