Evo November 2021

IT SOUNDED A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME; a simple one, too. Select the ten cars you would choose for your dream garage: your Perfect 10. There was a caveat, of course: you had to have driven them. Ah. Compiling such a list was not the work of a moment; in fact it was a proper mug of tea and packet of Jaffa Cakes exercise just to get started. In fact, when you’ve never sampled something it’s easier to leave it out; when you start scratching off cars you have driven, ones you have more than just memories of, the agonising is almost unbearable, Jaffa Cake consumption out of control. Because that’s the thing about cars: we grow emotionally attached to them. We ignore those that have frustrated, annoyed or underdelivered, happy…

IT’S ABOUT THE TRANSITION. TODAY, rolling through drifting autumnal mist and on to the soaring, twisted hill-roads around Brescia in northern Italy, it’s about the change of pace from mild to wild. In some cars you want it to be like throwing a switch. An explosive step-change to get the adrenaline flowing. The game-on moment in Bullitt when McQueen floors it, his Mustang’s true purpose revealed and indulged. Porsche’s new 911 Carrera 4 GTS isn’t like that and deliberately so. Zuffenhausen already offers two versions of ‘the switch’. In one, the 911 GT3, the track-honed tearaway, tension is always loaded, begging to be released with the speed of a flick knife. In the other, the 911 Turbo S, the glorious brutality of its acceleration is too tempting a draw not to…

FLOAT INTO THE CUSHIONED SEAT and hear a little sigh from the quilted leather as you settle into what is by today’s standards a chair of larger than normal proportions. The sound of a motor whirrs over your shoulder as the chrome-plated hook brings you your seatbelt. Pull the door closed and hear the double-glazed window rise a millimetre or two to seal the cabin. No need to press the starter button because the W12 is already running, audible – just – over the Sicilian morning soundtrack. Left foot on the brake pedal, one hand grasping the gear selector, the other finding its grip on the Alcantara steering wheel… Wait… the what? Bentley trims its cabins in quilted leather, it creates diamond shapes the envy of the modified Audi world and…

CHANCES ARE THIS COULD BE THE FIRST time you’ve read anything to do with Hyundai’s Kona, the crossover niche being one we tend to steer clear of: the automotive white goods of our roads; a necessity rather than a desire. There are exceptions, there always are. Ford’s Puma (no, not that one) benefits from the company’s talented chassis engineers being afforded the time and resource to make sure it steers as sharply as all good Fords should. In ST trim we prefer it to our Focus ST Fast Fleet wagon, which took some time to get our heads around. Sticking with the evo Fast Fleet for the moment, our Volkswagen T-Roc R wasn’t as typecast as you would expect, either. It lacked a couple of layers of detail that the pre-Mk8 Golf…

TWO VERY DIFFERENT RACING CARS this month, one anchored in the present but from a marque very much looking to a new future, and the other from a giant of the sport prophesying where it thinks the future may lie. The latter is the Porsche Mission R concept, an EV racing car aimed at ‘customer motorsport’ – Porsche being the self-proclaimed and undeniable kings of this highly profitable branch of the sport. Porsche’s environmental and sustainability goals are well known. The company aims to be carbon-neutral by 2030; by that date some 80 per cent of new Porsches will be electrified in some form. So while the Mission R may have roughly the same performance around a lap as a 911 GT3 Cup car, the way in which it delivers that performance…

LIKE MANY MOTORING JOURNALISTS, I’ve sat alongside Gavan Kershaw as he’s spirited the latest and greatest Lotus around the Hethel circuit with swift grace, and marvelled at how easy he makes going insanely fast seem. Sure, he’s equally adept at the smoky, squealy, high-drama stuff too, but it’s the unfussed way in which he achieves the big speeds and the low lap times that truly impresses. He doesn’t bully the car, isn’t prone to look-at-me flourishes behind the wheel – he’s silky smooth and relaxed. And forever smiling. In part, Kershaw – currently attributes director at Lotus, ensuring each new model and those of the future are infused with the Hethel DNA – credits his driving style to the influence of some of his mentors within the Lotus vehicle dynamics department…