Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

...to TopGear Speed Week 2016: an unashamed celebration of the fastest cars of the year. Fast comes in many automotive forms, from the exquisitely exclusive £1,800,000 Aston Martin Vulcan to the somewhat more attainable £22,895 Ford Fiesta ST200... At the beginning of September, we gathered our favourite performance cars of 2016 at the stunning Red Bull Ring – a 2.7-mile sinew of perfect, F1-grade tarmac set against a backdrop of beautiful Austrian countryside. While the focus of Speed Week remained the track, for many the journey to the showdown had been a significant adventure in itself... Digital had battled analogue over the mountains as the Honda NSX and Porsche 911R fought to claim the mantle of the best driver’s car on the Grossglockner Pass. Meanwhile, on a deserted stretch of…

Infiniti Q60 £34,000 approx. WE SAY: INFINITI’S NEW COUPE HAS ITS MERITS – JUST DON’T GO THINKING IT’S SPORTY Take a good slow look at the Q60 on these pages. It’s going to be a while before you see another. Infiniti’s global sales are small, and in Europe tiny. Despite years of optimistic projections from Infiniti bosses, they’re still struggling at about a tenth of the numbers that BMW, Audi or Mercedes each shift. And it’s not like their cars have been hopeless. Sure, they’re a bit patchy dynamically, but that’s an accusation you could equally level at certain of their rivals’ perfectly successful vehicles. Infiniti also got into crossovers good and early, which should have brought rewards, and these days it has a good range of cars running Mercedes…

Porsche Panamera Turbo £113,075 WE SAY: SHARP LOOKS, PLENTIFUL TECH, PLUSH INTERIOR. STILL FAST A facelifted Panamera? Nope, it’s an all-new model. Every single part has changed, whatever the similar (though perter) looks suggest. This Turbo is the fastest for now. Its new 4.0-litre V8 engine houses two turbos inside its vee, like a Mercedes AMG GT, while four of the cylinders deactivate at a cruise. Peak outputs are 542bhp and 568lb ft, enough on paper for a 3.6-second 0–62mph time and 190mph top speed. What about on tarmac? Feels even quicker, if we’re honest. Engage Launch Control and it propels itself at the horizon in an utterly rude manner, while an empty, three-lane autobahn nicely exhibited the Panamera’s effortfree lunge to (and slightly past) its claimed vmax. Given it…

THE WOWS Renault Trezor In the spirit of all good concept cars, Renault’s new Trezor hits all the bullseyes: daft name, impossibly low-slung and slinky bodywork, embarrassing mode of ingress, next-gen drivetrain. But it’s not the flight of fancy that it might first appear. OK, we’re not likely to see red glass making any kind of appearance on a new Clio anytime soon, but as design senior VP Laurens van den Acker says: “This concept prepares the way for trends we are likely to see in our upcoming vehicles”. So elements of the Trezor might have a future. So what is it exactly? A rear-drive, carbon-heavy two-seat GT with the motor nicked from the Formula E Renault e.dams, giving 350bhp and 280lb ft and a 0–62mph time of under…

The man who reinvented the hypercar with the McLaren F1 has now applied even more original thinking to the pickup. The OX is conceived to supply transport currently deprived to much of the developing world. It’s vastly cheaper, stronger, higher in capacity and easier to maintain than anything else currently available. Instead of taking inspiration from a Toyota Hilux or Land Rover, Murray thought of the Renault 4 – its long-travel soft suspension found remarkable of-road ability from front-drive. So the OX’s engine is under the front seats, pushing down on the driven wheels. Far-back rear wheels mean the weight distribution isn’t bad even fully loaded. The structure is Murray’s patent iStream system of fat panels bonding a welded steel frame. Here, the panels are engineered plywood, proof against dents…

It’s called the Case IH Magnum Autonomous Tractor, but from now on we shall call it RoboCrop. It’s a driverless farm machine designed to minimise time in the feld and maximise time in the pub. Many agri-vehicles already have a self-steering system linked to GPS for orderly seed sowing, ploughing, badger culling and whatever else they do these days, but they still need someone on board. The Magnum doesn’t, but it’s not completely farmerless. It still needs programming by an earthy human, armed with a tablet app to set boundaries and plot paths and generally make sure it stays between the hedgerows. But it can be up and running in minutes, and even work with a squadron of other RoboCrops in a vaguely terrifying farmy army. And until they form…

I can feel it coming, a faint tickle in the sinuses, but I can’t stop now. The battered Audi A3 I’ve been following at a steady 110mph has just peeled right, revealing a stretch of three-lane autobahn perfection – empty, approximately straight, well-sighted, dry. Systems check: vmax mode sinks the carbon spoiler closer to the bootlid, switch the exhausts to Spitfre and any stragglers up ahead should have fair warning. I give it all the throttle, mashing the pedal into the footwell with unnecessary force, searching for an extra millimetre of squidge from the carpet covering the bulkhead. In the F-Type SVR, you don’t just drop the hammer, you drop a branch of B&Q. Even deep into three fgures, it squats and hurtles forward like a demented rhino, snorting on…

FORD FOCUS RS Price: £31,000 Engine: 2261cc turbocharged 4cyl, 345bhp, 347lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual, AWD Performance: 0–62mph in 4.7secs, 165mph Economy: 36.7mpg, 175g/km CO2 Kerbweight: 1547kg ABARTH 124 SPIDER Price: £29,365 Engine: 1368cc turbocharged 4cyl, 170bhp, 184lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual, RWD Performance: 0–62mph in 6.8secs, 144mph Economy: 44.1mpg, 148g/km CO2 Kerbweight: 1060kg The inevitable march of progress leaves two of the cars in this so-called sensible, lowerperformance section of this magnifcent collection with enough speed to embarrass the last decade’s supercars. One of them, however, is a little less bombastic. The cyclical irony of Fiat courting Mazda to share the undergarments of its legendary MX-5 will not be lost on those who know just how much the little Japanese roadster has done to kill Italian participation in a…

MERCEDES-AMG C63 ED1 Price: £77,540 Engine: 3982cc twin-turbo V8, 503bhp, 516lb ft Transmission: 7spd auto Performance: 0–62mph in 3.9 seconds, 155mph Economy: 32.8mpg, 200g/km CO2 Kerbweight: 1800kg BMW M2 Price: £44,080 Engine: 2979cc turbocharged 6cyl, 365bhp, 369lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual Performance: 0–62mph in 4.5 seconds, 155mph Economy: 33.2mpg, 199g/km CO2 Kerbweight: 1570kg AUDI TT RS Price: £51,800 Engine: 2480cc turbocharged 5cyl, 395bhp, 354lb ft Transmission: 7spd double-clutch Performance: 0–62mph in 3.7 seconds, 174mph Economy: 34.4mpg, 187g/km CO2 Kerbweight: 1440kg JAGUAR F-TYPE SVR Price: £111,000 Engine: 5000cc s’charged V8, 567bhp, 516lb ft Transmission: 8spd auto Performance: 0–62mph in 3.7 seconds, 200mph Economy: 25.0mpg, 269g/km CO2 Kerbweight: 1705kg PORSCHE 911R Price: £136,901 Engine: 3996cc flat-six, 493bhp, 339lb ft Transmission: 6spd manual Performance: 0–62mph in 3.8 seconds, 201mph Economy: 21.2mpg, 308g/km CO2…

This was the Österreichring in 1974. It was a fast, frightening circuit. Local hero Niki Lauda punted his Ferrari 312T around here at an average speed of nearly 140mph. Twelve years later, after a chicane had been installed to slow things down, Nelson Piquet had reduced the lap record by a further 11 seconds, the average speed climbing to 159.4mph. Apart from the chicane, there wasn’t a slow corner in the place – all were third-gear or above when cars only had fve. So the fact the Österreichring was heavily modifed (in 1996 when it became the A1-Ring and again in 2011 with Red Bull) to comply with new F1 safety standards actually suits our needs very well. For fast laps in road cars, the Red Bull Ring is close…

Price/as tested £32,450 Model 2.0 CRDi Premium SE Driver Esther Neve Why it’s here Is there more to the Tucson than the pricetag? 1995cc, 4cyl TD, 4WD, 183bhp, 295lb ft 43.5mpg, 170g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.5secs, 125mph 2250kg REPORT 4 Give me a car with roof rails, and I’ll put something on the top. In this instance, a 16ft 6in prospector canoe, resplendent in glorious red. This is what the Hyundai Tucson was made for (in the marketing department’s eyes, at any rate) – the thrill of adventure, the lure of the wilderness, the call of the unknown. As strange as it sounds, Hyundai’s marketing department isn’t actually far of with its hypothesis. This kind of car is bound to appeal to active types, so it’s very likely to be…

Price £32,995/£39,995 Model E10 S Driver Jack Rix Why it’s here Is this the most liveable lightweight you can currently buy? 1999cc turbo 4cyl, RWD, 247bhp, 295lb ft 38.5mpg, 190g/km CO2 0–62mph in 4.0secs, 145mph 850kg REPORT 3 Call me shallow, but the Kermit-green colour scheme just wasn’t working with my wardrobe. Luckily, swapping body panels is a possibility, so I decided a nose around the factory in Norfolk was in order, along with a change to a more neutral tone, daaahling. Exchanging the glass reinforced plastic panels – a function designed primarily to limit costs from accident damage – is so easy any monkey with a spanner (me) could do it, and the results – along with new black lower bodywork (part of the Black Aero pack) – makes…

Mercedes-Benz E220d Estate £37,935 WE SAY: SMOOTH DIESEL AND HUGE BOOT MAKE FOR A REAL CONTENDER The old Mercedes-Benz E-Class Estate’s bigness was almost unrivalled, which is sort of the point of these kind of cars. Capacity was 1,855 litres with the rear seats folded fat, which put it squarely in commercial vehicle territory. The new one loses 35 litres of space, but gains a CLSstyle sloping roofine that may not make it classically pretty, but does give it a bit more style than the old generation. And because there’s 1,100mm between the arches, it’ll swallow a standard-size Euro pallet. We didn’t know parents had started loading their kids’ paraphernalia onto pallets and forklifting them into the back of cars, but Mercedes assures us they have, and that this is…

What makes this SUV sporty? The all-new, second-gen VW Tiguan has a much broader range than the Edge. What you see here is its most assertive R-Line trim, which matches the Ford with lower, sharper suspension, unsubtle styling mods and 20in wheels. AWD is optional here. The Edge Sport is Ford’s large SUV in its topmost trim level, posh Vignale excluded, and brings with it sports suspension, a body kit and fat 20in alloys. Edges get four-wheel drive as standard, as well as torque-vectoring tech, apparently to aid handling prowess. Like hot hatches on stilts, then? With the VW group’s laser-honed MQB chassis beneath, this Tiguan handles like it’s half the size of the Edge. Which it almost is. The spin-off is a ride quality that’s firm, though not fatally…

FORD TRANSIT SUPERSPORTVAN Affectionately nicknamed the "Supertranny", what looks like a plumber's best friend is actually a sports car's worst nightmare. Those fat tyres are the giveaway that it runs a 200bhp 3.2-litre five-pot diesel and smuggles hot-hatch performance. BELL COBRA TAH-1F With I.eOObhp, a top speed of 216mph (available from a height of just 10cm) and a £7m pricetag, sorting the insurance for this one was interesting. But its ability to regress the entire TG staff into giggling cameraphone-waving children was second to none. BUGATTI VEYRON SUPERSPORT It takes quite something to overshadow a very orange Pagani Zonda F on the Stelvio Pass, but the slightly less orange Veyron SS did just that in 2011. Described as "mind-scrabbling", it ruined all who drove it. Nothing has seemed remotely fast…

The truck you are looking at is not levitating. Nor is any kind of trickery involved. In fact, as you see it here, it’s travelling forwards at somewhere north of 100mph, having recently departed a ramp somewhere stage left. By jumping over a ghost town in New Mexico, of-road racer Bryce Menzies broke Tanner Foust’s 2011 record for the longest truck jump ever. Although it’s yet to be fully ratifed by Guinness World Records, initial measurements suggest the 29-year-old from Las Vegas has taken the record from 101 metres to 115 metres. Now you don’t just roll up at a deserted town and bounce clean over it without a bit of practice. The stunt took six months to put together, with several test leaps conducted at a secret location near…

We humans think we’ve elevated ourselves clear of the rest of the animal kingdom because we’ve learned to cooperate for the common good. Call it society. Unlike a pride of lions or a swarm of bees, our concern for our fellows goes beyond the ones we immediately know. We’ll try to do good for people we’ve never met, or even those as-yet unborn. Looking after our own progeny is nothing more than Darwinism, but taking care of other people’s is, well, society. Or maybe it’s just enlightened self-interest. We want to live in a world of reasonable equality (at least of opportunity) and solidarity, so we submit to the imperatives that allow it to fourish. Sadly, all that goodness gets very frmly parked as soon as we get into a…

Putting together a hot hatchback. Easy, right? Take something small and sensible, and an engine that’s a bit too big and powerful for it. One ginormous shoehorn later, you have a pent-up little performance car that’s able to bloody the noses of things rarer and more exotic on a tight piece of road. At least that’s how it used to be, back when VW was frst signing of the original Golf GTI in the Seventies. But things have changed, and each of the diverse bunch that’s qualifed for Speed Week – three of which we’re driving down to Austria’s Red Bull Ring the elongated, 1,200-mile way – goes about its business quite diferently. The fourth? We’ll get to that in a bit. Our newest contender is a modern-day GTI. This…

Price/as tested £23,595/£24,120 Model Dynamique S Nav dCi 110 Driver Simon Carrington Why it’s here Can it out-Qashqai a Qashqai? 1461cc, 4cyl TD, FWD, 108bhp, 184lb ft 72.4mpg, 103g/km CO2 0–62mph in 11.7secs, 112mph 1421kg GOODBYE So after six (long) months we’re saying goodbye to our Renault. Sometimes, when we bid farewell to a long-term test car, we do with a sense of sadness. However, after 4,000 miles, involving plenty of family ferrying, my daily commute and the occasional blast round the country, I’ve little regret about giving back this everso-sensible SUV. The Kadjar is not a bad car, in fact it ticks every box that an SUV should. It’s spacious for both front and rear passengers with good headroom in the back (ideal for child seat extraction), has a…

Price/as tested £134,520/£150,720 Model V10 Plus Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is Audi’s everyday supercar still special to live with? 5204cc, V10, 4WD, 602bhp, 413lb ft 23.0mpg, 287g/km CO2 0–62mph in 3.2secs, 205mph 1454kg REPORT 4 Driving a supercar hasn’t changed the fundamentals of how I live my life. I don’t suddenly have a yacht in Saint-Tropez, my skin hasn’t taken on a mahogany tinge and I’m still married to the same woman. I know, shocking revelations. I still need to get to the ofce, do schoolruns, pick up milk on the way home, occasionally stop at Homebase. Same s**t, a diferent way. This pic shows a standard view out: rain, trafc, tedium. So here’s how the R8 copes with it all: it’s a cinch. Honestly the most challenging…

Cizeta should have made it. It had all the ingredients that, 15 years later, would see Pagani succeed, but luck was not on its side. It came together well enough. Claudio Zampolli, an ex-Lamborghini engineer who had gone on to run exotic car dealerships on America’s West Coast, teamed up with music producer Giorgio Moroder, known for “I Feel Love”. They had money and moved in the right circles. Marcello Gandini, who had styled the Miura and Countach, had his design for the next model rejected by Lamborghini’s new owners, Chrysler. The sketches of what would have been the Diablo went to Zampolli, the company used his initials as its name (rather unfortunately pronounced ‘cheese-eater’) and set up shop in Modena. So far, so good. Plus Zampolli realised his new…

Vauxhall Mokka X £22,050 WE SAY: VAUXHALL GOES DOWN THE ‘IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT’ ROUTE The Mokka was a prompt arrival at the small-crossover party, and over the years acquired more and more rivals. But its business kept growing and it ended last year top of the class in the UK sales league. Now we have the Mokka X, its mid-life facelift. As it was doing such good business, Vauxhall has an excuse to keep the changes small. Besides, consistent direction helps build brand image. In becoming the X, it’s been given alterations that make it look, inside and out, more like an Astra. Again, cross-car consistency helps solidify a brand. So we have new headlights (all LED in upper trims) bolted into new wings, a wider…

WE SAY: THERE ARE DIFFICULT CHOICES IN LIFE AND THEN THERE’S THIS, THE KIND OF DILEMMA TG LOVES TO HAVE Serena beating Venus. A Toro Rosso overtaking a Red Bull. Pippa Middleton on the steps of Westminster Abbey. It’s awkward when the upstart young sibling sticks one over on the establishment. So, by rights, the Fiat 124 Spider shouldn’t be a better sports car than the evergreen Mazda MX-5. But you know what? It just might be. The new “Fiata” is, as you’re probably well aware, a convoluted Japanese import. Originally destined to be badged as an Alfa Romeo, built in Hiroshima, using turbocharged 1.4-litre engines shipped out from Turin to replace the Mazda’s 1.5- and 2.0-litre four-cylinders. It’s dressed in retro yet dowdier bodywork, stretched in length and…

L and Rover’s design HQ is expanding. It has to if it’s to cope with the wave of new product that’s coming over the next few years. Range Rover, Land Rover, Defender: the brand lives in three distinct silos now, having morphed from British Leyland country bumpkin into one of the glittering jewels of the car industry. An insatiable appetite for SUVs has helped. But a highly astute design philosophy has played a major part too, as has a growing reputation for engineering integrity and ingenuity. LR’s chief design ofcer Gerry McGovern occupies an impressively stark mezzanine ofce, and is a man possessed of a clear strategic vision. There may be a fufy white cat around somewhere, but I can’t see it. Having just been inside the all-new Discovery, I…

You’ll have heard this factoid before, but we’ll say it again – back in the mid-Sixties it took Ford less than two years to sell a million Mustangs. It wasn’t especially advanced, but it was good-looking, fast, cheap and practical enough to capture middle America’s imagination. Ford quite rightly deduced that such a car would do well in across the pond too, so just a few months after the Mustang’s April 1964 launch it greenlit Project Colt – kick-starting the development of a proper two-door coupe tailored to the most peculiar tastes of us Europeans. The fnished article emerged in 1969, fve years and £20m-odd later. Capri was its name, and it was “The car you always promised yourself,” or so the ads claimed. On purpose it was (and remained…

Monterey week is an extended three-Michelin-star automotive extravaganza, with Pebble Beach as the rousing pièce de résistance. But sometimes you just want a burger. At the Concours d’LeMons, now into its eighth glorious year, you don’t even get that. No, this is a plate of beans. Served cold, out of the can. Criteria for entry is simple. “We allow bad examples of good cars, and good examples of bad cars,” co-founder Alain Galbraith says. He then takes to the microphone to outline exactly what sort of bribery the judges, this year including former Ford, Mercedes and VW designer Freeman Thomas, are likely to respond most positively to. Beer, mainly. (Alcohol, Galbraith avers, may have played a part in the event’s conception.) Needless to say, the communal tongue is wedged frmly…

TARUS 2x2 ATV There’s nothing more Russian than a stout, two-wheel-drive motorbike for hunting, fishing, lumberjacking and whatever else goes on in remote, unpoliced woodland. Except maybe for Vladimir Putin, bare-chested on horseback, gnawing on a bear. It’s called the Tarus 2x2 and it’s designed to go where four-wheel ATVs can’t – between trees, over stumps, through thick bogs and even up and down steps. It’s easy to take apart, and disassembled it’ll fit snugly in the boot of a car. So long as that car is no smaller than a Range Rover Sport, and the boot is clear of shovels, bin bags and quicklime. £1,300 approx (plus import costs) moto2x2.com GANKER FIGHTING ROBOTS These battle bots start life as a kit, which you build yourself while getting to grips…

Of course we went over the Alps. Because if you have to drive a couple of sports cars from a factory in southern Germany to the Red Bull Ring in deepest Austria and fail to take in at least one Alpine pass, well, that’s a dereliction of duty. That two museums dedicated to one of those marques lie at either side of the Grossglockner Pass is nothing more than a happy coincidence. Actually, when I say either side, what I actually mean is “Stuttgart” and “Gmund”. They’re 354 miles apart. I wouldn’t claim the Grossglockner is the quickest route between them, or the shortest, but having done it, I can categorically say it is the best. I measured the pleasure, so to speak. This is what we often forget to…

At the mere mention of NASCAR, most journalists will dive into a barrel of wellworn cliches. Cliches such as its fans are all Trump-worshipping, Coors-guzzling rednecks with Confederate fag tattoos. Or that the technology is so Stone Age, it makes a ride-on lawnmower look like VSS Unity. Or that the tracks are ovals because Americans can’t remember to turn right as well as left. But not me. Nope. I would never stoop that low. Especially as I’m currently sitting in the belly of the world’s angriest car, and everything has just become very serious indeed. The vibrations are making my eyeballs rattle around in their sockets, I’m uncomfortably hot, my head is throbbing and my nerves are frayed to the point that if there wasn’t netting covering the windows, I…

Price £90,843/£103,999 Model 911 Carrera C4S Driver Charlie Turner Why it’s here Is the all-new C4S the ultimate winter sports car? 2981cc 6cyl twin turbo, 4WD, 414bhp, 369lb ft 31.7mpg, 204g/km CO2 0–62mph in 4.2secs, 189mph 1565kg HELLO As summer rapidly becomes a distant memory, the evenings draw in, leaves separate from the trees and autumn begins to dominate proceedings, what could be described as the perfect sports car for the winter season has arrived in the TopGear Garage. Regular readers will have read many words on the rolling automotive controversy that is the 991 Gen 2, the car that fnally sees Porsche’s icon resort to turbocharging throughout the range. While this has angered the purists, and while there’s no doubting some of the purity and mechanical connectivity of the…

Three of us were of to Italy. Two wanted to fy, but we needed a car when we were there, and had a lot of baggage. Perfect excuses to do what I wanted to do anyway: drive out and back alone. On great roads. Day one would get me over the Channel on the DFDS boat, for an easy autoroute hit and an overnight beyond Geneva. I carefully plotted my route over several of the best French Alpine passes then down to the Italian autostrada system via Turin and Genoa. I put many waypoints into BMW-routes.com on my desktop, hit ‘download’, put the resulting route fle on a USB stick and plugged it directly into the car’s satnav. Easier than in-car entry. The Clubman is a bit of an odd…

Price £54,547/£54,547 Model Caravelle Gen 6 Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is the Caravelle a genuine alternative to an SUV? 1968cc 4cyl turbodiesel, FWD, 201bhp, 332lb ft 44.8mpg, 164g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.9secs, 126mph 2405kg HELLO I know, you want to walk up to the window and ask for a Mr Whippy, don’t you? To be frank, I felt a bit of a berk driving around London in the latest addition to TG’s lifer feet, so clearly the only answer was to take it far away, to somewhere sunny and warm. Somewhere I might actually need a vanilla cone. It’s a Caravelle Generation 6, the 200-strong limited edition fagship of VW’s shuttle bus range. About the only choice you can make is what engine to have (148bhp single- or…

Land Rover Discovery Sport Driver Owen Norris Price £43,000/£51,499 1999cc, 4cyl turbodiesel, AWD, 180bhp, 317lb ft 53.3mpg, 139g/km CO2 0–62mph in 8.9secs, 117mph 1884kg To say I’m distraught is a slight understatement. The kids are crying. It’s like we’ve lost a family pet. I tried telling them it’s only a car so we shouldn’t be sentimental about it, but we can’t help it. The Sport’s been great. But before it leaves us for good, it’s time for a long-overdue trip of-road. So I’ve driven over to the Land Rover Experience centre at Eastnor Castle in deepest Herefordshire to see if my long-termer is a real Land Rover or not. It was on these very tracks that the original Land Rover was developed all those years ago (and every model since),…