Table of contents for June 2018 in Evo

I TOOK A STEP BACK IN TIME THIS month with the help of a BMW E30 M3 Roberto Ravaglia edition. Now before you think I’m going to hark on about when cars were simpler, more involving and charismatic machines… er, you’ll be kind of right. The cause for the M3’s arrival was to attend the 76th Goodwood Members’ Meeting in something suitably (though only just) period. It was brilliant. I’ve always had a soft spot for BMW’s homologation special, every drive a ‘pinch me’ moment of driving simplicity matched to engineering perfection. This time was no different. Rear-wheel drive, 215bhp, 170lb ft of torque, five gears, and an LSD. Oh, and 225/50 R16 tyres. I couldn’t have wished for more, and quite frankly I didn’t need any more at 6am…

IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT WE NEVER went to the moon, or that we did go but were warned away by aliens, or that the earth is flat, or even that Paul McCartney died before crossing Abbey Road. All nonsense, of course. And I never believed a word of them. But now? Now we are told that the South Koreans have made a sports saloon that’s better than those from Jaguar (the Kia Stinger 2.0 GT-Line, Driven, evo 247) and a hot hatch that’s better than anything the Germans can muster (the Hyundai i30 N, group test, evo 245). Now anything is believable. Really, it is. The Letter of the Month winsan MHD watch The writer of this month’s star letter receives an MHD AGT watch worth £550. Sharing design…

HARDCORE. A NOUN: THE MOST active, committed, doctrinaire members of a group. Sounds like us, and many of you for that matter, given our respective and complementary allegiances to evo. Committed, that is, to a movement that places driving enjoyment at the very top of the list, and a predilection for cars that aren’t especially bothered with the monotony of the everyday. And just like us, you may feel our movement is under threat, given it’s struggling for compatibility with the equally committed doctrines of the anti-speed lobby, environmentalism, electrification, and that term – and I’m sorry to mention it in this company – ‘autonomous driving’. Shudder. Thankfully, despite all this, hardcore cars still exist. They come in many different forms, and at many different price points; hardcore as a…

IF YOU’RE THE ORGANISED TYPE you’ve probably already planned your summer driving trip. Let me guess: Channel Tunnel, Route Napoléon via the old pits at Reims, into the Alps for a pass or two, up to Stuttgart for the Porsche and Mercedes museums, then a high-speed run to the Nürburgring for a handful of tourist laps. Wine, pizza, beer, steak on a stone. Sounds brilliant. Sign me up. But in reality, those winding mountain passes will be clogged with cyclists, and a day at the Ring will entail far more queuing than actual circuit activity. So how about swapping the Cup 2s for winter tyres and heading to the frozen north after the clocks go back next autumn? For us Brits, snow is rarely conducive to enjoyable driving, especially if…

‘I love an RS Audi, M BMW or AMG Merc as much as the next man, but their ubiquity only makes the RC F more intriguing’ PRIOR TO LIVING WITH GY17 OBF I’D never spent much time in a Lexus of any description. To be honest, LFA apart, I’d never really lusted after one, but there was something about the RC F that I found genuinely appealing, and intriguing. It was a car I really wanted to get to know. The RC F exists on the periphery of a sector dominated by Audi, BMW and Mercedes. Indeed, before the Lexus, I’d run an AMG C63 S. More money than the £67,730 RC F, and a bit more power, but broadly appealing to the same audience. Being a Lexus newbie I’m…

WHILE THE MERCEDES-AMG C43 SHOWED off its 2018 upgrades at the Geneva motor show in early March, its bigger brothers, the C63 and C63 S, had to wait until the New York show a few weeks later for their moment in the spotlight. The entry-point C63 models – in coupe, saloon, estate and cabriolet forms – now have the same electronically controlled limited-slip differential that previously only came with the S specification cars, while both the non-S and S are the recipients of a new gearbox. Gone is the previous C63’s seven-speed MCT auto, in its place Mercedes’ nine-speed transmission, as found in the C43 and many more of the company’s models. It still features a pack of wet clutches rather than a torque converter, despite this more powerful integration,…

THE RANGE ROVER SPORT SVR IS A difficult car to like. Ostentatious, obnoxious and profligate, it seems to serve little purpose beyond infuriating the anti-car movement by consuming as many resources as possible, as quickly as possible, with little regard for anything around it. A poster child for gratuitous consumption, it also has attributes that tally uneasily with the things that evo looks for in a car. It offers considerable speed – 0-62mph in 4.5sec and 176mph all-out – albeit not through clever aerodynamics or light weight, but from the brute force of a supercharged V8. It grips, handles and stops, too, although not because it’s low or lithe or delicate, but because it puts 275-section rubber on the ground, sends power to all four wheels and features the complication…

BMW’S M3, PORSCHE’S 911 AND MERCEDESAMG’s C63 are all achingly desirable machines, cars that have the ability to perform as proficient, exciting road and track cars. But as well as appealing to you and me, they also need to work over a broader spectrum, to satisfy a wider audience, and this means that their ultimate potential to thrill isn’t being realised. Narrow such a car’s operating window, however, make it stiffer and noisier and its controls heavier, and it can deliver so much more for people like us. What Porsche, AMG, BMW et al do to make their most hardcore sports coupes feel more at home around the Nordschleife than the North Circular will be familiar to scholars of the Demon Tweeks motorsport catalogue. Big brakes, stickier tyres, roll-cages, bucket…

AMONG THE LESS ENJOYABLE ASPECTS OF WORKING at evo – buffing mud off a car in the middle of a hailstorm on a Welsh mountain; losing sensation in your buttocks on a Ryanair flight; failing to find a reliable driving partner on a launch event and having to share a car with a Brexit enthusiast from the Clacton Daily Bugle – trying to turn a seven-feet-wide sports car around between two muddy banks to make another pass for a photographer lurks somewhere towards the top of the list. A First World problem, I know, but it is one unknown to drivers of the Renault Twingo GT. In this car you almost seek out opportunities to take a wrong turn, just so you can twirl the car around in what feels…

AT FACE VALUE, YOU COULD BE forgiven for thinking that Celtic Tuning’s Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio is just another one-dimensional, big-power machine. The Newquay tuner has developed a software package to take the saloon’s twin-turbo V6 from 503bhp and 442lb ft of torque to an even more generous 585bhp and 489lb ft. With no mechanical changes involved, the necessary modifications to the ECU can be carried out by Celtic’s network of dealer and mobile tuners. Very useful if you don’t happen to live in Cornwall. During normal driving, you can feel the extra performance right from the bottom of the rev range. Small throttle movements have the car surging forward no matter what the revs or which gear you’re in, and you soon recalibrate your own ECU and use one…

LATELY, I’VE BEEN FINDING the C43’s automatic gearbox increasingly frustrating. It’s important to stress that it does a thoroughly excellent job if left to its own devices, slurring seamlessly through all nine ratios, and even when tasked with acting a bit more lively in Sport mode, possessing an uncanny knack of knowing which gear to be in, and when. However, being the awkward human element as ever, I try to have as much control as I can over my 362bhp performance estate car. Sure, if the journey involves the M25, or for the first 15 minutes after leaving home when both car and me are warming up, then yes, I’ll leave it in Comfort and auto. But the rest of the time I like to decide which gear I’m going…

‘There’s no flared arches or rear wing, and it resembles a scaled-down Leon, but that’s no bad thing’ I’LL DECLARE FROM THE OFF THAT I’ve never been a huge fan of SEAT’s styling. It’s always seemed, to my eyes, a bit too conservative – clean and minimalist, yes, but somehow struggling to find its own identity amongst a sea of other VW Group products. Even the sportier variants have looked like they were a little embarrassed to be in the same company as some other manufacturers’ wilder offerings. Surely a car with loftier ambitions, even just a warm one, should be as stirring to look at as it is to drive. So, seeing the latest Ibiza in the evo car park came as a pleasant surprise. OK, there’s no flared…

1 BODY The RS5 super-GT will soon be available in Sportback form for the first time, gaining two rear doors and a hatch as per its mainstream A5 Sportback relative. The RS5 Sportback shares the standard A5 version’s 60mm increase in length over the equivalent coupe, bringing rear-seat passengers extra leg and headroom. The boot is bigger, too, though not as capacious as the RS4 Avant’s. The RS5 coupe’s wider body styling has been carried across, with Audi’s designers lengthening the rear box arches by 54mm to suit the Sportback’s long side-profile. The extra length of the Sportback over the coupe adds 45kg to the lesser S5, and we expect this to be mirrored on the RS5, leading to a kerb weight of around 1700kg. 2 POWERTRAIN Powering the RS5…

BENTLEY IS HEADING TO THE Pikes Peak hill climb this June with its Bentayga W12. The British firm hopes to take victory in the SUV class on the hill, although at the time of writing it’s a class of one, including the Crewe effort. More importantly, perhaps, Bentley hopes to break the SUV record set by a Range Rover in 2013. Ironically, the course’s gradual switch to an all-asphalt surface in recent years means it now feels less suitable for vehicles of this type than it might once have been. Bentley has signed Rhys Millen for driving duties, whose vast experience includes two outright victories and 14 class wins at Pikes Peak. He becomes the seventh official ‘Bentley Boy’, a distinction reserved for drivers contracted to race cars directly from…

I’M SITTING IN A SMALL TOWN IN southern Portugal, slightly stunned. I haven’t caught my head on the low-hanging branch of a lemon tree and there hasn’t been an accidental tasering. There hasn’t been an intentional tasering either for that matter. No, the reason for the slight befuddlement is that I’ve just driven the new Vantage in anger for the first time. And it is seriously, unexpectedly fast. The shock is undoubtedly compounded by the fact that I was mistakenly approaching this new Vantage as a direct successor. Really, though, there is a model missing between this latest iteration and the last one. The previous Vantage had been tweaked and tuned and had its life artificially extended like a much loved teddy bear. It was still a wonderful car at…

IT’S A GUILTY PLEASURE, THE FORD Mustang; a sports coupe that’s hard to justify in a world of C63s, M4s and RS5s. But its charm and charisma make it hard to ignore. It’s a car that wears its blue-collar heart on its sleeve in the guise of a 5.0 badge, shuns turbocharging for cubic capacity and still prefers six on the floor (although a new ten-speed auto is also available). A rough diamond on a road of polished performers, the Stang puts entertainment and thrills first. The outgoing version was far from perfect, but when it cost less than £40,000 it’s little wonder Fold sold 33,000 of them across Europe. For 2018 the Mustang receives a midlife facelift, most of which is incredibly subtle for a car that can now…

‘The acceleration turns from vivid to breathtaking, the car surging forward with real violence’ I’VE BEEN STUCK BEHIND THE tracking car for a few laps now as evo’s Aston Parrott shoots all the angles. The supercharged V6 sitting over my shoulder is happy to amble, but there’s a sense of barely contained and powerful forces itching to be unleashed. Finally I’m given a thumbs up, and the car ahead peels off to reveal Hethel’s invitingly long Mansell Straight. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? With second gear hooked and around 2000rpm dialled in, I squeeze the throttle. The response is instant, with no lag and no feeling of inertia. Yet it’s only when the bars on the digital rev counter click past 4000rpm that the bottle is truly uncorked and the…

THE LONG SNAKE OF CARS CRAWLS around the banking, edging towards the start line, anticipation building for the 24 hours of racing that lie ahead. The speed gradually increases, then, as the front two cars pass the start flag, they dive for the racing line. It’s a short sprint to the first corner – a sharp left leading to the Y-shaped infield – and as the prototype cars brake to the apex they emit bangs that sound like weapons-grade popcorn being cooked. Just as you hear the last explosions, a shrill howl from a Porsche 911 RSR’s flat-six cuts through the air as the revs burst at every downchange. The Huracáns and R8s towards the back of the pack then release a naturally aspirated wail too, but at a much…

I RECENTLY FOUND MYSELF WITH 90 minutes to kill in a part of the UK that I don’t know particularly well. It was nearly dusk and it had been lashing down with rain all day, but rather than holing up in a coffee shop and browsing the prices of early Clio 197s and road-legal P1 GTRs on my phone, I decided to get out of town, select a minor road at random and head off into the countryside. Rainwater was flooding off the fields and collecting in large pools on the bumpy, rough and often narrow lanes, while sight lines would come and go as hedges went and came. Not exactly a perfect recipe for a great drive, you might think, yet that is exactly what I had – in…

REGULAR READERS AMONGST you might be thinking I have a rock star rider that demands I’m furnished with a V8-powered long-termer. OK, so apart from stopgap Fast Fleeters in the shape of evo’s largely unloved Focus ST Estate and sci-fi BMW i8, I’ve had back-to-back bent eights: a Bentley Conti GT V8 S, Mercedes-AMG C63 S Coupe, then a Lexus RC F. And now I’ve been given the key to the Mustang Convertible. It’s all coincidence, honest. A 5-litre pony car isn’t the ideal daily driver when the UK is hit by a polar vortex. Especially when it’s equipped with summer tyres and an equally summery canvas roof. Consequently, I only managed a few days’ driving in the Stang before snow forced me to hole up at Meaden Towers, light…