Table of contents for September 2025 in Evo

IT IS WITH GREAT SADNESS THAT I have to write that Ian Fraser has passed away. Long-time readers will remember Ian for his contributions during evo’s early years as a columnist and occasional feature writer. His insight, experience, expertise and wisdom were attributes from which we all benefited during those early days of the magazine’s existence. I suspect that many of you, like me, were aware of Ian and his contribution to automotive media long before evo came to be. An early editor of Car magazine, having cut his teeth in his native Australia, Ian created FF Publishing to buy the magazine when its then owner wanted out. He would go on to build on Car’s existing foundations of being more than just a magazine about cars, to create publications…

‘WHERE’S YOUSUF?’ THE NIGHT IS DRAWING IN, AND SO IS the weather. Rain is blowing sideways across the North York Moors and lashing the White Horse Inn’s windowpanes as we assemble on the eve of this penultimate Eras chapter. Tucked away in the car park are a pair of all-time great hot hatches, a featherweight mid-engined sports car, a high-tech all-wheel-drive heavyweight, and the ‘control’ car running through each Eras test: a Porsche 911 Carrera. And preparing to tuck in for the night inside the hotel are evo’s Dickie Meaden, Sam Jenkins, Aston Parrott and I. No sign so far of senior staff writer Yousuf Ashraf, however. Phone calls go straight to voicemail. WhatsApp ticks remain singular and grey. Just as we’re considering sending out a search party, the windowpanes…

‘AUDI HAS SPENT MONEY ON THE IMPORTANT BITS. POWER IS UP FROM 306BHP TO 328BHP’ TIMES ARE TOUGH FOR THE AVERAGE enthusiast in 2025. Cheap hot hatches have pretty much died out, affordable sports coupes are no more and everything that’s left seems to be getting ludicrously expensive. Flagship hot hatches from Mercedes and Audi run to over £60k, which used to be BMW M3 money. The M3 itself is nearly £90k these days, and if you want a brand new Porsche 911 – even a basic Carrera – no less than £103k will do. Inflation is a factor, of course, but external pressures on manufacturers have booted prices completely out of line with what customers are willing to pay in this turbulent financial time. Prices have reached silly levels,…

WE HAVE AN EMBARRASSMENT OF BIG, practical performance cars on the Fast Fleet at the moment. There’s ed-in-chief Gallagher’s Audi RS6, super-snapper Aston Parrott’s Alfa Stelvio Quadrifoglio and my own new long-termer, the rather wonderful Defender Octa. Not to mention the modest but mighty Dacia Duster that’s currently being enjoyed by senior staff writer Sam Jenkins. And then there’s the M5 Touring. Normally safe in the guardianship of managing editor Ian Eveleigh, I prized the key from his grasp for a smash and grab raid to the Ardennes to drive the Pagani Huayra R Evo Roadster for evo 335. The beefy hybrid Beemer was born to the task of being packed with overnight bags and Parrott’s camera gear (and extensive inventory of haircare products) and storming into Belgium for the…

IT’S JUST A CAR. YOUR PROBLEMS ARE still your problems, your worries are still there. Driving a truly great sports car shrinks them a little, though; temporarily puts them on pause. And I’d say the GTS 4.0 is one of the best sports cars on sale today. In fact, according to last issue’s group test, the best. Shame it’s about to go off sale. And an even bigger shame – for me – that this long-term test has come to an end. Being bumped into in traffic a few weeks into this test brought a silver lining for our silver sports car: since it underwent lengthier-than-expected repairs (see evo 333), Porsche kindly extended the loan by a few weeks. As a result, the Boxster joined Fast Fleet in the depths…

THIS IS NUTS. WE’VE BEEN SITTING IN THE NEW LAMBORGHINI Temerario for barely two minutes and yet here we are, barrelling into a braking area at 190mph. It’s quite the introduction. One that highlights the raw speed of this ultra-techy 907bhp hybrid supercar, but also the absurd ease with which you can access and deploy its performance. We’ve been waiting a while for this opportunity. Appetites were whetted by the initial reveal (evo 326), in which details emerged of an all-new hybridised 10,000rpm twin-turbo V8 designed and built in-house at Lambo’s Sant’Agata factory; the long-awaited Huracán replacement didn’t so much promise to take the fight to Ferrari as launch a full-scale assault on Maranello. As with the Revuelto back in 2023, our first drive of the Temerario is on track…

BENTLEY TOOK A DIFFERENT APPROACH when it launched the fourth generation of the Continental GT, the car that re-established the brand a quarter of a century ago and has been a mainstay of the company ever since. Rather than launch with the ‘entry level’ GT (seems wrong to call a Bentley ‘entry level’), it went with the range-topping Speed model. But there were, of course, sound reasons for doing so. The Bentayga SUV may have given the company a footprint in the lucrative SUV market, but the Conti remains the icon of the range, the Bentley that sees thousands of customers losing themselves for countless hours on the configurator, trying to decide between the several billion combinations available to them. Or they might decide to work with Mulliner, Bentley’s bespoke…

THE FORECAST IS FOR HEAVY RAIN. Of course it is. After weeks of wall-to-wall sunshine that has bleached the lawn and almost tempted us into booking a summer holiday in Skeg Vegas, it’s going to chuck it down this afternoon. And the reason for the storm clouds rolling in from the west? We’ve had a cracking pair of convertibles delivered and today is the photoshoot. I’m heading to the location in the brand new Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, launched a year after the coupe. Sometimes when you chop the roof off a car you’ve got used to seeing as a coupe it can look a bit awkward, but the Vantage Roadster (not Volante) looks great, roof up or down. After the trend for folding hard-tops, it’s refreshing to see a…

@evomagazine @evomagazine @officialevomagazine OF ALL THE NEW CARS TO BE LAUNCHED THIS YEAR, the Defender Octa piqued my interest more than most. New Ferraris and Lambos are all well and good, but you kind of know what to expect. But a 600-plus bhp Defender built with Dakar homologation in mind? Now that is something different. Despite repeated overtures and increasingly unsubtle hints, editor-in-chief Gallagher failed to send me on any of the Octa launch events. Indeed, it wasn’t until KP25 EUZ arrived that I’d so much as sat in Land Rover’s souped-up Defender. To say I was excited is an understatement. This is an Edition One spec – reserved for the first year of production – which means Faroe Green bodywork, in this instance wrapped with factory-fit satin PPF. Inside…

THE WORLD PROBABLY DOESN’T NEED AN estate car with 543bhp, Cup 2 tyres and carbon bucket seats. Nor one with carbon body panels and a cooling package specified for hard track miles. But after driving the new M3 CS Touring on the road and lapping it extensively on one of the most demanding circuits in the UK, we can’t help but conclude that, in a strange way, it absolutely does. The CS Touring is a remarkable package. Staggeringly expensive at £126,275, but if you’re looking for a factory-spec wagon that can turn its hand to everyday duties and hunt down 911s on track without breaking a sweat, this is the only one. The CS formula is familiar by now (and tends to go quite well at evo Car of the…

‘IT HAD TO BE A BOLD STRIDE INTO THE FUTURE AND NOT A REPEAT OF FAMILIAR TROPES’ THE APEX SUPERCAR IS AT A crossroads. If you’re Gordon Murray, you build the lightest, purest, most analogue car you can. If you’re Bugatti, you build a grandiose behemoth of blinding speed and dazzling mechanical complexity. If you’re Pagani, Koenigsegg, Lamborghini or Hennessey you build something that sits somewhere in between. And if you’re Ferrari? Well, you build this, the ultra-contemporary F80. The latest in Maranello’s storied bloodline of special-series cars, the F80 can trace its ancestry back four decades to the delectable 288 GTO. In the F40, F50, Enzo and La Ferrari that followed, Ferrari created a dynasty of supercars charting the most significant automotive advancements of their day. From turbocharging and…

WAIT… WAIT… PAST THE POINT WHERE IN A SUPERCAR you’d already have been hard on the brakes. Every fibre of muscle in your foot is straining, desperate to go for the pedal. Mind over matter… wait a little longer… now! Mash the pedal with all the force your leg can muster, feel your body become a dead weight against the six-point harness, blend out of the brake and turn the wheel. The Dallara EXP’s carbon splitter darts for the apex, the inside front slick kisses the kerb and you’re away to the next corner. And all of the above took place in a few fractions of a second. It’s the kind of braking and cornering performance that takes some mental adjustment, and the hallmark of a serious racing car. But…

I MAY BE BIASED, BUT THE S1 ELISE’S tiny, slim-rimmed Nardi is one of the nicest steering wheels I’ve held. It’s completely free of buttons, but the size, simplicity and delicate feel in the hands is a perfect match for the car. I’ve seen plenty of Elises with thicker, racier aftermarket Momos and the like, but I’ve always thought Lotus nailed it with the standard item. Still, perfection can always be improved upon a little bit, can’t it? After more than 60,000 miles the leather on my Elise’s wheel had taken on a mirror-like sheen, so it was time for a refresh. That’s where Edge Automotive came in: a Rugby-based upholstery specialist that carries out all manner of retrimming work, from seat restorations to complete interior overhauls with custom finishes. The…