Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

There’s a thing here at TopGear – if you’re lucky enough to be the first to drive something new and exciting, you will be bombarded by text messages from the team, demanding a one-line review. Ollie’s hot take on the T.50 will live long in the memory: “Hey dude. It’s the best thing I’ve ever driven. It’s exactly the hypercar we’ve been saying we need all along. Smaller. More intense. Focused on experience not outright speed.” I freely admit that I’m the first to get caught up in the pantomime of a new hyper-thing with a telephone book power figure, TikTok friendly party tricks and styling by Marvel, but deep down it’s obvious that the T.50’s philosophy is what really moves us, and creates a legacy that lasts beyond a…

THE GOOD Damnnn she a good looking car Kirk Bell We might be looking at McLaren F1 2.0 Paul Esthète 007 number?? YES PLEASE! One of the coolest Le Mans cars I’ve seen Nick THE BAD Toyota all the way Amir Bobby Behlim LANCE NEEDS A JOB I SUPPOSE Charlie Lord Forgive me if I’m a little sceptical. I’ll believe it when I see it Andrew Willis THE UGLY Well it’s the least they could do. They had the drafted regulations changed to suit them only to bail at the last minute M-P THEY WILL HAVE THEIR WORK CUT OUT TO WIN LE MANS CONSIDERING THEY’RE TAKING THE VALKYRIE UP AGAINST CARS THAT WERE DESIGNED WITH ONLY PROTOTYPE RACING IN MIND TBP Lawrence Stroll is going to let his son…

01 Red Bull RB19 Possibly the most all-conquering F1 car ever – time will tell. At the time of writing, Adrian Newey’s RB19 has won 16 out of 17 races in 2023, collecting 12 poles, 10 fastest laps and 24 podiums. It makes even the early turbo-hybrid Mercedes F1 cars look like a bit of a pushover. 02 McLaren MP4/4 The record-breaking Red Bull has dethroned the McLaren that Senna and Prost steered to victory in all but one of the 1988 races. Masterminded by Steve Nichols and Gordon Murray, the Honda-powered MP4/4 began a four-year stranglehold on the constructor F1 title for the British team. 03 Porsche 956 Between 1982 and 1987, nothing won Le Mans except Porsche 956s. That’s how good it was. OK, by 1986 it was actually the later…

“INEOS IS TARGETING A MORE NICHE BUYER, THE KIND WITH AN ACTUAL AFFINITY FOR RURAL PURSUITS” Want to know the real result of this test? Come back in 15 years. Because what Ineos needs above all else is a reputation for durability and robustness. And you can’t earn one of those overnight. A name for solidity and dependability would offset many of the coming criticisms, the price first among them. When the team behind Ineos first went into this, I’m sure they weren’t thinking “Yeah, a £76k starting price is where we want to be”. But that’s where it’s ended up. More expensive than a new Defender for a car that’s doing no more than mimicking the old one. Tough sell. Land Rover worked out that its audience had moved…

£92,995 FOR Phenomenally luxurious rear, superb build quality AGAINST CVT spoils the driving experience, challenging looks It looks like a van, but the LM – Luxury Mover – actually uses the same hard bits as the NX and RX SUVs. So it promises more acceptable structural rigidity and body control if not searing car-like reflexes. It’s available in four- or seven-seat iterations, with prices starting from £89,995. It has the Merc V-Class in its sights, but it’s also an alternative to the S-Class and perhaps even the mighty Range Rover. With its ‘spindle’ grille, deep windscreen, and full width L-shaped rear light bar, the LM is far from pretty but certainly has presence. Suspended on double wishbones at the rear with adaptive dampers fitted with frequency sensitive valves, its NVH…

SUBARU FORESTER E-BOXER SPORT £40,090 FOR Old school, unpretentious, practical as you like AGAINST Tiny hybrid range, dated interior, not the cheapest Remember when Subaru used to be cool? These days you’d be forgiven for forgetting it still exists entirely. Take the Forester, now one of the firm’s bestsellers and about as exciting to drive as watching paint dry. It’s a hybrid these days, only the battery is so small that it can barely manage a mile of all-electric range. Horribly dated interior too, though it’ll likely be harder wearing than some rivals. Perhaps this new electric era is the reset it needs… PR BMW i7 M70 £161,963 FOR Performance, hustles well despite size, fabulous interior AGAINST Expensive, do you really need the extra grunt? The dual motor electric i7 M70…

01 REVERSE LOCKOUT Tactility and action. That’s the key to the satisfaction that abounds from just operating the T.50. The reverse lock-out switch is a perfect example 02 KEY Too large and clunky for this svelte supercar, but press a button and the door sweeps up on hydraulic rams. Harder to pull down, mind you 03 PLAQUE There are more remarkable plaques around the T.50, but this sums up the simplicity. Lever above is the release for the side locker 04 REV COUNTER Most dials are backlit, but Gordon wanted the T.50’s floodlit from the sides. The light plays beautifully across it, especially at night…

Driving around Tokyo is daunting. With no centre or suburbs, its road network is huge, spiralling, occasionally latticed and sometimes subterranean. At times, even Mr Roboto in the satnav gives up and shrugs directions your way. Which has happened. Meaning I’m lost while leading Mick Schumacher (behind the wheel of a stunning Mercedes 190E 2.5-16 Evolution II) through Japan’s neon-lined labyrinth. It’s a hot, humid evening and Mercedes F1’s reserve driver (and son of iconic seven time Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher) is cutting the perfect shape of a Nineties boyband member. Where I’m perspiring like a burst pipe, he palms back his blonde curls and looks effortlessly cool in his loose fitting, oversized Tommy Hilfiger contractual clobber. Sartorially, it couldn’t be more of a perfect fit for the…

I have always felt very strongly that if you have a convertible and it’s not raining, then the roof should be down. It would be part of the first package of measures I would introduce as prime minister (including the introduction of fashion police on the streets – £50 spot fines for middle aged men in shorts above the knee, etc). It’s not just talk, I have lived it out – I used to have a Saab 900 convertible with heated seats and I had hair to keep my head warm and it was delightful. Who’s unable to spare 18 seconds at speeds of up to 30mph? Drivers with the roof up lack the imagination to enjoy life, they’re not embracing the convertible lifestyle. In fact I recently took part…

The future has never quite been what we thought it might be. Look back at the many breathless predictions of what we’d be doing in this space age era of the well developed Noughties and you’ll feel massively hard done by. Instead of soaring upwards in a giddy state of constant enlightenment we’re doomed to repeat history in an endless loop, only with recordings in better definition. Audi’s futuristic 2004 RSQ concept might not seem that far away, but we’re closer to the 2035 of its supposed existence than its reveal. It wasn’t unveiled at a motor show or anything so prosaic, rather it was driven by slap happy Hollywood star Will Smith in science fiction blockbuster I, Robot. The RSQ was literally a star vehicle, built for nine minutes…

VAUXHALL CORSA (2006) Price now: £500 Harris says: Surely the best possible first car is the cheapest runner that you can find. There’s no chance it’s going to escape without a few dings as you make your way into the motoring world, so why not buy a pre-dinged Corsa? HYUNDAI COUPE (2005) Price now: £1,995 Harris says: Want to look cool with a coupe as your first car? Probably best to get a reliable Hyundai that’s literally called the Coupe. Just try to ignore the fact that it’s front-wheel drive and only has around 100bhp. FORD FIESTA (2012) Price now: £4,000 Harris says: A recent study that dropped into our inboxes said that the average spend on a first car is a hefty £4,000. If that is your budget, why…

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When it comes to ‘not serving up steaming clangers’, Ford hasn’t dropped the ball too often this century (at least compared with, say, Peugeot, who spent a large chunk of the Noughties seemingly unable to pick up the ball in the first place). Which was why the EcoSport – introduced to Britain in 2014 – came as such an unpleasant surprise. An inoffensive compact crossover based on the Fiesta, there didn’t seem much that could go catastrophically wrong. Much went catastrophically wrong. The driving dynamics… weren’t. The suspension… didn’t. Mechanical refinement… wasn’t. So what happened? Much contemporary analysis centred on the EcoSport’s Brazilian origins (though the first UK bound cars were actually built in India, it began life a Brazilian built product for the South American market). The inference being,…

In the watch supplement that comes with this issue, we look at cars and watches with a history so intertwined you really can’t imagine one without the other. Watches have been around longer, of course, but they are the junior partner. Watches often imitate cars. Some even contain bits of metal shaved from old cars. There’s one on the opposite page with a minute hand that looks like an old rev counter. All of the watches opposite in fact contain a watchmaking curiosity called a retrograde hand. This may seem to have been copied from cars, but wasn’t. We all know how a normal watch hand moves – rotating 360°, aka going round and round in circles. A retrograde hand climbs from point A to point B before snapping back…

WHEN IS A GAME NOT A GAME? THIS MIGHT sound like the sort of riddle you’d find in a Christmas cracker with a paper crown and tiny screwdriver set, but the answer in the new Forza Motorsport’s case is when it’s a ‘platform’. If you’re going to wring maximum enjoyment out of this rebooted version of Xbox’s storied sim series, it’s better not to think of it as a game at all. Instead Forza Motorsport is a platform for racing, a vast simulation toolkit that offers near endless combinations of cars, circuits, regulations and conditions to be applied either online or offline. New additions to this toolkit include a proper day and night cycle and more convincing weather. While that might sound like something only there to please endurance racing…

1 IT’S ALL GROWN UP Like most BMWs these days the all-new X2’s kidney grille is bigger and bolder than before. Much like the rest of the car: the X2 has grown in every direction, now longer (by 194mm), wider (21mm) and taller (64mm, despite the more coupe-like sloping roofline) than the MkI. Meanwhile the wheelbase has grown by 22mm. 2 THERE ARE THREE ENGINE OPTIONS Two petrol, one electric. The entry car is the sDrive20i powered by a 1.5-litre mild hybrid engine producing 168bhp. Then there’s the much fruitier M35i xDrive, which gets a turbocharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder – and quad exhausts? – capable of 296bhp and 295lb ft. Oh, now the pipes make sense. The 0–62mph run takes 5.4secs and top speed is limited to 155mph. 3 THE iX2…

“THE CLASSIC RAW 911 ‘WASHING MACHINE FULL OF GRAVEL’ CHUNTER IS BACK” £231,600 FOR Palpably better to drive than a GT3, somehow AGAINST Other than the fact all 1,963 are sold, not much The 911 S/T in a sentence: mix a GT3 Touring manual with GT3 RS power and lightweighting. Nigh on a quarter of a mill for parts bin stew might seem like Porsche is exploiting the 60th anniversary of its arse engined icon to trouser a few quid. Be reassured: it isn’t. But it may have just undermined your want-factor for a GT3. Or an RS. Or any other sports car. Thanks to a cocktail of weightsaving – much of it hidden from view – the S/T weighs in at 1,380kg, an impressive 40kg less than a GT3…

Ever since we started driving, we’ve been looking. You may not realise you’ve been looking, but you have. The trouble is we never find it. Well, I’ve found it. The NA-137. The GMA T.50. The road. And the car. And that’s it. That’s what I’d do with my final tank of fuel. And while we’re at it, powers that be, could I also request the exact same weather and traffic as 7am–11am on 6 October 2023? It’s a week later now, and every night I’ve dreamed about the T.50 on that road. I’ve never had that before. Reliving memories is one thing, but to have your off-duty brain replay scenes with such vivid clarity you remember them the next morning is quite another. My subconscious clearly doesn’t want to let…

JR: I’m leaning on the Bronco’s balcony sized wheelarches, forehead slowly curling at the corners like a kettle chip in the bone dry heat, when I feel it – a subsonic rumble, resolving into a heavy metal V8 blare and finally a sandstorm as an Irn-Bru orange F-150 Raptor R comes barreling towards me, drifts a perfect circle inches from the Bronco’s bumpers to ensure no crack or crevice remains undusted and skids to a stop. The door opens, I’m flapping and coughing, pulling my deeply unimpressed face while secretly being slightly impressed… JB: Jack! You are too kind. You really are. I know I’m a guest in the TopGear world, but you don’t have to always submit in these little faceoffs before we’ve even got going. I’m a big…

“I’VE GIVEN UP TRYING TO JUSTIFY REASONS FOR BUYING CARS ANYMORE” A little over five weeks ago, I became a father for the second time to a beautiful, healthy little girl named Bella. Upon having a child, it’s customary for those around you to joke about the lack of sleep, time, and money your life will now be fraught with. And of course, they’re absolutely right. However, newborn babies have a tendency of sleeping for many hours each day. And with my eldest daughter now at nursery, there’s unusual periods of time where there’s very little to do. Not so much that you can get actual jobs done, but enough to open the phone and browse various classifieds while everyone else is actually working. It gets worse as the day…

Never has such a richly detailed racing game had such a simplistic title. Big Run sounds like you’re trying to explain the concept of long distance rallying via sign language to a super clever captive gorilla. Don’t let the monosyllabic title fool you though, this is, for 1989, a staggeringly accurate recreation of the Paris-Dakar rally, starring an unlicensed take on the Porsche 959 which had won the event three years earlier in 1986. The in-game route mirrored that of the real event held earlier in the year, starting in Tunisia and taking in Libya, Niger, Mali and Guinea, before finishing in Senegal. It might sound like a stretch to describe scenery entirely constructed of flat, 16-bit sprites as evocative but, as Big Run progresses from Tunis all the way…

GO TO TOPGEAR.COMFOR MORE MIND-BLOWING MANUFACTURER GUIDES What’s Polestar and when did it start making cars? This is all going to sound a bit sketchy at first, but bear with us. Polestar first started out as a racing team called Flash Engineering back in 1996, started by Swedish racing driver Jan Nilsson. The team, based near Gothenburg, entered Volvos into the Swedish Touring Car Championship, a knockoff of the thriving BTCC. Nilsson won the drivers’ title in 1996 and 1997 in an 850 thanks to Volvo’s generous donations of cash and cars. He upgraded to an S40 in 1998 and an S60 in 2001, but they didn’t win anything. In 2005 the team was sold to a fellow called Christian Dahl, who renamed it Polestar Racing. It was in effect a factory…

In technical parlance, the new Porsche 911 GT3 R rennsport improves on a number of its donor car’s key metrics, including aerodynamics and the power emitted from its 4.2-litre flat-six combustion engine. In layman’s parlance, this thing is off the scale. Porsche describes the new car as “probably the hottest track tool Porsche has ever made available as a collectors’ item”. Of course it’s a collector’s item. An £820k plaything for 77 of Porsche’s very luckiest – and track savvy – customers. What they get for their money isn’t just raw numbers, though we’ll come to those in a tick, but also history. The rennsport’s apparently a ‘logical’ successor to the GT2 RS-based 935 from a few years back, and uses the already potent 911 GT3 R customer racecar as…

Kia is really going hard at this electrification game. It’s held the first Kia EV day and launched a new production model, the creatively named Kia EV5. Now it’s also showcased two shiny new concept cars, the EV3 and EV4. Kia says it’s keen to broaden the appeal of electric cars for drivers with lower budgets, which is good news given the EV9 arrives with a not so insignificant £64k price. Targeting greater affordability with a starting price below £30k, Kia tells us the EV3 takes on the benefits of the flagship EV9 model in a compact SUV form, plus that there will be the same configurable versatility in the cabin of the EV3 that it promised in the EV5, ie a camping table and lounge-like swivelling reclining seats in…

“EVs WILL ELIMINATE FREEDOM” I stumbled on a TV clip of a protest by drivers in 1966 against the new 70mph speed limit. A fellow called Graham Arnold stood up to rail against “speed limits, parking restrictions and “all the petty privations that have been put on motorists” by “successive governments”. I dunno, don’t parking restrictions help drivers? Otherwise the roads would be blocked. It also now turns out that camera-enforced speed limits on busy motorways actually reduce journey times because they smooth the flow. These days we’ve a new set of hot buttons. People are furious about an urban 20mph limit that mostly just reduces your wait time at the next red light and doesn’t affect trip times discernibly. Ultra low emission zones are another. They penalise demonstrable polluters,…

During just one single day in August this year, at an event in California clumsily named ‘The Quail, a Motorsports Gathering’, around a dozen new hypercars were unveiled. Meanwhile over the course of the whole of this decade, how many new superminis and hatchbacks have been launched? It’s probably in single figures. This inverted pyramid doesn’t serve us well. Of course I’m not immune to swooning at hypercars. But increasingly a hypercar is little more than an abstract construct. A collector’s item that gives you as much real world pleasure as an NFT artwork. So many of them exist only because growing inequality means more of the rich need a heat sink for their sweltering millions. Buying lots of luxury saloons looks a little silly. Whereas buying lots of hypercars…

“THE i5 MIGHT BE SOFTWARE CRITICAL BUT BMW’S CHASSIS HARWARE REMAINS WORLD CLASS” £73,200 FOR Handling, ride and performance, beautifully engineered, interior is stunning AGAINST It’s expensive, some of the spec is overly complicated Welcome to a BMW presentation in 2023. Look in vain for any mention of steering, suspension or handling. The ultimate driving machine is a sepia-toned memory. Marvel instead at the new 5-Series’ software integration, chuckle at the presence of an app that streams the Bundesliga, and embrace the arrival of AirConsole which turns the car’s Curved Display into a smartphone-enabled games console. You might need this as a distraction while charging your new i5. Although a 520i petrol is incoming, the focus today is on the first fully electric 5-Series. It’s fitted with BMW’s fifth generation…

£49,500 (+ VAT) FOR Huge fun, you’ll never tire of the turbo flutter AGAINST Certainly not cheap, just as impractical as ever This is the Suzuki Jimny by Twisted, and it’s the first time that the North Yorkshire-based firm has ever applied its modifications to something other than a classic Land Rover Defender. The conversion to full Twisted spec involves strapping a turbocharger onto the little four-cylinder, which ups power from 100bhp to a much healthier 165bhp. And remember, this thing only weighs 1,090kg. To go with the turbo there’s a sports downpipe, a Syvecs ECU and a performance air filter. Plus, there’s raised suspension with Eibach springs and Bilstein dampers as well as a new rear anti-roll bar. The front bumper and mirrors are colour matched with the rest…

01 TOP SPEED GMA only knows the top speed is 226mph because it had to do it for the ESP calibration. That’s with the shorter sixth gear. Our car had the longer sixth. GMA still doesn’t know if it will be faster or slower with this gearing. 02 REV GAIN/LOSS Cosworth’s original claim was that the flywheel-less V12 revved so fast it could gain 28,400rpm per second. Actually it can gain 52,000rpm per second. It also flames when it gets hot. 03 ECONOMY We saw a best of 25mpg on the cruise north from Barcelona (meaning over 400 miles from a tank). After that we barely touched a motorway for 600 miles and yet overall economy worked out at 20.2mpg. Any other supercar would have been in the mid-teens on…

AS THE RAPTOR R AND BRONCO RAPTOR reach the peak of their climb into the hot air of the Mojave sky there’s not much time to think. The commitment required to keep the accelerator pinned hard against the bulkhead has short-circuited normal neural pathways anyway. Logic defeated, you are flying high in well over 2.5 tonnes. Regular service will resume just as the nose tips into its downward arc and the brain snaps back into action with a heady mix of doom, horror and hysterical amusement. But at the peak you don’t think. You just feel. Elated, free, all-powerful, all-knowing. For such a very stupid act the emotional reaction is pretty amazing. Again. Moments later, when you’ve stuck the landing and not died it’s easy to conclude that nothing could be…

Subaru Impreza WRX STi EJ207 A toss up: it was either Subaru’s EJ207 or Mitsubishi’s 4G63T occupying this spot. The Lancer Evo’s engine is fizzier and more responsive, the flat four in the WRX STi sounds better. We went with the latter for the only turbocharged engine in our top five. Bored out for famous 22B and renamed the EJ22. Honda S2000 F20C We make no apologies for including two Hondas here, even though the engines have commonalities. The S2000’s F20C was a generation on from the K20A and is regarded as Honda’s ‘big block’ engine as later versions had a 2.2-litre capacity. But it’s the 237bhp 2.0 VTEC that we love most, not least for its 9,000rpm limit and 120bhp/litre specific output. Alfa Romeo GTV 2.0 Twin Spark Alfa’s…

1947 American businessman and driver Bill France Sr calls a meeting at the Streamline hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida about the future of stock car racing in the country. The National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing is born 1948 The first NASCAR race occurs on a Daytona Beach road course. Future Hall of Famer Red Byron wins 1949 Sara Christian becomes the first woman on record to race in NASCAR’s top division, now called the Cup Series, at Charlotte Fairgrounds Speedway in North Carolina. She finishes 14th 1959 NASCAR runs the first edition of its most famous race, the Daytona 500, on a 2.5-mile high-banked oval called Daytona International Speedway. The race has a photo finish, and it takes more than two days to determine the winner: Lee Petty,…

DOES THE M2 ONLY EXIST BECAUSE THE 1M WAS A SUCCESS? Yes. Simple as that. The 1M is genesis for the small BMW M car. OK, it’s physically bigger than an E30 M3, but it created a tier beneath BMW’s most revered badge. And it was, like so many of the best things are, a skunkworks project. OK, it had more foresight and intention than the Z3 M Coupe that had arrived 15 years earlier, but it was still a parts bin special. The rear suspension, differential and brakes came from the E92 M3, the 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight six was shared with the Z4 sDrive 35. It went on sale in 2011 and just 6,300 were made, of which 450 came to the UK. WHAT MADE IT SUCH A LEGEND?…

CITY CARS These small cars are perfect for urban life, but the trade-off is a much lower range 1. HONDA e PRICE: £37,395 RANGE: Up to 136 miles This TG favourite has retro styling and a brilliant interior, but it’s very expensive and the range isn’t great. Somehow we can’t help but love it though… 2. FIAT 500 PRICE: £28,195–£37,195 RANGE: Up to 199 miles The latest version of the 500 offers sharper looks, good value and decent range – and a parcel shelf full of soft toys shouldn’t hurt the battery too much. 3. CITROEN AMI PRICE: £7,695–£8,695 RANGE: 47 miles Say hello to your little French friend. The pared back Ami is the perfect car for the city streets, as long as you don’t have ambitions to go…