Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2020 i Fast Car

We’re going to have to shatter your illusions here right from the off, and admit that this car doesn’t actually exist. But knowing Ken Block, it almost certainly will at some point, and that’s a reason to get excited. You’ll probably be aware of this dude’s broad variety of custom Fords, be it for rally or Gymkhana purposes – Mk2 Escorts, classic Mustangs, new-wave Fiestas, sodding great pickups, he’s modded and thrashed the lot. And the next model in the crosshairs is the Fox-body Mustang – the often-unloved variant which is enjoying a little renaissance in Radwoodesque circles. These renderings you see here accentuate the Fox-body’s 1980s roots, with all those louvres and slashes, and Kenny from the Block’s plan is to base it around a nat-asp Roush V8 with…

This car, vivid and vibrant acid-yellow as it is, goes by the nickname ‘Shadow’. This might sound like an incongruous and bizarre name for something that’s so in-your-face it might as well have spilt your first pint in your debut post-lockdown pub trip, but the fact of the matter is that it comes from another age. This car wasn’t always this boisterous, and in fact it was always assumed that it would live in the shadow of its more raucous stablemate. You see, this isn’t the only Focus RS that its owner, Grant Butler, has lavished great care and attention upon. The other one is a car you may well be aware of – it’s deep purple and has 1010bhp, so you can imagine what a game-changer that was when…

How do you distil the essence of the supercar? It’s an intangible thing, there’s no hard-and-fast set of rules; we know that it has to be something unusual and out-of-the-ordinary, a car with flair and panache. One that looks sensational, and has colossal horsepower from an engine with many, many cylinders. It should stop people in their tracks, cause grown-ups to mop their brows and kids to whip out their phones and snap it for the ’Gram. What we’re trying to pin down here is a formula which refuses to be defined: the wow factor. There have been countless interpretations of the supercar concept over the last five or six decades. Sylph-like Italian masterpieces, brutal American tyre-slayers, artisanal British craft creations… some manufacturers have even managed to sanitise the formula…

Italian brake gods, TAROX, may now be Ford’s official supplier for OEM performance gear, but that doesn’t mean that older cars in the Blue Oval range aren’t still benefiting from the genius of their aftermarket division. There are new fitments coming out all the time and we suspect that a back-catalogue of Ford models will be high up on their agenda going forward. Take this awesome Mk6 Fiesta ST Sport Kit for starters. It’s a cracking little car already and worthy of the ‘Sports Technology’ badge, but like all cars, the little track-day hero could always benefit from a little more stopping power – and that’s exactly what this no-nonsense upgrade offers. Available with either 300 or 330mm discs, along with huge, 6-pot billet calipers, there’s absolutely no messing about…

REC X RWB Watch, £1450 Now, there aren’t many of us that have the cash to commission Akira Nakai-san to build us a genuine RAUH-Welt Begriff 964, and even if you do have the money, would you have the patience, as Nakai-san has a fairly substantial waiting list to get through? But, how about owning a piece of the most iconic RWB builds of all time, Stella Artois or Rotana? Well, RWB have teamed up with REC watches to produce these two, limited-edition pieces of arm candy that actually contain parts from those iconic cars. There are loads of cool little details that give a creative nod to the vehicles they represent too, and we’re not just talking about the matching colourways. The casebacks are inspired by the wheels, the…

BMW’s M division has always dabbled craftily with the fusion of the suave and the aggressive. Picture a stylish, crisply cut Savile Row suit; perhaps a sober black with a delicate charcoal pinstripe. But within it resides not an accountant or a lawyer, but a snarling bear with glistening rows of knife-sharp teeth, its rippling muscles barely contained by the genteel fabric. That’s basically what the original BMW M5 was. Unleashed upon the crowded executive/ midsize market in 1985, it took many a boy racer by surprise at the lights, looking for all the world like the motorway-munching wheels of a travelling salesman (albeit one who was doing rather well for himself). Beneath that stylish suit hid the chassis from the M535i and the engine from the spaceship-like M1; it…

We imagine that many of you, like us, grew up playing the Gran Turismo games on various consoles over the years. Back in the nineties, we remember queuing up at HMV to get the very first GT game… and cocking up the disc of GT2 by being a bit over-zealous with the weird scratch-and-sniff coating! Sony has recently announced the arrival of the PlayStation 5, and with it will come the latest chapter in the franchise, Gran Turismo 7. It’s a full-fat game, which will be great news for anyone who’s been playing GT Sport and missed some of the features it’s been lacking; GT7 will feature all sorts of new cars, as you’d expect, the graphics are sharper and more detailed than ever, and – best of all –…

MISHIMOTO BMW F23/F30 INTERCOOLER, £569 Ready for an item so sweet it’s guaranteed to make your teeth hurt? Well, just check out this big, bad bugger for F23/30 platform BMWs – it’s like properly “sick duuuude”, as our cousins across the pond like to say. The best bit though, is that there’s no sugar-coating necessary, this one is every bit the quality your posh blown Beemer deserves, and even comes in a choice of finishes - we’re liking the super-stealthy black option, just in case you were wondering. Anyway, this 6-inch thick monster FMIC increases core volume by 96-percent, and external surface area 130-percent over the standard part, and this means it can instantly bag you gains of up to 10whp on a stock tune. It even retains the factory-style…

The modern Mustang, the S550, has been with us for five years now, and it’s proving to be a bit of a tuning sensation with more and more quality upgrades appearing on the aftermarket. Here we bring you the best ones to start with… The world’s best-selling sports car ever, the Mustang has been an integral part of the motoring landscape since its big reveal at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Various attempts have been made to Europeanise the ’Stang over the years, but the S550 generation is the first to really do it properly – it follows the traditional Mustang format of being a big, brawny coupé with a rumbling V8, but the S550 also comes in right-hand drive for the UK market, so there’s no need…

One thing we’re always asked, or more specifically shouted at in petrol stations, KFC drive-thrus and the odd car show is: what are the first mods we’d bestow upon a new project? Well, first of all that always depends on the weapon of choice, doesn’t it? If it’s a diesel Beemer, we’d say a spot of ECU software. A street-storming Ford hot hatch is always ripe for some decent coilovers. And how about a Nissan Juke? We’d immediately drive it into the nearest tree, obviously. But, just to be fair to everyone in the wide world of modified car culture, we can generalise a little and narrow it down to the first five mods we’d recommend, for everything from the chassis to the audio system. So, this month, in the…

Vans are cool, that’s just a fact. They’re so much more than mere workhorses and load-luggers; sure, they grew out of necessity, but since the dawn of vanning, owners have been just as keen to make their own unique mark on them as car owners have. And with the Transit van being the daddy of them all, Ford’s ‘backbone of Britain’ has a long and diverse history of receiving the custom treatment. So the fact that Ford has now decided to create a mash-up of the new Tranny and the Stateside Raptor is pretty bloody awesome, isn’t it? What you’re looking at here is the Transit Trail, and it’s way more than a case of simply gluing on the fat ‘FORD’ grille from the Raptor. This is a van built…

Yeah, OK, we’ve had a pretty freaky few months, and we’re nowhere near through the worst of it yet. But at least things have eased to the extent that we’re allowed to drive our cars if we want. The rules have changed from ‘stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ to ‘look, just don’t f**k about, OK?’, so we’re able to go out for a drive if it’s a means to, say, go for a bit of exercise away from home, or whatever. Happy days. But now that we’ve emerged into a brighter new world, what are we met with? Basically, everyone hates us. Shit, isn’t it? It’s not our fault, we were playing by the rules. But all the time we were staying home and watching our pride-and-joys gathering…

STYLING: Wrapped by KW Kustoms in Hexis Metallic Gloss Yellow, Airtec Clubsport wide-arch kit, Airtec Clubsport front bumper, Maxton Design spoiler, sideskirt and rear bumper extensions in gloss black, Kuro carbon rear diffuser, Kuro carbon wing mirror covers, Kuro carbon bonnet vents, Monkey Wrench bespoke wing mirror repeaters, Monkey Wrench bespoke headlights, custom eyebrow covers, Zunsport top and lower badgeless grilles, carbon roof TUNING: 2.5-litre five-cylinder, Airtec Stage 3 intercooler, Airtec big boost kit, Airtec alloy radiator with twin fans, Airtec oil cooler, Airtec crossover and Group A filter, Airtec billet air-con delete kit, Airtec quick-shift kit, Vibratechnics lower gearbox mount, Anembo billet plenum, Extreme 400bhp map, recirc blanking plate, Milltek high-flow downpipe, Milltek decat, Milltek non-resonated back section, Sitech billet gearbox side spider mount, all plastics hydro-dipped in Lightning…

AUTOSTAR LEGEND-01, FROM £161 They certainly got the name right here, because there’s more than a whiff of legendary Ford design with this one. But, then again, we just don’t want to live in a world where properly classic wheel designs don’t make our pink bits go all funny. AutoStar say that the smaller version of the Legend is perfectly spec’d to suit the Mk7 Fiesta, which was exactly the car we were thinking of when we saw them. But, perhaps the best bit is both sizes will fit a whole load of other Fords, too. Whether it’s keeping a period look, or adding a little retro chic to a more modern motor, we reckon you just can’t lose. Get in there quick though – at the moment they’re shifting…

So-cool Distancing A paltry 2-meters, pahhh! After a couple of months of practice our lads are officially experts at keeping the hell away from everyone else. The boss has been out walking every morning, doing something middle class, we think they call it golf. Glenda has been getting some serious exercise too, with an online personal trainer that looks suspiciously like the man himself… if he was a fair bit thinner. Midge just hasn’t turned up for work on FCTV for weeks forcing Jules to get a few ringers in… or maybe he just been sacked, we’re not sure? And as for G? Well, he didn’t even know we were on lockdown in the first place, at his age you don’t get out much anyway. So, there you go, when…