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Autocar's highlights of the year
The Christmas break is a great time to reflect on the year that's nearly finished – and there were plenty of memorable events to look back on in 2017, from new car launches to breaking news stories.
The Autocar team have picked their personal highlights from the past 12 months. Scroll through the gallery to check them all out.
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Driving the Transfagarasan Pass in a Rolls-Royce Wraith Black Badge
It’ll be a very long time before I do something more momentous than this year’s June trip with photographer Stan Papior to the famous Transfagarasan Pass in Romania – in £300,000 worth of Rolls-Royce Wraith Black Series.
The trip had everything: a car of awesome refinement and capability, a road that can honestly be described as one of the Tarmac wonders of the world, vistas like I’ve never seen and an extraordinary yet comfortable destination, the former hunting lodge of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, now a hotel.
I’d never been to Romania before. It is a welcoming place, full of people essentially like us except they don’t have as much money to spend, especially on cars. The roads vary from modern, EU-financed intercontinental arteries to goat tracks, and its drivers can be disturbingly ambitious. But this was an exploit from which I learned plenty, and which I’ll always remember.
Steve Cropley, editor-in-chief
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Driving a Fiat 124 Spider on a great Sicilian road
Two quid. That’s all it cost to upgrade from a Fiat 500 to a Fiat 124 Spider for a week at Sardinia airport in the year’s biggest no-brainer.
Suddenly, p125 of the Lonely Planet guide for the Mediterranean island came into sharper focus on this so-called holiday. “Taking in sensational panoramas, mountain woods and one of Sardinia’s great coastal roads, this 108km route offers the best of il mare [the sea] and i monti [the mountains],” read the guide of the round trip from Bosa to Alghero on the island. I’d trust Frankel or Prior to tell me of a great driving road, perhaps less a more general guidebook on Amazon – but, wow, Lonely Planet, take a bow.
The coastal road in particular driven south from Alghero to Bosa at sunset is not only Europe’s rival to the Pacific Coast Highway but it's superior, too. Wide, challenging roads, which were deserted and with a quality surface, contributed to as perfect a score as I can recall when adding together car plus roads plus scenery. The perfect busman’s holiday.
Mark Tisshaw, editor
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Experiencing racing's craziest fans at the Nurburgring
The Nürburgring’s mad endurance racing epic, the N24, featured a 161-car-strong starting grid this year. Somewhere towards the back of the order was a team of hard-nut racers doing it in a caged-up Volkswagen Golf Mk3 – in among the GT3-class Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys, BMWs and Mercedes-AMGs. I’d read, of course, that the race was just that insane – but I had no idea the event would leave such a mark on me.
It’s several times more worth the trip, I reckon, than any other motorsport event I’ve ever been to. And, having driven there in a BMW M3 Competition Pack, I also got to try out BMW’s M4 CS among the Eifel mountains – on the strength of which the whole trip could be justified as work. On the Sunday morning, while the teams below were on their 20th hour of flat-out competition around the most challenging and spectacular circuit in the world, my weekend hit its zenith in a helicopter a couple of thousand feet above Hatzenbach. “Fifteen years ago, Autocar road testers used to race among all this,” I thought to myself. Hats off to them. I’m not sure I could.
Matt Saunders, road test editor
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Putting The Lorry in for a rebuild
Halfway through 2017, I received some bad news. The Lorry, my 1984 Series 3 88in Land Rover, was unwell. Poking around before the actual MOT test, my garage phoned me to say it wouldn’t pass. Actually, it would have failed in a fairly spectacular fashion. There were two options: either stick it in a barn so that presumably it could be found in a few decades time by my relatives, or rebuild.
The Lorry still had some work to do, because there was the village fête and classic car show. For years it had not missed the annual event: we shoehorn a freezer in the back, it becomes an ice cream van and all proceeds go to the village hall. The day after that was MOT expiry day. Instead of driving it into a barn, I drove it to a care home. This year, it’ll finish on a high, rebuilt, galvanised and ready for 2018.
James Ruppert, used car correspondent
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Counting fingers with the Chinese police
A visit to the Chinese equivalent of the Hill Street Blues cop shop and a medical to check that I had 10 working fingers and thumbs were the strangest introduction to a new car launch I’ve ever enjoyed.
I was in this predicament to drive new Changan SUVs in Chongqing, China’s motor city, and the police station was the first stop after a 13-hour flight, as our hosts earnestly attempted to organise temporary driving licences so we could drive on the public road - a rare opportunity in China. Defeated by a strictly observed police lunch break, we moved across town to a second cop shop, which turned out to be ill-equipped to deal with our unusual request. On to a third location, by which time our jet-lagged group were losing the will to live.
Here, an army of uniformed bureaucrats pored over our British driving licences and passports and then photocopied them at least 150 times each. For the paperwork, I was given a Chinese name – I think equivalent to Julie-Anne. “Do you mind if it’s a bit girly?” asked the giggling PR man. Next was the medical, an eyesight test with a nurse wearing milk-bottle-bottom spectacles, height and weight recorded and a mugshot with my hands visible to prove I had 10 operational digits.
Eight hours after arriving in China, we were the proud owners of temporary driving licences, valid for three days. At least Autocar snapper Stan Papior was on hand to record the happy moment. Next, we ventured into Chongqing’s madcap traffic for the ‘test drive’ – a 20-minute crawl to a restaurant car park.
The following day we had a time-consuming discussion with our hosts that finally resulted in us getting the chance to drive the SUVs around a closed proving ground. We were promised more road miles later that afternoon – to use our hard-won licences – but then our hosts changed their minds, due to “insurance difficulties”. You couldn’t make it up.
Julian Rendell, special correspondent
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Three weeks of fun
This’ll sound cheesy, but it’s true. My ‘moment’ of the year was looking at my calendar when coming up with reasons, just for a social media post, why people should apply to work at Autocar. Inside three weeks, I’d had a day’s hilarious off-roading in a Suzuki, a 24-hour race at Spa in a Citroën and two days with a steam locomotive, plus drives of a Jaguar Sportbrake, an XJR, a Porsche 911 GT2 RS, the Rolls Phantom, a Hyundai the length of the country (and then a bit more) and a radio-controlled full-sized Nissan GT-R. Better still, the biggest privilege of all, I got to tell you all about them. What a gig.
Matt Prior, editor-at-large
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A slow road trip to Brighton
It’s hard to believe that a 65-mile journey that took seven hours, at a maximum speed of around 20mph, and including numerous traffic jams, biting cold wind and a 4.25am alarm call could make it into any ‘best of’ list. Of course, this was no ordinary journey, but the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run.
It was my first time at the event, let alone taking part in it – and very much my loss for that. It helped, of course, to be in an excellent car with excellent company. John Worth’s Daimler Type A is as exquisite as it is faithful to the original, and his enthusiasm for the car – all cars, in fact, especially, oddly, old Vauxhalls – is infectious. It was a happy reminder that little else matters when you are in a great car in great company - a fact even more true when it is played out on such an incredible occasion as the RAC Club’s magnificently organised celebration.
Jim Holder, editorial director
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Dashing through the snow in a McLaren 650S
Usually, I fly to the Geneva motor show. Once I went in and out in a day. This year I took a McLaren 650S there and back for a valedictory drive in one of this country’s greatest supercars. But we’d shot the car before, and I wanted this story to look different. So we took it up into the mountains above Geneva and soon found ourselves in snow. Quite a lot of snow, as it happens. Rather more, indeed, than we had intended.
With nothing more than a set of Pirelli Sottozero tyres to cover its modesty, this 641bhp mid-engined supercar turned snowmobile as if born to the role. We slithered around a bit but nothing like as much as you’d think, before descending back to town, passing any number of far more practical cars that had fallen into snowdrifts. As for the shot, well, you can see that for yourself...
Andrew Frankel, senior contributing writer
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A final farewell to Wimbledon's stock car oval
On the last Sunday of March this year, the chequered flag fluttered at Wimbledon Stadium for the final time before the oval racing venue was demolished to make way for a new football stadium for AFC Wimbledon. The place held a special resonance for me: one of my first assignments as a fledgling motorsport journalist was to attend a National Hot Rod race meeting there on a cold November evening in 1997.
I fell in love with the all-action racing, the colours, the smells and the sensation of being able to press your nose against the catch fencing and feel the cars scorch past. The venue itself had seen better days but, for me, the dog-eared grandstands and fading signage were part of the character and somehow comforting in a city where the past is erased so rapidly that sometimes you don’t realise it's gone until it is too late. I’m glad I was there to help give the venue a proper send-off.
Matt Burt, executive editor
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A sneak peak at the future at Hyundai's R&D centre
For a while, I thought we might never get into Hyundai Motor Group’s Namyang R&D centre in Korea. The guards at the site’s entrance wanted to collect all our computers, optimistically figuring they could fit an entire bus load of journalists’ laptops into one plastic bag. A 40-minute stand-off ended in compromise (laptops in the coach hold, which the security staff painstakingly sealed using tiny stickers intended to cover smartphone cameras) and we were in.
The need for secrecy was apparent when we reached Namyang’s test track to drive a prototype of the Kona SUV. The track’s runway-length main straight was so busy that it resembled the M25 at rush hour, albeit with virtually every car sporting some form of camo livery or future tech. Quite the sight. The vehicles hinted at future Hyundai, Kia and Genesis products, with the occasional interloper from another firm out there for benchmarking. It was the sheer volume of vehicles that stuck out: proof of just how hard car firms are having to push development at such a time of change for car tech.
James Attwood, digital editor
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Touring Tuscany in a Ferrari
It might seem a cliché to pick a Ferrari drive as my year’s testing highlight, but that’s what’s lodged firmly among the many fine memories of 2017. Speed and glamour are the obvious appeals of driving a GTC4 Lusso T (that’s the rear-wheel-drive V8 turbo version of what was originally Ferrari’s FF four-seat hatchback), but what the Tuscan test route had was length, an abundance of bends, scenery and an almost unnerving lack of traffic, not to mention cameras. That provided the chance for a sustained bout of hard driving and several moments of fleeting, full- throttle acceleration. It was utterly exhilarating, lasted for mile after mile and underlined the amazing dynamism of this over-large Ferrari.
Richard Bremner, senior contributing editor
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Tunnel trip in a Lamborghini
I suspect my contribution to this assemblage of memorable moments is somewhat less thought-provoking than most, but I can only report the facts. They are as follows: a Lamborghini Huracán Performante, the Hindhead Tunnel and a redline set at 8500rpm. The air was so coagulated with V10 that I could almost reach out and scoop it up in the palm of my quivering hand.
The Super Trofeo exhaust system gives you resonance upon resonance upon resonance, underpinned by an industrial turbulence with a descant that quite literally kneads the breath from your lungs. It’s so crushingly loud that the traffic behind may even have grounds for a tinnitus-related class action in years to come, although truly you’d need a heart of stone to remain indifferent to it all. Very puerile, very Lambo. We’re blessed that such machines are still allowed.
Richard Lane, road tester
Lamborghini Huracán Performante breaks Autocar's handling track lap record
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Discovering we have more speed than Keanu Reeves
Michelin pulled out all the stops for the launch of its new Pilot Sport 4S tyre in January. We had a handful of BMW M cars, Thermal Raceway in Palm Springs and, um, Keanu Reeves. Hard to say why. Anyway, Ted from Bill and Ted was in my group for the track driving session and, as luck would have it, he was directly behind me in the train of cars.
The instructor at the front of the queue set a fairly steady pace to begin with and the M2 driven by ‘John Wick’ loomed large in my mirrors. But as the pace increased lap after lap, it fell further and further behind. At the end of the session, the Hollywood star apologised to me for holding the group up. And now I know: I am quicker than Neo from The Matrix.
Dan Prosser, contributing writer
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A classic cruise with Kia
In the summer I was invited to join designers from Kia’s Frankfurt studio for the ‘Kia Miglia’ – a day out in the mountains south of the city in a collection of classics, many owned by the designers themselves. Kia design director Gregory Guillaume turned up in his fine Austin-Healey.
Racing back from the drive in the evening on the busy A8 autobahn (the first to be built in pre-war Germany) in an immaculate 44bhp Karmann Ghia convertible was a far more eye-widening and skill-stretching experience than it would have been in a modern supercar.
Hilton Holloway, special correspondent
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