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Everything you need to know about cars this week
Your weekly digest of the biggest news in the car world, in one handy place
Hypercars will race at Le Mans in 2020!
"The FIA has announced a new top class of racing for the World Endurance Championship to replace LMP1, and it is genuinely quite exciting: the new, modern prototypes will look like hypercars.
"Though the name has yet to be finalised – it’ll be the subject of a fan vote, so get your Hypey-McHypercar suggestions in now – the main crux will be they have to look amazing..."
Advertisement - Page continues belowReview: the Alfa Romeo Giulia
"The first Alfa you want to buy in a long time. The Giulia is the Italian brand’s answer to the BMW 3 Series, Mercedes-Benz C-Class, Audi A4 and Jaguar XE – a mid-size saloon with an all-new rear-wheel drive platform (that also underpins the new Stelvio SUV) in which Alfa (or parent company FCA) has invested billions in a quest to take Alfa from sales of 75,000 per year to 400,000 within three years..."
The new Suzuki Jimny is here
"The Suzuki Jimny is loved equally by cash-strapped off-roadists and Balearic Island rental fleets. Mainly because it’s so cheap it’s practically disposable, yet so rugged it’ll actually last for ages and need very little care or attention. It’s also full unstoppable engineering, making it incredibly capable in the rough stuff.
"This is the new one – the fourth-generation. And boy we’re excited. Isn’t it bloody excellent? Kind of like a baby G-Wagen..."
Advertisement - Page continues belowThis is the new Audi A1
"The littlest Audi is bigger than ever. And it’s angry. Very angry. We’re told those three slits above the colossal grille are a homage to the ’84 Sport Quattro – a car with which the A1 shares literally nothing save for the four-rings on its nose. Maybe that’s what it’s angry about…cynical marketing.
"Anyway, the reason for this bigness is the new platform – the same ‘MQB A0’ item that underpins the Seat Ibiza, Arona and Volkswagen Polo. The new A1 is about as tall as the car it replaces, but almost six centimetres longer and three wider..."
Sell everything and buy this 'perfect' McLaren F1
"There are McLaren F1s. And then there are McLaren F1s. This is the latter – the penultimate ‘standard’ F1, since upgraded by the factory to ‘LM Specification’. And you can buy it. Not at auction, but from RM’s new Private Sales department for an ominously unspecified sum. Given the last time this thing was up for sale it brought $13.7million, count on said sum being duly outrageous..."
Toyota is building a road-going hypercar
"Toyota is going to build a road-going ‘super sports car’. This is roughly the time you can start getting disproportionately excited.
"Following on from the company’s historic Le Mans win – and indeed, alongside news that the WEC’s top prototype class from 2020 will more closely resemble ‘hypercars’ – Toyota has confirmed that development on a production hypercar has begun..."
McLaren 570S Spider vs Audi R8 Spyder vs Merc-AMG GT C Roadster
"Underneath ominous clouds, it’s the new Audi R8 V10 Plus Spyder (‘Plus’ meaning an additional 70bhp and that pert wing) and the Mercedes-AMG GT C Roadster (the wider, more powerful GT) that’ll streak into an early lead. Literally.
"While the McLaren 570S Spider languishes back at 25mph to let its origami hard-top retract, the Germans spirit away, accelerating to, um, 31mph with their old-school canvas tops aloft. For 15 agonising seconds, the McLaren watches the R8’s carbon ducktail disappear up the B3135, fearful of a flurry of phone calls to Somerset plod reporting an angry Decepticon jammed mid-Transforming halfway down Cheddar Gorge..."
Advertisement - Page continues belowPorsche has bought a slice of Rimac
"Porsche has bought a minority stake in Rimac Automobili. You know, the 400-strong Croatian company behind the Concept One and C_Two EV-hypercars. The company that supplies Koenigsegg, Jaguar and Renault. And the company that will develop the battery system for the Aston Martin Valkyrie. Yeah, those guys..."
Ford and VW might form a 'strategic alliance'
"More industry news. Ford and Volkswagen have signed something called a “memorandum of understanding”, with a view to forming a “strategic alliance” that could see the two companies jointly develop a range of commercial vehicles…among other things.
"The aim of this tie-up is to, in their words, “strengthen each company’s competitiveness and better serve customers globally”. Details are scant – a press release promises updates as the no doubt very serious and lawyerly discussions between the two companies progress – so for now we’ve no choice but to wantonly and recklessly speculate about what this partnership might entail..."
Advertisement - Page continues belowHyundai and Audi are teaming up to make hydrogen cars
"Remember when mentioning Hyundai and Audi in the same sentence might seem like the set-up to a lazy joke? If you need any further proof the pair are on similar pegging now – beyond brilliant Hyundais – then the pair are now working together.
"This isn’t Volkswagen buying yet another brand. Hyundai makes nearly as many cars as the whole VW Group, so it’d never happen anyway. Nope, this is a tie-up between Hyundai and Audi to help bring hydrogen cars to our roads..."
Review: the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class
"It’s the fourth-generation Mercedes-Benz C-Class, freshly updated for 2018. One in five Mercs sold is a C-Class, and if you lump in the old 190 saloon that went before it, this is a car that’s sold nearly ten million units since 1982.
"Not a car you want to mess up then, yet Mercedes describes this as the biggest update the car has ever had; over 6,500 components have changed, which is nearly 50 per cent of the whole car..."
The new Volvo S60 is here
"Volvo is on a roll. Has been for a while. And that roll looks set to continue thanks to this – the new S60. It is a car of firsts. The first Volvo to be built in the USA, at the company’s factory in Charleston, South Carolina, and the first Volvo not to be offered with a diesel engine.
"There are four versions, all of which use the same 2.0-litre, four-cylinder petrol and eight-speed auto. In the T5 it’s turbocharged, giving 247bhp which is sent to the front-wheels only. The T6 adds supercharging for an extra 60bhp and all-wheel drive. It manages 0-60mph in 5.6 seconds, 0.9 seconds quicker than the T5. Then there are the plug-ins. The T8 and the T8 ‘Polestar Engineered’..."
Top Gear solves Britain's beer crisis... with supercars!
"Because – and correct us if we’re wrong here – cars produce carbon dioxide, right? Quite a lot of it, in some cases. Generally regarded as a bad thing, but right now, with CO2 stocks dangerously low, that’s surely the answer. Use our most polluting cars to fizz beer!
"Now, we’re not exactly sure of the process for getting CO2 from the tailpipe of a car into the molecular structure of beer. We’re guessing: length of hose, one of those old-school coffee filter paper things, and maybe a large conical flask.
"Tiny, technical details. What we need to know at this stage is: which cars will most quickly put the fizz back in our nation’s beer? Which pump out the most CO2? Or possibly the most CO2s?"
This is (potentially) a $45m Ferrari 250 GTO
"Because today, RM Sotheby’s reckons it’s worth north of $45 million. That’s right, fourty-five big ones. It’ll be offered up for auction at its Monterey sale towards the end of August, where it might just become the most expensive car ever sold at auction, eclipsing the $38m paid for… a 250 GTO back in 2014..."
Review: the Cupra TCR racer
"What we have here ladies and gents, is the new Cupra TCR. It’s the latest stripped out racer and evolution of the Seat Leon WTCC car, the forefather and seed that helps grow the ultra-competitive, relatively low-cost TCR racing series..."
Is this the most bizarre BMW M1 in the world?
"What’s weirder is that the history of this utterly bizarre violet wedge has largely remained a mystery – seemingly slipping through the cracks of the world of BMW enthusiasts.
"Until now. Because as soon as we got a whiff of it, we had to get all Clouseau, uncovering a fascinating story of high-speed record attempts, unprecedented Eighties excess, duplicitous behaviour, and, ultimately, neglect..."
ABT has boosted the Audi RS3 to 493bhp
"German tuner ABT has a long and storied obsession with making things inexplicably powerful and fast. Step forward the new ABT Power R – a modified Audi RS3 packing 493bhp.
"Yes, that’s a full 100bhp more than a ‘regular’ Audi RS3, which itself isn’t considered weedy, or slow, or indeed ‘regular’. At least not by any sane human."
Review: 2018 Dacia Duster
"Sure it’s a bit slow, a tad unrefined, a little light on available active-safety features. But that’s by the standards of rivals that are twice the price.
"The Duster isn’t trying to kid anyone. It’s not cheap in a way that insults your intelligence or makes you feel mean. It’s a far better car than it needs to be at the price, and we love it for that."
Say hello to the ultimate Lamborghini Miura
'Polo Storico boss Paolo Gabrielli said the restoration took 19 months. “The original production sheet wasn’t of much help, as we relied mostly on the specifications from the 1974 modifications,” he said. “The challenge for the Polo Storico team was even more daunting as the car arrived in Sant’Agata in pieces, although the parts were all there, and with considerable modifications.”'
We've taken the Ford Fiesta ST on a massive UK road-trip
"Primary colours, little pigs, dimensions. Yes, the best things come in threes. This now includes cylinders. Because the brand-new Ford Fiesta ST is powered by a mere three. And this got us thinking. Three countries make up Great Britain, we could sort out three family challenges… and, um, then we ran a bit short. Because as well as city, country and motorway, we wanted to do some track driving. And three writers was logistically one too few. And we couldn’t drive everywhere on three wheels..."
Click here to read part one, here to read part two, here to read part three and here to read part four.
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