Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2015 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

SUBSCRIBE TO TOPGEAR Get Britain’s number-one car magazine every month, delivered to you as a hefty paper offering, an interactive app or a digital edition. See page 76 for more details TOPGEAR.COM The website used to be held together by sticky tape and hope. Now it’s new and shiny. Enjoy TELEVISION Watch your favourite episodes again and again (and again) on Dave TOPGEAR SUPERCARS The best supercar stories from the last year gathered together. Available at selected retailers NEW CAR BUYERS GUIDE Comprehensive road tests for every new car on sale in the UK, available at all magazine retailers TOPGEAR PORTFOLIO Available exclusively at WHSmith,TopGear Portfolio is a collection of the best images from our archive When the second-generation Swindonbuilt Honda Civic Type R arrived on UK roads, it was…

SPIDER OR SPYDER? FERRARI’S FIRMLY IN THE ‘SPIDER’ CAMP, BUT WHO ELSE USES ‘I’ AND WHO USES ‘Y’? “The previous Spider seems a wobbly lard bucket in comparison” It may not be the purist’s choice, but in many ways the Spider is the signature Prancing Horse. The first Ferrari, the 125S, was technically a Spider. In fact, seven years before Ferrari actually became Ferrari, Enzo produced an open car called the Auto Avio Costruzioni 815, powered by a 1.5-litre eight-cylinder. It had the princely power output of 70bhp. That was 1940. Seventy-five years later, a horsepower deficit is definitely not an issue the new 488 Spider faces. Powered by the same 3.9-litre twinturbo V8 that made its debut in the GTB earlier this year, the new car makes an identical…

Dear Uncle TG I like the look of the Vauxhall Cascada. Should I buy one, even though I’m not a middle-aged divorced lady? Stuart, Barnet No. Please wait until you are. Dear Uncle TG What does AMG stand for? Anish, by email Aufrecht Melcher Großaspach, which translates from the German into “AAAARRGH MY GOD!” Dear Uncle TG I read that Jaguar Land Rover is thinking of building a factory outside of Britain. What is the world coming to? Peter, Winchester It sounds to me like the world is going global. I know, imagine that. Dear Uncle TG I love my Lotus Elise but I find it a bit noisy for long journeys. I think quite a lot of the noise on the motorway is coming from the tyres. Does this…

DREDGED UP Nottinghamshire Police discover – and recover – a 1982 Ford Capri at the bottom of a lake. Sounds fishy NO CHOKE Lewis Hamilton is refused entry to Wimbledon’s Royal Box after turning up in a floral shirt without a tie. ROUGH JUSTICE Australian woman is imprisoned in Abu Dhabi for taking a picture of a car parked across two disabled bays. BACKWARDS THINKING LAPD hunt Audi driver filmed driving several miles down Laurel Canyon… in reverse, without crashing. DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION Woman hits back of van in slow-moving traffic. Van driver alleges she was, er, ‘enjoying herself’ at the time of the crash. “In Ludicrous mode, the car will accelerate at 1.1g, which is actually faster than falling” Elon Musk announces an update to the Tesla Model S.…

YOU WEREN’T THERE, MAN In the late Seventies, as people became more conscious of motorsport safety standards, it was suggested that grand prix cars should use bulletproof rubber fuel tanks left over from Vietnam war helicopters. But they were too heavy, so most teams refused to use them, and that was that. FUEL FOR THOUGHT In 1982, the BMW F1 team discovered an old fuel formula in the archives of a German chemical company. It was lead-free, so met the rules and regs, although it behaved as if it were of a higher octane than allowed. Originally developed for a jet fighter, it turned out to be perfect for a turbocharged F1 engine, and gave an instant increase of about 100bhp. INFECTIOUS ENTHUSIASM Fans of the Ferrari Formula One team…

PORSCHE DESIGN CHRONOTIMER SERIES 1 DEEP BLUE Last year Porsche Design announced it was taking design and production back under its own roof, after years of farming things out. Watch freaks rejoiced, hoping the company – formed by Ferdinand Porsche but now siphoned off from Porsche itself – would return to its Seventies roots and give us some stone-cold classics. And here we are, with the Chronotimer Series 1, which looks like it might deliver just that. Specifically this is the Deep Blue version, with a polished titanium case and fabric strap. It’s Swiss-made with a decent automatic movement – the same one you’ll find in various posh watches from Breitling to Tag Heuer – and reminds us slightly of Omega’s Dark Side of the Moon. €3,950; porsche-design.com 9VOR11 MODEL…

The X1 has morphed from a natively rear-drive, comparatively low-slung outlier to something much more like everyone else’s small crossovers. That means a taller body, a transverse engine and native front-drive. Higher power ones get AWD, of course. It’s another manifestation of BMW-Mini’s new-gen platform and engines. You might grumble at the loss of individuality, but it’s simply a much better vehicle than it was. You’d expect the new layout to provide space and versatility, and it does. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the X1 is now better to drive too, and looks less bony and awkward than the old one. This XDrive 25d is top of the X1 tree for now. Its new diesel makes a useful 231bhp with a lot less racket than the old one – the 0–62 time…

The thermometer at Florence airport is nudging 43ºC, parts of the superstrada are literally dissolving and the air is so thick with heat you can almost see it. It’s so hot, in fact, that we briefly consider keeping the roof up on the Boxster Spyder and turning on the aircon. But that would be a criminal waste of the car’s USP. Not to mention that aircon is a (no-cost) option on the Spyder, it adds 9kg to its overall weight, and it’s a pointless hypothesis because our car doesn’t have it anyway. Roof off it is for the full Tuscan hairdryer. Lowering the Spyder’s top is a refreshing bit of manual labour in a lazy-arsed world of instant gratification. The previous Spyder’s roof was more of an umbrella than a…

Volume does not necessarily equal sportiness. This is a thing of which Peugeot in particular needs reminding. See, the 308 GT has a Sport button. Like other such buttons, it dials in an armful of unwelcome heft to the steering, puts the auto ’box into DEFCON 3 and ups the sensitivity of the throttle pedal. It also ups the noise. Not by popping open a set of baffles in the exhaust, à la Aston Martin, or even by piping existing engine noise into the cabin. Oh no – it begins a ridiculous, totally dominating synthesised soundtrack. What does it sound like? A bit five-cylindery – like an Audi quattro, just one that’s suffered a heavy front-end impact. Nothing like a little, four-cylinder diesel, that’s for sure. That Peugeot has gone…

Ten make it to Scotland unscathed on a Sunday night. OK, that’s not quite true. Nine make it, of which two aren’t firing on all cylinders. Not literally. It’s more that their windscreens aren’t at full transparency. Losses for both the BMW M135i and Megane RenaultSport Trophy in the drag finals at Bruntingthorpe saw them chew on their respective winner’s dust. Which turned out to contain more than dust. Decent cracks afflict them both, but thankfully haven’t developed any further. Meanwhile, Bruntingthorpe’s victor, Audi’s RS3, is nursing a puncture, and so sits forlornly outside Tom Ford’s house, some 300 miles south, awaiting a new tyre. With a following wind, it should reach Knockhill by lunch. All in all, this is about par for the course for a TopGear test. I’m…

The best hot hatch on sale in the UK is the Volkswagen Golf R. It’s been a long journey, and after a week of testing including drag racing, circuit work, dreary motorway commutes, an overdose of breathtaking B-roads and a final charge more suited to pace notes, wide eyes and gritted teeth, the Golf has emerged victorious. It’s not a particularly complicated set of reasons as to why. The Golf R smashes the averages and shines nova-bright in the right circumstances. The practical stuff is dispatched with imperious ease, meaning that space, ergonomics, reliability, quality and general drudge are all things the Golf excels at. It’s no harder to digest than chicken soup. It’s also easy on the eye, subtle yet purposeful. But when you start to play with this…

There can be smoke without fire. This comprehensively busted popular idiom comes in the form of thick white smoke currently flooding through the Jaguar F-Type Project 7’s dash-mounted air vents, being sucked hypnotically over the door tops and gliding softly out across the moor like a huge, white, crashlanding cloud. CumuloContinental rather than cumulonimbus. The exhaust is spitting supercharged V8 fury, whipping the fog with little vortices of high-pressure gas from quad pipes, and the wonderful thin-rimmed steering wheel has edged to the quarter-to position as the car starts to follow the camber of this moorland and gently drift towards the pointy rocks at the side of the road. With the rev counter reading north of 5,000rpm and the car doing roughly three mph, clipping a medieval kerbstone might result…

REPORT 3 2494cc, 4cyl turbo petrol hybrid, AWD, 195 + 141bhp, 155 + 199lb ft 54.3mpg, 121g/km CO2 0–62mph in 9.2secs, 112mph 1785kg £42,995/£44,640 Total mileage 9321 Driver Esther Neve Why it’s here Is this a worthy competitor to the Evoque? Thanks to a few long-haul driving trips, the Lexus has clocked up an impressive mileage since the last report. It’s been to the very south of France (that’s Rocamadour in the photo above; visit if you get the chance – it’s amazing), it’s been west to Yeovil and then, a week later, further west to Padstow. In total, it’s now reading a heady 9,321 on the odometer. These mile-heavy trips mean that I have been able to evaluate several elements of the NX in closer detail. Let’s start with…

REPORT 12 1968cc 4cyl twin turbo diesel, FWD, 178bhp, 295lb ft 37.2mpg, 199g/km CO2 0–62mph in 12.4secs, 117mph 2512kg £49,214/£58,834 Total mileage 20,197 Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is VW’s camper worth 20 years of holidays in Spain? I’ve come over all little red hen recently. Summer is here, and demand for the Cali has skyrocketed, but where was all this need for a camper van in February? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where. So since I put up with it in winter, I’ve got first dibs, come summer. Not that it takes any putting up with. It’s a perfectly civilised car to drive. OK, the cutlery and cupboards rattle, but you sit commandingly, and because it makes absolutely no pretence of being fast or sporty, you never feel…

REPORT 5 898cc, 3cyl turbo petrol, RWD, 89bhp, 100lb ft 65.7mpg, 99g/km CO2 0–62mph in 10.8secs, 103mph 943kg £12,595/£13,765 Total mileage 4056 Driver Sam Philip Why it’s here Is this the best city car on the market? The Twingo RenaultSport you see above is not real. It is a mere fiction, the pixelated creation of digital whizz and Friend of TG Dougie Wood. But it’s quite the thought, isn’t it? A Twingo hot hatch, I mean. After all, the Twingo’s basic ingredients – engine in the back, rear-wheel drive, lissom kerbweight, little in the way of weighty, unnecessary luxury – seem ripe for transformation into a pocket rocket: a Porsche 911 for those of us who can’t afford Porsche 911s. And though the idea of a bum-engined, oversteering French hot…

This grubby prototype is your first look at the revised 911, due to debut at Frankfurt in September. And beyond a gentle visual tweak – this is the 911, after all – the big news is that 991 V2.0 is going a whole lot more turbo. The fruitiest 911 variants have embraced turbocharging for years, but now forced induction looks likely to find its way across the range, from basest Carreras upwards. “You have to respect legal requirements [for lower CO2], so yes, we’re thinking turbos for standard 911s,” Porsche engineering boss Wolfgang Hatz told us. “Emissions are important for us.” Hatz confirmed that, by the end of the decade, we’ll see a 911 hybrid too. Before you start wailing, remember Porsche did a fair job of hybridising the 918…

TG TOP FACT Over two thirds of the world’s land area and more than half of the world’s population have no direct access to paved roads. That’s where the airship comes in It’s a blimp! Actually it’s not. Blimps are full of warm gas generated by burners, much like a hot-air balloon. This is an airship full of lovely, floaty helium, so it’s more like a party balloon. Doesn’t look like one… That’s because it has a newfangled ‘tri-lobe envelope’. In other words, the rigid hull is split into three sections, shaped to behave like aircraft wings and therefore provide extra lift. And it’s a hybrid? Technically, yes. About 80 per cent of lift comes from the helium, with the other 20 per cent provided by the wings, which also…

1. WHO Happy Germans 2. WHAT Stuck in traffic 3. WHERE Berlin 4. WHEN November 1989 This is a fairly famous photograph of the Brandenburg Gate, which – according to the official captions – was taken on 11 November 1989, two days after the Berlin Wall came down. So you might first assume that we’re seeing a mass exodus from east to west, as people fled life behind the Iron Curtain for a more prosperous existence on the other side. But closer inspection suggests otherwise. The image was in fact taken in the west, looking east. These were western cars, some of them even with British plates. Perhaps then, these were relatives of people in the east, going to visit or collect long-lost friends. People in the poorer east generally…

1 Which pop musician drove for ATS during the 1981 season? 2 Why did Lotus miss the 1965 Monaco Grand Prix? 3 Which F1 team did Bernie Ecclestone run in the Seventies and Eighties? 4 For which F1 team did Felipe Massa make his debut? 5 Which team did Alain Prost buy and rename after himself? 6 What are the names of Lewis Hamilton’s two bulldogs? 7 James Hunt was an expert breeder… of what type of bird? 8 Who became the first posthumous world champion in 1970? 9 Which driver gave Benetton their first and last race wins? 10 1986 Lotus driver Johnny Dumfries has another name. What is it? ANSWERS 1 Slim Borgudd 2 It raced in the Indy 500 instead 3 Brabham 4 Sauber 5 Ligier 6…

It's a story that shows no signs of ending any time soon. Since Björn Waldegård secured Ford's first WRC title in 1979, right the way up to VW Motorsport's back-to-back championships in 2013/14, Castrol has been the lubricant behind some of the most memorable milestones in the history of the sport. When Ford added two consecutive manufacturer's titles of its own in 2006 and 2007, once again, Castrol had a hand in its success. It's an enduring relationship, founded on technical partnership between Castrol and M-Sport, the Cumbria-based race and rally specialists who have overseen Ford's WRC participation since 1979. Nigel Arnfield, Head of Powertrain for M-Sport, has a unique perspective on the part that Castrol plays in keeping Ford competitive in a series as demanding as the WRC. "Castrol…

For 25 minutes, I’m driven around the German countryside by Prof Dr Thomas Weber, Mercedes’ head of R&D this past decade. Imperiously resistant to most of my attempts to get a question in edgeways (and I’m generally an annoyingly first-rate interrupter), he expounds at length about the good points of his new GLE, and a lot more about other matters in Mercedes’ engineering present and future. At no point does he talk about his cars being especially good to drive. And in the TopGear sense, this one isn’t. But then, it’s an SUV, and Mercedes SUV buyers don’t want their cars to corner like hot hatches, because if they did there would be too many other sacrifices. But the GLC does drive like a rather good Mercedes. Which means solid…

What’s this, then? It’s the new Fiat 500, successor to the 2007 reimagining of Italy’s budget icon. Doesn’t look ‘new’ to me… It isn’t, not really. Fiat says it’s changed 1,800 parts, but judging by the, erm, subtle revisions to the exterior, most of them must be buried deep below the surface. So there are new engines? No. As with the outgoing 500, you can choose the thrummy two-cylinder TwinAir with either 84 or 104bhp, or a 68bhp, 1.2-litre 4cyl petrol. A diesel, and Eco spec version of the 1.2 will follow after launch. What is new, then? Well, the front end is a bit more 500X-y, and out back there’s a pair of new tail-lights. There are also new colours, decals and alloy wheels to add to the bewildering…

For a hypercar manufacturer like Koenigsegg, testing a car’s potential on track is, quite simply, one of the first rules of the game. It’s fair to say this is something that suits Michelin down to the ground, too. Literally. Koenigsegg is one of a number of extreme performance car makers to have chosen Michelin Pilot Sport tyres as standard equipment for its range and a few weeks back, the Swedish firm took its own One:1 megacar to Suzuka and Spa Francorchamps with a simple objective. To measure just how quickly it could lap two of the world’s legendary race tracks in standard trim. That standard trim includes Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, factory-fitted to every One:1 that leaves Koenigsegg’s Ängelholm factory. And even with two people on board, a…

In the old days, a station wagon was exactly that – a wagon for taking people and their bags to the station, where a train would do the rest of the work. That’s the Americanism. In the UK we know them as estates, because that’s where you’d use them, to carry polo sticks and murdered grouse around your country pile, which also explains why a posh wagon is known as a shooting brake. Today they have much broader briefs. Yes, they are inherently useful and often boxy things, but, thanks to the wonders of modular production and global platforms, almost any car can be turned into an estate without retooling an entire factory. Which is why many decent hot hatches also have a long-arsed cousin, five of which we’ve rounded…

Expectations appear to have been confounded. Admittedly, we might have suspected that some of the members of our final six would be present, but the loss of some of the early favourites is still a bit of a shock. The arguments, however, have been sound, and although TopGear science may be a little laissez-faire, the results have been broadly unanimous, bar a few curses: Golf R, Civic Type R, Megane Trophy, Fiesta ST, S1 and Cupra Estate. The last one perhaps more of a surprise, but a welcome one. Which means that there’s a merry little band accelerating onto the M90 north. An endlessly interesting and disparate little troupe, FWD and 4WD, little, big, estate and all turbo, which threads up to Perth, and then hacks right and starts to…

HELLO 1984cc, FWD, 276bhp, 258lb ft 42.2mpg, 158g/km CO2 0–62mph in 6.1secs, 155mph 1440kg £ £29,205/£32,020 Total mileage 3012 Driver Dan Read Why it’s here Is it really the king of hot hatch estates? This is only its first appearance in the mag, and already the Leon is off to a strong start, having fended off some rival fast estates in our HotHatchMegaFest. You can read about that elsewhere in the issue, but in the meantime, let’s talk about more exciting matters such as bootspace. Usually, cargo capacity is measured in good old English litres, though I find it more appropriate to use good old English pointers. Specifically ones the size of a small cow. His name is Jabulani, he’s nine years old and he fits comfortably in the Leon’s…

REPORT 7 Rolls-Royce EJ200 turbofan, Nammo hybrid rocket, 47,700lb thrust 200 litres of jet fuel and 800 litres of rocket fuel per run 0–1000mph in 42.0secs 1050mph max 7750kg Weeks to go 18 Run by Mark Chapman Why it’s here It’s Bloodhound SSC... Bloodhound is starting to look like a car. This month, we’ve entered the final assembly phase, with painted ‘skin’ panels being riveted onto the spaceframe. We won’t completely seal the car yet – there’s piping and wiring still to fit in, so we’ll trial fit for now but leave ourselves access for fine tuning. We’re also assembling the rear suspension deltas – or rather, RAF 71 Squadron are. This is a huge help, as they’re experts in highg-force components, and they’ve put in three months of work…

REPORT 6 2993cc, V6 diesel, 4WD, 290bhp, 443lb ft 40.4mpg, 185g/km CO2 0–62mph in 6.8secs, 138mph 2115kg £76,250/£95,250 Total mileage 16,243 Driver Tom Ford Why it’s here Is there any point in a Range Rover ‘Sport’? No owner ever really takes a Range Rover off-road. It’s a familiar refrain, and probably correct for 99 per cent of the RR population. And yet it’s still probably a greater slice of the pie than the people who take their Range Rover Sport diesel to a track. Which obviously we have, because… well, because this is TopGear. We are a public service, and people need to know. We have sought conclusions. We have reached conclusions. First, it’s surprisingly rapid. It launches without wheelspin, and the paddles work with relevant speed in Dynamic mode…

360º Enjoy a truly immersive lap of Dunsfold Park in the Mercedes-AMG C 63 topgearpromo.com/mercedes F Watch the exclusive AMG engine test at: topgearpromo.com/mercedes rom its formative years in the late Sixties as an independent racing tuner, to becoming the whollyowned high performance division of Mercedes-Benz, 10 years ago, AMG has always been about one thing: the engine. Today the company is among the most revered names in motoring, combining the production of prodigious road cars with a habit of winning GT races, Formula 3 championships and multiple German touring car titles. AMG even lends its name and know-how to the all-conquering Mercedes Formula One™ programme. It is some roll call of success and little surprise that Mercedes’ fastest, most powerful models have come to be known, quite simply, as…

If you don’t want a flying car, you are officially dead inside.But though the concept of a car-o-plane has been on the menu since the Fifties, the reality remains tantalisingly out of our reach. Until now, perhaps. This is the Terrafugia TF-X, a bold vision of a transportation future unbounded by roads, runways or aesthetics. The TF-X – which will seat four openminded humans – is capable of vertical take-off, thus negating the need for a runway. Wings furled, it’ll squeeze into a standard single garage, thus negating the need for a hangar in which to store your personal plane. It’s powered by a plug-in hybrid arrangement, a pair of electric motors combining with a 300bhp petrol engine to produce a megawatt of output. Yep, this is basically a Prius…

Have you ever learned another language? Those first couple of hours, as you try to grasp alien sentence structures and past participles, are head-scrambling. The end of my morning lecture on pace notes won’t end in an innocuous role-play with the person sat beside me, though. Nope. I’ll be attempting to bellow directions at Dakar driver Nani Roma. In his competition Mini. On Dubai sand dunes… Pace notes are just one of many vital skillsets possessed by a co-driver. It is, perhaps, the least enviable job in motorsport: you must guide you and your driver around blind bends and over tummy-pummelling jumps while being beaten senseless, all while you stare down at a piece of paper rather than out the window. Your glory for getting it right isn’t always as…

TEAM LOTUS TYPE 49B 1/12 Tamiya models are cult classics, famous for their immaculate detail. So much so, that if you were to shrink yourself to the size of a field mouse you could jump into this Lotus 49B and drive off. Although you’d have to fight a micro Graham Hill – complete with moustache – for that honour. But first, a brief history lesson. When the little Lotus turned up for its maiden race in 1967, it demonstrated some very fresh thinking. It was the first F1 car to use the engine as part of the chassis, and what an engine – the Cosworth DFV, a dinky yet mighty V8 that would dominate for the next thousand years. And it was fast, straight out of the traps, winning that…

I realise the Daily Mail and other self-appointed guardians of the nation’s moral outlook don’t like the idea, but the ‘scandal’ of ‘satnav racing’ is simply what we all do, isn’t it? Tap in the destination, note the ETA, and it’s only human to hope to be there before then. That’s not a ‘lethal race’, it’s just avoiding the impoliteness of unpunctuality. It’s no more scandalous than hurrying to eat an ice cream before it melts down your wrist. Even so, my distance-over-time trace in Audi’s new supercar this morning was a little extreme. It had taken a while to get a set of photos that do justice to the R8’s deceptively epic form. Then we had a plane to catch. I keyed the airport into the satnav. The time…

The poor old Evora was sorely neglected during Lotus’s turmoil years. But, at last, here’s the Evora 400, and it’s a lot more than just a number, or indeed a facelift. It’s a major reshuffle in the parts you can’t see. Transformations in what you can see – nose, tail and cabin – seem like a decade of progress, not just six years. It’s a more serious machine. Some of the delicacy and suppleness of the old chassis is gone, replaced by a bracing cascade of forces and speed. Even standing still, it’s a far better car. The old flaky cabin construction has been banished, and the boot no longer closes with the flex of a Tupperware lid. The 400 number refers to its horsepower. To get that out of…

The new, uglier Jazz has brake steer, just like a McLaren does. Slowing the inside wheels on turn-in supposedly aids agility, in conjunction with much faster steering. After hours of driving it, I couldn’t tell. It’s worth mentioning because so much of the Jazz is ‘as you were’. It didn’t need to change. Buyers loved the old one, and continued buying it even when both purchaser and car were past retirement. So Jazz MkIII keeps the central fuel tank, liberating space under the rear seats and huge 354-litre boot. The door openings are enormous. Visibility is good. The seats are comfy and a doddle to fold. None of this is as cool as an autoapex-finder, but it’ll keep the Jazz at the top of the practicality game long after trendy…

WE BEGIN WITH A QUESTION. What does the term ‘hot hatch’ mean to you? An easy one, you might think. But, like anything that sounds idiotically simple, it is, of course, a concept that becomes migraine-complicated within the time it takes to say “um”. Mainly because as soon as you pause to ponder, you’ll find that the hothatch family tree explodes off in multiple different directions like a car-shaped grenade, splitting into various sub-genres that become increasingly niche. It’s like watching glass slowly shatter. Or the birth of a fractal made of VW corporate nodes. But still a relatively easy call, right? Or so you’d think. It turns out that, depending on which criteria you use to define such things, there are 150+ variations on the hot-hatch theme, varying from…

THIS IS B RUNTINGTHORPE An ex-Cold War US Air Force base littered with the decaying carcasses of aircraft fuselages isn’t your average automotive test facility. You won’t catch Euro NCAP smashing up new motors here in deepest Leicestershire. But Bruntingthorpe (or Brunters, if you’re so inclined) is perfect for doing big speeds in cars in a safe, controlled environment. Its two-mile-long runway, once the stomping ground of nuke-laden bombers, gives us the chance to drag race several hatches and record multiple acceleration and braking runs in each car. The surface is more like a British B-road than a racetrack, too: pockmarked, gritty and as much of a nightmare for shonky traction control and ABS set-ups as it is for windscreens. Brunters also gives us the space to line up the…

Rationality has haunted McLaren’s v2.0 adventure since it was kickstarted in 2009. Science isn’t on my mind right now, although it’s undoubtedly the reason I haven’t just punched a £259,500 hole in a hedge. No, what’s on my mind equates roughly to “Waaaaaaaaahhhhhh!” Most unscientific. Why? Because the McLaren 675LT throws you down the road with such force it’s what you imagine bungee jumping off the back of the Space Shuttle must feel like. And ‘feel’ is the word. A lot of modern supercars have such high limits that it’s difficult to get close to them without being superhuman or going toe to toe with the Grim Reaper. Most of us will tacitly admit that, say, a Golf R is more effective than a Koenigsegg on a tricky B-road. Not…

REPORT 3 6166cc, V8, RWD, 707bhp, 650lb ft 15.6mpg, n/a g/km CO2 0–62mph in 3.9secs, 199mph 2013kg $60,990/$65,695 Total mileage 3650 Driver Pat Devereux Why it’s here What’s it like to live with a 700+bhp muscle car? You don’t expect many frills on a 700bhp car which costs just a smidge over $60k in its home country. But no one told Dodge that. Instead of the 6.2-litre supercharged motor being the sole luxury, as per true muscle-car lore, the Challenger Hellcat has a truly surprising level of cabin equipment and finish. We specced the car with the upgraded electronics package ($695), but even the standard Hellcats get a big, 8.4-inch touchscreen. What our car also adds is satnav, HD radio, satellite radio and a host of extra goodies such as…