ECOTY: THE TEST
LIKE A LAS VEGAS HOTEL SUITE THE MORNING after the night before, dawn in the car park of Scotland’s dismal homage to Fawlty Towers betrays the debauched parking of last night’s late night arrivals.
Yes, there’s always a loosely formed plan for turning up on location, Sunday night, ready for eCoty kick off on the Monday morning, but somehow that schedule inevitably slips. Which is how the hotel’s walls came to reverberate at some ungodly hour to the rumble of a heavily turbocharged Ferrari V8, and why, glancing around now at familiar shapes coated in distinctly chilly dew, there’s a random nature to how 2021’s eCoty contenders have been dozing.
It is a scintillating sight: a black 992 GT3 Touring, the early hours moisture beading sensuously over its almost cartoon-esque curvatures. A BMW M5 CS, squeezed into a space in the corner like bionic forearms into a onesize-too-small T-shirt, its bronze detailing glistening like Spartan war paint. A ludicrous matt camouflage Huracán STO parked around the corner like something from an influencer’s social media feed. As ever with eCoty, there’s that welcome disparity between contenders, illustrated by the presence of the Hyundai i20 N in all its baby blue glory, juxtaposed with the large slab of Aston Martin parked alongside and a cool half-a-million pounds’ worth of heavily optioned Rosso Corsa Ferrari hybrid supercar nearby. We really do have a cracking line-up this year.
There is a plan, which is just as well, all things considered. For 2021 we want to stretch our horizons, freed – largely – from the Covid restraints that kept us nearer to home last year, but still based within the United Kingdom for fear of any random new legislation leaving our tantalising selection of cars stranded with the wrong paperwork halfway up a mountain somewhere overseas.
So we’ll begin here, in a small town near Pitlochry in Perthshire, and then work our way into the Cairngorm mountains for the best part of a couple of days, before then swinging northwards and basing the remainder of the week on our favoured western side of the North Coast 500. We’ve not been here en masse since that unforgettable eCoty back in 2015, when freakishly warm, sunny weather and the excitement of discovering amazing roads for the first time for many of us, me included, came together in a week to remember. The winner back then was the Porsche 981 Cayman GT4, and there’s a GT department Porsche present once again in 2021 after the 718 GT4 triumphed in 2019. Will it be a Porsche year again with the new GT3, or will a resurgent BMW M keep the momentum going after its victory last year with the M2 CS? Then again, with both Ferrari and Lamborghini present, not to mention the ultimate Civic Type R, anything could happen.
Where moments ago there was silence, now there is a bustle and chatter in the air. The first cars are fired up, plumes of condensation sprout from oversized exhaust pipes and wipers flick moisture off cold windscreens. Above even the bellow of the Lambo’s V10 on cold start I can hear some fairly roughly hewn consonants from Jethro, who’s clearly not happy about something, and it turns out it’s the poor Ferrari that’s in the firing line. ‘You can’t make anything work,’ is the polite version of his general summarisation. ‘You plug the Apple CarPlay in and it doesn’t work, the radio has no signal. Maybe you get used to it but it’s so annoying!’ The F-word features heavily, and I don’t mean ‘Ferrari’. Not that I know it right this very moment, but it won’t be the last time someone has an issue with the way the Ferrari presents its information and interacts with the driver.
I’m going to stick with the M3 – my drive up here – for the short trip to our designated first fuel stop, and shall then be dumping it faster than forest-fire retardant from an air tanker. This might seem rather unfair on the Beemer, but the majority of the 7000 or so miles on its odometer are mine as it’s my current Fast Fleet car, and from Ferrari SF90 to Lamborghini Huracán STO and Porsche 992 GT3 Touring, there are many cars here that I’m just itching to drive for the first time, and others I can’t wait to be reacquainted with.
After some shenanigans with a lack of superunleaded, and an overladen trolley-load of sandwiches and crisps that’s probably visible from deep space, our convoy of eight cars, plus further support vehicles for photographers Aston Parrott and Andy Morgan, filmmakers Ed Day and Jack Worrall, and editorial assistant Sam Jenkins, heads for the Old Military Road. The Ferrari is mine.
The SF90 is the sort of car where the PR operation sends you briefing documents in advance to better understand how to
