Tabla de contenidos para December 2016 en Evo

Test location: Duck’s Cross, Bedfordshire GPS: 52.193552, -0.374515 Photography: Barry hayden Somewhere online i read that you can fix a broken record with a toothpick. obviously if you’re looking at a record that is so broken that it has the ability to be in several different rooms at the same time then it’s probably beyond help. however, if it’s just skipping and repeating the same same same same section, then the toothpick technique might work on the afflicted groove. i would explain it in more detail here, but this is meant to be a car review, so you’ll have to look it up. why was i investigating methods of fixing broken records? well, because i’m getting bored of hearing myself think ‘i wish this came with a manual gearbox’. of…

Test location: Shingay cum Wendy, Cambridgeshire GPS: 52.108881, -0.086133 Photography: Aston Parrott IT’S GOING TO TAKE A while for us to get used to this new breed of AMG-lite. We’ve come to expect that cars from Affalterbach will be slightly unhinged, wild, tyre-smoking hooligans. The new C43, however, feels like it’s been created by a different branch of AMG, one run by engineers who value speed and grip over enjoyment, engineers who haven’t had one too many steins of Weissbier. Engineers who created the A45 AMG. But perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up on that, because by forgoing an exotic V8 engine in favour of a 362bhp twin-turbo 3-litre V6, the C43 brings an AMG C-class within reach of a wider audience. In estate form it costs £45,250, which…

8-12 May 2017 evo magazine, in collaboration with White Label Events, would like to invite you to the inaugural evo Great Drives of Europe Tour. This will be an unmissable event that blends one of Europe’s most spectacular hotels with sensational driving routes, fantastic food and wine and engaging, like-minded company The tour will give you the opportunity to enjoy your car on the open roads of north-west Spain and stay in Frank Gehry’s masterpiece – Hotel Marqués de Riscal. The hotel, built around a winery, is five-star-rated, has a spa, a museum of viticulture and a wine shop. During the tour you’ll drive some of the best roads Spain has to offer, try the finest food and wines, plus you’ll have the opportunity to have your car and your…

Black-sheep Mclarens. seriously. ThaT’s what these two are, and that’s how they feel today. Sitting in the Anglesey sun, the McLaren F1 and the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren stand out visually, acoustically and, as we’ll discover, dynamically against the latest McLarens. In many respects they don’t feel like McLarens at all – certainly not the McLarens we’ve become familiar with sincetheWokingmarquereturnedtoroad-carmanufacture in 2011. They lack the indomitable cohesiveness of the modern Macs, the feeling that a similar amount of blood, sweat and (engineering) tears was poured into the indicator-stalk function as the high-speed DRS activation. Take the styling. The F1’s profile – all Hawk-fighter rake – is a lesson in profile design. But its rear lights? Round. Boring. Taken from a Bova coach. And yes, I’m aware of the tooling costs…

How many McLarens will utilise hybrid powertrains in the near future? We know where we’re going with our powertrains year on year for the next seven, eight, nine years. We know when we’re bringing hybrid in and we can see ourselves going to a mix of hybrid and eventually full hybrid across the range. So, I expect something like 50 per cent of the range to be hybrid by 2022. Are full-electric powertrains, at some point, an inevitability? I do think it’s a journey – but we believe the world will go to full eV. However, it’s still got to provide a compelling driving experience. What will then continue to evolve is the power source, whether it’s batteries or hydrogen or whatever. What was the view from the McLaren board…

‘The 675LT changes direction so well,’ says Jethro Bovingdon. ‘It also finds so much grip from its Pirelli Trofeo R tyres. That encourages you to turn in on the brakes to get the rear to step out just a bit. The rocksolid body control makes the rear of the car and the throttle feel totally connected. It’s also lunatic fast at the top end, even if the engine can still be caught off-boost at times – you need to be right up above 5000rpm to get the response you need. ‘I love the pedal positioning – the brake pedal falls perfectly in line with where your left foot naturally sits and so you feel it’s your duty to exercise it. Do so and the slightly longer travel than you’d expect…

WHILST ONE PERSON CHILDISHLY suggested that the replacement for the 650S should fly, others had more sensible suggestions. here are the thoughts, hopes and desires of the evo team and regular Fast Fleet contributor the Secret Supercar Owner (who has owned both a 12C and a 650S) about what 2017’s new Super Series car should be. ADAM TOWLER I don’t want the P14 to be too lairy. the 12C came in for criticism at launch for not looking or sounding ‘special’ enough, but I think the coreMcLarenshouldbeavehicleforallseasons and every occasion. as time has passed I value more and more the pure functionality of the 12C; leave the real fireworks to the Long tails. DAN PROSSER where the current 650S is starting to fall behind the competition is the drivetrain. the…

T H E P R E V I O U S G E N E R A T I O N had gone out on a high with the hardcore R26.R, so it was hardly surprising that the first of the new RS Mégane IIIs, the 250, should feel a tad polite by comparison, even in Cup form with its firmer suspension and limitedslip diff. In fact, the new RS Mégane was another fine machine, with a fizzing turbo engine and a chassis of rare talents. The 250 and the variants that followed would quickly emerge from the R26.R’s shadow and now, with production at an end, it’s the perfect time to assess these brilliant all-rounders as a second-hand buy. At launch there was the £21,995 250 Cup and, for…

new entry this month. * = grey import. Entries in italics are for cars no longer on sale. Issue no. is for our most recent major test of the car (D = Driven, R = Road test or group test, F = Feature, FF = Fast Fleet). Call 0844 844 0039 to order a back issue. Price is on-the-road including VAT and delivery charges. Engine is the car’s main motor only – additional hybrid tech isn’t shown. Weight is the car’s kerb weight as quoted by the manufacturer. bhp/ton is the power-to-weight ratio based on manufacturer’s kerb weight. 0-60mph and 0-100mph figures in bold are independently recorded, all other performance figures are manufacturers’ claims. CO2 g/km is the official EC figure and EC mpg is the official ‘Combined’ figure or…

Test location: Ramona, California GPS: 33.03763, -116.87653 INFINITI’S INTENTIONS FOR its new Q60s are perfectly clear. this is a two-door, four-seat, four-wheel-drive coupe powered by a twin-turbo 3-litre V6 in a body packed with more tech than any of its rivals. And those rivals, if you haven’t guessed already, are from the obvious German brands. But it’s going to take more than a comprehensive spec sheet to drag the masses from their 4-series, C-classes and A5s, so this latest attempt by nissan’s luxury arm needs to be very good. the Q60s’s silhouette is long and elegant, but thanks to a low ride height and slightly nose-down stance, there’s more than a hint of aggression, too. the shape isn’t that distinctive – the profile could be mistaken for almost any of…

Test location: Buderscheid, Luxembourg GPS: 49.937594, 5.947933 Mercedes’ sL is the company’s equivalent of Porsche’s 911 but with less overt hero worship and a little more restraint. it’s been in continuous production for a decade longer than the rear-engined Porsche, too, with the first examples leaving Mercedes’ Bremen plant in 1954. the first roadster wasn’t produced for another three years after that, though, and it took more than 40 years for the first AMG-fettled sL to appear: the 525bhp sL73, complete with the 7.3-litre V12 that would find its way into the back of horacio Pagani’s first road car, the Zonda, no less. since 1995 an AMG model has been ever-present in the sL range, and the recently updated ‘r231’ model continues with a choice of two: the sL65 with…

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO I SET YOU ALL a challenge. It wasn’t the easiest task (probably up there with picking the perfect two-car garage, in fact) and I’m sure there was plenty of headscratching, but I thought £150,000 would be more than enough to, in theory, buy and restomod a suitable car in a similar way to what Singer does with 964-generation Porsche 911s. The response, dear readers, was excellent, and ranged from a DB7 (the straight-six model, only with the crappy Ford switchgear ripped out and the chassis dynamics brought up to date – lovely choice Bryan McCavour: Ian Callum’s a genius and it’s no secret that Astons of that era could do with a nice rebuild!) to a Ferrari Mondial inspired by the PPG IndyCar pacer of…

Just like the P1 and the mighty F1 long before it, the 540C breaks new ground for McLaren. Far from being the fastest or most expensive car to come from Woking, though, the 540C is actually the slowest. And the cheapest. It’s also the least powerful, and the first to have a sub-200mph top speed. At £126,000, it’s the entry point to the world of McLaren Automotive. It is of the current line-up, anyway. If you look towards the classifieds you’ll find early, higher-mileage 12Cs trading for a little less than that. The cheapest cars dip below £110,000, but for the cost of the 540C you could snag a more recent example with fewer than 10,000 miles behind it. That rather begs the question: is your £126,000 better spent on…

IT’S EVO CAR OF THE YEAR 2015. THE FINAL DAY. We’re in Scotland, so far north that it feels lawless. Any further north and it becomes godless. We’ve been blessed with bright sunshine for three days straight, but fog is hiding the scenery this morning and photography is off the agenda. Thankfully visibility is good at road level, which means we can at least drive. There’s just one car i haven’t tried yet: the mcLaren 675LT. its key has been like a ticket to the chocolate factory all week – damned hard to get hold of. But i’ve got it. i drop into the mcLaren’s cabin, swing my feet into the footwell, pull the steering wheel towards my chest and, in that moment, completely fall for the LT. The seating…

THERE’S NOTHING MORE EXCITING THAN an invitation to drive something ludicrously fast, sophisticated and far beyond the realms of even a normal supercar. Something that gives you a glimpse at the outer edges of what’s possible shy of a big-budget single-seater racer. But the elation is usually strangled when you realise you’ll be allowed just three laps in the car on a circuit you’ve never seen before. You might get a flavour of the car, but nothing you can really get your teeth into. Today is different. In fact, it’s not just today. We’ve got a P1 GTR for two full days on a track I know as well as an old friend. Incredible. ‘Trying to extract the last little bit of time isn’t easy, but not because the car…

Attempting to set A lAp time in A FerrAri press vehicle is the stuff of legend. There was a time when you’d get an articulated lorry full of engineers, laptops and assorted tyres, and an oppressive weight of expectation resting on your shoulders after several days’ testing and a target time set by one of Ferrari’s in-house hot-shoes. These days it’s a bit different. You still get a few engineers and testers, but they smile a lot more than they used to, and the car is delivered in a modest lorry. You get a few sets of tyres to play with, too, but that’s as much a reflection of the need to cremate at least one set in the pursuit of ‘views’. nevertheless, the pressure is on. not least because…

FO R M O R E T H A N 1 5 Y E A R S T H E XKR was Jaguar’s performance hero, only recently disappearing from the brochures. More GT than hardcore coupe, it majored on strong performance delivered in easy-going comfort. There are two generations of XKR. The original, all-steel cars are known as X100s (pictured bottom), and have the retro-styled ‘fuselage’ body. Early cars (’98-’02) featured a 4-litre V8 and fivespeed auto ’box, while the facelift cars (’03-’06) had the much better 4.2-litre engine and six-speed auto. In 2006 the all-alloy X150 XK appeared (above), with a 4.2 XKR on sale from the start. This model ran until 2009, when a 5-litre V8-powered version, ending production in 2014, replaced it. Although there were a few…

Jaguar XJ220 headlight covers There’s an element of the lost supercar about the Jaguar XJ220. nothing to do with the mclaren f1, more something related to the way it looks, which is too benign and maybe even a bit vacant for a car of such terrifying speed. perhaps this is because at a glance the XJ220 appears to have no eyes, which in tandem with the gills at the base of its flush-glazed windscreen give it an otherworldly presence. the 213mph XJ220 does have headlights, of course, but so rarely do you see them in action that it’s easy to forget Jaguar went to the trouble of fitting a pair. and they really were trouble. the tail lights might have been filched from the rover 200 without much fuss, but…

I C A N ’ T H E L P B U T T H I N K T H AT W H E N A N entrant – the winner, no less – in a hot hatch supertest does away with back seats, it’s also not really part of the competition (Golf GTI Clubsport S v Focus RS v Leon Cupra 290 v Civic Type R, evo 227). Volkswagen – just as Renault did before – has removed the Golf’s back seats in order to save weight and enable the adding of stiffness, all in aid of a Ring time. But surely the car must now be categorised as specialist or a two-seater for comparison purposes? The very nature of a hot hatch is that it should be useable:…

Test location: Lutterworth road, Leicestershire GPS: 52.47389, -1.15131 Photography: Dean Smith The rear-view mirror rattles violently, shaking its image of the road behind to a blur. The windscreen surround shudders, too, and the steering wheel wanders around the cabin like a leaf in the wind. it might be Ferrari’s fastest and most technologically advanced drop-top to date, but over a bumpy road surface the 488 Spider (Driven, evo 216) feels about as structurally robust as a wet sponge. The m600 Speedster will feel just the same, i think to myself as i first lay eyes on it at Noble’s Leicestershire factory. The carbonfibre-bodied Speedster is the first new model from Noble since the m600 coupe debuted way back in 2010 and it’s tasked with lifting the company’s output to 20…

Test location: chipping norton, oxfordshire GPS: 51.97946, -1.40418 Photography: Barry Hayden Performance fords and aftermarket tuning are such natural companions that it’s hard to be sure where one ends and the other begins. In the case of mountune, a kind of semi-official tuning arm to ford in the UK, the line is even blurrier. What’s clear, though, is that the new focus rs is ripe for modification. In the same way that the nissan GT-r spawned its very own tuning industry, the focus rs is certain to become the darling of tuning companies across Britain and beyond. many will surely be tempted into chasing vast power increases, the car’s four-wheel-drive system finally unshackling them from the limitations of a front-wheel-drive configuration. mountune has taken a more restrained approach. rather than…

Despite this being the first time I’ve driven a 570GT, I’ve got an uncanny sense of déjà vu. Ever since I first sat in a car, I have like most people assimilated through hands, feet, backside, nose and inner ear all sorts of sensations relating to different cars. And right now my brain is slowly going through the filing system, checking the microfiche, looking for a match. It doesn’t take long. The 570GT has plenty of the same sensations that the original MP4-12C had. Although the 12C had the novel ProActive Chassis Control suspension setup and the 570GT has a more conventional arrangement with anti-roll bars, the GT’s ride in its Normal chassis mode feels very similar to the 12C’s. There’s a familiar suppleness, particularly over larger bumps Since the…

The jaded car hack, too seasoned to be impressed by it all. Unflustered. That’s the impression I should be trying to give. But I feel bloody nervous. I’ve been waiting several years to drive a P1 and I’d sort of written off ever getting the chance to do so. But with the key in my hand, lots of fuel in the tank and the most picturesque circuit in the country at my disposal, the moment is here. So I get in, swinging my feet into the footwell. Just like the LT, the P1 has that prototype-racer seating position, but even more reclined. The low scuttle, the panoramic view through the windscreen. Racetracks kill all sense of straight-line acceleration, so even the likes of the Audi R8 V10 Plus or Nissan…

Scourge of the Rebel Alliance? Not quite. Although this McLaren Special Operations 12C has had a very eventful life. It started out as a pre-production prototype – number 19 to be precise. It then travelled the world’s motor shows and eventually became a press car. When its press duties ended, it was assigned to MSO as a blank canvas for the division to tweak and modify. It was used to develop a roof snorkel, the MSO front bumper, carbonfibre sill tops – and has generally been the rolling demo car for MSO. MSO admits that the black and white colour scheme isn’t to everyone’s taste, but its purpose is to highlight the contrasting MSO features. However, despite its challenging looks, the men and women of MSO have become rather attached…

THE BATHROOM SUITE, resplendent in a shade of sludgy avocado, was probably the thing that most obviously dated the cottage, but the colour scheme in the rest of the rooms was redolent of a different era, too. A Neapolitan theme to interior decorating saw a mocha brown hallway fading into a primrose yellow kitchen, while the floor-to-ceiling pink bedroom was like sleeping inside a marshmallow. The oven next to the steel sink had one of those high grills above the hob and there should have been an Apple II on a desk. If I’d turned on the television (Trinitron, obviously), I would have expected to see Gilles Villeneuve wrestling a 312, or the Jam on Top of the Pops. If you haven’t guessed, the first time I set foot in…

HENNESSEY, THE AMERICAN FIRM best known for its attempts to dethrone Bugatti from its title as builder of the world’s fastest road car (advantage: still Bugatti with the 258mph Veyron Super Sport, according to Guinness World Records), also has a knack for squeezing high outputs from regular production cars. For the Focus RS, that means the HPE400 package, which lifts the hot Ford’s 345bhp standard output to 405bhp, with peak torque up from 347lb ft to 425lb ft. While development of the upgrade isn’t yet complete, Hennessey has revealed the modifications involved. There’s a high-flow air filter in place of the standard item, a stainless steel exhaust mid-pipe with an electronic dump valve, and an ECU tweak to extract more power from the 2.3-litre four-pot motor. A series of Hennessey…