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Top Gear magazine
The best images from Top Gear's Defender issue
Want a sneak peek inside this month's TG Mag? Head this way
The old Defender was so farmy it actually reeked of sheep juice. Can the shiny new one keep the agriculturalists happy? Short answer: probably not, at least until a hose-down van version arrives. But that didn’t stop us from rustling an old ewe into the boot, just to be sure. New carpets please.
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With fluffy sheep and boggy fields, it’s unlikely that rural Berkshire will break a Defender. So to give it a proper workout, we headed somewhere a bit tougher – Namibia, for a three-day safari around the Skeleton Coast.
When you’ve run out of ways to spend your billions – honestly, you can’t give it away these days! – there’s only one thing for it: a vastly expensive supercar with no roof, no windscreen and no shame. The Bentley Bacalar and Aston Martin V12 Speedster are two of the latest. Umbrellas not included.
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Bisi Ezerioha is a tuning kingpin – famous, among other things, for his 1,026bhp, roof-boxed Honda minivan. And now this. On the outside it’s a Porsche 935 made from original moulds. Underneath it’s an electrified 911 from the Eighties. It’s called the 935 K3V, has a 637bhp motor, a 32kWh battery and a range of 140 miles. Because pink is the new green.
Time for a quick round of Golf? Good. Here’s the new GTI, the eighth generation, now with 242bhp, 273lb ft, 0-62mph in the low sixes and a top whack of 150mph+. If that’s not quick enough for you, then sit tight ’till the new R comes along.
In the 50-odd years between these Astons, humans have gone to the Moon, developed the internet, photographed a black hole, cloned a sheep and invented the spork (actually that’s a bit older – but who knew?). The DBS, meanwhile, has put on some weight and nicked an engine off Mercedes. And we still really want one.
Never meet your heroes, they say. They don’t know what they’re talking about, says Chris Harris, after blasting Colin McRae’s famous blue Subaru – yep, that Subaru – through the woods for Top Gear TV. You’ve seen it on telly – now read more in the latest issue of Top Gear Magazine.
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R8, RS6, RS4… they all owe their lives to this, the original Audi quattro (small Q). Born in 1980, its drivers came with a Pat Sharp perm and a Tom Selleck ’tache. 40 years on, we send a shaven man from Sunderland to see what the fuss was all about. Read @stephendobie’s words in the new issue of Top Gear Magazine.
Welcome to the age of the all-electric hypercar. Leading the charge (sorry) is a man called Mate, whose Rimac C_Two (not a lady shaver) has 1,887bhp, 1,696lb ft and the 0-62 time of a particle accelerator. The frontline of this craziness? A small village just outside of Zagreb in Croatia, where we joined him for a drive.
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Remember the time we stored the Stig in a roofbox of a 1,100bhp turbo hypercar on a melting ice lake just after he’d towed us around it on some skis? Just one of our memories of Koenigsegg, recounted in this month’s Top Gear Magazine.
You wait bloody ages for an Alpine, then two come along, like a year or so apart, with different amounts of power, slightly different suspension, a tiny weight difference and…. you get the gist. It’s the A110 versus A110S. Read the twin test in this month’s Top Gear Magazine.
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