Ford Focus (2012) - the best-selling car in the world

Ford's Focus is now the best selling car the world over

By Ollie Kew

Motor Industry

04 September 2012 10:32

Ford's Focus has overtaken the Toyota Corolla in the sales charts. Unremarkable, you might say? Not when you realise this is the global sales mantle, making the Focus the best-selling car name on the planet in the first half of the year.

It's proof Ford's 'One Ford' gamble has paid off - to truly nail the 'world car' conundrum, streamlining production costs but still keeping consumers happy.

In the first six months of 2012, Ford shifted 489,616 Focus models worldwide. In comparison, the nearest competitor - Toyota's venerable Corolla - sold 462,187 examples.

What makes the feat more impressive is that the Blue Oval only switched to its 'One Ford' programme a few years ago, with a view to streamlining its operations and building global models, rather than umpteen variants for bespoke markets. CEO Alan Mulally's mission when he joined Ford was to reduce the number of models sold globally from 97 to just 20. Click here for his explanation why.

The US Focus is near identical to that sold in Europe and elsewhere around the world, barring emissions regs, local legislation and the vagaries of global spec preferences.

So far, Ford has been racking up the big-number celebrations this year. Last week, Ford produced the 350 millionth vehicle in its history, at the Rayong plant in Thailand. The century-plus output is equivalent to turning out one vehicle every 10 seconds for 109 years, enough to stretch to the moon and back twice if parked end to end, says Ford proudly.

And in July 2012 Ford's Dagenham UK plant built its 40 millionth engine since operations began there in 1931.

Well, it's certainly a boon. But don't forget Ford is on track to lose $1 billion in Europe in 2012 - it's only keeping its head above water thanks to strong sales elsewhere in the world. But it makes you wonder about the state of the balance sheet if it hadn't embarked on its global harmonisation programme.

For CAR's review of the ultimate current Focus - the 247bhp ST - please click here.

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McLaren 12C vs the world - Part 2 (CAR archive, July 2011)

 By Ben Collins

CAR Features

31 August 2012 10:00

The weather at Rockingham  racetrack is perfect for this test of the titans: clear skies with a balmy track ambient to help tyres bite bitumen. As the sun beats down, poker-faced crews unload their darlings from immaculate trucks; stopwatches are fondled, new tyres pressured. Yet the way I drive on them, these tyres will be snuffed after two laps, leaving a short window to post a fast time and assess the ultimate performance of these supercars.

 I’m in the SLS first. With its hefty 6.2-litre engine mounted ahead of the driver, the rest of the machine revolves around it like Eeyore’s tail. The nose darts into corners swiftly, but the tail can’t match its poise and quickly falls into smoky slides. I dispense with second gear for tight corners altogether because it just spins the wheels into the rev limiter. Third’s as low as I need to go.

 In fact, avoiding gearshifts isn’t such a bad thing in the SLS: even though its dual-clutch gearbox is the same as the Ferrari 458’s, software programming means the shift is laboriously slow when you’re in a hurry.

The brakes have decent feel and good bite, though, so I run through the fast banking of Turn 1 at 100mph, accelerating up to 133mph before standing heavily on the pins for the sharp U-bend at the end of the straight. The big bird pulls up in time, but with more interference from the ABS than I expect. ‘Don’t try that again sunshine,’ it seems to say.

After a couple of laps of sloppy cornering I post a best of 1min 33sec. Time to switch to something more agile.

The Lamborghini Performante and the Audi R8 both share the same V10 and common running gear. But boy do they feel different. I take the Lambo first, ripping from the pitlane to the tune of its rich, extravagant roar that’s punctuated by staccato barks with each brutal gearshift.

The only way to drive this Lambo fast is to hurl it into corners hard, then smash the throttle pedal to the floor. Do this and you’ll bypass the understeer and fast forward straight to the most adorable four-wheel drift. Crucially, the drivetrain is also flexible enough on the limit to allow you to scrabble into corners with both front and rear axles skidding – rare in a four-wheel drive.

The Pirelli Corsas (Pirelli’s competition-grade rubbers) are strong enough to make the most of the Lambo’s stiff suspension, but they’re taking a serious pounding here. I push and push and push until finally I feel the times falling away and pit to save the tyres. The time? An impressive 1min 29.9sec.

Driving a Lamborghini by the scruff of its neck is not for the faint hearted and the Audi R8 provides the everyday antidote. But, wearing standard Pirelli P Zeros and weighing around 100kg more, it’s already on the back foot when it comes to hot laps. So I’m surprised when it all starts to click: the Audi is easier to drive because its all-wheel drive is more rear-biased than the Performante and its suspension settings are slightly softer; the transition of weight into corners is totally predictable and allows me to feather the throttle on my own terms, rather than driving like a hooligan; the steel brakes bite instantly, unlike some carbon discs which need heat to wake up; the chrome gearbox gate takes some getting used to, but it gives the R8 character. Best of all, there’s no rolling across the front tyres like there is in the Lambo, and it’s more planted at high speed too.

But even after a great drive, I’m still astonished that the Audi is only 1sec slower than the Lambo, and matches its sibling’s 135mph peak speed.
Now for the one I’ve been building up to: the fearsome Porsche GT2 RS. It’s running Michelin’s  Cup, a suitable shoe for what is in essence a racing car. Porsche has done a fine job of nearly eliminating the GT2’s rear roll endemic from its rear-mounted engine, but it’s replaced the cougar in the passenger seat with a pair of spitting king cobras. The turbos on this thing...

Laying down the staggering 516ft of torque without killing yourself takes some focus. The power surges through the rear wheels so viciously that I have to apply the throttle in four stages on the exit of every corner: once to create some movement in the rear axle, followed by a cautious increase, then I ride the surging boost before finally pinning  the throttle to the metal, hanging on and jabbing opposite lock. I absolutely f***ing love this car.

Fire round the track in the Porsche and every bump and change in camber clangs through your fillings, yet that hard suspension works wonders in the superfast Turn 1 to yield a 139mph top speed and 1min 28.8sec lap.

Can Ferrari or McLaren topple that? Right now it feels unlikely, but the 458 has the perfect balance of support and suppleness. Like Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder it seems to ride on a cushion of air that allows the chassis to move into each wheel – not too much, just enough for the driver to feel every dynamic element of each and every corner.

The mid-mounted engine means that all the movement revolves around the driver. You feel connected and important at the centre of gravity. As the back end squirms, you increase the throttle and expect to find the limit. But the car takes more. The E-diff alters the power delivery across the rear axle, compensates for the loss of traction, allows you to push further, harder.

The Ferrari lets you sense everything and responds to your every input. The slightest crack of the throttle changes its pitch, making it so driveable you could balance an egg on the end of your toe. Then there’s the bellowing V8, the seamless gearshift, the fantastic brakes and unintrusive ABS… but what I love most about the 458 is that when you really overcook your entry speed, it doesn’t make a big deal out of it. It just puts you back on line with only a modicum of driver input. That it beats everything that’s gone before with a 1min 28.3sec is the icing on the cake.

The 458 handles better than any supercar I have driven, and differently to any supercar I have ever driven – until now.

During the Cold War the Americans stole Russian MiG fighter jets in order to assimilate their successful traits for aerial combat. When I set out in the McLaren, it feels as if this car is designed to stand toe-to-toe with the 458 the way the F-16 once took it to the Ruskies.

McLaren insists that I drive the 12C with traction control on, albeit on its most reduced track setting, but I fight the computer from the first corner. Every time I accelerate and get some yaw into the chassis, the TC cuts power and a series of jarring wiggles ensues. The 12c’s brakes are sensitive and powerful, but the ABS is inconsistent and intrusive. It cuts in too much, giving me lurid close-ups of the gravel run-off areas because it overly reduces my braking effort.

However, the turn-in is crisp and utterly refined and something special happens mid-corner too, where the chassis really hooks up and beckons me in for more. Shame that in high-speed turns the 12C is more edgy and quickly chewed through its P Zeros. And we’re all shocked that my best efforts yield only a 1min 30sec – not only 1.7sec slower than the Ferrari, but slower than the Porsche and Lambo too.
And then the controversy really starts. I drive into the pits and an alarm bings as a message pops up on the dash saying that the hydraulic system that controls roll requires attention. I pull up and a puddle of hydraulic oil seeps onto the Tarmac. McLaren’s mechanics swarm around, hoiking the car up on a jack, pulling off wheels, burning forearms on scolding carbon discs as they frantically try to remedy the problem. It could be terminal they say, not sure if we can fix it.

Was the car broken when I lapped it? I don’t think so – the problem was the intrusive traction control. But after half an hour of faffing and flapping, the McLaren boys are back. They’ll let us do a lap with the traction control off, but there’s a catch: we’ll also be lapping on the optional, stickier Pirelli Corsas, not the regular P Zeros.

With no interference from the stability systems and unbridled control of the engine I discover this is the sweetest road-going turbo I’ve driven. The lag is brilliantly managed so you can fine-tune the throttle through corners, although it’s not on a par with the 458’s non-turbo V8.

The 12C mirrors the ‘cushion of air’ sensation of the Ferrari, as well as its mid-mounted poise, but the chassis response is faster and it’s beautifully balanced through the stop and go sweepers of Rockingham’s infield.

Does it knock the 458 off its perch? No, but it’s close. There are too many agents at play between driver and function for the McLaren to outshine the immediacy of the Ferrari. It can outpace the Ferrari in a straight line, but weirdly the Fezza just feels faster. And even with those stickier tyres, all I can summon is a 1min 29.2sec – still the best part of a second off the Ferrari.
But for once lap times mean nothing to me – I simply prefer the 458 because it’s purer and, ironically, closer in spirit to the McLaren F1.

Ben Barry delivers the final CAR verdict:

You have to feel sorry for McLaren – the hydraulic leak in the suspension that caused the 12C to be so much slower than the 458 was unfortunate. Still, a lap time is only one element of what decides our final ranking, and this misstep doesn’t alter our verdict, as the car we drove on the road – where, ultimately, it matters most – was perfectly representative.

Choosing a last place is always tough when you’ve got an amazing selection of cars, but this time it’s the Merc SLS languishing in sixth. It’s a very nice thing to live with and has a character and style all of its own, but it’s dynamically outclassed by everything else, plus the R8 is just as capable as a GT.

Fifth goes to the Lambo. If you want undiluted supercar thrills, the Performante is for you. But none of its strengths can disguise the fact it’s getting on a bit and becomes tiresome when you’re not in the mood. The Audi R8 edges it because it’s both thrilling to drive and easy to live with. It’s also a bargain in this company.

Now it gets tricky. I could justify handing gold to the Porsche, because it’s so exciting, and actually pretty easy to live with in the right conditions. But there are two rather contradictory caveats: the tyres don’t work in the wet, and our car had no air-con. There’ll be times when you wouldn’t want anything else, and times when you’d want anything but the GT2 RS. If you’ve got a garage full of cars, maybe that’s not such a problem, but here it’s third best.

There are all sorts of ways in which McLaren bests Ferrari, particularly composure through fast turns, ride quality and outright speed.

Yet the 12C’s all-round polish can’t compensate for the fact that the Ferrari is the more engaging, more interactive, more compelling machine to drive hard, and if your supercar is going to tick any box, it’s a good idea to prioritise that over everything else.

The Ferrari lifts your spirits in the way the McLaren can’t, and, you know what, a 458 isn’t such a chore to live with. We’d have never predicted but… Ferrari beats McLaren.

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McLaren MP4-12C versus the world (CAR Magazine archive, July 2011)

By Ben Oliver

Memory Lane

23 August 2012 15:08

It’s the group test to end all group tests: McLaren 12C versus Ferrari 458 versus every other supercar that matters. Can anything overwhelm the mighty McLaren? Three days on road and track should settle it once and for all.

So, this is IT, the big one. In a layby on an empty Welsh road linking nowhere in particular to somewhere else altogether sit a McLaren MP4-12C and Ferrari 458 Italia. Both cars are brimmed with superplus, fluids tickled to temperature, specs long since decided, minders long since departed. Finally they’re ours, and over the next couple of days we’ll drive them hard on road and track, after which their tanks will be empty and their tyres will be fried and we will say once and for all which is best.

The McLaren carries the momentum into this test; it’s the car that’s watched the 458 from a distance and had time to figure out how to do it better. Gut feel – and lots of hypey PR – says it’ll win.

Yet the McLaren experience begins with frustration as you fruitlessly try to find its automotive clitoris of a ‘door handle’ – you stroke the underside of the door’s strake and, so the plan goes, the aperture pops open. You’ll get it eventually, but a valet parking attendant will doubtless one day die of old age before retrieving a 12C from a hotel car park.

Once the door is open, it’s like one of those big pointy foam hands that annoying people wear in football stadiums. It points at your face and narrows your range of movement for straddling that thick carbon monotub and placing your feet into the faraway footwell.

Then you close the door and settle into a seat that’s more comfortable than the Ferrari’s? (optional) bucket, press the starter button and it becomes clear that what we’re dealing with here is a game-changer: the McLaren is mind-blowingly quick, it rides exceptionally well and the way it stays so flat and composed through fast corners is downright spooky. You just look at where you want to go, decide on the amount of lock you need and power your way through – no confidence-lifts off the throttle, no extra nibbles at the wheel. Wow.

Being naturally aspirated, the Ferrari has the purer engine, but the 12C’s twin-turbo V8 is hugely impressive. It settles to a surprisingly gruff idle, but that melts away when all 443lb ft comes on strong from 3000rpm and doesn’t taper  – at all! – until 7000rpm, one big fist of torque punching you down the road. Turbo engines typically don’t like to rev but it still feels right to wring the McLaren’s neck and give it the full 8500rpm when you’ve got space. Up there it doesn’t feel turbocharged at all.

The Ferrari certainly won’t be having this one all its own way. But to presume it’s either McLaren or Ferrari taking top honours is like expecting your F1 team-mate to dive out of the way or crash to help you win – there are other cars vying for your £170k or so, too. So in that same layby sit Mercedes SLS AMG, Porsche 911 GT2 RS, the Lamborghini Gallardo Performante and the Gallardo-based Audi R8 V10. You can snap up one of those for £109k. Peanuts!

It had to be here, the R8: it’s the evolutionary footstep where the hunched apeman transitions into the upright Homo sapien, the supercar you can take home to your parents. Would Ferrari and McLaren and everyone else have put such a focus on all-round ability without it? Doubt it.

Climb in and the switchgear and dials and the touch and smell of everything is unmistakably Audi. Perhaps you might not like a TT driver to feel quite so at home, but the R8 is so un-Audi-like and so un-Lamborghini-like to drive that it’s genuinely bewildering. It just feels so light and lithe and linear. Is it sure it’s not adopted?

The R8 flows over tricky roads like a rolling pin over hot dough, the steering is delicately weighted and the engine is just magnificent, the way it’s so docile around town and quiet when you want to fly under the radar, but when you open the taps it spins so freely and smoothly and the note hardens to such an intensely frenetic waaaaaaa that it’s just amazing.

When you’re driving the balls off this thing and you grab the gearlever it snaps into the centre of the gate and from there you just slice it through what feels like a very slight magnetic force and into the next cog. Bliss.
I got chatting to an AMG engineer about the R8 at the Geneva show in 2008. ‘Great isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Light like a feather. Fantastic.’

The R8 clearly made an impression, and its focus on all-round usability has filtered through to the SLS – Merc’s first return to the segment since the Mercedes/McLaren SLR joint project, just as the MP4-12C is McLaren’s.
Yet the SLS is more GT than supercar. It’s the only car here to have its 6.2-litre V8 mounted up front, albeit slung way back in its extraordinarily long snozz for excellent weight distribution. Prod the throttle at idle and the SLS rocks like a hot rod; gun it on the move and it lets rip like Keef Richards coughing up phlegm then unleashing a solo to blow Slash into his Marshall stack; get on the throttle early in corners and you’ll feel the rear end twitch and squirm. It is unique in this group for its raw musclecar attitude, yet it has civility too, what with its comfy seats, excellent infotainment system and beautifully put together, special-feeling interior. And it steers with an immediacy and delicacy that confounds your expectations when you first peer down that aircraft carrier bonnet.

Yet there are flaws. The dual-clutch ’box is infuriatingly reluctant to respond to paddleshift commands, and the GT focus means it turns to mush on track. I liked the ride quality when I drove it on smoother French roads last year, but it gets too spiky when you’re driving fast over UK B-roads, at which point you descend into a vicious circle with the sharp throttle and average traction and kangaroo down the road. It just doesn’t feel as focused as the competition when you drive at ten tenths.

Still, big miles are far more easily swallowed in the SLS than the Lamborghini Performante, the drop-top version of the hardcore Gallardo Superleggera. Drive it for a few hours and you’ll tire of the Lambo’s lumpy low-speed ride, dated sat-nav, windy hood and fixed-back seats that cosset like a kick in the kidneys.

But when you’re driving great roads for the hell of it, it all comes together. The differentiation to the R8 – with which it shares its DNA – is staggering. The Lambo’s fantastic steering is far meatier; its similar V10 engine is louder and fiercer; and, in Corsa mode, the automated manual gearshifts whack through the transmission like a sledgehammer pounding an anvil. Its four-wheel drive chassis is also more front-biased than the Audi R8’s, so it claws its way over crests, pulls you through corners like a roller coaster. It is packed with addictive drama, yet anyone can pedal this Lamborghini quickly.

And so we drive and drive, supercar headlights catching in supercar mirrors, engines wailing, speeds escalating, surprised sheep pulling the splits as we hove into view, the road running and running into the distance, and every single one of us coming back to that same layby and clambering out, eyebrows raised. ‘That was brilliant,’ we all gush about everything. But after half a day one thing is clear: the McLaren has not pulled a gap to the Ferrari.

As soon as you move off in the Ferrari it just feels so together, every corner of the car in sync with the other, the whole thing shifting like one tight unit, just like the McLaren. Yet despite this rock-solid resolve it rides incredibly compliantly – not as well as the McLaren, perhaps, but well enough. Then you floor the throttle and, as the chap who stumbled on our shoot and asked for a ride observed: ‘F**k, f**k, f**k, oh my god, f**********k!’

The steering is so swift that the way it pivots around its grippy front end takes your breath away, the brake pedal has a solid feel that you immediately trust and the gears fire home with just a tap of your pinky on the paddleshift, a subtle blur to the Lambo’s cataclysmic blow.

But what I love most about the 458 is the absolutely precise interaction between the accelerator, the rear tyres and the E-diff, the way you can mete out the power so accurately and feel the effect of every stroke of throttle on the way the rear tyres dig into the Tarmac. It’s a key part of the appeal of this non-turbo’d V8, but that it’s also sonically incredible – that it evolves from an unsteady bwaaaaaaaaaa to a near-F1 scream – and that it revs so energetically and with such a lack of inertia makes it the best engine of a spectacular group.

When you drive the Ferrari hard, there’s not really anything you can point at and say ‘That’s it, that’s the something I don’t like.’ You can with the McLaren: the mushy response of its endlessly strong £9.8k carbon brakes; the sleepy throttle response that makes the Ferrari feel wired on Red Bull; the shunt when you back in and out of the throttle and the turbos are fully lit; the non-linear effect when the spoiler turns into an airbrake on high-speed stops; the unnecessarily heavy effort it takes to pull the paddleshift, a by-product of the pointless pre-cog system (you give the paddle a soft pull so the gear can be ready, then a hard one so it instantly engages); the fact that Ferrari’s manettino  is the more intuitive interface for shifting between stability modes and shift speeds and so on.
More tellingly, you might find yourself bounding cross country at custodial speeds in the McLaren and craving just a bit more drama.

But when I drove a 458 to Goodwood from Maranello last summer, it was clear McLaren could attack it in the all-rounder stakes – cruise control, comfier seats, less noise, and none of those daft steering wheel-mounted indicators and wipers that I still can’t fathom. And Woking has achieved much of that – the McLaren is the easier car to live with.

Two of the best drives I had in the McLaren came when we were heading back from our shoot in the dark, and I wound down the pace a little and just wanted to get back to the hotel. Suddenly I started to prefer the 12C’s calmer steering to the Ferrari’s manic rack, preferred the more linear precision of its response immediately off-centre. I began to appreciate how succinctly you could link together a series of bends and how absolutely bloody brilliant that ride quality is. These were proper, seared-in-the-back-of-my-mind magic moments, moments when I started to ‘get’ what the McLaren was all about.

But here’s a twist: the Porsche GT2 RS. The rear-wheel drive, twin turbo 911 has a widow-maker reputation, and you’d think that adding an RS suffix to that nomenclature would only fast-track you to the nearest morgue. And, yes, the power and torque outputs have swollen, but the ride’s now more compliant, so this Porsche does a better job of keeping itself attached to Tarmac, so it’s actually easier to drive hard. And because it’s an evolution of a decades old design, it feels instantly, reassuringly familiar. There are actual door handles and indicator stalks, windows you can see out of, a clutch pedal and gearstick, and a button that you push once to instantly disable absolutely every safety net, rather than giving it the weird Masonic handshake that the McLaren demands.

Porsche is lucky that it didn’t once rain during our shoot, because we all know that the super-sticky Michelin Cup tyres are to be trusted around standing water like George Best was around alcohol. But here, under a white-hot June sun and wide-open blue sky, the GT2 RS is life-affirmingly good, spitting its anodyne, boost-laden soundtrack over the moors like the RAF jets that scorch overhead.

You might look at the 6800rpm redline and think it disappointing after the 9000rpm Ferrari, but this is a different kind of visceral. It punches on boost at 2500rpm and you’ll probably shift by 5500rpm, and within that 3000rpm window you’ll have a whopping great 516lb ft on tap.

 It takes a while to build up to it, but the first time you swing the GT2 into a fast corner without a dab on the brakes and feel the nose bite at the apex with absolute clarity and you get on the throttle early and sense the back arc round just a smidge is, well, it’s a moment that makes you consider ranking it first of six amazing cars.

I love the gearshift, love the solid brake pedal feel, love the fact that the torque surplus really makes the 911 chassis work hard while the well-resolved stability controls watch your back. Not so keen on no air-con on a 24degC day, mind, and, erm, sod driving it in the wet.

I keep driving the other cars and thinking ‘nah, the Porsche can’t win, can it?’ then I get back in and it ignites my adrenaline all over again. It might, you know, it bloody well might.

Only one way to settle it for sure: to Rockingham  racetrack for fast laps with ex-Stig and racing driver Ben Collins.

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McLaren 12C vs the world - Part 1 (CAR archive, June 2011)

By Ben Barry

CAR Features

24 August 2012 12:00

So, this is it, the big one. In a layby on an empty Welsh road linking nowhere in particular to somewhere else altogether sit a McLaren MP4-12C and Ferrari 458 Italia. Both cars are brimmed with superplus, fluids tickled to temperature, specs long since decided, minders long since departed. Finally they’re ours, and over the next couple of days we’ll drive them hard on road and track, after which their tanks will be empty and their tyres will be fried and we will say once and for all which is best.

The McLaren carries the momentum into this test; it’s the car that’s watched the 458 from a distance and had time to figure out how to do it better. Gut feel – and lots of hypey PR – says it’ll win.

Yet the McLaren experience begins with frustration as you fruitlessly try to find its automotive clitoris of a ‘door handle’ – you stroke the underside of the door’s strake and, so the plan goes, the aperture pops open. You’ll get it eventually, but a valet parking attendant will doubtless one day die of old age before retrieving a 12C from a hotel car park.

Once the door is open, it’s like one of those big pointy foam hands that annoying people wear in football stadiums. It points at your face and narrows your range of movement for straddling that thick carbon monotub and placing your feet into the faraway footwell.

Then you close the door and settle into a seat that’s more comfortable than the Ferrari’s (optional) bucket, press the starter button and it becomes clear that what we’re dealing with here is a game-changer: the McLaren is mind-blowingly quick, it rides exceptionally well and the way it stays so flat and composed through fast corners is downright spooky. You just look at where you want to go, decide on the amount of lock you need and power your way through – no confidence-lifts off the throttle, no extra nibbles at the wheel. Wow.

Being naturally aspirated, the Ferrari has the purer engine, but the 12C’s twin-turbo V8 is hugely impressive. It settles to a surprisingly gruff idle, but that melts away when all 443lb ft comes on strong from 3000rpm and doesn’t taper  – at all! – until 7000rpm, one big fist of torque punching you down the road. Turbo engines typically don’t like to rev but it still feels right to wring the McLaren’s neck and give it the full 8500rpm when you’ve got space. Up there it doesn’t feel turbocharged at all.

The Ferrari certainly won’t be having this one all its own way. But to presume it’s either McLaren or Ferrari taking top honours is like expecting your F1 team-mate to dive out of the way or crash to help you win – there are other cars vying for your £170k or so, too. So in that same layby sit Mercedes SLS AMG, Porsche 911 GT2 RS, the Lamborghini Gallardo Performante and the Gallardo-based Audi R8 V10. You can snap up one of those for £109k. Peanuts!

It had to be here, the R8: it’s the evolutionary footstep where the hunched apeman transitions into the upright Homo sapien, the supercar you can take home to your parents. Would Ferrari and McLaren and everyone else have put such a focus on all-round ability without it? Doubt it.

Climb in and the switchgear and dials and the touch and smell of everything is unmistakably Audi. Perhaps you might not like a TT driver to feel quite so at home, but the R8 is so un-Audi-like and so un-Lamborghini-like to drive that it’s genuinely bewildering. It just feels so light and lithe and linear. Is it sure it’s not adopted?

The R8 flows over tricky roads like a rolling pin over hot dough, the steering is delicately weighted and the engine is just magnificent, the way it’s so docile around town and quiet when you want to fly under the radar, but when you open the taps it spins so freely and smoothly and the note hardens to such an intensely frenetic waaaaaaa that it’s just amazing.

When you’re driving the balls off this thing and you grab the gearlever it snaps into the centre of the gate and from there you just slice it through what feels like a very slight magnetic force and into the next cog. Bliss.
I got chatting to an AMG engineer about the R8 at the Geneva show in 2008. ‘Great isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Light like a feather. Fantastic.’

The R8 clearly made an impression, and its focus on all-round usability has filtered through to the SLS – Merc’s first return to the segment since the Mercedes/McLaren SLR joint project, just as the MP4-12C is McLaren’s.
Yet the SLS is more GT than supercar. It’s the only car here to have its 6.2-litre V8 mounted up front, albeit slung way back in its extraordinarily long snozz for excellent weight distribution. Prod the throttle at idle and the SLS rocks like a hot rod; gun it on the move and it lets rip like Keef Richards coughing up phlegm then unleashing a solo to blow Slash into his Marshall stack; get on the throttle early in corners and you’ll feel the rear end twitch and squirm. It is unique in this group for its raw musclecar attitude, yet it has civility too, what with its comfy seats, excellent infotainment system and beautifully put together, special-feeling interior. And it steers with an immediacy and delicacy that confounds your expectations when you first peer down that aircraft carrier bonnet.

Yet there are flaws. The dual-clutch ’box is infuriatingly reluctant to respond to paddleshift commands, and the GT focus means it turns to mush on track. I liked the ride quality when I drove it on smoother French roads last year, but it gets too spiky when you’re driving fast over UK B-roads, at which point you descend into a vicious circle with the sharp throttle and average traction and kangaroo down the road. It just doesn’t feel as focused as the competition when you drive at ten tenths.

Still, big miles are far more easily swallowed in the SLS than the Lamborghini Performante, the drop-top version of the hardcore Gallardo Superleggera. Drive it for a few hours and you’ll tire of the Lambo’s lumpy low-speed ride, dated sat-nav, windy hood and fixed-back seats that cosset like a kick in the kidneys.

But when you’re driving great roads for the hell of it, it all comes together. The differentiation to the R8 – with which it shares its DNA – is staggering. The Lambo’s fantastic steering is far meatier; its similar V10 engine is louder and fiercer; and, in Corsa mode, the automated manual gearshifts whack through the transmission like a sledgehammer pounding an anvil. Its four-wheel drive chassis is also more front-biased than the Audi R8’s, so it claws its way over crests, pulls you through corners like a roller coaster. It is packed with addictive drama, yet anyone can pedal this Lamborghini quickly.

And so we drive and drive, supercar headlights catching in supercar mirrors, engines wailing, speeds escalating, surprised sheep pulling the splits as we hove into view, the road running and running into the distance, and every single one of us coming back to that same layby and clambering out, eyebrows raised. ‘That was brilliant,’ we all gush about everything. But after half a day one thing is clear: the McLaren has not pulled a gap to the Ferrari.
As soon as you move off in the Ferrari it just feels so together, every corner of the car in sync with the other, the whole thing shifting like one tight unit, just like the McLaren. Yet despite this rock-solid resolve it rides incredibly compliantly – not as well as the McLaren, perhaps, but well enough. Then you floor the throttle and, as the chap who stumbled on our shoot and asked for a ride observed: ‘F**k, f**k, f**k, oh my god, f**********k!’

The steering is so swift that the way it pivots around its grippy front end takes your breath away, the brake pedal has a solid feel that you immediately trust and the gears fire home with just a tap of your pinky on the paddleshift, a subtle blur to the Lambo’s cataclysmic blow.

But what I love most about the 458 is the absolutely precise interaction between the accelerator, the rear tyres and the E-diff, the way you can mete out the power so accurately and feel the effect of every stroke of throttle on the way the rear tyres dig into the Tarmac. It’s a key part of the appeal of this non-turbo’d V8, but that it’s also sonically incredible – that it evolves from an unsteady bwaaaaaaaaaa to a near-F1 scream – and that it revs so energetically and with such a lack of inertia makes it the best engine of a spectacular group.

When you drive the Ferrari hard, there’s not really anything you can point at and say ‘That’s it, that’s the something I don’t like.’ You can with the McLaren: the mushy response of its? endlessly strong £9.8k carbon brakes; the sleepy throttle response that makes the Ferrari feel wired on Red Bull; the shunt when you back in and out of the throttle and the turbos are fully lit; the non-linear effect when the spoiler turns into an airbrake on high-speed stops; the unnecessarily heavy effort it takes to pull the paddleshift, a by-product of the pointless pre-cog system (you give the paddle a soft pull so the gear can be ready, then a hard one so it instantly engages); the fact that Ferrari’s manettino  is the more intuitive interface for shifting between stability modes and shift speeds and so on.
More tellingly, you might find yourself bounding cross country at custodial speeds in the McLaren and craving just a bit more drama.

But when I drove a 458 to Goodwood from Maranello last summer, it was clear McLaren could attack it in the all-rounder stakes – cruise control, comfier seats, less noise, and none of those daft steering wheel-mounted indicators and wipers that I still can’t fathom. And Woking has achieved much of that – the McLaren is the easier car to live with.

Two of the best drives I had in the McLaren came when we were heading back from our shoot in the dark, and I wound down the pace a little and just wanted to get back to the hotel. Suddenly I started to prefer the 12C’s calmer steering to the Ferrari’s manic rack, preferred the more linear precision of its response immediately off-centre. I began to appreciate how succinctly you could link together a series of bends and how absolutely bloody brilliant that ride quality is. These were proper, seared-in-the-back-of-my-mind magic moments, moments when I started to ‘get’ what the McLaren was all about.

But here’s a twist: the Porsche GT2 RS. The rear-wheel drive, twin turbo 911 has a widow-maker reputation, and you’d think that adding an RS suffix to that nomenclature would only fast-track you to the nearest morgue. And, yes, the power and torque outputs have swollen, but the ride’s now more compliant, so this Porsche does a better job of keeping itself attached to Tarmac, so it’s actually easier to drive hard. And because it’s an evolution of a decades old design, it feels instantly, reassuringly familiar. There are actual door handles and indicator stalks, windows you can see out of, a clutch pedal and gearstick, and a button that you push once to instantly disable absolutely every safety net, rather than giving it the weird Masonic handshake that the McLaren demands.

Porsche is lucky that it didn’t once rain during our shoot, because we all know that the super-sticky Michelin Cup tyres are to be trusted around standing water like George Best was around alcohol. But here, under a white-hot June sun and wide-open blue sky, the GT2 RS is life-affirmingly good, spitting its anodyne, boost-laden soundtrack over the moors like the RAF jets that scorch overhead.

You might look at the 6800rpm redline and think it disappointing after the 9000rpm Ferrari, but this is a different kind of visceral. It punches on boost at 2500rpm and you’ll probably shift by 5500rpm, and within that 3000rpm window you’ll have a whopping great 516lb ft on tap.

 It takes a while to build up to it, but the first time you swing the GT2 into a fast corner without a dab on the brakes and feel the nose bite at the apex with absolute clarity and you get on the throttle early and sense the back arc round just a smidge is, well, it’s a moment that makes you consider ranking it first of six amazing cars.
I love the gearshift, love the solid brake pedal feel, love the fact that the torque surplus really makes the 911 chassis work hard while the well-resolved stability controls watch your back. Not so keen on no air-con on a 24degC day, mind, and, erm, sod driving it in the wet.

I keep driving the other cars and thinking ‘nah, the Porsche can’t win, can it?’ then I get back in and it ignites my adrenaline all over again. It might, you know, it bloody well might.

Only one way to settle it for sure: to Rockingham racetrack for fast laps with ex-Stig and racing driver Ben Collins...

>>For the second part of our McLaren supertest, check out CAR online on Monday 27 August

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Bugatti Veyron in the real world (CAR archive, September 2006)

By Georg Kacher

Reviews

27 July 2012 10:00

The Bugatti Veyron sounds like a low-flying chopper as it starts climbing the hill on the far side of my home village. The roar is muffled for a few seconds by the two-storey buildings that form the core of the settlement in the Munich stockbroker belt. But then, rapidly gaining intensity, the noise morphs from subconscious to ‘what the – ’ at the bottom of the approach road to our house. A dog barks, a child cries, the evil neighbour emerges from hiding, the friendly neighbour applauds. Max, our 17-year-old son, does a Carl Lewis down the driveway to welcome the meanest, baddest and most extreme car that will ever spend the night in the Kacher garage.

Tiptoeing across a drainage pipe, fighting for traction at walking pace, the sizzling and crackling monster grinds to a halt. We have touchdown. The driver lets the engine idle for a few more moments to cool the turbos, but then he turns off the 16 cylinders and the rural silence rules again.

This is one of Bugatti’s five demonstrators. Two of them circle the US, appearing at high-visibility enthusiast events like Amelia Island or Pebble Beach. In the course of these weekends, the company is auctioneering test rides for prospective customers and wannabes, at up to $10,000 per 30-minute session. Let’s do some quick maths here: on a busy day that’s $20k per hour, $140k per day (assuming a one-hour lunch break), or $700k per five-day week. At that rate, a new Veyron would pay for itself within a month.

But you could lose it all again at the petrol station. At 11.7mpg you can virtually watch this thing drinking an oil well dry. And that’s a figure you can clock up without really trying. Night-time autobahn stints in the 180 to 250mph bracket will dip under 6mpg. And at the VW test track at Ehra-Lessien, a lead-footed Bug will return 3mpg. At this rate, the 987bhp beast takes only 65 minutes to empty the 100-litre (22-gallon) fuel tank. So before I get in the Veyron, I go back indoors and get another couple of credit cards.

My first time in a Veyron was an impromptu autobahn-and-cross-country stint around Wolfsburg. Next, they flew us to Sicily and let us loose on the Targa Florio loop, which proved to be not quite wide enough for serious driving. Finally, we experienced extreme speeds on the Enna circuit, which is a bit like a huge version of Indianapolis, without banked corners but with plenty of chicanes. Now, finally, for the real test: I’m living with a Veyron for 61 hours.

So, what to do first? We start at Max’s school, where in half an hour he collects enough brownie points from his mates to be guaranteed free drinks until the end of term. We soon learn that when you’re out in the Veyron, you’d better know your Bugatti stuff, as people are fascinated by the pub facts. Like this: our two-seater costs as much as 47 Golf GTIs in Germany. Or this: VW’s own insurance company refuses to cover this model. Only a broker who typically does yachts and planes will take care of the £895,000 8.0-litre coupé.

On the way home, we take the back route and thunder through the state forest in full fighter mode, leaving a cyclone of conifer needles and deaf deer behind us. As long as the road is reasonably straight, this car has no rival. Its top-end urge is so irresistible that not even an F1 car, which is typically handicapped by too much drag, could keep up beyond 185mph. Thanks to stability control and four-wheel drive, irritations in the pavement can only be felt as kicks and tugs, never as serious threats to the impeccable directional stability, which is almost mechanical in its Velcro-strap sure-footedness.

There are, however, quite a few things the Veyron does not like. Kerbs, for instance, be they parallel, transverse or at an angle to the car’s flight path. At around £40,000 per set of wheels and tyres, you really don’t want to scratch a rim. Automatic car washes are off-limits, too – they can’t cope with the enormous 22-inch road rollers. And you need to take care entering a multi storey car park. Unlike the Lamborghini Gallardo and Murcielago, the Bugatti has no front-end hydraulic lift, so it keeps scratching its chin on ramps and inclines. I’m assured it’s okay, but the Kevlar protection plates make a horribly expensive noise. The turning circle is a limo-like 12 metres, and the poor visibility makes merging with traffic a heart stopper. When you travel one up, it’s best to scan the huge blind spot via the tiny passenger door mirror. Alternatively, you can boot the loud pedal and hope for the best.

The Veyron’s biggest foe is the radar trap. Although we didn’t get stopped for speeding, the police kept flagging us down just to take a closer look at this unknown flying object. Veyron owners may well find that they can limit the damage to their licences by offering any wavering traffic cops a brisk spin round the block. Almost the entire team of Munich’s 12th precinct has now been through this routine, and even the top man came by to let the brute acceleration force dimples into his cheeks. It’s impossible not be impressed by a 0-62mph time of 2.8 seconds, but the men in olive were even more thrilled by the stopping power, which leaves your tummy upside down as effectively as any funfair ride.

The Bug was soon the talk of the town on Cop Radio, and it wasn’t the near bald front tyres or the poorly adjusted headlamps they were talking about. By the end of day two, we were getting the thumbs up from just about every patrol car that crossed our path. All I need now is to discover a way of transferring this good karma to my A8.

To our great dismay, nobody tried to race us at the lights, nobody tried to follow in our slipstream, nobody challenged us for g force. In a straight line, the Bugatti is of course unbeatable unless you’ve got ‘Lufthansa’ written along the side of your vehicle. But through tight corners, the Veyron can’t overcome its weight, and its stability control system is definitely calibrated for minimising risk, not maximising drama. It took me half a day to locate the ESP off switch (it’s about halfway down the driver’s left shin-bone), and it took me three more hours to pluck up the courage and push it. The difficult bit was to lose the minder and to find an open corner in the middle of Munich. We finally spotted what we were looking for in the Olympic Park, where you can get four-wheel spin in first, experience a pupil-widening gap between early understeer and eventual oversteer, and learn to modulate 921lb ft, or more than double the getting-out-of-shape oomph produced by the Ferrari 599.

I’m sure Walter Röhrl could powerslide this thing into and out of a Eurotunnel train, but mere mortals are better off paying attention to such instincts as fear and self-preservation. Having said that, I did deactivate ESP once more on a familiar autobahn on-ramp, and the Veyron’s tail stepped out with the perfect elegance of a talented debutante to whom three-four time is second nature. When the car finally swung back in line, the speedo read 100mph and my guardian angel ordered a large whisky.

During my time with the car, no passenger stained the seat, although my wife came close. ‘I want out,’ she yelled as I was shifting into third at an unmentionable speed on a challenging country road. ‘Did you hear me?’ I did, but I was busy keeping the cruise missile ground-bound. ‘If you don’t back off NOW, you do your own laundry and ironing.’ Immediately, I feathered the throttle, but it may have been too late: with arms folded firmly across her chest, Raphaela looked as if she’d just signed the divorce papers.

Heaven forbid, but should I need to woo the ladies, the Veyron would make a fantastic ally. George Clooney certainly doesn’t need a car like this, but when your name is Georg Kacher, and when your gym membership ended with the last world war, a bit of extra visual and aural attraction brings about a quite remarkable transformation. Just cruising along with the traffic, it couldn’t have been sheer speed that was attracting so much female attention, but the sense of special occasion brought about by that exquisite mix of looks and sound. After 15 minutes of telling a young lady about the paddleshift transmission, the sat nav display in the rear view mirror, and the power gauge that spans from zero to 1001bhp, I found myself with a telephone number. I promise you, I really didn’t have to try.

As we meandered around town, you could see the virus spreading through the population. When I parked the car at the verge of the pedestrian precinct, we got swamped instantly. How much? How fast? How many? The answer to that last question is actually very few. The fact that so far only 14 cars have been delivered, out of the 300 Bugatti would like to build, may be bad for VW, but it’s fantastically good for turning heads. It’s safe to assume that every single person who saw our Veyron was seeing it for the first time.

On the morning of the third day I took the Veyron out on my own, away from the crowds, to focus on details such as the seats. Most owners would be perfectly happy with the optional non-electric racing buckets fitted to this car, but a big frame is definitely better off in the standard seats. The main instruments are close to useless. The rev counter is big enough, but the speedo is the size of a wristwatch, and the digital read-out needs to be blown up threefold to make any sense at all. I love the machined metal surface of the centre console, but you need sunglasses to filter the worst reflections. The proposed full-size sat nav screen has been ditched as too distracting, and there is nowhere to hook up your iPod. The glovebox is about as big as the boot, and total luggage volume is something like 30 litres. At least the missus can take along her’ favourite jewellery.

While under warranty, the Veyron is protected by a flying doctor service, but once that two-year/30,000-mile grace period is over you pay for all repair work. Which can be very expensive: a new gearbox is around £70,000. ‘We have yet to experience a serious engine problem,’ said Lars, our accompanying mechanic, who has to smoke the wheels off his Audi S4 Avant in a vain attempt to keep up. ‘Some of the mules have done over 100,000km without missing a beat.’

Bare naked and totally unprotected from the elements, the massive 8.0-litre 64-valve heart breathes heavily in its open-air display case right behind the rear window. Long term, you wonder about the corrosion. More pressingly, the seven-speed double-clutch gearbox started playing up after just 200 miles. It became rough around town, jerky away from the lights, and the shift quality deteriorated. At one point, a cog-shaped warning light came on. Lars hooked up his computer, nodded knowingly and mumbled something about a service in Wolfsburg next Monday.

Oil consumption? ‘Negligible,’ said Lars. Unlike the thirst for petrol. Still, filling up the Veyron is pretty entertaining. Within minutes of arriving at my local Shell station it had to be cordoned off because onlookers’ cars blocked the forecourt and then the main road.

At 2.5 turns from lock to lock, the steering is so much nimbler than the frame it directs, so roundabouts are a lot of fun until you run out of road. Fast corners succumb obediently to the grip of your palms, esses are lessons in rhythmical dance. Less confidence-inspiring is the car’s behaviour on rutted roads, where the wide track and the wide tyres are often at odds with the few remaining smooth bits of tarmac, so tramlining is an issue, especially in the wet.

The low-speed ride is as bad as most supercars: stiff sidewalls, stiff springs and stiff dampers add up to a degree of brittleness no electronic brain can neutralise. The suspension is height-adjustable in three steps, and the aerodynamic set-up also changes with speed and driver intention, providing 350kg of additional downforce when you run out of revs in sixth gear at 230mph. Behind the wheel, you barely notice the subtle alterations in stance and attitude.

Ordinary supercars excel in the 125 to 185mph speed range. Special supercars like the Bugatti demotivate the rest of the four-wheeled world between 185 and 250mph. Silly velocity? Impossible in today’s traffic? Wrong, and wrong again. You’re forgetting the Veyron’s phenomenal stopping ability. With a combined deceleration force of 2.0g – that’s 1.4g pulled by the car plus 0.6g added by the air brake – you can squash kinetic energy at a mind-blowing rate. A high-speed emergency stop is in fact such a physical manoeuvre that the stomach is likely to stage a protest. Since precious few fellow motorists check their mirrors with the frequency required to spot an approaching Veyron, the amazing brakes are an absolutely essential lifesaver.

Unlike anything else with the exception of Schumi’s weekend tool, the Bugatti takes very little time to reach the critical 185 to 250mph bracket. You enter it from zero in only 17 seconds, and about 20 seconds later you will hit an aerodynamic wall at 230mph. No, I didn’t venture into the final 20mph zone on public roads. But I can report that 230mph in this supercoupé on steroids feels about as wild and daring as 150mph does in a regular sports car.

As far as automotive overkill goes, the über Volkswagen from Molsheim will probably never be dethroned, not even by Messrs Koenigsegg and Pagani. The first Bugatti of the 21st century is without a doubt an amazing piece of kit, an engineering tour de force and a driving experience the lucky few will treasure forever. The Veyron had to break many rules to break new ground, and it probably deserves a planet of its own where it can show off without pushing onlookers to the brink of a heart attack.

Would I buy one if I had a few spare millions stacked up behind the house? Probably not. Don’t get me wrong: I love the speed, the power, the torque, the acceleration, the brakes, the sheer silliness of it all.

But not at close to two tonnes, not at this rate of fuel consumption. What the enthusiasts are waiting for is a modern minimalist Bugatti. It must be light, it must be nimble, and it must be a track star – which is something the Veyron will never be.

Our phenomenal two-tone crowd-stopper is the ultimate automotive manifestation of the Olympic motto: citius, altius, fortius, faster, higher, stronger. But its basic concept – although well meant, and developed with great diligence – was conceived in a cul-de-sac.

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