BBC Top Gear Magazine February 2021

group therapy roup rapy

Homologation. Stupid word. Responsible for some of the most exciting cars ever to have turned a wheel, and yet ‘homologation’. You can’t abbreviate it (go on, try), you can’t make it sound sexy or cool (again, have a go. Maybe attempt a French accent) and it’s bloody hard to even describe to people what it is. Don’t try. Seriously, just say ‘road racer’ or ‘rally replica’ and move on, change the subject. Do not get into what I’m about to go into. That way lies nothing but social pariahdom. Let me be your guide. And, to compound your pain, I’m going to start with a lesson. I know, back to school time, although here the three Rs are Racing, Road cars and Regulations. Now let’s do some ’rithmetic and write each…

best of the best

01 SÉBASTIEN LOEB, 2006, C4 Of all the statistics that follow Séb Loeb, his 79 rally wins (30 clear of the next man), the fact he only lost three tarmac events between 2005 and 2013, that in 2010 he finished the championship 100 points clear, our favourite is this. In 2006 he missed the last four rallies of the season after a mountain bike accident. It didn’t matter, having won eight of the 12 rallies that had taken place and finished second in those he didn’t win, he already had the title sewn up. 02 COLIN McRAE, 1995, IMPREZA Arguably the most talented and definitely most committed driver in WRC history. That alone buys him second position, even if he only won the world championship once, in 1995. Back then, aged 27, he…

fiat panda 4x4

Esther Neve Only the other day, I was musing on what car I’d buy as a daily driver when that Euromillions win occurs (it will happen). As part of my thought process, I went back through the lifers I’d run, and wrote a list of which had made me smile the most. The Panda was right up there – second on the list, in fact, after the Honda Civic. The simple reason being that the sticking plaster-coloured mini 4x4 did everything asked of it and more. It was epic through city streets (more people let me out into traffic in the Panda than any other car ever), it was adequate on motorways, it was superb off-road and, though it was tiny, it was surprisingly capacious and really very comfortable. So, come the happy…

future proof

There’s a very high chance you haven’t, like I haven’t, had your vaccine yet. As I write we’re locked down harder than ever, case numbers spiralling higher. We’re a year on from when it felled its first big car-world casualty, the 2020 Geneva Motor Show. All things considered, any talk of a post-corona world rests firmly in the realm of the hypothetical. Much of that talk pivots around phrases like ‘get back to normal’. Get back? Ah yes, get back to galloping materialism, environmental carnage and brutal political discord. Allow yourself to peer forward to the summer of 2021, if that’s when we’re to be relieved of the yokes imposed by this evil little spiked sphere. Keeping things to our shared orbit of cars, what’s your most fervent hope? We might all…

chris harris

Someone recently posted a video on Twitter of the new Aston Martin thingy without a windscreen. It was flecked with mud and crud, deploying its mighty V12 to pierce the M40’s rain at around 62mph, and the poor sod at the wheel was wearing a full-face crash helmet. This video was a metaphor for all that’s wrong with the car industry. And this type of car – the one without a windscreen – signals the beginning of the end of a decade of mostly good things. But that image of the grubby speedster is one of misery. A car supposedly born out of passion traduced into a rolling metaphor for excess and stupidity. If these things had been around in Aristotle’s day, they’d have assumed some grand significance as a harbinger of…

vauxhall equus, 1978

Modern UK history is littered with examples of cunning but ultimately pointless ways in which the plucky British have stuck two fingers up in the general direction of the dastardly Germans, whether on the football pitch or the hallowed halls of European power. Vauxhall had its own teeny skirmish back at the British International Motor Show in April 1978, whipping the covers off a top secret roadster concept. Vauxhall and German stablemate Opel might have been owned by General Motors since the roaring Twenties, but it wasn’t until the Seventies that GM began merging them in order to cut models and save a bit of cash. Perhaps keen to assert his authority, Vauxhall boss Bob Price wanted to see if the company could offer a more modern take on the likes of…