Evo April 2021

FORD, JAGUAR AND VOLVO ALL RECENTLY ANNOUNCED their 100 per cent unflinching commitment to build and sell only electric vehicles. Good on them. Even if it does feel like a decision made in haste rather than with a clear strategy in place. Jaguar has given itself just four years to reinvent itself as a luxury electric car brand, but won’t start with its almost finished all-electric XJ – that would be far too easy. Instead it will turn to a third party and ask if it can borrow an existing platform for Gerry McGovern and Julian Thomson to design the brand’s future around. It’s a challenge that even the team who sent Perseverance to Mars would call extreme. Ford has given itself a bit more time, with its $1billion investment allowing it…

THERE’S A PROBLEM, AND I’M NERVOUS about breaking it to you. I’ve been driving for two hours this morning in the new Mk8 Golf R, on a variety of different roads, lightly trafficked, with the first of the year’s sunshine gently warming the tarmac. As the R’s Bridgestone Potenzas crunch on gravel at our first photography location for the day, I know Aston Parrott is going to substitute ‘hello’ for the inevitable question: ‘So, what’s it like then?’ The same question that’s no doubt uppermost in your mind, too, as you read these words. The problem, Houston, is that my heart’s BPM barely rose during those two hours. It’s a new Golf R – a 316bhp hot hatch no less – and yet… If I’m really honest, I felt like I…

THERE ARE DEFINITELY FASTER, MORE sensible, less impractical sports cars on which you could spend just £500 less than one hundred and thirty thousand pounds. But there can be few cars on this earth that meet with such universal approval from the general public as you rumble past with your hair (or what’s left of it) being blasted this way and that by the wind. And there aren’t many sports cars that sound like the new AC Cobra 378 Superblower MkIV either, or which will make you feel so uncaringly good about life when you’re behind the wheel. Especially if the sun happens to be shining and, just for a moment, you allow yourself to forget about all the rubbish that’s going on in the world right now. So although it’s an…

AMONG THE VAST ARRAY OF MODELS that McLaren has launched since the MP4-12C, it’s some of the less potent that have found most favour. We’re big fans of the 570S and GT, for example, models that don’t feel like they need any more than their 562bhp because in a sub-1500kg car that guarantees sensational performance. You’ll hear few complaints about their ride and handling, either. Renowned tuner Iain Litchfield can spot an opportunity when he sees one, though. The market-wide shift to turbocharging over the last decade or so has played to his skills and he’s doing good business uprating Porsche 911s and BMW M models that, like those McLarens, are impressive straight out of the box. So why is he turning his attention to McLarens now? ‘Now that we can look…

THIRTY YEARS AGO AUDI’S FERDINAND Piëch turned to his family’s business, Porsche, to build him a car that would redefine Audi and shake off its dowdy image. The RS2 was a project only Piëch could sanction and the result was an 80 Avant with so much Porsche knowhow thrown at it that it felt more of a fully fledged Zuffenhausen car than the 924. Now Audi has taken a new generation of Porsche underpinnings to create a brand new EV in the same factory where its R8 supercar is built and where it assembled 924s and 944s for Porsche all those decades ago. Taking the J1 platform that underpins the impressive Taycan, Audi also utilises the same electric front and rear motors and their respective single- and two-speed gearboxes that Porsche…

SADLY THIS IS NOT ALPINE’S ENTRY TO a new GT racing formula, and, unless something very dramatic happens, it will not be appearing at Le Mans any time soon. What you’re looking at is a design study by Arseny Kostromin, a young Russian designer who has gained over a decade’s experience working in the studios of Renault and Volkswagen and the Genesis Advanced Design Studio in Frankfurt and now works from his own Berlin-based studio, focusing on automotive design techniques and processes. His latest project is this stunning interpretation of the Alpine A110 as a fully fledged racer. He’s called it the A110 GTA and, while it may have familiar Alpine design cues, it is spectacularly bespoke and – to our eyes – off-the-chart desirable. Kostromin’s GTA is based on a carbonfibre monocoque…