ECOTY: THE FINAL EIGHT
The contenders have been whittled down by half, so now it’s off to the Scottish Borders with our favourite 50 per cent for more testing, this time on some of the most revealing roads we know. Adam Towler is your guide to this tough week’s work
THE BORDER THAT SEPARATES ENGLAND FROM Scotland on the A68 is a wild and windswept place. Perched upon high, with the burn-strewn mountains in front, behind lie the tall, dense forests of Northumbria, a claustrophobic mass creeping up in the rear-view mirror, ready to suck you back into their endless, intimidating depths. There’s an invisible cloak of loneliness in the air tonight. It’s mercifully dry, but with no sign of the stars that can dazzle in this part of the world when cloud cover is absent, as the nearby observatory attests.
The little green Porsche’s wheels gently rotate to a stop, and car and I pause. I just need a momentary breather. There are some alarmingly tumultuous sections of road nearby and I wonder, with more than a tinge of guilt, if my low-flying antics registered on any radars, military or otherwise. We’re in a land – like the world
– ravaged by the effects of coronavirus, in financial, health and social terms, which makes the eerie silence of this great expanse all the more unsettling, the sound of the wind interrupted only by the heavily restricted gurgling of the 4-litre flat-six ticking over.
No one thought Porsche would put into production an entirely new, naturally aspirated engine for its mainstream sports cars, but then no one could have foreseen the seismic shift the world has undergone in 2020 due to Covid-19. Yet despite the best efforts of outside influences, if last week at Anglesey has proved anything, it’s that if nothing else 2020 is a corker for new driver’s cars.
There’ll be plenty of time to evaluate the Cayman GTS over the coming week. Your six judges – Gallagher, Meaden, Barker, Bovingdon, Catchpole and myself – have eight finalists to drive, ponder over, argue about and make excuses for. In the end
selecting those final eight wasn’t too difficult. Most were dead certs: the viciously exciting McLaren 765LT, the polished-toperfection Civic Type R, the ‘GT4 Lite’ Cayman GTS 4.0, and the loveable BMW M2 CS. It was also obvious, instantly, that the GR Yaris was something special, so that was always going through as well. The F8 Tributo had little trouble earning its place either, although the 911 Turbo S had to work a little harder for its pass. The 'nearly there' cars were the A110S and the Golf GTI, neither quite enthralling enough to make the final cut, but for very different reasons. Instead comes the undoubted surprise of week one, the rumbustious, tyre-shredding Italian playboy that is the Lamborghini Huracán Evo RWD. For the first time in years I and every one of the judges genuinely can’t call it. Which for all of us, and hopefully you too, is very exciting indeed.
TUESDAY DAWNS CLEAR AND REASONABLY MILD. ANY additional minutes of precious slumber afforded by the Cayman’s rapid progress across the hills to Hawick town centre last night were wiped out by the arrival after midnight of Gallagher in the 765LT, the shuddering boom of the gravellous Ricardo-bred V8 reluctantly reversing into its parking space enough to set the floorboards trembling and the sash windows vibrating. That’s the Longtail to a T: it’s a complete beast of a machine and unambiguous about it. I think I like it a great deal.
Right now we all just need superunleaded, so I’m sticking with the Cayman for the short run to the luckiest petrol station in southern Scotland. Fuelled up, we continue en masse to the first location, which will be our base for the first couple of days. I lead, the Civic tucked menacingly in behind, Jethro in the M2 CS after
that, then John in the Lambo and Dickie Meaden in the Ferrari. It’s quite a pack, a snarling congregation of xenon and LED eyes, jostling for position, the weight of responsibility lying with the Cayman and me up front to set the pace and spot the hazards. The sun is shining but they’re pale, watery rays, and the road is cold and slick with a layer of overnight chilled moisture.
It’s a slippery surface that isn’t playing into the hands of the M2: I can see Jethro is struggling, the gap between the Civic and the BMW lengthening and the Lambo and Ferrari all over the back of the little black muscle car. When we reach the parking area, with the photographers already there, kicking around, cameras under their arms and wearing that facial expression that says ‘I’ve been here for hours…’, the impressions flow forth. Jethro confirms the CS’s Michelin Cup 2s were not at their operating temperature and the BMW felt very nervous as a result. Dickie, meanwhile, looks remarkably chilled getting out of the Ferrari. ‘I don’t think I used any more than 3500rpm all the way here,’ he says, not meaning to sound smug but simply parlaying how immediate and effortless the F8’s torque delivery is, and how high the F8’s limits are.
As for me, I’m actually rather glad to hand the key to the Cayman GTS to someone else. We’ve done a lot of miles together, and as much as I love it, I have started to find myself wanting more. More of what is hard to say. Will anyone else feel the same, though? Can a Porsche – and potentially another 4-litre-engined Cayman at that – take the eCoty crown again? The ‘evo’s biased to Porsche’ lobby group will be in uproar, but it’s entirely possible it will.
Pretty soon the hillside is buzzing with activity. We’ve a camera crew present, plus our elite snappers Aston Parrott and Andy Morgan, and a couple of additional drivers in support. Sadly no catering truck though, which no one wastes any time in reminding ‘TV’s’ Jethro Bovingdon of. Having recently flown in from LA, a period of quarantine meant he couldn’t join us until part two and had to miss out on the first week of skidding around on track, which he hates anyway. Cars come and go, taken off individually or in pairs, following a photographic masterplan that so far is as well oiled as the contents of our supercars’ sumps.
Talking of Jethro, he’s about to arrive in the Lambo and I want to grab his thoughts. I say ‘about to arrive’, but what I really mean is he’s probably two miles away, yet the bark of the V10 is filling the valley, reverberating off the wooded hillside on the far side in a way that confuses the ear and suggests he’s somehow found a new road in the opposite direction. WHAAR, WHARP! Still no sign of the car. WHAAAAAARP!
Suddenly, a luridly green dart is just visible on the horizon, snaking left and right, following the contour of the landscape, tracking the road like a missile homing inevitably in on its target. Everyone stops what they are doing and stares into the middle distance like rabbits eyeballing a predator. The Huracán is close now, its form finally visible to all, and with a final Woop, Woop, Woop down the ’box it pulls into the parking area and the noise ceases instantly.
‘It’s hard to enjoy it without worrying that you’re going to get arrested, it’s so loud,’ is Jethro’s opening gambit through a grin that would outshine even the flashbulb of a Hollywood paparazzo. ‘And I wasn’t even flat out; I couldn’t hit the limiter. I don’t think I even went over 6500rpm. I cannot believe this is the slowest car they
THIS IS INTENSE. MY FINGERS ARE SWEATING AND MY HEART IS RACING
make, it’s so strong. Yes, the steering is a bit slow, but I’d rather that than the horrible active steering as you can really lean on it. Given you can’t wring these things out on the public road it’s the theatre that becomes ever more important – the engine and ’box are the best on sale.’ Praise indeed.
I grab the key to the M2 and shut the door on the outside world. It feels snug but comfortable; familiar, conventional and somehow strangely reassuring because of it. I know the CS well enough to know that it will be a real force to be reckoned with as the week progresses, just as it was at Anglesey. The S55 engine fires up with real presence: thick, almost treacly notes – the voltage warmth of an analogue synthesiser after the crisp but arguably clinical digitalsample playback of some other cars here. The manual shift feels like those of BMWs in the 1980s – heaven knows how they manage to engineer that in, but they have. As John said earlier: ‘It’s hard to describe how much more colour and flexibility having a manual ’box brings to the drive. You work the engine differently and the pace and tone of the drive are more your choosing. Yes, if you’re on a track or flinging it down some tricky bit of road, the ease of an auto or paddleshift is welcome, but that’s such a small part of life with a driver’s car.’ I agree wholeheartedly: I just couldn’t imagine ordering an M2 CS and not ticking the little box for three pedals and a stick.
Until there’s some heat in the Michelins it doesn’t feel that much more connected than an M2 Competition, but once you’re in the groove with it the whole car comes alive, and soon enough it’s more about what happens at the rear axle than the front that’s dominating your thoughts. The CS provides a delicious sensation of sitting on its rear haunches and powering through a corner, almost like slalom skiing through a sequence of switchback bends. And because the engine is so responsive, and so broad in terms of a rev band, whether you want to keep it neat and tidy or push the rear out further is directly influenced by your right foot. That engine, too: sometimes I just let the revs soar even on a light throttle, just because I can, just to sense the pedigree in the smoothness of a straight-six; another time I only use even gears and feel it pull heartily from barely 2000rpm. And then I park up, buzzing, climb out and look back at it, and fall in love all over again with its JPSesque gorgeousness, its buxom beauty that implores you to keep staring. Wherever we go on this eCoty, people admire the CS, even with a luridly green Lamborghini alongside.
Jethro seems to agree: ‘First impressions didn’t help. The steering wheel is so fat! Why? And on cold tyres the CS feels like it might be too extreme for its own good. It hunts around like an old CSL on those deadly first-gen Cup tyres, shudders and shimmies when you ask too much of the front tyres, and the traction control is working overtime on part throttle. But… that awkward phase, even in cold conditions, lasts for barely two minutes. There’s something
IT’S SHOCKING HOW EAGER THE 911 IS TO TURN IN