Sommaire pour November 2023 de Evo

LONG-TERM STRATEGY PLANNING is at the core of everything the automotive industry does. From new product and tech roll-out, to managing a model’s withdrawal from the production line, every detail is sweated and supply chains managed until the last car leaves the showroom. So you can understand the eruption of anger last month when the UK government decided to put back its planned 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by five years. Just three years after announcing that original deadline. Car buyers and manufacturers were already facing enough challenges and confusion ahead of 2030, be it making new-car purchasing decisions, or committing several billion quid of shareholders’ money to building new Gigafactories and deciding when to halt ICE production. This delay won’t address any of…

IN THIS MAGAZINE’S QUARTER OF a century we haven’t been much troubled by Cadillac. There has been the odd foray into Europe and the UK, but mostly these experiments have been short-lived and doomed to failure. Cadillac seems somehow the most American of all brands. Which is our slightly snotty Western European way of saying… pretty crappy. ‘Luxury’ served up with cheap materials, dynamics tuned for roads very different from our own, and a sort of faded, brittle feel of a marque struggling to reanimate former glories for modern times. However, what do we know? What does anyone know in these uncertain days? New brands pop up every five minutes, new technology sweeps in to decimate much of what we hold dear, but then the promise of efuels and flexible…

THERE ARE MANY COOL THINGS THAT I’VE BEEN TASKED WITH IN this job, but I will admit I never saw this coming. As part of evo’s 25th anniversary, I was asked to meet one of London’s top chefs and co-create a unique, specialised menu for a fabulous dinner celebrating all things evo. Why a curry you ask? As one of evo’s later alumni, I have to admit that the Shell garage sandwiches usually associated with group tests and trackdays didn’t seem to offer much of a culinary legacy, but there was apparently a culture of late-night curries on those press weeks in the office before remote working and high-speed internet became a thing. So, in the same way that evo’s founders decided to create the ultimate car magazine for those…

UNTIL THE GALLARDO APPEARED ON THE SCENE IN 2003, Lamborghini hadn’t built an entry-level model since the Jalpa, which ceased production in 1988. You either had the bunce to buy a Diablo or a Murciélago, or you caught the bus to Maranello and sheepishly enquired about a 360 Modena or F430. To this day I rather like that old-school, unequivocal, la dolce vita approach to making supercars. I also love the string of obscure V8-engined baby Lambos that sold in their handfuls throughout the ’70s and ’80s, but it’s impossible to overstate the significance of successfully bringing the Gallardo to market. Urus aside, it defines the Audi-owned era and defies the fears of those who felt the union would never work. The Gallardo was more attainable. Thoroughly developed. Commercially sound.…

‘IT FELT LIKE THEY’D SET NEW BENCHMARKS FOR YEARS OR EVEN DECADES TO COME’ HISTORY SHOULD TEACH US HUMILITY AND PROVIDE some context, even when new ground is being broken. Even the most bleeding-edge discoveries and products will one day become the norm and they’ll inevitably be overtaken and relegated to being a monument of a previous era. Glorious, yes, but outgunned and out-manoeuvred. It regularly happens in our little world of the performance car. Sometimes it’s a very slow process – the McLaren F1 being the best example – but it will happen. Even so, you can forgive our excitement in 2013 when Ferrari, Porsche and McLaren all readied their new ultimate models. Augmented as never before with electric motors and weaponised with things such as torque-fill, powerful torque…

FUNNY, ISN’T IT, HOW HOT HATCHES have got very serious indeed in recent years – to the point where anything with less than 300bhp and an assortment of wings, vents and aerodynamic flicks seems distinctly undernourished. Given all of that, when looking back at 2008’s Renault Sport Mégane R26.R, you could be forgiven for wondering why those of us who were there still refer to it with such reverence. After all, it musters just 227bhp, which doesn’t even qualify as warm these days for a C-segment hatchback, and then there’s its Nürburgring lap time, the first occasion such a claim had really been applied in a marketing sense to a hot hatchback. Eight minutes and seventeen seconds, you’ll recall; impressive at the time, but barely breaking into the class top…

‘THE LAST NATURALLY ASPIRATED, V8-POWERED Ferrari, it’s a 458 Italia with 90kg slashed away via stripping the interior, lighter glass and a Lexan engine cover; a 458 fitted with a tweaked 4.5-litre V8 producing an astonishing 597bhp at 9000rpm and with gearshift times cut by 44 per cent; the Ferrari that introduced Side Slip Control; the only car ever to win eCoty unanimously.’ It’s quite the accolade, that unanimous 2014 eCoty victory; the only one in the history of the magazine. It could be argued that it wasn’t the strongest of years – the Jaguar F-type R Coupe was a distant second, the Porsche Cayman GTS third – but it was a ten-car field that also included a BMW M3, McLaren 650S and Aston Martin Vanquish, so the stronger argument…

WELL, WE WERE WRONG. THE BMW M5 CS may have prevailed at eCoty, edging out the fabulous Lamborghini Huracán STO along the way, but after six months in its company and getting to know it in intimate detail, we all agree it’s a bit of an old clunker. Stupid seats. Gold grille. Automatic ’box. Need I go on? I’m not sure what we were thinking back on those amazing roads in Scotland. M5 CS beats Porsche 992 GT3? Or Ferrari SF90? Come on… that’s ridiculous. BMW finally collected the M5 CS after we’d accrued some 9000 miles in the UK and Europe, on road and track. The plan for YH21 FWW is for it to now be inducted into BMW GB’s Heritage Fleet. To sit alongside stars like the E30…

THE FERRARI ROMA SPIDER HAS BEEN six years and three CEOs in the making and it’s all the California’s fault. Poor thing can’t catch a break even when it’s been off sale for over half a decade. The car destined to be a Maserati, but which proved too costly for the Trident badge to carry off, soon became a Ferrari to wow and woo first-time customers who weren’t ready for something mid-engined or with a V12 behind its grille. And it worked: 70 per cent of the 17,500 people who bought Californias were new to the brand. Yet for some at Ferrari it dragged the marque down to a level they didn’t feel comfortable with, then-CEO Sergio Marchionne telling the assembled media at the 2017 Geneva motor show that the…

AS WE MOURN THE LOSS OF THE FIESTA ST, the Puma ST has become Ford’s closest alternative to the beloved hot hatch, blending strong dynamics and practicality into one affordable package. And now the performance division has added a second model: the mild-hybrid Puma ST Powershift. While it has the same chassis and design and costs just £10 more than the regular ST, the new model swaps the torque-rich 1.5-litre three-cylinder for a smaller 1-litre turbo three, and the six-speed manual for a seven-speed dual-clutch with 48V mild-hybrid assist, increasing kerb weight by 36kg to 1394kg as a result. Peak outputs are 168bhp and 183lb ft, 29bhp and 53lb ft behind the regular ST for a 0-62mph time and top speed seven-tenths and 7mph slower. The Powershift’s 1-litre is immediately…

SO, THE 25 MOST SIGNIFICANT DRIVER’S CARS OF the last 25 years. We thought long and hard as to how to compile our list, ‘discussed’ at length the criteria as to what makes a car significant for us (and therefore for you). Cars were dismissed and then brought back into the fold. Others were a shoo-in up to the eleventh hour and then unceremoniously dumped because collectively it was decided that they didn’t have that X factor or didn’t really move the game on. Or both. Categorically we didn’t want to create a countdown of merely the fastest or most powerful, or the quickest around a track. Nor did we decide on models based purely on their reputation or popularity, or how good the launch was. The selected cars are…

A CAR SO INFLUENTIAL, THEY NAMED A MAGAZINE after it? Well, not quite, but the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution still had to be here, didn’t it? Rarely has a car of such humble origins bristled with so much exotic, motorsport-led energy as the Evo VI. The Evo VI was the last of the pure homologation Evos – road cars built in specific quantities to qualify for use in motorsport’s Group A and N categories – and the last based on the smaller, lighter, second-generation Lancer bodyshell. Later cars were faster, and more capable still, but there’s just something about this era of Evo; where rival Subaru had adopted the World Rally Car rule set for ’97, freeing it from links to the road car beyond the most elementary, Mitsubishi stuck with…

WE WERE JUST GETTING USED TO THE IDEA OF THE 911 engine being water-cooled rather than air-cooled when Porsche sprung another surprise on us: the company was entering the SUV market with a big 4x4. In fact it did a brilliant job of keeping the Cayenne under wraps during the development process (the board decision to build it had been taken back in 1998), only announcing it was going into production a few months before the first press drives took place in November 2002. Porsche aficionados didn’t know what to make of the Cayenne at launch. It wasn’t exactly pretty, with a cumbersome look, especially so the 450bhp Turbo version with its gaping grilles. With a claimed 0-62mph time of 5.6sec and a top speed of 165mph, the on-paper performance…

TVR WAS ALREADY RIDING HIGH WHEN EVO WAS launched. The glorious Griffith had won our hearts, the Chimaera was selling in its thousands and the wild Cerbera, complete with in-house ‘AJP8’ (later Speed Eight) engine, signified the company’s growing ambitions. We’d enjoyed all of them during the latter years of Performance Car, so it was natural TVRs should feature regularly in the pages of our new baby. Peter Wheeler’s relationship with the motoring press was famously prickly, but thanks to the emollient efforts of TVR’s then PR man, Ben Samuelson, we managed to navigate our way through those turbulent waters sufficiently to find ourselves behind the wheel of pretty much every new car to emerge from Blackpool. They were special times. Why the Tuscan and not the Sagaris or T350…

‘YOU ONLY HAD TO LOOK AT IT TO BE SEDUCED. ITS CHARISMA REMAINS UNDIMMED TODAY’ TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ASTON MARTIN WAS BUILDING tiny handfuls of glorious but positively Jurassic V-car behemoths in Newport Pagnell. Sure, the Jaguar-based DB7, being built in rather larger numbers down the road in Bloxham, had provided a financial lifeline, but something bold, entirely new and entirely Aston was needed to prove that the winged badge had a future. It was at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show that Jac Nasser, head of parent company Ford, revealed a startlingly handsome, front-engined supercar concept called Project Vantage. It had been styled by Ian Callum, it featured Aston Martin’s first V12 engine, and it was received with something approaching rapture. Now all they had to do was put it…

‘THE CRITICISM WAS PROBABLY STARTED BY 997 OWNERS WHO HAD JUST BEEN OVERTAKEN’ TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CARS: ONE FROM the beginning of a dynasty, one at its culmination. One manual, rear-driven and with the bare minimum of electronics; one all-wheel drive and all about technology. Both have become ever-present landmarks, both in the evo story and the wider evolution of the performance car. When this magazine came into being, the Nissan GT-R was in its fourth, R33 generation and still called the Skyline. The musclebound R34 came along in 1999 but it was the R35 generation that arrived in 2008, dropped the Skyline label and became simply the GT-R, that picked up the performance car goalposts and set them down in a whole new playing field. Fifteen years ago. A…

DON’T DO IT. DON’T FALL INTO THE TRAP of hating the 992 GT3 RS because some people are willing to pay a vast premium over the already vast £192,600 asking price. Don’t roll your eyes and think ‘well, they’ll just sit in air-conditioned garages, anyway’. Firstly, my experience suggests this is only partly true. For every 992 GT3 RS that will slip from one collector to the next without ever being truly exercised, there will be another that pounds around Silverstone, Spa and the Ring. Visit any trackday in the UK or Europe and you’ll see new and nearly new GT3s and RSs represented very strongly. More important even than this use case, though, is that Porsche Motorsport’s engineers and test drivers sweated and toiled for the most enlightened customers.…

READING ABOUT RICHARD PORTER’S ATTEMPTS TO HAVE affordable fun in his Fiat Panda 100HP (Fast Fleet, evo 314) got me thinking about the 2006 Fiesta Mk6 we purchased from a friend for £1000 for our sons to learn to drive in. It has had many parts replaced over time, such as springs, dampers, brake lines, etc. I changed the front discs for £64 and the spark plugs for £24. It has now just passed its fourteenth MOT, at 100,122 miles. It will need a new battery soon, which will cost £44.99. Meanwhile my 2016 BMW X3 3.0 diesel at £22,000 and 54,000 miles needed a new battery at a whopping £430 plus fitting, and a transfer box at £3121. Thank God it was still under warranty. Whenever I drive the…

IT DOESN’T FEEL ALL THAT LONG AGO TOYOTA WAS the blandest of bland, the beigest of beige car brands. When evo issue 001 was published, Carlos Sainz’s Corolla was vying with Tommi Mäkinen’s Mitsubishi Lancer for the WRC title, a brace of Toyota GT-Ones had taken on the Le Mans 24 Hours, and the Celica and the MR2 were mainstays in the company’s line-up. But in the years to come, performance cars disappeared from Toyota brochures while, elsewhere in the range, cars like the RAV4 morphed from inventive lifestyle vehicle to anonymous SUV dross. Despite a (slightly baffling) eight-season F1 campaign from ’02 to ’09, Toyota was a resolutely unsporting brand. One of the biggest car companies in the world, an industry powerhouse, but for enthusiasts – nothing to see…

THERE’S A FORMULA FOR A GOOD HOT HATCHBACK. It starts with the engine, which should give the sense that it’s slightly too big for the car. All the best fast French hatchbacks feel like this. Some fast Fords too. Fast Volkswagens rarely have this sensation but make up for it in other ways. Being able to reach their third birthdays without zizzing like a trapped wasp, for example. Then there’s the chassis. Great hot hatchbacks are front-wheel drive, of course. Except the Sunbeam Lotus. So what you need is a front end that’s absolutely nailed down, ready to dive into corners and claw out the other side with barely a hint of slip while the back end feels like it’s on the same team, moving around and giving the car…

SCIENCE SAYS SMELL IS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL memory-joggers: the bits of the brain that process scents are also strongly linked to memory and emotion. Settling into a first-generation Audi R8’s leather-and-aluminium cockpit instantly time-hops me back a decade to a past life, pre-magazine journalism, as a driving experience instructor. Much of it involved passengering in supercars, of varying ages and conditions, doing my best to make sure drivers looked after the cars and enjoyed themselves for three or four laps of an airfield or test circuit. A pinch-myself dream job in many respects, stressful work in others, partly depending on what car you were in for the day: a shift in a Ferrari 360 Modena was going to be a fraught one, possibly catching lift-off oversteer from the…

‘THOSE ZONDA QUALITIES THAT SHONE SO BRIGHTLY REMAIN DAZZLING TO THIS DAY’ LIFE IS GOOD WHEN YOU HAVE THE KEY TO A Pagani Zonda tucked in your pocket. It’s a feeling we got to know very well at evo over the years, thanks to many visits to Pagani’s factory in San Cesario sul Panaro, and, of course, the utterly surreal period when Harry Metcalfe’s sensational C12-S regularly sat outside evo Towers. It’s a happy coincidence that both Pagani and evo were founded in 1998. Our paths wouldn’t cross until March of 1999, when the Zonda C12 was launched at the Geneva motor show. Weirdly, few people seemed to pick up on it, but, curious about a new supercar that looked like nothing else and came from a company we’d never…

OUR JOURNEY TO GOODWOOD FOR THE EVO trackday was to prove a remarkably complete, 24-hour test of the Caterham Seven whose specification I had helped decide. Back in March, my suggestion to Caterham’s CCO, David Ridley, that it would be neat to celebrate evo’s 25th anniversary and Caterham’s 50th by adding a Seven to the evo long-term test fleet was met enthusiastically. Over the following weeks editor Stu and I lost hours on the excellent Caterham configurator, firing suggestions back and forth, homing in on the ideal spec. What we wanted was a car that would blend everyday comfort (for a Seven) with excellent trackday capability, which resulted in a cross between the road 420 and track-biased 420R, based on the narrow chassis with lowered floors. For habitability we have…

‘You’re more likely to see an F-Pace than a Jaguar from the class the brand built its name on’ WHISPER IT, BUT I’VE NEVER REALLY BEEN a fan of Jaguars. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not had any bad experiences with them that have led me to this judgement, rather it’s an irrational view based entirely on my dad’s absolute blind devotion to the brand. He’s had loads over the years before settling on an X-type – probably the closest he’ll get to living out his Inspector Morse fantasy. Such is his obsession that throughout my three months running the XE 300 Sport you see here, it was the first thing he asked about on the weekly box-ticking Sunday phone call. ‘So, you don’t want to know your grandson’s GCSE…