Table of contents for March 2025 in Evo

TURN TO PAGE 54 AND YOU CAN read James Taylor’s drive of the new 911 GT3 and GT3 Touring, derivatives 12 and 13 in the current Gen 2 992 line-up. It’s a line-up that could grow to 20 variants once the new Turbos, the GT3 RS, a couple of GT department specials and some limited-edition anniversary models are added. Yet the range hierarchy that Porsche favours – with conspicuous success – is ignored by others who are fighting to attract the very same customers. And it possibly won’t surprise you that those who offer a limited choice are also those who are constantly hitting their overdraft limit and maxing out the credit card. Take McLaren. It has tried in the past with a ‘range’ when it offered the 540C and…

LAST MONTH WE DROVE McLAREN’S Artura Trophy Evo race car; this month we’re behind the wheel of Ferrari’s 296 Challenge one-make racer. Like the McLaren, Maranello’s entry-level competition car loses its battery-driven hybrid system in favour of a racing-friendly, exclusively internal combustion V6 powertrain. This is partly pragmatism, as hybrids are hard to manage in motorsport applications, but primarily because GT racing regs currently don’t allow for hybrid in the production-based categories. And this regulatory quirk inadvertently gives us a glimpse of a parallel universe. One in which Ferrari’s V6-engined supercar can run without heavy and complex hybrid technology. As we’re about to discover, it doesn’t disappoint. The 296 follows Maranello’s well-established bloodline of production-based one-make racers – one that began with the 348 Challenge way back in 1992. This…

NEWS, INTERVIEWS, TECH AND EVERY NEW CAR THAT MATTERS THERE’S A REAL BUZZ AT COSWORTH RIGHT now. I doubt that, ten years ago, anyone could have predicted that high-power, high-revving, naturally aspirated engines with double-figure cylinder counts would have a renaissance, or that the Northampton-based engineering firm would be the go-to company for the design, development and manufacture of such bespoke engines. But it most certainly is. It created and delivered the 4-litre V12s for the GMA T.50 and T.33, is in the process of finishing off development of the epic 8.3-litre V16 for the new Bugatti Tourbillon and is hard at work on the 15,000rpm V10 for the Adrian Newey RB17 hypercar. Yet the most remarkable thing about all these engines is not their extraordinary specific outputs but that…

IT’S ONE OF THE FABULOUS THINGS ABOUT THIS car and this location: the way the sound travels over the huge, uninterrupted expanse of the airfield gives it a wonderful clarity. If I were standing on a pit wall, hearing it up close, then it would be almost too much – glorious in its physicality yet almost hard to comprehend. But at an eardrum-friendly distance like this it’s easier to appreciate the loud, almost animal, angry stabs of competition V12 as the car accelerates down nearly a mile of concrete. ‘Chassis zero-two-eight Romeo, runway two-five, cleared for take-off…’ The flashes of luminous orange make it easy to pick out against the broad, flat swathes of grey and green, but it’s a tiny spec on the landscape. A Hot Wheels on a…

LIKE THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, THE 1990s era of DTM (latterly the International Touring Car Championship) burned itself out in an unsustainable orgy of unlimited budgets and extraordinary technology. The combination of spectacular cars, proud brands, vast budgets and stellar drivers was undeniably epic, but it all came to an inevitable end at the close of 1996. After a three-year hiatus, the 2000 season was a new beginning for the beleaguered DTM series. It carried the same initials, but those evocative three letters hid a subtle change of name, the Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft retitled as Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters as early plans for a significant number of races to be held outside of Germany meant the German Motor Sport Federation (DMSB) wouldn’t bestow national championship status upon the revamped…

I’M MAKING A SIZEABLE ASSUMPTION that you have landed at this report before the first drive of Land Rover’s Defender Octa (page 12), based on feedback telling us that evo’s Fast Fleet pages are those the majority of you read first when your new issue makes it through the letter box. (What do you mean you don’t subscribe? Turn to page 94 for that.) Should this be how you start your monthly evo fix, it’s worth stating here that the Defender you see above and the one shown leaping around a WRC stage near the front of this issue are two very different vehicles, related by name and the necessities of modern car production only. This latest addition to the evo fleet doesn’t even share the Octa’s BMW-sourced twin-turbocharged 4.4-litre…

LONG-TIME EVO READERS MAY HAVE been suprised by my last report, in which I announced that after 20 fun-filled years I was seriously considering letting the big Lambo go to a new home. As a result I received a dozen messages from readers, all imploring me to think again. Well, I’m pleased to say that after having three prospective buyers around to see the car, I failed to bring myself to sign on the dotted line. So instead – and given the Murciélago has been driven through every British winter since 2004 – I decided to re-equip it to better face the elements. Back in 2017 the Lambo and I negotiated the ravages of a Scandinavian winter, getting as far as just south of the Arctic Circle in Norway. That…

THE STYLING SKETCHES AND CONCEPT of the Alfa Romeo Brera were gorgeous, Giorgetto Giugiaro at his best. It was a vision in red, from the sleek, crisply detailed nose to the truncated rump. So much more seductive than the other affordable Alfa coupe of the time, the bland, forgettable, Bertone-styled GT (you can be forgiven for having to google it). But while nobody expected the award-winning Brera concept to make it to production with gullwing doors and a 400bhp Maserati V8 under the bonnet, something closer to the concept’s proportions would have helped. Concept cars have a lip-service relationship with reality, of course. Their job is to pitch the concept, sell the idea. Once they’re green-lighted, production reality asserts its gravity. Engineers turn fanciful into practical, ditching wheels the size…

THERE ARE, OF COURSE, MANY questions surrounding the Land Rover Defender Octa. You will potentially have just one of your own: why? Why build a 626bhp high-performance version of a car that is considered a school-run family car first, a utilitarian off-roader for the wheat fields and wilderness second? Conventional wisdom suggests that if you’re going to build a performance car you wouldn’t start with a Defender. Unless, of course, you and your team were previously responsible for the exceptional Jaguar Project 7 and Project 8, and having delivered the Range Rover Sport SV your idle imagination turned to ‘what next?’ Throw in your employer’s decision to enter the Dakar rally raid and a halo road car to trade off the competition equivalent battering sand dunes adds to the justification.…

OUR FIRST PROPER CHANCE TO TRY THE Folgore version of Maserati’s GranCabrio coincides with some particularly grim British weather. Not exactly dream convertible conditions then, but even roof-up in a soggy Midlands car park it still looks ineffably glamorous. The lengthy soft-top arcing over its four seats mimics the GranTurismo coupe’s fastback roofline, and the body has the same Coke-bottle contours. It carries just as much visual allure as its piston-powered stablemates. The Folgore also shares the same aluminium, steel and magnesium platform (and production line) as the V6 petrol versions of the GranCabrio and GranTurismo. Power, however, comes from three 300kW electric motors, with the total useable output quoted as 560kW (or 750bhp) and torque a monster 996lb ft. That gives it significantly more muscle than the 542bhp, 479lb…

OUR INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW – not clean-sheet new but thoroughly updated, ‘992.2’ generation – Porsche 911 GT3 begins with a presentation. Nothing unusual there: this is standard car-launch fare. Senior figures and key players behind the car’s creation summarising the key points with the aid of a deck of slides, static cars to walk around on stage, and isolated components on display. So far, so normal. What’s more unusual is some of the information they’re choosing to share with us. Not least, research into what their existing customers wanted from this new car. The GT3’s project manager, Jörg Jünger, shows us data from a survey of 2000 Porsche GT customers around the world, asking them their likes, preferences and – pertinently – wishes for future GT models. The vast…

HAVING EXPERIENCED ALL THREE CARS ON TRACK it seems almost absurd that such performance should be allowed to mingle with everyday traffic. But all three of these GTRs have been road-registered and so it seems wrong not to at least taste what they’re like in the real world. I’m glad that there is a nose lift on the Senna as I edge out of Lanzante’s steep driveway and merge in between a Dacia and a delivery van, but the first roundabout emphasises that a tight turning circle is not part of the GTR’s armoury. Even though I barely tickle 30mph for the first few miles, it’s nerve-wracking initially as I get comfortable with the width and mirrors. After a runway wide enough to accommodate the broadest of Boeing wingspans, there…

MY CURSOR HOVERED OVER THE checkout button for quite a while. Could a new gearshift mechanism really be worth £595? Replacing the Elise’s gearbox itself would cost less than that. But words like ‘billet aluminium’, ‘ballraced pivots’ and ‘SKF PTFE-lined spherical bearings’ had my attention and weren’t letting go. I’d been looking for a way to improve the gearchange in my Elise for a while, and Prodimex’s gorgeous re-engineered aluminium shifter looked like just the ticket. Early Elises aren’t known for having a great gearshift. In fact, the one in my car felt awful when I first bought it, with a stodgy resistance across the gate and a vague, loose action into gears. Some of this, I suspected, was because the shifter links to the gearbox via cables rather than…

THERE’S SOMETHING EFFORTLESSLY cool about a fast wagon. It doesn’t need to make itself stand out with oversized arches or quad exhausts either – an understated sleeper like the Skoda Octavia Estate vRS has its own cool factor too. In fact, the way the Octavia doesn’t shout about its performance is a big part of its appeal. Its design is subtle, with understated badging and a quietly confident stance, allowing you to enjoy its capabilities without drawing unnecessary attention. Although admittedly KY73 YPV turned a few more heads than most Octavias thanks to its Royal Green Metallic paint, a colour that continually drew compliments. I’m not sure deputy editor James Taylor’s first choice of Phoenix Orange would have had the same positive reaction. It certainly wouldn’t have had from me.…

NONE, NOT EVEN CATERHAM, ARE immune to the winds of change that blow through the car industry. But just as the Project V signposts a silent, electrified, conventionally bodied medium-term future for the Dartford-based company, the Seven CSR Twenty is a celebration of its past and present. As well as being a 20th birthday present for Caterham’s most sophisticated chassis – the wider-bodied CSR, which features pushrod inboard front suspension and a fully independent set-up at the rear – this is also the ‘most premium’ Seven. CEO Bob Laishley says it’s built for ‘longer distance road trips’, although looking at the CSR Twenty both inside and out, you have to wonder exactly how it meets that brief; it still looks very much the minimalist, insectoidal sports/track car that we know…

FAREWELL, AUDI RS4 B9 – FOR GOOD this time. Audi sounded the swansong for the B9 generation, which ended production recently, with last year’s RS4 Competition: a special edition limited to 75 cars in the UK, with rebelliously low-riding, manually adjustable coilover suspension, plus lighter, louder exhausts and faster shifts from the reprogrammed eight-speed auto transmission, among numerous other enhancements. Now it’s saying a final, more emphatic goodbye with this even-more-limited runout special, the RS4 Edition 25 Years. Production is limited to 250 cars worldwide, with 50 allocated to the UK. The quarter-century label is a reference to 2001’s RS4 Sport, the fastest version of the original B5-generation RS4, as is the Imola Yellow paintwork, first applied to that car. Whereas the UK’s allocation of RS4 Competitions were any colour…

TWIRL THE WHEEL FROM ONE LOCK-STOP TO THE OTHER ON most off-the-shelf sim racing wheels and you’ll get around 900 degrees of rotation, or 2.5 turns lock to lock. Do the same in a Ferrari 296 GTB, and that drops to under 720 degrees, or two turns. In F1, drivers typically wind on about three quarters of a turn to navigate the Grand Hotel Hairpin in Monaco; that’s total steering lock of about 540 degrees, or 1.5 turns. In this Lexus RZ, using the second generation of Lexus and Toyota’s steer-by-wire technology, the maximum I can turn the wheel in either direction is 100 degrees. I’ll save you the world’s simplest mental arithmetic: that’s 200 degrees total. Less than two thirds of a turn. Armed with this knowledge, I’m ready…

IT WAS THE QUESTION ON ALL OF OUR LIPS. At the reveal of Alpine’s A390_β concept crossover last year, company execs gave a presentation explaining how the new Nissan Ariya-based EV would, in Alpine’s words, ‘transform into a racing beast like the A110’ and drive like a lightweight sports car. Hmm. For a car that could weigh as much as 1900kg in production form, that would take some doing. Then one journo simply asked, ‘But how can a heavy four-door electric car drive like an A110?’ A moment of silence from the Alpine execs as they figured out how to tackle that particular question. Sovany Ang, vice president for product performance, stepped up. She explained that though the A390 wouldn’t be a lightweight car per se (she wouldn’t disclose an…

FAVOURITE FILMS, HOLIDAY DESTINATIONS, CARS… Revisiting any of them after a lengthy gap comes with a slight sense of foreboding, a mild fear that they won’t be quite as good as you remember, given how everything – including you – has changed in the meantime. There will be a few tentative minutes while you try to match current reality with a memory that has almost inevitably been polished smoothed by the passage of time, the negatives buffed away, the positives made brighter. I last drove a 350Z in 2007, more than 17 years ago, and my abiding memory is of it being a handsome, uncomplicated and appealing driver’s coupe, a bit hefty and a bit rugged compared with its German rivals but with well sorted, exploitable rear-drive handling. But am…

‘I’LL TIGHTEN MY GRIP ON THE ALFA’S key and if my resolve holds firm, next month’s report will have my name on it.’ That’s how James Taylor ended the last update on ‘his’ Giulia. Ah. About that… I’d been teeing up a drive in the Quadrifoglio for a while, and a road trip to northern Scotland with a couple of mates seemed like the perfect excuse. Everything was in place: I’d managed to prise the keys from James, annual leave was booked and accommodation sorted. I was starting to dream about how the Quadrifoglio was going to feel on some of the most spectacular roads in the UK, but before those dreams became a reality, I discovered that my trip coincided with when we’d arranged with Alfa to swap our…