Imagine the
scene. It's a nightmare scenario, but try all the same.
The powers that be have decided to ban all private cars
from the public road. You have only one night of personal
petrol-powered excitement left before the dreaded rule is
enforced. Which car would you choose to spend those last
dark hours with - to drive to its limits until the dawn
comes up? We had sleepless nights trying to dream up our
wish-list and then spent one on these:
The Nissan
Skyline R34 GT-R,
Porsche 911 GT3, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI GSR and BMW
M5.
Now we know which one to grab for a one-night stand if it
ever comes true...
In the fading light the Porsche seems to hover a few
inches above the ground, like some silver ghost racer. The
darkness has merged with the low-profile tyres
and filled in the spaces between wheelarch and wheel, doorsill
and tarmac. But then there's not much to fill. Only a few
millimetres separate the top of the tyre from the bottom
of the wheelarch and mere centimetres prevent the bodywork
from scraping the ground. Only a lack of competition numbers
distinguishes this GT3, the latest 911, from a racing car.
Those front headlamps may still take a little getting used
to, but from the side there's no denying the beauty and
history in that 911 shape. It's changed, of course, over
the years. But the alternations have been soft and gentle.
Like a pebble that's lain at the bottom of a riverbed, the
911 has been smoothed and polished ever-closer to perfection.
Apart from the red brake callipers and the gold and red
coat of arms on the nose, there's hardly any real colour
to this 911. So in the darkness it floats, somehow not quite
of this world.
The
machine next to the 911 is most definitely of this world;
right here and right now. Cars do not leave the factory
with a higher 'in-your-face' quota than the Nissan
Skyline R34 GT-R. Even in day-light it looks evil. It's
a big, solid lump of thing, the Skyline - longer and wider
than the 911 and 50 times uglier. But it's the right sort
of ugliness. The Skyline is ugly in the same way as a mid-
'80s Group B rally MG Metro 6R4 was ugly. It's the same
sort of 'I don't care what I look like; I'll get the job
done, you'll see' school of styling.
Mitsubishi's
Lancer Evo 6 GSR looks like it was designed by someone who
never went to school, never mind design college. It doesn't
look like he's quite finished yet, either. At any moment
he might come wandering out of the darkness with a chainsaw
to hack out a bit more cooling space around the front, or
a hammer and some nails to add a third tier to the rear
spoiler. The Evo's looks are unreformed and unreachable
borstal boy. Ram-raiding? Drive-bys? Bank-jobs? Been there,
done that. And won the World Rally Driver's Championship
for the last three years.
Forest night stages, gravel and oily-fingernailed mechanics
waiting in arclit
service areas are light years away from blue-chip world
of the blue-propelled BMW
M5. The sophisticated styling of the normal 5-Series
has been altered only slightly to accommodate the needs
of this, the high-performance version. The changes include
bigger wheels and tyres, a deeper front spoiler, lower body
stance and the merest hint of a bootlid spoiler. It bares
no resemblance at all to the smash-and-grab looks of the
Japanese machines. This BMW could never be caught at the
scene of the crime. At best, there might be some grainy
black and white security video footage of it leaving the
car park of a multi-national, three days before the share
price collapsed.
But what's it doing here? After all the other three:
Porsche 911 GT3, Nissan
Skyline R34 GT-R and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI GSR all
have, as Ann Widdicombe might put it, 'something of the
night' about them. Surely the BMW is too civilised to keep
such dark company?
Think again. For a start, the rear-wheel-drive £59,995
M5
has the biggest, most powerful and torquiest engine of all.
The five-litre V8 produces 400bhp and lb-ft of torque, making
it the most powerful engine ever to leave a BMW factory.
Porsche's 3.6-litre GT3 engine was developed from the
flat- six used in the racing 911 GT1. Rear-mounted, it delivers
360bhp and 273lb-ft of torque to the rear-wheels of the
£76,500 GT3.
Both the Japanese cars are front-engined and four-wheel
drive and both turn out 276bhp. The Mitsubishi's single-turbo,
four-cylinder two-litre produces 275lb-ft; it's the performance
bargain of the decade at £30,995.
There's no confirmed price for the Skyline yet, but
it's going to be around £54,000, which gets you twin-turbos,
a 2.6
litre straight-six and 14lb-ft of torque more than the
Mitsubishi.
That's how they stand on paper, anyway -
four potentially brilliant driver's cars. We've spent all
day at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, but now the night
has come and if ever there were cars suited to travel in
the hours of darkness, it is these.
