Excess all areas

The refrain in the excellent ecoty issue (evo 281) that a given car had too much power to deploy on the road made me chuckle. We know this, and also that it is fairly easy to extract 25 per cent more power from modern turbocharged engines just by rewiring their brains.

Too many of us get fixated by power and absolute performance. Why? Perhaps the insidious effect of Top Trumps. Yet those things don’t really matter in the real world. My RS4 was only really fun when the crankshaft was rotating at more than 6000 times a minute, which is frowned upon when driving to the shops (which is pretty much all we’re allowed to do right now).

The things that really matter are aesthetics, tactility and amusement. This is why petrolheads love the Toyota GR Yaris (the Civic fails the aesthetics test for me) and the Alpine A110 (the S less so, for being more brutish, harder and serious).

Very few of us use their chosen road car on track, which leaves so much untapped performance for the socially responsible. That said, don’t get me wrong – I still like to read about the excess…

Damien Cann