Tag: topgear.com

Not the original hot hatch, but the car that reframed the template. The GTI maxed out Gérard Welter’s crisp 3dr design by the simple expedient of adding side mouldings and red go-faster inserts, while a 900kg kerbweight ensured that even 1984’s 105bhp 1.6-litre suffered little inertia. Then came the 115bhp version, and the 130bhp 1.9…

Frank Stephenson is a car designer with more hits than the Beatles, including the Escort RS Cossie, first BMW Mini, Maser MC12, numerous Ferraris and the McLaren P1. These days he runs his own consultancy – Frank Stephenson Design. Here he shares his views on the 5 Turbo 3E This is how you bring an…

There are many excellent retro car designs out there, but we cannot, in good conscience, let the stinkers go unpunished, starting with this hideous blob of chrome-plastered horror. It was supposed to look like the elegant original Thunderbird from the ’50s, and did… if the original had suffered a bad reaction to a bee sting…

Ferrari. Everywhere. Literally everywhere. From the media platforms; from mainstream newsfeeds to tabloid and broadsheet papers and even playful jibes from other global brands such as Toblerone and KitKat. And less playful ones from former CEOs. Maybe Ferrari took advice from Lewis Hamilton’s girlfriend when devising and launching the Luce, because its new EV truly…

The Toyota GR Yaris Aero Performance and VW Golf GTI Edition 50: two cars that feel like they’ve snuck past the fun police. Ever-tightening emissions regs and the narcotic fug of electrification means that anything aimed almost entirely at high revving hedonism is now a rarity. No hybrid gubbins here, just pure internal combustion. One…

One of the biggest surprises of 2026’s Monterey Car Week, the McLaren McL 6GT has a deeply uncool name, but everything else about it is quite the opposite. Harking back to the M6GT, Bruce McLaren’s original, never fully realised vision for a McLaren road car, it brings not only ’70s Can Am throwback looks to…

If we learned nothing else about shooting zombies in the dark over the last 25 years, we learned this much: fidelity is the enemy of atmosphere. However crisp and clear modern Resident Evil has become, however bouncy Leon’s hair might be as it swishes to and fro while he runs from the recently un-unalived in the remakes,…

What is it? Underneath a part Weismann, part 1990s TVR-looking body, it’s 2005’s sports car of the future: powered by diesel. Remember diesel? Remember Trident? Well, one’s a low CO2 fuel with exceptional torque and range, and the other is a defunct British sports car maker revived in the late 1990s. Did they build any?…

We pit the buzzy new Toyota GR Yaris Aero Performance against the ‘buttoned-up’ Volkswagen Golf GTI Edition 50: two hot hatches that ask big money for a few small tweaks. You’ve read the twin test: now swot up on each car’s stats (Yaris on the left, Golf on the right). Price: £49,145 OTR (£49,145 as…

There’s a small silver piece of trim at the base of the windscreen of our Audi A6 Sportback e-tron. It announces that this car is fitted with the fancy Bang and Olufsen ‘Sound and vision system’, a £2,895 option. However, it’s a pretty good representation of this entire car. Can you guess what happens on…