Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

@jack_rix @rixjack jack.rix@bbctopgearmagazine.com How often does a truly revolutionary car come along? I’m not talking about a next-gen sports car with incremental clicks to power, downforce and lap time, or a supermini with new flip up seats. Forget the road less travelled, these are the cars that turn hard left into the undergrowth by approaching styling, software, handling, propulsion, infrastructure and/or packaging in a way as yet unseen. Please make your way to the stage, Toyota Prius. Yes, the Honda Insight technically got there first, but it never caught on like the Prius, which brought fuel efficiency and a green glow to the masses. When it comes to EVs, many laid the path for the revolution that’s underway but the Tesla Model S proved they could be fast, sexy and…

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2007, A NEW BMW M5 Touring has entered the world – this is only the third M5 Touring model ever to leave the BMW factory. And everything about it is enormous. The stiffened body is 5m long and almost 2m wide. The boot offers a 500 litre cargo bay, until you flip down the split-folding rear seats (not quite flat) and uncork a 1,630 litre chasm riddled with lashing points for securing your outdoor lifestyle equipment. Underneath, it naturally shares its oily and volty bits with the latest M5 saloon – the first plug-in hybrid M5. The first plug-in hybrid M car, in fact, if you ignore the XM. Which we, like most buyers worldwide, are more than happy to. That means there’s a 4.4-litre…

Q: WHAT’S THE WEIRDEST AUTOMOTIVE ESPORT? I was pleased and slightly bemused to hear sim racing ‘esports’ getting a mainstream mention recently. During the Hungarian GP, Max Verstappen was criticised for being irritable on the radio, reportedly because he had stayed up playing video games until 3am. I can honestly say, I’ve never found a Formula One world champion and consummate athlete more relatable. Max had been competing in the iRacing Spa 24 Hours, a virtual endurance race, alongside his esports squad Team Redline. This sort of digital competition is still enormously popular, though it hit its peak during the pandemic, when real motor racing wasn’t an option. It was a strange time, and never more so than when I ended up in an invitational F1 esports race competing against…

“WE HAD TO DECIDE YEARS AGO, FROM SCRATCH, TO DO SOMETHING EXCEPTIONAL, COMPLETELY NEW” How best to follow up one of the most successful Lamborghini supercars ever built? Ditch its key USP. Make it more… comfortable. Spin the Random Fighting Bull Name Generator wheel. This is the follow up to the Huracán: welcome to the new Lamborghini Temerario, a car that replaces the transcendental, nat-asp V10 for [shudders] a battery, three electric motors and a turbo V8. It’s also a car that claims a new found focus on comfort. Perhaps it should have been named The Tempest, because swapping one of the finest free breathing V10s of the modern age for a hybrid V8 and more comfort suggests hell truly is empty, and all the devils are here. At least…

“AN ARACHNID BUGGY APPROACHES, HOSING WATER IN EVERY DIRECTION” Mariners will always respect the sea. In difficult times they’ll be in blind fear of its implacable power. An incoming tide is a landlubber’s window on its power. As King Cnut predicted. When the waters are approaching from both sides the fear is doubled and more. One of the most relatably terrifying episodes in scripture follows the parting of the Red Sea for Moses to lead his people through. The divinely created causeway closes afterward, drowning their chasing persecutors… “And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea.” In comparison, today’s TopGear jeopardy is trivial. It’s neap tides, the gentlest ones, and a blissfully calm day as we…

If you’re wondering, the reason we’ve selected F1 ’97 from the wealth of official Formula One games isn’t because it was an especially exciting season. And, no, it’s not because we choose these things by lobbing a dart at a dartboard covered in game names either. F1 ’97 was the second licensed PlayStation F1 game, but it’s notable because it’s the point when developer Bizarre Creations really hit its stride. Splitting handling out into separate Arcade and Grand Prix modes allowed the game to commit to a more simulation oriented physics model for those who wanted a proper challenge. There was no danger of mistaking one for the other either, as for some reason Arcade mode had a different colour grade that was so vivid it looked like the saturation…

“This month, I’ve mostly been driving cars that aren’t the F-Type” £104,880 OTR/£109,360 as tested/£1,132 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Was Jag’s final petrol sports car the wrong car at the wrong time? DRIVER: GREG POTTS FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS, OTHERS on the TopGear team have been enjoying time with the Jag while I’ve been out on car launches. First the car was borrowed by our social media wizard Barzi Karim. “The suspension soaks up all the road imperfections very well – much better than my MkVII Golf R with DCC in comfort mode,” said Barzi upon its return. Glad to see that my thoughts on the impressive ride quality are shared. Mind you, it wasn’t all positive feedback – Barzi did pick up on one of the flaws of using…

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When it landed in 1998, the original Ford Focus was a game changer: a quantum leap for family hatchbacks. But what made it such a smash hit? The seamless collaboration of Ford’s UK and German development teams? The deep engineering integrity? No and also no. The real reason the first Focus was so good? Because the MkV Escort was so very bad. Arriving in 1990, Ford boasted it had spent a billion pounds on its development. Must have been some very fancy biscuits in the Dunton meeting rooms, because they sure as hell didn’t spend it on engineering the thing. The styling was as underwhelming as the engines, the MkV inheriting the pensionable CVH units from the previous Escort. The gearshift was in dire need of a blue pill. The…

GIVEN THE FAN IS SO VISIBLE ON THE T.50’s tail, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s there to suck air out from under the car. After all, its designer, Gordon Murray, gave the world the Brabham BT46B Grand Prix car, so effective it was forced to withdraw after one race. That too had a vertical fan, and it did indeed suck air out the sealed underbody like a vacuum cleaner brush, creating gigantic downforce. (As a way to circumvent the ‘no moving aerodynamic devices’ rule, Murray actually claimed that it was a cooling fan that just happened to draw from underneath. He always liked to save weight by making one part do two jobs. Anyway…) The T.50’s fan doesn’t do that. It creates downforce not by its own crude suction,…

It’s happened. I’ve driven my last ever new Audi R8. The final, hardcore GT model arrived on a gloriously sunny day and left a week later with one of its carbon fibre canards crumpled and hanging on by a thread courtesy of a lovely old bloke who felt terrible about the whole thing. Sorry Audi. I feel terrible, too. About the old fella’s mishap and the fact that the R8 is a thing of the past. Even that dreaded phrase “will be reinvented as an EV” hasn’t been attached to the R8 for a while. It’s over. I swoon literally every time I see an R8 coupe. Especially if it’s an early car with that gorgeous open gated shifter. Futuristic yet understated, beautifully built but exotic in all the ways…

A map and a compass. An edict has been issued from TopGear high command, and we are required to find our way from Morocco’s capital Marrakesh to Xaluca Arfoud in the southeast near the Algerian border using only these old school navigational tools. No smartphones, no GPS, and no police convoys. As if. This desert digital detox will occur in the new Dacia Duster, a car whose huge success – 2.4m sold and counting since 2010 – is predicated on a similarly streamlined approach to life. It has what you need and not a whole lot else. Except that this new version dares to tamper with the formula and has aspirations. Say it isn’t so. The map and some basic arithmetic suggests that we’re looking at a distance of 510km…

Even in Maserati’s rich, bizarre, dazzling, disastrous, triumphant, tragic, comedic and fascinating history, the story of the MC12 is quite a tale. It was conceived to return Maserati to top level motorsport and achieved multiple championships in a long career from 2004 to 2010. However, the twists and turns along the way are pure Maserati. Although, the first real controversy was that the MC12 was actually based on a Ferrari Enzo chassis and also featured its 6.0-litre V12 engine… Initially, the MC12 had to fight to be homologated by the FIA. A battle it eventually won at the end of the 2004 season, despite having already competed in a number of races. The ACO, which organises Le Mans, simply wouldn’t allow the MC12 to race as it was too long…

“IT DAWNS ON ME THAT THE CLUTCH IS BEGINNING TO FEEL A BIT SPONGY… AND IS IT STARTING TO SMELL?” GORGEOUS, ISN’T IT? IF ALFA ROMEO launched the Brera now, the internet would be in raptures. That’s how well Giorgetto Giugiaro’s design – first revealed as a concept at the Geneva Motor Show in 2002, presumably to the sound of a thousand jaws thudding into the carpet in unison – has held up. It would’ve looked right at home on a bedroom wall full of supercar exotica. Which is where I put it, right? Wrong. Full of Manchester United posters, you see. Sorry Alfa, even the Brera wasn’t dislodging Paul Scholes. But of all the cars to light that spark as a preteen, this was right up there. Not only…

£102,540 OTR/£117,385 as tested/£1,474 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: The Range Rover casts a big shadow. Can the Sport step out of it? DRIVER: BEN PULMAN ROAD TESTER CAR TYPES WILL tell you they’ll know if a car is fundamentally ‘right’ within 50 metres of driving it. To an extent they’re correct, yet these days there’s much more to a car than how your butt and brain feel as it goes down your favourite road. Despite six months with the RR Sport, with every passing mile I seem to get further from a verdict. It’s because the Sport is a “but…” car. For everything good, there’s something bad. Take the design. It’s clean, it’s uncluttered, and when painted in Firenze Red and matched with 23in wheels, it looks great. But… the black…

£76,140/£79,481/£1,141 WHY IT’S HERE: Does a utilitarian off-roader work as a lifestyle vehicle? DRIVER: OLLIE MARRIAGE THERE’S A SPITFIRE FLYING OVER Dunsfold. Of course there is, it’s that sort of place. It’s the end of a sunny, warm day of filming and it’s lazily buzzing and looping above, sounding bloody magnificent. I’ve got picnic chairs with me, so I grab one and turn the Grenadier’s roof rack into a viewing platform. Brilliant. Rack, rather than the bars it arrived with last month, you’ll note. Typically, the £452 Rhino Rack bars didn’t work with my own attachments, so I’ve switched them for the £2,043 full length roof. Ouch. Especially as it means I can’t open the Fieldmaster’s roof panels. No matter, the Grenadier now has a second storey. And it’s large enough…

“Part Trophy truck, part WRC car, it’s a bolder, more badass 911 Dakar” £62,479 OTR/£65,359 as tested/£785 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Can a jump hungry, extreme pickup double as useful family transport? DRIVER: JETHRO BOVINGDON HUGE, HEAVY VEHICLES purporting to be ‘sporty’ are extremely stupid, aren’t they? No matter what the press release says, the website marketing slogans might promise or the ’Ring lap time suggest, you can’t defy the laws of physics. Trying to make a 2.5-tonne SUV behave like a sports car is a fruitless and ultimately absurd pursuit. Agreed. No doubt. But check out my new Ranger Raptor! It’s based on a Ford Ranger, of course. We’ve gone full bad boy spec by opting for Shadow Black paint (a £720 option) and the 3.0-litre twin turbocharged V6 petrol engine,…

“I am not Adrian Newey, I’m Duncan from Bishop’s Stortford” says Duncan Cowper, a specialist lime plasterer from Hertfordshire. Duncan might not be F1’s greatest car designer, but he’s stood near the start line of the Pikes Peak race in Colorado and we’re looking at the Dax Rush he’s designed, built and brought over here to compete (for the second time) in what is probably the world’s most extreme hillclimb. And Duncan’s car… isn’t slow. Duncan has turned up to Pikes with a car that looks very much like a Caterham, except it’s a Dax – a UK sports car company from Essex now known as JK Sports cars that produces GRP Cobra replicas complete with 8.2-litre V8s. Back in the day, Dax produced several different GRP kits, including a…

ANYONE FOR AN ALL-NEW, 1,000BHP, V12 POWERED, MANUAL gearbox, fantastically mad looking hypercar? This is the Nilu, by the newly formed Nilu27. It’s the brainchild of Sasha Selipanov – a designer who’s worked for the likes of Bugatti, Koenigsegg and a few other relatively small marques – and it wants to show two fingers to digitalisation and electrification. Sitting in a mid-mounted position is a 6.5-litre naturally aspirated V12 that’ll rev to almost 12,000rpm. It can actually run to over 15,000, though a lower red line was ultimately chosen to find the right compromise between performance and reliability. We’re told that Nilu27 is not “a numbers brand” mind, and the car will be dictated by experience and emotion instead. Note the 12-into-1 gloriously exposed exhaust headers, culminating in the high,…

FIAT PANDA CITY CROSS What is it? The FWD City Cross gets the looks of the 4x4 for less hardware. It’s supposed to be a speed bump friendly urbanaut, but it’s much more than that. Why are we interested? It has underbody protection, lifted height, plastic cladding and extra fogs. Plus it gets traction control/hill descent gubbins. How many were made? Interestingly, the City Cross was quite popular – there are probably twice as many as the various 4x4 derivatives. Costs? Depends on the model, but £8k+ will get you a low mileage 2020 car with FSH and low miles. You’d pay £2k more for the 4x4 – do you really need it?…

WE UNDERSTAND DOWNFORCE THESE days. We mainly understand that cars look better with wings, whether they’re necessary or not for road cars is another matter. Anyway, Porsche’s 911 GT3 RS is about as sophisticated as road legal wings get – 409kg of downforce at 125mph, 860kg at 186mph. We’ve timed 0–60mph in 3.14secs. Yet thanks to the extra drag caused by pulling that great wing through the air, even with its DRS enabled, it’s actually slower above 100mph than Porsche’s junior version, the Cayman GT4 RS. Follow Through is Dunsfold’s fastest corner, where the Porsche’s downforce is most switched on. Through there the GT3 RS pulls 117mph and peaks at 1.77g. That’s immense. The McMurtry is up over 140mph, pulling pulling a peak of 3.39g. McMURTRY SPÉIRLING (MkI) Price: £1m…

“One hundred per cent this is an MG. It ties in with the production cars coming, it’s not just a throwaway thing.” So says Carl Gotham, European advanced design director for Chinese megacorp SAIC, current custodian of ‘British’ MG. And he’s talking about the EXE181, an electric, perspex canopied, single-seat streamliner with more swoop than a flock of agitated starlings. It’s a mad thing, a knee high throwback to the golden age of concept cars when manufacturers would arm their motor show stands with bizarre 4,000bhp fever dreams powered by dark matter and constructed from nothing but alloy of unobtanium. But there really is history here, even if SAIC is mining a seam of MG gold that has very little to do with the company’s contemporary product. Mind you, Gotham…

First, there was the Maserati MC20 – the first mid-engined Maser supercar for two decades. And it was good. Then Maserati decided to take it racing. And lo, the world smiled at the Maserati GT2, with its huge swan neck rear wing. Now, Maserati’s decided to combine those two for a more extreme, road legal but track focused supercar. This is the GT2 Stradale. They don’t even call it ‘MC20’ anymore. Obviously though, that’s what it is. Same carbon fibre tub, same butterfly doors, same 3.0-litre twin turbo V6 with another 10bhp dolloped on top to give 631bhp. That means it’s actually more powerful than the old MC12 supercar’s Ferrari Enzo V12, needing enlarged cooling ducts to gulp in 16 per cent more air. As a result it’ll go from…

Aston Martin laid on a typically lavish launch event for the new 2018 Vantage. We ignored it. Nicked the car away from its Portuguese digs and caught the ferry from Gibraltar to Tangier, northern Morocco. While everyone else was testing the wine, we’d plotted a 1,300-mile loop of northern Africa. Now that’s a test. Marrakech was pure survival, dodging cyclists, impatient 30-year-old Mercs and actual snake charmers. The motorways were infested with corrupt cops demanding cash payment for the ‘tolls’. No change given. US dollars nor dirhams. Right. And Casablanca was… well, we had to change hotels when it appeared that the flashiest car in the city was being followed. But out on the ‘apex or die’ sinews of the Dadès Gorges, the baby Aston was a delight. More manageable…

When Jürgen Klopp arrived at Liverpool Football Club way back in 2015, he kicked off the mind games with one Jose Mourinho by declaring himself “the Normal One”. In hindsight, Liverpool fans can look back and say that normal wasn’t half bad. Klopp left the club this summer having won numerous trophies and countless hearts. So ‘normal’ is nothing to be sniffed at. We don’t mind a humblebrag – so long as the results are positive. These days, normal family cars are pretty impressive too. Gone are the days of squeezing three kids across the narrowest of rear bench seats, gone are the days of jump seats in estates with questionable safety standards, and gone are the days of wondering whether you’ll make it to your summer holiday destination without…

£49,990 when new/£27,000 as tested Why it’s here: is a used Tesla just as good as a new one? DRIVER: JACK RIX DEPENDING ON WHAT SIDE OF THE FENCE YOU’RE sitting on, the used EV market right now is either a bloodbath or riddled with opportunity. As choice increases exponentially and the market is flooded with recently expired three- and four-year lease deals, there’s a surfeit of supply to demand… and prices tend to take a dive. Bad news if you’ve just been told your three-month-old £85k Merc EQE is worth £45k trade in, but music to your ears if you’re in the market for something affordable and electric. Which is why the time felt right to tell this story from the inside… of a Tesla. We’ll be running an approved…

£88,100 OTR/£113,484 as tested/£1,982 pcm WHY IT’S HERE: Is Porsche’s big SUV still a game changer 20 years on? DRIVER: ROWAN HORNCASTLE ACCORDING TO PORSCHE, THE NEW Cayenne chewed through nearly two and a half million test miles during its development. But how many of these were on track? I’m not sure. But having pounded our Cayenne S around a circuit for six days straight as a support/camera car for an upcoming YouTube series, I can safely say that it is surprisingly capable on track. Over the past few months, I’ve never really twizzled the steering wheel-mounted drive mode button all the way right to ‘Sport Plus’. When you do, the car crouches down on its air springs, pumps the cabin with more synthesised V8ness, exercises the throttle and engine and…

Peering into someone’s eBay watchlist can tell you a lot about their mental health. My fiancée’s account is filled with things we actually need. Mine on the other hand is almost exclusively full of cars – obscure, overpriced or non-running cars. But there’s one item which has sat on this list for several years, and serves as a constant reminder of how ridiculous car ownership can be. It’s a used ashtray for an R34 GT-R Skyline. When I first added it I scoffed, as the idea of spending £65 on a bit of plastic seemed ridiculous. It’s now more than three times that. For the past seven years I’ve owned an R34 GT-R and for at least five of those it’s been unusable. This was mainly down to its engine…