Indice dei contenuti per March 2021 in Evo

DESPITE EVERYTHING 2020 THREW AT US IT STILL managed to deliver a bumper crop of new driver’s cars, as eCoty 2020 demonstrated with one of the toughest years of judging and the closest voting we’ve experienced in the past 22 years. We said it at the time, and we stand by it today, any of our eight finalists could have claimed the title and not a single judge would begrudge the result. Such a stellar year is traditionally followed by a fallow period as everyone catches their breath, takes stock and prepares for the next chapter. Looking through the 2021 product plans there doesn’t appear to be any downtime and this year looks to be as strong as the last. Two of 2021’s new stars have been revealed this month.…

THERE WAS A CHARM TO BENTLEY’S flagship Mulsanne that far outweighed its attributes, which by rights should have placed it firmly in the ‘not an evo car’ category. At well over 5 metres in length it wasn’t a car you’d fling around on a whim. And as it weighed over 2.5 tons you didn’t really want to, because that’s a whole lot of real estate to try and keep on one continent should it go a bit Brexit and want to leave. Its six-and-three-quarter-litre V8 wasn’t especially advanced, relying on more traditional, tried and tested technology to deliver its thumping performance rather than leading the advancement of the internal combustion engine. But it was a magical motor to experience. It was the heart and soul of the big Bentley until…

ITS LE MANS ASPIRATIONS MAY BE some years away from becoming reality, but Lotus has confirmed that in the meantime it will not only replace its entire current sports car range, and work with Alpine on the project, but the process will start later this year with the Type 131 (see evo 278) beginning prototype production. This show of strength will be delivered by a new managing director, Matt Windle, who has moved from his role as executive director of Lotus Engineering to take over from current Lotus Cars MD Phil Popham as the company continues to expand under its Vision80 strategy. Even for Lotus, with the backing afforded it by parent company Geely, this is no small undertaking. Under the terms of its agreement with Alpine, Lotus will develop…

THE AMG GT BLACK SERIES IS HUNGRY. Not just peckish, but full-on, stomach churningly, dementedly ravenous. It sits idling in the cold air on the broad expanse of the West Circuit pitlane at Bedford Autodrome, a hint of agitation to its note but surprisingly reserved as it ticks over, while its giant mouth, now even bigger than that of the GT R and GT R Pro models and inspired by the GT3-spec racer, demands to be fed. Air, or a 991.2 GT2 RS for brunch, perhaps? Me, as a tough and tasteless hors d’oeuvres? Glistening Armco with a sodden grass jus for high tea, given the weather conditions today? I hardly dare contemplate that particular scenario, nor the fact that the Black costs a formidable £335,000. This superhero AMG is…

GIANT INDUSTRIAL CONGLOMERATES FOR WHOM building cars is but one part of the corporate portfolio are nothing new. However, finding a minnow of a car company that makes racing cars, occasional road cars, karts, offroad trucks and aeroplanes is something of a novelty. But that’s 114-year-old Praga, based in Slovakia, whose R1 bonsai LMP racer won outright the 2020 Britcar Endurance series. Designed for high-end trackday use and highlevel competition, the R1 has the feel of a LMP3 car that’s been shrunk in the wash. Not that the 195,000-euro (c£170,000) R1 feels much like a car at all. The ‘door’, if that’s what you can call it, feels more like threading yourself through a ship’s porthole window, and once you’ve slithered through, across and down into the cockpit your surroundings…

OTHER THAN PERHAPS BEING ON THE grid itself, there are few better ways to spend a weekend than watching some racing at one of the UK’s multitude of historic circuits. Once the world reopens, your support will be more valuable than ever too, with club motorsport in particular heavily reliant on its audience to keep the wheels turning and ensure it survives well into the future. And who knows, if your kids enjoy it (and chances are they’ll love it), you might also sow the seeds of a future career – just as it did for Jakob Ebrey. Today Ebrey is known as one of the country’s most prominent motorsport photographers, with more than two decades shooting the British Touring Car Championship, British Rally Championship, GT racing, Formula 1 and…

AS OF 2021, THE RENAULT MÉGANE RS HAS BEEN both refreshed and restructured into a simple two-tier range with a single engine and transmission. Both versions feature the 296bhp 1.8-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine from the previous Trophy, mated to a six-speed dual-clutch transmission. The six-speed manual is therefore gone in the UK, which means the Mégane joins the growing ranks of hot hatchbacks – like the BMW 128ti and Golf GTI Clubsport on the preceding pages – that are auto-only. The previous RS’s rear-wheel-steering system is standard on both models, so too a valved exhaust and four-piston Brembo brakes. We’re driving the RS 300, which along with smaller 18-inch wheels (although optional 19s were fitted to our test car) also features the softer Sport chassis, an open front differential and…

REGULAR READERS WILL SEE A PATTERN emerging here. I’ve been banging on about the benefits of premium hot hatches for a while now in Fast Fleet, having spent a good amount of time in several of them, from the benchmark Volkswagen Golf R to BMW’s latest M135i. In recent times this class of car has become a real boxticker for me, despite having a demanding family who need transporting all over the place, because design developments have meant it’s possible to get all the practicality needed for that role without compromising on the power and fun we crave. (Well, that’s what I tell Mrs Browne anyway.) So when the chance came along to run the new Audi S3 Sportback, I was quick to put my name forward. The first thing…

NOT A TURBOCHARGER IN SIGHT. REAR… erm, rear-motored. Rear-wheel drive. Up to 469bhp with overboost and 90kg or more lighter than the four-wheel-drive versions. This is it. Porsche’s take on a purist EV. Or at least a purist EV supersaloon. It’s called, simply, the Porsche Taycan. Prices start at £70,690, a £12,890 saving over the 4S and almost half the price of the headline-grabbing Turbo S, and it still rips along at quite a pace in all its spooky silence. Or accompanied by an haunting sci-fi plasma-y warp-drive soundtrack should you switch on the (optional) Electric Sport sound. Driving EVs is a very simple business. Explaining their performance potential and various battery options is not. So here goes… That 469bhp figure is largely misleading. In fact, the Taycan produces 322bhp,…

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT A LAP TIME. BUT before we get heavy with the numbers, I think it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the aesthetics, because this new GT3 feels like a much bigger transformation than with previous generations. Devoid of its disguises, it looks startlingly more trim and taut than a standard 992. It’s as though, in order to match the kerb weight of its forebear, it didn’t just need a strict diet but full-on surgery. The way the standard car’s bulbous bottom has been sliced into. The way the lower front looks as though it has been pulled open and a jaw removed. The deeply sunken nostrils… it’s almost brutal. It has to be the most aggressive GT3 to date. The most RS non-RS. Just look…

‘AT SPEED THE CHASSIS SETTLE SAND BEGINS TO FLOW’ YOU HAVE TO HAND IT TO BMW, it’s never been afraid to rip up its own rulebook, stare controversy hard in the face and ask: ‘So what? What are you going to do about it?’ Electric and hybrid cars that resembled nothing else in the line-up a decade before any of its competitors had anything remotely interesting to offer with a plug; SUVs larger than the second homes their owners drive them to at the weekend; a willingness to apply the sacred M name to anything that glides down its production line and to hell with the backlash (profit is profit); and a readiness to flip its design language on its head, seemingly on a whim. There are certainly some brave…

THE LAYOUT AS YOU OPEN THE T.50’S DOOR AND peer inside is very familiar. Same central driving position as the F1; same set-back, flanking second and third seats. Slide yourself in and the differences become apparent. In the McLaren F1 the longitudinal structural beams that run through the tub from the engine mounting points on the rear bulkhead to the front bulkhead were positioned more inboard than they are on the T.50. On the latter they’re within the rocker panels so that getting in and out of the car is much easier. Comfortably slotted in to the driver’s seat, you have in front of you a simple steering wheel with a minimalist selection of buttons and switches, in contrast to the modern trend. What switches there are come from a…

AFTER 11 MONTHS AND NEARLY 8000 MILES of service on the Fast Fleet, our Volkswagen Passat R-Line Edition has left us. evo’s example of the range-topping, 268bhp Passat arrived in January 2020 and was one of a limited run of only 2000 cars, each fitted with pretty much all the goodies available on VW’s large estate car. The Moonstone Grey paint – the only colour choice – was almost always the first talking point for anyone who crossed paths with KY69 BZN. It’s a very Marmite colour (not literally, of course), with some loving it but seemingly more unsure about it, but I thought it worked well with the black 19-inch wheels and smattering of gloss black trim pieces that were all part of the sportier R-Line look. Inside, everything…

THREE MONTHS IN IS THE TIME WHEN the odd gripe or criticism starts to bubble to the surface of a recently acquired resident of the evo garage. The honeymoon period is over, the miles are accumulating and you start to notice the small things that are missed, ignored or not even seen during those first couple of months. Now they are there. Glaringly obvious and staring you in the face every time you drive. The equivalent of spotting an imperfection in an otherwise flawless piece of artwork, or that area of the ceiling that you missed during Lockdown 1’s decorating blitz. You know it’s there and your attention can’t help but be drawn to it each and every time. All Fast Fleeters have had something that has stood out for…

THIS LATEST VERSION OF THE SUPRA IS QUITE THE departure, being the first four-cylinder version in the model’s five-generation, five-decade life. But, of course, the GR Supra is already like no Supra that has come before, with significant chunks sourced from BMW, including the turbocharged 3-litre straight-six and now the turbocharged 2-litre four. There’s a hefty cost saving by dropping two cylinders and one litre: almost £8500, for a list price of £45,995. The main things you expect to sacrifice are a charismatic soundtrack and lots of ready torque. The 3-litre Supra is more subtle than you might expect but its straight-six suffuses the snug cockpit with a quietly confident burr, and even a modest throttle squeeze delivers a rich swell of torque. As it turns out, the 2.0 is…

BY 2030 WE COULD BE WATCHING all-electric racers like this competing in endurance races such as Le Mans, Daytona and Spa, says Lotus Engineering. Its design study, titled E-R9, is what it imagines such a long-distance racer could look like and combines not only pure electric power and adaptive suspension geometry, but also ‘morphing’ surfaces for adaptive aerodynamics and jet fighter-style ‘aero vectoring’ for highspeed cornering. It’s a great-looking sports racer, with its delta-wing upper body and jet-fighter canopy, and Lotus has deployed its free-thinking, competition-honed expertise to imagine what technology it might embody. But is it really possible that we could have electric endurance racers in just nine years’ time? The current pinnacle of electric racing, Formula E, features single-seaters with a top speed of 174mph racing on street…

I LOVE SPORTS CARS. THAT’S NOT EXACTLY A SURPRISING revelation, I know, and I’m sure most of you feel the same, but I do – more than any hypercar you care to mention. Sports cars, to my mind, are cars with dimensions, kerb weights and engine outputs ideally suited to enjoyment on a great B-road; cars that are equally at home on a circuit but not overpowered or overbearing; cars that are attainable, even if just vaguely so. The trouble is, what we loosely term ‘sports cars’ are currently a dying breed, with many major manufacturers simply not making any, and even Lotus about to stop making them for a while, so it’s particularly exciting to get these three together: the all-rounder, the hardcore track machine, and the modified one.…

IT MAY LOOK VERY SIMILAR TO LAST YEAR’S CAR, BUT THE new R1T is a thorough evolution for the 2021 season, with up to ten cars set to compete within their own class in the Britcar Endurance series. The Praga engineering team have added further carbonfibre to the structure, increasing its strength and stiffness in specific areas, while extremely tough Zylon panels form the bodywork around the sides and A-and B-pillars, the aim being to assist with distributing the force over a wider area in the event of a heavy impact. Naturally, the car’s aerodynamics have been given a further honing, although the changes are not so radical that a 2020 car can’t be upgraded to 2021 spec. After CFD work with Praga’s aero partner, a 15 per cent increase…

ANDRELAX. AFTER THE RATHER unsettling proposition that is the front-wheel-drive, automatic BMW hot hatch on the preceding pages – who’d have once thought that possible? – here’s something much more within our respective comfort zones. A new Golf GTI. A go-faster one at that. And breathe… If the concept, and indeed the ingredients, are all very familiar, then that needn’t detract from what should hopefully be an important new arrival in the hot hatch market. In recent years, Karsten Schebsdat’s engineering team have brought us a superb series of VW hot hatches, peaking with future classics such as the Mk7 Clubsport S. This new Mk8 Clubsport is unusual in that it’s available right from the start of this generation’s GTI production run, rather than late in the day, and there’s…

FORGET BOND AND HIS GADGET-LADEN Silver Birch DB5. When it comes to ultimate Astons, my heart has always belonged to the big, ballsy GT flagships. From the 1970s Vantage to today’s epic, twin-turbocharged DBS Superleggera, there’s something about these bruising machines that speaks so eloquently of the marque. To me, they will always be the quintessential Aston Martin. Of all these rollicking flagships, it’s the Viragebased V550 Vantage that makes the most emphatic statement. At least to me. This could have something to do with it being introduced at a time when I was just experienced enough for Aston’s PR boss, Harry Calton, to entrust me with its humble, Ford-sourced ignition key. As a kid who’d grown up with a fascination for all cars, but especially Astons, getting near one…

IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I LAST PUT finger to keyboard on the Rallye, and the rollercoaster that was 2020 means its latest appearance comes after an unexpected flurry of activity. Put simply, my small, French, late-’90s homologation special bought for weekend blasts spent two or three months acting as my primary mode of transportation. Aside from everything else, this has had quite an impact on the odometer. In the car’s previous report in June 2020 the odo was reading 113,976, which meant I’d put only around 3000 miles on the car in three full years. Fast-forward a few months and that number read 116,299 – 2323 miles greater. It turns out that piling miles on a tiny car with little in the way of modern equipment, no power steering…