Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2017 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

As the performance and potential of the hypercar genus heads ever upwards, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand we can marvel at them as feats of engineering that harness explosive potential and deliver a set of figures that, even half a decade ago, would have seemed fanciful. But this increased potency comes with increased frustration, as the chances to fully deploy the potential beneath your right foot are few and far between. Having been fortunate enough to have driven the latest crop of hypercars and supercars including the Bugatti Chiron, Lamborghini Huracán Performante and McLaren 720S, I can tell you that the experience for the most part involves being an involuntary element in several thousand social media posts. Watching in your rearview mirrors, hoping that the…

Heard the one about the 124mph car-sled? According to Tesla boss Elon Musk – and his “The Boring Company” offshoot (we’re not sure if Elon does irony, but that’s a cracking name) – it’s the solution to Los Angeles’ traffic woes. It appears Mr Musk, for all the autonomy and electrical wonder of his cars, hates LA’s infamous congestion as much as the next man. Difference is, his enormous brain can’t rest until he’s done something about it. So, he’s come up with a typically grand solution – the kind of solution you’d expect a Seventies film about the future to contain. The idea is you’ll park your car – a red Tesla Model S in his whizzy promotional video – on a street-level sled, which then plummets into the…

Lotus is being sold to Chinese car giant Geely. On the face of it, this is good news for Norfolk. Volvo has been owned by Geely this past seven-plus years, and has flourished and remained master of its own destiny. Lotus needs investment, and Geely can give it. Although Lotus has found the money from its own pockets to launch the next Elise, due in 2020. CEO Jean-Marc Gales said that over the past three years Lotus had stabilised and moved from big losses into a small margin of operating profit. “We came out of a deep, deep ocean.”…

Attention, fast Volkswagen fans and impatient Uber drivers looking to upgrade from a Prius – a brand-new fast petrol-electric Golf is here. Yes, VW already makes a hybrid “hot” hatch. It’s called the Golf GTE, but that makes do with just over 200bhp. This is much better. It’s called the VW Golf GTI First Decade, and its petrol engine alone develops a massive 396bhp. And all of it’s entrusted to the front wheels. The rear wheels, meanwhile, are spun by an electric motor with a mere 16bhp. Think of the e-motor as the GTI First Decade’s conscience. Once you’re done slewing around on fossil fuels, marmalising the front tyres at every roundabout, you can switch to battery power (making your Golf GTI rear-drive in the process) and cruise silently around…

1999 PORSCHE 911 GT3 Price: £76,500 (when new) Engine: 3600cc flat 6cyl, 360bhp, 273lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual, RWD Performance: 0–60mph in 4.8secs, 188mph Economy: 21.9mpg, 320g/km CO2 Weight: 1350kg In 1998 Porsche won Le Mans with the 911 GT1. This may seem an irrelevant way to start a story about the GT3, but it reveals just how close the link is between road and race at Porsche and also why the GT3 has such a stellar reputation. Winning Le Mans required a new engine, but the cost of developing it was prohibitive – unless Porsche could use that same engine in its road cars… This was the fabled Mezger fatsix. In the GT1 it was a 3.2-litre twinturbo; for the 996 GT3 that arrived the following year, it lost…

Your beloved chariot has reached a state of such unhygienic and frankly squalid grottiness that you’ve started to receive more than the usual number of threatening letters from the neighbours. Time to give your car a clean-up, but not before you’ve read TopGear’s handy guide to vehicular sprucifcation! 1) Choose your cleaning products Though a vast range of specialist car care brands is available on the market, not many people know that you can achieve a showroom shine with standard household cleaning products. TopGear recommends Pantene Pro-V shampoo for the frst wash, followed by an anti-dandruf conditioner for that fake-free salon fnish. If you wish to use car wax, please choose ethically. Turtle Wax may buf your car to a lusty shimmer, but you should see what they do to…

BEST BIT A possible end to thick charging cables. Could mean smaller batteries too WORST BIT Yet more miles of roadworks to lay the charge pads under tarmac Inductive charging for a mobile phone is, if we’re honest, pretty much the high point of decadence. You still have to put the thing down on a charging plate, and the charging plate still has a wire to the mains. So you haven’t cut any cables or clutter, you’ve merely saved your over-entitled frst-world fngers the two-second efort of shoving a plug up your phone’s little jacksie. But inductive charging for cars is diferent. Many public recharging spots don’t have a cable attached. You bring your own. When you come back, it’s been lying on an oily road, maybe in the rain.…

Are these cars even comparable? If the Civic Mk10 wants to be a credible family hatch force, it has to see off the best in the class, right? That’s the Golf Mk7, here fresh from its mid-cycle facelift where the big news was all-LED lights (not on this SE model), and a larger, worse (optional) touchscreen. The door’s open, Honda... Meanwhile, Honda’s completely reimagined the Civic with seemingly contradictory goals. It wanted to regain pole position as the besthandling car in the class, but also grew the wheelbase and body for more space. New 1.0-litre 3cyl turbo replaces the dated 1.4 motor. I thought downsizing was dead? There’s too much inertia in the car industry for that to take effect yet. Besides, though VW’s cylinder deactivating 1.5 is the headline-grabber,…

Elemental RP1 from £109,080 WE SAY: WE CAN’T WAIT TO SWAP THE BOBBLY HAT FOR A CRASH HELMET ON A CIRCUIT... Downforce. Everyone’s doing it these days. Firms from Porsche to Honda trumpet their fgures, claiming the extra 100kg of aero weight that’s delivered at 150mph, is vital not only to their claimed ’Ring lap time, but your morning commute too. Well, this is the only car I’ve ever driven where I can confdently say I noticed the downforce at normal road speeds. That’s because it develops a lot of it and doesn’t weigh very much. This is the Elemental RP1. You might remember I frst drove it as a prototype getting on for two years ago. It’s the work of a small team, some of whom used to work…

Audi SQ5 TFSI £51,200 WE SAY: AUDI’S FAST CROSSOVER USED TO BE DIESEL ONLY. FOR GOOD REASON? Normally, when Audi puts a new model on sale, it predicts one in 10 of the ones it sells will be a sportier S model with four exhaust pipes to complement its 4WD. S1, S3, S4, you know the policy. So it was pleasantly bowled over when the old SQ5 rocked up in 2010 and took 15 per cent of Q5 sales worldwide. In Europe, and particularly Britain, where we didn’t see the petrol version, but got a V6 turbodiesel, it was more popular still. This wasn’t a fast Audi that sold of the back of a smart badge alone, either. It was agile, comfortable, sounded uncannily throaty, and was quick. The run-out…

The VW I.D. Buzz is a concept car and I slept in it. I also read, ate, typed and got changed in it. I even drove it. All of which you might see as entirely irrelevant, given VW may never put it into production. Only this isn’t irrelevant. In fact, this is probably the most relevant thing you could possibly do with a concept car – take it to its natural environment and see if it stacks up. See what actual people think of it. See what it looks like when it’s not on a spinning plinth. See if it can do the job it’s designed to do. It’s important to do this not only because this is a relevant test, but also because the I.D. Buzz is a relevant car.…

There’s something in the air at Imola, a sense of gravity… a duty to drive well. And it’s weighing heavily on my bowels. There are nerves. It’s not the Senna thing – Tamburello corner (once fat with 20 seconds of full throttle, now a chicane) has been toned down since then. It’s not the fact that this new Huracán Performante is now ofcially the fastest combustion-engined production car around the Nordschleife, or that I’m waiting in the pit lane and raindrops are pinging of the windscreen. No, it’s that the editor, who’s already driven a Performante prototype around here, concluded it was “pretty much uncrashable”. Why on earth would you say that? The Lamborghini Huracán Performante is what happens when you lock a Huracán in a cage, feed it raw…

Our Car of the Year is fnally in the TG Garage. I know this as everyone in the ofce keeps pestering me for the keys. And they will get to drive it. But not right now, as I’m running RJ66 KYZ as an experiment. See, a lot of my esteemed colleagues are, um, ageing men. And so they’re completely love drunk on Alfas; spouting words like “passion”, “soul” and “greatness” when talking about cars badged with a man being eaten by a serpent. But I’m not like them. I’m a millennial. And not the good kind that grew up learning HTML code before I could speak. I was the awkward Nineties kid that befriended Tamagotchis and had Sea-Monkeys for pets. So, I simply don’t get the whole ‘Alfa Thing’, as…

You might ‘look’, but car designers ‘read’. And the frst read of a new car is usually the most signifcant. This is the one that generates the gut-punch, the wow, or possibly the eeeuurghh. That frst instant you clap eyes on something is also the one in which your mind is invariably made up. BMW’s 8-Series concept is challenging because it isn’t particularly challenging. In a good way. Sitting in a hangar in BMW’s Miramas test facility in France, it issues one statement on that frst read: it’s beautiful. Simple as that. There’s nothing jarring about its proportions, its form is that of the classically elegant luxury coupe, and your eye will wander in vain in search of a gimmicky detail. What gives? Aren’t concept cars meant to blast brands…

his is the Rolls-Royce Sweptail – a bespoke one-of built for one of Rolls-Royce’s “most valued customers”. Inspired by the “swept-tail” Rolls-Royces of the Twenties and Thirties, work began on the Sweptail in 2013, when an unnamed, exceptionally wealthy fellow asked Rolls to build him a “one-of luxury motor car like no other”. So it did. And it was shown at the Villa d’Este Concorso d’Eleganza this May. Amazing what a blank cheque will do. The grille is the largest ftted to any modern-era Rolls-Royce. It’s milled from a single piece of aluminium, before being hand-polished to a mirror shine. Further back, you’ve the “swept-tail” that gives the car its name, while Rolls says the way the bodywork wraps under the car “with no visible boundary to the surfaces” is…

Just in case you weren’t convinced Mercedes-AMG was actually going to put an F1 engine in a street-legal hypercar, here’s the evidence. It’s happening. This is the powertrain of the Project One hypercar. Looks pretty exotic, right? At the N24 endurance race, AMG boss Tobias Moers also confrmed the frst few specifcation titbits for the brand’s ultimate fagship. Get a load of this: the engine remains a 1.6-litre turbocharged V6, and it red-lines at 11,000rpm. Then there’s the army of hybrid motors: an 106bhp booster for the turbo, a 159bhp motor on the V6 crank itself, and two 159bhp motors at the front axle, for instant getaway, mighty turn-in torque-vectoring and, all combined, a 15-mile zero-emission range. Moers is particularly proud of the engine’s 40 per cent thermal efciency. Toyota…

When you’ve got an electric car and that kind of power, we do one lap on one full charge. Seven minutes in the car. You can’t run lap after lap getting quicker and quicker. I start around the corner, having gone the wrong way down the track, line the car up, then say, “get ready, here I come”. I have to push right from the start. I’ve still only done eight laps of the ’Ring in this car, across three days. And the second day I only got one lap because it was soaking wet. If you look at the Porsche 918, they ran day after day after day, whittling the time down, but we had to get it right. The homework was done at the factory, we did two…

The Mercedes-AMG S63 Coupe is the consummate GT car. A luxurious four-seat coupe, it cloaks a ballistic V8 turbo engine beneath subtle looks, with a cocooning cabin tucked behind. A thunderous blitz to the horizon if you want it, and a plush, quiet sitting room of a motorcar if not. Not the S63 you’re looking at here, of course. German tuner Fostla does not see the svelte S Coupe as the consummate GT car, but a blank canvas to wrap in orange chrome, tack massive arches upon, then shoehorn 730bhp beneath. And then rename “Combat Monster”. At least the outside lane of the Autobahn should clear quickly……

BMW M4 CS £89,130 WE SAY: HOW IS IT THAT A TRACK-HONED CAR CAN ACTUALLY BE BETTER ON THE ROAD TOO? You know the story. Cars that work on the ’Ring don’t work on the road. Well, it’s nonsense. Has been for ages. And the car you see here is the latest to dispel the myth. It’s the BMW M4 CS. If you know your M cars beyond their model codes, you’ll immediately recognise how cool those two fnal letters are. If you don’t, it’s the middle ground between the regular M4 and the bonkers, two-seat M4 GTS. Its £89,130 pricetag, 454bhp power output and 7m38s Nürburgring lap all sit roughly halfway between the M4 range’s book-ends. Yep, BMW’s quoting the one lap time that works the internet’s keyboard warriors…

This is probably the part where I should wafe on about the simple pleasures of driving a convertible: the wind whipping about your jowls, the sun holding you in its warm embrace, not just the sight, but the smell of the countryside streaming by. Then, I’d trot out some statistics about UK motorists buying more drop tops than anywhere else in Europe, for some unknown reason. But the truth is, I don’t much care for convertibles. I like the idea of them, but the reality? Not so much. I can’t hear hands-free calls, they mess up what’s left of my hair, I get sunburn within 12 minutes (even on a cloudy day) and should I choose not to get roof down when the temperature creeps over 15ºC for all the…

The news bulldozed through the petrolhead internet on the morning of Wednesday, 1 March 2017. Lamborghini had done it. We all presumed, after the Porsche 918 Spyder obliterated the production car lap record around the Nürburgring Nordschleife – becoming the frst fully fedged road car to dip below the seven-minute barrier in the process – that its 6min 57.00sec run would remain the standard for the foreseeable. Attention was focused more on the four-door saloon battle and the arrival of the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, and whether Honda or Volkswagen would emerge with the spoils from the front-drive niche of ’Ring bragging rights. Yet there it was. An almost poetic press release, a crucial on-board video and a time. The Lamborghini Huracán Performante, driven by N24 racer and GT3 motorsport…

In the most recent series of TopGear, Matt, Chris and Rory were challenged to a race across Kazakhstan to witness a rocket launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The hook was that they each had to choose a car that had travelled over 480,000 miles – the distance to the moon and back. Chris chose a Volvo V70, Rory a London black cab and Matt an ancient Mercedes E-Class which, despite having done half a million miles, ran pretty much faultlessly throughout. If that’s what Matt’s former Berlin taxi was capable of, the mind boggles at what my current generation E-Class could achieve. The bulk of E-Classes sold worldwide will have the new 2.0-litre four-cylinder diesel engine, which should be extremely reliable as the R&D that has gone into its making…

With 2,000 miles under its belt, the GT is starting to showcase the diversity of its talents. Supercar law dictates you should go for most lurid colour available, but our choice of Pacifc Blue lends the McLaren a more sophisticated appearance. For my money, the GT is the best looking of the McLaren range, the glass hatch creating more elegant proportions across the rear deck, and the GT’s greater simplicity making it feel better resolved than its P1 and 720 relations. And does it turn heads? Few cars I’ve driven have had people reaching for their cameras faster. But looks are merely subjective and, in this incredibly competitive market segment, the GT has to back them up with performance capabilities and driving dynamics. The frst thing that strikes you is…

It’s the day after the wedding. For obvious reasons, the Aston had been left at the reception venue the night before. I could have got a lift to pick it up, but it was a bright, warm Sunday morning so I hopped on the mountain bike, shoved the Seasucker bike rack in my pack and pedalled to get it. So here’s the thing: the Aston wears the ribbon better than the bike. Hardly surprising? Well no, but the DB11 is a change of direction for Aston – it’s less trad, aimed at a more youthful, active demographic. The styling has a lot to do with that. The channels behind the windows that duct air into the depths of the car, venting it behind the rear spoiler to reduce drag –…

The new 911 GT2 RS has to be Porsche’s worst kept secret, but not a lot can prepare you for a passengerseat blast in the maddest and most powerful 911 ever built. This is what we know: the new GT2 RS will have “in excess” of 650bhp and 553lb ft via a heavily revised 3.8-litre twin-turbo fat-six pinched from the Turbo S. There’s waterinjection intercooling, new internals, unique turbos and more. It bins the Turbo’s 4WD, adds a sevenspeed PDK, and raids the GT department’s parts bin for all the best bits, adding some new ones for good measure. Note those headline power and torque fgures Porsche is currently communicating are conservative. Each comes with a greater-than symbol, suggesting fnal fgures will be signifcantly more… Just think about that for…

Skoda is hoping to put an end to cliches relating to abominable snowmen. It’s retiring the much-loved Yeti later this year and replacing it with an all-new car named the Karoq. The party-pooping Karoq also ditches the opinion-dividing proportions and looks of the Yeti and expands in length and width. The engine options are sensible TSI petrols and TDI diesels – but the most powerful version, which you probably shouldn’t buy but want to, has a 187bhp 2.0-litre TDI diesel, four-wheel drive and a slick-shifting seven-speed DSG automatic. It’s good enough for a 7.8-second 0–62mph time and suggests that there may even be room later on for a driver-focused Karoq vRS version, however odd that concept may seem. Being the pillar of sensible consumer advice we are, we even drove…

197BHP, 2.0L ENGINE T ere’s no superfluous power for its own sake here. T e GT86’s engine develops just enough grunt to feel fun and manageable in equal measure. It’s a perfect match for the chassis, and that’s what makes it such a pure driver’s car. SKINNY TYRES Toyota’s less-is-more approach doesn’t end with the engine. T e GT86’s narrow tyres allow confident drivers to override the traction control system for even more fun.. NIMBLE, RESPONSIVE STEERING You get seamless feedback through the steering wheel as part of the bargain, much of which is down to the perfectly optimised thickness, diameter and weighting of the wheel. SPORTS GEARBOX T e GT86 is available in automatic, but for the purest driving experience, you’d be well advised to go manual. Its gearbox…

Every new car that matters, ra ted or slated Volvo XC60 D5 AWD Auto Inscription Pro £48,150 WE SAY: IT’S GOT THE SAFETY THING COVERED, OBVS. AND MUCH MORE M eet Moosi. He works at Volvo’s safety lab. He’s a crash-test-dummy moose. His substantial bulk, as with a real one, balances drunkenly atop tall spindly legs. So he’s held in position by cables attached to the lab’s roof. A test car careers towards him, and just before impact the cables are released, so his vast torso slams into the car at windscreen level. It makes an awful mess of A-posts and roof structure, and of the crash-testdummy humans inside. But less of a horror-show than it used to, because Volvos are now reinforced against him Every time any Volvo comes…

Vauxhall Crossland X £18,290 WE SAY: IT’S A CROSS BETWEEN AN MPV AND A CROSSOVER. OF COURSE... In times of yore, ye small MPVs did fourish, and was the Vauxhall Meriva among the choicest. But it set no one’s heart afre, and lo in latter days do crossovers stalk the land. Vauxhall’s Mokka X doth sell like hotte cakes. Here endeth the saga. Not quite, actually. In the cold light of morning, SUV switchers might remember they have have to carry kids and their inconvenient appurtenances – pushchairs, sports clobber, grandparents. Small crossovers aren’t always that roomy, and tend to be a bit on the slow and thirsty side. So here’s the Meriva replacement, for a world that shunned small MPVs. The Crossland X has the high bluf nose of…

Mini Countryman Cooper SE £31,585 (excluding grant) WE SAY: IT’S LIKE A BMW i8. NO, REALLY, HEAR US OUT ON THIS ONE... Which new Mini is this? It’s the Countryman Cooper S E – a hybrid version of Mini’s small SUV. It’s the first plug-in hybrid Mini, and the first mainstream Mini with electrical propulsion. More will follow. Why the Countryman? It’s the only Mini big enough to consume batteries and an electric motor without impeding interior room. It’s also based on the same platform as the BMW 2-Series, which has a hybrid option. In fact, it uses the 225xe’s engine and motor: a 1.5-litre petrol engine drives the front axle, and an electric motor powers the rear, with a total of 221bhp and 284lb ft. It’s essentially the same…

VOLKSWAGEN UP GTI Price: £14,000 est Engine: 999cc, 3cyl turbo, 113bhp, 170lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual, FWD Performance: 0–62mph in 8.8secs, 122mph Economy: n/a mpg, n/a g/km CO2 Weight: 997kg On sale: early 2018 Vibration is pulsing through the Up GTI’s pedals and reverberating through its phat-bottomed steering wheel. Odd, given the littlest VW’s usually good as gold; refnement-wise, top of the tots. But it’s not the newest, teeniest VW hot hatch to blame. This being a German prototype, it’s fnished to an immaculate, eat-yourdinner- of-the-tartan standard. The heated plaid is simmering gently; its crystal-clear reversing camera is hooked up to the pin-sharp radio readout. Everything functions at showroom demo quality. But in the onslaught of an 8.0-litre, 16-cylinder, turbocharger-squared hurricane, it’s trembling. An Up GTI at eye level with a…

Meet Ben Chapman, a man with 20,000-odd windscreens on his CV. This is one of those apparently run-of-themill repair jobs that actually demands a serious amount of skill. A company called Laddaw stores all the new screens at its Birmingham depot, with twice-daily deliveries to Autoglass’s regional outposts. Fitters receive two weeks’ training, before heading into the feld with a seasoned pro, and then going solo. “The game’s always changing, there’s always new technology to get your head around,” Ben says. “It can be a challenge at frst, but I enjoy it.” At which point, he fnds himself dismantling the Scenic’s complex rear-view mirror: its housing has all sorts of sensors that need to be carefully detached. Two 10mm bolts hold the interior A-pillar trim in place, the black exterior…

From Zenos to Focus RS to new BMW 5-Series in the space of a year. Fair to say my purchase pattern isn’t a typical one for a 33-year old IC1 male, but at least it’s heading in a consistently more comfort-orientated direction. Honestly, though, I’m delighted, because while this new 5 is plush and sensible, this is the 261bhp 6cyl 30d version, which is one of the world’s fnest and fruitiest diesels. It’s also an xDrive, which upset me at frst, because it meant I wouldn’t be doing any fagrant skids. Then I realised that I wouldn’t be doing any fagrant skids anyway, but I now have a fghting chance when the weather turns foul. This is all part of the sensible new me, see. To keep an even keel…