Innholdsfortegnelse for Best Of 2016 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

Every new car that ma t ter s, rated or slated £54,335 £51,450 Maserati Levante Jaguar F-Pace Odd, isn’t it, that we live in an age where manufacturers responsible for several of the most seductive sports cars of the last century, and heroic feats on the racetrack, are staking their future solvency on high-riding, familyorientated, diesel-drinking SUVs. Nowadays, it seems, if a brand has allure we care little about where that magnetism stems from, so long as we can have a slice of it for ourselves: sewn into a leather jacket, slapped across a theme park, or glued to the posterior of a pseudo of-roader. Which is how I fnd myself in the chocolate-box Cotswold town of Burford, adjudicating a bout between Jaguar and Maserati, but rather than upsetting the…

BMW M240i £35,090 The M235i, which was a pretty damn good small sports coupe, has got a new engine and a new, even more meaningless badge, which along with updated, sharper iDrive, is the only visual giveaway. But let’s not get convoluted. The genius of the M240i is that it’s pretty much all you’d ever need to amuse you on the road, and to bimble about in every day. Praise be, someone at BMW still sees the joy in stringing out a line of six cylinders under a bonnet. The 240i still uses a 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo engine, but it’s new: a child of the modular engines that BMW is rolling out. Efectively, the engineers simply glue together 500cc cylinders and strap on turbos until they reach the right motor…

1You won’t mistake it for a puny E220d A heavily domed bonnet is your chief indicator, along with a completely redesigned front end with vertical black struts in the grille and flared nostrils. The front wheelarches are 17mm wider to accommodate wider rubber and scare small children, while the interior is festooned with leather, Alcantara, carbon fibre and ambient lighting – with 64 colours to choose from. 2It’s gruntier than an AMG GT R AMG’s 4.0-litre twinturbo V8, firing through a nine-speed dual-clutch gearbox, is turned up to 604bhp and 627lb ft of torque in the maximum-attack “S” model shown here, or a more sedate 563bhp and 553lb ft in standard trim. Yep, that 604bhp figure is 27bhp more than the very angry, very green AMG GT-R. It’ll also crush…

I feel very lucky, I feel my life is a never-ending privilege ALEX ZANARDI Inspirational is the word most of ten associated with Alessandro Zanardi – the first of TG’s Heroes of 2016. In 2001, the ex-F1 driver and two-time CART champion lost his legs in a horrific accident. He now describes it as “the biggest opportunity of my life – it became my greatest chance”. Since then he has won six Olympic medals, and five World Championship golds. Fif teen years to the day af ter his crash, he lined up for the start of the handcycle road race at the Rio Paralympics. Ollie Marriage: You’d won gold in the time trial the day before. Were you disappointed to ‘only’ win silver that day? Alex Zanardi: No, because quite…

Best B-road Hero BMW M2 THE BEST CARS in the world Pick a B-road. Any B-road. It doesn’t really matter. You could throw all the numbers into a hat and select at random. You could add some science: the longest, the B6318, runs for 61 miles; the most northerly is the B9087, which is up in the Shetlands. Then there’s the B660. In places it’s only fve feet four inches above sea level and it’s miles away from the coast. There are 18,800 miles of B-roads in the UK, and I guarantee the BMW M2 is fun on every single one of them. I’ve got the B3081, which probably sounds to you as though I’ve lucky-dipped, but a few years ago this was named Britain’s twistiest road. That’s a bit…

THE BEST CARS in the world The city is where we’re seen. So we want a car that dresses us well, and has some sense of place. This little Citroen is right for town. It’s modern – modish, even, in its details – but because of its simplicity and balanced proportions, it’s probably timeless too. You don’t want to be a fashion victim in a clone of everyone else’s outft. So go ahead and personalise the heck out of the C3, picking body and roof colours, swapping out the wheels, selecting or deleting Airbumps. Inside, the ranges of fabrics and dash covers consciously reject the usual tropes of car trim. No racing stripes on the upholstery, or drilled pedals, or mock carbon-fbre garnishes. No “cockpit”-shaped dash or “bucket seats”…

THE BEST CARS in the world I t’s 7:30am on the Isle of Man. It’s so cold, the snot in my nose has frozen solid, I’ve lost all feeling in my toes and icy rain water is leaking into my trousers. My mood should be lifted by the sight of the BAC Mono in front of me, but instead it flls me with dread. I’m about to set of in what amounts to a racing car with zero electronic aids on roads that are so wet they may as well be lined with banana skins. I’m here because I want to feel what it’s like to ride the TT course, to cling precariously to a superbike nudging 200mph through villages as onlookers cheer me on. I haven’t taken my full…

Price/as tested £31,250/£35,765 Driver Jack Rix Why it’s here Can the Focus RS do sensible as well as sideways? 2261cc, 4cyl turbo, 4WD, 345bhp, 347lb ft 36.7mpg, 175g/km CO2 0–62mph in 4.7secs, 165mph 1547kg HELLO That’s it, it’s all over. I’ve had my fun, I suppose. Time to stop shoehorning my wife into two-seater track cars, driving at irresponsible speeds and kidding myself that those delicious little pickles you get in a 3am kebab are one of my fve a day. I’m having a baby, you see, like, any minute now, so I’m doing what any responsible father-to-be would do and swapping a Zenos for a sensible fve-door hatch with a big boot and Isofx. The fact that it has 345bhp, Recaro shell seats and a drift mode button is…

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 REPORT 3 In the month that we celebrate the diverse capabilities of the C4S by naming it Best Winter Weapon, it wasn’t all plain sailing. With mileage fast approaching 13,000, the 911 was sufering from terribly squeaky brakes at slow speeds. Given that 50 per cent of my two-hour commute is spent crawling through London trafc, this was beginning to substantially detract from the C4S’s otherwise excellent experience. I called Porsche Cambridge on a Wednesday, expecting a minimum two-week delay before they could ft me in, and was staggered when they could see…

Scott Devon founded the originally titled Devon Motorworks in Los Angeles in 2008, looking to capitalise on the imminent death of the second-gen Dodge Viper by buying up the rights, and producing his own super-coupe on the same underpinnings. The Devon GTX was the handsome result. It used the same 8.4-litre V10 and running gear as the Viper (albeit pumped up to 650bhp), but wrapped up in a carbon body with a completely redesigned and far smarter cabin, butterfly doors and its strange shaved-off wheelarch blisters. Ouch. And the car wasn’t just a rebodied, retrimmed Viper with a rocket up its backside. Devon went to the considerable trouble of developing a new active suspension system that offered 60mm of ride height adjustment. Prod the button, and the TX could scoot…

Shell Concept Car £n/a This isn’t a car, it’s a rolling treatise on energy reduction. And yes, you are right in thinking this is Gordon Murray’s T25 city car. Although no marque has stepped forward to turn it into a production reality since it appeared in 2012, development hasn’t stopped, and Gordon Murray has partnered with Shell and engine specialists Geo Technology to explore more ways to reduce emissions. Andy Jones, design director at Gordon Murray Design, calls it the weight waterfall – removing weight from one area means you can take more from another. So no stone has been left unturned: body, suspension, brakes, steering, exhaust, cooling, interior. There’s practically no NVH materials in it. Weight has come down from 627kg to 550kg. So no power steering needed to…

Toyota C-HR 1.2T £23,995 This was going to be a Juke rival. But its engineers, very keen drivers, decided the company’s small platform wasn’t good enough, so they shifted up a size to the brand-new global platform. The project director said he’s happy to sacrifce rear room and bootspace for the looks, but because of that growth, neither are actually terrible. Sure, back-benchers have no view to their sides, but the Rolls Phantom is the same, styling it out as “privacy”. It’s got a manga face, bulging arches, a laid-down rear window, peaked D-posts and a detached roof. But amid this storm of line and formwork, some cohesion emerges. If that’s not weird enough, you should see inside. Still, the new textures, shapes and colours are wrought from far betterquality…

Engine 2995cc, V6 turbo, AWD, 349bhp, 369lb ft Performance 37.7mpg, 170g/km CO2, 0–62mph in 4.7secs, 155mph Weight 1660kg The S5 Sportback is a bit of a nobrainer. Spec-for-spec it’s the same price as the Coupe on which it’s based, but you get a pair of usable rear seats and a much bigger boot. You could, of course, simply buy a cheaper S4 (Avant, obviously) – and that’s probably what we’d do – but looks matter, and the S5 certainly delivers. Based on the MLB Evo platform, it shares much with the A4 and Q5, including a very wellappointed interior. Bit dull to drive, if we’re honest, even as a turbocharged V6, but fast and pretty mature with it. This is not surprising. Rides well, sounds nice, ample grip – it…

Have you ever seen a list of the world’s greatest cars that doesn’t include a Citroen DS? It’s a reliable chart-topper, famous as much for its looks as its technical unorthodoxy. In a mid-Fifties world of shocks and springs, the DS instead used hydropneumatic suspension with little spheres of pressurised oil and nitrogen for each wheel, meaning the car always remained level. That wasn’t the only innovation, but it’s the one that made its name. A name that, as any pub-quizmaster will tell you, is a play on déesse, the French for goddess. And there’s nothing more French than a strange Citroen. Although in this case, it’s not in a cheeky, joie de vivre sort of way; more of a philosophical, je ne sais quoi sort of way. If the…

T he trouble with private planes is that they’re essentially tiny airliners. You still board through a side door and you still sit in a long tube with porthole windows, while up front the pilot gets all the views. But hey, you’re paying. Why shouldn’t you get the best seat in the house? This is why you need a Valkyrie. It’s a fve-seat, single-engine plane with the largest one-piece cockpit canopy in the world, which not only provides panoramic views for everyone on board, but pops open so you can drop into your seat like a fghter pilot. It’s pushed along by a rear-mounted propeller, powered by a twin-turbocharged, six-cylinder piston engine, and has not one but two sets of wings – the small ones at the front are there…

There’s a new Golf this month (see page 107). Another new Golf. I measure out my life in new Golfs. I began this job when the MkII was current, and one of my early highlights was testing the 16V when it launched, amazed at its urbane but electrifying power. Then the MkIII: I had a VR6 long-term test car for 40,000 miles. It had a magical engine, but the rest of the car was so riddled with inadequacies and failures I ended up giving VW’s then-chief engineer a lift in it, furiously pointing them out. Any car company that listens to my advice is surely doomed, but I wasn’t alone. The customers wanted a better-quality Golf, and in the MkIV they got one. The craftsmanship and graceful action of its…

Yeah, yeah, we all know Volkswagens are sensible cars, and among sensible cars they’re among the most desirable. But there’s a widespread assumption that you pay for that combination. If we’re giving an award for Best First Wheels, surely cost is pretty well paramount? It turns out the littlest Volkswagen is a bit of a winner here too. Because of two things. First, it has high residual values. Second it’s got a lot of safety equipment so insurance is (relatively) cheap. And if you’re young and it’s your frst car, insurance is likely to be the biggest cost. Bigger even than buying the thing. The chance does exist that you might be able to buy a car more cheaply than the Up. We’ve highlighted the Sandero. Or you might go…

A Golf. Short of needing seven seats or some genuine of-road ability, those two words can answer just about any car requirement you care to throw our way. Stratospheric mpg from an unashamedly prosaic hatchback? Buy the diesel BlueMotion. Tech-heavy hybrid to coo over and feel environmentally cocksure about? Try the GTE. Serious track-day toy that will genuinely thrill? The GTI Clubsport S (a real 2016 highlight) has got that covered. And among all of those, there’s a crossovery estate, a high-rise mini-MPV and a 4WD hyper-hatch that quite a lot of us would have over a Ford Focus RS. The one we’re focusing on here, though, the one car that’s the answer to any sensible question you care to ask, is probably the least glamorous: the 1.0-litre TSI…

W e’re not sure why car designers think “styling” is a dirty word. We asked one once, and he suggested we swiftly remove ourselves from the event he was hosting. Our best guess is that they think it suggests a disregard for the mechanical or practical, that it sells the process of creating something as complex as an automobile short by implying they are concerned only with the superfcial – how a car looks, not how it functions when you fll it full of people and things, or whether it complies with any/all of the rules and regulations it’s supposed to. Which is why we suspect Gorden Wagener, Daimler’s head of design, won’t be best pleased to learn we’ve chosen to recognise the C-Class Coupe for its “Style Over Space”,…

THE BEST CARS in the world Best Everyday Supercar McLaren 570GT There is no such thing as a “practical supercar”. It’s a contradiction in terms on the same intellectual level as “moderate terrorist” or “diet cake”. The point of a supercar is to be impractical. Whimsical, even. Fantastical to look at, and with a poisonously narrow gofaster brief that means it’s about as useful in real life as male nipples, or those cheap spanners you can buy made from metallic softwood. Yes, you can get searingly fast cars that are also practical – the Porsche 911 Turbo being one – but is that really a supercar? It’s got four seats, for goodness’ sake. And there are approximately seven hundred lesser models which all – bar a few extra bits of…

THE BEST CARS in the world Does anyone still want an estate car? The inexorable, illogical rise of the SUV and its crossover cousin might have displaced it as the default family car, but in a year bookended by rude shocks – the death of David Bowie, the ascension of Donald Trump – there’s something reassuring about the humble station wagon. They’re so stable that even when decorated with a death metal band, they’re not phased. Not that the E-Class or V90 are particularly grunge spec. Merc prices start at £37,935, Volvo at £34,955, and that’s before you dip into options (less a dip, more an immersion in an Olympic-sized swimming pool). Thankfully, it’s the entry point into two of 2016’s most compelling and progressive automotive experiences. Let’s examine them…

Price/as tested £20,495/£21,035 Model Sport Nav 2WD Driver Dan Read Why it’s here Has Mazda made the world’s best little crossover? 1998cc, 4cyl, FWD, 118bhp, 150lb ft 47.9mpg, 137g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.0secs, 119mph 1230kg REPORT 8 Despite having no kids and a garage begging for something fast and silly, I have somehow amassed a small collection of sensible, family vehicles. One is the CX-3. The other is my Skoda Yeti. Both are fridge-freezer white with modest petrol engines. Both cost about £20k in the specs you see here. Put together, they make as much horsepower as one Golf GTI. I know. Living the TopGear dream, eh? Let me explain. I share the Yeti with my wife, who being from Canada likes SUVs and can’t operate a gearstick. Fine, but…

Price/as tested £32,450 Model 2.0 CRDi Premium SE Driver Sam Philip Why it’s here Is there more to the Tucson than the pricetag? 1995cc, 4cyl turbodiesel, 4WD, 183bhp, 295lb ft 43.5mpg, 170g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.5secs, 125mph 2250kg GOODBYE White good. This is one of the cruellest insults to level at a car. White goods are, after all, characterless, forgettable, all those things we don’t want from automobiles. But the Hyundai Tucson is a white good, and I mean this as the deepest of compliments. After all, white goods have their place. If you want to keep stuf frozen, a freezer will do you very nicely. For a two-seat sports car to be bland is unforgivable, but that’s because two-seat sports car buyers buy two-seat sports cars with heart, not…

Lotus Evora Sport 410 £82,000 I’m sure my English teacher once told me it’s poor form to bosh out a list early on in a piece of written work, but hopefully Mr Lennie will allow me this one. The Evora’s had some mega attention to detail lavished on it. Beautiful herringbone weave carbon fbre drops 12kg from the rear deck, 2kg of the roof, 2kg of the front access panel, and so on. Stickers replace badges. The rear windows are now made of carbon. Take it from me, you won’t relish reverse-parking a 410 outside Harrods. The glass partition between engine room and humans is now one pane thick, not two. Saves weight, and halves the insulation from the stupendous-sounding 3.5-litre supercharged V6, now developing 416bhp, up from 400 in…

NanoFlowcell Quantino £n/a The Quantino is a 2+2-seat city car that handles like a lower, heavier BMW i3. I’m telling you this now because this bit of the mag is called “Drives”. And it’s the mind-melting science that actually powers the Quantino that needs properly picking apart, rather than the surprisingly agile way it slews around a corner. Basically, it’s an electric car, but it’s not a charge-up battery job. The Quantino uses a fow cell to generate power on board. Instead of plugging it into the wall for a couple of hours, you fll its twin 159-litre on-board tanks with “two ionic liquids” via a roadside pump. One batch of “bi-Ion” fuid holds a positive charge, the other a negative charge. The car pumps these liquids through a membrane,…

How unnervingly refreshing it is for TopGear to bring you news of an all-new Alfa Romeo – the frst SUV ever to carry the Alfa name, no less – and not have to awkwardly tiptoe around the likelihood that it’ll probably be a bit… rubbish. The new Alfa Romeo Stelvio (cor, Alfa’s in a sweet spot with car names right now, isn’t it?) is heavily based upon the foundations for the Giulia saloon (see what we mean?), which ripped up the formbook earlier in the year by actually being good. Better than that, in fact. A genuine contender versus the likes of BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes (see p149). So its taller sibling has a headstart in life. The Stelvio’s reveal strategy is following the same tried-and-tested template that worked…

Even before the Brazilian Grand Prix, commentators were suggesting that Max Verstappen could be the next Ayrton Senna. Then came Interlagos. In scenes reminiscent of Senna’s 1984 debut in torrential conditions at Monaco, the 19-year-old Dutchman showed just what a prospect he is. Here he chases the two Mercedes through the Senna Esses. By the time you read this one of them will have won the World Championship. But when we look back at the 2016 season, this is what we’ll remember: Verstappen ripping the feld apart with a virtuoso display after a poor strategy call from his Red Bull team dropped him down to 16th. In the space of 14 laps (just 37 miles here) he climbed back up to a podium position, overtaking teammate Daniel Ricciardo and…

THE BEST CARS in the world The glass must be too thick. Or maybe French péage booths are intelligent enough to detect three blokes trying to act all suave in their M&S shirts and Burton Menswear shoes and decide to take us down a peg or three. The télépéage readers aren’t working. Hazards fashing, we’re reversing out. Again. Humiliation. Stress. And on two separate occasions, a sizeable amount of angry arm-waving. I think we’re at Dijon before I twig that if I hold the useless plastic lozenge out of the window, the booth decides I’m already making enough of an arse of myself to raise the barrier grudgingly upwards. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This was meant to be an efortless sweep down through France, a convivial conquest…

THE BEST CARS in the world I don’t know what the guys and girls at Tesla were smoking when they came up with the Model X, but it had to be pretty potent, as nothing about this car makes any sense. Come on... a massive two-tonne, sevenseat family van that can outrun some supercars? Powered by batteries? That drives itself?! Imagine a young designer suggesting that to the board at a company like Mercedes. He’d be fred on the spot. Look at it. It’s the size of a shed, yet the P100D model will polish of 0–60mph in 2.9 seconds. And it’ll complete this ludicrous sprint without so much as chirping a tyre. It mercilessly rams torque at all four wheels, riding a surge so vicious that few cars outside…

THE BEST CARS in the world Best For Big Families Skoda Kodiaq S ometime along life’s road, there comes a fork when things change. When you take as much satisfaction from a smooth transition from six- to seven-seat mode as you do from the race from six to seven on the tacho. When rear packaging matters more than rear-wheel drive. When adaptable cabin storage assumes greater import than adaptive damping. Sigh. At which point we could recommend you an MPV. The new Renault Grand Scenic is most agreeable. But more and more people stick their fngers in their ears when they hear that sort of advice. Cars overtly designed for big families are going fast in one direction only. Out of fashion. No, the big family cars people actually want…

THE BEST CARS in the world Best Performance Car Porsche 911R Best Winter Weapon Porsche 911 Carrera 4S H uman beings have a habit of wistfully wishing for a future that contains more of the past, and more often than not these retrospective yearnings are badly misplaced. Anyone denouncing the 2016 Formula One season as tripe would do well to watch some mid-Eighties turbo-era races from the “Golden Era” to remind themselves of the yawn-fest it usually became. But in the world of driving, it is hard to escape the fact that the older ways might well be more fun. The Porsche 911R is evidential proof. You have to choose your vocabulary quite carefully when describing this machine, not least because calling a 911 “backwards-looking” musters images of Seventies Porsches…

Price £28,155/£29,920 Model GTi 270 Driver Ollie Kew Why it’s here Does Peugeot’s first family hot hatch in two decades cut la moutarde? 1598cc, 4cyl turbo, FWD, 266bhp, 243lb ft 47.0mpg, 139g/km CO2 0–62mph in 6.0secs, 155mph 1205kg GOODBYE If everything is cyclical in the car world, like the form of football teams and popularity of bands, then right now you’d say Mercedes-AMG is at the top of its game, BMW M has been struggling, Citroen is on the up and up and Ford is entering a wilderness. Peugeot Sport is the dark horse in hot hatchbacks right now. It’s the rival no one saw coming, that’s turned out three really strong cars so far. The RCZ R was a revelation, the 208 GTi PS is neck and neck with a…

Price £23,310/£34,285 Model Cooper S All4 Driver Paul Horrell Why it’s here In moderating its eccentricities is it still a Mini? 1998cc 4cyl, 4WD, 192bhp, 221lb ft 40.9mpg, 159g/km CO2 0–62mph in 7.0secs, 142mph 1525kg REPORT 5 I always advise against big-ticket options, because their monetary worth disappears by trade-in. Imagine spending £1,000 on a leather sofa then dumping it after three years. That’s what you do if you buy leather in most cars: wave goodbye to its entire value and buy it again when you get your next car. But that’s changing, for two reasons. Firstly, more people get their cars on PCP or manufacturer leases. Second, with some cars, the options value is at least partially retained. So Mini has started to work this into its deals. Take…

AUDI R8 Price/as tested £134,520/£150,720 Model V10 Plus Driver Ollie Marriage 5204cc V10, AWD, 602bhp, 413lb ft 23.0mpg, 287g/km CO2 0–62mph in 3.2secs, 205mph 1454kg REPORT 6 L  et’s call this a happy coincidence. I’d booked the standard blue V10 coupe in as a compare-and-contrast with mine and the dates happened to coincide with the launch of the new V10 Spyder. So, all currently available R8s (a V10 Plus Spyder is only a matter of time, and surely some sort of hardcore one, too) materialised in the TopGear car park at the same time. Better still, all in perfectly contrasting specs. This was really interesting. One of my minor criticisms of the R8 is that the seat is mounted too high. The Spyder had the lower slung one-piece buckets ftted.…