Evo Magazine

THE FERRARI ROMA SPIDER HAS BEEN six years and three CEOs in the making and it’s all the California’s fault. Poor thing can’t catch a break even when it’s been off sale for over half a decade. The car destined to be a Maserati, but which proved too c

THERE ARE MANY COOL THINGS THAT I’VE BEEN TASKED WITH IN this job, but I will admit I never saw this coming. As part of evo’s 25th anniversary, I was asked to meet one of London’s top chefs and co-create a unique, specialised menu for a fabulous dinn

IN THIS MAGAZINE’S QUARTER OF a century we haven’t been much troubled by Cadillac. There has been the odd foray into Europe and the UK, but mostly these experiments have been short-lived and doomed to failure. Cadillac seems somehow the most American

LONG-TERM STRATEGY PLANNING is at the core of everything the automotive industry does. From new product and tech roll-out, to managing a model’s withdrawal from the production line, every detail is sweated and supply chains managed until the last car

DON’T DO IT. DON’T FALL INTO THE TRAP of hating the 992 GT3 RS because some people are willing to pay a vast premium over the already vast £192,600 asking price. Don’t roll your eyes and think ‘well, they’ll just sit in air-conditioned garages, anywa

READING ABOUT RICHARD PORTER’S ATTEMPTS TO HAVE affordable fun in his Fiat Panda 100HP (Fast Fleet, evo 314) got me thinking about the 2006 Fiesta Mk6 we purchased from a friend for £1000 for our sons to learn to drive in. It has had many parts repla

AS WE MOURN THE LOSS OF THE FIESTA ST, the Puma ST has become Ford’s closest alternative to the beloved hot hatch, blending strong dynamics and practicality into one affordable package. And now the performance division has added a second model: the m

SO, THE 25 MOST SIGNIFICANT DRIVER’S CARS OF the last 25 years. We thought long and hard as to how to compile our list, ‘discussed’ at length the criteria as to what makes a car significant for us (and therefore for you). Cars were dismissed and then

‘GAME-CHANGER.’ ASIDE FROM BEING A cliché beloved of car writers, the dictionary defines it as ‘an event, idea or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current way of doing or thinking about something’. Which makes the MP4-12C a car more

THE MINI WASN’T ON MY NOMINATED final five (see page 114). Or rather it was, but then I scratched it out because I feared I might be letting nostalgia elbow its way past rigorous objective journalism. You see, the R50 Mini Cooper was incredibly influ

A CAR SO INFLUENTIAL, THEY NAMED A MAGAZINE after it? Well, not quite, but the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution still had to be here, didn’t it? Rarely has a car of such humble origins bristled with so much exotic, motorsport-led energy as the Evo VI. The

YOU REALLY HAD TO BE THERE, AS THEY SAY. FOR A while the Impreza was a cult; then it became almost a cultural phenomenon. It was the car to have, right up until the point where someone without a valid claim to the keys snatched it, whereupon you stoo

WE WERE JUST GETTING USED TO THE IDEA OF THE 911 engine being water-cooled rather than air-cooled when Porsche sprung another surprise on us: the company was entering the SUV market with a big 4x4. In fact it did a brilliant job of keeping the Cayenn

IT’S SAFE TO SAY THE BUGATTI VEYRON ONLY EXISTS because of one man, VW’s mighty (and slightly scary) overlord, Ferdinand Piëch, who held an ambition to create the world’s greatest and most expensive supercar. His first move was to push through VW’s p

THERE HAVE BEEN OTHER LIGHTWEIGHT, ALUMINIUM-intensive, mid-engined sports cars during the last 25 years. The 21st-century Alpine A110 is not a revolutionary car. But it is a brilliant one – and a significant one in that its existence at all is a bit

THERE’S A FORMULA FOR A GOOD HOT HATCHBACK. It starts with the engine, which should give the sense that it’s slightly too big for the car. All the best fast French hatchbacks feel like this. Some fast Fords too. Fast Volkswagens rarely have this sens

UNTIL THE GALLARDO APPEARED ON THE SCENE IN 2003, Lamborghini hadn’t built an entry-level model since the Jalpa, which ceased production in 1988. You either had the bunce to buy a Diablo or a Murciélago, or you caught the bus to Maranello and sheepis

IT DOESN’T FEEL ALL THAT LONG AGO TOYOTA WAS the blandest of bland, the beigest of beige car brands. When evo issue 001 was published, Carlos Sainz’s Corolla was vying with Tommi Mäkinen’s Mitsubishi Lancer for the WRC title, a brace of Toyota GT-One

HISTORY SHOULD TEACH US HUMILITY AND PROVIDE some context, even when new ground is being broken. Even the most bleeding-edge discoveries and products will one day become the norm and they’ll inevitably be overtaken and relegated to being a monument o

THE E46-GENERATION BMW M3 FIRST appeared on the cover of this magazine for issue 024. A simple side profile of the car finished in Imola Red, set against a black background. Nobody had driven the car at this point but there was already a big buzz sur

SCIENCE SAYS SMELL IS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL memory-joggers: the bits of the brain that process scents are also strongly linked to memory and emotion. Settling into a first-generation Audi R8’s leather-and-aluminium cockpit instantly time-hops me b

TVR WAS ALREADY RIDING HIGH WHEN EVO WAS launched. The glorious Griffith had won our hearts, the Chimaera was selling in its thousands and the wild Cerbera, complete with in-house ‘AJP8’ (later Speed Eight) engine, signified the company’s growing amb

PREVIOUS TYPE R CIVICS HAD BEEN BRILLIANT IN parts, offering glimpses of the car it could be, and in the awesome FK8 it all came together. It was surreally good: astonishingly capable, wonderfully tactile and blisteringly quick. Honda had persisted w

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN UNASSUMING, EVERYDAY cars that are nice to drive. Italian and French companies used to be especially good at this, but there was always a sense that the spring in the step of a Fiat Brava or Peugeot 306 was a happy accident bec

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ASTON MARTIN WAS BUILDING tiny handfuls of glorious but positively Jurassic V-car behemoths in Newport Pagnell. Sure, the Jaguar-based DB7, being built in rather larger numbers down the road in Bloxham, had provided a financial

IT WOULD BE EASY TO BELIEVE THAT THE FORD GT, evo Car of the Year 2005, got the win partly because it was so much better than we were expecting. After all, Ford hadn’t built a proper supercar since, well, the GT40, and this pastiche of that legendary

TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CARS: ONE FROM the beginning of a dynasty, one at its culmination. One manual, rear-driven and with the bare minimum of electronics; one all-wheel drive and all about technology. Both have become ever-present landmarks, both in

FUNNY, ISN’T IT, HOW HOT HATCHES have got very serious indeed in recent years – to the point where anything with less than 300bhp and an assortment of wings, vents and aerodynamic flicks seems distinctly undernourished. Given all of that, when lookin

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LIFE IS GOOD WHEN YOU HAVE THE KEY TO A Pagani Zonda tucked in your pocket. It’s a feeling we got to know very well at evo over the years, thanks to many visits to Pagani’s factory in San Cesario sul Panaro, and, of course, the utterly surreal period

OUR JOURNEY TO GOODWOOD FOR THE EVO trackday was to prove a remarkably complete, 24-hour test of the Caterham Seven whose specification I had helped decide. Back in March, my suggestion to Caterham’s CCO, David Ridley, that it would be neat to celebr

IT’S BEEN A BIT LIKE THE WAIT FOR A particularly longed-for Christmas present as a kid, knowing it’s there, wrapped up under the tree, but not being able to play with it until the day itself arrives. (I remember one Christmas staring at a long-wished

Skunkworks projects are always significant. They deliver the cars that no number of product strategy and finance meetings could ever agree to sign off on. They result in the cars the engineers know are possible but are rarely allowed to deliver. Skun

‘THE LAST NATURALLY ASPIRATED, V8-POWERED Ferrari, it’s a 458 Italia with 90kg slashed away via stripping the interior, lighter glass and a Lexan engine cover; a 458 fitted with a tweaked 4.5-litre V8 producing an astonishing 597bhp at 9000rpm and wi

WELL, WE WERE WRONG. THE BMW M5 CS may have prevailed at eCoty, edging out the fabulous Lamborghini Huracán STO along the way, but after six months in its company and getting to know it in intimate detail, we all agree it’s a bit of an old clunker. S

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WHISPER IT, BUT I’VE NEVER REALLY BEEN a fan of Jaguars. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not had any bad experiences with them that have led me to this judgement, rather it’s an irrational view based entirely on my dad’s absolute blind devotion to the brand

IT WOULD BE EASY TO START THIS NEW series with a 550-word assassination of the Alfa Romeo 4C. Too easy. The Alfa has been filed away as a disaster in most people’s minds and we’ll beat that particular dead horse on another occasion. No, it needs to b