Table of contents for December 2025 in Evo

IF YOU’VE SPENT ANY TIME ON A classified ad or auction house website in the last three months, you will have noticed a worrying/brilliant trend: a catastrophic/sensational fall in used and new car values. The latter is a particularly gory bloodbath, with new, unregistered cars often carrying five-figure discounts. These aren’t your volume, mass-market models either; we’re talking thoroughbred evo metal, from Audi RS3s to Porsche 911s, with the stock looking for homes running into the hundreds. Set your filters to ‘nearly new’ and this number swells further still, with cars that have been pre-registered to hit those all-important targets. For dealers, it’s not a pretty sight. It’s not one the rest of us should revel in, either. Yes, many cars have for some time been wearing list prices they…

VISUALLY, THE NEW M2 CS GIVES OFF ALL THE RIGHT signals. It tells you what it is before it’s even turned a wheel: a muscled-up front-engined coupe that’s dripping with attitude; pinched at the waist, wide at the hips and up for a fight. That bit lower, that bit more menacing than a standard M2, with an unapologetic ducktail kicking up vertically at the rear. It looks like it’ll be an absolute riot, an M2 with the aggression dialled right up – and the badge promises much, too. Past CS models have been stellar, with carefully targeted tweaks and upgrades to bring out the very best in M cars for road use, without going to extreme CSL levels. The previous M2 CS is a case in point, cramming huge character…

THE TIME HAS FINALLY COME FOR Ferrari to lift the lid on the most highly anticipated project in its 78-year history. No, it’s not a plan for it to regain dominance in Formula 1, it’s the Elettrica, its first all-electric car. We’ll have to wait until 2026 to see its final design – and find out its final name – but before this, Ferrari has opened the doors at Maranello to allow those responsible for it to explain why they believe this EV is deserving of the Cavallino. The first thing to know is that this will not be a Rimac Nevera-rivalling hypercar but what promises to be the most useable Ferrari yet, with four doors, two rows of seats, and power to all four wheels. This sounds very much…

AS THE PRESS CONFERENCE UNFOLDS AND MORE details are revealed, there’s a growing feeling that the 911 Turbo is getting right back to its core values. It started moving that way in 2020 with the first 992-generation Turbo S, after a number of years when the Turbo was quite hardcore, a quasi-GT2 if you will, the product of a company rattled by the arrival of the Nissan GT-R. When the GT-R landed in 2008 it offered similar specification, performance and practicality to the Turbo for half the price – and provocatively set a Nürburgring lap time for the Germans to chase. And chase they did. But the monster under Porsche’s bed is no more, vanquished not by the Turbo but something more mundane: more stringent European drive by noise regulations. The…

THERE WAS A UNIVERSAL SIGH of disappointment when the BMW 1-series switched to front-wheel drive in 2019 for its F40 generation. No longer was it a uniquely tail-driven hatch with a longitudinal engine, and with it came the death of the six-cylinder M140i – not a perfect hot hatch by any means, but one with a uniquely appealing hot-rod character and huge tuning potential; a tempting alternative to cookie-cutter four-pot rivals. For the F40, BMW promised that the hot version – the four-cylinder, four-wheel-drive M135i xDrive – was better to drive and lighter than its predecessor, but only the latter was true. The 1-series had lost its USP, and most of its charisma. That was then, and BMW hasn’t given up on trying to create a genuinely exciting hot hatch from…

‘CH-CH-CHANGES,’ SANG DAVID BOWIE ON HIS 1971 classic. It was this refrain that kept looping round in my head on the day when our new Alfa Romeo arrived atevo Towers. Three years after we last ran a Stelvio Veloce in these pages, had there been any? RX25 GDY had come straight from photography duties on Anglesey. Aston Parrott, our hyper-talented staff photographer, had been the first behind its wheel, swapping into it for a brief initial stint upon the departure of its bigger brother, the Stelvio Quadrifoglio, from our fleet (see evo 338). As he handed me the key (along with half of the beach, it seemed), he didn’t seem overly bothered to be passing it on. ‘Drives and sounds like a diesel, but looks beautiful,’ was his one-line review.…

MONTH TWO, AND THE SKODA SUPERB Sleeper Edition continues to impress. Over many, many miles on and between a wide variety of photoshoots, it has remained utterly reliable and proved more than capable of keeping up with far flashier machinery. Recently, for example, it was the perfect partner at a track shoot with a pair of Porsche 911 GT3 RSs for a future issue of evo. Having a fast, dependable camera car transforms high-speed tracking shots, allowing us to maintain pace while capturing every dynamic moment. While setting up for such car-to-car shots, with someone else driving and me harnessed in the boot area with my camera, I have noticed the rear of the car can get a bit gassy, and this time it isn’t Dickie. The smell is likely…

THROUGH THE BLUE HAZE OF TYRE smoke a pair of squiggly lines lead all the way back from where I am to where I started. It’s like the man upstairs has scrawled the sun-bleached road with a Sharpie. And then set fire to it. It was only meant to be a quick rolling burnout for Aston Parrott to shoot, but once the wheels start spinning and the Mustang launches off the line it becomes more of a quest. One to see how many gears I can pull before the Hennessey Super Venom Mustang finds traction. In the end I run out of resolve before the supercharged V8 runs out of grunt. Heavily tuned muscle cars might not be woven into the fabric of UK and European car culture, but their…

YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR WONDERING IF Honda has taken leave of its fiscal senses by introducing a new Prelude. It has arrived during a fallow period for stylish two-door cars, with even the Audi TT – a car first introduced not long before the Prelude name was rested in 2001 – now off sale. Then again, you could say that with other players off the board and the choice of such cars so slim, now is the perfect time to wade in. Indeed Honda reckons there’s life in the coupe market yet, and in the UK that equates to around 20,000 cars per year. ‘Coupe’ is a broad church mind, inclusive of everything from BMW’s 2-series to Aston Martin’s Vanquish. It’s the former, specifically BMW’s entry-level 220 coupe, that…

‘IT’S A KIND OF SCULPTURAL OBJET D’ART AS WELL AS A COMPETITION CAR’ I’M TRYING TO CONCENTRATE ON THE TRACK AHEAD. Two things are making this tricky. Firstly, the view all around is distractingly stunning. The Red Bull Ring is nestled in the Styrian Alps, at an altitude where clouds hang so low you feel like you could reach out and touch them. When patches of sunlight hit the hills, the forests and mountain peaks are illuminated in vivid greens, blues and purples. And the BAC Mono Cup – a car with no roof, no windscreen and a widescreen all-round view – puts you in that landscape more emphatically than most cars can. The other reason I’m finding it a tad difficult to focus is that the Mono Cup is also…

AS TOUCHSCREENS GO, THE M5’S is one of the better ones: largely intuitive, with big virtual buttons to stab at, and home to possibly the best manufacturer satnav I’ve encountered. (Six months in, I haven’t sworn at it once.) Having the good old physical iDrive controller as another, often more precise way to interact with the screen is a bonus too. Well, I say ‘good old’, but in the M5 it has become flatter and transparent for a jewel-like effect. Very pretty, but in its new form it doesn’t seem to respond as reliably as the regular, less glitzy version; despite my best efforts, frequently an attempt at a click ends up becoming a nudge towards the back of the car. Odd. Another area where the M5’s HMI trips up…

OH, WOW. IT JUST FEELS SO… RIGHT. Within a couple of corners it’s flowing and harmonious, the responses precise and the balance malleable. That sense of almost floating down the road, maintaining momentum and picking whatever line you choose through a sequence of bends. It may be a year since I last drove an A110 R, but such is the instant rapport, the re-found familiarity, that it’s like coming home, patting the Labrador and settling down in your favourite chair to some warm toast and butter with an old episode of Rally Report. All the reasons that it took the silver medal in eCoty 2023 are coming flooding back through the steering wheel. All of which makes me think it might have been a mistake for Alpine to provide one…

BACK IN 2022, ACROSS THE PENNINES IN mixed conditions against the very best that McLaren, Ferrari and Porsche had to offer, the Maserati MC20 stole our hearts and won evo Car of the Year. Where did that come from? At the time Maserati was offering only the ageing GranTurismo and underwhelming saloons and SUVs, and out of nowhere came this completely bespoke and utterly bewitching carbon-tubbed creation with shades of F40 in its character. Maserati was back. Or was it? Earlier this year (evo 335) we revisited the MC20 in a test against rival sports and supercars, and it wasn’t quite the car we remembered. The bombastic personality was intact but it was missing finesse, and felt quite ragged at times – particularly compared to McLaren’s brilliant Artura. Hmm. Was…

IN THE LONG HISTORY OF PERFORMANCE CARS, there have been few tougher acts to follow than the 458 Speciale. The holy grail of hotted-up mid-engined Ferraris, this exquisite V8 screamer – light, beautiful and spine-tinglingly sonorous – remains one of the very best road cars Ferrari has ever built. And now it has a successor. Such is the weight of expectation that comes with the Speciale tag that Ferrari chose not to reveal its intended name to the team charged with delivering the new 296 flagship until well into the project’s development phase. The choice of Speciale is telling. Where the other names associated with Ferrari’s sharpest mid-engined models – Challenge Stradale, Scuderia and Pista – speak of street cars with an overt track vibe, Speciale affords the latitude to…

‘THE SPEEDO GOES ALL THE WAY UP TO 500. THAT’S KPH OF COURSE, BUT THAT’S STILL A CHUNK OVER 300MPH’ IMAGINE FLYING TO DUBAI TO VISIT THE BURJ Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. You ride the elevators over half a kilometre skywards to the viewing platform on the 148th floor and step out only to find the view obscured by fog. That’s kind of how I feel just now. We’ve trekked to Gatwick, ‘enJoyed’ an easyJet flight to Basel and rocked up at the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, France, to drive the Mistral, officially the fastest opentop car in the world… and it’s absolutely chucking it down. We have just four hours with the car and if it doesn’t stop raining we won’t even get the roof off,…

AT THE 1973 CANADIAN GRAND PRIX AT MOSPORT, history was made: the first use of a safety car during a Formula 1 race. When a heavy crash littered the track with debris, a Porsche 914 with yellow flags flying from its rear bumper pulled onto the circuit to pace the field. It didn’t go particularly well; with the running order jumbled following pit-stop chaos and only hand-timed lap charts to rely upon, the Porsche entered the track in the wrong position, allegedly causing eventual winner Peter Revson to gain a lap on the field (and a fair few arguments postrace, not least because Emerson Fittipaldi and Team Lotus believed they had won, and began celebrating accordingly). Fast-forward to 2025 and things have moved on a little. The safety car has…

OUR LONG-TERM DEEP CRYSTAL BLUE MX-5 is the RF model (for Retractable Fastback), with the motorised folding hard-top. Having a Soul Red soft-top MX-5 Roadster on test for issue 338’s evo Eras 2020s feature gave us the chance for an impromptu twin test, to see which flavour of MX-5 is sweetest. Helpfully, both cars were in the exact same spec otherwise: the top Homura trim, with Bilstein dampers, 17-inch BBS wheels and Bridgestone Potenza S001 tyres. In terms of raw figures, the RF weighs around 43kg more than the soft-top Roadster and has a higher centre of gravity, with that extra metal and plastic above the chassis. Perhaps for that reason, its ride quality is a bit lumpier than the soft-top’s. On my first drive inevo’s long-termer, I was a…