EvoSeptember 2016的目錄

The Goodwood experience without the expense. Just be prepared to get up early “Sometimes all you want to do is rock up, stare at some cars and enjoy a greasy bacon butty” THINK GOOD WOOD, think Festival of Speed and Revival. Think expense, sold-out tickets, long queues and acres of tweed. They are unquestionably wonderful events – the Revival in particular, which exudes a magic that few other meetings can match – but both require a significant commitment of time, effort and money in order to attend. Sometimes, all you want to do is rock up, stare at some cars, enjoy a greasy bacon butty and strip the roof of your mouth with a steaming coffee. Welcome to the Goodwood Breakfast Club. It has many of the advantages of the…

“Push a button to call the service and ask the person on the line to book event tickets” THE BASIC CONCEPT Of a luxury car has remained unchanged for decades. first and foremost, your luxury car must be large. space is an indisputable luxury; valiant attempts by manufacturers to fill supermini interiors with leather and toys do not make them luxury cars, they merely turn small, cheap cars into small, expensive ones. Secondly, it must boast the latest technology. Air conditioning, electric windows, satellite navigation, double-glazing, radar cruise control – all debuted on luxury vehicles. And thirdly, travel in a luxury car must be quiet, unruffled – an easy experience. but ultimately, this experience has been limited to what can be achieved within or by the car itself. however, Mercedes-benz…

Pure cars rule! Has the Boxster lost its way? Love the ceramic di sc subscribers’ cover image Fastest growing video at YouTube.com/evo ‘Porsche 911 R at 200mph’: Henr y C atchpole puts the 911 R’s top-speed claim to the test on the Autobahn Most liked Instagram post on @officialevomagazine Our shor t video demonstrates that the Mercedes AMG GT R isn’t exactly quiet Most viewed story at evo.co.uk ‘Police in the UK could be getting Ford Mustang V8s’ Twitter poll: Which M-car would you rather have? May 26th • 982 Votes • Final results…

You can almost hear the committee meeting that came up with this latest Ferrari’s name. ‘It needs to be historic,’ says an espresso. ‘How about Gtc? We’ve used that before,’ says a suit so sharp it could prepare sushi. ‘I like it,’ replies the espresso, ‘but we need to remind people about the “four” stuff. You know, the seats, the steering, the driven wheels.’ ‘OK, but Gtc4 sounds much too sporty,’ chips in some designer stubble. [Pause for cigarette break.] ‘Why don’t we tack on a lusso?’ suggests some indoor sunglasses on their return. ‘Perfetto!’ cries an enthusiastic mahogany tan. ‘Gtc4 lusso. snappy. so much better than FF. to a long lunch!’ decrees the sharp tailoring. The initial impression is that the Gtc4 lusso is a mild facelift of the…

OACCORDING TO THE official figures, just 60bhp separates the BMW M2 from the bigger, more expensive M4. in reality, however, the difference is greater than that. ‘M2s just about make the 365bhp that BMW claims,’ says dMS Automotive founder rob Young, ‘whereas M4s always produce way more than the claimed 425bhp.’ in the real world, then, the difference is closer to 90bhp. With an ecU remap, that margin can be closed significantly. the one offered by dMS is good for 417bhp, with 455lb ft of torque available at 3800rpm – an 86lb ft increase over the standard M2. the 155mph limiter is also removed, giving access to a top speed of over 180mph. All for £1440. ‘the M2 feels less hardcore and more grown up than the old 1M,’ reckons…

THE BANGING SOUND you can hear is one more nail being hammered into the coffin of natural aspiration. In line with most of the rest of the automotive industry, Porsche is downsizing and turbocharging its engines, and hot on the heels of the 911 and Boxster, the Cayman is the latest model in Porsche’s line-up to junk an atmospheric motor for a blown one. The 718 Cayman s uses the same four-cylinder, singleturbo unit that powers the recent 718 Boxster s (see evo 222), replacing the free-revving flat-six that to our simple and regressive minds just didn’t need replacing. The new engine certainly hasn’t ruined the Boxster s, but when we sampled it we reckoned enough had been lost from the driving experience that it should be downgraded from a…

HERE’S A LITTLE GAP IN THE TRAFFIC. Enough to pin the accelerator and hold it there all the way to the limiter in third. We’re heading home, day nearly done. Photographer Gus Gregory is checking the interior driving shots he’s just finished on the back of his Canon, but he hasn’t yet experienced the P1 GTR. No lag, the power comes in hard and without hesitation. I’ve caught Gus’s attention. At about 4500rpm the rear tyres light up for maybe a second before the traction control tempers the delivery just enough to restore traction. Then the fury ramps up again. Gus – a veteran of Veyrons and the like – is grabbing at fresh air, trying to restore his own grip on reality. ‘Oh my god… Oh my GOD… JETHRO!’…

ENGINE ‘It’s based on a 2-litre turbo, ’08-spec WRC engine. It’s capable of 600bhp and 600lb ft, but has been running around 500bhp to ensure total reliability. The shift point is about 8200rpm, but it revs to 8500. We needed that engine speed because we’re limited on packaging ratios. We’ve used the rally transmission casing and diff casing, and that means that we could only physically get a certain dimension ratio in there and we wanted to target 180mph, so you need to rev to 8500. In turn that dictates your crankshaft, piston and conrod design, your timing, turbo spec – all are specific to the car. The driver has a three-position “performance chooser” that targets different turbo speeds and response levels for anti-lag. We don’t have the old rocket-type…

‘The ST200 is a faster, limited-edition version of our favourite small hot hatch, which makes it an important car here on planet evo’ FLIGHT BA0344 TOUCHES DOWN AT Nice airport right on schedule. It’s just gone 2.30 in the afternoon and as we wait to disembark the aircraft, I run through our plan one last time. It’s an ambitious one. Hastily laid, too, and the closer I look at the timings, the more convinced I become it’ll go awry. A rank of new Ford Fiesta ST200s is lined up somewhere outside the terminal building. The ST200 is a faster, limited-edition version of our favourite small hot hatch, the Fiesta ST, which makes it an important car here on planet evo. If we manage to execute the plan exactly as it’s…

‘For more than half the race I defended as stoutly as I could while chasing down a podium position’ We use Anglesey circuit so often here at evo that i consider it my home track. i had joked that a home advantage might give me an edge over my competitors come the Anglesey round of the caterham roadsport championship, but i never actually believed it would… Britain’s most picturesque circuit would be the setting for my second outing in the caterham racing car. i made my debut a few weeks earlier at Brands Hatch (see evo 224), recording a sixth-place finish and a DnF, which left plenty of room for improvement in north Wales. Most of the test day was spent simply trying to get the pedal alignments right. i…

A COUPLE OF ISSUES AGO I wrote about a few of the Golf R’s more irritating traits and behaviours, one of which was the way the stereo volume was reduced when the parking sensors were activated. Several readers emailed or tweeted to say this function can be switched off by delving into the submenus. Having done exactly that, I am just a little bit happier with our VW, so thank you to everybody who got in touch. One such reader was Simon Pearce, who took delivery of his Golf R, also in Night Blue, back in February. ‘It was very reassuring to hear of your experience with the notchy gearchange and lumpy clutch,’ he wrote, ‘as I was beginning to wonder if I had a faulty drivetrain. It’s certainly worse…

‘Carbon-ceramic brakes do seem to recover far better from extreme, fade-inducing use’ IT WOULD HAVE BEEN swifter to uproot a giant sequoia with his bare hands, but Dan Prosser eventually managed to prise the Jag’s key from my grasp recently. He said he really enjoyed the car and then proceeded to pass it around the office like some sort of automotive shisha pipe. A few days later Jethro texted to say: ‘Your car was pretty quick on track. Ceramics lasted a lap before going very, very long, though. Must weigh about 3000kg!’ First sentence good, second sentence deeply troubling. As for the presumption about the F-type’s weight, it proved wildly out when we put the R on the scales and it rang up just 1825kg. Alright, it’s not going to…

‘Since I’m a shortarse, the fixed driving position is something of a compromise’ IT’S TAKEN ME SEVERAL months to get behind the wheel of our Caterham, and by sheer coincidence my first spell of any distance was the 100 miles or so from Hethel in Norfolk to the old evo office in Northants having returned the Elise 250 Cup tested in issue 224. On that journey, the Elise shone considerably brighter than our Caterham. Not least because despite its refinement penalty when compared with regular vehicles, it’s a Mercedes S-class next to the Seven. Driving the Seven down a motorway in the rain is a little like being on the deck of the Cornelia Marie in a Bering Sea. Grip is mighty in the dry but fleeting on wet roads,…

CARCARE / MAIN TENANCE Schrader TPMS kit € 193.05 tpmseuroshop.com Tyre-pressure monitoring systems are undoubtedly handy, even for those of us who check our pressures regularly. This kit, appropriate for any car old or new with a top speed up to 155mph, uses in-wheel sensors just like OEM systems. VIDEO GAME Jalopy (PC) £ 9.99 store.steampowered.com A quirky take on the driving-game genre: fix, drive and fix again your Trabant-like vehicle as you drive through Eastern Bloc countries. There’s a beautiful simplicity to both the graphics and the gameplay. DRIVING SHOES Piloti Superleggera £ 180 piloti.uk.com Finding racing-style shoes that don’t draw too much attention is difficult, but these Superleggeras are tasteful enough to get away with for everyday use and are FIAcertified. The sole features a vintage tyre tread…

evo videps! Experience the sound and fury at youtube.com/evo RATINGS * Tepid ** Interesting *** Seriously good *****A truly great car SUPERMINIS & HOT HATCHES OUR CHOICE Renaultsport Mégane 275. This generation of Mégane has got better and better with every update, and the 275 is simply sublime. Optional Öhlins dampers and Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 rubber (taken from the Trophy-R) aren’t essential, but improve things even further. BEST OF THE REST The latest Ford Focus RS (left) is our favourite super-hatch, with the more grown-up Golf R close behind. The SEAT Leon Cupra 290 (which replaces the 280 and has an extra 10bhp), is a real buzz, especially with the Sub8 pack and sticky tyres, while the Fiesta ST Mountune is our pick of the smaller hatches. Don’t…

“It’s more sophisticated than just interrupting the ignition” IF YOU’ VE EVER HIRED a car you’ll probably be familiar with flat shifting – where you keep the throttle pinned as you jab the clutch pedal and simultaneously move the gearlever as quickly as possible into the next gear. it isn’t elegant but it makes for some pleasingly rapid gearchanges. you’d never want to do it in your own car, though. unless, that is, you have an aston martin v12 vantage S fitted with the new seven-speed manual gearbox with amShift – a system that aston has developed to allow quick and safe upshifts while keeping the throttle wide open. Flat shifting technology has been available on motorbikes for some time. their low-inertia engines allow for gears to be engaged without…

THIS MONTH ABARTH 124 SPIDER // FERRARI GTC4 LUSSO // AUDI S4 //AUDI S5 // DMS BMW M2 // MERCEDES-AMG C43 4MATIC COUPE //VW GOLF GTI CLUBSPORT S // PORSCHE 718 CAYMAN S THE TEAM This month, we asked our road testers to name the most disappointing Ferrari they’ve experienced: NICK TROTT Editor ‘550 Barchetta. Ugly, wobbly, unnecessary. Wanted to love it. Hated it.’ STUART GALLAGHER Managing editor ‘412i. I thought it would make a great alternative all-rounder. Then I rode in one. Never meet your heroes.’ HENRY CATCHPOLE Features editor ‘458 Spider. The steering column seemed to have misplaced all the coupe’s rigidity.’ DAN PROSSER Road test editor ‘The first Ferrari I drove was a 360 Spider. A weak introduction to the Prancing Horse.’ JETHRO BOVINGDON Contributing editor ‘It…

‘The new engine has excellent throttle response and a much stronger mid‑range’ WE WERE BIG FANS OF the previous-generation Audi S4. Its supercharged V6 had real character, the optional torque-vectoring rear Sport differential created a neutral balance that could be adjusted under power, and the suspension had a fluency that made the pulverising chassis setup of the faster RS4 feel rather overwrought. Having driven and enjoyed the latest A4, there are high hopes that the S4 might once again deliver a sweet, responsive drive in a subtle, superbly built package. It will cost from around £43,500, and the appealing Avant version will start at around £45,000. The big news here is the switch from supercharged to turbocharged technology, plus the adoption of an eight-speed automatic gearbox instead of the old…

THE C43 BADGE IS BACK, but rather than being attached to a brawny reardriver with V8 power – how we’ve come to expect our aMg C-classes to be – this new version has a V6 engine and four-wheel drive. don’t panic, though. This isn’t a downsized replacement for the full-fat, 469bhp twin-turbo V8 C63, but an additional aMg model that will sit beneath it in the range and cost £15,500 less. The 3-litre twin-turbo V6 in the C43 started life as part of Mercedes’ ‘bluedirect’ family of engines, and here it’s been breathed on to deliver 362bhp and 383lb ft – the same state of tune as in the sLC43 (evo 222). it sends drive through Mercedes’ 9g-tronic automatic gearbox to the four-wheel drive system, which itself eschews a complex…

‘THE HUGE POWER WILL COME LARGELY FROM A HIGHREVVING, NATURALLY ASPIRATED V12’ IT’S NOT WHAT you expected, right? This is the AM-RB 001. A collaboration between Aston Martin and Red Bull Advanced Technologies involving lots of very talented people. However, it will forever be known as ‘Adrian Newey’s road car’. That’s no slight on anyone else involved, more a mark of the significance of the most successful F1 designer of all time finally diverting his vast brain power to a car that people – very rich people, admittedly – can actually buy. I imagined it’d be covered in those intricate aero tricks, flips and slits that give you a migraine if you stare at them for long enough on an F1 or LMP1 car. But no. The AM-RB 001 looks…

IT’S A FACT OF LIFE THAT IF YOU TELL SOMEONE they can’t have something, that something is immediately what they want more than anything in the whole world. If you happen to be one of the 24 lucky souls who managed to secure one of Aston Martin’s £1.8million and very definitely track-only Vulcans, that ‘something’ is the possibility to drive it on the road. You’d think threading the 820bhp, slick-shod, downforce-drenched monster into Eau Rouge, or howling round the floodlit fantasy world of Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit would be more than enough fun, but we should never underestimate the importance of being able to drive to the pub and impress your mates. And so, by popular demand, and despite never being designed with road use in mind, the Vulcan…

‘The BMW M235i is no stranger to these pages and for very good reason’ HEREVER YOU CARE to look, the automotive industry seems to be converging on the same technical solutions. Hypercars must have some form of hybridisation, hot hatches are powered by four-cylinder turbo engines, supersaloons run twin-turbo V8s. Variety and novelty are being wrung out of almost every sector, but in the case of the £35,000 four-seat performance coupe the picture could hardly be more different. Just a few months ago the sector more or less didn’t exist – only BMW would sell you a proper, performance-orientated two-door with four seats in this price bracket – but with the recent arrival of the Ford Mustang 5.0 V8 GT there is now at least a little more choice. Does…

SMALL, QUICK H ATCHBACKS are one of the enduring joys of driving. Good ones never fail to entertain, great ones stand tall amongst the best driving experiences you can have. That they’re attainable – or at least a realistic aspiration – when new, and genuinely affordable second-hand, only adds to their appeal. The big news in recent months has been the impending arrival of the Fiesta ST200. coming hot on the heels of the Focus rS and building on a class-leading reputation forged by its closest sibling, the ever-excellent Fiesta ST, the 200 is one of those cars that takes an already honed machine and adds that final bit of polish. it’s typical of a car approaching the end of its lifecycle, yet far from feeling long in the tooth.…

I WAS GOING TO GET A hot hatch. I really was. They feel like the sweet spot in terms of useable performance cars on the road these days. Cars such as the M3 and 911 – previously about the perfect compromise in my eyes – have arguably become too fast and too grippy to really exploit on a day-to-day basis, and hot hatches have clawed their way up to where those fabulous cars used to reside: fast and agile, interactive and enjoyable on all sorts of roads. And yet I find myself running a Vauxhall VXR8 GTS. With a 576bhp, 545lb ft 6.2-litre supercharged V8 and a price tag of £56,234. How? Why? Well… I wanted something big enough for the family (unlike the Nissan GT-R and Jag F-type I’ve…

‘I’ve managed to reach new fueleconomy heights but also plumb new depths over the last month’ NOT SO MANY MILES covered this month, but they’ve all been good ones. For starters, the Conti’s on its summer tyres, so I’ve had more grip to lean on. Not that it was exactly lacking on winters. As a consequence of the tyre change I’ve been playing with the suspension modes – four in all, from Comfort to Sport Plus – to try and find a happy medium. Toggling between each mode is a bit of a faff, because you have to first press the little damper button aft of the gear-selector lever then use the touchscreen to choose the mode you’re after. It doesn’t exactly make for spontaneous fiddling, but for the most…

IT TAKES A LOT TO wrest the Bentley key from my hand, but even I had to concede that a trip to Spa-Francorchamps with two videographers and all their equipment, plus my own race kit, meant the Conti GT had to be swapped for a more practical car. Practical is something the Skoda Octavia vRS does very well indeed, especially when it’s the estate. What’s more, ours being a diesel meant we could fuel-up just before the Chunnel then drive to Spa in one hit and do the back-and-forth from hotel to the track for three days before filling up once more and making it home without stopping. When you’ve got miles to cover, these things matter. A diesel estate isn’t exactly the stuff of epic road-trips, but the vRS…

DAN’S GOLF R AND STU’S Skoda both have Apple CarPlay fitted and, I have to say, it feels like the ultimate form of in-car entertainment. Why complicate things? Really all you need is satnav and some music, so multiple click-wheels, screens and menus all feel like unnecessary clutter. The new Mercedes E-class definitely has some of the best tech in the business, but a recent drive saw me defaulting to CarPlay and leaving it be as soon as possible. And the MX-5? Its infotainment is refreshingly rudimentary. You get Bluetooth, a simple satnav, DAB and that’s it. All I want is CarPlay and then, to me, it’d be perfect. I hope manufacturers finally catch on to the ‘less is more’ approach, and soon. As for driving the MX-5, it’s been…

WANTIT. BUYIT. OWNIT. LOVEIT. Analysis..............151 Used Rivals..........155 Buying Journey.......156 Buying Guide.........158 Model Focus..........162 Upgrades.............165 CASH IS KING, OR SO IT ONCE WAS said. But when it comes to cars, that’s no longer the case, as buying on some form offinance is now by far the preferred option in the majority of new car sales. That also holds true to a certain extent in the classic car market, where the availability of ‘cheap’ money has encouraged even those who could afford to buy outright to spend their money in other ways. ‘There’s been a taboo about finance in the past, but not any more,’ says David Moss at Oracle Finance. ‘Our clients tend to be passionate about cars, but they may also need their own capital for other uses, such as…

EVENA DE CADE AGO, IT SEE MED almost too good to be true. A motorsportinspired, 5-litre, naturally aspirated V10 engine producing 500bhp at a searing 7750rpm. BMW had never produced anything quite like it before, hasn’t since, and probably never will again. In today’s world of downsizing and turbocharging, such an engine will soon be almost beyond imagination. It appeared first in 2004, in the E60-generation M5. With launch control engaged, it propelled the 1755kg saloon from 0 to 62mph in just 4.7sec and – with the electronic speedlimiter removed – on to a top speed of 205mph. And then a year later came the E63 M6 (soon followed by the E64 Convertible). The M6 took the M5’s drivetrain – V10, SMG paddleshift gearbox and all – and wrapped it…

TTHE KEY TO YOUR CAR IS OF GREATER MEANING than its modest dimensions imply. Obviously it starts the engine, but there’s much more to it than that, especially if the car in question is of an evo persuasion. You don’t get quite the same jittery sense of anticipation when you reach into your pocket for your house keys, do you? The best keys are the simplest ones, of course, featuring only a flattened plane to grip between thumb and forefinger and a serrated snout to rattle down the barrel and coax the lock pins into position. Twist once to awaken the electrics and hear the fuel line gulp, twist again to fire a high-voltage current to the spark plugs. Sadly the significance of this ritual is lost on most manufacturers…

‘On the one hand,’ says Oliver Blume, chairman of the executive board of Porsche (right), ‘in the future you will have electric cars with a lot of digitalisation and connectivity, but on the other hand you will have the need – especially for Porsche – to launch puristic race cars like the 911. We will go to both strategies – the new one and the old one ‘Maybe it’s a mad example,’ he continues, ‘but talking about sport shoes, today you can buy sport shoes of the ’70s or the ’80s and people love it. I’m convinced that in ten or 15 years we will also have fans that would like to drive a real sports car where they can feel that it’s a real car. that’s our strategy in…

Just seven days after winning the Le Mans 24 Hours with Porsche, Frenchman Romain Duma s claimed the fa stest time at the famous Pikes Peak Hill Climb in Colorado. Driving a Honda-powered Norma prototype entered in the ‘Unlimited Division’, Duma s beat Rhys Millen’s electric-powered Drive eO PP03 by six seconds. Duma s’s car evolved from an after-hours project star ted by a small group of Honda Per formance Development engineers and is ba sed on a French prototype cha ssis. The car ha s four-wheel drive, weighs around 600k g and produces 600bhp from its turbocharged V6 engine. Duma s completed the 12.42-mile Rock y Mountains course (and its 156 turns) in 08:51.45 at an avera ge speed of 81. 29mph. The record is held by Séba stien…

“How faithful can a historic tyre be to an original with today’s health and safety mandate?” HISTORICAND classic motorsport is responsible for some of the biggest motoring events in europe. Goodwood can shoulder most of the responsibility, but along with its Festival of speed, members’ meeting and revival, plenty of other venues jostle for space on the calendar, from laguna seca to adelaide. As spectacular as these meetings can be, and as well prepared and immaculately turned-out as the race cars often are, there’s sometimes doubt as to how authentic the experience is. Most historic competition cars must conform to the Fia’s appendix K regulations, which have been created as ‘a set of rules that preserve the specifications of their period and prevent the modifications of performance and behaviour which…

letters@evo.co.uk t @evomagazine f @evomagazine THANK YOU, HENRY CATCHPOLE, FOR YOUR excellent review of the latest Lotus Elise (the Cup 250, evo 224). But as an Elise owner I feel you neglected some ‘real-life’ characteristics of the current model, which some readers might want to know about. For example, there is a notice stuck on the inside of the convertible roof. It basically states that in bad weather I am going to get wet. I wonder if by adding this notice it somehow transforms a less than perfect design element into a car characteristic. And then there’s the boot. Yes, it has one. In the same way tight, skinny jeans have pockets. And anything you do squeeze inside it will get rather warm; the nearby engine seems to heat the…

I IT SeemS The worlD has gone crazy for SUVs, crossovers and high-riding hatchbacks, so it’s refreshing to drive a new drop-top sports car. It’s even nicer to drive a new small, Italian sports car, even if the Abarth 124 Spider isn’t exactly all-new or, for that matter, all-Italian. The Abarth is the more performance-orientated version offiat’s new 124 Spider, which is a less sporting version of mazda’s mX-5. If you didn’t know already, the 124 and mX-5 share the same basic underpinnings, but different engines and suspension calibration has given each one a different character. Abarth has approached the 124 in much the same way as it has Fiat’s 500 in the past. This means more power, significant suspension revisions, more aggressive styling and substantially more noise. Where the…

NEITHER A RUMBLING V8 nor a revvy supercharged V6 could make the firstgeneration audi S5 feel like a proper drivers’ car. the chassis was too wooden, the steering too lifeless and the balance far too uninteresting for it to ever engage and reward in the way a sports coupe should. With less weight and a turbocharged engine, though, audi hopes the all-new S5 will put that right. Launched concurrently with the S4, the second-generation S5 is lighter than the previous model – by some 60kg, audi claims – and careful management of the airflow has kept the drag coefficient down to 0.25, a best in class figure. The big news, though, is the new turbocharged V6 that it shares with the S4. Displacing 2995cc, the engine is related to the…

THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE VW golf line-up is starting to get complicated. at the bottom of the ladder is the standard gTi, all 217bhp and £27,495 of it. next comes the gTi performance pack, which adds 10bhp, a limitedslip diff and £995. Then there’s the gTi clubsport edition 40 (evo 218), which has more power still – up to 286bhp on overboost – and a more focused chassis setup with the option of michelin pilot Sport cup 2 tyres. The edition 40 was launched last year to celebrate 40 years of the golf gTi and it costs £30,935. Now Volkswagen has taken things a step further with the clubsport S, which has more power still, less weight, cup 2 tyres as standard and an even more focused chassis. Just 400 will be…

Nick Trott meets the boss of Lotus to talk about the next Elise, selling 2000 cars a year and the future of Hethel THE LAST SEVEN YEARS WILL SURELY be remembered as the most calamitous in the history of Lotus – more so than the tragic months after Colin Chapman’s death in 1982. It started with the appointment of Dany Bahar in 2009 – a former Ferrari commercial Svengali bursting with the kind of panache and promise not seen at Hethel since Chapman. And as we know, that didn’t quite work out… Just a year later the Malaysian government sold its 42.7 per cent stake in Proton to industrial conglomerate DRB-Hicom, which in turn put a further seven per cent of Proton’s shares on the open market. Under Malaysian law,…

‘I THINK SEDANS ARE dying out – large and small.’ I can’t tell you who told me this, except to say it was an executive from a car manufacturer that still invests in sedans/saloons, but it was a statement that caught me off guard. Why? Because saloons have been a mainstay of the automotive landscape for the last 50 years, if not longer. But the evolution of the saloon is clear to see – and the shift in customer interest from what was once a permanent fixture of any car manufacturer’s range to other classes of vehicle entirely. It’s hard to identify the spark of this change, but I think it’s a result of SUVs becoming less utilitarian and more road-biased, and the success of crossovers such as the Nissan…

‘Early signs are that a sweet spot where power can still be put down cleanly has been found’ IT’S AN OWNERS’ CLUB fable if ever there was one, but I think there may actually be some truth to the claim the Mk1 RS was rather more powerful than officially suggested. The figure up for scrutiny is 212bhp, which might be quite tame now, but back in 2002 was (briefly) the most ever bestowed on a front-driven production car. Here’s the thing, though: with the sole deviation from factory spec being the Powervalve exhaust system (manifold left untouched, note) fitted last month, my car recently made 235bhp on the chassis dynamometer at Superchips HQ in Buckingham. Now Powervalve are good, but that good? Surely not. Not that I’m complaining. That kind…

‘Thankfully the new exhaust avoids the fartiness of a yoof’s 1.2-litre hatchback’ ‘THE FOUR-POT IS ALMOST masochistic in its desire for revs.’ When I wrote those words in evo 212 about the engines in the first three generations of MX-5, they certainly applied to the three cars I had spent the day driving at Goodwood. Problem is, they don’t seem to apply to my own Eunos. It’s not for want of TLC, but over recent months I’ve become increasingly disappointed by the Roadster’s lack of top-end fizz. The modest outright pace doesn’t bother me, since it’s neatly matched to the levels of braking power and grip available, both of which are limited, by modern standards at least. But while the 1.6 seems to zing through the mid-range with smoothness and…

FOR MANY, THE MITSUBISHI LANCER Evolution IV, V and VI are the ultimate Mitsubishi ‘Evos’. They share the same bodyshell, with the engine turned through 180 degrees compared with the original I, II and III for improved engine bay packaging, and they also saw the introduction of Active Yaw Control. The IV, V and VI came in GSR and RS versions, the former more luxuriously appointed and with AYC, the latter aimed at motorsport and with simpler interiors, wind-up windows and no AYC. Air con was still an option, however. The IV (below right) took Tommi Mäkinen to the WRC title in 1997, and is clearly identifiable from the V and VI because it retains the narrow body of the standard Lancer. It has also acquired a reputation for engine…

THEE46-GENERATION BMW M 3 is a true used performance car bargain right now, and whether you’re a long-term owner or a doe-eyed newbie like evo’s website editor Hunter Skipworth, there’s plenty you can do to keep it in the sweet spot. Hunter wasted no time in jazzing up his main points of contact with the car, retrimming the steering wheel in Alcantara, just like in the CSL (£130 from royalsteeringwheels.com), and fitting the weighty gearknob from a 330Ci Clubsport (£60 – have a look on eBay). His next job was a reinforcement to the rear subframe – a known weak point – which came in at £1440, including new bushes and an alignment. Contact Ergen Motorsport (ergen.co.uk) for details. As you’ll read in Fast Fleet soon, brakes are another key…