Table of contents for COTY 19 in Evo

McLAREN HAS LIFTED THE LID ON ITS LATEST Super Series model – the 720S Spider. Although the company’s decision to build a drop-top 720S is not an unexpected one, the coupe’s complex carbonfibre and glass canopy-style roof made it a challenging exercise to create a Spider version without diverging too much from the original’s dramatic aesthetic. McLaren’s answer is a new roof mechanism, comprising a single carbonfibre panel that retracts beneath a tonneau sitting over the engine compartment. As well as looking neater than the 650S Spider’s similar arrangement, which featured two panels split longitudinally, it also means the roof can be optionally specified in electrochromic glass, which is able to change between clear and opaque at the flick of a switch. Further contributing to maintaining some of the coupe’s…

FURNITURE Adam Williams chair From £6500 adamwilliamsdesign.co.uk For its latest project, high-end furniture studio Adam Williams Design is creating chairs inspired by the iconic Ferrari 250 GTO. Each metal chair is bespoke to the individual customer, so no two will be the same. AUDIO Porsche Design 911 Soundbar Black Edition £3599 porsche-design.com A 911 GT3’s exhaust could never be accused of giving out an unpleasant sound, although if you have terrible taste in music it’s unlikely that even this limited edition Porsche Design sound bar can help you. MANUAL Haynes Ferrari Engines Manual £35 haynes.com Haynes manuals are usually reserved for the tinkerer, the mechanic, the anorak, but its latest offering may be a little more for the hands-off, covering 15 of Ferrari’s most spectacular engines in brilliant detail. IN-CAR…

letters@evo.co.uk @evomagazine @evomagazine Humble sigh Ted Kravitz’s column (evo 256) raised some interesting points about Lewis Hamilton and women in F1. Let’s talk Lewis first and the relative lack of recognition for his achievements in comparison with other British sporting greats. I completely agree that racism may be a factor in this, but it could be argued that you’d struggle to find many people who don’t like Mo Farah. The difference for Farah – and Chris Hoy and Steve Redgrave – is that British humbleness. I’ve never seen one of them spit their dummy out, flash their cash or be cocky. It’s just not the British way. I want Lewis to win because he’s British and that’s great, but I took much more delight from Jenson’s unexpected rise to glory…

I’M QUITE LAZY AND I LIKE A DRINK. THAT’S why I often find myself in minicabs. Not long ago a minicab was a bracing and sometimes frightening way to keep abreast of developments in the world of seven-year-old medium-sized diesels stuck in a car/owner relationship best described as ‘abusive’. What has happened to this velour to make it so sticky? Which bit of the engine is malfunctioning to bring on the check engine light? How long can a wheel bearing keep making that noise before full and final failure on the outer reaches of the North Circular? Then Uber came along. I like Uber. I like that they’ve removed that nocturnal scratch around for a cab number so that someone in a shabby hatch can come and extract you from…

EDITOR STUART GALLAGHER Experienced his first Wetherspoons on eCoty and is still in shock. Thankfully this didn’t cause him to forget the PIN number for his credit card. DEPUTY EDITOR ADAM TOWLER A new car’s harshest critic, Adam wears his heart on his sleeve and stands by his every verdict. He does, however, steal his sons’ lunch on a regular basis. ROAD TEST EDITOR JAMES DISDALE Consuming more tea than a McLaren does superunleaded, evo’s no-punch-pulling road test editor has covered more miles in our contenders than any other judge. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JOHN BARKER An evo founding father, John can dissect what’s good – and crucially what’s bad – about a car’s dynamics quicker than it takes mere mortals to scramble eggs. CONTRIBUTING WRITER JETHRO BOVINGDON evo road test royalty,…

AFTER ELEVEN YEARS YOU’D THINK THAT I would have forgotten the travesty that was eCoty 2007. Sadly not. We had our strongest pre-event favourite so far, but the fabulous Ferrari 430 Scuderia, somehow, finished second to a rear-engined freak of German engineering, more commonly known as the Porsche 997 GT3 RS. I ordered several recounts when it appeared that the GT3 RS had taken the crown, but even I couldn’t correct/twist (delete as necessary) the scores to get the Scud to the first place it so thoroughly deserved (in my view). Making matters worse, there was further discord amongst the esteemed judges when another deserved winner, Audi’s R8, finished third, much to the dismay of eCoty stalwarts David Vivian and John Barker (page 104). I hadn’t driven the 430 Scuderia…

‘IT SEEMED THAT WHATEVER YOU ASKED OF THE R8, IT DELIVERED. I WAS UTTERLY BEGUILED’ I THOUGHT THE R8 WAS UTTERLY BRILLIANT. Out of nowhere, straight out of the box, Audi absolutely nailed the junior supercar thing. We drove on all sorts of roads, we had all sorts of weather, we even had a fabulous racetrack at our disposal, and the R8 excelled consistently. I put it ahead of the eventual winner, the Kermit-green 911 GT3 RS, and the shouty, second-placed 430 Scuderia, too, because the R8 did everything very well and some things exceptionally well. My esteemed colleague Mr David Vivian agreed and also placed it first, but it was not to be. It was a vintage eCoty, possibly the best ever. There were 12 contenders in all, other…

‘IF YOU’D NEVER DRIVEN A GT3 YOU’D PROBABLY THINK THE CAYMAN’S 3.8-LITRE ENGINE WAS THE PERFECT POWERPLANT’ IF THE LAST 20 YEARS OF EVO WERE A PHOTO album, each eCoty would be a snapshot. A frozen moment of those cars in those places, a summary of that year’s greatest cars on the most enthralling roads. Winners are by definition the best of the best, cars that rank not just highly among their peers but among all vehicles. But just how sure are we of that? Cars don’t necessarily improve over time. Context changes. Parts age. Time skews perception, making some characteristics more desirable while the contemporary importance of others ebbs away. Photographs fade and curl at the edges. The Nissan GT-R, Lotus Evora and Porsche Cayman GT4 aren’t fading away…

I’D BEEN KEEN TO HAVE A GO IN OUR I Swift Sport, and I finally got my chance to spend some time behind its wheel this month. But my curiosity soon turned to disappointment as I discovered that the Suzuki appears to be quite the hypochondriac. The Sport is loaded with active safety tech, but whether it’s due to underdevelopment or poor calibration, almost all of it is unbearably irritating. The collision alert system, for example, is so oversensitive it’ll cry a startling high-pitched screech if so much as a butterfly crosses too closely in front of the car. The lane-keep assist system, meanwhile, is pretty hopeless (but then most are), and the adaptive cruise control once inexplicably leaped onto the brakes with such aggression I could do nothing but…

RATINGS + = new entry this month. Cars in italics are no longer on sale. Issue no. is for our most recent major test of the car (D = Driven, T = Driven Too, F = feature). Call 0330 333 9491 for back issues. Engine is the car’s combustion engine only – electric motors aren’t shown. Weight is as quoted by the manufacturer for the car in basic spec, e.g. with a manual gearbox. In most cases this is to DIN standards (i.e. with fluids but without a driver), but where the manufacturer only quotes a ‘dry’ weight (i.e. without fluids) this is indicated by *. Note that a dry weight will make the car’s power-to-weight ratio (bhp/ton) appear more favourable. 0-62mph (claimed) is the manufacturer’s 0-62 figure, with a…

APPARENTLY THIS IS THE BEST PLACE TO HEAR it from. Standing round the back of Cell 9, a dyno room in the bowels of Cosworth, one of the engineers waggles a long door handle that looks like it might open an industrial freezer. He’s letting those controlling the engine on the other side know that we’re ready. The cells are meant to be soundproof, but they can’t quite contain the screams of engines from World Superbikes or Formula 1 cars. Or, as we’re about to find out, the Aston Martin Valkyrie. For some reason I close my eyes as the revs flash through their first buzz-saw crescendo, picturing a Valkyrie leaving the start line at Silverstone, the circuit they are simulating. The sound is angrier and wilder than that of…

Autodromo Group B Series 2 autodromo.com c£895 The ’80s-inspired Group B returns to Autodromo’s range. Now in Series 2 form, the original’s nylon strap has been replaced by a brilliantly retro stainless-steel bracelet. Grand Seiko SBGN001G grand-seiko.com c£3195 Seiko’s luxury sub-brand is celebrating 25 years of its high-spec quartz movement by adding a GMT function to it for the very first time. Just 800 examples of this sporty result will be made. Bamford Heuer Monza bamfordwatchdepartment.com £6500 Bamford’s modded TAG Heuer Monza loses the original’s black theme and adds a titanium case plus a colour scheme that harks back to the 1970s Heuer Montreal.…

A NEW YEAR BRINGS NEW BEGINNINGS, A FRESH start, and for this column, a New Year’s resolution: that, like Fernando Alonso, we’re going out at the top. Alright, in no way did Fernando go out at the top, but since my tour of duty here is at an end, like Alonso outrageously cutting pesky time-consuming corners at his last race in a frantic attempt to score a point, let’s go out in style, with a few key truths about Formula 1. First thing to say is that while it’s mostly a business, there are enough moments of pure sporting drama, passion, controversy and achievement taking place throughout the F1 field to keep even the most cynical observer satisfied. The recently confirmed race return of Robert Kubica, for example, is a…

‘ANALOGUE THROUGH AND THROUGH, THE GT OFFERED THE COMPLETE DRIVING EXPERIENCE, ONE THAT BENEFITTED HUGELY FROM ITS ELASTIC V8’ ROUNDING UP THE YEAR’S BEST CARS AND testing them against one another is not something unique to evo. Indeed, there’s always a glut of such tests around this time of year. What separates eCoty from the rest is that people – and you guys in particular – not only seem to care about the outcome, but take great interest in the way in which we conduct the test. And you remember the winners. Though that’s not difficult when they’re always 911s… evo has never been big on lavish black-tie ‘dos’ and handing out gongs to the industry, but I think it’s a mark of eCoty that it matters to the engineers…

LIKE ALL THE BEST DRIVES, I CAN REMEMBER it amazingly clearly. Alright, not visual details perhaps, they’re more in line with Monet’s later stuff, when he was going blind and it was all a bit of a blur of colour. Rosso Corsa in this case. A full score of sounds is perhaps hard to conjure up too, although recollections of specific snippets, like a ferocious flaring of revs or the click of a paddle, paints an abstract aural collage. But what is etched into my memory with the permanence of a 2am tattoo is how the Ferrari F12 felt, how it moved as I drove down that particular road in the south of France five years ago. It was a particularly good year, 2013. Sometimes in the weeks leading up…

TYRE PRESSURES HAVE BEEN A recurring topic of conversation at evo this month, and in most cases they have been of the ‘low’ variety. Maybe it’s down to the falling ambient temperatures or perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but several of our Fast Fleet cars have issued warnings via their monitoring systems, often providing detailed individual pressure readings and recommendations with fancy graphics, illustrations and wonderful bleepy noises. I’d been expecting the 308 to warn me too, as it had started to feel a little ‘squidgy’ as summer disappeared in the rear-view mirror and winter approached. And then, sure enough, the day came. The 308, however, in its typical Gallic style, has its own approach to warnings. A simple message appeared on screen that may as well have said: ‘You…

NISSAN HAS CONFIRMED IT WILL BUILD 50 examples of its GT-R50 by Italdesign that made its debut in concept form at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed. It’s ‘a GT-R without limits’ according to Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan’s senior vice president for global design, and will closely ape the design and engineering of the concept. Prospective purchasers will need just over £1million to buy one, though. The GT-R50 is a celebration of both the GT-R and Italdesign’s half centuries. Drawing on existing styling cues, Nissan’s San Diego design hub was responsible for the styling, with the firm’s Paddington design office providing further refinements. Italdesign’s input is its expertise in the production engineering for such limited-run projects (it will build the 50 examples at its Turin HQ). The carbonfibre-clad exterior is close…

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN CAR MAGAZINE proudly proclaimed ‘There will never be another month like this?’ That famous coverline, which ran across the front page of the September 1987 issue, celebrated an extraordinary collection of four features, in which the magazine drove a prototype Lamborghini Countach, marvelled at the unveil of the Ferrari F40, had minds blown by the first road drive of the Porsche 959 and twin-tested the 288 GTO against Aston’s V8 Zagato. I can remember buying that magazine and being in awe, both of what those cars represented and what it must have been like to pull those stories together. In those days you could always rely upon Car to deliver those kinds of story – fabulous exotica driven hard and fast, or scoops of fascinating previously…

PLEASE DON’T BE RAINING. PLEASE don’t be raining. Please don’t… Oh, it’s not, and there’s already a bright blue, warming pantone to the morning sky. Excellent. Improving the mood further is the knowledge that, in just a few hours’ time, the very best new cars we have driven over the last 12 months will begin convening at our base for eCoty 2018 in readiness for our biggest test of the year. Some of them may not even need washing before a camera is pointed at them. As with last year we will crown an eCoty victor from each of our ten evo Knowledge categories, the evo Top Ten if you will. But for 2018 we are also reintroducing the multi-car testing element to eCoty, bringing together eight cars – some…

GT OF THE YEAR Aston Martin DBS Superleggera THE DEFINITION OF GRAND TOURER HAS been stretched somewhat in recent years, as well-heeled continent crossers are as likely to plump for high-end SUVs or fast estates as the traditional archetype of the low-slung, two-plus-two coupe with an enormous engine. Yet there’s really nothing like the latter if you want to live the glamorous GT dream, annihilating autoroutes and monstering mountain passes as you spear effortlessly toward the French Riviera. C’est magnifique, non? It’s a brief the DBS Superleggera fills to perfection. I mean, just look at it. Oozing equal parts beauty and brutality, it’s a car that you just know is going to be something a bit special, a machine that’s engineered to make even a trip to the grocer’s a…

THE SIRENS ECHOED THROUGH THE VALLEY. They sounded high-pitched and almost comically weak but one screeched into the next, then another fainter call would join the melee, then another and another… Two police cars and four grumpy-looking Italian officers were already atop the pass, looking around our eCoty contenders and trying to communicate with Harry Metcalfe, who was playing dad and attempting to calm the situation. Four more cars were on their way up to us. Things were looking quite grim. Things had been going so well, too. eCoty 2003 was the first time we’d held separate ‘real world’ and ‘surreal world’ tests. The former played out in Scotland, where we whittled 11 contenders down to a top three – headed by the Subaru Impreza STi Spec C imported by…

1998 Porsche 911 Carrera (996.1) evo early adopters only had to wait until issue 003 for the first eCoty. Held in north Wales, the ‘crushingly capable’ 996 Carrera walks it, with Lotus’s Elise 135 and Ferrari’s F355 also on the podium. 1999 Porsche 911 GT3 (996.1) To the Scottish Highlands, and a second 911 victory. And who could argue with that? Except maybe Ferrari, whose 360 Modena finishes second. A people’s champion, the Subaru Impreza RB5, takes third. 2000 Porsche 911 Turbo (996) Back to Wales, and – well, this is getting awkward – another win for a 911. And Barker ruins it for everyone by giving away the result in his Ed Speak column. 2001 Pagani Zonda C12 S Tuscany, and Porsche’s dominance is broken as the 996.2 Carrera…

I HAD THE CHANCE TO SEE A NEW AUDI recently – the e-tron GT (which you’ll read about in a future issue). It was all very top secret, locked away in a photographic studio behind a formidable security gate, with mobile phone cameras taped over and legal documents signed promising to keep one’s mouth shut until the allotted embargo time. Anyway, the reason I mention this is that parked by the front door was a rather special looking RS4. There was something different about it, other than the obviously highly unusual colour. Turns out it was the company car of Audi’s head of design, Marc Lichte. And after he’d finished giving an enthusiastic briefing on the GT, and I crammed in as many questions as I could about a car…

Citroën 2CV ‘This car was technically my mum’s, but I have many fond memories of driving it on beach trips with the roof open.’ Volkswagen Golf 1.1 (Mk1) ‘I fitted wheels so wide that you couldn’t have more than one person in the back or the tyres would rub on the arches…’ Opel Manta 1.8 (B2) (1) ‘A Manta is possibly the perfect car in which to learn all about oversteer.’ Datsun 260Z (2) ‘I spent two years restoring this car and I desperately regret ever selling it. I tried buying it back years later to no avail.’ Ford Fiesta XR2 (Mk2) ‘I bought my XR2 from a friend who I knew through karting, and I drove it like it was a go-kart. It relished being driven hard everywhere.’ Saab…

WANT SIX CYLINDERS IN YOUR JAGUAR sports saloon? Then your only option these days is to go diesel. You can blame WLTP regulations for that, which have seen the supercharged V6 kicked out from both the XE and XF ranges. The range-topping petrol in each car is now a version of Jaguar’s Ingenium four-cylinder – something that makes us a little uneasy. It’s never felt more than merely acceptable, whether in the context of rivals or in isolation: the noise of a fourpot churning away behind the leaper just doesn’t seem right somehow. There’s little cause for complaint on paper though with this £44,700 XF 300 R-Sport. A figure just short of 300bhp isn’t staggering for a turbocharged 2-litre these days, but delivered at a fairly relaxed 5500rpm, and with…

Audi S1 Forge Motor sport big brake kit £1589.65 forgemotorsport.co.uk Audi’s S1 hot hatch boasts a specification far more sophisticated than its size might suggest. Except for its sliding-caliper front brakes. Forge’s big brake kit takes the disc size from 256mm to 356mm and replaces the calipers with proper six-piston solid units, bringing the brakes up to the standard of the rest of the car. BMW M3 (E46) Eventuri carbonfibre air intake £739 mstyle.co.uk Anything that makes the intake noise of the regular E46 M3 sound something like that of a CSL is worth the money. Eventuri’s carbon intake with a reversed cone filter not only increases the induction noise from the 3.2-litre straight-six, but it also claims to improve power and torque. Mazda MX-5 (NA a nd NB) Wilwood…

‘A MAN IN RED AND WHITE IS STANDING BY THE CAR AND BECKONS YOU OVER. IS THAT? IT CAN’T BE…’ FULL WITH FESTIVE FOOD AND ENJOYING a familial argument about whether the Queen has ever considered letting Prince Philip write her Christmas speech, you gently allow the paper hat to fall over your eyes as you doze on the sofa in this year’s new socks… Outside, flakes are falling gently in the forest. There is a crunch as every footstep breaks the surface and compacts the snow, but at first this is the only sound you can hear. Yet as you walk further, a low, idling brrrapbrrrap-brrrap reaches your ears. You head towards the noise, which is soon accompanied by a pool of bright light glimpsed between the trunks. A…