Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Evo

ONE CAR. ONE ROAD. WHAT WOULD they be? It’s the perennial question that’s impossible to ignore in this game and always a brain scrambler to answer. You also need to avoid nominating a car you’ve never driven but quite like the look of, because that could end in you suggesting you’d like to drive an Alfa 4C, which will only take you on a journey to colossal disappointment. You need to avoid crashing into the obvious cliché, too. A Ferrari on the Stelvio Pass? Italy has so many more great roads to offer than one full of tourist coaches and cyclists, and the last thing you want when enjoying a prime slice of Maranello metal is a crowd. Supersaloon on a German autobahn? Once you’ve hit the limiter, what next?…

RENAULT IS WASTING NO TIME IN offering a Trophy version of its latest Mégane RS. Set to go on sale this autumn, the new Trophy follows a familiar path, gaining more power and a sharper chassis to take it beyond the standard car. With 296bhp – 20bhp more than the regular RS – the Trophy will be Renault Sport’s most powerful car to date. It’s far from an ECU job, though. Upcoming WLTP emissions regulations have necessitated the fitment of a particulate filter, which has increased exhaust back-pressure, so the engineers have responded with a lower-friction, ceramic ball bearing turbocharger for quicker responses, and a valved exhaust for greater flow – and more noise when it’s desired. Six-speed manual and dual-clutch EDC transmissions are available, the latter rated for greater…

IF YOU’RE TESTING PREMIUM car tyres of the calibre developed by Continental Tyres, there’s only one place to go – the south of France. Set amidst scenery of jaw-dropping beauty, the roads there are challenging for tyres, car and driver; they’re also tremendously entertaining and home to several of the most iconic stages of the Monte Carlo Rally. Though hardly essential to the enjoyment of tyre testing, it would be remiss not to also mention the glorious climate and the endemic sense of glamour and style that pervades the whole region as further attractions for visiting this part of the world. And this is where the 12 winning teams of the Continental Black Chili Driving Experience found themselves in the baking heat of early July, with the mission of learning…

MERCEDES IS THE CAR INDUSTRY’S niche-filler extraordinaire, and AMG’s willingness to offer one of its bombastic derivatives in every sector the mothership operates in knows no bounds. Unless, of course, you want an AMG-fettled B- or V-class, because even Tobias Moers has a threshold for what he will ask his engineers to work on. By far the widest AMG choice comes from the C-class line-up, the volume seller that chases BMW 320d sales as hard as it hounds Audi RS and BMW M customers for their monthly payments. And following the regular C’s midlife nip and tuck last month, AMG has presented its updated C63 range, from saloon to coupe, cabriolet to estate, with two tunes of hot-vee V8 to get stuck into: the 469bhp non-S and 503bhp S. You’ll…

IGNORE THE SPEC SHEETS FOR THE MOMENT, specifically the prices, because when it comes to mid-engined, rear-drive sports coupes, Lotus’s Exige and Porsche’s Cayman have been like two boxers slinging insults at each other and puffing their chests out, but never actually ducking under the rope and getting in the ring. There have been a few excuses from both sides as to why they’ve avoided a tear-up. Most have come from the Norfolk-based camp and have primarily centred around not being in peak condition at the same time as the Stuttgart swinger. Lotus’s contender has also fluctuated between classes by overdoing the training and being more on a par with the Cayman’s bigger-hitting 911 GT3 uncle. Oh, and for the last 36 months the Hethel firm has been devoid of…

IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A BIT OF A HEAD-scratcher, the BMW M2. On paper its combination of compact dimensions, thumping six-cylinder performance and good old-fashioned rear-drive fun should have made it the pick of the M line-up. Yet it never quite gelled. It always felt like a car engineered to a price rather than to the exacting standards we’ve come to expect of the M division. You could find evidence of this in the M2’s slightly ragged handling, but the biggest clue to its somewhat mongrel status was its 3-litre turbocharged straight-six, which was essentially a lightly modded version of the N55 unit used in the now-defunct M135i. It wasn’t a bad engine, but neither was it an outstanding one. Preferring to do its work in the mid-range, it lacked both…

OF MANY THINGS THAT attracted me to this Rallye was the comprehensive history retained by its former keeper. It’s always nice to be handed a large folder full of old bills and service records, even if you’ll give them only a cursory glance when excitedly leafing through them before a purchase. One thing I did notice was a note on the latest MOT certificate failing the car for a large exhaust leak. This was fixed and a fresh MOT handed out according to the paperwork, but the seller admitted it was more of a patch-up job than anything else. And true enough, soon after buying the Rallye I noticed it was becoming rather loud under hard acceleration and at a cruise. I’m under no illusions of the 106 being a…

OUR BMW M240i MAY NOT HAVE been an ideal photographer’s car, lacking as it did the generous load space of an estate or even the convenience of a hatchback’s tailgate, but with a turbocharged 3-litre straight-six engine producing a healthy 335bhp and 369lb ft of torque in a small coupe body, all was forgiven on any occasion when I wasn’t trying to fit a stepladder inside. It could, I think, have been even more enjoyable had it been equipped with the manual gearbox, which would have upped the involvement levels a little further. But I have to admit that the £1600 eight-speed Sport Automatic transmission was perfect for the motorway slogs that photoshoots demand. Our M240i was also fitted with BMW’s Adaptive M Sport suspension – a £515 option but…

WE’VE HAD OUR C43 MORE THAN SIX months now, so its time on the evo Fast Fleet is nearly up. With 10,750 miles on the clock, it feels as though the engine has really loosened up; at what point do the bushes and dampers start to lose their edge, though? By 40,000 miles I assume there’s some deterioration, but I wonder if there’s a golden period before that where all the stars align. If you’re an engineer, I’d be interested to hear views on that topic. This version of the C43 and its ilk have been replaced by a facelifted model, with larger turbochargers and a remap offering a little more lung capacity at the top of the rev range, and a 23bhp jump to 385bhp. I understand that tweak:…

HOW NICE TO BE ABLE TO TALK about a Porsche Cayman without the gravelly cacophany of the current four-cylinder engine barging its way to the front of the narrative. As a conversion based on the previous, 981-generation Cayman, the car you see here is powered by the direct-injection, naturally aspirated ‘MA1’ flat-six, in this case in 3.4-litre S tune, and that is unequivocally a very good start indeed. You can apply individual CSR elements to your Cayman, but sampled all together in one car the resulting RPM Technik 981 CSR can be viewed ostensibly as a Cayman GT4-lite, or possibly even a GT4 alternative. The Hertfordshire-based Porsche specialist has built nearly 30 of its more driver-focused CSR conversions over recent years, mainly based on water-cooled 911s. This car showcases RPM’s…

SERGIO MARCHIONNE – CHIEF executive officer of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and chairman and CEO of Ferrari – has passed away following complications after shoulder surgery. The 66-year-old had been admitted to Zurich University Hospital for a routine procedure but passed away on Wednesday 25 July. ‘Unfortunately, what we feared has come to pass. Sergio Marchionne, man and friend, is gone,’ confirmed John Elkann, of the FCA-controlling Agnelli family, in a statement. Marchionne joined Fiat in 2003, when the then ailing Italian car maker was on the verge of bankruptcy, posting a loss of €6billion. Within two years he had turned the loss into a profit, helped considerably by securing €2billion from an alliance with GM. He also laid off thousands of workers, embarked on an ambitious new model plan and…

HERE’S ANOTHER NEW CAR TO emerge from Gaydon, and how’s this to grab your attention: it has 664lb ft of torque from just 1800rpm. I thought that’d do it. The DBS is a DB11 V12 on full afterburner reheat, both visually and in performance, but given our rather indifferent opinion of the DB11 V12 – itself now replaced by the moderately improved DB11 AMR – it seems quite a stretch for an evolution of that car to challenge Ferrari’s extraordinarily angry 812 Superfast for front-engined supercar supremacy. Nevertheless, one of this car’s key strengths was actually relatively easy to achieve: extracting 715bhp from Aston’s twin-turbocharged V12 may seem like a landmark achievement, but getting the extra 85bhp and 148lb ft over what the AMR offers simply required an ECU remap,…

THERE’S A SENSE THAT NOT EVEN BMW is quite sure why buyers might choose a standard M5 over the new Competition variant. Yes, there’s the price, but when you’re already spending the thick end of £90,000, what difference does an extra £6500 really make? Even a senior M engineer struggled with the question. He seemed perplexed, as if he knew he had to come up with an answer but couldn’t think why anyone wouldn’t buy the sharpest M tool in the box. Eventually he suggested that ‘maybe the owner of a standard car wants to spend more time on the autobahn’. Hmm, maybe indeed. So, what have we got? There’s more power, with the twin-turbo V8 producing 616bhp (up 24bhp), but torque remains unchanged at 553lb ft. However, the standard…

EVEN FROM AN ENIGMA SUCH as Ayrton Senna, his answer was intriguingly obscure: ‘Fullerton. Name, Fullerton.’ He’d been asked ‘Who was your toughest rival?’ and, having carefully considered it, began talking about Terry Fullerton, his karting teammate from a decade previously. ‘It was pure driving, pure racing,’ said Senna with quiet reflection, a memory of a time before he was the megastar driver; a simpler time, free from the influence of politics and money, when only the next apex mattered. Purity. Most of us seek it to some degree, yet as a state of mind it’s increasingly hard to achieve in the modern world. Our connected society – from the moment we wake up, our drive to work, to a day in the office – is all online, multitasked, assisted…

NEW TYRE TIME FOR THE M5. The Pirelli P Zeros that the car arrived on had survived 9000 miles (the majority on road, a few hundred on track), but the last 1500-2000 miles had seen a marked drop-off in their performance, primarily in the wet where the front-end precision washed away and an element of unpredictability crept in at the rear. I also felt they had hardened over those last few thousand miles, adding a brittleness to the M5’s ride that wasn’t there when the car arrived and the tyres were fresh. BMW homologated two tyres for the M5 during its development: the Pirelli and Michelin’s Pilot Sport 4 S. While there appears to be no option to specify a specific tyre when you order an M5, BMW GB opted…

‘Its ability to push on must have humbled its contemporaries in 1974‘ THE MADNESS OF THE GRAND PRIX hit Monaco in May, and with a few friends in town it provided the perfect opportunity for a blast around some of the amazing roads that form the gateway to the French Alps. There were eight drivers amongst four cars: my Porsche 911 (997) GT3 RS 4.0, Ariel Atom and Lamborghini Aventador Roadster, plus a special guest, a friend’s 1974 911 2.7 Carrera with mechanical fuel injection. A spiritual grandfather of the GT3 RS 4.0, this 2.7 Carrera makes around 210bhp and looks stunning following a full body-off restoration last year. It has been fitted with up-to-date Ruf suspension and, as a result, delivers a classic but incredibly involving driving experience. Everyone…

THE STINGER CONTINUES TO generate interest and, mostly, admiration wherever it goes. This month it helped out with tracking photography on an Enzo magazine photoshoot based out of Car-Iconics in Oakham. The guys there love their cars, trading not just in Ferraris but anything that interests them, and the Kia did that. To some people the Stinger looks a fraction too long, but most love its visual impact, especially ours in its unique (for now) metallic blue paint. And having been for a ride around some of their favourite lanes nearby, the Car-Iconics guys were deeply impressed. The GT S does comfort and agility well, a twist of the mode button to shift from Comfort to Sport tightening up the suspension a little, adding a welcome growl to the V6…

YOU WANT SOME FAMILY-friendly versatility, so you need a hatchback, right? Actually, that’s not always the case. A hatchback can be brilliant if you want to fold the back seats down and carry a large object or two, but the rest of the time there’s a lot to be said for having a decent-sized boot slung out the back. This is especially the case with the RS3, because to squeeze that bulky five-cylinder engine under the bonnet, Audi’s engineers had to move the battery to the boot. This eats into the load space and results in a back-seats-up carrying capacity of 280 litres for the Sportback, against the saloon’s more useable 315 litres. It’s not a massive difference, I grant you, but when you’ve a family that’s yet to master…

IT’S ALWAYS A JOY DISCOVERING stretches of bituminous spaghetti in the most remote places. The B-159 just north of San Pedro de Atacama, in Chile’s Antofagasta region, is one such road, the relatively straight and flowing sections of which are broken occasionally and briefly by a rollercoaster wiggle through trickier terrain. Something like an Audi Ur-Quattro would be perfect here, particularly given access to unpaved roads nearby and the settling snow further up in the mountains. An animated and amusingly sweary Audi designer is trying to draw comparisons between the brick-like icon and Audi’s new Q8 SUV, but doing so having called the rally star ‘f**king ugly’ perhaps isn’t the kind of comparison the attendant PRs were hoping for. Nor do the few shared styling cues (sharply ridged wings, the…

FIFTEEN YEARS. THAT’S HOW LONG IT took McLaren Automotive to replace its very first hypercar – it’s very first series road car – the F1 with the P1. Now the Woking concern is hoping to slash a third off that time when it comes to replacing the latter, having confirmed that the P1’s successor will arrive before 2025. The announcement came at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July. As the covers were coming off the new 600LT, McLaren CEO Mike Flewitt also presented a new ‘Track 25’ strategy, which outlines the company’s targets as far as 2025. This itself is an update to the earlier Track 22 strategy (up to 2022) revealed at the Geneva motor show in 2016. Just over 24 months ago that plan was to launch…

‘It is clearly more entertaining to drive than any other XE, but it could do with a bit more drama’ JAGUAR HAS LONG NEEDED A HALO model to give the XE a push from the top; a model to sprinkle some sex appeal across the rest of the XE range, which, let’s face it, has so far failed to take it to the Germans that dominate this sector, both commercially and/or dynamically. The £150k, 592bhp XE SV Project 8 (evo 250) is too far removed, too unattainable to really do the job. And while the 375bhp V6-powered XE S, which this new turbocharged, four-pot 300 Sport effectively replaces due to emissions issues, tried reasonably hard to perform the role, truth is it never quite pulled it off. Cars like the…

MOST FAMILY HATCHBACKS AREN’T fun to drive. The original Ford Focus was an exception. It was sensible, practical and affordable, but also handled with a fluidity that some significantly more expensive cars struggled to emulate, and engaged the driver in a way few of its rivals – nimble Peugeot 306 excepted – could match. Subsequent generations maintained many of the first car’s qualities but, as often happens as model generations progress, the Focus grew larger and its responses became dulled. This new Focus has refound the fun factor. Not laugh-out-loud, spring-out-of-bed-at-4am fun, but certainly change-up-a-bit-later, lift-off-mid-corner-to-see-what-happens fun. You can’t go too far wrong driving anything on the sinewy Route Napoleon in southeast France, but the new Focus positively goads you into skirting the Alps rather than plodding up the autoroute…

WE’VE GONE PAST THE POINT OF NO return. If I screw up the braking now, we’re nose-first into the barrier; there’s no shying away from that alarming fact. But it’s OK. I’ve already driven a prototype Senna at Silverstone (evo 249), so I know its powers of braking are unlike those of any other road car I’ve ever driven, born from a combination of ludicrous downforce, tyres so sticky they squidge under thumb pressure, and ceramic brakes that take nearly as long as a human pregnancy to manufacture. I know the Senna stops from very high speeds like it has driven headlong into a superglue manufacturing plant. ‘I KNOW THIS!’ I scream, silently, to the sensible half of my brain, the one that’s currently questioning my sanity as the 200-metre…

IT PROBABLY GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT THE rivalries we are about to witness on the roads that rock and roll across the Pennines will clash with extreme prejudice. Forget McLaren’s supercar tussles with Ferrari, Lamtborghini and Porsche – the quest to build the ultimate hot hatch appears to be far more serious than that. ‘Needle match’ is too blunt a description. Despite a persistent obsession to nut things out against the clock on Germany’s Nordschleife, the contest is no mere grab for power and speed. The beauty of this apex gathering is diversity: a conspicuous absence of ‘me too-ism’, rock-solid conviction in the respective approaches and tech, and an honest, boldly defined pitch for your £30k or so. Apart from the things required to be called a car, all the…

RUNNING LONG-TERM TEST CARS is one of the best parts of a rather silly job. Over the past few years I’ve had an R8 V10 Plus, a Bentley Continental GT V8 and an AMG C63 Coupe, plus a few months here and there in a BMW i8 and a Mustang 5.0 Convertible. And now I have a VW Up GTI. Have I done something to upset editor Stuart Gallagher? Almost certainly, but the little Vee Dub was all my own doing. I’ve always enjoyed running hot hatches, and I have a soft spot for the smallest and most terrier-like examples. Some of my fondest Fast Fleet memories are of living with a Fiat Panda 100HP, so when I heard evo was to get an Up GTI for six months I…

‘YEAH, MAKE IT A BIT THICKER. I’m sure there will be space.’ I said it with such confidence that the guys at Forge who were making a new aluminium radiator for my 2002 didn’t even question me. Why would they? It’s my car, I’ve worked on it a lot and I should know how much space there is between the front of the engine and the radiator. So when I dropped off my crusty old radiator at Forge’s Gloucester HQ and ran through the specs for my new one – to be mounted exactly the same way and be exactly the same shape, only ‘a bit thicker’ – I said ‘go for it’. A few weeks later an enormous box was delivered. It contained the flaky old radiator and the…

ASKED ABOUT THE PROS AND CONS of Caterham ‘ownership’, you’d probably expect me to wax lyrical about the immersive driving experience and the car’s utter brilliance on track, but also to moan about the compromises needed to drive it on the road. And you’d be right, except for the last point. I’m sure others will disagree, but for me there’s huge appeal in using a Seven for daily driving duties. It’s not the easy choice by any means, but equally it’s not a hardship, even on my commute into the office, which features more than its fair share of motorways. Of course, there are caveats. Firstly, if you’re over six feet tall and are the owner of feet that only fit shoes size 10 or over then you’re going to…

DON’T LET THE CITIGO’S PINT-SIZED dimensions and first-car vibe fool you. It’s a quality product engineered to a point far beyond its city car rivals. Furthermore, in this new Monte Carlo guise, priced at £11,500, it’s an enjoyable drive, too. The Monte Carlo benefits from a sportier chassis set-up, which sees the ride height reduced by 15mm and the fitment of larger wheels shod with 10mm wider tyres. Under the bonnet sits the usual naturally aspirated 999cc three-cylinder engine, its unchanged power and torque outputs of 59bhp and 70lb ft respectively translating to a 101mph top speed, with 0-62mph taking a lengthy 14.4sec. This is largely due to the tall, economy-biased gearing: second will see you past 60mph and third beyond 90mph. A shorter final drive would be welcome, but…

WHY DON’T MORE PEOPLE BUY XFs? Its recent refresh gave it a punchier nose, adding some much-needed dynamism – from the front at least, because the rear looks a little unfinished, as if the team went home on a Friday and forgot what they were doing by Monday morning. Overall, I like how it looks, although it’s very spec-dependent and can go from tailored suit to cardigan and zip-up slippers with a simple misjudged selection on the configurator. It’s still pleasant inside. The infotainment system is comically bad in everything it does, but the ergonomics for those who enjoy driving are unquestionable – best in class, I’d say. The fit and finish may lag behind those of German rivals, but spec an XF with consideration and it’s all rather pleasant.…