Speed Week 2020: getting 8,553bhp down to Anglesey

Never bring a knife to a gunfight. And never bring an Ariel Nomad R to a week-long camping extravaganza in Wales. 

It’s a less well known epithet, but recently invented since watching a brand new, near-600bhp Audi RS6 Avant turn up, at unusual speed, indifferently dragging behind it the giant stainless steel bullet of a Airstream Missouri. To call it a ‘caravan’ seems a bit mean. It’s more an aerodynamic flatlet. Or possibly a bijou mobile palace, hooked up to a hunk of German tendon on wheels. Suffice to say, Charlie Turner has full insulation from the elements, four comfortable berths, an oven and a luxury toilet. I have a tight spiral of bin bags, two plastic seats, a packet of fig rolls and a... spade. 

To explain: we are the first to arrive at an innocent and picturesque layby somewhere near Ffestiniog in Wales, en route to Anglesey Circuit. It is not currently raining, for which I give thanks, seeing as the Nomad actually has less weather protection than a stout hat. A brief moment to catch up, plot and plan, and then begin a week of festivities. Because that’s why we’re here: with all the car shows and music festivals cancelled because of various forms of bat-derived airborne disease, Top Gear magazine has decided to hold its own carnival of rapid things. The annual Speed Week test, except modelled on your typical festival. Which means camping, foods that only come in various shades of beige, intermittent hurricane class storms and memories that edit out the toilets for fear of PTSD. And where some festivals provide entertainment in the form of gambolling in six inches of quality slurry, tripping lightly on magic mushrooms and seven pints of local cider, Top Gear will be slithering some of 2020’s most impressive performance cars around the really quite lovely Anglesey track. Poetry, literary, classical, pop. There are many kinds of festivals. Ours? Ours is more heavy metal.

Examples of the performers start arriving within the hour. Ollie Marriage glides – an entirely appropriate verb – up in a Porsche Taycan Turbo S. All 760bhp of it. The only glitch in the matrix being a large and resolutely rectangular pop-up roof tent suckered to the top, doing all sorts of gross damage to both the aerodynamics of the previously slippery Porsche and its range. A pure electric sportscar in a TG Speed Week test – up until relatively recently, something you’d have laughed at. There’s a distinct lack of giggling – the Taycan is masterful. And not just quick in a straight line as per the usual electric canon, because it devours corners, too. A quick go confirms it; the Taycan provides the kind of speed that doesn’t even demand your whole attention, easy as it is. It is casual in its weaponisation of material and weight, nonchalant in its violence, a one-handed electric Gatling gun of performance. It’s so fast that distance suddenly becomes a very fragile thing weighed against the insistence of its delivery. The roof tent spoils it a bit though, because it howls like a demented set of giant pan pipes from its perch on the roof. 

Next to arrive is Rowan Horncastle in a Morgan Plus Four painted in what can only be described as Farrow And Ball’s finest flat blue. Or maybe it’s green. It’s a Pantone choice confusing enough to be an internet meme, has an artfully bungee’d selection of bags strapped to the rear rack, and a passenger seat full of random PPE. Rowan looks happy but slightly confused – a condition common to many Morgan owners – and the tea kettle turbo whistle as it approaches is new. In fact, it’s a strange one, this Morgan. The first of a new breed that features an aluminium box-section monocoque, a BMW-sourced 255bhp turbo four and a six-speed manual gearbox. And although there’s modernity hidden under its skirts, it feels like there’s a rheostat and some Bakelite still in there somewhere. Warm, glowing, blood-warm oily things. Most modern cars feel like they might be so thermally managed that their internals are Borg like, assimilated into a surgeon’s theatre, but even with the BMW bits, the Morgan feels characterful and alive. Whether it can stand up next to the corporate big hitters is another matter entirely, but out on a pretty, twisty Welsh hillside, it looks grand. Call the Midwife with forced induction. 

Ollie Kew then appears in the most rational of cars – a brand new Volkswagen Golf GTI MkVIII. So new it bussed in from Germany as a left-hand-drive car, it features a boot full of tent and many very obvious advantages. It comes equipped with 242bhp, front-wheel drive, clever traction control and the slightly disgruntled face of the latest Golf. Frankly, it looks as if someone coughed in its face. But despite its sour expression, the GTI makes sense on a B-road, soaking bumps and ridges, manual gearbox good enough. But in the face of other excess, it immediately feels a bit normal. Hard to fight specifics when your remit is intentionally broad, but the VW is the cheapest car due to take part in our fiesta, and usability carries weight. Basically, fun doesn’t always recognise horsepower or expense – you can have plenty of the latter two and very little of the former. Still, the overriding covetous feeling is probably something to do with the fact that it might be a car I can steal to sleep in. 

The Golf’s sober suit is placed into stark relief by the next arrival, too. Editor Jack Rix turns up in the freshly hatched McLaren 765LT, the harder, faster, more aggressive version of the 720S – an upgrade that feels slightly like making one’s nuclear bomb just that little bit more explodey. There’s a vague feeling that the newest and brightest of McLarens gets slightly less shiny simply because of the volume and regularity of newest and brightest, that someone might well have smeared some marketing on a 720S and forgot to wipe it off. After all, there is nothing better to guarantee disappointment than the expectation of brilliance, high expectation being the harbinger of anticlimax. But you can’t ignore the fact that the 720S is a masterclass. The Longtail series is a family of undiluted brilliance. McLaren knows how to do this. 

A quick go and the first impressions are that the 765 is... hectic. And not in a good way. Hard and uncompromising on a bumpy road in a way that the 720S is not, it’s as forgiving as old bone and ancient cartilage, not so much offering feedback as jabbering psychotically. But by God, it is quick. And when it goes fast, it becomes something else. That thing is still not easy mind, the 765 delivers its wisdom in jerky, packaged moments, wheelspin in all four of the initial gears, involuntary intakes of breath if the boost hits mid-corner. It feels slightly beyond me, certainly beyond what’s useful in a public space. Even if those ‘public’ are currently made up of dopey looking sheep. But the fact remains: on a bumpy B it doesn’t so much flow as hold a knife to the throat of physics and demand attention.  

Sorting through the fug of adrenalised reaction, it feels like you manage rather than drive it, negotiate a result rather than dictate an outcome – though there isn’t a lot of explicit thinking going on, mainly because you are operating on synapse and feral instinct, and because the last thing to go through your head if you get it wrong here is going to be your face. 

The overriding impression is that the 765LT has no safe word: no matter how many times you say ‘aaaargh’ it will not stop. A friendly word of warning if you ever get the chance to drive one: fourth gear is not a gear for a Welsh back road, and downforce doesn’t work if you’re already in the air. Racetrack needed, stat. It’s probably the only place you can fully explore the 765LT’s potential without risking the structural integrity of your sanity. 

I hand the McLaren back to Jack with a not inconsiderable sense of relief, and retire to the Ariel, glad to be settling into a car sporting a supercharged 335bhp 2.0-litre Honda nestled in a web of happy scaffolding. OK, so a car with a Sadev pneumatic box, dog rings and straight cut gears, no bodywork and no traction control, let alone a heater or radio, seems like cold comfort. But you don’t so much sit in a Nomad as inhabit its belly, all tucked up like a racing foetus, and that’s comforting in its way. We point ourselves west and north and head on. 

This has been just a starter, a palette cleanser before the main event. There are many more headliners currently converging on Anglesey for Top Gear’s little fête, and we have to be there to make sure that the riders are in place, the M&Ms have been sorted into the correct colours, and that everything has been doused in alcoholic gel as per the guidelines. 

I invite you to come along. The music is experimental and based (mostly) around pistons and tortured tyres. The food is bad, the toilets worse, you’ll feel deeply grubby by the end of it and you might get a non-specific infection. But your name is on the guestlist, you have backstage passes and there are a couple of surprise guests on the bill. Welcome then, to Top Gear’s Festival of Fast. A Fastival, if you will. Speed Week starts... now.

A huge thank you to Esso for supplying us with a few barrels of their Synergy Supreme+ 99 fuel to keep our Speed Week contenders topped up on the track