BBC Top Gear Magazine 01-Feb 2015

CONTENT TEAM OF THE YEAR MOTORING MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR SUBSCRIBE TO TOPGEAR Get Britain’s number-one car magazine every month, delivered to you as a hefty paper ofering, an interactive app or a digital edition. See page 80 for more details TOPGEAR.COM Check out TopGear.com for your daily dose of TG. Or you can join us on Facebook and Twitter There are 12,000 aerospace-grade rivets in the upper section of Bloodhound SSC’s body. This multitude of tiny connections holds together a web of titanium panels, all of which have been painstakingly curved by hand into voluptuous three dimensions on an English wheel – a resolutely old-school coachbuilding tool. This is both terrifically skilled and hard work: aluminium is difficult enough to shape, and aluminium is several times more malleable than…

INTERWEB, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, LETTER, CARRIER PIGEON. YOU SEND IT, WE PRINT IT TWITTER.COM/BBC_TOPGEAR FACEBOOK.COM/TOPGEAR SECOND FLOOR A, ENERGY CENTRE, IMMEDIATE MEDIA COMPANY LONDON LIMITED, MEDIA VILLAGE, 201 WOOD LANE, LONDON W12 7TN FROM TOPGEAR.COM McLaren Special Operations has introduced us to this, a Gulf-coloured P1... So does this mean they could make a Martini one? Daniel The Porsche 918 comes in Martini livery (with the logo and everything). Yiannis Kaparos Bit of a problem here, Gulf colours look good on anything. Joshua VoVillia Anyone who thinks this looks better than the transparent purple-black over bare carbon fbre must be mad. Richard Harrold I once made the mistake of buying a Gulfliveried jacket at Le Mans. Alex Joe Mills SO MUCH YES. Sideways AMG GT S It looks like a GT40!!!…

I should have waited to write this. I’m tempting fate; this is a mistake. Anyway, I’m teaching myself to drive today. More specifically, to drive and ride. I’ve complicated my life in recent months by having a clear-out of some of the various hulks and wrecks lurking about the pile of mud and stone where I live and replacing them with more interesting, possibly even functioning, toys. And that’s the point: I undertook this exercise intending to simplify my life, to cut down on paperwork and maintenance and replace the many with the important few. So, gone are some of the bought-to-impress cars and flashy bikes – including a BMW HP4 road rocket of a bike I miss already and a Land Rover I should NEVER have parted with. And…

This, I suspect, is going to be a contentious question. Have Aston Martins ever really been any good? Glorious, yes. Caddish, of course. Likeable, most defnitely. A little bit knowing, quite possibly. A keystone of this nation’s sense of its own identity as evinced by the more memorable of its industrial products, like Mallard and Concorde – yes, yes, all right. But actually that good? I’m not sure. It pains me to say this, because as a lad I could imagine nothing more wonderful than a V8 Vantage (I’m talking about the one from the Seventies, which is when I was a lad, not the more recent one). The thought of that car kept me awake longer than the thought of Catherine Bradley did. Somewhere on the bookshelves, I still…

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT NEW CARS THIS MONTH EDITED BY SAM PHILIP The wait is over Honda’s hybrid NSX has landed at last TURN OVER OK, you can breathe out now. This is, at long last, the new Honda NSX in its production form. And with so many changes to the New Sports eXperience project over the seven years since the second-gen car was announced, let’s start by confirming exactly what the production spec is on the new version of Lord Ayrton’s favourite supercar. The NSX drivetrain is a 75-degree twin-turbocharged dry-sumped V6 mated to a nine-speed dual-clutch transmission. On top of that, there are three electric motors – one for each of the front wheels and another to fill in the torque gap when the engine’s turbos…

For all its dynamic flaws – and, sadly, there are many – one thing Alfa Romeo’s dinky 4C has never lacked is beauty. And now, thanks to the removal of its roof, the two-seat sports car has been rendered yet more jaw-slackeningly attractive. There’s no complex retractable folding hard top here, just a soft, stowable canvas rag. Buyers can spec an optional carbonfibre hard-top, but there’s nowhere to store it when the sun comes out. Apart from your garage. Thanks to the 4C’s pre-preg carbon-fibre monocoque, we’re told that the de-roofing hasn’t hindered the chassis stifness, or made the Spider stack on the pounds. Thinner glass in the windscreen and side windows, plus a new carbon-fibre windscreen frame bonded and bolted to the chassis, has kept the weight gain over…