Table of contents for February 2017 in Evo

I AM PREPARED TO BE PROVED WRONG ON THIS. IN fact I hope I am. But I genuinely fear that those in charge of the World Rally Championship have lost the plot. This month, those at evo who have a far more extensive anorak collection than me have spent more time with Citroën’s WRC driver Kris Meeke than they have with their own families. The rest of the time they’ve been chasing the news on every 2017 WRC team from Ford to Toyota and Hyundai and even Volkswagen. And it’s what they have reported back that’s of concern. For 2017, power is up. Corner speeds, too. The centre diffs are back, and programmable mid-stage, while aerodynamics are, well, judge for yourself on page 110. I grew up in Essex and…

LOTUS CARS HAS MADE a profit for the first time since Colin Chapman was at the helm of the Norfolk-based company. It is confirmation that Ceo Jeanmarc gales has got it right when pulling lotus out of the mire it was driven into by former boss dany Bahar. In the 30 months he’s been at hethel, gales has put his purchasing background to good use. ‘every nut and bolt, supplier and component that goes into every car has been scrutinised,’ he reveals. ‘Is this the best product for the job we need it to do? are we sourcing it from the best supplier? are we paying the right price?’ This may seem a simplistic approach by gales, but it’s an effective and successful one. the evora sport 410 and exige…

WITHIN FIVE MINUTES OF getting behind its wheel, the new BmW 5-series is driving itself. this has the simultaneous effect of being impressive to the point of slack-jawed bewilderment and also crushingly depressing. soon cars will no longer need us; people, like you and me, will be superfluous. The new seventh-generation 5-series, coded G30, has enough driverassistance technology to be just a few steps away from fully autonomous driving. it’ll brake when required, steer through curves on the motorway, and execute a perfect lane-change manoeuvre if so commanded. It’s hardly the most promising prospect from an evo perspective, for while the 540i’s turbocharged 3-litre straight-six fires up with its familiar cold-start theatrics, the drama is fleeting, and this new 5-series, bigger in all directions than the previous model, is more…

WHEN WE FIRST DROVE Audi’s new s5, in Portugal in evo 225, it felt balanced, quick and supremely assured. What it failed to convey on those sun-baked roads outside Porto was a sense of adjustability and, for want of a better word, fun. now it’s back for a second shot, this time on the colder, damper and altogether more challenging roads of the UK, to see if there’s an entertainer hidden beneath those chiselled lines. First, a recap. for the new s5 a 3-litre turbocharged v6 replaces the outgoing car’s supercharged v6 unit. it produces 349bhp and 369lb ft – 21bhp and 44lb ft more than before. As you’d expect from a performance Audi, there’s four-wheel drive, specifically the latest quattro system, which features an electronic clutch to control the…

IT’S MORE PHOTOGENIC IN ITS USUAL dark grey, but it’s a pale sort of beige right now. In fact, everything up here on this scrubby hillside has a sandy tint to it today, from bodywork to wheels to my beaten-up old shoes. Even the dim-witted, deadeyed sheep seem to be more off-white than usual. Caked in a thick layer of salt, the road that noodles itself over this little corner of the Brecon Beacons in south Wales, normally the darkest of graphite greys with crisp white lines, has turned into a long and winding sandpit. And the grit is spreading, coating everything from passing cars to footwear and even livestock in a fine, dusty layer. On any other day that would cause havoc on a photoshoot. The photographer would soon…

THE CLIO TROPHY’S INTERIOR is, let’s be frank, a bit rubbish. The steering wheel is covered in a material that looks like a close approximation of leather, yet manages to be shiny and sticky at the same time. The plastic of the facia looks and feels so brittle that you fear one slip when changing gear and you’d punch a hole right through it. And yet, far from being a major problem, the shoddy interior is part of what makes the Trophy so fantastic. The Trophy is all about necessity. It’s about what is needed to make a fast, fun, hot hatch. So there are no carbonfibre body panels or Perspex windows because the back-to-basics interior and the lack of luxuries save enough weight. And there’s no more power than…

THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A PARTY. The moment we could finally welcome the Clio RS16 as a production car (albeit a limited edition), proclaim it one of Renault Sport’s finest efforts and introduce it to its great, great, great grandfather. Instead it’s a bitter tale of what might have been. When the notion of grafting the best bits of the Mégane 275 into a current Clio was first mooted, our hearts skipped a beat. Big fans of the RS Mégane, but frustrated by the patchy charms of little brother Clio, we couldn’t wait to experience the latter with the best bits of the former transplanted into it. Sure enough, when we first drove the RS16 concept back in evo 226, it seemed like a winner. So when Renault invited us…

KRIS MEEKE OBVIOUSLY HE DOESN’T SAY IT, BUT KRIS MEEKE HAS definitely got the rougher deal today. We’re at Silverstone and, over on the circuit, MotoGP rider Jorge Lorenzo is doing some promotional work for his sponsor, Monster Energy Drinks, which involves him driving a Mercedes Formula 1 car. On the rally stage next door, Kris is also performing promotional duties for his employer. He’s driving a Citroën Dispatch van. To be fair, we have a laugh in the Dispatch. I wouldn’t have thought you could get a completely standard van quite so sideways quite so precisely, but Meeke does it lap after lap, carrying more and more speed into corners with judicious use of the handbrake to get the angles. If this is what he has to do occasionally…

OCCASIONALLY, IF I’VE got a lot of travelling to do, I’ll buy a Jack Reacher novel. I know they’re not Dickens or Booker Prize-winning, but by golly they’re page-turners and immensely enjoyable if you like a good yarn; easy to pick up, hard to put down and something of a guilty pleasure. Sometimes you don’t want the best, you want to satisfy a craving for a story, and Lee Child provides. The motoring equivalent? Well, the polished brilliance of a 911 Carrera may make it the car that wins group tests, but I wouldn’t blame you if it was the bombastic noise, stunning looks and accessible oversteer of an F-type R you were drawn towards in a showroom. No, the ride isn’t as good, neither are the gearbox and steering,…

WHEN I LOOK BACK ON MY time with the VXR8, it’s nearly always with a smile. Okay, so when an overdraft warning pinged through on my phone I might have rued the 18.1mpg, but even when the children were eating gruel and my wife was darning socks, I reckon it was probably worth it. The VXR8 GTS isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s unique, big-hearted and almost impossible not to love (unless you’re Dickie Meaden, who hates it). I wanted to run this huge Vauxhall because it represents the end of an era for the incredible line of V8-powered, rear-drive saloons built in Australia. Ford no longer builds the Falcon and now the Holden Commodore – on which this car is based – is dying, too.…

I‘T’S ALIVE!’ THAT WAS the text message I’d been waiting a long time to receive from Ergen Motorsport in Southampton. At last my M3 was up and running again. It hadn’t been easy establishing what exactly had gone wrong when the car became nothing more than a large silver ornament during a trip to Germany many months ago. Starting the engine would cause the revs to flare, but then it would die. Hooking the car up to a diagnostics reader would show a whole range of faults that seemed to follow very few patterns. Few patterns except for one, that is: VANOS. Things had smelled a bit fruity under full throttle for a while, which I should’ve known was a hint that the system, which controls the E46 M3’s variable…

News BENTLEY BARNATO Business LOTUS RECOVERY New metal ASTON DB4 GT Motorsport ROBO RACING Tech NEW INSIGNIA ADDING A HEAVIER , RETRACTABLE metal roof to an MX-5 may strike some as counterintuitive to the whole philosophy behind Mazda’s lightweight sports car. After all, the model has always championed simplicity and purity over appealing to a mass market by dangling trinkets and tricks in a bid to win their monthly payments. However, for Mazda and the MX-5 a retractable roof is big news, and in today’s world of £40,000-plus Porsche Boxsters, £30,000-plus Lotus Elises, flaccid BMW Z4s, outdated Mercedes-Benz SLCs and disappointing Fiat 124 Spiders, the Japanese two-seater remains a lone, bright star. Of course, there is sound reasoning behind Mazda’s introduction of the RF – which stands for Retractable Fastback…

ASTONMARTIN DB4 GT CONTINUATION The original Aston Martin DB4 GT was built between 1959 and 1963, with eight of the original 75 in special lightweight form. Aston Martin has now announced it will build a further 25 lightweight cars, to original specification, each with 340bhp from their twin-spark straight-six engines. Production will commence in late 2017. It’s clearly the latest fashion: Jaguar, Lister and Shelby have all created continuation cars in recent years. McLaren F1 continuation model, anyone? McLAREN 570S TRACK PACK GT3 and GT4 racing categories provide inspiration for McLaren’s Track Pack for the 570S. The rear wing is 12mm higher – adding a surprising 29kg of extra downforce at 150mph – while kerb weight is 25kg lighter thanks in part to Alcantara-trimmed carbonfibre seats and new alloy wheels.…

VAUXHALL INSIGNIA VAUXHALL’S ALL -NEW Insignia, now going by the name of Insignia Grand sport, is not an obvious evo subject. But as with many new mainstream cars, it’s not the design, the segment it belongs to or the people who will buy it that interests us. no, what intrigues us are the future derivatives that the new Insignia, to be launched at the Geneva motor show in March, may spawn; something with a Vxr badge, perhaps. BODY Like most new cars, the Insignia will be lighter than before. around 60kg has been shed from the bodyin-white alone and, overall, up to 175kg has been saved, depending on which model you go for. Despite this, the wheelbase has grown by 92mm and the track widened by 11mm. the former should…

GIVEN THAT THE COMBUSTION ENGINE AND MOTORING as we know it are seemingly on borrowed time, can I suggest we all stop moaning about the prevalence of downsized turbo lumps and instead live in the moment and revel in the experience of simply hearing revs rise and fall, shifting gears ourselves and actually controlling the many facets of the cars we drive? If the thought of a new four-pot Boxster turns you off, buy a secondhand six-cylinder version instead [pictured], plus a tasty French hot hatch from yesteryear – all for the same outlay. The point being, we still have many options available to us. We can buy V8 nutters, six-cylinder growlers or four-pot howlers, all for less than a new Focus. No one is stopping us. The day will…

PORSCHE’S DECISION TO swap the Boxster’s naturally aspirated flat-six for a turbo’d flat-four may have resulted in abject disappointment from those who appreciate good acoustics, but there’s been elation from those who tweak the cars. Eking out extra power from a highly strung naturally aspirated engine is an involved and expensive process, and the gains are quite meagre compared with the effort required. However, a turbocharged engine can be made to churn out extra power with relative ease, and if you know what you are doing, it can do so reliably, too. Knowing this doesn’t make it any less surprising to see a Boxster with damned near 400bhp. German tuner TechArt has created just that, though, taking the 2.5-litre engine in the 718 Boxster S and increasing its power from…

WITH OVER 3000 ORDERS already taken and more or less unwavering critical acclaim, the dB11 is proving every inch the game-changer Aston Martin hoped it would be. And every inch a rod for its own back. A good question to ask would be this: why would i want to buy a £192,995, 568bhp old-school Aston vanquish when i could have a £154,900, 600bhp dB11, arguably the best Gt currently on sale? A certain emotional pull and a last hurrah for that naturally aspirated 6-litre v12 can’t be ruled out but, against its new sibling, the vanquish… well, it doesn’t. Little surprise, then, that Aston has wasted no time distancing its old best Gt from its new one and, adopting the idea that attack is the best form of defence, the…

NICO ROSBERG, F1 WORLD CHAMPION. SOME sort of mistake, surely? His Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton was robbed of a fourth title by mechanical woes, and even won ten races to Rosberg’s nine. And then Nico retires! Rather a lot to fit into 850 words, this one… The first question, though, is whether Rosberg deserved the title. The debate will smoulder for years to come, but it’s undeniable he did a great job. He earned it by delivering when it mattered and minimising his bad days; by being consistent. Who can forget Lewis in Singapore? Nico played to his strengths and mitigated his weaknesses. You cannot do any more. Indeed, he came of age this season, sucking up pressure and delivering some brilliant qualifying drives and flawless races. Paradoxically, it was…

LOTUS EXIGE SPORT 380 THE JOY OF THE SPORT 380 BEGINS LONG before you drive it. If you’re a geek – and you will be if the idea of this ultimate Exige floats your boat – your juices start flowing when you read the specification, the best bits of which reveal an array of detail improvements and an obsessive pursuit of weight saving. The original V6-engined Exige S was always a mouthwatering machine. The step to the lighter Sport 350 was a delight, so it’s no wonder the evolution to the even lighter, even faster Sport 380 instinctively seems like the best thing Lotus has done in years. Excess mass has been hunted down with dogged determination, to the point where the quartet of rear lights has been pared down…

THE MID-NINETIES WITNESSED A renaissance for the two-seater sports car. Just as today we’re going through a purple patch for hot hatches, two decades ago you were spoiled for choice if you were in the market for something low, lithe and exciting. Certainly more exciting than the hot hatches of the day (Mk3 Golf GTI, anyone?). While hot hatches had never been so bad, in terms of sports cars we had never had it so good. TVR was in full flow with the Griffith and Chimaera, Mazda’s MX-5 could do no wrong, BMW and Mercedes-Benz were fully behind the roadster resurgence, and so too Porsche with the Boxster. And then there were the small British sports car specialists. Caterham had taken the plunge to branch out from building Sevens by…

11 June 1978 FIRST LE MANS WIN The iconic bubble canopy and tall airbox define the shape of the Renault-Alpine A442, but its victory at Le Mans in 1978 (in modified A442B form) secured its place in the history books. Renault won the event at the third attempt with Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud holding off Wollek, Ickx and Barth’s Porsche 936 at an average of 131mph. It remains Renault’s only victory at Le Mans. 1 July 1979 FIRST FORMULA 1 WIN Renault debuted its turbocharged RS01 at the British Grand Prix in 1977, but it was 1979 before Jean-Pierre Jabouille drove the new, ground-effect enhanced RS10 to its first Formula 1 victory, fittingly at the French Grand Prix in Dijon. While the race is best remembered for a dramatic…

A FEW WEEKS AFTER MEETING KRIS MEEKE AT Silverstone, evo caught up with the Citroën star again, this time with the Dispatch van swapped for the 2017 C3 WRC. No driver in a regular seat for 2017 has more experience of the new breed of WRC car than Meeke, his parttime campaign in 2016 keeping him match-fit while he developed Citroën’s all-new WRC contender. And whereas Hyundai and M Sport/Ford have split their testing pretty evenly between their drivers, Meeke has racked up at least 75 per cent of the C3’s running. This is his car. We were granted access to the team at the very first test of the C3 in southern France, and then again at subsequent runs on asphalt and in the soaking wet forests of Wales.…

IN MORE THAN 20 YEARS in this job I’ve never run a Mercedes long-termer. This could account for why I’ve never considered myself a ‘Merc Man’. That said, the arrival of this AMG C63 S Coupe might force me to reappraise that opinion, for on the evidence of our first few weeks together I feel very much aligned with Affalterbach’s freshest export. First, the numbers. Were you to spec an identical car to this you’d need £82,875. That’s to say £68,710 for the base C63 S, then just over £14,000 for the options, which include keyless go, a panoramic sunroof and a 13-speaker Burmester sound system (all part of the £2595 Premium Package), carbon-ceramic brakes (£4285), 19-inch front and 20-inch rear wheels (up from 19s all-round and costing £1735), and…

IN CASE YOU MISSED it, BMW celebrated its centenary in 2016. Something that’s more likely to have passed you by is that it was also 50 years since the 2002 arrived. Ideally I would have joined the celebrations in my own example, but it’s still languishing in my conservatory, unfinished. So instead I asked BMW UK if I could borrow its precious 2002 Turbo. Much to my delight, instead of being laughed off the phone, the answer was yes. In the days I had the car I took it to be included in an aerial shot with a group of other 02s arranged to form a ‘50’. Then it was over to the annual BMW show at the British Motor Museum at Gaydon where the car won best 2002 Turbo…

BMW WANTS TO BE CONSIDERED A technology brand as much as it does a car manufacturer. In a speech during a showcase of BMW’s future product plans – there’s an i8 Spyder coming in 2018 and improved batteries (in terms of range and output) for both it and the i3 – Dr Ian Robertson, board member for sales and marketing, explained how the company’s move into autonomous driving and the digitalisation of how we connect with our car will see the German marque focus on digital technology as much as on its next generation of internal combustion engines. This switch won’t see BMW abandon the art of building cars completely, rather the development of its future models will be led by the requirements of electric mobility, autonomous driving and internet-based…

‘I’M A BIG FAN OF THE 911. Its driving feel drives me crazy!’ this is Koji Sato, chief engineer on Lexus’s LC project and the man tasked with turning Lexus into a brand keen drivers no longer cross the road to avoid. You’ve got to admire his ambition. Sato-san tells me his team benchmarked the 911 for steering feel, along with Lexus’s own LFA – that most unlikely of supercars. of course, Lexus has failed to get anywhere close to the stratospheric heights of the LFA in the six or so years since evo first got behind its wheel (and refused to get out). A couple of F models have arrived and disappointed, but, this time, well it just might be different. After all, Lexus has had long enough to…

THERE ARE CERTAIN things i could tell you about the Twingo GT that would probably make it sound quite intriguing. it’s rear-engined and rear-wheel-drive for one thing, and for another it’s been given a good seeingto by the hot-hatch wizards at renault Sport. But i wouldn’t want to mislead you because, as it turns out, the Twingo GT is much more interesting in concept than it is in reality. The little Twingo shares its underpinnings with the Smart ForFour. That unusual mechanical layout isn’t some laudable attempt to channel the spirit of the Porsche 911 into a city car, unfortunately, but instead it’s a clever way of reducing the car’s turning circle (with no engine between the front wheels, they can reach much greater steering angles). hardly the stuff of…

THINKING. ALWAYS A DANGEROUS PASTIME. Especially when you’re a freelance journalist who has turned procrastination into an art form. Still, what is life without daydreams? That’s what I say. Especially when you can turn a few hours of staring out of the window and drinking copious cups of coffee into a long-overdue evo column. I blame my erstwhile colleagues Nick Trott and Jethro Bovingdon for prompting my latest catastrophic distraction and litany of missed deadlines. The former for asking us to concoct our ultimate McLaren Special Operations (MSO) project a few issues back, the latter for reminding me of his N24 drive in Jim Glickenhaus’s eponymous home-brewed racer. Where am I going with all this? Rather pleasingly, the haphazard wiring in my brain has taken these random sources of diversion…

IN DAYS GONE BY WE PRODUCED PIECES LIKE THIS because new performance cars and depreciation went hand-in-hand, their values plummeting quicker than they could lap the Ring. That’s all changed now. Appreciation is the name of the game. Buy new for list price today, flip for a 10-15 per cent mark-up tomorrow. This situation is having a knock-on effect with used evo icons. Cars that, not so long ago, could only find homes with those who got them. Lusted after them from new. Promised themselves that, one day, they’d own one. Even these cars are now finding favour with those looking for a quick buck in the growing ‘modern classics’ market. But we haven’t selected the cars you see here because we rate them for their investment potential; that couldn’t…

EVEN NOW, EIGHTEEN YEARS AFTER it made its debut at the 1998 Paris motor show, the Clio V6 still looks wonderfully outlandish. If you ever chance to see one on the road, it commands at least as much attention as any Ferrari. Look at one for long enough and, even though you know it has a mid-engined ancestor in the Renault 5 Turbo, you start to wonder how on earth it came about… Back in 1998, Renault was keen to find suitable homes for the 3-litre V6 engine that it had developed jointly with PSA. A plan was even hatched to put it in a Twingo (with a Spider chassis). But top management decided the next Renault Sport project should be a Clio. So the Clio V6 concept appeared in…

IT’S ALWAYS SUCH A PLEASURE TO get back in an R26.R. Not least because you’ve generally forgotten quite how good it is. Whenever you pull down the shoulder straps of the harness you ask yourself: ‘Can this car still be as brilliant as I remember it?’ And all it takes is one corner to answer with an emphatic ‘yes!’. The qualities of the R26.R are truly timeless. Every facet is so well matched to the next: the amount of grip to the amount of power and torque; the quest for weight-saving tempered by the desire to ensure the R26.R was as capable on the road as it was exciting on the track. Today we’re here to compare its on-track capabilities with those of its illustrious descendent, the Mégane 275 Trophy-R.…

WE’RE REACHING A TIPPING POINT. it wasn’t all that long ago that hot hatches were fairly modestly powered things, but these days the quickest of the breed are closing in on 400bhp. Supersaloons are now beyond 600bhp, too, thanks to the new Mercedes-AMG E63 S. The darling old brake horsepower is going to have to be retired soon, the poor little poppet. As a unit for describing a car’s performance, it’s just falling hopelessly out of touch. But there could be a solution. Perhaps we can adapt the earthquake-measuring Richter scale, reimagine it for our own purposes. As the fastest, baddest cars on the planet, the million-quid, carbonfibre-everything hypercars would slot in right at the top with a 9.0, which, according to the wording of the Richter scale, is enough…

THE WORLD RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP USHERS in a new era of cars in 2017 – and the series has been dealt an even tastier script by the sudden withdrawal of the dominant Volkswagen team. The arrival in november of four-time champion Sébastien ogier and his teammates jari-matti latvala and Andreas mikkelsen onto the driver market was a major last-minute curveball for many of VW’s rivals. They’d been planning to spend the final two months of the year nailing down the specs of their cars ahead of the first round of WrC 2017, rallye monte Carlo. instead, there was frantic activity from the likes of Toyota and m-Sport (which runs the Ford Fiesta WrCs) as they moved to get proven rallywinning talent on their books. In the end, rumours of a privately…

THE F430 IS ARGUABLY THE FIRST truly modern, mass-market Ferrari. it’s a car no excuses had to be made for, one that could be used every day without issue. it was also the point where the ‘junior’ Ferrari took off into the performance stratosphere, offering nearly 500bhp and a price to match, the car retailing in the uK for around £117,000. the all-new 4.3-litre engine (fundamentally shared with Maserati) was chain-driven, so the belt-change maintenance regime of older V8 Ferraris was a thing of the past. Overall, it really was good news in terms of reliability and running costs, as our two experts (right) attest. there are four variants of the F430: the berlinetta and the spider (both 483bhp, and arriving in 2004 and 2007 respectively), plus the 430 scuderia…

HAS THERE EVER BEEN a more exciting time for hot hatches? There’s a Leon Cupra with what feels like in excess of 300bhp, a four-wheeldrive Focus RS with a drift mode, a turbocharged Civic Type R with a fabulously unnecessary complement of aero add-ons, and, of course, the Renault Sport Mégane, recently retired but still utterly sublime. And let’s not forget the smaller hatches: Peugeot finally finding its mojo again with the 208 GTi, and Ford’s Fiesta ST hopping into the desirability spot recently vacated by the RS Clio. Amongst all of this, however, it has been rather easy to overlook the good ol’ Golf GTI. With a mere 217bhp, or 227bhp with the optional Performance Pack, it’s been looking a bit tame of late. Thankfully, Volkswagen hasn’t rested on…

NO, YOUR EYES AREN’T deceiving you. We may have just said goodbye to a Focus ST Estate (evo 229), but that hasn’t stopped us welcoming another one onto our fleet. In fact, this will be the third ST Estate we’ve run in recent years (we also ran a prefacelift version in 2013-14). It perhaps speaks volumes of the talented Ford that this is the case. Rapid, fun, practical and comfortable, it’s an all-rounder that’s ideally suited to life at evo. As a workhorse, it’s got a lot going for it: it’s spacious but not too big, it’s able to make light work of long journeys, and it’s not likely to become a wheezing pinprick in the rear-view mirror of more exotic machinery when it needs to run in convoy with…