Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix editor@bbctopgearmagazine.com “WE CELEBRATE THE FULL SPECTRUM, FROM SUPERCARS TO SCRAPPERS” September 1993. I’m a hyperactive nine-year-old whose hobbies include ‘standing on head’ and ‘sweets’, Meatloaf was doing anything for love and X-Files was introducing binge-watching as a concept. A new car magazine also appeared on shelves with a leather-clad Clarkson on the cover, a hard-earned photo of every new car on sale, together, and the promise of a MASSIVE FREE POSTER inside. Well, some things just don’t get old, do they? Here we are, 350 issues later. Slightly fewer cars on the cover, definitely less leather, but the same approach as always – to bring you the world’s best and most beautiful car magazine celebrating the full spectrum, from supercars to scrappers, and mainlining that joy, our passion, into…

In 2008, Infiniti launched in the UK with a bold intention: to provide a tech-laden Japanese alternative to the German exec fare served up by BMW, Audi and Mercedes. Trouble was, as Infiniti had perhaps failed to spot, British buyers already had a tech-laden Japanese alternative to the German exec fare, etc, etc… in the shape of Lexus. And, while Lexus was great and all, it was hardly showing the Germans a clean pair of heels in the actually-selling-cars department. So how did Infiniti – to Nissan as Lexus is Toyota – differentiate its offerings from those of the German and Lexus mainstream? Well, in the case of the M37 – and indeed pretty much the rest of its range – through the bold strategy of ‘being substantially worse’. The…

Drift 21 While there are plenty of racing titles out there, there are very few that focus entirely on the noble art of doing very big skids. PC sim Drift 21 is here to fix that, with a game that faithfully recreates the twin challenges of chaining together a series of precision slides and not constantly referring to them as ‘Tokyo drifts’. You’ll spend as much time in the workshop as you do at the circuit, though. That’s where you’ll take a modest donor car like an E46 BMW M3 or Nissan Silvia S15 and then painstakingly make it completely undrivable. It’s an admirably comprehensive recreation of building a drift car from the ground up, right down to fitting each individual camshaft holder. The problem is that the absence of…

01 Nissan X-Trail 4Dogs Nissan unveiled its most important concept car ever in 2017. No, not the 400Z, it’s an X-Trail with a built-in shower. The X-Trail 4Dogs was kitted out with wipe clean padding, pull-out shower with hairdryer and extra ventilation for the dog. Sadly the 4Dogs never went on sale in real life. 02 Land Rover Defender All the latest LRs are offered with a treasure trove of pet friendly ramps, beds, showers and a ‘spill resistant bowl’. You can spec all this on a Range Rover Sport, but it looks so much cooler applied to the boxy Defender. Why aren’t border collies on the car’s official options list? 03 Aston Martin DBX If your dogs are so pedigree they only chase pheasants and widdle up against antique…

“EV CHARGING SOCKETS ARE REALLY HARD TO FIND” A new survey says, “over half of UK motorists are concerned they don’t have charging facilities where they live.” Well, duh. They won’t have looked. See, only a tiny fraction of them will be drivers of a car with a plug. There are 500,000 EVs and PHEVs out of 35 million vehicles on UK roads. That’s 1.4 per cent. So among the 1,000 motorists surveyed for this research, just 14 will have had a reason to track down the “charging facilities near where they live”. Plus maybe a few who were, in the weeks before the opinion pollster phoned, researching life with an electric vehicle with a view to buying one. Petrol and diesel car drivers can very easily find filling stations.…

“AS MUCH FUN AS A 3-SERIES? I DON’T THINK SO. BUT MAYBE MORE COMFORTABLE” from £38,000 (est) 2.0TD 4cyl 261 bhp 9spd auto 5.7 secs 56.5 mpg 132 g/km FOR Refined diesel engine, comfortable cabin loaded with S-Class-grade tech AGAINST So-so practicality, we don’t really know what it’s like to drive yet… The trouble with so many new cars is that the sheer range of options can leave you baffled, and means a few select options can leave one car feeling utterly unlike another. That could be the case here – the new C-Class you’ll be able to order in the coming weeks will look exactly like the car pictured, but it won’t have our Germanmarket test car’s adaptive suspension, rear-wheel steering or all-wheel drive. Mercedes says there’s simply no…

£31,565 1.3T 4cyl 156 bhp 6spd man 9.5 secs 44.1 mpg 145 g/km FOR Slots into daily life. Techheavy but not baffling. Safe AGAINST A little dull to drive. Stiffish ride. Only one engine Nissan can fairly claim its original 2007 Qashqai original invented the idea of a tall hatch – as opposed to a lowered SUV. Its proposition: more room and image than a hatchback, for little sacrifice in economy and dynamics. I said it would fail. Even Nissan wasn’t all that confident. Yet it promptly started selling at three times Nissan’s prediction. The idea simply caught fire. Nowadays about half of cars sold this size are crossovers. The Nissan is still the best seller among all the subsequent rivals. It’s designed, engineered and made in Britain, and it…

“IT DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER WHAT CAR THEY’RE FITTED TO; IT ALWAYS SEEMS TO WORK” The Nineties era of Japanese tuning introduced us to many brilliant things. Like the 1,000bhp Nissan Skyline, or the highly flammable, highly reflective bomber jacket littered with high-performance Engrish. Essential wear for any tuning guru. But even better than this was a wheel called the Volk Racing TE37. A lightweight, six-spoke design which, if you’ve ever played Gran Turismo or watched old footage of cars racing around Tsukuba, should already be familiar. According to RAYS Engineering (who make the TE37), this name wasn’t the result of a cat walking across a keyboard. Instead, a nod towards its intended use and target weight. The TE bit stands for Touring Evolution, and the 37 (or rather 3.7kg)…

Released in 1987, around a year after Out Run, Continental Circus plonked players directly into the carbon fibre and kevlar tub of a turbocharged F1 car and replicated everything we loved about Eighties Grand Prix racing: fat rear tyres, showers of sparks and extremely unruly handling. The F1 car in question was the yellow and blue Lotus 99T, famously campaigned by Ayrton Senna, though the in-game version had its sponsor logos subtly altered so as to avoid flogging cigarettes directly to game playing children. Perhaps the most realistic element, though, was the accurate representation of Eighties F1 car reliability. The slightest contact with another vehicle and your car would begin billowing smoke like a member of an aircraft display team. All was not lost, however, because you could dive into…

Car biz news doesn’t get any juicier than this: Rimac and Bugatti are combining forces to form a new company, Bugatti Rimac, with Rimac calling the shots. According to Mate Rimac, the man on course for full world domination, both companies have agreed to “pool our knowledge, technologies and assets with the goal of creating very special projects in the future”. In other words a fledgling Croatian EV start-up has just been handed the keys to the grandest car company in the universe. DOES THIS MEAN ALL FUTURE BUGATTIS WILL BE PURE ELECTRIC? In a word… no. Here’s Mate: “What people expect is for us to take the Nevera and slam a Bugatti logo on it, but that’s not going to happen. We will not just restyle the Chiron to…

Welcome to Peugeot’s new Le Mans car. Well, a close approximation of it at any rate. The 9X8 – ‘9’ references the Le Manswinning 905 and 908 prototypes, ‘X’ is for hybrid all-wheel drive and ‘8’ links it to Peugeot’s road cars – is still very much in development, but we’re promised it’ll look almost exactly like this when it goes racing next year. And no, it won’t suddenly sprout a rear wing. Peugeot claims nothing in the rulebook says it has to run with a wing, and that clever aero trickery means the 9X8 doesn’t really need one. Stellantis’ motorsport boss Jean-Marc Finot called the decision to forgo a wing “a major innovative step”. He said: “We have achieved a degree of aerodynamic efficiency that allows us to do…

This is a collaboration between two of the coolest outdoor brands around right now. You’ll know from these pages that Californian company Alpha is planning to make gloriously retro 4WD trucks and other off-road EVs, but now it has teamed up with German tent maker Heimplanet to produce something special for its Wolf pick-up. Heimplanet’s unique tents use inflatable grids instead of traditional tent poles, meaning the Cloudbreak can be erected on the back of your pickup in less than a minute and is super strong in extreme weather. If there was ever a way to make camping bearable, this is it… Alphamotorinc.com; $tbc…

1 T’S GOT A WHOLE LOT OF POWER We know, it’s a mid-engined Ferrari supercar with a hybridised twin-turbo V6 as opposed to a screaming V8, but wait. Unbelievably, the 296 GTB’s power output matches the V12-engined 812 Competizione. Yep, you’re looking at the thick, scary end of 819bhp and a 2.9secs 0–62mph time. 2 IT’S NOT THE FIRST V6-ENGINED FERRARI Nope, that honour rests with 1957’s Dino 156. That car was a racer, though, and in the Sixties neither the Dino 206 GT or the Dino 246 GT was graced with the Ferrari badge. As a result, this is Ferrari’s first production road car to feature this configuration. Oh and the V6 on its own produces a record 654bhp. 3 YOU CAN DRIVE ON ELECTRICITY ALONE The 296 GTB’s…

We might owe Hyundai a thank you here, for halting the small hot hatch implosion. A bitesize history recap: when the last Fiesta ST arrived in 2014, it went to war against the new Peugeot 208 GTI and a rethought Clio RS, among other established talent. The latest version has had life easy thanks to its dad killing off all foreign claims to the kingdom. Neither the quick Clio or 208 have been replaced. The French – who have owned this scene since the Eighties – shrug and mumble about maybe doing an electronique one at some point soon. Meanwhile Citroen hasn’t even bothered producing a hot hatch for a decade. Vauxhall – the company that was once upon a time busily applying VXR badges to Corsas, MPVs and the…

RENAULT ARKANA R.S. LINE E-TECH HYBRID £30,900 FOR Hybrid set-up works well, something different AGAINST Looks like a Megane, firm ride, outdated interior 1.6 4cyl hybrid 143 143 bhp 10.8 secs 58.9 mpg 108 g/km It seems someone, somewhere is asking for a budget BMW X6, so Renault’s here to oblige. The Arkana comes in techy full or mild-hybrid flavours, and the former works well here, with impressive economy and seamless transition between electric and petrol. Rear space is impressive despite that sloping roof, but the the ride is awfully firm. Renault thinks you’ll want this over a Toyota C-HR. But why limit yourself to just these two? SB LAND ROVER DISCO SPORT P300e £49,335 FOR Swishing around silently is smugly satisfying AGAINST You can’t have the PHEV with seven…

1993 TopGear magazine launches with a typically unambitious cover featuring every single new car on sale in Britain. It costs £2.40, which in today’s money is five grand. So the mag you’re holding is a bargain. 1994 TG readers vote the Toyota Corolla as Britain’s most satisfying car to own. They do the same in 1995, 1996 and 1997. You wild bunch. 1995 Vectragate – TV’s Jeremy Clarkson enrages Vauxhall by referring to hugely important new Cavalier-replacing repmobile as “just a box on wheels”. We didn’t call it ‘beef’ then, but this started one. 1996 We drive the Ferrari F50 and the F1 car it nicks its V12 from. TopGear.com launches. And crashes, probably. 1997 TG mag buys an old Ferrari on editorial budget. Those were the days. Whoever thought…

“IT’LL BE A RIVAL TO THE BOXSTER, OR IN AMERICA TO THE LOWER RUNGS OF CORVETTE, BECAUSE IT’S GOING ON SALE WORLDWIDE. THAT’S A BOLD AMBITION” The new Lotus Emira is propelled entirely by little explosions. It isn’t even a hybrid. That’s not because Lotus is incapable of something electrified, or dragging its feet. Next year there will be a “lifestyle product” (aka crossover) that’s all-electric. In 2025 an electric sports car, a co-operation with Alpine. So the Emira, by having only a petrol engine, surely qualifies as an instant classic. Just as well it looks so good. It’s a mid-engined two-seater. Lotus has done plenty of those. But it doesn’t quite replace any of them, even though the Elise, Exige and Evora have lately shuffled off this mortal coil.…

Everyone loves to be beside the seaside, don’t we? And of course, life on the French Riviera is the ultimate dream, with weather so relentlessly sunny that you barely even need a roof on your car. Citroen was evoking that intensely at the Paris motor show in 1998, revealing its C3 Air concept. The company was in full teasing-the-new-C3 mode, even though the hatchback wouldn’t be launched for another three or four years. It was stuck with a load of quite old cars in its range, so it needed to prove that it was young and hip and stylish and all that. What better way to show how fun and frivolous you are than a fun and frivolous convertible. And what a convertible. It was a bold statement from the…

WHAT BRINGS THESE TWO TOGETHER? They share more in common than their cylinder or seat count, both being Ferraris whose designs ruffled feathers on arrival. The Roma has stirred up debate with its passing resemblance to the Aston Martins it spars with in the GT market. But the 308 GT4 arrived to similarly miffed reactions, the first Bertone-designed production Ferrari apparently looking far too much like other pop-up headlamped wedges from the Italian styling house. SEEMS TO HAVE AGED WELL, THOUGH Doesn’t it just? We bought one way back in 1997 with the cover line “We buy a Ferrari for Mondeo money”. A lot has changed since our publisher parted with 17 grand 310 issues ago, but at around £50k, the GT4 is still at the relatively attainable end of…

REPORT 3 CUPRA FORMENTOR The big news this month is that the Cupra has been back to a dealer to have an upgrade to the multimedia touchscreen system to try to cure some of the lag and occasional total freeze. And yes, it is more responsive from this week’s prodding, and there have been no total meltdowns (which involves switching the car off, locking and unlocking it, etc), so it appears to have been as much of a success as it could have been. The only caveat really is that I noticed the lag issues more when the temps were colder, and it’s been quite warm, so I’ll have to reserve judgement slightly. That and the fact it hasn’t resolved the system’s general lack of intuition and added-step/screen scanning when…

What’s Honda, and when did it start making cars? Honda is the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer. But it does cars too, obviously. Also quad bikes, lawnmowers, outboard motors, power tools, generators, humanoid robots and jet aircraft among many other things. Founded as the Honda Technical Research Institute by Soichiro Honda in 1946, the company started out retrofitting surplus generator motors to bicycles. Then in 1948 it became the Honda Motor Co and soon began making proper motorcycles using its own engines and chassis. The company’s first cars arrived in 1963. First came the T360, a little pickup truck so named for its mid-mounted 356cc motorcycle engine. The tiny but gorgeous and very clever S500 roadster followed a couple of months later with a 531cc inline four, a 9,500rpm red line…

So you’re a fan of Formula One and want to buy a watch. Well consider yourself extremely well catered for, because the sport is absolutely mad for the things. Nine out of 10 teams have a watch sponsor this year – Alfa Romeo is the only one this year to show up empty wristed. Ever since cars first raced against each other, watches and motorsport have been closely intertwined. The first cough-and-splutter motor races in the 19th century had to make do with early pocket chronographs developed to time horse races. But as motor racing proper got going in the 20th century, the watch industry worked hard to keep pace – not easy when you consider cars went from walking pace to 150mph in a few decades, while the watch…

The BMW i3 is a car that’s been around for a while and will soon be off sale in the US, but still looks like something from the future. I actually test drove one at CES a couple of years ago, so it was fascinating to finally have a chance to live with one for a week. I had the Range Extender, which was killed off in Europe when BMW facelifted the i3 and upgraded its battery. You can still buy one in the US though – it’s basically an electric i3 with a 42kWh battery for around 125 miles of real-world range, but there’s a tiny two-cylinder petrol engine as a backup. That gives you an extra 60–70 miles of gas if you need it. Seems crazy BMW built…

£62,415 3.0TD 6cyl 278 bhp 8spd auto 7.5 secs 33.1 mpg 220 g/km FOR Refined looks inside and out. Easy to buy and own AGAINST Poor ride. You’ll have to keep explaining The creation story, a prog-rock group, a maker of pushbikes. Now Genesis is something else too: the posh car arm of the mighty Hyundai Motor Group. This isn’t a corporation with a habit of failure. But good, honest, ordinary cars don’t automatically lever a manufacturer into premium territory. There, a brand needs a hook. And frankly the first batch of Genesis’s cars don’t have one. Maybe they’re “distinctively Korean” but few Europeans know what that means. Or maybe there are enough people who are just tired of the obvious competition. Let’s hope they don’t mind being asked who…

£142,000 4.0TT V8 527 bhp 8pd auto 3.6 secs 24.3 mpg 264 g/km FOR Stunning looks, improved dynamics, a proper sports car AGAINST Square steering wheel, interior layout The car came first. Aston was already working on an uprated Vantage before it got the gig to produce an F1 safety car. It then aligned the two. So, although this is the first car ever to wear an official F1 logo, it isn’t a limited edition model. It’s more money, but maybe not as much as you’re thinking – £142,000 is an eighteen grand uplift over standard. Reflecting that, the engine has only come in for a software tweak, gaining an extra 24bhp for 0.1secs off the 0–62mph and a slightly more fiery top end. The drama of the acceleration is…

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We’re on the Passo della Raticosa. For 300 years this was the main road connecting Florence and Bologna, two of the world’s finest cities. It’s 968 metres above sea level, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, not replete with fast sweepers or good sight lines but a lot of fun all the same. C’mon, this is Italy in full effect. It’s easy to imagine a nuova Fiat 500 fizzing and parping its way breathlessly between villages, or the gladiators of the original Mille Miglia pushing as hard they dare on the mountain hairpins. There’s not much that can save you if the brake pedal goes soft up here. As it happens, the 2021 edition of the Mille Miglia will be passing through in 24 hours, but having done the event…

LOTUS ELAN M100 (1994) Price now £8,995 Harris says It should come as no surprise that the only sub-£10k Lotus you can feasibly buy in fine working order is the front-wheel-drive one. Yep, the Nineties Elan turned convention on its head. Aged well, don’t you think? LOTUS EXCEL (1987) Price now £13,995 Harris says Let’s face it, you want an Elise if your budget’s this big. But that’s predictable, so consider the Excel, which could only have been born in one decade. Vast history and only 64,000 miles too. Bet you still want an Elise. LOTUS EUROPA S2 (1969) Price now £15,995 Harris says Look at this Europa – the Sixties original, not the oddball of late Noughties that basically fixed a roof on an Elise and called itself a…

REPORT 2 ASTON MARTIN DBX All too often we drive our cars around, completely oblivious to the scale of complexity in their design and engineering or the skill and care that has gone into their construction. In all, a DBX features roughly 14,500 parts… a day spent at Aston’s St Athan facility, where I lent a ‘helping’ hand, brought that skill and complexity into sharp focus. Read the full story on topgear.com. CT REPORT 2 AUDI E-TRON In the past month I’ve travelled almost 1,200 miles, including a 600-mile round trip to Durham and Lancaster. Overall I got 2.9mpkWh, with a best of 3.3 during a roadworked 50mph section of the M6. That’s enough to give the Audi a genuine, but pretty crap, 250-mile range. It’s a very, very good…

01 Honda NSX Honda’s first supercar is a proper legend. So good it barely changed for 15 years. Gordon Murray was such a fan, he used it as inspiration for the McLaren F1. Indelibly linked with Ayrton Senna, who famously gave Honda a few pointers during its development. 02 Honda e One of our favourite everyday EVs. Not without its problems – the Honda e can’t go very far on a charge, it’s pricey and not very practical – but it’s beautifully designed and engineered. Makes you feel good, even when you’ve only got 50 miles of range left for a 60-mile trip. 03 Honda Integra Type R Lauded as one of the finest front-wheel-drive performance cars ever made, the Integra Type R was the first Type R of any kind to be…