Table of contents for July 2015 in Automobile

SUZUKA CITY,JAPAN What a tease. Sitting at Suzuka Circuit, home of the Japanese Grand Prix, is a Subaru BRZ with a big carbon-fiber wing and lots of little STI stickers, but it’s not the Subaru BRZ STI we’ve been asking for. It’s no track-bred turbocharged coupe, no common man’s Porsche Cayman GT4. It’s a Subaru BRZ tuned by Subaru Tecnica International (STI). Limited-edition Subaru models badged tS (which stands for tuned by STI) have been on sale in Japan for some time now. The Subaru BRZ tS and other tS models demonstrate what Subaru Tecnica says is its core competency: “tension control.” This is better known as tweaking, tightening, and dialing in a chassis. To create this tS model, STI dresses up the BRZ with its unique, flexible front strut…

Chevrolet learns to think small The outgoing Chevrolet Camaro is a great, terrible car. On one hand, it has enjoyed immense success since rebooting in 2010. It has outsold its archrival, Ford’s Mustang, every year through 2014, totaling more than a half-million cars. It even stars in movies, namely the “Transformers” series. Yet it’s also big, heavy, and difficult to see out of, and has a propensity for understeering through corners. How does Chevrolet go about replacing such a successful, flawed car? “We could have done nothing,” offers Camaro chief engineer Al Oppenheiser, who led development of the fifth-generation car and shepherded the sixthgen debuting this winter. At first glance, “nothing” seems to be exactly what Chevrolet did. Camaro exterior design director Tom Peters says his team considered new styling…

The black-and-white illustration is a magazine advertisement from 1968, and it portrays a Porsche 911 Targa zipping down the street of a big-city business district. The Targa is glamorously open to the elements with its hard plastic roof stowed and the zip-out plastic rear window stashed. A stylish couple occupy the front seats. Beneath, the caption: “Some day, all convertibles will have a roll bar.” The 2016 Porsche 911 Targa is a stylish, brand-new expression from the Stuttgart carmaker, almost exotic-looking compared with the coupe. Back in late 1966, the very first 911 Targa was also a stylish, brand-new expression. Of course, Porsche sold plenty of 356 Cabriolets in the 1950s, especially in California where the stripped-down Speedster with its chopped windscreen was an instant classic. Yet when Porsche introduced…

1978 Maserati Bora 4.9 Sold at $132,000 S/N AM 117/49-US 960 RED OVER BLACK LEATHER interior. 320-hp, DOHC, 4.9-liter V-8; five-speed manual transmission. Just a fair quality paint re-spray; good stainless trim, good glass. Complete but tired. Yellow foam is exposed at the leather seams of the upholstery; the interior has a distinctive, unappealing odor. One of just 564 Maserati Boras (also known as Tipo 117) made between 1971 and 1978. Designed by Giorgeto Giugiaro’s Italdesign, the unibody Bora also was built by Italdesign. Although Lamborghini names cars after fighting bulls, Maserati named many of its cars of this era after winds, such as the Mistral. The Bora was named for northeasterly maritime winds that blow of the Adriatic coast of Italy, so now you know. THE STORY BEHIND THE…

The Lincoln Continental Concept Everyone remembers and loves the 1961 Lincoln Continental, the long, low sedan with suicide doors. This front-wheel-drive concept has far less swagger than that sedan from the ’60s, but it’s definitely cooler than anything we’ve seen from Lincoln in the last decade. Most important, it has us excited to see what the automaker can do with a dedicated rear-wheel-drive platform, which should be coming in the next few years. • A production version of the Continental is confirmed for next year and will likely be built on a stretched version of the platform that underpins the MKS. • A turbocharged, 3.0-liter V-6 engine will be exclusive to Lincoln and will likely send its power through an available all-wheel-drive system. • Push just one buton, then the…

I AM DISTRAUGHT THAT ROBERT CUMBERFORD did not include two of America’s important designers (“Te 25 Greatest Designers of All Time,” May 2015). First, Robert Bourke of Raymond Loewy and Associates, who designed the 1953 Studebaker Starliner Coupe, which is still a beautiful car. Second, Stan Mott, who with Cumberford created the Cyclops II, perhaps the most innovative and striking vehicle to roll upon the roads of the Earth. JIM WASIK Cherry Hill, N.J. LEST YOU FORGET You recognized Bob Gregorie, but no mention of his award-winning 1940 Lincoln Continental and 1940 Ford Coupe, two of his best designs? DAVE MARTIN Danbury, Conn. What about George Walker, who was hired by Ford when the company thought Bob Gregorie’s design for the 1949 Ford looked a litle plump? Walker’s fresh, clean…

1 The Original This will bruise a few egos: Early Camaros are terrible to drive, heavy, and numb even by the standards of the day. But the 1967 Camaro enjoyed important advantages. The first was its smashing good looks. Under Bill Mitchell’s design leadership, the car was more elegant than it needed to be; its lines germinated from a mini-Riviera concept, and it shows. This is especially notable since Ford’s Mustang, following its sensational debut in 1964, was already becoming fat and cheap-looking. The availability of 81 factory options plus 41 dealer accessories was another strength, guaranteeing there was a Camaro for just about everyone. 2 Yenko Camaro Chevrolet intended the Camaro to be more of a cute compact than a muscle car. Don Yenko, owner of a Pitsburgh area…

MALAGA, SPAIN—Think of the 2016 Porsche 911 Targa 4 GTS as a superb chef’s knife honed to a finer edge, a world-famous cabernet sauvignon from an even better year, or the driver who wins the Indianapolis 500 by 0.43 seconds. Using Porsche’s already sharp, all-wheel-drive-only 911 Targa as its starting point, the 430-horsepower Targa 4 GTS rockets from 0 to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds when equipped with Porsche’s seven-speed PDK dual-clutch gearbox. Sevenspeed manual cars clock in 0.4 second slower, Porsche says. While the Targa 4 GTS has the same 325 lb-f of torque as the Targa 4S that sits one step below it on the ladder, peak power comes in 150 rpm higher at 5,750 rpm. The differences are minor on paper, but get the GTS past 4,000…

The wagon’s heyday has come and gone, along with vinyl records, “Saturday Night Live,” and Prince. Yet these former industry royals refuse to disappear despite the powerful forces of time edging them to the fringes of relevancy. Volvo knows that crossovers and SUVs such as its new XC90 are the way of the future, but it went ahead and introduced the 2015 Volvo V60 wagon anyway. The Swedish brand’s nostalgic stubbornness proved to be to our advantage— we spent 23,354 miles living the wagon life, and we’re pleased to report that it lived up to the reputation Volvo built back in the glory days of rear-facing seats. But the best news is that with the V60’s next-generation powertrain and fresh-faced looks, kickin’ it old school doesn’t mean living in the…

AUSTIN,TEXAS Tony Roma’s secret sauce has nothing to do with babyback ribs. The Tony Roma we’re talking about is an engineer at Cadillac rather than the man behind the barbecue restaurant chain. This Tony takes cold metal and raw data and turns them into saucy, soulful machines. He’s had a hand in all of the V-Series cars and is the chief engineer of the second-generation CTS. Now, Roma and his team have cooked up something new: the first-ever Cadillac ATS-V. Fittingly, I get a sense of this otherwise quiet and unassuming guy—born and raised in Ohio— over a massive plate of barbecue in Austin, Texas. (This Tony can also tackle a formidable serving of meat. Just sayin’.) Roma has been with GM since 1993, but most of his stories are…

The messiest melodrama in motorsports is based on the reliable David and Goliath theme, but David is played by an unlikely character: a newly slimmed-down Donald Panoz, who turned 80 in February and figured it was time to start thinking of his health. (His weight loss plan: “Eat like a bird; shit like an elephant!”) At a time in his life when most men are planning their next early bird buffet, Panoz remains deeply invested in racing even after selling his stake in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) to NASCAR in 2012. Panoz—who founded the company that developed nicotine patch technology yet still chain-smokes Silk Cuts—also has lawyers on speed dial, and he has pointed them at a former employee who was hired by a former Panoz partner. If…

Everything ends eventually, but we’re still caught of guard by landscape-shifting moments—when inextricable ties break, when a fairy-tale romance fades, or when a raging rivalry flickers. Just after Subaru pulled back the sheets on the all-new 2015 WRX STI at last year’s Detroit auto show, Mitsubishi announced it would be ending production of its Lancer Evolution after the 2015 model year, capping the quarter-century runoff with a small-batch, Japanonly Evo X Final Edition. The long-burning fire between the STI and Evo, both more capable than ever, won’t be stoked, marking the end of a brawl that spilled onto our shores at the start of the new millennium. We brought these bitter rivals together for a bittersweet goodbye and ended up asking ourselves the same question over and over again: “What…

I have this rule about driving convertibles with the top up. I simply don’t do it. If the weather’s so awful that a vinyl roof will make a big difference in comfort, I leave the car in the garage. That’s why my dad was laughing so hard when I arrived at his house in Phoenix after a drive from Los Angeles one Christmas. The thermometer read 32 degrees, and the tonneau cover concealing my unused softtop was encrusted with ice. So was I. What I wasn’t about to tell my father was that in the cruel stop-and-go traffic trying to escape L.A., I lost first gear when the linkage went out of adjustment. Shortly after, I lost second gear, too. I made it across the chilly desert that night by…