JUDGE’S NOTES: ADAM TOWLER

Towler contemplates the cars and the format of future ecotys

SO THERE IT IS, ANOTHER ECOTY schemed, planned, booked, embarked upon, written up, edited, proofed and on its way to the printers, a mammoth team effort to bring you what we hope is the most in-depth review of this year’s greatest driver’s cars. Phew.

There’s an entirely worthy winner, a few surprises in the finest tradition, and something of a shocker too. However, sifting through the reams of notes from this year’s test, one passage of text resonates more than any other: Dickie Meaden’s thoughts on the size, weight, power and ultimate pace of our collective contenders, and how for much of the time the roads of northern Scotland simply didn’t feel big enough for them.

There’s always the danger of sounding like the proverbial structurally compromised acetatebased music recording, of being that whiny fool who has to find something to moan about even with the very best performance cars at their disposal: too powerful, too fast, too capable? Diddums. Typical journalist, etc. But if it needs to be said, then say it we will: more than ever, the modern ‘evo’ car has a level of performance that’s out of kilter with its surroundings, unless those surroundings happen to be a racetrack – at which point, what relevance is a car that weighs nearer to two tons than one? How many racing cars can you think of that weigh over 1300kg? Most are a lot less, for obvious reasons – wear and tear tend to rise by a series of multiples as the kilos pile on. And why would you want a trackday car with the dubious ability to haphazardly steer itself for a few seconds on a motorway, or that has heated seats and so on?

The riposte – and a relevant one – is that if these are also doubling as everyday cars then customers really do want all those additional features, the comfort, refinement and technology, because the roads we all drive on for the most part are traffic clogged, and boring. Or even if it’s just to drive to and from a track without getting a headache, or having to use a paper map. And so the endless cycle of discussion continues to go round and round, an argument without end, both sides making valid points, unhealthy compromises being made in both environments. And the thorny truth always lingers in the background that in reality an old race car is going to be a more suitable, more exciting track car than a £300,000 supercar, and with change left over.

Unquestionably, though, we seem to be ensnared in an oncoming trap – a narrowing of vision where ever more crowded roads, an increasing social intolerance of fast driving and powerful, Ice-powered cars, and legal and legislative pressures are meeting cars that can reach 60mph from rest in under three seconds and feel like you’re barely moving at 100mph.

This year it was a situation exacerbated by the mass of campervans that have multiplied in Covid times, their bulky white silhouettes clogging once deserted routes that no longer have that wild, innocent feel to them. Of course, it would be arrogant in the extreme to not expect people to want to take their holidays in whatever way they see fit, but it is having an impact all the same. If even the most remote part of mainland Britain feels congested, there’s a serious problem for those who love driving. And that’s the crux of the issue really: this should all be about the simple honest pleasure of driving a great car on a challenging piece of road, a pastime not defined by speed or any other number but simply by enjoyment.

So it’s no great surprise that the cars that did really well this year where those that generated a spark of excitement right from the off. Cars that let the driver know what they were doing, and were having to contend with, even at 20mph. Cars you could talk about in detail even after driving only 50 yards because they’d made an indelible impression.

Maybe a track element would have delivered a different result. Then we’d really have been able to make some judgements based on fully uncorking a 1000bhp supercar. But at the same time we’d also probably appear to some to be simply cocking about in cars, obliterating free tyres and driving in a manner that has little relevance to trackdays, let alone to driving on the road. And this isn’t Track Car of the Year. Or maybe we should open the gates to restomods, given the amount of word count we’ve devoted to them in recent years. Are these now the cars that many enthusiasts aspire to? Or as a reader pointed out to us recently, are they simply £300,000 pieces of indulgence that are an irrelevance to the majority?

Choosing a location for ecoty is nothing like as straightforward as it seems. There needs to be the epic backdrops, the sense of adventure to make it more than just one long car review amalgamation, the right sort of corners both for driving and for photography, enough fuel stops, hotels with enough rooms, and so it goes on. It’s getting tougher to find the right places, but then maybe it’s the cars that need to change, not the location…