Innehållsförteckning för April 2020 från Fast Car

The late actor Paul Walker, arguably best known for his work in the Fast & Furious series, continues to influence the motoring world in 2020 as his iconic car collection crosses the block at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale sale. Walker had collected all sorts of cool stuff, both stock and modified, including an E30 M3, the Nissan 370Z from Fast Five, a big-power R32 Skyline, and a Mustang Boss 302 race car – but the big story is that, weirdly, he’d collected five examples of the E36 M3 Lightweight. This limited edition model, of which fewer than 130 were built, was a stripped-out road racer, and Walker seemed to think it had strong investment potential. He was right. The previous auction record for one of these was $145,750, but when Walker’s cars…

Cars prepped for ice racing are usually fairly lightweight and run skinny studded tyres, the aim being to scrabble for whatever purchase is possible while skating balletically across the surface. But Bentley clearly had a meeting in which the principle conclusion was ‘Er, sod that’ – so they’ve built this massive thing. Look at it. It’s mental. It’s got a whacking great 6.0-litre W12 engine for starters, as well as three-chamber air springs with a 48v anti-roll system. The reason for its existence is to compete in this year’s GP Ice Race at Zell Am See, Austria, with Junior WRC driver (and ex-presenter of CBeebies’ Catie’s Amazing Machines) Catie Munnings at the wheel. “At first I thought it would feel heavy, but I was amazed by how dynamic, nimble and…

Boyden Barlow is our favourite type of car guy. He’s been a fully-fledged petrolhead for his entire life, and he’s got a supremely focused eye for how to build a unique and alluring show car, as well as the skills and contacts to carry these ideas out to flawless perfection. But at the same time, he’s not out to impress anyone; Boyden builds cars the way he does simply for the love of the craft. It’s all fuelled by passion, he lives for this stuff and he’s really good at making it happen. Most importantly, while he does build cars to a show-and-shine-winning finish and he enjoys displaying them, they’re primarily built to be used. And used hard. See, he’s a guy with a heavy right foot and a supernatural…

Performance motoring means different things to different people. Obviously we all want a fast car, that’s a gimme – we’re so into the idea that we named a magazine after it, and we’ve stuck with it since the 1980s. It’s a way of life. But the manner in which we celebrate this keenness for quickness out on the road? It’s very different for each and every car fan out there. Flicking through the pages of this magazine, you’ll find yourself amazed (as is true of every issue we’ve ever put out) by the level of attention to detail that modders and tuners put into the finish and presentation of their projects. Every car featured in this mag is a surefire show-stopper, drop-dead gorgeous and as desirable as any off-the-peg supercar.…

DRAPER TOOL CAB, £3095 If you’re anything like our Midge, and your holy grail is the biggest toolbox in the known cosmos (but without paying second-hand R8 money – Midge), then this 72-inch monster from Draper could be the one for you. Standing at 5 foot 5 and a hefty 6-foot wide, you could land a Boing 747 on this one, so you’re gonna need more gear than Ant Anstead and Bob the Builder put together to fill the bastard. We mean, it’s even got its own suspension and everything! Not got a garage? Well, that’s no problem either; stick it in your bedroom and caress it every night. The missus will love it! www.drapertools.com POWERFLEX BMW EXHAUST MOUNTS, FROM £10 Sometimes it’s the little things in life that can…

There’s a reason why so many 1950s and ’60s American pickup trucks wear such dramatic and timeworn patina these days. The very purpose of these vehicles was to be functional rather than overtly desirable; sure, manufacturers put effort into giving them alluring design features to elevate them above their market rivals, but General Motors’ marketing department in the 1950s would no doubt have been a little surprised if they’d learned that these sturdy workhorses would become desirable collector vehicles half-a-century on. Just picture the scene: after a decade or two of hard work on the farm or delivering groceries in small-town America, a truck finds itself parked up in a rural field, its shiny new replacement taking its place in day-to-day life. The gentle chirrup of crickets as the milky…

Not heard of the Essen Motor Show? Well, you should have as it’s one of the biggest car tuning events on the continent! And this year saw over 360,000 car nuts visit the eight-day show. Yes, eight days! That’ll give you an idea of the sheer scale of this event, as that’s precisely how long it takes to walk around it. Essen is the European version of SEMA, but instead of being in Las Vegas it’s in Western Germany where there’s less gambling, less strippers (not that we looked) and no hotels that look like they’ve been designed by someone on acid. Nope, Essen is suave, stylish and super-cool – a bit like us. So obviously we jumped in the car, hopped on the Eurotunnel, headed East through France and…

There used to be a time when 1,000bhp was seen as a really big number. No, wait, that came out wrong… 1,000bhp is a big number, a really massively big one. But it wasn’t all that long ago that it was the sole preserve of top-fuel dragsters; the idea of deploying that many horses on the road was total pie-in-the-sky. But the goalposts have shifted a long way in recent years, with numerous hypercar manufacturers touting four-figure outputs. Naturally the aftermarket is all over this, as there’s nothing more fun than schooling a multi-million-dollar bauble with a tuned-up road car, and the American muscle car fraternity in particular has become a little obsessed with the idea. Look at the Dodge Charger here – it has 1,500bhp. That’s quite a lot,…

If you’re after a bargain-basement hot hatch, you could do a lot worse than the Peugeot 207 GTI. We reckon it’s a pretty canny purchase right now – after all, history has not been kind to this car; nobody really wants them and, let’s face it, they’re not particularly good-looking, are they? But there is actually a lot to love here. Powered by a revvy little 1.6-litre turbocharged motor, you get a solid 175bhp (the sister model, the 207 GT, had the same engine but detuned to 150bhp), and there’s also a pretty decent set of recliners and a reasonably amusing suspension setup. Yes, you will get tired of pub bores telling you that it’s ‘not a proper GTI’ because it doesn’t tripod like a 205, but you’ll have the…

‘If it ain’t broke, try not to cock about with it too much,’ as your old grandma used to say (probably). The FK8-generation Civic Type R has proven itself to be essentially the perfect hot hatch in recent years, with its insane performance, stellar chassis, and surprising practicality. So the 2020-model-year refresh is pretty restrained. Debuting at the Tokyo Auto Salon, we saw that the facelift comprises a bigger front grille for improved cooling, body-colour accents in the air intakes, an Alcantara steering wheel and shorter gear-lever, stiffer rear bushes and two-piece brake discs. It’s as if Honda has modified it on your behalf! There’s also the option of the new Boost Blue paint shade, plus there’s now manual heater controls so you don’t have to arse about with the…

“Having recently attended a few track events, I’ve caught the bug again and now I’m getting ready to make a few more changes for 2020,” Boyden tells us. And he’s not mucking about either – a quick scroll through his Instagram (@boyden_barlow) shows us that the S14a has once again been stripped down to a bare shell and the green paint is gone. He’s keeping tight-lipped about which colour it’ll be painted this time, but we do know that he’s planning a fully forged engine build with a Garrett GTX4058 turbo – so we can expect some pretty eye-watering horsepower. He’ll also be tube-framing the rear end to match the front, swapping to a rear-mounted radiator setup, and much more. Hell, we might even end up featuring it again……

If the hysteria of social media is to be believed, there are strange things going on in North America. And no, we’re not talking about that fellow in D.C. with the intriguing hair, or the common belief that aerosol-propelled cheese is an acceptable foodstuff. It’s the SEMA show we’re on about, and specifically the colossal deviations from normality that essentially broke the internet from its moorings at the back end of last year. We’re used to seeing cars which are absolutely bananas bleeding out from every Vegas orifice, but 2019 really knocked things up a notch. And if you teleport yourself to the north-west border of Washington state, then amble twenty miles or so up to Coquitlam in British Columbia, you’ll find the root of some of this mischief. This…

Wolfrace Wolfsburg, from £136 (each) Our spidey senses are tingling with this one, and call us strangely physic, but we reckon that the bods at Wolfrace had VW’s finest in mind when they crafted this crazy split-ten. Yep, we know it’s amazing; it is but what we do. Anyway, apart from the design, which seems to make them look even bigger than they are in the first place, we’re also loving the duo of finishes. Gloss black for a touch of class, and gloss black with a polished face for when you’ve really got your party pants on. There’s a good selection of PCDs as well, so they will also fit stuff that’s not from Wolfsburg. Good game, we say. www.wolfrace.com Sizes: 8x18, 8.5x19, 8.5x20 PCDs: 5x112, 5x114, 5x120 Offset:…

The Audi RS6 has always been a bit of a lunatic: a car that has supercar performance that can take the kids to school and get a herd of Great Danes in the boot. But the latest incarnation, the C8, takes things to the next level. Tick the Dynamic Package Plus box when buying one and you’ll get a car that’s electronically limited to 190mph and can hit 62mph in 3.6-seconds. Yeah, you did just read that right. It might have cost you over 100k for the privilege but that’s just ridiculous performance by anyone’s standards. But this is Fast Car magazine and while the above figures are mighty impressive, they are still standard figures and we know the RS6’s 4.0-litre, twin turbocharged V8 is capable of more. With a…

A clutch has one job in your car - to transfer the power from the engine to the gearbox, via the flywheel. Now, obviously, you’ll be wanting as many of those lovely horses as possible to be transferred across, hopefully without eating your clutch or flywheel along the way. Perhaps what’s most important is the last bit, there’s no point in having any clutch if it explodes every 5-minutes… although there’s equally no hero points achieved for having a highly-tuned engine where all the power goes to waste in a huge cloud of smoke and slippage either. The truth is that, when there’s any sort of engine tuning or fruity driving thrown into the mix, then the extra torque or extreme conditions your clutch has to endure can make it…

ALL IN THE DETAILS The more you look at this car, the more details you unearth. One thing we particularly love is how, despite wearing that custom Pandem 86 widebody kit, it also makes a real feature of its original Sprinter bumpers and OEM body addenda – look how the glossy black plastic at either end has been artfully reworked to follow the lines of the fat new arches, complete with original red pinstripes. It’s this level of attention to detail that really sets SEMA builds apart from the rest. It may not be a DeLorean, but this outstanding 1980s Toyota has its own flux capacitor. Not a real one, obviously, but a figurative one that worms its digital tendrils into your brain’s frontal lobes as you gaze upon it,…

If you’re wondering where the wheels came from, make no mistake: these aren’t off-the-shelf items. Very far from it. In fact, Old Bones Fabrication made them specifically for this build, taking original Chevrolet steel wheel centres and mating them to split-rim barrels. The vital statistics are 7.5x17in up front and a meaty 11.5x17in out back, and they cleverly match James’s colour-coding template: the over-arching concept was to make the body green, the suspension components grey and the drivetrain black. So while the wheels’ outers have been beautifully polished, the inner bits are painted gloss black to match the rest of the drivetrain.…

The Mk4 Supra is one of our all-time favourite rides, and if you’re creaky duffers like us it’s easy to forget that it’s actually quite an old car now – the A80 launched way back in 1993, and went out of production eighteen years ago. So when we hear stories about people’s Supra projects turning from tuning and modding efforts into restoration attempts, that all kinda makes sense. It’s not just a case of bolting massive turbos on and seeing what happens, suddenly you have to worry about obsolete bushes and discontinued window seals and what-have-you. But thankfully, with the advent of the shiny new A90 Supra, Toyota has decided to give owners and fans of the old A80 a little treat: the GR Heritage Parts initiative means you’ll be…

Niche British sports cars always do well, don’t they? That’s why you can’t cross the street in London without having to jump out of the way of a Connaught Type D Syracuse or a Ronart Lightning. Alright, perhaps we’re being overly cynical – the new Jannarelly Design-1 certainly does appear to be a compelling package: the £115k ‘UK Edition’ model features a mid-mounted Nissan 3.5-litre V6 in a steel spaceframe with a carbon fibre body. It’s liberally sprinkled with Union Jacks and red, white and blue details, and the fact that it’s actually being built in Dubai means it should hopefully sidestep the peril of sinking like a stone through automotive posterity. So it probably won’t go the way of the Bristol Fighter, or the Marcos TSO. Or the Arash…

Janice is my neighbour. Janice is a bloody terrible driver. Janice has a horrible BMW 2 Series Gran Tourer on finance which she’s weirdly proud of for some reason, even though it looks like a coffin on wheels. Janice is the bane of my life. The main problem is that Janice is such an appalling driver, it only takes one element of her routine to change and she gets totally thrown off course. Like, for example, if I’ve parked an extra car out the front of the house. Which I’m prone to do, as I like cars and tend to drive them a lot. Now, all the other neighbours are cool with this, as they’re not shit drivers and they realise that it’s not beyond the wit of a competent…

So, how much horsepower do you think Tim and the F7LTHY team are getting from this colossal Texas Speed V8 with its vast Precision turbos? Incredibly, they’re planning to rein it back a bit to ensure reliability and they’re still talking about a four-figure number! “We’re going to run it at about 1,000bhp,” says Tim, with an impressively straight face. “It’s easily capable of more, but that’s where we’re going to keep it for reliability and longevity.” The final tuning is well underway and it’ll all be set up for the track very soon… and Tim’s got a little secret too, just between you and us: “Honestly, I ran it naturally-aspirated at SEMA, the turbos were there for show,” he smirks. “We ran out of time to tune it for…

It’s been a fair old while since we’ve seen a new wheel from XXR land in the UK, but we have to say that this 18-inches of pure pant-wetting loveliness, has been well worth the wait. Launched at SEMA, and now available here through SRB Power, there’s not many cars – Audi, Nissan, Beemer, whatever - that we think this crazy design wouldn’t look the part on, certainly in the relatively restrained (er, ish) bronze and black finishes. That Candy Red job, though? That’s the boy, isn’t it? This particular hue really is off the ‘effin chain, and we’ve even heard that there’s a Candy Purple version on the way, too! Of course, either of these lairy buggers would be a brave choice for many, there’s no doubt about it.…

JL AUDIO JD AMPS, £TBA We don’t have to tell you that JL Audio put together some of the finest high-end amplifiers ever to storm the audiophile universe. What many forget, though, is that they have a pretty bloody amazing entry-level range too. In fact, their JX amplifiers have always been extremely highly regarded by those in the know, and now they’re set to be replaced by something even better. What’s more, the new range – these seriously powerful, compact ‘JD’ jobs – will be landing here in the UK in a couple of months. Instead of a simple update on the older JX kit with a little added shazam, they’ve gone the whole hog with a quadruple hit of re-engineered Class D tech. There’s no less than three new…

It all starts with a 1.2 Corsa D. The mass market supermini isn’t quite as glamorous as a range-topping VXR – and it can’t take the fight to the faster car’s turbocharged 1.6 Z16LER – but the simple Vauxhall makes a perfect first car. For Ryan Crew, the basic machine sparked an enthusiasm that’s still burning today. “It was my first car and I immediately fell in love with the shape,” he remembers. We can see why. Upswept and angular, the fourth-generation Corsa is a radical departure from its rounded predecessors. “There was just one problem… I always wanted a bit more power.” Enter the VXR. A quick drive in a friend’s example is all it took: Ryan had to have the fastest Corsa going. He sourced a near-new 2014…

“Car Audio Security is staffed by a bunch of bona fide petrolheads” Way back in 1970, when all this was fields and everything had a sepia tint, Joni Mitchell was lamenting the nature of how ‘they paved paradise and put up a parking lot’. The song in question, Big Yellow Taxi, made a bold and pioneering statement about environmental concerns, about deforestation and the pursuit of human convenience over the beauty of nature, although as Alan Partridge subsequently pointed out in the 1990s, this act of town planning was ‘a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise’. So there you go, there’s always a counterpoint of view. With a fusion of logic and reality firing on all cylinders, we find the fellas at Car…

Midge: “Right, who downloaded Deliveroo on my phone? That’s fucked it…” Midge: “Look what I got!” Jules: “Are you sure you’re not a closet American?” Midge: “I don’t own a gun.” Midge: “You know what they don’t sell in Selfridges?” Initial G: “Enlighten me.” Midge: “Fridges.” Midge: “Who’s the bald fella?” Glenda: “I think he invented something. like the NutriBullet or George Formby Grill.” Midge: “Fish cakes with blue cheese, I’ve unintentionally invented the Surf and Smurf!” Build Off You’ll already know that the Ed to Ed Build Off is over, and that Midge lost in spectacular style in the Car Sumo Challenge last month. Well, what you won’t have seen yet is the final forfeit where Jules cooked up a load of Japanese muck, and made the little one…