Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i TopGear Malaysia

Editor editor@topgear-malaysia.com Happy New Year, folks! While most of you work on getting your 2020 resolutions off to the best possible start, we’d like to start the year by tipping our hats to the stars of 2019 in our annual Awards issue. In the automotive scene, this turn of a decade will be remembered for the massive strides made towards mass electrification by mainstream carmakers; an era that coincides with the preservation of petrol-powered entertainment through needlessly powerful engines, tyre-shredding engineering and motorsports by the specialists. And we believe we’ve covered the full spectrum in our report card for the past 12 months. From a humble Malaysian car – the local team really wanted to give a certain national nameplate its due credit – to the virtually untouchable likes of…

TopGear telly returns this festive season with a Christmas special that promises to be groundbreaking in at least two regards. First, because it might actually be screened some time around Christmas. Second, because it genuinely, properly tackles a major motoring issue of our time. The issue of urban transportation. See, scientist-types predict that, by 2050, 70 per cent of the world’s population – some seven billion people – will live in cities. Which means that, in the future, the world won’t need SUVs or supercars. What the world will need… is city cars. Specifically, city cars that are tough enough to withstand anything the mega-cities of the future can throw at them. So, as a service to humankind, Paddy, Freddie and Chris were ordered to go out and buy, for…

Meet Elva – the lightest McLaren road car ever and the newest member of the Ultimate Series, following in the footsteps of the P1 and Senna and sitting alongside the new Speedtail. No weight has been announced, expect something below the 1,198kg Senna obvs. After all, there’s no roof, windows or windscreen, while the doors are McLaren’s smallest ever and single-hinged. You can wear a helmet, or you can specify a windscreen, but McLaren suggests you’ll need neither. An Active Air Management System (AAMS) uses a movable carbon deflector to direct air from the Elva’s nose, projecting it over the passengers and creating “a relative bubble of calm” beneath. Note “relative” because there’s an 804bhp version of the 4.0-litre V8 twin-turbo. So, 0-100kph in under three and 200kph in 6.7secs,…

01 BONKERS MINI GP Good news! The new Mini GP looks exactly as mad as we thought, and indeed hoped, it might. The 2.0-litre 4cyl makes a hefty 302bhp and 450Nm of torque too. We like. 02 WIDEBODY POLESTAR 1 The brainchild of digital wizard Khyzyl Saleem, car builder Daniel Covarrubia and EA Games. Looks like the inside of a teenager’s head – is actually a Need for Speed car made real. 03 VW ID. SPACE VIZZION Volkswagen hasn’t given up on the estate just yet. In fact, it’s bringing the whole thing into the next generation – these swoopy lines will transform into a production EV in late 2021. 04 WORLD’S FASTEST TRACTOR JCB breaks its own record for tractor top speeds, hitting a two-way average of 218.73kph in…

With the new lunar new year unfolding, Swiss luxury watch and jewellery house Chopard’s latest celebratory limited edition timepiece is a fitting homage to the Year of the Rat. The dial of this new watch dedicated to the Chinese zodiac is entirely hand-crafted using the traditional Japanese lacquer technique known as Urushi and combining the lacquer with gold dust. The dials of this limited series were created through Chopard’s cooperation with Urushi grand master Yamada Heinado. The varnish used in this ancestral lacquering art comes from the sap of the Urushi tree indigenous to both Japan and China. Its resin is harvested once a year in extremely small quantities. Then, it is further treated for three to five years to become a highly resistant, honey-textured lacquer that’s applied in extremely…

NICHE-TASTIC Aren’t they? The old A6 Allroad was built long before Audi released its first actual SUV, the Q7. Something of an oddity – a jacked-up estate masquerading as an SUV in a world obsessed with the things – the Allroad sold in relatively small numbers (admittedly going solely on how many you see around) compared with the Mercedes ML, BMW X5 and Range Rover it effectively competed with. Which is a shame. IS IT? Yeah, because they’re really good. Both of these cars are genuinely nice things to biff about in day-to-day. This old Allroad is rare for an altogether different reason, though – because, instead of the six-cylinder diesel engines most Allroads were (and indeed are) supplied with, it has an almost 300bhp 4.2-litre V8. A derivative of…

Cars are an environmental catastrophe, and it’s perfectly justified that governments act to quell their impact, especially (but not solely) for their effects on the climate emergency. But making cars sustainable will in no way secure the future of our home planet. Not on its own. Other industries have huge impacts and seem to be getting away with it. It’s our job as citizens to hold those industries to account, by voting for regulation and if necessary by withdrawing our custom. In short, buy less stuff that does bad things. We’re endlessly reminded, and rightly, about single-use plastic and fast fashion. Other offenders are more hidden. IT is one. Data, and its transmission and the server farms in which it resides, has a colossal impact. Add up the global total,…

FOR Focused performance, entertaining exhaust note and broadly competent damping AGAINST Little middle ground between lazy and overzealous, retro cockpit lacks focus The tuatara isn’t exactly an American supercar, not in the truest sense anyway. The name refers to a reptile endemic to New Zealand described by researchers as one of the world’s fastest-evolving creatures despite looking much closer to anything you’ve seen in Jurassic Park than the ugliest gecko hiding in your kitchen cabinet. Cars evolve over time too, and we think we’ve just identified the real tuatara of the motoring world: Mini’s latest John Cooper Works (JCW) models, starting with the Countryman JCW. On the surface, every modern Mini tries its absolute best to reproduce the iconic look of the nameplate’s British Leyland days and succeeds to a…

“IT’S AN END-OF-AN-ERA CAR. WE’LL BE DEWY-EYED WHEN IT’S GONE” £73,405 FOR Perhaps the hardest-cored convertible car on sale. Surely Porsche’s prettiest car AGAINST It’s not quite the unique proposition it used to be, nor does it sound as good Oddly enough, this isn’t a Boxster. While it follows in the footsteps of two generations of Boxster Spyder, it’s been named 718 Spyder. Porsche seemingly brought the 718 badge back to in an attempt to attach some emotion to its sports car’s 4cyl makeover, so making such a big deal of it on a 6cyl car is curious. But let’s just put it down to some marketing complexities our little brains will never understand and get on with digesting the spec of the car. Because what a spec. The Spyder…

“IT ARGUABLY HAS THE STYLE AND ENOUGH SECONDARY TALENTS TO WARRANT A SECOND LOOK” RM115,888 FOR Chic styling, roomy and practical cabin as well as kit count AGAINST Dull drive, and it is pricier than the bulk of its rivals “Oh, it’s a Citroen!” exclaimed a random onlooker who took a closer look at our C3 Aircross tester whilst we were filling it up at a Petronas station. This was just one of many similar instances we encountered throughout our weekend test stint with it. Despite its smaller size, this Citroen often gets mistaken for the larger and more expensive – and much faster – Mini Countryman (see page 48 for the real deal). Perhaps this is a testament to how well Citroen can style a car to look much…

An hour-long drive through the Klang Valley’s notorious traffic isn’t something we typically look forward to at any given time, let alone on a searing, weekday afternoon. But it was a ridiculously small price to pay for a hot date with the new Ferrari F8 Tributo on the Sepang International Circuit, even if we were restricted to three laps which amounted to just ten minutes behind the wheel of Maranello’s latest mid-engined poster child. Prancing horses with V8s mounted just in front of the rear axle aren’t new. But as the ‘tribute’ in the F8 Tributo’s name suggests, the successor to the 488 GTB could mark a paradigm shift in its high-speed genre. If the upcoming SF90 Stradale has taught us anything, it’s that the decade to come will likely…

RENAULT Manufacture of the year In the past 12 months Renault has delivered a record-breaking£72k hot hatch with six-point harnesses, carbon-fibre wheels and ceramic brakes; an even better version of the beautifully light, delicate Alpine A110 that’s arguably more desirable than the equivalent Porsche; and a sub-£20k EV that claims well over 322km of range. That’s three stand-out cars in less than a year – all wildly different from one another, and yet all undoubtedly the very best of their ilk. It’s the variety that’s key to Renault’s ascension to TG award-winning excellence. Its mainstream cars are fine, but give it a brief to nail, a set of very specific parameters to fulfil, and it chases perfection quite unlike any other car manufacturer. Whether that brief is for the world’s…

THE CONCEPT OF CALIFORNIA DOUBLE IS SIMPLE: make use of The Golden State’s enviable geography to ski and surf in the same day. It’s bucket list stuff. Especially for Brits, where the closest we can get to it is a morning at Milton Keynes snow dome and an afternoon at the local lido’s wave machine. But Mother Nature isn’t making TG’s ski-to-surf quest easy. Our plan was to be shredding the sunrise pow at Big Bear Mountain – just a few hours east of LA – to then leg it to the coast and throw up shakas on party waves in Malibu by sunset. Thing is, you need snow to ski. And, thanks to global warming/an unseasonably warm autumn [delete to match personal opinion], there’s no snow. So we’ve had to…

Supercars are essentially hopeless. Exquisite pieces of cutting-edge engineering so hampered by their value and impracticality that most end up buried in a car collection and are rarely let into the wild for anything more than an Instagram-fuelling, slow-speed show-off. The Sterrato is the antithesis to that static supercar culture, a car designed to be used, and used hard. Developed as a skunkworks project that shows Lamborghini still knows how to have fun, the recipe is relatively simple. Take one AWD V10 Huracán, raise the ride height, add some cladding, beef up the air filters, fiddle with the ECUs to add a bit of rally DNA into its thinking, talk to Pirelli to get some special ‘balloon’ tyres and what you have is an RC car made real. A childhood…

Just a GT2 RS. Ha. For starters, ‘just’ is not a diminutive to use around the GT2 RS. It’s not ‘just’ anything. It’s one of the wildest, most exciting supercars out there, the kind that leaves you both breathless and panting. Simultaneously. Which is quite clever. So no, a GT2 RS itself is not ‘just’ anything. And in the same way this, the 935, is not ‘just’ a GT2 RS. Not even ‘just’ a slick-shod one. Read through the tech spec and almost every feature is followed by the suffix ‘in accordance with FIA article…’. And yes, that includes the escape hatch in the roof. And the 115-litre safety fuel cell with optional fast-fill coupling. Forget the road-car element for a second, and tell me that a 700bhp twin-turbo rear-drive…

Charlie Turner “Driving an RS has been a dream since childhood – to get to do so on the Palms to Pines Highway with the Taycan in the mirrors was bucket-list stuff” Rowan Horncastle “Mammoth Mountain is a long way from LA. It’s even further from Mexico. Which is the drive I had to do to make it work. Totally worth it, though” Jonny Fleetwood “You may only get one take at this… don’t mess it up. Right. Has anyone else ever tried a panning shot of a car travelling at 400+mph?”…

SVP Autonomous Driving, BMW 1 BMWs are for drivers. Won’t they become commodities when they drive themselves? It’s an addition. They’ll still be good for manual driving, but in traffic jams or highways you can do urgent emails or whatever. I don’t see this as the enemy of BMW. 2 So when will it happen? Highway Pilot will be 2021. You can do something else as the car drives up to 130kph [81mph, but only on motorways]. 3 What about full self-driving? We need more sensors, prediction, interpretation, more computer power. That’s just for level 4 [self-driving but in very restricted circumstances]. 4 Hmmm, no one will put a date on that. Will it be in the eight-year lifetime of the iNEXT, the 2021 crossover? We’ll add functions during its…

The BMW M2 CS is here; a 444bhp track-honed road car that aims to send this generation of 2-Series Coupe off into the stars with a big, fat powerslide. That engine. It’s ‘derived’ from the M4 Competition’s straight-six. So it’s a twin-turbo 3.0-litre, producing 444bhp – 40bhp up from the ‘regular’ M2 Competition. BMW reckons on 0-100kph in 4.2s with the standard six-speed manual (yay), or 4.0s flat if you spec the seven-speed double-clutcher. Tick the Driver’s Pack box, and the top speed rises to 280kph. Other mods include adaptive dampers that cycle through ever more aggressive modes until you inevitably feel a bit unwell, and larger M Sport brakes as standard. The electric power steering has been tuned by M, and there’s an active M diff that works with…

Later this year, super-spy James Bond will return to silver screens worldwide for the franchise’s landmark 25th feature film, and it stars a stellar new Omega timepiece that will aptly serve as a constant reminder to Bond that he has No Time To Die. Marking his fifth appearance as Bond, 52-year-old star Daniel Craig has given valuable input into the design and creation of the new Seamaster Diver 300M 007 Edition that he will proudly don on his wrist in the upcoming film. A non-limited edition special, this Seamaster stands apart from the standard colourway and polished finish of its regular siblings by combining a 42mm titanium case with a matte black dial and bezel, as well as military-esque tanned lume and matching titanium mesh bracelet. Each 42mm timepiece has…

Many many moons ago, when I was a lot younger and fresh off the law school boat, the urge was incredibly strong to work my way to that first brand new car. For most my early working life, I basically pottered about in a 10-year-old used Proton Saga Megavalve Auto in 1.5 “Istimewa” spec, no less. Rather predictably, it was silver in colour – simply because the only other choice was a dull maroon which did no favours to the boxy shape of the car. Fast-forward to about five years into my work life in the new millennium, and I was finally in a position in life to actually walk into a car showroom to place a deposit on a brand-new car, complete with that unmistakable smell that comes along…

“AT HEART THE S8 IS STILL A BIG, WORLD-CLASS LUXO-BARGE” FOR Agile, fast point-to-point, interior quality, discreet styling, performance doesn’t compromise luxuriousness AGAINST Doesn’t have the brutish character of an S63 “Something very fast,” and “something that can shove a little bit” is what Skipp Sudduth’s Larry asks for in the opening minutes of Ronin, faced with the prospect of having to flee from a shady arms deal through cobbled Parisian streets. Enter the first-generation Audi S8. A dark green one, naturally. With a big 4.2-litre V8, quattro AWD and relatively plain looks, it’s the quintessential Q-car. And deeply cool for having starred in a movie with possibly the best car chase ever committed to film. And that coolness endures – through its Lamborghini V10-engined successor to the new fourth-gen…

BMW M340i xDRIVE £47,970 FOR All the everyday speed you could ever want AGAINST Don’t think it’s an M car – it’s not really This is a properly quick car, but not too fast. Or shouty. The straight-six is always awake and ready to sing. It is, by the way, a newer, stronger version of the 3.0-litre straight-six that is in the Z4/Supra. The AWD system gives you confidence while still bringing control and delicacy to the handling. The M340i is a pitch at the AMG C43 or Audi S4 and this is the one I’d have. It’s lithe and spirited when you’re in the mood, otherwise subtle and calming. PH CHEVY CAMARO V8 CONVERTIBLE £49,000 est FOR Nat-asp 6.2 V8 for the win. Manual coupe is sub £40k AGAINST…

THE DAY ARRIVE SHOT& OILY, like a just-used frying pan. The smell of warm tarmac seeps into everything, pulled out of the road by greasy sunshine that oozes slowly into the valley like poured honey. There’s no one about, and I am having A Moment. The grammatically incorrect capitals are necessary. The road is fantasy: a bijou mountain pass designed by a drunkard, positively cambered corners that float and curl around the landscape, tossed around the place without rhyme or reason. Hairpins feel like quarter-mile, 180° walls of death lobbed at the scenery like the incomplete noose of a lazy hangman. Straights are short, punchy, and have consequences. The Porsche 911 I’m driving also has consequences, seeing as it’s worth more than I am, even if I get broken for parts.…

Handsome, isn’t it? Check out the proportions, the visual balance. So much better than the old cab-forward Flying Spur. That was a car for the driven, not the driver. The new one shifts the emphasis forwards. You get the feeling Bentley thought long and hard about how and where to position this car, and once it’d worked that out, the information fed directly into what it should look like, how it should drive. It comes across in the design. It’s just so right. Name another four-door saloon you can be seen driving without being mistaken for the chauffeur. Another that gets the blend of presence and dynamism spot on. Choose a door to open. Do it now, before you read any further. Bet it was the driver’s. It’s good in…

Speed, a binary metric easily derided as irrelevant, is currency for some. Having the fastest production car has been driving the hypercar market forever. But being the first to break 483kph – that’s different. That only happens once; people like and remember round numbers. On 2 August, after exiting the Ehra-Lessien banking at 257kph and keeping the throttle pinned for 57secs, Andy Wallace and Bugatti broke that barrier, hitting 490.48kph. But the number fails spectacularly to adequately articulate the achievement. Some figures: at 483kph you’re travelling one mile every 12 seconds and a football pitch every 0.68secs, the Chiron was gulping 15 litres of fuel and 60,000 litres of air a minute. As a warm-up act, I popped over to Ehra-Lessien to vmax the ‘cooking’ version of the Chiron, and…

If 2019 taught us anything, it’s that the rise of the EV has created a car market that has never been more vibrant, diverse or creative. The fact that the challenge of shifting four people around our planet can deliver such diametrically opposed creations as the Tesla Model 3 and the Ford GT500, makes Planet Car a truly captivating place to be. To be clear from the outset, this isn’t a twin test – it’s a celebration of two award-winning cars. Lazy automotive stereotypes dictate if you like one of them, you can’t possibly admire the other, so, on behalf of the whole TopGear team, I’d like to call bullshit on that feudal mentality right now. You can drive a Tesla and love muscle cars; you can have a garage…

It takes all of about three minutes driving a Taycan to realise that Porsche has permanently altered what people who love conventional cars will think of electric cars. The distinction is important, because anyone who thinks the Taycan completely rewrites the book on voltage-based driving will be disappointed. To people who don’t care about cars and driving, a Tesla Model 3 does pretty much everything the Porsche will do, for a fraction of the price. But, for those who do care, the Taycan will be mind-bending in the way it trashes what we thought was possible. The Turbo S model is uncomfortably accelerative on UK roads, its suspension is far more comfortable than any Porsche I’ve driven before and yet, despite its vast kerbweight, it feels no less agile than…

The third-generation Bentley Flying Spur has landed in Asia Pacific looking particularly ravishing in its Monaco White Sand paintjob and Blackline specification during its official launch in Singapore recently. Underneath the alluring aesthetics lie the same six-litre W12 engine powering the Continental GT. Fed to all four wheels via an eight-speed dual clutch transmission, the Flying Spur’s 626bhp and 900Nm of twist allows it to dispatch the century sprint in just 3.8 seconds all the way to a top speed of 333kph. It’s fast but also somewhat frugal; cylinder deactivation (which shuts off up to six cylinders at a time) makes the new Flying Spur 15 percent more efficient than its predecessor. Also part of the Flying Spur’s rich catalogue is something called Bentley Dynamic Ride – supposedly the world’s…

J Goodyear has launched its latest series of Eagle F1 tyres in a very big way. The range now consists of five products, namely the SuperSport, SuperSport R, SuperSport RS, Asymmetric 5 and Asymmetric 3 SUV. The core SuperSport trio was developed in conjunction with Goodyear’s recent endeavours in motorsports – BTCC, Le Mans and NASCAR included. Aptly, this series of tyres is aimed squarely towards owners of high-performance cars, with features such as an innovative U-shaped compound, specialised ‘Power Zones’ that create pockets of control for better handing in wet and dry conditions, and thread deformation protection for increased high-speed stability. Whilst the SuperSport and SuperSport R are designed as all-purpose performance tyres, the SuperSport RS stands out as the most track-focused offering. It is the sole semi-slick tyre…

WHO: WILSON HENNESSY WHERE: LEIGHTON BUZZARD, UK “Wilson… love the ‘raw’ iPhone vibe, but can you take the cover shot on an actual camera as well, please? WHAT: CAR HEAVEN WHERE: SINGAPORE Wearnes Auto motive’s multi-brand, multi-storey showroom across the causeway takes window shopping to a whole new level WHO: VIJAY PATTNI WHERE: PPA AWARDS, LONDON, UK Meet topgear.com editor Vijay, breaking the internet every day. Here accepting an award for our brilliant website WHO: JAMES GOUGH WHERE: DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY These floor protectors failed when James tried to get his 12,000 steps in on the Mach-E shoot WHAT: SCORPION WHERE: HAKSKEEN PAN, SOUTH AFRICA Ollie Marriage’s new pet caused some consternation among the Bloodhound crew WHO: ROWAN HORNCASTLE WHERE: MALIBU BEACH, USA Rowan taking our Family Car of the Year…

Stefan Bellof was one of the fastest, most outrageously skilled racing drivers of all time. After winning the 1984 World Endurance Championship in a Porsche 956, he was widely tipped as a future F1 world champion, before a crash at Spa-Francorchamps ended his life at the age of just 27. For more than 30 years, Bellof’s 6m11 lap of the Nürburgring – set in a 956 at the frankly ridiculous average speed of 125mph – stood as the fastest-ever lap of the Green Hell. Stefan Bellof was, basically, a superhuman, capable of physical feats beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals. Stefan Bellof, as the photograph below proves, was a bit rubbish at perching insouciantly on a wall. This is a good thing. And not just because it’s nice to…

Ford’s new all-electric car is a 5dr crossover, but to make you want it, they’re calling it the Mustang Mach-E. Clearly, a battery-driven family car isn’t what you’d associate with the word Mustang, but it’s not a total imposter. Several design elements hint at the pony car, it’s primarily RWD (though AWD is available too) and some versions are Mustang-fast. You can put down a deposit now, directly on the web. It starts at just over £40,000, but the top-spec ‘first edition’ has AWD and the big battery plus extra equipment, at about £58,000. That buys you a biggish, long-range machine. It’s more the size of an Audi e-Tron than a Kia E-Niro. The base version has a 75kWh battery and RWD, for 450km of range (WLTP). A bigger 99kWh…

Sound the new Ferrari klaxon, here’s another. The fifth new model from Maranello this year, no less – a 2+2, front-engine V8 GT designed to muscle in on the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, AMG GT and Porsche 911 Turbo’s patch. Although Ferrari claims 70 per cent of its chassis is new, the Roma’s basis is the milder-mannered Portofino – same wheelbase, same 3.9-litre twin turbo V8 engine, but juiced up by 19bhp to 611bhp. It also uses the eight-speed DCT gearbox from the SF90 Stradale, and the interior is clean-sheet new. It weighs 73kg less than the Portofino, too, so 0–100kph in 3.4 seconds is a tenth faster and a top speed of 319+kph is plenty for anyone that lives in the real world. Similarities to Bond’s DB10 are undeniable,…

Swiss luxury watchmaker Zenith has released a special range of its signature Defy El Primero 21 chronograph. What sets this particular range apart from Zenith’s usual is its special homage to three South East Asian nations and their landmarks – Malaysia included. At the base of this special is Zenith’s signature chronograph featuring an open worked dial. It elegantly displays contrasting white markings, a chronograph power reserve indicator at 12 o’clock, hours and minutes in the centre, small seconds at 9 o’clock, a white second counter at 6 o’clock, and a red 30-minute counter at 3 o’clock. With a combination of straight lines and angles, the geometric facets of the 44mm titanium case also perfectly complement the voluminous architecture of the open-worked movement. Notably, each version of the Defy El…

The ‘family wagon’ comes in about as many flavours as lung-shredding vapes these days. And, more often than not, prospective buyers won’t be flipping through the brochure of a traditional estate – it’ll be some form of SUV, crossover, or jacked-up something or other that’s sold as a more practical and stylish alternative to the staid, standard wagon. But boil those hundreds of iterations down, and you’ll find three common themes. In broad strokes, your choices for a new set of proper family wheels are as follows: a standard estate, a ruggedised halfway-house or an SUV. Yet despite their differences, they’re all billed as the perfect one-and-done car. But if any one of these cars is actually all things to all people, what’s the use of the other two? To…

“THE UK LOVES A PERFORMANCE CAR, NO MATTER WHAT SHAPE” £38,450 FOR Punchy engine, four-wheel-drive grip, smooth DSG gearbox AGAINST Is a fast crossover, scratchy interior plastics, droney noise It’s almost surprising that it took Volkswagen as long as it did to get to this point. The VW Group already has the Cupra Ateca and the Audi SQ2 as fast crossovers, and a quick glance at the headline stats would seem to suggest that all it took to create the T-Roc version was a transplant of the important bits from the Golf R. The engine is the same 2.0-litre turbo producing 296bhp and 400Nm, the gearbox is the same 7spd DSG, and the AWD system is – you guessed it – the same 4Motion system. It’s likely that the hot…

RM75,999 FOR Cool looks, comfy ride and decent equipment list AGAINST A tad heavy and perhaps not the liveliest in segment to ride Without doubts, it’s fair to say that the folks flying aboard the mighty big wing were fairly late to the modern retro bike boom. This is ironic considering that Honda was solely responsible for modernising superbikes through its legendary CB750 back in the late sixties – a piece of its history worth certainly worth revisiting. Honda finally got to it when the base CB1100 was released in 2013, and updated later in 2017 whereby the sportier RS version pictured here was spawned alongside the base bike – now designated the ES. Only the RS version landed locally in early 2019, and it had a very established crop…

It was a good year for the simplest automotive pursuit of all: going very fast in a straight line. Simple, that is, until you stop to consider the endless subtle ways brutal physics conspires to extract its exorbitant price for every precious mph gained. And the courage and complex skills of those in the driving seats, Andys Green and Wallace. Bloodhound LSR (see p100) looked doomed, but at the turn of the year it was bought out of receivership by the admirable Ian Warhurst. This blood-curdling jet-powered monster, 10 years in the making, is now doing 1,011kph runs in the South African desert, towards next year’s attempt to perhaps double that speed. Meanwhile, Bugatti got its super-luxurious Chiron past 483kph, but not quite with standard bodywork. So it launched an…

Heel and toe. Ring any bells? Don’t worry if it doesn’t, because the Ford Focus ST isn’t very well set up for it. It’s just me, being old, that cares the brake and throttle are too far apart. And why do I care when thumbing the S-for-Sport button on the steering wheel means the car blips the downshifts better than I ever could? Maybe I’m just upset about that. But no, I’ll tell you what the real issue is: I’ve got nothing else to be upset about. The Ford Focus ST has no vices. No weaknesses. No chinks in its armour. The 2.3-litre four-cylinder engine is strong and tuneful, the manual gearbox’s shift is swift, slick and sweet, it brakes hard, grips well, has a brilliantly integrated diff and well…

A fan favourite since it was launched a few years ago, the Mercedes-Benz GLC has finally gotten the facelift it needed to keep its highly-competitive segment rivals at bay. The mid-size SUV, now packing a snazzier set of lights on both ends, is now offered in GLC200 and GLC300 formats – the middle-ground GLC250 no longer a part of Malaysian line-up. At RM299,888 the GLC200 props up the range with 197bhp and 320Nm – up from the pre-facelift’s 184bhp and 300Nm – as well as a nine-speed automatic gearbox. An additional RM50k buys you the GLC300, which adds on AMG Line kit, adaptive damping and all-wheel drive on top of a peppier engine. The GLC300’s 258bhp and 370Nm also mark an improvement over its pre-facelift namesake, which only made 241bhp.…

Launched in late September last year, the fastest version of Mercedes-Benz’s smallest four-door sedan – or “Limousine” as the brand prefers to call it – seems to tick all the right boxes expected of yet another everyday ‘super’ car. We finally had the chance to sample it briefly during a recent press drive to Melaka. Simply put, size really doesn’t matter with this fast four-door. Though we only spent just a few hours behind its wheel, there’s indeed much to savour with this pint-sized power player of sorts. On the surface, the A35 is fashioned similarly to any of the three-point star’s other three-lettered performance specials, albeit with some restraints. In the A35’s case, it’s easily set apart from its ‘regular’ siblings by snazzy 19-inch AMG alloy wheels, AMG-specific grille,…

REMEMBER: THE VALUE OF INVESTMENTS CAN GO DOWN… WHO: STEPHEN DOBIE, DEPUTY EDITOR TG.COM I fell for it when I saw the fantastic Bullitt themed ad, fell even harder seeing Tiff Needell J-turn it on mid-Nineties TopGear, then 10 years later fulfilled a childhood promise to myself by buying one on eBay. I loved it for two years and didn’t lose a penny when I sold it. SQUIRRELLING AWAY WHO: TOM HARRISON, STAFF WRITER My dad had a Puma when I was growing up. En route to work one morning he smelt burning toast. So he pulled over, only to find a squirrel/rat/whatever had stored loads of bread in the engine bay. SIZE DOESN’T MATTER WHO: ANDY FRANKLIN, CREATIVE DIRECTOR I wanted to drive the Racing Puma ever since it…