Innholdsfortegnelse for Award 2017 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

For most people, 2017 will be remembered for Trump taking office, Brexit negotiations and P Diddy’s insistence that he be referred to as LOVE. While we live in strange times, the automotive world has provided a welcome distraction from the rolling 24hr news cycle of insanity that surrounds us. At the upper reaches of the performance stratosphere, the Bugatti Chiron proved that limitless engineering ambition and equally ambitious budgets could produce results that challenged our understanding of physics. Meanwhile the long-awaited, almost as rare Ford GT delivered on the brief of its Le Mans-conquering history, mildly civilised for the road. While over at McLaren, the 720S proved their momentum and endless pursuit of performance show no signs of slowing any time soon. Porsche’s GT division punctuated the year with a…

I learned to drive in my grandfather’s car: a MkII Ford Cortina 1600. On crossply tyres in the rain, it certainly taught you the rudiments of car control. It was quite tail-happy, and a great car to slide around roundabouts. When I frst got my licence, I remember going out with a friend in his Mum’s Hillman Imp, the day he passed his test, I think. We rolled that. It was a fairly early experience of getting into a ditch and skating along the side of the car. Touch wood, I’ve not been in too many big accidents. Mainly as a passenger, in fact. I was a passenger with a motoring journalist some years ago in Italy in a Jaguar XJR, back when it was a six-cylinder. We left the…

eco driving Save for the apparently inexhaustible supply of hapless X Factor auditionees, we live on a planet of fnite resources. We all need to do our bit to save energy, but what’s the most fuel-efcient way to drive? Let TG be your green gauge. Pump up your rubber According to science, increasing a car’s tyre pressure by 6psi will improve its fuel consumption by one per cent. Thus, according to maths, increasing your tyre pressure to a mere 600psi will reduce your fuel bills, and indeed grip, to zero! Clear out the junk A heavier car drinks more fuel, so any self-respecting eco-driving guide will implore you to ditch unnecessary weight before setting of. But frankly, how much diference can you really make by chucking out a few empty…

Back in WWII, some fighter planes had 'drop tanks' - fuel tanks that could be jettisoned once dry. giving less weight and therefore more speed and manoeuvrability After the war. car guys started buying them from military surplus places. They stuck V8s in the back and took them racing at Bonneville. There lies the inspiration for B&R's 'Bellytanker' collection. This one is a chrono and limited to 500 pieces. From £3,400; bellross.com PARMIGIANI FLEURIER BUGATTI TYPE 390 'An engine block on the wrist,' or so they claim. Figures, because Type 390 looks as big and almost as heavy PF's tribute to the Chiron is a flying tourbillon and features the world's smallest ball-bearing. 295,000 CHF; parmigiani.com TAGHEUER HERN AGE AUTAVIA SPECIAL ED. Jack Heuer is a bit of a legend.…

VW T-Roc SEL 2.0 TSI 4Motion DSG £31,485 WE SAY: ANOTHER OFFERING FOR THE OVERCROWDED SMALL CROSSOVER CLASS The T-Roc isn’t a practical family crossover – the longer Tiguan does that, using the same platform and engines. The T-Roc is the stylish one. It fulfls this superfcial role superfcially well. A whole clothes rail of diferent two-tone exteriors, painted wheels and cabin-trim options targets a crowd to whom it’s as much capsule wardrobe as it is car. The outside has arresting short, wide proportions – it’s actually a redressed Audi Q2. The shape is emphasised by chromework and beautiful LED lights. The sharpness of the crease lines in the rear doors is a small work of panel-pressing art. Indoors, out of sight of the Audidriving Joneses who you are trying…

Alpina B4 S Vauxhall VXR8 £63,000 £74,500 WE SAY: BADGE SNOBS, LOOK ELSEWHERE. AWAY FROM THE MERCS AND ALFAS, THERE’S SOME VERY TASTY SUPER-SALOONS OUT THERE FOR YOU... Why have we paired the Vauxhall VXR8 GTS-R and Alpina B4 S? For this simple reason: they’re alternatives to the obvious. I mean, if you’re in the market for a fast saloon, you might not be looking further than a Mercedes E63S or Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio. We wouldn’t blame you – both are mighty. But they’re also pretty full on, and that might not suit you. You might want something a little more relaxed and laid back. This has long been Alpina’s schtick: M Power speed, but punched through a velvet glove. The latest B4 S uses BMW’s N55 3.0-litre turbo as…

Jaguar F-Type 400 Sport £81,005 WE SAY: JAGUAR TURNS UP V6 F-TYPE. BUT NOT BY NEARLY ENOUGH... Porsche has been adding equipment, aesthetic tweaks and arbitrary badging to existing models for years. With the 911 GTS it basically added in the most exciting options on your behalf, stuck a new badge on the back and charged you for the privilege. The Jaguar F-Type 400 Sport is similar – it’s a limited edition that gets the 3.0-litre, supercharged V6 amped to a nice round 400PS (OK, 395bhp), the eight-speed auto (with the LSD), meatier brakes and the usually optional Confgurable Dynamics system which gives individual control over the steering, dampers and so on. You can have rear- or all-wheel drive, and the choice of a fxed or foldable roof. The former…

Few cars can have laboured under a greater weight of expectation than the Ford GT. It was commissioned, developed and delivered with the express purpose of winning the GT class at Le Mans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its forebear rubbing the prancing horse’s nose in it, back in 1967. With that part of the brief successfully delivered, focus turned to homologating the car for the road. A process that traditionally needed to be completed in advance of the car racing at La Sarthe, but one that Ford had managed to agree with the ACO to complete by the end of the year. No matter what the politics are (and there are a lot surrounding the GT and Le Mans), the result is genuinely jaw-dropping. Few cars ofer greater…

MUSCLE CAR OF THE YEAR At points, 2017 has felt like an all-you-can-eat bufet of bad news. However, humour is always a healthy combatant against hard times. Luckily, this year, we had Dodge’s hilarious SRT department and its laugh-out-loud, unhinged, drag-racing ultra-muscle-car – the Demon – to act as four-wheeled respite to the doom and gloom. When news of Dodge’s high-octane 840bhp, wheelie-popping production car hit our radar, it took days for our cerebral cortex to untangle itself so we could digest the long list of what Dodge’s burnoutmeister-in-chief Tim Kuniskis called its “bests and mosts”. Seriously, the ofcial press release was so thick with world frsts it may as well have been sponsored by Guinness; the world’s fastest production car to 60mph, the highest-horsepower V8 engine ever produced, the…

We're used to modern performance cars being faster than their predecessors. Such is progress; the McLaren 720S is miles quicker than a McLaren F1. And two decades ago that was just about the fastest thing you could drive on a public road without being relieved of your licence and thrown in jail. The Volkswagen Up GTI is a bit diferent. It’s just two tenths of a second quicker to 62mph than a MkI Golf GTI – a diference so miniscule it’d take far less than a botched gearchange for the old timer to pull away into the middle distance. That they’re more or less as quick as each other is no accident, because the Up is perhaps the most faithful, spiritual homage to the MkI Golf GTI since, well, the MkII Golf GTI. Today’s Golf is…

ROADSTER OF THE YEAR It’s a gamble, trying to put the roof down. Modern, mollycoddling drop-top supercars like these three all allow you to operate the roof mechanism while you’re rolling along. When you do, you look like an intergalactic, ocean-going tart. But, being able to trickle forward while stowing or unfurling the roof means every minute opportunity for a hit of open-air action can be seized upon. Just as well, as it’s forecast to rain today. Underneath ominous clouds, it’s the new Audi R8 V10 Plus Spyder (Plus meaning an additional 70bhp and that pert wing) and the Mercedes-AMG GT C Roadster (the wider, more powerful GT) that’ll streak into an early lead. Literally. While the McLaren 570S Spider languishes back at 25mph to let its origami hard-top retract,…

Haruna or Irohazaka, long sweepers, the camber always with you on the way up. They never tighten, either, so you just apply the lock, hold it there and then test the front end with your right foot, which plays perfectly into the Civic’s hands – it just digs in and begs for more. The way the steering weights up and tells you where you are is sublime, and my head starts to swim with the g-force before the grip runs out. The surface is immaculate, too, so for the frst time on the trip we can deploy +R mode, giving us a fraction more body control and throttle response. I’d prefer the Sport setting for the steering, though, rather than more artifcial weight, but the modes are the modes –…

Hello Audi SQ7 £72,895 OTR/£94,920 as tested JACK RIX Let’s get something out of the way, straight of the bat. I am a 33-year-old man with a wife and a child under one, so a 2.4-tonne “full-size” seven-seater SUV is technically… overkill. However, I’m a frm believer that you can’t have too much space, and if you’ve seen the amount of paraphernalia necessary for a family weekend away then we should be exploring every inch of the SQ7’s 705-litre boot. That’s with the third row folded down, electrically, of course. Fold the triple-split second row fat – a bafingly complicated afair involving tugging straps and pulling levers (the SQ7 came last in our patented World’s Greatest SUV seat-folding test (issue 295) – and there’s 1,890 litres. Enough to swallow a…

Goodbye Fiat 124 Spider £23,295 OTR/ £23,645 as tested STEPHEN DOBIE Cars like this are exactly why we run long-termers. The Fiat 124 Spider, on frst acquaintance, seems like a softer, stodgier-looking MX-5. After a night or two in one it’s easy to conclude that your money is best spent on the Mazda base car. But after seven months in RV66 LAA, it’s got under my skin. A rundown of its technical highlights doesn’t take long. It’s a classic roadster with a pure spec, its engine over the front axle and driving the rear wheels through a fabulous 6spd manual gearbox. The dials are analogue, the handbrake manual and your only choice of driving modes is whether you want the ESP on or of. The main diferentiator between the 124…

THINGS WE’VE LEARNT THIS MONTH “This is our dedicated sports car. It’s simple, pure energy, it’s a hunter. It has a fick in the tail and the lowest nose we’ve ever produced. If the DB11 is a samurai sword, this is a scalpel.” That’s design director Marek Reichman giving us a hands-on intro to the new Aston Martin Vantage. He’s fully spooled up now, arms fying everywhere, his language getting more design-speak by the second. I’ve pressed the pause button here, on his sword/ scalpel analogy, not to point and laugh at some marketing guf, but because in truth it’s rather key. We are witnessing the rebirth of a company, one that’s emerging from a decade where its products overlapped and leaked into one another like layers on a sub-standard…

The humble motor car and its place in our society has been having a bit of an identity crisis of late. Electric and hybrid cars – and our inevitable march towards robotised, self-driving boredom – dominate the landscape. Sometimes, it can get a bit depressing. Step forward Lamborghini, who clearly got this worldwide memo for sustainable motoring and immediately hit ‘delete’. For this new concept car, dubbed the Lamborghini Terzo Millennio, is quite simply nuts. The best kind of nuts, mind. The press release states that “the technological goal of the project is to enable Lamborghini to address the future of the super sports car in fve diferent dimensions: energy storage systems, innovative materials, propulsion system, visionary design, and emotion”. It’s certainly got the latter nailed – we’re experiencing upsetting…

Every new car that matters, rated or slated EDITED BY OLLIEKEW Jaguar E-Pace P300 R-Dynamic HSE £50,170 WE SAY: ON FIRST IMPRESSIONS, IT’S THE BEST-LOOKING, BEST-DRIVING SMALL CROSSOVER I suppose we should start with the name, because the name is going to confuse people. E-Pace is the small Jaguar crossover, cheaper and titchier than the F-Pace, same as how the junior XE saloon plays understudy to the executive XF. And you might reasonably expect the E-Pace to be a shrunken, cost-cut version of the F-Pace. It really isn’t. But back to the name, because no, the ‘E’ does not stand for ‘electric’. The electric motors in an E-Pace wind the windows up and down. There is no plug-in socket and you can’t have a hybrid. Turbocharged four-cylinder engines only, actually.…

Vauxhall Grandland X £22,310 WE SAY: VAUXHALL PLAYS IT SAFE. THE RESULTS ARE UNDERWHELMING Are you in the market for a mid-size crossover? Of course you are – everyone is these days. You probably want your crossover to be more than just practical, useful family transport. You want a crossover because of that SUV vibe, that hint of outdoor adventure you see in the adverts. In which case, this isn’t the car for you. The Grandland X is a join-the-dots SUV. Remember that GM sold of its European arm to PSA? Well, the Grandland X is based on the same underpinnings as the new Peugeot 3008, which lookswise is a cracker. The Vauxhall is plain – especially so inside, where there’s nothing to titillate or entice. It’s harmless and easy…

Mercedes-AMG GLC63S £75,670 WE SAY: A SUPER-CROSSOVER SHOULD BE BILGE… BUT IT’S INFECTIOUSLY LOVABLE Think of the new GLC63 as the collision point between the best bits of the C63 and E63 super-saloons, with Mercedes’s demure GLC faux-by-four. A respectable crossover with the C63’s 503bhp heart and the E63’s all-wheel drive and paddleshift gubbins. A thundering, gurning, exuberant force of “what would happen if” versus common sense. There’s a standard GLC63 with a 469bhp, 4.0-litre bi-turbo V8 for £69k, but it’s a relatively bargainous £6,750 hop up to the ‘S’, with an extra 34bhp and 37lb ft, and a microchip-managed rear diferential instead of a Victorian mechanical one. Obviously, the engine dominates it. This is a two-tonne machine but, dearie me, it’s fast. And it’s fast everywhere, such is the…

It may be a tiny, almost throwaway sentence in the specifications of the new Bentley Continental GT, but its significance shouldn’t be ignored. GT OF THE YEAR It reads “To optimise weight distribution and packaging of the W12 powertrain, the front driveshafts have to pass through the sump of the engine.” On further investigation, it becomes apparent that there’s just 1.5 millimetres of clearance between the spinny bits of the driveshaft and the up-and-downy bits of the engine – stop me if I get too technical here. Now, while this isn’t new – everything from a Ferrari FF to a Ford Sierra 4x4 has employed variations on the as-the-crow-fies driveshaft method – it does have huge implications for Bentley. This isn’t an evolution of a Continental. It’s a whole new…

It was, at risk of stating the obvious, a good year for cars. For a start, the new Best Car in the World turned out to be exactly that. If your tastes and means are more modest, there's always the Up GTL Between the extremes, another whole bunch of stuff is rightly marked throughout our annual awards celebration. If the Phantom was the Best, the Chiron was the Fastest, it looked untouchable, above all for the brief 42 seconds it occupied in getting from zero 40 400 kph (near as makes no difference 250mph) and back again. Then the Agera RS did it six seconds quicker, thus reinforcing Koenigsegg's status as the official car of the internet. Designer of the McLaren F1 - the world's former fastest car - Gordon…

FAMILY SUV OF THE YEAR These are not numbers cars, but if this award were decided on stats alone, we’d have no choice but to give it to the Land Rover Discovery. This is a car so grandly over-specifed for the job of carrying many people and things – for above all else, that’s what a family SUV must do – that justifying it to yourself is actually quite tricky, no matter how big your brood or how outrageous your demands. It’s just 3cm shorter than a Range Rover but as big in every other aspect, at least as capable of-road as any Land Rover launched in the last two decades and feels spacious enough inside to accommodate a whole VW Up, let alone your children and their things. It…

something strikes me about the GT2 RS that didn’t the frst time I saw it. It doesn’t look like a factory-built Porsche. There has always been some intangible Porsche-ness to Weissach-developed machinery, from the way it sits on the road, to the design of the alloy wheels – even the iconography of the lettering and the aerodynamic additions. You could spot it a mile of. It just looked right. Not so this new 991-generation GT2 RS. I’m not saying it looks wrong – although I’m sure many people will think it quite foul – but that the combined efect of all that black plastic and carbon against the silver paintwork and lord-knows-what-else is to appear a little, how can I put it... aftermarket. Perhaps a darker colour would lessen the…

SUPERCAR OF THE YEAR Building a car isn’t easy. Building a decent one is even harder. But factoring in that you want to achieve this while being competitive in one of the most sacrosanct sectors of motoring – supercars – as well as cultivating a brand from scratch, and staying in the black, sounds like one of those disastrous Dragon’s Den pitches that’d have Deborah Meaden scrunching her face up with anger until it looked like a scrotum. Yet, this is exactly what McLaren has done. In less than a decade. And not just ‘done’, but – once a few speed bumps were navigated – excelled at. Over the past seven years, McLaren has created products that have furrowed a new direction in the supercar space and spawned a product…

Luxury is a word the car business has steadily stripped of real meaning. It’s ftting, then, that the new Phantom annexes the territory somewhere beyond common-or-garden luxury. Far beyond. It’s what it doesn’t have, or do, that defnes it. For a car of such generous size and weight, with a vast 6.75-litre, twin-turbo V12 under the bonnet, rolling along on four ginormous pieces of rubber, the Phantom is so quiet it’s almost an anechoic chamber. In fact, Rolls-Royce hasn’t just managed to deliver the sort of refnement you’d hope for in a brand new superlimo, it’s somehow engineered the silence in such a way that it’s actually less intrusive or discombobulating than the silence you might encounter in a church or mausoleum. As those vast doors close themselves, hermetically sealing…

Hello Tesla P90D Ludicrous £111,900 OTR/£78,400 as tested (secondhand) CHARLIE TURNER With the rise of the EV set to dominate this industry in the coming years, and Tesla making a serious impact in the market, we felt it was high time we spent some time living with its core product. Welcome, then, to the Tesla Model S P90D. Time for a handy guide to Tesla’s naming convention. P stands for Performance, 90 is the battery capacity in KWh (100 being the current top dog and 75 the lowest) D denotes dual-motor all-wheel drive – basically meaning the car has an extra motor driving the front wheels – and, fnally, the fact that the badge is underlined means our car has had the Ludicrous Performance upgrade and will dispatch the 0–60mph…

Report 4 Peugeot 3008 £27,595 OTR/£32,410 as tested ESTHER NEVE The 3008 is, as described by my neighbour, very swish. I gave her a lift to her work and she spent the time exploring the various options of the TFT set-up. The TFT screen is something I’ve become accustomed to over these past few months so it’s useful to be reminded how cool it is. There are four options ready set up for you: driving, dials, minimal and nav. Dealing with these in order... driving shows you your speed large and small, and an icon of the car. Dials (my favourite) is the traditional layout. Minimal is just a digital speed readout in the centre. Nav gives you a speed read to the left and the rest of the binnacle…

Report 3 Mercedes S500 Cab £111,215 OTR/ £126,520 as tested JASON BARLOW Clearly this isn’t the case for all Mercs, but generally these are cars that take their time to get under your skin. So while the super-niche, exceedingly well-heeled target market at which the S-Class cabrio is aimed would no doubt lean towards the V8 AMG S63 or V12 S65 for maximum Miami trafc-light impact, the S500 is The One. For a start, there really aren’t many better engines than the 4.7-litre twin-turbo this car runs. Mercedes is not short of cracking engines, but this a world-class gem: whisper quiet on the motorway, but capable of turning hot rod should the mood take you. It trounces any lingering doubts that might remain about the character and responsiveness of forced…

Remember the Honda Urban EV concept from the Frankfurt show? Of course you do. It rocked our world with its perfect stance and minimalist look, riddled with hints of Honda Civic MkI, Peugeot 205 GTi and VW Golf MkI. It gave us faith that when future-gazing electric hatchbacks take over, old-school style might still be an option. Now Honda has gone one step further and revealed the Sports EV concept at the Tokyo show. Using the same stripped-back aesthetic, it shows what a two-seater sports car – dare we say a spiritual successor to the rev-hungry S2000 – might look like. And while it won’t be able to deliver 9,000rpm manual upshifts, it’s still got plenty going for it. It’s pure electric, in case you hadn’t clicked yet, and based…

Gordon Murray is launching a new car company, and its frst product will be a sports car that uses “the engineering principles” of the McLaren F1 he designed in the mid Nineties. He’s released a drawing too. He stresses it’s meant “for real-world conditions”. That means not too much power? He nods. We talk about the McLaren 720S, which I’ve just been driving, or the Ducati Panigale bike he had been considering but rejected – things that are too fast for the road. “You can never even use max revs on those 200bhp bikes. You’d be dead or in prison. I just want to get back to real driving.” Today’s cars are “losing the plot on involvement,” says Murray. It won’t have a hybrid powertrain. But he won’t say much…

Jaguar XJR 575 £93,710 WE SAY: POWER, NOISE AND FURY IN A SEEMINGLY SENSIBLE PACKAGE We’ve seen this before, right? Sort of. The XJR 575 is the replacement for the XJR. The subtle name change denotes the fact that it now has a few more horses to play with – 575PS (567bhp) to be exact. It’s the same motor, and indeed power, as you’ll find in Jag’s sportiest offering, the F-Type SVR. So it’s fast, then? Alarmingly so. Jag says it’ll do 0–62mph in 4.4 seconds (although that estimate feels conservative), and it’ll reach a top speed of 186mph if you keep your foot in. Naturally, this being a fast Jag, it also makes a noise like Thor stubbed his toe on a landmine. Torque is a bountiful 516lb ft,…

£ n/a Engine Fuel cell with AC motor, FWD, 172bhp, 221lb ft Performance 0-62mph in 9.0secs, 103mph, n/a mpg, 0g/km CO2 Weight n/a kg Honda doesn’t sell the Clarity in the UK. It’s looked at our dismal hydrogen filling station count and concluded we’re not ready. But when we are, a car like this could go down very well indeed. Ignore the paucity of places to fill its tank and it’s essentially a long-range electric car; a motor drives the front wheels and is fed by a battery that’s topped up via hydrogen. So it accelerates briskly and cruises silently, but its 300-mile range means you can be sat at 70mph without forward planning, so long as you live near London. Or, oddly, Rotherham. Alright, it looks strange on the…

ESTATE OF THE YEAR A broom, a burns kit, a pair of binoculars, some fags, a mallet, a couple of hefty fre extinguishers, some wheel chocks, a trolley jack and a call sign: Recovery. Not an average day’s work for an estate car, but then the Merc-AMG E63S is no ordinary estate car – 604bhp, 4WD, 1,820 litres of load space, rumours of a derestricted top speed beginning with a two. We’d been pondering how best to test the almost unique abilities of Merc’s mightiest hauler, when a call came in. “Do you want to come and get involved down at Newquay? And by the way, you haven’t got anything big and fast you can bring down, have you?” I paraphrase, but only slightly. As you’ve probably heard and hopefully…

Top Gear isn’t just the UK’s favourite monthly car magazine, it’s the biggest monthly car magazine in the world, with our international editions delivering unique worldclass TG access around the planet. Having had our say back at TGHQ, we asked our worldwide network of editors and their teams to nominate their favourite cars from the past 12 months. Think of it as the world’s largest sports day for cars and you won’t be too far wrong. Here’s how they voted… TG Bulgaria 01 Porsche 911 GT3 02 McLaren 720S 03 Ford Fiesta TG China 01 Bentley Continental GT 02 Land Rover Discovery 03 Porsche 911 GT2 RS TG Czech Republic 01 McLaren 720S 02 Porsche 911 GT3 03 Volkswagen Up GTI TG France 01 McLaren 720S 02 Volkswagen Up GTI…

HOT HATCH OF THE YEAR It’s absolutely relentless. I’ve barely scratched my fshy tofu broth and gelatin dumpling flled with unidentifed pork-based product and already she’s back, carrying yet another tray of steaming oddness. No good asking questions, either – my Japanese is limited to a series of grunts and awkward head nods, and she doesn’t speak a word of English. On the plus side, our waitress, who insists on leaving the room backwards on her knees while bowing profusely, doesn’t seem at all fazed that I’m wearing nothing but a loose-ftting dress. Peculiar evening, but entirely necessary as part of our Ultimate Japanese Roadtrip. The idea being to immerse ourselves in the culture, car and otherwise, while seeking out some of the greatest driving roads Japan has to ofer.…

Report 3 Mini Cooper S Works £22,155 OTR/ £29,430 as tested PAUL HORRELL Simple things can get complicated. I’m not talking about the Mini itself – though this 210 trim is, by my reckoning, an over-elaboration of the ideal perky small car. This is about changing its windscreen. A crack had been slowly spreading from the bottom left-hand corner. I rang my local dealer, Baron’s of Kentish Town, London. They ordered the glass and said it would likely be a day. By contrast, Autoglass said two hours and they come to you, but for complicated BBC accounting reasons, I wasn’t allowed to try that option. I took the car in. It wasn’t ready at the end of the day. They’d broken the rain sensor in separating it from the old…

Report 4 Ariel Nomad £36,538 OTR/ £55,313 as tested OLLIE MARRIAGE Yesterday I drove the Nomad to Cornwall and back to see Bloodhound SSC’s debut. 503 miles all told. Today I feel completely fne. Not a twinge or an ache. Nevertheless, you might think I’m mad. Half the people in the ofce think I’m mad. Up to the point they drive it. This is not like other lightweights. From Atom to BAC Mono to Caterham they’re all sharp, darty and hyperactive. A few years back, I drove a Radical SR3 SL to Scotland in one hit. It was mentally draining, and when I got there I couldn’t sleep. The next day, my shoulders, neck and back seized solid. The Nomad is diferent. It has a diferent gait, sits happily and…

Hello Seat Ibiza FR £16,630 OTR/ £18,995 as tested OLLIE KEW What the new Ibiza has six months to prove, is if it should be on the tip of your tongue when your mother/brother/ mates/in-laws enquire: “What is a Good New Car?” The family petrolhead is often faced with this question. The words “Fiesta” or “Golf” tend to fall out of our mouths, because they’re a known quantity, the Heinz baked beans of motoring. Seats don’t feature much, because they take some explaining – “They’re like VWs, only cheaper and more triangular, but pretty much the same underneath, same engines and that. Oi, wake up.” The new Ibiza, on its new, bigger platform that’s already begat the latest VW Polo and will one day also spawn an Audi A1, Skoda…

Goodbye BMW 530d £49,265 OTR/ £66,150 as tested JACK RIX You can fnd a report to back up pretty much anything you like these days, so that’s exactly what I have done. A company called The Miles Consultancy (us neither) analysed real-world fuel consumption on seven plug-in hybrid models and found out that, on average, they returned 45mpg. That equates to CO2 emissions of 168g/ km, compared to 159g/km on average for diesel company cars. So there you have it, plug-in hybrids are a hoax and diesel is the future. Job done. However, we should probably ask why I’ve been scratching around to fnd this largely irrelevant survey, to tarnish the reputation of electrifed cars. It’s because I’ve fallen back in love with diesel. Sure, it’s had a rocky road,…

It began life as a desirable but not uncomplicated Sixties road car. Then BMW tasked Alpina to go further, and the result was the 3.0 CSL. The frst run cars, of which 165 were built, used the 2985cc M30 engine, to produce 180bhp. This MkI car weighed 1,165kg, 200kg less than the car it was based on. But it also cost only a few hundred quid less than Porsche’s electrifying Carrera 2.7 RS. The real bad boy Batmobile CSL turned up in 1972, when BMW decided it was time to enter the European racing fray, in a bid to depose the none-more-hairy Ford Capri RS2600. In order to homologate the car for Group 2, 1,000 production versions had to be built, whose slightly bigger straight-six (3003cc, which allowed it to…