Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från Evo

I’D NEVER BEEN TO THE Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari. I hadn’t driven through the park to its entrance, parked up in the long grass and walked down the hill to the entrance behind the grandstands. I hadn’t stopped to look and appreciate the intimacy that only circuits of a certain era provide. The sense of being at the centre of somewhere special. The hub of a community – one devastated by floods last year when the Santerno river burst its banks and submerged the town and the circuit that it dissects. I hadn’t appreciated how this is a circuit whose topography and course are dictated as much by the landscape it wraps itself around as it is the need to provide a stage for some of the fastest…

FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE, 600BHP PORSCHES are usually called 911 Turbos, but the new, all-electric Macan Turbo packs this kind of heavyweight punch beneath its (slightly awkward looking) fastback body. Following the Taycan as Porsche’s second EV, the electric Macan has the unenviable task of replicating the success and popularity of the combustion-engined original, which first launched a decade ago and has set the standard for mid-size performance SUVs ever since. Having driven both the £69,800 Macan 4 and £95,000 Turbo on the Route Napoleon in southern France, we wouldn’t bet against it doing so. Underpinning the new Macan is a brand new Premium Platform Electric architecture, which has been co-developed with Audi and will also underpin the forthcoming A6 e-tron saloon. As with the Taycan, the Macan’s platform runs on an…

Chief Product Development Officer When did Ferrari decide that it was possible to launch another V12 car, despite regulative restrictions? Some years ago – it was a brave decision, but not a difficult one. We love the V12, we know that our customers love the V12, and our volumes generally are not very high. We believed in the possibility to keep the engine alive in a world where regulations are changing very quickly and in several different directions. But the V12 is something iconic and we decided to keep it alive, we are very happy about that. Is the character of the 12Cilindri closer to the 812 Superfast it directly replaces, or the 812 Competizione? We have two cars in one, depending on the manettino setting and depending on your…

I WAS MOST INTERESTED TO READ RICHARD PORTER’S column (evo 321) regarding the durability of car bodywork. I have always maintained that the way a car drives is far more important than the way it looks. I quite like ugly vehicles, having had Nissan R35 GT-Rs and a few other ugly things such as an Allard K1, a Phase 1 Standard Vanguard, a Bond Minicar and an AC Petite. The cost of car body repairs is getting quite ridiculous. In my family a learner driver accidentally reversed her 2017 Polo into a neighbour’s new Discovery. The Polo suffered severe damage to two doors, which would have written it off if I hadn’t bought replacements second-hand and had it repaired privately. The Land Rover needed a new tailgate and rear bumper,…

NESTLED IN THE FOLDS OF THE Lincolnshire Wolds between the market towns of Horncastle and Louth, Cadwell Park is a hidden gem. It packs a lot of variety into its 2.2 miles, from the seemingly never-ending sweep of Chris Curve, via the tight and twisty ‘Mountain’, where superbikes and supercars get airborne, to the leaf-shaded, wooded section. There’s limited run-off in many places and more blind corners than sighted ones, all of which has earned it the nickname ‘the mini Nurburgring’. A flying lap starts with a slightly downhill run onto the long start straight, so you can be carrying a lot of speed for the first corner, Coppice, which curves gently away out of sight to the left. Slice into the hidden apex and almost as soon as you…

THERE WAS NO QUESTION THE HONDA CIVIC TYPE R NEEDED TO BE a part of TCoty. It’s aced every challenge evo has thrown at it, running away with its first group test and putting in a strong showing at eCoty 2023, outscoring (and often outrunning) sports cars, supersaloons and grand tourers alike. Most recently, it won our mega-test of every hot hatch currently on sale (evo 318). And we know from its original launch at Estoril that it’s a devastatingly capable car on track, too. So its presence in this test was a given – much like the 911 GT3 RS, it’s an established yardstick against which to measure cars of all genres. But experience also tells us that hot hatches, even ones which are brilliant in isolation, often fade…

‘IN THE SEVEN, IT’S ALL ABOUT CARRYING AS MUCH SPEED AS POSSIBLE’ THIS IS WHERE THINGS GET SERIOUS: power-to-weight ratios to shame a supercar (or hypercar!), at-best rudimentary weather protection, two seats and a single-minded focus on driving thrills. The Ariel Atom and Caterham Seven are unashamed headbangers that can be driven on the road but truly come alive on track. The ‘evo25’ edition is our idea of the ideal road and trackday Caterham Seven. As such it’s a mash-up of the best bits from the 420S, 420R and 420 Cup. Starting with the narrow chassis and lowered floors, we added the more practical ‘Trackday’ rollcage as opposed to the full-on race version, comfort seats, less vocal rear-exit exhaust and full weather equipment (including a heater). So far, so sensible.…

WE USED THE SAME VBOX TIMING SYSTEM TO LOG EACH CAR’S lap times. Driver Richard Meaden did multiple flying laps in each car to give each its best chance to post an optimum time, and thanks to the Lincolnshire weather gods, all of those times (shown below) were recorded in the dry. The Vbox also logs corner speeds, and they made for fascinating reading. The effect of confidence and downforce through the scary-quick Coppice was clear to see: the Radical, Revolution, GT3 RS and Spartan all carried more than 100mph minimum. Through the tricky, twiddly esses at Hall Bends, the Radical railed through at near-motorway speeds, recording a 67mph minimum compared with the M3 CS’s 57mph, for example. The plucky Caterham was a real corner-speed hero: with no downforce but…

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SINCE COMMITTING TO DRIVING MY 993 more frequently this year, I’ve been reminded of a significant issue: its weak headlights. After delving into potential solutions, I stumbled upon Morimoto, a company based in the USA that offers an updated headlight system tailored specifically for the 993. Featuring high-output bi-LED projectors that emit a modern white light, this set-up promises broader, brighter dipped beams and formidable full beams, while the units themselves (pictured on page 123) integrate neatly with the classic ’90s 911 design too. I couldn’t help but notice that Morimoto also offers a reimagined rear-light arrangement for the 993. By day, their largely uninterrupted red lenses bring a subtle update over the factory units, on which you can see the separate indicators, fog lights and so on. Then by…

A COUPLE OF MONTHS IN AND I’M used to the lofty driving position, the main complaint with the GR Yaris. It’s compromised, for sure, particularly the way the low rear-view mirror creates a blind spot, and anyone else who drives it notices it straight away, but I’m acclimatised. Also, it’s almost muscle memory now to fire up the engine and hold the lane-keep assist button to turn it off. The Toyota’s system is far from the worst I’ve come across but I think they’re all a blight, finding lines where there aren’t any and jumping in with a finger-wagging wheel jiggle, and unable to distinguish when you’re straight-lining corners on an open road from changing lanes. What I still haven’t got used to is the wonderful delivery of the little…

THERE’S NO GETTING AROUND IT: AUDI RS PRODUCTS haven’t taken home nearly as many group-test trophies as BMW M cars have over the years. Performance models from Ingolstadt have a reputation for being big on performance but a little short on fun and personality, and while that judgement is fair to an extent, there have been some truly stellar – and barking mad – moments in Audi Sport’s history. After all, it takes a sense of humour to stuff a twin-turbo V10 under the bonnet of an estate car. In 2024, you can bag a slice of that history for very sensible money if you venture into the classifieds. That C6 RS6 can be bought for as little as £14,000, while the company’s very first RS model, the rare RS2,…

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO ON SOME VERY nondescript, featureless roads around the Munich suburbs, we experienced Audi’s inaugural hot hatch: a buttercup yellow S3, with chrome mirrors, a set of flat-faced, six-spoke alloy wheels and a 207bhp, 1.8-litre four-cylinder turbocharged engine driving a Haldex four-wheel-drive system via a rather slow and unremarkable six-speed manual gearbox. It was far from an inspiration to drive; aspirational maybe, but even in the world of lacklustre hot hatches that occupied forecourts in the late ’90s, there was little reason to recommend Audi’s first performance hatch over Subaru’s thrilling Impreza Turbo. Unless soft-feel plastics and electronic climate control were your thing. It’s taken a while for the S3 to find some spice. Each iteration since that original has felt uneventful to drive and more like a…

IT POSSIBLY HASN’T ESCAPED YOUR attention that after we first drove the new Mercedes-AMG C63 (in S E Performance Estate form) way back in December 2022 it’s not been seen in these pages since. Granted, we didn’t think much of the direction AMG had headed down, replacing the growly 4-litre twin-turbocharged V8 with a harsh 2-litre four-cylinder turbo motor attached to a plug-in hybrid electric powertrain. Heavy, uninvolving and all just a little uninspiring considering all the goodness that we had feasted on previously. But we’d like to try it once more, to spend more time with the 600-plus bhp M3 rival, and Mercedes says we will. Just not yet. In the meantime there’s another new AMG: the CLE 53 4Matic+. The CLE is a new model line that replaces…

Citizen Super-Titanium Small Seconds NJ0180 €429 citizenwatch.eu Rather than having a long central seconds hand reminding you that time is rushing by, Citizen’s latest watch relegates seconds to a small, offset subdial. The case and bracelet are in titanium (Citizen was the first company to sell a titanium watch, back in 1970), while available dial colours are blue (pictured), silver, turquoise or dark green. Cimier 711 Heritage Chronograph From CHF 2770 cimier.com Taking inspiration from the Cimier Sport model of the 1960s, this new chronograph has its subdials at the 7 and 11 o'clock positions on the dial – hence the ‘711’ name. You can get that dial in ivory beige (as pictured), sunray green (a limited edition of 100) or sunray blue, and also choose between a leather strap…

THERE ARE SOME BIG NUMBERS ASSOCIATED WITH the new Aston Martin Vantage. Really big. 656bhp. 590lb ft. 202mph. And a £165,000 entry price, taking this once-junior Aston into thoroughly senior territory. Is this a by-the-numbers car, though? An injection of power and torque to grab the headlines, a spring clean for the interior, neat facelift on the outside, and that’s as far as it goes? Meeting the new Vantage in person, you quickly sense that’s not the case. evo’s first briefing on the car (in issue 319) suggested Aston Martin’s engineering team had been given the freedom – and budget – to make this renewed Vantage the very best it can be. Not so much renewed as reborn. As we’re talked around the car at its launch base near Seville…

HAVING THE 992 GT3 RS AT CADWELL Park as our TCoty benchmark car brings our experience with the ultimate RS full circle. For it was on track – at Silverstone for the international media launch – that we had our first taste of what has proved to be a truly mind-expanding car. There was no road driving at that launch event. The track-only format sent an explicit yet unspoken message about the newest 911 RS. One that told of a car with limits so lofty that only a circuit environment would afford us the opportunity to explore its ultimate capabilities. Though frustrating, Porsche’s strategy was sound. Never had we seen a road car that employed so much technology and adjustability to maximise its on-track performance. Nor had we seen a…

‘THE ALPINE HAS FOUND ITS HAPPY PLACE AT CADWELL PARK’ POP! THE NOISE TAKES ME BY SURPRISE. At first I worry that a tyre’s blown or some piece of unseen debris has struck the Elise’s aluminium underbelly. I slow down and turn the Lotus’s tiny but beautifully formed steering wheel left and right to see if anything feels awry. All seems well, so gradually I up the pace once more, the modified K-series engine barking vocally on the way to its near-7500rpm red line and then, as I hit the brakes, there it is again: POP! Now I know what it is, and it’s cause to grin rather than tip-toe back to the pitlane: the Analogue Automotive Elise SuperSport is spitting flames from its exhausts. Big ones. This no-expense-spared restomod…

‘THE GT3 MR IS FABULOUS, BUT THE SPARTAN IS GENUINELY MIND-ALTERING’ YOU’D STRUGGLE TO FIND TWO MORE different cars than the Manthey-tweaked 992 GT3 MR and the supercharged Spartan, yet each occupies a similar place in the trackday hierarchy. Neither is likely to be an only car, so although the GT3 MR is more useable, both are likely to be reserved for trackdays and recreational road driving. As-tested the Manthey package adds more than £60,000 to the list price of a GT3 (call it £210,000 all-in), while this top-spec Spartan is £175,000. Big boys’ (or girls’) toys, in other words. The notion of meddling with the factory 992 GT3 might seem crazy, especially if it lifts the price above that of a GT3 RS. But Manthey Racing – once an…

‘THE SPARTAN SCORES A SHOCK SECOND PLACE. IT’S A WILD TOY’ HOW TO SEPARATE THAT LITTLE LOT, THEN? THESE CARS are all – deliberately – so different that there’s a lot of subjective light and shade involved in choosing a unanimous Top Three. But Cadwell Park has been a perfect venue to make a nuanced decision: ‘There’s less margin for error at an old-school circuit like this, so what constitutes “fun” has little to do with lap time and everything to do with engagement and reward,’ is how John Barker neatly sums it up. And for engagement and reward, ten cars in particular have really stood out. The Focus ST Track Pack, a wallflower initially, stays in the conversation for quite some time, as does the BMW M3 CS. The…

‘AS THE MILES BUILD AND THE ELECTRICAL WELL DRAINS, THE V8 FIRES MORE REGULARLY’ IT’S ALWAYS SPECIAL, TURNING UP AT THE FERRARI factory to collect a car. Just being allowed through the gate feels like a privilege, as behind you sightseers edge as close as they dare to the threshold while from across the road their friends take photos that frame them below the iconic Ferrari sign. Filling one of the parking spaces is ‘our’ car, an SF90 XX Spider, its glowing red paintwork beading with rain. We pop indoors to complete the paperwork and find the area filled with the happy hubbub of middle-aged tifosi taking group photos in front of the wall-mounted F1 car while they await their factory tour. I’m lucky enough to have been here a…

THE SUN CAME OUT, ALBEIT BRIEFLY. Just long enough to finally roll the Abarth’s roof back for the last 20 minutes of backroads to get home. Sunny spring days in the English countryside are picture postcard stuff. Driving slowly through villages with the roof down you get the sounds and smells to go with the scenery. Birdsong, petrol lawnmowers, freshly cut grass. You know the drill. Such bucolic interludes are intrinsic to opentop driving, but once you get up to speed much of that gets swept away. Some convertibles, like the MX-5 or – weirdly – the Caterham Seven seem to cosset and connect you without too much in the way of buffeting or noise, but get the Abarth above urban speeds and you lose the feeling of a convertible…

THE FIRST FAST FLEET CAR THAT I COULD really call my own was a Mk5 Golf GTI back in 2005. White, three-door, manual, cloth interior and 18-inch Monza alloys that needed to give kerbs an extra-wide berth. I loved it and it established The Airport Test. On landing late at night, probably on the wrong side of London, and faced with a long journey of overnight roadwork diversions to tackle, the GTI was the perfect car to get into. Welcoming and stress free, yet interesting enough to make the last few miles through deserted lanes entertaining. Negotiating passport control and baggage reclaim was infinitely soothed by the thought of settling into that tartan-clad interior. Well, as you can tell by this month’s slightly reduced mileage, the Octavia has spent two…

OUR CUPRA HAS DELIVERED A MIXED bag of experiences over the last month. While it continues to deliver laudable all-round performance, there have been some notable frustrations with certain features. The entertainment system, for example, continues to disappoint. The slow start-up time repeatedly tests my patience, as does having to use the cumbersome USB-C interface when charging my iPhone (because, as mentioned last month, connecting the cable to charge the phone results in the muting of any audio being played via Bluetooth). A dead phone battery gave me cause to use the built-in satnav recently, which proved easy at first – inputting a destination was a doddle – but became unintuitive after that – finding where to turn off voice directions, for example. So using it was as much a…

YOU’LL PROBABLY SPEND YOUR FIRST FEW MOMENTS in the second-generation Audi RS5 wondering whether you should’ve bought a BMW M4 instead. There’s almost no drama; the twin-turbocharged V6 is quiet and refined, and with a supple ride and calm responses it feels much more GT than sports car. Stick with it though, because the RS5 has an aggressive alter ego and exceptional bandwidth that make it a joy to live with. Leave everything in Comfort mode and the RS5 is no more stressful to drive than a normal A5. In fact, it’s even more relaxing, since the 2.9-litre engine – putting out 444bhp and 442lb ft – delivers effortless acceleration from any point in the rev range. Switch up to Dynamic mode, take manual control of the eight-speed auto transmission…

WE’RE APPROACHING THE FAST, UPHILL Turn 12 of the Monteblanco circuit in southern Spain in the Taycan Turbo GT. I’m riding shotgun with Lars Kern, the Porsche factory driver who took this car around the Nürburgring in 7min 07sec last year. He shouts across: ‘At first I wasn’t convinced by the Active Ride suspension. I lost pretty much all feeling for the car, and it didn’t give me what I needed on track.’ We’re still accelerating. At what feels like the point of no return, I lunge for the imaginary brake pedal in the passenger footwell. A heartbeat later Kern finally eases off, but not by much, and turns in hard towards the apex. I’m sucked down into the Taycan’s carbon seat through the compression, then slammed into the backrest…

‘AT FERRARI, WE LIKE TO SURPRISE,’ SAYS marketing boss Enrico Galliera at the unveiling of Maranello’s latest supercar, the 12Cilindri. But how much of a surprise can this be? We know there’s a V12-engined two-seat GT – the replacement for the 812 Superfast – lurking under the red silk cover before us, but as it’s pulled off, there are gasps in the room. The car beneath looks like a Daytona. Not the modern Icona-series SP3, but an original, plexiglass 365 GTB/4 with its visor-style headlights and vented clamshell bonnet. Ferrari doesn’t usually do retro, and this isn’t what we were expecting. It feels like we’ve been predicting the death of big, naturally aspirated V12s for a decade, but noise and emissions regulations haven’t swallowed them up just yet. Ferrari knows…

FIFTEEN CARS SQUEEZED INTO CADWELL PARK’S tree-shaded assembly area: hatchbacks, saloons, roadsters, sports cars with and without roofs (and doors), rare exotica and down-to-earth affordable heroes. All of the cars in this line-up are purposely very different to reflect just how broad the world of performance cars is, but each of them would be right at home at an evo trackday. The winner will not be the fastest car around the lap, but the one that feels the most enjoyable, exploitable and genuinely thrilling. If the performance car world is a broad church, then the world of track driving is, ostensibly, a narrower one. But it’s a fascinating one nonetheless. You can learn things about a car on a track that you simply can’t on the road, and to experience…

‘THERE’S MUCH TO BE SAID FOR MODEST POWER AND EASY-TO-READ HANDLING’ IF A HOT HATCH REPRESENTS THE MOST accessible entry point to trackday driving, the simple front-engined rear-drive sports car is the next rung up the ladder. Not necessarily in terms of outright speed around a lap, but very much as a way of developing your driving skills and enjoying the endless fun of steering a car on the throttle. The GR86 and MX-5 make a great pair. Both are evo favourites and each occupies the sweet spot where your daily driver can double as something for weekend fun or the occasional trackday. The Toyota here is bone-stock while the MX-5 is a BBR-modified example, so it’s not quite like-for-like, but the comparison should be fascinating with very little to…

THE NORMAL LAWS OF MATHEMATICS DON’T SEEM to apply to either of these cars. There are numbers associated with both of them that are mildly head-scrambling. One of them is 642bhp, the power output of the M2. It’s been fettled by Litchfield Motors, the Tewkesbury-based tuning specialist, which recently turned its attention to the new G87-series with a suite of ECU, exhaust and chassis upgrades and further options on the way. This is its development car, in the latter stages of fine-tuning. Wearing light weight, wider-offset 20-inch HR Ealloys(which Litchfield says save around 2.4kg at each corner, and for which it charges £5243, including a set of Pilot Sport 4 S tyres) and sitting lower on a height-adjustable spring kit (£1495), the wheels fill the arches menacingly, making the M2…

IT WOULD BE REMISS TO HAVE A TRACK CAR TEST without including two ultimate expressions of the genre. The Radical and Revolution are the only cars here that aren’t road-legal: they’ve been created purely for the track, for both racing and recreation, but they’ve also both been designed as cars that a novice or a seasoned driver could hop into and find equally rewarding. In short, they’re designed for fun as well as lap times, so they fit right in with this test’s ethos. And as an ultimate benchmark for pure, focused driving, there’s little else out there like a Radical SR3. The SR3 has been around since 2002 and has evolved continuously since, with more than 1500 cars sold around the world, and multiple dedicated championships across various continents.…

‘ DESPITE THE AMAZING TECH, IT FEELS AUTHENTICALLY ANALOGUE ’ TRULY EXCEPTIONAL CARS DELIVER MOMENTS THAT stay with you forever. Personally there have been three such moments in the 992 GT3 RS; two when driving and one as a passenger. The passenger experience was sitting alongside legendary Porsche factory racer Jörg Bergmeister for a hot lap at the RS’s Silverstone international launch. Naturally I requested a full qualifying effort, and being the nice man he is, Big George obliged. In spades. The car was running on Cup 2 Rs, which is pretty much road-legal race rubber, but even allowing for the unusually sticky tyres it was still ridiculously impressive. The cornering was otherworldly for a road car, especially through Copse and the fearsome Maggotts-Becketts right-left-right-left. But it was the braking…

MY SUSPICION PROVED TO BE CORRECT: our M2’s wheel alignment was indeed ‘out’. Confirmation came from my local German and performance car specialist, Gem Tech in Cambridgeshire, where owner Jeremy found a marked mismatch side-to-side, particularly in the toe angles, at both ends of the car. How it came to be like this is unclear. There is some grumbling online about G87s arriving with less-than-optimum geometry, but this is mostly from customers in America who had a BMW USA-approved height-adjustable suspension kit fitted when their car landed in the States (or ‘port installed’ as it’s called). Such suspension isn’t even an option in Europe, so that’s not the problem here. I’d like to think YF23 VTT left the factory as intended; I’d also like to think that those who covered…

IT WAS DARK, NATURALLY IT HAD BEEN raining, and the road – a typical British B-road barely wide enough for two cars but with a central white line that was still visible – would pass for a shallow stream, the puddles forming a small reservoir with a sideline in destroying tyres, wheels and suspension components. I’d managed to avoid it throughout the winter until the fatal night when I didn’t. The windscreen filled with water. The wipers sprung into action. The noise was terrifying. The shock through the steering wheel and up to my shoulders was violent. The tyre pressure warning alarm was surely only moments away from being activated. I was already planning the recovery with a call to Land Rover Assistance. The tyre pressure warning alarm never went…

THE LIGHTER, ICE GREY CAR PICTURED here is evo’s long-term 911 Carrera GTS: rear-wheel drive, manual gearbox, optional lightweight pack (carbon-shell bucket seats, no rear seats, reduced sound deadening, rear-wheel steering). The darker Agate Grey car is a 911 Carrera 4 GTS: all-wheel drive, dual-clutch PDK transmission (though you can spec it with a manual ’box for no extra cost), four-way electric-adjust seats. Aside from the extra driven axle, these two are specced quite differently. This C4 is in relatively luxurious guise: electric sunroof, demure interior trim and a slightly higher ride height, compared to ‘our’ cafe-racer GTS with its buckets and carpet trim over the space the +2 pews would normally occupy. Just how much difference does all that make? A back-toback test over 48 hours is revealing. And…

‘THIS THING IS CONVERSATION-STOPPING, PASSENGER-nausea-inducing fast. Everywhere.’ That’s how Harry Metcalfe described the C6 RS6 he ran for a year on evo’s Fast Fleet back in 2008. Even in a world of hybrid supersaloons and 1000bhp-plus electric cars, that description holds true today. Some believe it took until the (admittedly excellent) C7 generation for the RS6 to really get into its stride, but for the maddest, most eccentric version of all, the C6 takes the cake. Its nuclear-grade twin-turbo V10 generates 572bhp – more than the 911 GT2 of the time and not a million miles away from the current RS6 Performance. That gives it a 0-62mph time of 4.5sec, and with impenetrable four-wheel-drive traction and a slick-shifting six-speed automatic gearbox, you get the sense the RS6 can achieve that…