Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

Ladies and gents, we have a new Pagani: the Huayra Roadster BC. “Looks like the other one with the roof chopped off!” I hear you scream. But it’s not. It’s all-new. Let’s start with the engine – a 6.0-litre twin-turbo V12 specially designed for Pagani by AMG, whose engines have powered all of Pagani’s cars. It’s now the only V12 AMG makes and is bespoke to Pagani to futureproof 12 cylinders for years to come. It’s a thumper, too – there’s 791bhp and 774lb ft for the bespoke Pirelli P Zero Trofeo R rear tyres to try to deal with. It uses a completely new composite of carbon that’s stiffer and lighter (overall weight is 1,250kg), although it does increase costs by 450 per cent. Oops. There’s 500kg of downforce…

A century ago, the Bauhaus school was started by German visionary Walter Gropius. He wanted to tear up the design rulebook and put as much beauty as possible into everyday objects. In his world, the craftsman would be indistinguishable from the artist; everything created would make the world a place of ever-increasing harmony. This world view was put in jeopardy by another man with a plan. In 1933, Hitler came to power, took the country in another artistic direction and the Bauhaus school was shut down. But for such a short-lived enterprise, the Bauhaus influence has been vast – on everything from buildings and furniture, to cars and watches. Bauhaus booted design into the modern era, casting aside the fluting, facades and frippery of old and introducing a world where…

We have one, or maybe even two, huge revelations for you. One is that there is a new game about the FIA European Truck Racing Championship. The other is that there is an FIA European Truck Racing Championship at all. This new offering (available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PC and Xbox One) is certainly unique, placing you behind the wheel of a five-tonne truck cab with a 1,000hp diesel engine. They slither around on corner exit like someone’s buttered their rear tyres and have braking distances measured in light years. But with just 12 trucks on the circuit at any time, clumsy AI and some conspicuous absences in the line-up of maker logos, this full-priced game will only last you until the novelty of racing these ludicrous vehicles wears off. About…

Chronographs have a legendary status in the aviation world - the ultimate horological companion for early pilots who were reliant upon accurate timing and precise aerial calculations. Ever since, chronographs have been revered as the unrivalled adventure watch. The Farer Mechanical Chronograph collection has been developed with the Swiss Made ETA 2894-2 Elaboré movement at its heart, to produce a refined and shallow-profiled 39mm case. Each of the dials is rich in three-dimensional detailing and unique colour combinations to accentuate the Farer design aesthetic. Explore the range at Farer.com BRITISH DESIGN. SWISS MADE. SEGRAVE MECHANICAL CHRONOGRAPH Mechanical Chronograph with matte charcoal black dial, blue tachymeter scale on outer flange plus 60 second and 30 minute subdials • Domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective treatment held by outer brushed bezel • Flat…

Fold the corner of this page over and remember to leaf back here next time the global economy has a hot curry with a side of laxatives. Lordy-lord, car finance is cheap now. You can get hold of an actual brand new, road-legal car with an engine and space for four or more, in return for under £100 a month. I appreciate our world of iPhones, mortgages and the DFS sale is built around a buy-now, pay-later mañana time-bomb, but that’s remarkable, isn’t it? The Toyota Aygo, Dacia Sandero and Suzuki Ignis are not the only cars that fall in and around the hundred quid a month milestone, but they represent the more interesting bookends. The Aygo is a traditional city car, pared back to bare painted metal doorskins, but…

“THE MORE THE REVS CLIMB, THE HARDER IT HITS, THE NOISE GAINING INTENSITY” £50,000 approx. FOR Brilliant new engine, clever 4WD system, well-judged ride/handling balance, interior design AGAINST It’s a £50k hot hatch, needlessly complicated screens and set-up Let me take you through a corner in the A45. In fact, no, let me shortcut to the unusual bit: what happens when you get back on the power. Up to that point, it’s the usual braking, downchanging and turning, all of which the A45 is thoroughly competent at. But when you hit the throttle, something unusual occurs. Gone is the old A45’s nose-heavy, understeer-led approach, because the all-new 4Matic+ system instead hurls as much power as it can at the outside rear wheel. This pushes the back axle slightly wide, effectively…

“IT’S A GOOD-LOOKING HATCH AND HIDES ITS NOSE-HEAVY PROPORTIONS CLEVERLY” £37,230 FOR Switch to FWD means the mainstream versions are super-competent AGAINST The top-of-the-range one is fast, but not as distinct as the old M140i When did you last see a 6cyl 1-Series? The one where aligning the engine longitudinally made sense. The one where RWD made it exciting? For every one of those happy buyers, BMW would sell about 19 regular low-powered 1-Series. Each of those were compromised on space and weight for no real driving benefit. BMW has understandably concluded that it’s not great business to give 95 per cent of 1-Series people a bum deal, when half of those didn’t even understand why, as they were unaware which wheels were driven. So now they’ve got a car…

£40,000 (approx) FOR Strong engines, build quality, actually better to drive than you remember AGAINST Smeary touchscreen replacing excellent clickwheel switchgear Why are Audi A4s relentlessly driven by such thrusting pillocks? You’ll see one of these grilles bullying into your rear-view, fresh LED signature ablaze, and think, “Oh dear, why’s this caveman in a Burton suit so tense?” It certainly isn’t their choice of transport. The A4 is quieter than a Volvo S60, more comfortable than a BMW 3-Series, more spacious than a Jaguar XE and better-developed and built inside than all of them. And yet, it’s never been the comprehensive, undisputed, outstanding favourite of the junior saloons. Perhaps because it’s a jack of all trades but a master of some. So, Audi’s gone to work on the A4 and…

The situation is flat-out intimidating, if I’m honest. There is a full pit crew, and serried ranks of colour-coded spanners marching across the blocky terrains of branded toolboxes. There are laptops, dataloggers, and men with code scrolling behind their eyes like human fruit machines, the space filled with the whirr and chatter of pneumatic tools. Outside, there is a huge Michelin tyre truck and people miming steering-wheel inputs with constipated expressions on their faces. These are not my people. They are far too organised, and… clean. Every other driver here has sponsors, matching kit and the studied nonchalance of the truly good-at-driving. I, on the other hand, have a plain white Arai helmet (albeit a good one – I appreciate my brain) and a mouldy race suit from when I…

“Complimenti… Bellissimo…” …mutters the Italian woman who has emerged from nowhere as we park the Ares Panther ProgettoUno in a quiet church square to duck out of the searing heat of the hottest day of the Italian summer. While this reads like a scene straight out of central casting, it isn’t. In this part of Italy – the hills above Modena – the love of cars runs deep. “È un Ferrari?” she asks, in between shooting myriad pictures and calling her grandson. It seems a reasonable question, given the Panther’s striking appearance and the noise ricocheting off the medieval walls as it’s fired up and repositioned for the next shot. My broken Italian struggles to articulate precisely what the Panther actually is. I offer ‘Ares’ and ‘Carrozzeria’. She shrugs. I…

On the first night, I take the plunge. Not the swimming – that came later, after I’d summoned up a second helping of courage. The first was needed for stockfish. Grey-tinged, slightly chewy, high in protein, off-grey in taste and Norway’s second-biggest export. Why they keep any of it for themselves beats me, but there it is, occupying half the real estate on every menu. This is how to experience it, though – with curiosity and before you’ve seen what it looked like a week earlier. In the winter, cod swim south from the Barents Sea to the more temperate, Gulf Stream-fed waters around the Lofoten archipelago. Mating season. For the past thousand years or more, fisherman have been interrupting cod coitus, the unfortunate paramours subjected to a barbarously medieval…

Every time I park the Rallye up, it costs me money. Part of me thinks I should have called it quits once it got through the MOT. But I’m also a soft touch. I go outside, see the dents, the faded paint, the stains, the tatty wheels and old tyres and want to make the 306 better. More than that, I’ve realised you have to invest in a project car – you feel more emotionally bound to it when you’ve shelled out for its upkeep and repair. So what’s going on here? Well, a few things this month, lowering my bank balance by £760. This on top of the £619 it cost to get it mechanically straight and through the MOT. In my head, I’d thought I’d spend £1,500 getting…

ATARI, 1989 If you vaguely remember a small-scale riot taking place at your local arcade back in 1989, chances are it was something to do with the release of this preposterously ambitious stunt sim. One of the first games to feature a polygon-based 3D environment, Hard Drivin’ also boasted a number of pioneering touches for the racer genre: action replays, airborne physics and a clutch pedal to operate the manual gearbox. It’s no wonder the game humbly referred to itself as “the world’s first authentic driving simulation game”. On starting a race you had two routes to choose from: pin the throttle and head straight on for the speed course or veer to the right into a stunt course, which included vertiginous jumps and imposing banked turns. Pick the latter…

REPORT 5 £33,190 OTR/£39,270 as tested/£452pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is a standard Giulia as brilliant as the QV? DRIVER Esther Neve I THINK WE’RE COMING AT THIS BASE-MODEL GIULIA THE WRONG WAY. The question shouldn’t be: “Is a standard Giulia as brilliant as the QV?” The question should be: “Is a standard Giulia better than the QV?” Think about it. Base model cars get all the abuse and all the stress. They get all the long, difficult journeys. All the width restrictors. All the supermarket runs. And they survive. Some even thrive – like the Giulia has in its six trouble-free months with us. Not one breakdown (the QV had several), not one glitch (the QV had many) and not one refusal to start (the QV was… temperamental). We should…

Howdy partners! As you have doubtless guessed from my greeting, it’s all change in the Cheery Bong II development programme, as we move onto the hot weather testing phase. Yes, after a challenging and varied 10 months in the Arctic Circle, followed by a surprisingly comfortable 14-hour flight in the hold of a North Korean military charter, I’m now soaking up the sun in Green Lakes, California. I assume this name is an example of the Americans’ legendary sense of humour, because I cannot help noticing that Green Lakes is not green, and has no lakes. Green Lakes is slap-bang in the middle of Death Valley. By day the temperature on the desert floor touches 50ºC. By night, the temperature in my motel room touches 50ºC. Though I have suffered…

COO, Ford of Europe 1 You’re laying off 12,000 people and shutting plants including Bridgend. Didn’t your bosses in Detroit just want to get rid of Ford of Europe, like GM sold off Opel/Vauxhall? No. Right to the top they want to stay in Europe. Different regions go through cycles. 2 But this is really bad. What went wrong? We were slow to take investment out of bad bits of the business. Among other things, we stayed in MPVs too long, and were too slow with crossovers. 3 What are you doing about it? This cost-cutting will right the ship, and there are good bits of our business to invest in – some versions of the Focus like the wagon, the ST, the Active. The Ranger pickup does well. Vans…

Attention, the four or five people for whom AMG does not yet cater. Have you been waiting for a ludicrously fast estate car that isn’t too big? Have you been hoping for a 415bhp hot hatch but thought the AMG A45’s boot was just too small? Then meet the Merc-AMG CLA 45 Shooting Brake. The estate version of the four-door saloon coupe version of the AMG hot hatch. This car shares all of its heavy-duty engineering with the A45. That means a record-breaking 2.0-litre turbo engine good for a massive 415bhp. If you can do without the ‘S’, you’ll be getting by with only 377bhp and taking 0.1secs longer to get to 62mph (4.lsecs), but it's unlikely to come to the UK. The CLA 45 'S' also brings with it…

Concepts don't have to be cutting-edge to be a good Idea. Take the Renault e-Pleln Air concept. It's an electrified replica of the original Renault 4L Plein Air, launched In 1968. Only around SOO were ever built … none with the electric powertraln from a Twizy like this. The concept has been built by Renault Classic, Renault Design and Melun Retro Passion. Original dials are replaced with a digital display, the grille swapped out for something a bit cuter, and there's a picnic basket Instead of rear seats. We can't yet tell you whether the range is better than the Twlzy's 62 miles. But be honest - do you care?…

HONDA HR-V SPORT £27,840 FOR manual gearshift, strong and smooth turbo engine AGAINST Dynamics not as lively as performance, short gearing Bit of a surprise, this. Mainly for its speed. If you’d told me it had more than 200bhp and could hit 62mph in 7.0, I’d have believed you. The published figures are 182bhp and 7.8secs, delivered by a more heavily boosted version of the 1.5, and fed through a lovely 6spd manual. Don’t have the £650 CVT. Satisfying drivetrain, then, and although the dynamics aren’t as crisp, this understated crossover has enough about it to create a bit of driving interest. OM NISSAN GT-R NISMO MY20 £174,995 FOR Godzilla returns. More pace, still as physcial as ever AGAINST McLaren money for a 12-year-old Nissan… Yep. Still at it. Still…

“WITH THE HOPES OF A NATION ON ITS SHOULDERS, THE C8 HAD BETTER NOT MESS IT UP” Twenty nineteen marks the 50th anniversary of the US being the first country to put a man, Neil Armstrong, on the Moon. But as long ago in the black-and-white-picture past as that seems, that was still nine years after General Motors showed its first prototype for a mid-engined sports car, the CERV 1. That could make the arrival of the mid-engined C8 the longest wait in automotive history. OK, so it wasn’t badged a Corvette back then, and neither was the CERV 2 which followed in 1964 – the first mid-engined Corvette concept, the Reynolds alooominum show car, was shown in 1972. But both were developed and informed Chevy’s thinking by GM engineer…

{ Case 1 } FORD PUMA Look! we don’t want to come over all ‘old man shouts at cloud’ here! but this one hurts. It’s the perfect case study of the cars we used to want, versus the cars the world wants now. In 1997, Ford’s idea for a healthier bottom line was to take the humble Mk& Fiesta! clothe it in a feline two-door body, have chassis genius Richard Parry-Jones set up the handling, and develop a completely bespoke, Yamaha-honed 1.7-litre, 123bhp engine that was exclusive to the Puma. The Focus, Ka and even the Fiesta never got a sniff. It was a smash hit, out-driving the mainstream coupe rivals of the time, which, in fairness, were rubbish. We’re talking dullards like the Corsa-based Vauxhall Tigra and Renault’s Megane…

Fast is beautiful, but for our purposes an eye-catching livery also helps. In the case of the Brabham BT52, we got the whole lot: a car that was fast, unarguably beautiful - perhaps the most sensational looking Fl car ever created - and a livery of elegant typographical purity. Never mind that Parmalat is an Italian dairy and drinks company - there was something about that lower-case font and the blue-and-white colour scheme that elevated the car. Fashion brand Fila appeared on the wing end-plates, and engine supplier BMW Motorsport also had a presence. The BT52 exemplifies Gordon Murray's genius for lateral thinking. This 1983 car was a rapid response {created in just six weeks) to a last-gasp rule change that hobbled ground effect aero, by banning the venturi sections…

ISN’T THE JAGUAR XJ OFF SALE NOW? Yep, Jaguar has stopped XJ production to make way for a brand-new, fully electric alternative. That could be a wondrous thing, but our hearts are nonetheless broken because it means that the V8-powered XJR is no more. If ever there was an excuse for one last blast… and with the XJ C, its great great grandad, for some context. SO WHAT HAVE WE GOT? On the left, the XJR575 with as much metric horsepower as its name suggests. It’s the most powerful XJ ever sold and the big limo at its punchiest. I’d have one of these over the current BMW M5, I’m such a big fan. On the right, the XJ 5.3C, a V12 version of the outstandingly pretty two-door Series 2…

HELLO £31,835 OTR/£36,185 as tested/£455pcm WHY IT’S HERE Meh first impressions. Can RenaultSport redeem itself over time? DRIVER Rowan Horncastle FED UP WITH THE DEPRESSING UNPREDICTABILITY OF A BRITISH summer, we’ve decided to add some sizzle to the TG Garage, courtesy of a very, very yellow Renault Megane RS 300 Trophy. There are many rungs to the fast Megane ladder and – as a reminder – the 300 Trophy is the penultimate step. Rather confusingly, you’ve got a choice of 280 Sport (kicking off at around £27k), a 280 Cup and the 300 Trophy version (ours is £36k as tested). The latter two get stiffer suspension and a diff on the driven front axle. All three get a four-wheel-steering (4WS) system called 4Control, but now there’s also a range-topping, limited-run…

REPORT 4 £36,439 OTR/£37,314 as tested/£467pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can avant-garde style save the saloon? DRIVER Jason Barlow CLOSE TO 400 MILES IN ONE DAY IS PUSHING IT. ESPECIALLY IN THE UK, and there are meetings interspersed. That means roadworks roulette. Bruntingthorpe first, to drive Citroen’s 19_19 Concept and Ami One. The little one is a shared-ownership urban runabout, with enough design smarts to make you smile but cheap enough for it to be worth making in the first place. Then you flee the city in the 19_19, with each occupant treated to their own individual experience. Onwards to Crewe to see the Bentley EXP 100 GT, a 5.8m-long, copper-infused super-luxe behemoth aimed at Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the other as-yet unknown hyper-rich circa 2035. Then back to the…

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Aston’s long-awaited Valkyrie hypercar is a moving object. Just before qualifying for the 2019 British GP, Aston’s ‘High Performance Test Driver’ Chris Goodwin took the first verification prototype for a lap of Silverstone – the start of an “extensive physical testing regime” before customers get their cars in a few months’ time. “On the spectrum of road cars I’ve driven, it’s not even on that. It’s totally off that scale,” he told us afterwards. It’s more along the lines of Formula One cars I’ve got experience of. I’m racing GT cars all the time – and it’s not like that. It’s just like sitting in an F1 car, right down to the seating position. When you fire the engine up, there’s a lot of structure-born feel from the powertrain coming…

There are three certainties in life. Death, taxes and Audi finding a way to fill every existing niche, then dreaming up a few more. This month’s SUV-inspired fodder? The Q3 Sportback and A1 Citycarver – yep, all lowercase. Q3 Sportback first. Well, Audi couldn’t sit by and watch Mercedes and BMW take all of the compact SUV coupe sales, could it? Target customer, then: everyone who likes the BMW X4 and the Mercedes GLC Coupe but isn’t quite sold on either. The Sportback obviously has plenty of normal Q3 in its genes. The interior, with its 10.25-inch digital instrument cluster as standard and optional 12.3-inch Virtual Cockpit, is straight from its sibling. And if you need some ammo to fire at the cynics, bootspace (measured up to the parcel shelf)…

THE GOOD Forget the looks. The most important thing is, ANALOGUE. Gr8_Balls_o_Fire Just weed me pants a bit Stuart Hunter If I had the cash I would buy one, leave it in my living room & worship it bond james bond NOW THAT’S ONE OF IF NOT THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CAR I HAVE EVER SEEN ze dud Stunning. I want 3 Gray Vegas Gaitskellini THE BAD LOOKS LIKE THE COYOTE FROM HARDCASTLE AND MCCORMICK Allan Jones More camp than an ocean of coffee essence. It’s got Austin Powers written all over it! FraxinusExcelsior This is a Lola-Ferrari-Pagani-Spyker-1980s-2000s-mishmash. It’s curvy, and I do love that, but the proportions are off. Claytonk THE UGLY Looks like an Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale inflated to 300psi had a child with Ferrari P4/5 that was…

Hot Wheels id Smart Track We’d like to bet that at some point in your life you have either owned – or desperately wanted to own – a Hot Wheels set. The brilliantly detailed model cars, iconic orange track and whirring power boosters have spread joy among kids and their respective guardians since 1968, but how does a half-century-old toy compete in the tech-filled modern world? Well, by adding tech by the bucket load. With its mega loop-the-loop, the 16-piece starter circuit is classic Hot Wheels. However, an iOS app will now wirelessly track speeds, lap times and stunts. Plus, kids can scan their cars onto the app, and the more they play in the real world, the more their car will level up for additional racing in the virtual…

Most intriguing tickbox on the Tesla configurator? Not the Performance option that gets you to 60mph before you’ve so much as got in and shut the door. It’s definitely ‘Full Self- Driving Capability’. That’s £5,800 on a Model 3. It means the car can usually follow its satnav along motorways, including changing lanes to overtake, and negotiating intersections – provided your hands remain on the wheel. This sounds dramatic. But it barely scratches the surface of what will happen with its over-the-air upgrades. For years Teslas have had a suite of cameras connected – anonymously – back to HQ. Tesla researchers have been training a stupendously advanced computer model, a ‘neural network’, to interpret those streams. Every recent Tesla car has a computer powerful enough to run that model. This…

“IT JUST FLOWS ALONG, NEVER OUT OF SORTS, WITH POWER AND POISE” £44,565 FOR Stylish estate drives as superbly as the saloon. Carry your (very large) cake and eat it. AGAINST The ride can get a bit lively. Some design details lean toward the fussy. Max Reisböck is a white-haired gent, tough-skinned from a life of metalworking, yet relaxed and fit a decade into retirement. Tucking into his schnitzel, he tells the story in a thick Bavarian accent. He used to work in the prototype shop at BMW. Back in the mid-Eighties his family was young, and he needed more space to take the tikes and their trikes on holiday. So he bought a rear-damaged 3-Series and set to work in a friend’s garage with an angle grinder and welding…

“THE WHOLE THING FEELS EXHAUSTIVELY DEVELOPED” £50,000 (est.) FOR The best componentry around. And one of the most thrilling driving experiences AGAINST No back seats, if you care. The price might frighten the faint of heart Delve beneath the Trophy R’s skin and you can quickly immerse yourself in a world of geekery. Taken as a whole, though, this is a hardcore Megane of the most familiar recipe: strip out the superfluous parts, fit extraordinarily tenacious tyres, watch the lap times fall and fun levels soar. The headline is a 7m 40.1s Nürburgring lap, making this the quickest front-driven production car around the Nordschleife. For this month, at least. Given it’s 20bhp down on the Civic Type R it’s sliced three seconds from – and bereft of the Honda’s downforce…

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Knockhill racetrack has these round red kerbs, like half-buried bratwurst. At Clark's, the bunless hot dog lies maliciously in wait just over a blind crest, ready to administer a ramping punch to the fractionally off-line. Get greedy with your turn-in and the porkie wonder will make a, er, radical difference to your trajectory … The GT4 is entirely calm as things get tilty. If there's a squirm or squeal of rubber at touchdown I neither hear nor feel it. No hint of the reputed suspension turret weakness alleged to afflict the first-gen GT4. Just another corner picked apart, unstitched, secrets spilled out, knowledge gathered. And done so with such dexterity that this new Porsche seems to be tickling Knockhill into submission, fluttering a chassis feather between each toe. It doesn't…

REPORT 3 £14,400 OTR/£15,050 as tested/£260pcm WHY IT’S HERE Is the daily grind in a basic Duster more cheap than cheerful? DRIVER Tom Ford THE DUSTER HAS FINALLY DONE SOMETHING THAT HAS GENUINELY irritated, and taken the sheen off a bit. It got a puncture. Now, you can’t blame the car for a screw in the tread, and having the (optional) spare wheel was a good choice – a quick swap and I could whip around to a tyre shop and get a plug. Except for the fact that, having jacked up the car on completely level tarmac and removed the flat, I realised that the supplied jack wasn’t actually tall enough to allow replacement of a fully inflated spare. Obviously plopping a short length of stable plank under the…

GOODBYE £143,305 OTR/£148,005 as tested/£2,012pcm WHY IT’S HERE The ultimate old-school charmer, but can it hack the daily grind? DRIVER Rowan Horncastle IF YOU’RE A DYED-IN-THE-DIAMONDS SYBARITE WITH £140K burning a hole in your Givenchy pocket, there’s a real tussle as to where your money goes if you want a fast, luxurious SUV. Fundamentally, you’ve got two choices – both very good ones. In one corner, the poorly punctuated Range Rover SVAutobiography Dynamic. The other? The Merc-AMG G63. Having lived with our much-loved office tank for six months, we have to say auf wiedersehen to our G63. But before we wave it off, I thought I’d get the Rangie in to see how it stacks up. On paper, there’s not much between them. When it comes to price, they’re within…

REPORT 3 £49,050 OTR/£51,985 as tested/£591pcm WHY IT’S HERE Can Supra DNA lift BMW’s sports car from the Boxster’s shadow? DRIVER Stephen Dobie IT’S DIFFICULT TO TALK TO ANYONE ABOUT THE Z4 WITHOUT THE Toyota Supra soon crowbarring its way into the conversation. The debate about whether the two should share parts so flagrantly is raging, of course, not least between two of TG telly’s own. I’m with the dating show host rather than the racing driver, though. A sentence I never thought I’d type. Sharing engines, gearboxes and electronics is far and away the easiest way to cut costs and enlarge profit margins. Doing so has enabled both BMW and Toyota to launch some very accomplished sports cars at a time when the market and its increasingly tight emissions…

IT STARTED OFF SO WELL. IT FINISHED SPECTACULARLY WHO: JACK RIX, DEPUTY EDITOR We were in Italy to have a go in Lamborghini’s recently restored, utterly pristine LM002, but didn’t have a location sorted. “Well, there’s an abandoned mine down the road we have exclusive access to, if you fancy that?” said the Lambo PR. Er, yep, that’ll do. Cut to a day largely spent drifting three tonnes of V12 SUV around in ankle-deep mud and puddles. Problem was, the wiper broke, so the windscreen quickly became caked, forcing me to trundle back to the rest of team with my head out the window… and straight into a shin-high concrete block, bending the front bull bar. Thank you, Lambo, for not castrating me there and then. SLIDING SCALE WHO: ELLIOTT…