Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

While the process of engineering any car is a mind-boggling feat, the challenge of delivering a hypercar, whose stated aim is to redefine our understanding of how rapidly mere mortals can propel themselves around a track, requires a very special kind of no-limits mindset – something the team at McLaren Automotive has in spades. But while making the Senna is an achievement in itself, giving it that evocative name is as big a statement as the bleeding-edge engineering it represents. Christening your creations has always been challenging, and the car industry is littered with some amusingly awful monikers. Some favourites of mine include the Mazda Bongo Friendee, Tarpan Honker and the Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard. How the marketing teams came up with these is beyond comprehension, but I’d have paid…

Meet the Ariel Atom 4. Looks subtly different, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s all-new from the ground up, a thorough rethink of our favourite open-sided lightweight. The chassis uses thicker-gauge tubing which helps to improve stiffness by 15 per cent, while the engine is now the 316bhp 2.0-litre turbo shared with the latest Civic Type R, which uses the VTEC valvetrain and exhaust system to hold pressure in the turbo off throttle, minimising lag. It’ll be fast – as quick as the outgoing supercharged version to 60mph (around 2.6secs) and then faster to 100mph. The Atom has grown slightly – the new engine is larger, so the car is longer, and while track widths are the same, the new Atom wears wider tyres. On top of that, there’s more room…

My favourite car memory was being in the passenger seat with my grandfather [Gianni Agnelli]. It was in a Fiat Croma but with the 3.0 V6 Alfa Romeo engine, souped up like every car he had. All his cars had peculiar engines or particular things and particular interiors. My love for uniqueness started by looking at what he had done in his life with his products and his cars. He would drive like a race driver in the cities, so it was always exciting to go in a car with him. The first accident I had was when I was nine, I took a Fiat Panda and I crashed into a tree. I always wanted to drive; cars are probably the objects in the world I love the most. I…

Jeep Renegade ￡20,000 est. WE SAY: LIKE THE WAY IT LOOKS? BUY ONE. AND BEST TURN THE PAGE, QUICK… You’ve already made up your mind. You looked at the photo up there, and the Renegade instantly appealed to you or repulsed you. If it’s the latter, you’re losing. Jeep’s shifted over 800,000 of these in Europe and surrounding territories since 2014, and thirst for the mini-Jeep is so insatiable that the company’s confirmed an even smaller, sub-Renegade model by 2022. This is as much Jeep’s cash-cow as its parent company Fiat’s is the 500. So, its 2019-model year-update (a tiresome American anti-logic trope) leaves the looks alone (the new grille is subtle, the pin-sharp LEDs optional) but conceals a new family of petrol engines. You can still have a 1.6-litre…

Ferrari 812 Superfast ￡262,963 When you buy a Ferrari, you pay for the engine and I will give you the rest for free,” said Enzo Ferrari, perhaps apocryphally. The 812 Superfast costs £262,963. I reckon that’s a fair price for this V12. It is utterly transcendental. Other firms make V12s, and they’re perfectly decent. Some are smooth, others are strident, but this is something else altogether. It’s not the power, it’s not the noise, it’s not the response, and it’s not even a combination of all those facets that makes it so special. One word: reach. The figures say max torque arrives at 7,000rpm. The figures are a nonsense. It’s the impact the V12 has at 2,500rpm that’s so shocking. Heck, it’ll pull gears from 800rpm onwards, and at the…

A radio crackles: “The Zenvo’s wing’s fallen orf, it’s fallen orf. Someone flag ’im in.” The small percentage of the pitlane that knows what’s actually happening bursts out laughing. Meanwhile, somewhere out on circuit, a marshal is presumably very confused. Because at the end of the corner he’s watching, the Zenvo’s wing will have miraculously righted itself… This is the Zenvo TSR-S, and it does something we’ve never seen before. Oh, we’ve heard of active aero and we’ve seen flaps moving and airbrakes deploying, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this before. Something that clearly has the Goodwood marshals in a state of some confusion. Zenvo calls it the Zentripetal rear wing. Zenvo, Denmark’s only car company, has been building cars since 2007. It faces the same challenges as…

Hello Ford Tourneo Custom Titanium ￡38,440 OTR/￡40,480 as tested Most sensible people tend to have 2.4 children. Sadly I’m not sensible and I have three. One of the many dilemmas that comes with having three children is what car to get. Even though it is becoming a larger market, there are no two ways about it – the options are limited. You can go for a 7str MPV (yawn) an SUV (￡ ￡ ￡) or a van. Yes, a van. But, as it happens, I love vans and I love driving them too. They make total sense for the needs of the larger family and, I suspect, they’re often overlooked. And expensive. This costs about ￡5k more than the equivalent van. As this is TG, we opted for the most…

Report 2 Skoda Karoq ￡28,415/￡29,270 as tested The TG Karoq stayed in our underground car park when I was away recently, and it seems to be covered in, er, something. A few jet washes later and barely any of it had come off. What is this crud covering our little Skoda? On closer inspection (by scratching it and a little bit of tasting maybe), it looks to be limescale. So we traced it back to the first parking spot in the TGHQ bunker. It seems a drain in the ceiling above connected to the fountains outside the BBC building has been leaking when it overflows. A careful polish later and the paintwork is now gleaming and green again, but the front black plastics seem harder to clear up. My next…

Goodbye Vauxhall Insignia Sports Tourer SRi VX-Line ￡27,810 OTR/￡34,575 as tested At the end of April, Ford announced that it would soon cease production of all cars in the US, other than the Mustang and its range of SUVs and trucks. In other words, Ford is going to concentrate on the stuff that people actually want to buy. Sadly, it does makes sense – in this country, as in the US, cars need to be either really cheap or really desirable, leaving an ever-reducing middle market. With the new Insignia, Vauxhall has made a pretty good job of creating a mid-market estate that you might actually want to own. The “new” model was launched a year ago and has graced the TopGear garage for six months. In that time, I’ve…

Jaguar D-type Loving the D-type is a bit like loving The Beatles or George Best. It’s such an icon that it’s also a bit of a cliche, at which point it’s tempting to say you always preferred the Stones or Denis Law. The trouble is, the D-type is actually better than folklore has it: it’s beautiful to look at, fantastic to drive, and it won the Le Mans 24 hours race three times on the trot, in 1955, 1956 and 1957, under the command of hero drivers. Jaguar’s design team had almost certainly clocked Alfa Romeo’s 1952 Disco Volante, which advanced the idea of all-enveloping bodywork. But in creating the successor to the lovely and successful C-type – itself a Le Mans winner in 1951 and 1953 – the design…

For all those whooping and hollering that the 600bhp DB11 was too soft and too slow (all three of you), allow us to introduce its evil twin – the DBS Superleggera. Effectively a replacement for the Vanquish S, it revives a badge last seen on the car Bond barrel-rolled in Casino Royale in 2006, then adds the Superleggera suffix – a nod to the “innovative lightweight construction methods pioneered by Italian coachbuilder, Touring”. Yet this is no hollowed-out racer. Full carbon-fibre body panels help to make it 72kg lighter than the DB11 V12, but with a kerbweight of 1,800kg, give or take a robust lunch, it’s still firmly a GT… albeit a super one. By simply tweaking the ECU and fitting a freer-flowing (and significantly noisier) quad-tipped exhaust system, 715bhp…

DRIVE COFFEE DBS 1 – GULF EDITION Not content with being “the world’s best coffee maker”, this bean machine is certified by the ECBC – the European Coffee Brewing Centre, for you caffeine novices. It can brew a full 40oz (1.2L) coffee pot in six minutes with a unique hot plate to keep your beans a-burning at a precise 79°C. It’s also hand-painted and finished with genuine automotive lacquers. Accompany it with Drive’s Le Mans coffee blend, offering aromas of chocolate, toffee and almond, and roasted to order every Friday. The coffee range also includes other motoring blends including Dakar and Imola. Coffee $18, machine $999; drivecoffee.com LAND ROVER EXPLORE The Land Rover Explore phone is as tough as the Defender. It can survive underwater, in extreme temperatures or with…

Hey, we like to say goodbye in style. So to send the Veyron off properly as it reached the end of its decade-long production run, we convinced Bugatti to let us drive one the length of Route 66. Chicago to Los Angeles, 2,404 miles along the most storied road of them all. Obviously we went for the faster Veyron: the two-million-quid Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse, one of few convertibles in history good for a 10-second standing quarter, and a 260mph top speed. Against long odds, we escaped any speeding tickets. However, we did suffer appalling sunstroke, being licked by a donkey, and getting lightly threatened by a gang of bikers. Standard US roadtrip fare. It was, for the most part, an exercise in self-restraint. There’s a gauge on the Veyron’s…

David Brown Speedback GT ￡750,000 approx. WE SAY: WANT SOMETHING NONE OF YOUR OTHER BILLIONAIRE FRIENDS HAVE? STEP THIS WAY, SIR… Remember David Brown Automotive? The company emerged four years ago with the Speedback GT, an Aston Martin DB5 pastiche built around the underpinnings of a Jaguar XKR. With wire wheels and chrome bumpers it was, shall we say, an acquired taste. Now we have the Silverstone Edition: de-chromed, de-bumpered, stealthier and cooler. Inside as well as out. It’s cohesive – a very steady design hand has been at work here – although it hasn’t managed to improve the 2006 infotainment. Shudder. The supercharged V8 develops an extra 90bhp, but don’t go thinking it’s a track car. It’s a refined GT, with a hint more athleticism than before. This is…

Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV ￡40k est. WE SAY: THE MOST POPULAR VEHICULAR TAX BREAK HAS A FACELIFT Why do I see these things everywhere? Since its launch four years ago, Mitsubishi has shifted over 100,000 Outlander PHEVs in Europe alone. That makes it the continent’s best-selling PHEV, and Britain’s best-selling plug-in of any type – hybrid or pure EV. There are three reasons for this. First, it’s an SUV, and everybody loves an SUV. It’s the bodystyle du jour. You’ve probably got one. And if you don’t, science says you will soon. Second, it’s not a diesel, but a plug-in hybrid, which means massive tax breaks and that warm, gooey feeling of having done A Good Thing for the environment. And, lastly, there’s nothing else quite like it on sale. At…

Mercedes-Benz C200 £33,180 WE SAY: C-CLASS GETS TONS OF EXTRA TECH AND A NEW ENGINE This Mercedes C-Class, believe it or not, is almost 50 per cent new, with 6,500 of its components changed. Hard to believe, isn’t it? It looks the same as the old one… It’s no surprise to learn those changes are nearly all under the skin, then, split into two key areas. Firstly, the electrical architecture has been nabbed from the luxo S-Class. What sounds like the dullest piece of news you’ve read today is interesting, honest; it means the C-Class provides a new suite of safety tech and is another step closer to self-driving. Secondly, there’s a heap of new engines. Most interesting – particularly post-Dieselgate – is a new entry-level petrol. Called the C200,…

Active aerodynamics is banned in most codes of motor racing. But in support of my long-held theory that the phrase ‘race-bred road car’ is usually a pile of marketing-led baloney, road cars now do often employ active aerodynamic devices, in the form of moving wings and other clever hidden flappery. This month we experience what’s perhaps the most outlandish of all, as it gets jiggy above the tail of the Zenvo TSR-S. The theory is solid. An aircraft turns by leaning. In that state, the wings’ force isn’t solely lift – there’s also a vector component that points inwards. Same with the Zenvo, except, of course, car wings are upside-down versus plane wings, as they’re aiming to keep you on the ground. While a plane banks with its inner wingtip…

“Rivals all bought the old RS and stripped it down to see where the magic lay” A moment of magic. That’s what you’re looking for. On the infrequent occasion one of the performance car world’s true heroes is replaced, your impartiality can’t help but falter a little, as you cross your fingers and toes, desperate for the first tangible evidence that it’s still special. The Megane RenaultSport is one such car, yet after several hours on the road in the all-new RS 280, no moment has yet materialised. The old one left you under no illusions about how special it was. You folded yourself into a snug Recaro seat, bum right on the floor, and prodded it into life. It battered you about as soon as you pulled away, crying…

Hello Mercedes-AMG GT R ￡143,245 OTR/￡153,960 as tested Please welcome the latest, definitely the greenest and arguably greatest car we have ever run in the TG Garage. For the next six months I’ll be running a car most readers will be familiar with in its weekend guise as the F1 pace car. I can’t believe my luck. The next few months will be an exercise in seeing how far you can push the track-derived, ’Ring developed (7:10.92 lap time) GT3 racer for the road before it releases its inner Hulk. The AMG GT R is the apex predator of the range, delivering 577bhp (a 121bhp increase from the base GT) from the 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8. This healthy boost in power has been achieved with new turbos (which can spin at…

Report 3 Citroen C3 Aircross ￡18,845 OTR/￡21,975 as tested In the interest of a properly all-round lifer experience, I have been a back-seat passenger (not driver, note) in the C3. This was not because I felt an unswerving need to be chauffeured around like Lady Muck, but because I have taken a few passengers on short and long journeys in the past couple of months… and they have all moaned about how hard and uncomfy the back bench is. Ungrateful wretches. However, as these are all well-adjusted, smart people, I decided not to dismiss their woes, but instead see how I felt in the back on an hour-long trip. I will admit the seats are hard and slippery, and so you do slide around. This can be annoying and uncomfortable.…

Report 2 BMW M5 ￡89,645 OTR/￡101,900 as tested Early morning at a petrol station, and the first time I’ve had to put 95 octane in. Had to – no super. No issue: it might prefer high octane, but the manual says it’ll cope with 91. In went the 95, and 50 miles later, on came the engine warning. This was soon followed by stuttering. Then the engine cut out. Hmm. Given how self-protecting engines are, I was surprised when it fired back up. Only to stutter and fail again a mile later. In it went to BMW. It looks like some condensation had gathered in the nozzle overnight and I was the first to use it that day. With relief I learned there was no lasting damage. The M5 is…

Feels like only yesterday when FGA and Ferrari boss Marchionne was upsetting people with his plans for a Ferrari SUV - an FUV as he calls it - and a push past 10,000 cars a year. Now, he’s turned his attention to Maserati and Alfa’s future, and the results are… better. Remember the Maserati Alfieri? Of course you don’t. Maserati first revealed its F-Type-alike two-seat coupe way back in 2014, but it’s back! Yes, the Maserati Alfieri is going into production, really, promise, absolutely-gonna-happen this time. The Alfieri will ditch the concept’s V8 engine, and be offered as a plug-in hybrid and a bespoke EV. This is the part where we say “Look out, Tesla” or some such cliche. Then again… Maserati claims the all-electric, all-wheel-drive version of the, erm,…

Ford Focus ST-Line EcoBoost 150 ￡ 21,805 WE SAY: IT’S NEVER HAD TO FIGHT SO HARD. GOOD THING IT’S THE BEST ONE SO FAR You could be forgiven for thinking normal hatchbacks are being obliterated in the zombie apocalypse of crossovers. Not so. Gold, silver and bronze sellers in the UK last year were the Fiesta, Golf and Focus. So a new Focus matters. Matters not just as a car for everyone, but as a car for us at TopGear. Over the years we’ve loved Focuses muchly because they drove so well. The new one is really very new. It has a longer wheelbase for more space but without having got lengthier overall, as the new structure is strong enough not to need so much beaky front overhang. The styling…

Dacia Duster Comfort SCe ￡13,195 WE SAY: DACIA STICKS TO THE BASICS TO GIVE THE PUNTERS WHAT THEY WANT All-new Duster, it says here. Hmmm. The body panels are all changed, yes, and the interior is very largely new too. But much of what’s underneath, less so: the platform and most of the engines are hardly altered. And, of course, quite a lot of that stuff is more ancient still, having been inherited from previous Renaults. Most of all, the Duster’s price, which is so far beyond retro it’s positively antique. The main joy of the Duster is the way it seriously over-delivers on that underpromising sticker. Owners love their Dusters. So Dacia kept the spirit of the old design, but modernised it and made some changes mandated by the…

Peugeot 508 GT PureTech 225 auto ￡35,975 WE SAY: LOOKS GREAT, GOES WELL ENOUGH, DESERVES TO DO BETTER THAN IT WILL A few years ago, Peugeot built a concept called Exalt. It wasn’t nutty enough to grab headlines, but it was also too radical to be a useful pointer to a production car. So we largely ignored it. Guess what, here it is, at dealers near you from October. In mitigation, big French saloons haven’t been showroom dynamite. The old 508, four-door and estate, sold one car in the UK for every 20 Merc C-Classes. It was more expensive per month than the Benz, because after 36 months it was worth about the same as your three-year-old pants. So then, the new 508. Looks good, and has a truly special…

Estoril, 21 April 1985. It was wet. By lap 10 he was 13 seconds clear of the field. At the end, only one car was left unlapped. His victory was emphatic, dominant. It was his first. Estoril, 27 June 2018. The rain has cleared away, but the place still looks a little forlorn. F1 doesn’t come here anymore, but the name has returned. A car called Senna. The world’s fastest road-legal track car. That’s the billing. 800PS (789bhp), 800 kilos of downforce. It’s ready, dropped into Race mode, engine idling fretfully, pointed arrow-straight down the pitlane, sizing up the downhill approach into Turn 1, ready to head out and show what it’s capable of. But this is a different story. One that ends not back in this pitlane after a handful…

The truth, as is so often the case, is contained in the tyre. It is easy to be bamboozled by a Ferrari technical presentation – endless charts and statistics working in combination with frantically hyperbolic Italian-English overload your grey matter and pummel you with information that leaves you almost brainwashed. During the performance, at least five people will stand up and tell you how fantastico-amazing the latest Ferrari Berlinetta is. By the end, if they told you it could soft-boil an egg and halve the third-world debt, you’d simply nod in accordance. But the man from Michelin, notably the only non-Italian in the building, is the quiet voice of reason. He tells us that the new Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyre that has been specially developed for the Pista isn’t…

Report 3 Audi RS4 ￡72,175/￡77,145 as tested To be a petrolhead really is to live in a constant state of stress. Just as we’re coming to terms with the fact that naturally aspirated engines are being choked out by the turbocharger, we get electricity to worry about. Which is why I made sure the RS4 was there to uphold petrol’s honour on last month’s I-Pace test. That and the fact that the similarities were striking: both circa ￡70k, both 0–62mph in something starting with a four, both rapid family wagons at heart, both painted in Elephant’s Breath grey. A poignant moment, then. Fossil fuels handing over the baton to electricity? Not quite. As you’ll have read, the I-Pace is a wondrous thing, but until the charging network catches up with…

Report 5 Honda Civic Type R ￡32,995/￡32,995 “Hang on for the red line to experience how relentless the torrent of power becomes” The decade that separates these machines saw the demise of an entire genre. The rally rep disappeared and the super-hatch emerged. We won’t see the Evo’s like again. WRC now exclusively features aero-honed superminis and zero homologation specials. Meanwhile, the hot-hatch scene has eaten the 300bhp-plus four-door territory. They seat a family, swallow a pet, breeze the daily grind and apply over 300bhp to the road with ease – without forgetting smartphone connectivity… Instead of ultimate power, the MR (Mitsubishi Racing) FQ (erm, F***ing Quick) 360 (horsepower) was tuned for drivability. Ralliart worked up a new ECU code and sharpened response with a stronger fuel pump and freer-flowing…

Report 2 Ford Mustang $64,740 A big American muscle car from Texas. An ickle lightweight sports car from Norwich. You probably think any similarities between these two are as far apart as the locations where they’re built, but you’d be wrong. Both the Hennessey HPE850 Mustang and Lotus Exige Sport 410 follow a very similar recipe: they’re both noisy, they’re both stripped out, they’re both supercharged and they’re both track-orientated road cars with trick dampers and a set of sticky (yet tricky in the wet) Michelin Cup 2 tyres. They’re also bloody good at what they do. But having schlepped the Stang east, and sent both of them down the same stretch of gnarled Norfolk tarmac, it didn’t take long to see that each had been engineered for its native…