Table of contents for August 2022 in Evo

THIS IS THE HENNESSEY MAMMOTH 1000 TRX. ‘Mammoth’ because, well, it’s a big hairy beast, ‘1000’ because it has 1000bhp and near-as-dammit 1000lb ft of torque, and ‘TRX’ (T-Rex, geddit?) because it’s based on Dodge’s hottest Hellcat-powered Ram TRX 1500 pickup. As an evo reader, you’ll know the Hennessey name from more than three decades of tuning muscle cars and pickup trucks from its base in Sealy, Texas. Not forgetting the Venom GT and Venom F5 hypercars – the former being one of the most exciting cars I’ve ever driven, and the latter being one of the handful of wildly fast and powerful cars targeting a V-max of more than 300mph. The Mammoth 1000 is the latest monster to leave Hennessey’s workshops. With 1012bhp and 969lb ft, this 3-ton truck…

THE 300TH ISSUE OF EVO. WHAT BETTER excuse to spend a morning with the bloke who started it all, incredibly almost a quarter of a century ago. So off I trek down to the Cotswolds to Harry’s Farm, just outside the postcard-pretty village of Shilton. We’re both more salt than pepper these days, both the wrong side of 60, but I have to say that Harry is looking remarkably trim. He still cycles (and trail-bikes) regularly. And he’s clearly as driven as ever, always looking for the next thing. Same old Harry really. Barker, Meaden, Fraser and I first got to know him in the mid-1990s when we were working at Performance Car. At first he was a reader who was generous enough to lend us the odd car to…

IT’S A BIG NUMBER, ISN’T IT? DESPITE being founded by the most disorganised bunch of human beings I’ve ever met – and Harry – evo has reached its 300th issue in rude health. It’s no wonder we’re all feeling a little self-reflective. From a personal point of view, I wanted to mark the occasion with something significant. Something that spoke to evo’s cultural influence as a pure, detail-obsessed place for car enthusiasts to gather and celebrate all that’s good and lampoon all that’s bad. A place where driving dynamics and excitement are prized above all else and where the chassis and powertrain engineers and test drivers are the stars, not some corporate high-up talking about mobility and platforms and all that important-sounding but ultimately dull stuff that other magazines seem…

SPAIN HAS SOME OF THE FINEST ROADS IN THE world. Today’s, to the west of Seville, are sensationally smooth and sinuous, oozing across the topographic crags and contours of the Andalusian countryside like a winding rivulet of well-used engine oil. So geometrically consistent, so perfectly cambered, so easy to read, they’re giving the GR86 a ‘fill your boots’ free pass with no tricky challenges to spoil the party. For now, at least. This is great. The GR86, like the GT86 before it, is all about fun and involvement within a sane speed frame. On roads like these it feels optimum, lithe and agile, biddable to the nth degree, delivering just enough thrust to tweak neck muscles, never so much it warps distance perception to the next tight right-hander. Brake feel…

I DROVE THE CUPRA DOWN TO Goodwood recently for our first evo trackday of the year at the historic racing circuit. These are fabulous days, with a mouth-watering assortment of cars on track, knowledgeable owners to chat to, and a nice lunch thrown in too. Lovely stuff. Alas, the Cupra didn’t exactly attract much in the way of paddock attention, which is sad when you consider it’s a 306bhp, four-wheel-drive junior super-estate. Shouldn’t that at least register somewhere on our petrolhead radars? That power figure and the Leon 310’s 1557kg kerb weight are almost exactly the same as an Audi RS2’s. I know, it made me think too… And it’s even more impressive when you consider how much extra safety kit the Cupra is carrying. Sadly, there’s something really underwhelming…

IT LOOKED LIKE A COMEDY SKETCH. Out they came, one after the other. Wheel after wheel, tyre after tyre, until finally a stack of five wire wheels with tyres mounted, plus a further five tyres, sat proudly by the car. The guys at Aston Engineering had never seen the like. To be fair, as delivery vans go the 508 SW PSE takes some beating. Fast, good-looking, spacious, comfortable and effortlessly rapid, this 355bhp petrol-electric hybrid super-station wagon could just be the perfect all-rounder. I hadn’t been near one since the model was launched over a year ago. I was impressed by it then but spending proper time with a car and doing proper things with it always offers greater insight. This time around, rather than scrutinising it in a road…

I MUST BE SOME KIND OF VW GROUP MQB platform expert, having covered many miles in our Audi RS3 and Cupra Leon Estate (both MQB Evos to be precise) as well as our Kodiaq vRS in recent weeks. Such a talent for understanding the ‘Modularer Querbaukasten’ – literally, ‘Modular Across Kit’, signifying its transverse engine applications – surely makes one a prime candidate for ‘he who must be avoided’ at any reasonable dinner party. Did you know that MLB is the longitudinal engine version? That’s L for ‘Langs’, or ‘long’ in English? Please try and stay awake – and could you pass the salt while you’re at it? Anyway, I borrowed Aston Parrott’s Kodiaq (from the MQB A2 group, don’t you know) for a family holiday, where its additional luggage…

IT’S BEEN A BIG YEAR FOR BMW M already. You might think the return of the CSL badge would be enough to mark its 50th anniversary, but with the M3 Touring and XM SUV – the latter only the division’s second-ever standalone model – the engineers have been kept truly busy. Which makes it all the more exciting that the M2 has been completely reinvented for its second coming. ‘We wanted to create something now which is already on a similar level to the M2 CS,’ says Markus Schröder, the project lead on the new M2. His team haven’t been feverishly benchmarking rival sports cars, I’m told. They’ve used the outgoing CS as a ‘jumping off point’ instead. The car as a whole sounds much more sophisticated than its predecessor.…

IN THE ROAD-GOING WORLD, THERE ISN’T A MORE FOCUSED driver’s car than the BAC Mono. It looks like a single-seat racing car wearing lights and number plates and drives like one too, holding many production car lap records. Since its launch a decade ago, just shy of 150 Monos have been shipped to more than 40 countries and it has been carefully, methodically evolved. Today’s Mono R is even more aerodynamic, more powerful and lighter than the original. It’s a pure driver’s car with minimal frills – ‘a car designed to go from A to A’. So what kind of Mono does BAC plan to build for the upcoming ban on the sale of new petrol-and diesel-engined cars, from 2030 in the UK and recently confirmed in the EU from…

SO THIS IS IT. AN ALL-NEW McLAREN SUPERCAR. For the first time since McLaren Automotive launched the MP4-12C onto the supercar scene in 2010, it is presenting a new car that shares nothing with what has gone before. The twin-turbocharged M838T/M840T V8 engine and seven-speed dual-clutch transmission are gone. The new car is not built around a derivative of the MonoCell carbonfibre tub. There’s a new electrical architecture, new multi-link rear suspension and, for the first time on a modern McLaren, an electronically controlled locking differential. Moreover, this is the first series-production hybrid to come out of Woking. The start of a new chapter and absolutely critical to McLaren’s success. This is the Artura. It could scarcely be more significant. I’d love to get straight into the dynamics of McLaren’s…

THE THRILL OF STANDING AND STARING HAS ITS place, but here at evo we don’t often critique the styling of cars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so we only occasionally offer an opinion, often based on us being among the first to see a new car ‘in the metal’. That doesn’t quite work here though, because the Lamborghini Countach LPI 800-4 exists as an homage to the original Countach LP400, revealed as a concept to a gob-smacked world at the Geneva motor show in 1971. The new Countach was created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that event and was revealed as a limited-run production car at Pebble Beach last August. It’s fair to say that Marcello Gandini, who styled the original Countach for Lamborghini when working…

‘IT’S BEEN A WHIRLWIND.’ THAT’S how Aston Parrott sums up reaching the milestone of 100 issues as evo’s staff photographer. And small wonder: during the last seven and a half years he’s notched up hundreds of shoots and pointed his camera at thousands of performance cars, capturing the images that have been seen on 46 newsstand covers, 53 subscriber covers and, of course, countless pages inside the magazine and on evo.co.uk. There certainly wouldn’t have been such a volume of work if Aston had stuck with his original passion. ‘At school I was into art and drawing and painting,’ he says, ‘but I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to those things. Then I realised that with a photo you can capture things exactly.’ The photography bug first…

WHEN JOHN BARKER AND I DROVE UP TO M-Sport’s headquarters in Cumbria a few weeks ago to interview and photograph Malcolm Wilson for evo’s My Life & Cars series (issue 298), it seemed fitting to take our then-new Ford Puma ST long-termer. After all, where better to photograph it than among its Puma Hybrid Rally1 relatives in the workshop where they’re built? My intention was to return our ST to its keeper, Sam Jenkins, just a couple of days later. However, a fault with my own long-termer, the Skoda Kodiaq vRS (see p141), meant I ended up staying in the Ford, so as I write, I still have it. The Puma had just 300 miles on the clock when I first borrowed it. I’ve since added another 4000 to that.…

LET’S START WITH THE GEARKNOB and work back. Key statistic: it weighs a chunky 200 grams. There’s a reason for this. Having done all the hard work in devising and installing a bespoke six-speed manual gearbox for a car with BMW-sourced mechanicals probably only ever intended to be used with its perfectly fine eight-speed paddleshift auto, the TGR engineering team hit one final snag. The feel of the gearchange wasn’t quite right. Nicely weighted but just a touch sticky. Back to the drawing board? Not really. They tried a heavier gearknob. Things improved but hot-knife-through-butter still wasn’t happening. Finally, the full 200g job for optimum ‘inertia effect’. Actually, forget hot knives… the stickiness had been erased by the extra moving mass of the definitive gearknob iteration. Good enough, job done.…

IT’S NOT YOUR STOMACH THAT WANTS you to back off when you launch an SF90 Spider – well, any SF90 for that matter – it’s the soft squidgy bit between your ears. Its immediate response to you being carefree with your right foot and first gear engaged is to immediately stop it. Just lift, bring the car to a halt and have a word with yourself. But you can’t because you’re already well through second gear and the shift lights are illuminating as quickly as the numbers on the digital speedo are becoming a blur before your eyes. Then third gear arrives and by now your right foot is at last beginning to listen to the sensible advice from above. Enough. Nine hundred and eighty-six bhp has that effect on…

‘OK. WE GO. GO!’ THE PECULIAR QUALITIES OF THE thin, surprisingly high-pitched, Italian-accented voice in my earpieces are somehow exaggerated by the ethereal detachment of the Impreza’s inbuilt intercom system. It can only be Piero Liatti, Prodrive Subaru works driver from 1995 to ’98. Winner of the 1997 Monte Carlo Rally in an Impreza WRC. That Piero. This is wild. I feel my left fingers squeeze the thin, simple, Alcantara-clad steering wheel rim even tighter and I move my right arm rigidly like a rod and piston to select first in the tight, six-speed H-pattern dog ’box. CLACK! It’s sweet. The worries about a ’box-full of neutrals and glistening swarf circulating in its oil now a fading memory. It might just be the best manual gearchange I’ve ever experienced –…

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IT’S A THREE-WHEELED MORGAN, but not a Morgan 3 Wheeler, the open sports car with front tyres that wouldn’t look too out of place on a mountain bike. We’ve jumped forward decades from the era so cleverly and enjoyably evoked by this car’s predecessor. The Roaring Twenties have become… well, we might have just about reached 1950. This is the brave new frontier of the Morgan Super 3. As I wait to turn into Pickersleigh Road and head out into the morning Malvern traffic, the Super 3’s indicator ticks loudly, like an antique carriage clock on the drawing room mantelpiece of an English stately home. How appropriate for what is probably the most eccentrically British new car on sale, latest in a vehicle lineage that shouldn’t really make sense in…

THIS MONTH I HAD ONE OF THOSE moments where you unexpectedly find new respect for a car you thought you knew well. Presented with a new comparison, you just see the car in a different context and suddenly your perspective on it shifts slightly. That occasion came after getting back into the M4 after several days in the new Lotus Emira. Clearly the BMW is a more luxurious place to spend time, but it was the sportiness of it that was really impressive. After a pure rear-wheel-drive sports car I wondered if the M4 xDrive might feel a little sluggish and if its extra weight might lend a certain lethargy to the experience. But not a bit of it. If anything the BMW felt the sharper tool, with a more…

YOU GENERALLY KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT when the latest addition to the evo Fast Fleet pulls up in the car park. Chances are a number of us on the team will already have spent time with the latest incumbent. Nine times out of ten we request a car to run on the fleet because we know there is more to be had from it. More to learn, more to enjoy, more to uncover. These are vehicles we want to know as much about as possible. Then there are the cars some of us haven’t gelled with; cars that make you feel a bit of an outlier because you’re not as fulsome in your praise for them as your colleagues are – as I wasn’t when it came to AMG’s E63…