Table of contents for October 2019 in Evo

THERE’S SOMETHING MISSING ON the centre console of this Porsche 718. It takes a few moments for me to twig, but now I have I can’t stop the smile from spreading broadly across my face. It doesn’t matter how hard you look for it, you won’t find a Sport button on the new Cayman GT4. Nor a mode switch on the steering wheel, a manettino-style device or anything of their ilk. So while I sincerely hope you do go on to read the rest of this story, and with a bit of luck maybe derive some enjoyment from it too, if you don’t, and you need a five-second summation of this car’s character – and why it’s a thoroughly essential evo machine – you could do a lot worse than…

STUART GALLAGHER Size. The killer ingredient when it comes to the perfect sports car. An engine’s power output, a chassis’ balance, the steering’s feedback or how easily the brakes can be modulated are all important, but they’re all redundant if you spend your time trying to keep the car within the confines of a road’s white lines. Get the footprint right and all of the above drop into place: enough power to work the chassis but not overwhelm it, precision from the steering, reassurance from the brakes and the crispest of the gearshifts (yes, it’s a manual), combined with a Weight that’s in proportion to all of the above. Performance isn’t paramount but involvement and enjoyment are, because a good sports car is as engaging and enjoyable at 50 per…

‘TO MAKE RIPPLES IN ANY INDUSTRY YOU NEED to make a splash. This is our splash.’ The words of Phil Popham, CEO of Lotus Cars, and his splash is the Evija, the first all-new Lotus for over a decade, the first since Chinese conglomerate Geely was handed the keys to Potash Lane in 2017 and the first all-electric British sports car. But will this latest four-figure-horsepower hypercar with a seven-figure price tag sink or swim? Does the world need another electric hypercar costing well into the millions and with a power output all but unusable on the road and not exactly exploitable on track? We’ll find out next year when the first deliveries are made, and yes, it does sound incredibly ambitious for a company currently selling fewer than 2000…

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THE LÉGENDE. IT TAKES A VERY COOL CAR to shoulder such a name tag without it being cringeworthy, but if any new car can do it then it’s the brilliant Alpine A110. evo has published page upon page of material devoted to or including this fabulous lightweight sports car, and we make no apology for that: the runner-up at eCoty 2018, it remains to my mind the most important and desirable performance car in the ‘almost real world’ – a beacon of lightweighting and genuine driver interaction. Now the launch-edition Première models are all sold out (they were the high-spec ones, all in Alpine Blue), the A110 is available in two versions: the entry-level Pure, and this, the Légende. This autumn, the line-up will grow further still with the arrival…

‘The Ceed feels much stronger than our previous long-term Proceed GT ever did’ HOW FUN DO YOU NEED A CAR TO BE? Odd question in a mag like this, you might think, but then you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, otherwise we’d all be knocking around in Caterhams. Reality dictates we need the boring stuff too, such as a roof that doesn’t flap about in the wind, and space for our elbows, so most of us buy relatively ‘normal’ cars instead. But logically this too works on a sliding scale, because we prioritise different things. Not everyone wants Civic Type R levels of ability in their hatchback, and you can, as I’ve been discovering this month, derive plenty of enjoyment from something a lot more humble if you’re in…

IT’S ALWAYS A GOOD SIGN THAT YOU are glad to be reunited with your long-termer. I lost ‘my’ Fastback for over a week recently as it was needed for a run down to the ‘Nürburgring’. You might not have heard of it but it’s an old circuit in Germany and they have a 24-hour race there every year, apparently. Anyhow, young evo staff writer Jordan Katsianis had been invited to attend by Hyundai, who had a couple of i30 Ns entered in the TCR class, so there was no better car for the task. Sadly, the works racers just missed out on the class win, coming second, and I felt I’d come second too, given what was deposited on my driveway as a replacement for the Fastback. So I was…

IT SAYS AN AWFUL LOT FOR THE UP GTI that in the 25 years I’ve been running longterm test cars I can’t recall doing more miles in any of them than the 17,000 I covered during my year with the little VW. Things got off to an auspicious start, for on the very day I took delivery of the box-fresh KS18 XNF I immediately filled it full of race kit and drove it to Spa for the Summer Classic historic race meeting. During the remainder of the year I revisited Spa, drove to the Le Mans Classic, to Scotland for eCoty 2018 and made numerous round trips to Anglesey. What these journeys revealed was that though the Up is small, it could take big drives comfortably in its stride. The…

WHAT IS THE POINT OF A 2000BHP electric-powered hypercar costing 26 times more than a Cayman GT4? Granted, the chances are that if you are in the position to drop seven figures on a battery pack clothed in a generic carbonfibre body you are already likely to have a car collection far exceeding the total number of cars many of us will own in our lifetime. But seriously, £2million for a car that’s related to one costing £40,000 that so happens to be one of the greatest driver’s cars you have been able to buy for the last two decades? Sorry, but the Lotus Evija makes no sense to me. I struggle to understand the appeal of a car that, until we get to experience it, offers the emotional attachment…

THE DE TOMASO P72, ONE OF THE debutants at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, sees the return of an Italian automotive brand that was last active in the noughties. This new car in fact marks the 60th birthday of the firm, and is inspired by a little-known 1964 tie-up between its founder, Alejandro de Tomaso, and Carroll Shelby: the P70. The core team behind today’s De Tomaso is also behind Apollo and its IE, though whereas the Apollo is an out-and-out hardcore homage to GT1 racers, the P72 is a more relaxed affair for drivers of all abilities to enjoy. Intended as a ‘halo’ model, De Tomaso will build only 72 examples, with a base price currently pegged at around €750k (£670k) and final spec to be confirmed. Two…

FOR ANYONE WHO HAS THE SLIGHTEST DROP OF PETROL flowing in their veins, there are few greater treats than an in-depth interview with the man who has gallons of the stuff sloshing around his body, namely Gordon Murray (evo 263). At the age of 73, his infectious enthusiasm for unattainable motoring ‘perfection’ is clearly what still drives him, and the resolute refusal to accept compromise or second best shows little sign of abating. Can you imagine being an engineer at Cosworth and getting a call from Murray wanting a new engine for his latest hypercar, the T.50? I wonder what the overriding emotion was. Excitement, anticipation, terror… or a mix of all three? Not content with designing what is argued by many to be the greatest road-going sports car of…

WHUMP. THE FAMILIAR SOUND OF FOUR wheels briefly leaving terra firma over a crest. There’s a momentary flare from the BMW in-line six before a foursquare, finely damped landing. No shudder, no scuff of low-hanging plastic on asphalt scored by previous, less successful touchdowns. Guess the car. The engine reference might have given it away in a group test in the past, but today you can’t be so certain. It could apply to either of the cars we have here, or indeed the Morgan on the following pages. Twenty years ago, if you’d been informed of a new sports car powered by a BMW straight-six, there’d have been few complaints, but in 2019 it’s caused quite some consternation. The car in question is the new Toyota GR Supra, which doesn’t…

RIGHTLY, ALPINE’S A110 CONTINUES TO BASK IN the glory of being a true breath of fresh air in the performance car world. SUVs with ludicrous power outputs and obscene kerb weights, supercars with so much motorsport-inspired aero they are rendered all but redundant on the road, and hypercars that, well, just don’t seem to make any sense to anyone who genuinely enjoys the thrill of driving (GMA T.50 aside). Bravo Alpine. And thank you. Thank you for restoring the faith in those who thought the days of new machines of this ilk were long gone. A new player in the ever-shrinking world of genuine sports cars is a rare thing indeed. Although, Alpine is doing nothing new, and while it may feel that we’ve just endured a fallow spell for…

‘THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL TURBOCHARGED four-cylinder engine in series production,’ reads the press release for the new Mercedes-AMG A45 hot hatch and its difficult-to-classify four-door CLA45 brother. (Mercedes will tell you it’s a coupe, the most abused word in the motoring lexicon just after ‘sporty’ and just before ‘emotive’.) Trouble is, the old A45 and CLA45 struggled to entertain with an already-generous 376bhp. Now that’s risen to 415bhp (non-S models get 382bhp), but turning up the wick alone is no guarantee of new-found evoness. Luckily, the new 45s are off to a running start. Earlier in the year AMG launched the A35 and CLA35, giving buyers a lower rung on the AMG ladder, just as the V6 43s and hybrid-assisted 53s have done further up the range. And those 35s…

AS PERHAPS THE BEST MODEL IN Aston Martin’s reinvented range, it’s hard to imagine how the brutish DBS Superleggera super-GT could be improved, yet the new open-top DBS Superleggera Volante appears to have done just that. While the Valkyrie and Valhalla speak of a new breed of Aston, the DBS sticks faithfully to the big, brawny blueprint for which the marque has been rightly celebrated. Such old-school qualities are reassuring, at least to those of us who recall the glorious V8 bruisers built at Newport Pagnell, yet the DBS is a far better and more talented machine than those old dinosaurs ever were. As you’d expect, the DBS Volante shares its underpinnings with the coupe. This is officially A Good Thing, because it endows it with obscene potency. With the…

THE MAJOR NEWS CONCERNING THE ALL-new BMW 1-series is that, shock-horror, it is no longer rear-wheel drive. The driven wheels have been switched from back to front mainly in the name of packaging, says BMW, hence the new One is bigger inside than its predecessor in just about every direction, despite being not much bigger on the outside. Traditionalists will no doubt claim that, with a transverse engine and front-wheel drive, the model is no longer a true BMW. But the company’s engineers argue otherwise. They reckon the new 1-series is not only more spacious but also more composed and just better to drive with its new FWD architecture. Which is all fine and believable, until you come to the top-dog M135i xDrive version, which is four-wheel drive. Or, to…

YOU REMEMBER MY 996, RIGHT? AS pictured here in happier times and looking rather splendid. Well, I think so anyway. The first water-cooled 911 is emerging slowly from the long shadow of its reputation for being ugly, unreliable, cheap and nasty inside, not a 993 and all those other criticisms levelled at it, but it’s still not been fully adopted by the Porsche crowd and the wider world. That means it remains by far the cheapest way into a 911 and the only true bargain Porsche left. OK, rant over. My 996 is a very early 3.4 Carrera with a chequered history and has lived a pretty hard life. As a 911 should. I bought it in 2013 over the phone without having seen it in person due to being…

’With a 104bhp deficit, the Porsche’s undoubted talents had to be sought out’ THERE ARE SO MANY DAYS WHEN THE alarm clock seems to go off impossibly early. And others, sadly fewer, when dawn won’t come quickly enough, when the anticipation of what the day ahead will bring has you staring at the clock, willing for it to be time to get up. Such was the giddy schoolboy feeling of taking the 458 Speciale and GT3 RS 4.0 on track for the first time at Paul Ricard in the south of France with three friends. Unlike any trackday I have done in the UK, transponders were handed out after the safety briefing for what would be a fully timed event! The prospect of examining time sheets at the end of…

NEWS, INTERVIEWS, TECH AND EVERY NEW CAR THAT MATTERS THE NEW FOCUS ST SHOULD BE THE car to get Ford right back into the fast hatch game. The previous version was lacklustre: it struggled for traction due to its lack of a limited-slip diff, and was outperformed by newer rivals with more tech and more power. One car in particular exposed the old ST’s shortcomings: the Hyundai i30 N Performance, which seemed to land from nowhere but was instantly on the pace, fully equipped and good value too. An ST is harder to get right than an RS, say Ford engineers, because while there’s a single-minded dynamic focus about an RS that customers understand, expectations of the ST are much broader. It’s expected to be a Swiss army knife of…

SCOTTISH RACING TEAM ECURIE ECOSSE, under the stewardship of Jaguar XJ13 expert Neville Swales, has announced it will build a limited run of a new, road-legal model called the LM69. But don’t go assuming that this is yet another four-figure-bhp electric hypercar, because in fact the LM69 is a homage to the 1966 Jaguar XJ13, the stillborn Le Mans racer designed to repeat the success Jaguar had enjoyed in said 24-hour race a decade earlier with the D-type. Unfortunately the XJ13 would never see competition, but its legacy stands – and now more acutely than ever upon the reveal of the Ecurie Ecosse LM69. Rather than being an exact replica, the LM69 is instead based on a theoretical version of a Jaguar XJ13 had it been in competition at the…

‘THE GT-R BUILDS FIERCE CROSS-COUNTRY PACE THAT ENGAGES AND ABSORBS’ LET’S AT LEAST TRY TO KEEP THIS simple. Almost any vehicle, however hopeless, can be driven for sport. With the right mindset, feeble and flabby are merely challenges to be overcome through the agents of guile, gritted teeth and slipstreaming. For white-van drivers it appears to be a way of life, though to be fair to the overtaken, today’s tin-sided hardware can haul a bit and hardly disincentivises its eager operatives from exploiting their good fortune. A sports car is something else. It doesn’t have to be a two-seater convertible. Nor does it matter where its engine sits in the chassis or, up to a point, how many cylinders said motor has. Not so many that it’s mistaken for a…

‘LOOK MORE CLOSELY, AND IT’S CRISPER, MORE CONFIDENT, MORE PURPOSEFUL’ MMM, THE RICH SCENT OF freshly cut grass. Hot engine smell, too. I can see the thermal haze escaping from the long, fluted bonnet, feel it on my cheeks, and after a particularly heavy stop I can also smell the expulsion of brake dust off the front discs. It’s driving stripped back to its fundamental constituent parts, but experienced in glorious, ultra-sharp 4K HD. To the side, the doors are cut so deeply away that my torso is alarmingly exposed: balmy Worcestershire air laps enthusiastically around my body. So far, so Morgan. And then, KA-CHOO! Excess boost pressure being released, in a manner more like that of a JDM hero cruising the high street on a Friday night… It may…

THROW THE LEVER AT THIRD, THEN FOURTH, each flyweight change accompanied by a heavy metal clunk as the fast-spinning dog ’box meshes. The flat-four is warbling angrily under the hard acceleration, filling the bare blue interior with its distinctive soundtrack. Just as the lights on the dash indicate that fifth is on the cards there’s a swift press of the firm brake pedal, the whole car squirming slightly as the tall tread blocks of the gravel tyres deform against the tarmac. A fraction later a minimal amount of right-hand lock to get the car rotating, the unweighted rear swinging round to point the scooped snout into the open right-hander. Feel the front-right wheel brrrrrap over the rough kerb on the inside, a suspicion of left-hand lock to transition the drifting…

‘It punches forwards and claws at the tarmac, making the most of every single ounce of thrust’ IT’S RUSH HOUR IN BERLIN. TRAFFIC lights and road works are conspiring to corral commuters into one lane where three is the norm. When the single file emerges across the junction like paste from a tube it is released onto a surface that is nearly as bumpy as most toothbrushes, riddled as it is with tramlines and cobbles. A paltry 50kph is of course the limit, if you can reach it. And in the midst of this unhappy maelstrom is the latest GT-R Nismo. It’s fair to say that this sort of stop-start conga crawl is not its natural habitat. And yet its handling of the situation means that I already know that…

THE CONCEPT OF TRUE LUXURY continues to evolve, and for car enthusiasts the car world has changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of decades. Classic and performance cars are now desired and valued by collectors as works of automotive art. Recently an Italian court ruled that a Ferrari 250 GTO (36 constructed, last one sold for $48.4million) is now a protected ‘Work of Art’ alongside masterpieces by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. With so many superb motoring events to choose from today, car enthusiasts are also collecting exciting cars to enjoy driving, showing or racing. But with many collectors living in busy metropolitan areas such as London, finding suitable garaging is becoming more of a problem in terms of available space and cost. The upshot is that many…

I FINALLY MANAGED TO GIVE THE R8’s legs a thorough stretch this month with a run to the Nürburgring. Unfortunately there was no lapping due to the small matter of a 24-hour race taking place, but there was the opportunity to test a number of key considerations to running a mid-engined supercar as a daily. Such as… can you fit two people’s luggage in it for a weekend away when one of those people is a car photographer who needs to take a tripod, a bag of lights, a second bag of cameras and some clean pants? The answer is yes you can, with a bit of room to spare, primarily because the space between the seats and the bulkhead is big enough for a squashy bag. There, evo delivering…

‘The primary reason for choosing an E53 was because I am intrigued by it’ THE THREE-CAR GARAGE GAME IS A GOOD one, and slightly unwittingly I think my current motley collection covers quite a lot of bases. I’m not saying it’s perfect, far from it, but I think it’s interesting. It has examples of front-, rear- and all-wheel-drive transmissions for a start. The trio also spans the ages with modern (2019), modern classic (2004) and classic (1979). And there is a range of prices, from £64,750 down to £1500, with the Escort somewhere in-between. (For various reasons I try not to ponder exactly where…) Some of you may remember the Mk2 Escort from past features in evo. I like to think it stands in a fine tradition of evo project…

I DROPPED ‘BIG RED’ OFF AT THE FORD press garage recently for the first of its Ford Performance accessories to be fitted. No sooner had it returned – mere hours in fact – than Antony Ingram whisked it away again to attend a Steeda UK airfield day (I’ll let him tell you how that went in a future report), but when we swapped cars again a few days later he seemed to approve of the mods. I’m not sure the £399 strut brace does much: it looks fancy, but there was already a brace there, albeit mainly hidden. The short-shift kit, also £399, and £115 carbonfibre gearknob are a different matter. I didn’t mind the shift feel as it was, but it’s now more akin to a six-speed Caterham’s. There’s…