Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i CAR UK

Factfile POWERTRAIN 5.5-litre 32v twin-turbo V8, eight-speed dual-clutch auto, 805bhp (ZR1, est) CHASSIS Aluminium, mid-engined DUE 2023 1 FOUR STAGES OF MADNESS The eighth-generation Corvette has broken with tradition by being mid- rather than front-engined, and by being built in right-hand drive for markets including the UK, Australia and Japan. But it’s sticking with tradition by spawning a variety of higher-powered versions. Nothing has been confirmed by GM, but we’re expecting four hot versions, including a 1000bhp hybrid. But these are less likely to be built in righthand-drive, given the sales volumes. 2 THE PUSHROD CLINGS ON The base Corvette C8 Stingray (order in the UK from official importer Ian Allan Motors) has a 6.2-litre pushrod V8 (below), and that will be combined with a front-mounted e-motor, driving the front…

The man credited with bringing dynamic excellence to the mainstream has died after suffering a heart attack on his farm in Wales. Richard Parry-Jones, the rally enthusiast who rose to be Ford vice-president in charge of 30,000 engineers globally, was 69. Terrible news for his family and friends. But the car world can take comfort from the fact that his philosophy of bringing brilliance to everyday cars – such as the Mk1 Mondeo, Focus and Ka – has spread throughout the industry, led by protégés such as Ulrich Eichhorn (who went on to do great work with VW and Bentley) and Matthias Tonn, who made the Mustang Mach-E drive so well. ‘He really transformed Ford into a car company with a reputation for great driving cars. He could translate a…

Three interesting new maritime watches have just been released, by American, German and Swiss makers, and in a range of styles from straight vintage reissue to strikingly simple modernism. Your holiday swimming might be in chilly British waters instead of the Mediterranean this summer, but you can rely on any of these three to tell you when your five minutes is up and hypothermia is about to set in. 01 | Bulova Oceanographer 666 £469 Launched in ‘72, the original Bulova Oceanographer was nicknamed the ‘Devil Diver’ for the 666-feet depth rating. Using imperial units instead of the standard 200-metre professional diver’s watch rating was US-based Bulova’s way of flipping the bird at its stuffy Swiss rivals. It’s just been reissued at a very keen price. uk.bulova.com 02 I Mühle…

THE WORLD’S BEST WRITERS IN THE NEW CARS THAT MATTER The wider wing, the aggressive diffuser and the fat twin-exit exhaust signal that this car means business Just as the impala instinctively knows exactly what to do when it spots a hungry lion on the prowl, traffic ahead seeks collective shelter in a move-over swarm reflex as soon as the silhouette of the winged 911 rises in the mirror. When we let our GT3 off the hook for the first time on the A33 that links Bielefeld and Brilon, where it meanders through horse breeders’ paradise, not once is there a need to even wait, let alone flash the quadbeam LED headlights. Adding to the unreality is the speed with which you find yourself approaching your prey. The 503bhp 2021…

This has to be in contention for Lightest Facelift of the Year 2021. But who cares? It’s a John Cooper Works Mini! What a fun chassis this continues to be, with the JCW bits finessing the great basic recipe. It’s firmly sprung and tightly wound, as if it’s repressing some inner rage at not being midway through a series of sweeping switchbacks in the Alps. So inevitably there are times when it clumsily trips over every rut and lump with fierce jolts in town, engine growling and exhaust burping at passers-by. But it’s still a Mini, and ours is an automatic one at that; it still deftly manages to zip around sharp corners, taking advantage of gaps in the traffic and relieving you of clutch crawling when it gets busier.…

Why is it here? The non-German premium alternative gives you a sleek exterior teamed with a cockpit that looks like a posh kitchen. The car feels fashioned from marble, from the heavy controls and door handles to the way it pummels mid-corner bumps with dampers you’d normally find on a superbike. A safe pair of hands with a wild side. Any clever stuff? Suspension by Öhlins, brakes by Brembo, dust caps and seatbelts by Polestar. The former has 22 clicks of compression and rebound adjustment to fine-tune the ride and handling – we’d recommend the softer end of their scale for UK roads. The ultimate in handling personalisation? Or just too tempting a prank to wind your friend’s left strut to its firmest setting and the right to its softest?…

The modern-day Bernie Ecclestone (with a dash of Simon Cowell), Alejandro Agag has persuaded some of the biggest names in motorsport to sign up to his electric rally raid. Owners of the nine teams include Nico Rosberg, Chip Ganassi, Michael Andretti and Lewis Hamilton, whose X44 squad is run by Prodrive. F1 2009 world champion Jenson Button is both an owner and pedaller. Other legends in the driving line-up include double World Rally champion and three-time Dakar winner Carlos Sainz, two-time DTM champ Mattias Ekström, three-time World Rallycross champ Johan Kristoffersson, reigning WRX champ Timmy Hansen, and nine-time WRC champ Sébastien Loeb. Beyond these familiar names are some intriguing female team-mates. Uniquely, Extreme E insists on a 50/50 gender balance to drive diversity in motorsport. At 22, the youngest is…

If money is no object and practicality not your priority, I’d say take a look at the Giulia GTAm, Alfa’s new £156k, 532bhp track-focused two-seater. Or perhaps the combination of £67,195, a 503bhp V6 and actual back seats is more you, in which case you might fancy the Giulia Quadrifoglio, basically a more sensible version of the same. But if you want a large helping of sporting flavour in a much more affordable package, this Giulia Veloce is right up your strada. The Veloce won the driver’s-choice gong in our BMW 3-series mega-test two years ago, though it was marked down on a couple of shortcomings, including interior quality and infotainment. So the Giulia was always good if imperfect, but now it’s been refreshed with more polish. A stint on…

We have long-term test cars to see how they cope with daily use, but after a few months there’s a danger you start to mellow to a car’s quirks. Note-taking, especially during the first few weeks when everything is a new experience, is thus crucial – even if you’re out with the family and haven’t yet paid for the parking because you’re busy scribbling in your pad. Case in point, the e-Tron’s virtual door mirrors. To begin with they were a MASSIVE DEAL. Now they’re just the mirrors on our Audi. And now I’m used to tilting my head down a little further to see the screen mounted inside the door, whereas initially I kept looking out at the camera arm. I’ve also got used to the images on the…

Oh Lordy; how annoying Laura, the Octavia’s voice-activated assistant, has become. Last month, after an initial flurry of oft-rebutted experimental directives, I gleefully listed Laura’s reluctance to butt in unbidden as one of her primary merits. Alas, the very next day I climbed aboard and – a hallmark of those for whom smoking long ago sloshed eagerly across the tar-laden moat that separates hobby from habit – unleashed a single, rewardingly phlegmatic cough... ‘How Can I Help?’ enquired Laura before – without so much as a by your leave – turning the heating up one degree on the passenger side. Indeed, once initially woken from her slumber by half an hour’s tomfoolery with the elder hooligan a few weeks ago, Laura is proving to be something of a light sleeper;…

What do you do after moaning about a manky car in a previous report? Wash it. With the weather drying and getting warmer, time to get down and dirty with a big yellow sponge and some microfibre cloths. A good wash is just what the doctor ordered to bring out the gorgeous Soul Red paintwork. It really shows off the smooth surfaces of the 3. But before washing, it was interesting to note the patterns where the airflow had pushed all that muck around. The edges of the rear doors seemed to be the focal point, and the entire rear end gunks up very quickly – so even with regular wiping down, the rear camera continues to be blinded on a regular basis. Pre-lockdown, I’d often save time by getting…

CARS, PEOPLE, SCOOPS, MOTORSPORT, ANALYSIS – THE MONTH ACCORDING TO CAR In the space of a fortnight, the same company unveiled a rear-wheel-drive coupe that exists purely for driving pleasure and an electric SUV that heralds the start of a new drive to save the planet. Welcome to 2021, Toyota-style. And, this being Toyota, there’s nothing random about these polar-opposite announcements. In fact, the seeds were sown in the late ‘90s when Toyota backed hybrids while others were going big on diesels. That turned out to be a very smart move; it’s sold 70 million hybrids. And now, while others are urgently diverting resources to electric replacements for cars that emit high levels of CO2 – or eschewing sporty flagships, such as Nissan Europe with the next Z car and…

GETTY Funny lot, rally drivers. If it’s not hurting, and leaving the car in tatters, that means they weren’t trying hard enough. So the World Rally Championship’s toughest event, Kenya’s Safari Rally, is welcomed back to the calendar for the first time since 2002 – but with a hint of regret that it won’t be as tough as it was. The last Safari Rally with WRC status was won by the Ford Focus RS driven by the late Colin McRae with co-driver Nicky Grist. ‘Safari was always exceptionally long, very rough and very tough on a car,’ recalls Grist, still heavily involved in Welsh rallying. ‘It’s not a question of driving flat out. It’s about driving as fast as you can, but slow enough that you don’t damage the car.…

Illustration: Chris Rathbone VINCENT COBÉE CITROËN CHIEF EXECUTIVE Vincent Cobée is in turn colourful, cryptic and comical. There’s a touch of the philosopher, appropriate given his nationality and the car brand he runs that’s steeped in original thinking: Citroën. This originality courses through two new bookends of the range – the electric Ami shared-mobility pod, and the flagship C5 X crossover, which mixes saloon, estate and crossover elements to create a distinctive concept. ‘We’re entering what I call Citroën 2.0, that’s Ami, plug-in hybrids, the new C4 with fully electric version, and the one coming next [C5 X] which is something like a large sedan,’ summarises the brand CEO. ‘I like the analogy with sport: we’ve got back on our feet, become credible and now we are starting to run.…

The Kacher criterion I usually have a least one day a week when I leave home at 6am, have a 200-mile drive to a 9am meeting, then I head to the office for a couple of hours before getting home at 6pm, arriving unstressed and relaxed, currently aided by my trusty Range Rover. Previously I ran a Range Rover Sport, and before that a Mercedes S-Class. So I fully understood Georg Kacher’s words in the S-Class comparison test in the March issue: ‘Cold, wet days a long way from home: why these cars exist.’ In the same edition Phil McNamara bemoans the 150-mile real-world range of the Mercedes EQC, and Ben Barry admits he could not live with the 180-mile range of the Porsche Taycan. I tried and failed to…

Meet Tobias Moers, CEO of Aston Martin as of 1 August 2020. After 26 years at AMG, the wiry, curly-haired father of two picked up the phone last spring to return a call to Lawrence Stroll, Canadian billionaire, motor racing aficionado and soon-to-be majority shareholder of the well respected British car maker. The British car maker that has, in its rollercoaster history, filed for bankruptcy no less than seven times. Earlier last year, Stroll – whose son is successfully competing in his fifth F1 season – had demoted the previous CEO Andy Palmer before offering Moers the top job. Under normal circumstances, the veteran AMG manager would have been immune to such a drastic career change. But after Mercedes appointed Markus Schäfer instead of Moers as its new R&D chief…

The overlap between Extreme E and the plight of the hawksbill sea turtle may sound a stretch, but the series is aiming to do more than just make EVs look exciting. Many have decried the series’ green claims as a gimmick. Arguing against that view is Richard Washington, Professor of Climate Science at Oxford University. He’s an expert in deserts as well as a member of Extreme E’s Scientific Committee. ‘I’m a motor racing fan, which makes me an unlikely climate scientist,’ he says. When the call came from XE he said yes ‘instinctively’. The transport sector, he explains, is responsible for 30 per cent of carbon emissions. ‘If we can find a way to clean that up we’ve solved a big chunk of the problem. Here you’ve got SUVs…

To drive and to look at, the Corsa-e is utterly conventional. Power source aside, there’s nothing unusual about it. Which, depending on your approach to electric mobility, is either a very good thing or a missed opportunity. Good if you want to segue from ICE to BEV with minimum disruption. But disappointing if you’re keen to tell the world you’ve started futureproofing your transport decisions. Look past the sober sheet metal. Put aside the ergonomically excellent but generic cabin. Ignore the odd juxtaposition of a penny-pinching solitary USB socket sitting alongside expensive matrix LED lights. Focus instead on the driving dynamics. Yes, it’s heavy (550kg more than the lightest petrol Corsa), but 192lb ft of instant punch means it can really fly along, while the combination of weighty and accurate…

1 MAZDA MX-5 It had to be top of this list. A buzzy 1.5 and a leggier 2.0-litre are on offer, plus editions with wild paintwork. Few cars offer such sharp handling at such a keen price. Nab one from £24,055. 2 TOYOTA GR YARIS Currently the darling of the hot-hatch world thanks to its punchy engine, rabid pace and rally-car looks. The Circuit Pack unlocks its full potential – you won’t regret it. It’s £30,020 without, £33,520 with. 3 PORSCHE 718 CAYMAN The cheapest Porsche has ace dynamics and a badge you can really brag about. Even so, we’d recommend the 4.0 GTS if you can stretch to it. The range starts at £45,230, or £65,390 for the GTS. 4 ALPINE A110 One of our favourite small sports cars:…

CLASSIC ADDITIONS CAR COVERS Prices vary Classic Additions supplies a range of high-quality indoor and outdoor car covers. The standard-fit range includes the best-selling Super Soft Stretch indoor (pictured) and Ultimate outdoor covers. If you would prefer something bespoke, Classic Additions also offers custom-made indoor and outdoor covers that are fully tailored to the shape of the car and hand-made in the UK. classicadditions.com CLASSIC ‘TRIPOD’ HEADLIGHTS From £199.99 + VAT New from Better Car Lighting are these reproduction ‘tripod’-style headlights for classic cars running 12-volt electronics. The seven-inch lights, reproducing the classic PL700 look, are available with either halogen or LED bulbs. Left- and right-hand-drive versions are in stock. They’re high-quality items that come with a five-year guarantee. www.bettercarlighting.co.uk INSPECTION CAMERA FROM LASER £380.98 This portable inspection camera allows…

Playtime is over. After years of fiddling around with camera mirrors, projector lights and the contents of the Porsche’s parts bin, Audi’s turned its attention to two big chunks of the mainstream market for its next EVs: compact SUVs and executive saloons. Enter the Q4 e-Tron and A6 e-Tron concept. You might think all Audis are serious, but its EV offerings so far have arguably been either a dip of the toe (the e-Tron SUV) or something inaccessible to many (the Porsche-based e-Tron GT). This new pair are Ingolstadt stepping up its commitment to the EV future. What’s so special about the Q4? This the first Audi to use the VW Group MEB platform (the one beneath the VW ID range). Audi has decided the deploy it as a compact…

The physical world is blending with the virtual one. Augmented reality, arguably no more than a gimmick in the video game industry, is being applied in possibly its most usable set-up yet – aiding drivers on the move. VW’s new ID.3 and ID.4 can be had with this technology, clunkily called an augmented-reality head-up display (AR-HUD), with those two new EVs being the cheapest way into the tech. While available as part of an option pack on either of these models in Europe, the system is built into certain trims as standard in the UK. In the case of the ID.3, that’s Tech and above, and for the ID.4 you need top-spec Max. Audi’s Q4 e-Tron and the Cupra Born (which is the same as the ID.3 underneath) will both…

Flick through the pages of CAR and you’ll often find us moving from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the Bentley Bacalar high-fives both, all by itself. Let’s get the ridiculous out of the way. At £1.5m plus taxes the Bacalar is egregiously expensive for a modified Continental GT. And the whole idea of a Speedster-esque version of a car that weighs as much as a Range Rover had most of us in the CAR team rolling our eyes so far back in our head we looked like a bank of Vegas slot machines, mid-spin. And then there’s the fact that having removed the rear seats and entire hood assembly (there’s not even an emergency top) and its accompanying motors, substantially lightening the back end of the car, Bentley’s engineers…

The BMW 420i versus Audi A5 Giant Test in the February issue was one of the most informative and emotive articles I’ve ever read on any (real-world) cars. Real hairs-on-end and lumpin-throat stuff about the 2000 CS and 2002, and about the inexorable rise of EVs and SUVs. Just last week I ordered a new 420i, admittedly without having driven one and therefore with severe misgivings, coming as I am from a relatively torquey 420d Gran Coupe. However, having taken on board your comment about it being ‘criminally underpowered’ I contacted the dealer yesterday to upgrade to a 430i. Therefore, while I blame you for my current states of domestic disharmony and increased impecunity, I thank you in advance for the next four years (at least) of undoubted driving pleasure.…

Imagine Jochen Rindt hadn’t died during practice for the Monza GP in 1970, and instead the 28-year-old Austrian walked away from his Lotus F1 car’s wreckage, then took race-day off to visit Alfa Romeo’s Autodelta works team at Balocco. Autodelta co-founder Carlo Chiti would’ve welcomed Rindt in this parallel universe, before inviting him to drive the Giulia Sprint GTA he’d steered to victory in Karlskoga, Sweden, four years earlier. Every detail would be preserved exactly as he last raced it. If it’s a romantic notion, that’s the gist of the blood-red 1600 GTA Corsa featured here, which has been impeccably restored by Bristol-based specialists Alfaholics to freeze-frame that victorious moment. It’s chassis number AR613102, the very car raced by Rindt three times (including that Swedish win), the little racing seat…

There’s a book in our house called Hamilton’s Hats, which is about a pig with an absurdly large headwear collection. I’ve read it to my son so many times I could recite it with my eyes closed. Open my skull and you’ll find it printed on my occipital lobe. I bring this up because Hamilton’s on my mind even more so than normal while driving the Peugeot 508 Sport Engineered, a car with an equally over-abundant number of metaphorical hats. A sleek fastback, a business-class motorway cruiser, a zero-tailpipe-emissions penguin-pleaser and now, apparently, a powerful sports car too. That’s quite the CV. Does that overcomplicate things? Most Sport Engineered 508s will be bought by company-car drivers, who you might think are easy enough to please – a posh badge to…

You join me in the Saudi Arabian desert, where nature has created a soaring and tumbling racetrack threading its way between vast sandstone rock formations. Marshals have warned me to be careful of snakes and scorpions, and I’ve discovered the skeleton of a long-dead camel just off the racing line. You don’t get this at Silverstone or Spa-Francor- champs. Approaching at speed is the eldritch hum of a jacked-up EV; a giant dust cloud stretching in its wake. Extreme E is The Blue Planet meets Mad Max. Here, in AlUla, electric SUVs are doing battle across jaw-dropping terrain. But Extreme E (or XE, for short) goes beyond that. The Desert X Prix is the first of five rounds in this year’s championship, with Senegal’s Ocean X Prix next up, followed…

DRIVING CAN IT DRIVE AS GOOD AS IT LOOKS? How do you make an i-Pace or ID.3 instantly look dated? Park it next to the new Hyundai Ioniq 5. A sleepy evening in Oxfordshire and, as we plug in for a top-up, you can’t miss the mixture of envy and bewilderment on the faces of the Jag and VW EV owners we meet. They thought they had the coolest EV on the block. They don’t. A fantastic start, then. But there’s more to a good family car than just eye-popping looks. Ford’s Mk1 Focus, for example, combined progressive design with family friendliness and ace handling dynamics. Rolling out of the charge station, we join the M40, heading north. The adrenaline junkie within immediately gets the better of me on the…

One of the highest roads in the Alps, in one of the snowiest bits of Switzerland, the Furka Pass is a rare gem of a road, even when its neighbours include the rightly lauded Gotthard Pass. Start planning your 2022 driving holiday now but, when you actually get there, be prepared for bad weather – conditions are changeable in the extreme, and the Furka’s a challenging road even in the dry… 1 Hairpins for days As the Furka climbs from the valley to the peaks above, this section is stuffed with myriad brake-wilting hairpins. Best start practising your double-declutching… (Or, if that’s too much effort, just buy the twin-clutch version.) 2 Rhone glacier Once sprawling to within a few metres of the road, the giant glacier has since retreated further…

Alex Tapley I can fill just about any car to the brim, but the Sorento always has space to spare Here’s how unpretentious and no-nonsense the Kia Sorento is: the most over-egged aspect of this big, straightforward seven-seat SUV is that the entry-level version is badged 2, rather than 1. And that’s your lot. Everything else about it is in the spirit of Ronseal – it does what it says on the tin – or Barry Scott, the no-BS voice of Cillit Bang cleaning products. Need a quick refresher on what exactly the Sorento is? Yup, me too. Now in its fourth generation, it’s the biggest SUV sold in the UK by Kia. It’s roughly the same size as the Skoda Kodiaq, Peugeot 5008 and Nissan X-Trail. It’s a seven-seater,…

It’s not on the raggedly surfaced but gloriously empty roads of the Lake District that it all makes sense. Nor is it on the M6. No, it’s in a traffic jam near Stoke where I finally appreciate the full glory of the Cayenne S Coupe. I already knew it was great on twisty country roads, and that it was happy on motorways. But the Stoke epiphany sealed the deal. Because a traffic jam is actually a very tricky place for a car to shine. So many ways to fail: too cramped, too uncomfortable, too noisy, too jerky as the stop-start mechanism judders into action, and too many ugly or flimsy bits of plastic that you can ignore while you’re driving along but become the depressing objects of your unwilling fixation…

When I first joined CAR I was handed the keys to a Civic Type R, and it’s still one of my favourite hot hatches three and a bit years on. I’ve just driven a current version – it’s still great – to compare it with my Ford Focus ST. The first big difference comes as soon as you get in. The Type R’s low, sporty seats plug you directly into its highly capable chassis, and it makes my Ford’s driving position feel like an MPV’s. On the Focus ST, you sit on the chassis, while in the Honda you’re part of it. Find some challenging roads, and the Honda has seemingly endless grip. Heavy steering in +R mode makes it feel like you’re scoring the road, and although the Civic’s…

Alex Tapley The Seven makes every journey special. Going to the shops feels like the Mille Miglia Just as a ballet dancer’s musculoskeletal system adapts and evolves, I’m pretty sure a Caterham driver’s body mutates in curiously specific ways over time. The Seven is gone but my fingers can still remember the contortions to unlatch the sidescreens from the outside, my neck still corkscrews to check over both shoulders whenever I change lanes on the motorway, and my right leg still hyperextends when climbing out of a car to avoid a non-existent hot side exhaust. It’s a souvenir of a few months in one of the world’s purest sports cars. The loan’s overlap with lockdown put epic road trips off the agenda but one of the Seven’s talents is to…