BBC Top Gear Magazine May 2025

@jack_rix @rixjack jack.rix@bbctopgearmagazine.com In this issue we drive a £4m track only Bugatti. Be honest, did you even flinch when you read £4m? It’s a preposterous amount of money – enough to buy 13 average UK houses or, more sensibly, 667,779 copies of your favourite car magazine – but my point is we’re being desensitised to the prices of rare and exclusive cars because they’ve long since detached from reality, and appear to be calculated based on a random phone number then adding four zeros. As a snotty faced kid in the early 1990s, I used to drive past the McLaren F1 in the Park Lane dealership and roll that asking price (£600k – £1.3m adjusted for today’s prices) around my head in disbelief. Then came the Veyron that smashed…

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Nic Mann hands me a turbine blade. This, he says with a gleam in his eye, was originally part of the Rolls-Royce Olympus 593 turbojet that powered Concorde. Nic worked on that fearsome engine during his time at the aerospace giant in the 1970s, and remains transfixed by turbines. So much so that he’s used one to circumvent the lag in his hillclimb special, the Mannic Beattie. Except that ‘special’ doesn’t even get close to describing this thing. Nic is supremely modest but his creation is close in spirit and execution to an F1 car. The kicker is, he designed, engineered and built it in his Berkshire garage for about £20k. “You’ll detect a whooshing sound, that’s the turbine spinning at 90,000rpm” A beloved statesman of the hillclimb scene, Nic…

THE RENAULT 5 TURBO 3E APPEARS TO be getting angrier, and… actually we quite like it when it’s angry. Because since it first burst onto the scene in a haze of tyre smoke and EV squeal, it’s grown from 500bhp to 536bhp. More than that, it’s able to pump out a whopping 3,540lb ft of torque, which is a) enough to give it a blistering 0–62mph time of under 3.5 seconds, but mostly b) downright terrifying. So, welcome again to the future of Renault hot hatchery. The reincarnation of its 1980s hero gets 268bhp motors hiding in each back wheel, and a 70kWh battery in the floor. It’s built around a bespoke aluminium platform developed by Alpine, developed specifically to be rear wheel drive, and swaddled in carbon fibre panels.…

JACK RIX TG’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF THINKS THE 5 TURBO CAN DO NO WRONG I tried, I really did, to engage my rational brain lobe and dismiss this as an overpriced, overweight marketing tool, but I kept getting sucked back in. The performance figures are suitably bonkers ñ nothing particularly new about that with fast EVs - but what is new is the level of lunacy applied to the design. It looks like a standard Renault 5 thatís been dipped in growth hormone. Then thereís the exotic in-wheel motors and the commitment to making it as extreme as possible with the roll cage and rally handbrake. Yes, the price is pretty wild, but itís basically an entirely new car from the ground up and has there ever been a more exciting electric…

THE GOOD It’s new, but then it isn’t. Love the looks Frank Baeyens Stunning. A proper sports car Daniel Harris Well done Morgan. Great looking thing Yarbles IT LOOKS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING Peterson THE BAD Why would anyone design a rear end like that? Really disappointing Disappointed Looks like a badly rendered concept for a restomod Morgan Still nobody STILL AN AUTO. GO AWAY HANS EFDÉ It’s 30 grand too expensive Oscar Sanchez Fernandez Looks like an old Morgan with a Citroen DS boot stuck on it Khunwilko THE UGLY The styling department must have taken all of 20mins to come up with that… Jerry Myer WHAT A HORRIFIC COLOUR Alan Scott Dreadful pastiche Adam Howard It’s about as cool as Clarkson in a leopard skin jumpsuit Jerry Myer THIS IS…