Evoの August 2025 の目次

THE GOLF GTI NEEDS LITTLE IF any introduction. Its status as an icon is beyond question, its desirability amongst its followers and fans unbreakable even when it goes through a rough patch. Which it has, more times than many might think. My era of GTI is the Mk2. For a child of the ’80s and a young driver of the ’90s, a three-door big-bumper 16-valve in Oak Green with black leather was the one. It was more than a hot hatch, to my mind at least. Yes, Performance Car and Fast Lane pitched it against the traditional rivals, but to me it felt like a car that could hold its own against machines from a class above: cars like BMW’s 325i and Porsche’s 944. It all went spectacularly wrong with…

PRETTY, ISN’T IT? THE MGA IS 70 YEARS old in 2025, and it looks as lovely as ever. Technologically, however, it’s very much a car from the 1950s, leaf springs and all. Unless it has been reworked by Frontline Cars. The Abingdon-based MG specialist has made its name both restoring and modernising MGBs into surprisingly potent packages over the last 34 years. (We drove two examples, the V8 LE60 and electric-powered BEE GT, inevo 316.) Now, for the first time, it’s turned its hand to the B’s predecessor too. This customer car is Frontline’s first ‘Factory Edition’ MGA, and while its looks remain faithful to its origins, the underpinnings are very much 21st century. It is offered with the choice of a 2 - or 2.5-litre Ford Duratec engine, the…

‘IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES… we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…’ The opening line from Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities. The 2000s promised to be the best of times. Here at evo, as the ’90s came to a close we’d just celebrated our first birthday, a significant publishing milestone, and we were very much looking forward to the next decade. However, we were on the cusp of not just a new decade but a new millennium, and for months a mixture of experts and weirdos had been predicting chaos when the clocks struck midnight on December 31, 1999, all because many electronic counters represented years with just two digits. The doom-mongers predicted that this would lead…

WHENEVER I’M ASKED TO NAME THE MOST significant new car I’ve ever driven, I struggle to think of anything that has left a bigger impression on me than the S1 Elise. In the three decades since I first drove one, no other car has remained so fresh in the memory. The qualities that made it so special then are even more relevant now: the singularity of its mission, the genius of its execution, the magic that’s still bound up in the driving experience, and – sadly – what’s been lost to progress. We knew it then, but it’s even more obvious now: the S1 Elise distilled the essence of Chapman-era Lotus into a pioneering modern sports car. One that would shape, and for some define, the careers of the many…

@evomagazine @evomagazine @officialevomagazine MY EXPERIENCES WITH SOME OF THE VOLKSWAGEN Group’s other recent hot hatches put something of a dampener on my enthusiasm for the Fast Fleet Cupra Leon. I’d driven this facelifted model abroad on its launch last year and enjoyed it, but my feelings for it had withered since, through no fault of its own. However, after a stint in our long-termer for its final weeks on the evo fleet, things were flipped on their head. I’m not a huge fan of its looks, and neither are the rest of the team. To my eyes the new front end is more generic than those of the pre-facelift car and the SEAT Leon Cupras that came before it, and while the rear end looks sharper, with its full-width light…

I PLUGGED THE M5 IN FOR THE FIRST time this month. I hadn’t planned to, but after lapping a city-centre car park one Saturday, searching in vain for a vacant space, it dawned on me that the M5, being a plug-in hybrid, could use one of the 20-or-so bright green electric-charging bays. Two-thirds of these were conspicuously vacant, Cambridge clearly in no hurry to embrace an EV future. Operating at a mere 7kW, these certainly weren’t the fastest chargers in the east, but the M5’s modest battery (18.6kWh net) was brimmed in under three hours, adding a claimed 40 miles of electric range. So far, so good. The disappointment came when I started to look at the cost of driving the M5 on electricity. Driving ‘normally’ along a full mix of…

YOU JOIN ME IN THE PRAGA BOHEMA’S SLIMLINE COCKPIT, Goodwood Motor Circuit unfolding ahead through the visor-like windscreen. I’m on my second lap, building pace and tyre temperature gently, acclimatising to this extreme-looking creation. But something is troubling me… You may recall Jethro Bovingdon drove the prototype Bohema on an airfield test track in evo issue 305 during the latter stages of the car’s development. Two and a half years on, production is underway and customer car deliveries likewise. Praga’s brought two Bohemas along to evo’s first Goodwood trackday of the year, so we can sample this high-downforce, low-volume hypercar in its finalised form. One is a customer car ready for handover, on static display to show off fit, finish and quality; the other is a hard-worked development car with…

YOU MAY REMEMBER IN EVO’S FEBRUARY 2024 issue we got together almost every hot hatch on sale in the UK for one big summit-meeting test. There were 18 cars (sales of Audi’s S3 and RS3 were temporarily paused to make way for the arrival of facelifted versions, so call it 20 in spirit). Today, in mid-2025, that same test would include in the region of 13 cars. What we have here is a similar test for sports cars: a cross-section of the market in one place at one time. The picture isn’t quite as pessimistic as the five cars you see gathered here: whereas our hot hatch test took in nearly every ICE and hybrid variant on the market, this test concentrates on the sports car world’s heartland middle-ground. In…

THE STELVIO QUADRIFOGLIO continues to prove itself to be one of the most characterful and entertaining cars I’ve spent serious time with. Despite being an SUV, it manages to deliver genuine driving enjoyment, so after a long day on location, jumping into its bolstered driving seat still feels like a treat. Its performance remains properly intoxicating. That 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6 is endlessly eager and sounds fantastic, with a hard-edged bark that makes even the most routine journey feel like one worth remembering, and Alfa’s sharp chassis tuning turns what should be a practical family car into something that genuinely wants to play – a rare treat in this part of the market. Lately, the Stelvio has been clocking up serious mileage thanks to a packed shooting schedule across the UK,…

IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT, AT SOME point, Ian Eveleigh and I would get our two big, blue, V8-engined German estate cars mixed up and go home in each other’s cars. And we did. Ev got the better deal, of that I’m convinced. After ten days with the M5 Touring, the whole experience left me a little cold. As with the RS6, its design features are exaggerated, but unlike the Audi, the BMW’s design has an appearance of being over inflated by an airline rather than designed and massaged to form some semblance of a design language. There’s a lot of black, shiny trim on the outside, and you can’t help but ask why a little more effort wasn’t put into how these areas are finished. Or perhaps it will be…

IS WAPPED OUR M5 TOURING FOR OUR Dacia Duster for a few days this month. I hadn’t driven a Duster before and, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think I’d been missing out. Yes, I’d heard all the assertions that this is an evo hero in a most unlikely form, but in my head they couldn’t overpower the knowledge that this is also a 128bhp budget SUV. Then exactly five minutes after setting off in it for the first time, I found myself whipping along an interesting stretch of B-road, hooting with laughter as I maintained as much momentum as I dare through a favourite sequence of corners before picking off two members of the 50mph club (one of them a previous-generation Duster) on the subsequent straight. Hmm. Maybe I…

THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE A HENNESSEY VelociRaptoR 1000, you laugh out loud. To British eyes it’s an absurd machine. At more than 20ft long and standing as tall as Tyson Fury (that’s 6ft 9in in case you’re wondering) it makes a Defender Octa look like a Suzuki Jimny. With 1043bhp it has hypercar power, yet it performs as well on rugged off-road trails as it does on the road. Trucks are big business for Hennessey. When we first visited the Texan tuner’s HQ, back in early 2013, the workshops still featured lots of muscle cars. Now trucks and SUVs account for the lion’s share of its output. Of those the Raptor (now in its third generation) has been the runaway success, with 3500 built in the last 15 years.…

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IN A WORLD OF EVER-TIGHTER REGULATION, THE comparative lack of regulations when it comes to be spoke built hill climb cars is one of the sport’s main attractions. That and the utterly staggering speeds of which modern hill climb cars are capable. David Gould first competed in hill-climbing in the late 1970s in a small single-seater he made at home with brazed tubes and a Mini engine. This was the Terrapin, fun and chuckable, but as with all designer/drivers he wanted more speed, so his next move was straight into the top class of the sport with the Gould 84G, built in 1981. The new machine was born at the height of the titanic battles between the cars with four-cylinder Hart engines, like the 84G, and those with Cosworth DFV…

EVER SINCE I BOUGHT THE MX-5 LAST March, I’d been thinking about an appropriate road trip, but work and other grown-up stuff just kept getting in the way. Then one evening last autumn came a phone call from my sister Claire that instantly put all those things into proper perspective. Her partner Jim, who we’ve known for 25-plus years, had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, the full Sir Chris Hoy. It would mean months of chemo and radiotherapy to keep it in check, but meantime Jim had been hatching a plan. When the initial round of treatment was over, which would take us to May of this year, he wanted to do a family road trip: three couples, a week spent driving down through France and touring the…

THE BOXSTER’S EMBARKED ON a couple of trackdays in recent weeks. First up, Castle Combe in Wiltshire for the Guild of Motoring Writers annual Big Day Out trackday, followed by one ofevo’s very own events at Goodwood. (There’s one more evo Goodwood day this year in September; you can book a space at trackdays.evo.co.uk.) Driving on the road, where there’s rarely the chance to stretch the 4-litre’s 395bhp legs, it’s easy to forget just how potent the GTS is. Given its head, the speed it can achieve on straights – and how quickly that speed builds – is remarkable. It hits more than 130mph through the opening high-speed sweeps at Combe before braking for the tricky Quarry Corner (informally known as Crash Corner), and the best part of 150mph on…