Evo February 2022

THE AUTOMOTIVE FUTURE IS PURE ELECTRIC. We know this because a small minority of EV evangelists won’t stop telling us, regardless of whether they have been asked for their view or not, and they are joined by a number of CEOs from car and battery manufacturers who have bet their investors’ money on the world plugging in. However, those manufacturers who aren’t solely at the mercy of other people paying for their ideas, the OEMs who enjoy the independence afforded to them by still having a proportion of private ownership or a family member still instrumental in the decision making, are less gungho when it comes to going all-in on electrifying their future. Toyota is a prime example. A very early adopter of hybrid technology long before other legacy brands took…

THE ELVA IS ASCENDING INTO A cloudless sky for mile after mile through a never-ending sequence of long, third-gear corners. At times the gradient is steep as a curve opens out and the road climbs rapidly to the next long hairpin. Interspersed are flatter, meandering sections that follow spectacular ridgelines before the tarmac coils back in on itself and the climb resumes. The Elva doesn’t notice. Whether its nose is pointing upwards or shovelling low along one of the flat sections, the acceleration is akin to freefall. My stomach is three corners back. Every time I pin the throttle to its stop it’s like the moment a rollercoaster hurtles over the big, heart-stopping drop. But there’s nothing to catch you at the bottom, so you just keep falling and falling…

THERE COMES A POINT WHEN I’M REALLY NOT SURE WHAT to make of the GTS Sport Turismo. About an hour ago I was at the wild and frankly awesome Willow Springs Raceway, about 80 miles north of Los Angeles, driving the four-door version of the GTS. It’s a fast, demanding circuit – not exactly the sort of place you’d even think to take a 2.3-ton EV. Then again, maybe that’s just me? A dinosaur. One who thinks all sports saloons should be like the BMW E39 M5, or something. Anyway, I kept an open mind. And then that same grey matter was well and truly blown by the GTS’s ability to resist understeer in three-figure-speed corners, to turn in crisply, and to even step slightly sideways under full power, while…

FORD’S FOCUS ST HAS ALWAYS BEEN A bit of a strange one for evo. It should be a contender that takes the Golf GTI to task for those who are happy to swap soft-feel plastics and a sophisticated approach for a little more spirit and engagement and traditional front-wheel-drive yobbery. But we’ve never fallen for the Focus as we have its wee brother, the Fiesta ST. Where the Fiesta feels alive, its character always bubbling away at the surface with a sense it’s been honed by the guys and gals at Ford Performance to be the best it can possibly be, the Focus doesn’t. There’s a sense it’s been pegged back, that it missed out on a layer or two of polish being applied and is therefore not quite as good…

THERE’S A SENSE OF DÉJÀ VU ABOUT this encounter. About 30 years ago I drove a Peugeot 205 GTI 1.9 with a Turbo Technics conversion. In standard, 130bhp form the Peugeot was sensational, so adding 50bhp seemed unnecessary, while introducing a bit of throttle lag and a burst of extra torque to a chassis that at times already seemed maxxed out appeared ill-considered. I was wrong: it was an absolute weapon and I remember it very fondly. Today, just a few miles into driving the Turbo Technics conversion for the three-cylinder, Mk8 Fiesta ST, I’ve been through the same emotions. The almost standard look of the Ford belies a similarly huge uplift in performance, the Turbo Technics kit dropping another 80bhp or so on top of the standard 197bhp, hence the…

PLEASE, DO NOT TURN THE PAGE BEFORE reading this. I know what you’re thinking: another swoopy, extremely high-powered hypercar, costing megabucks, from a brand you’ve never heard of. And you guessed right, it has indeed got a battery and there isn’t a petrol-powered engine in sight. But I promise you that reading on is worthwhile, because what you’ll learn about might, just might, be the saviour of the sort of cars that readers of this magazine love. One of the key people behind it is Matt Faulks, former boss of racing car support and development specialist Tour de Force. I always make a point of answering the phone to Faulks, not least because he once offered me a drive in an F1 car before Saturday morning practice at the 2018 Belgian…