Harris is leaving PH, but not without saying adios

There’s a line in my old notebook from December 2011, clearly doodled during one of the few telephone conversations that secured me a role on Pistonheads. It reads, “Give myself six months MAX before I flounce out.”

I had read enough on the forums over the years to know that I wasn’t going to have an easy ride.

It makes me very happy to say, nearly three years later, that I called it wrong. Mesers Garlick, Trent and Forrest did have to spend several evenings counseling me on the ways of the PHer and the PH forums, but before long I’d really forgotten that I used to write for magazines. I haven’t had a print client since I began at PistonHeads.

It’s time to move on now though. The video project is in a state of flux, and I need to concentrate on where that goes next. But, perhaps more importantly, I feel I’ve done my thing here now. Most of you know what I think about most motoring matters and I don’t want to retread the same ground. Besides, my Porsche contract clearly states that I have to move on after a few years and spread the word elsewhere!

Now the soppy bit – PH truly is a special place. Like any complicated society, it has its fair smattering of loons and wallys and of course the ability to hide behind a keyboard can lend some folk a readiness to address people in a manner they might not have the confidence to do in public. But forget all that - there really is so much knowledge and enthusiasm here.

What were my favourite bits? Initially, getting to grips with the history of the forums and reading some of the great threads – the Harry Flashman words, Nervous spilling his guts about psycho ex-girlfriends, Plato and the dry-cleaners. That one was especially brilliant. Very little of it was about cars, but most of it left me in tears. I’m proud of my own little entry on that legendary threads list. Not that I did anything to contribute towards it other than wear a silly hat.

Then there were the spats with the usual characters; dear old The Pits, Cmoose and The Crack Fox – who, strangely, I ended up getting sozzled with the other week. And all the others who’ve had a pop at me here. It’s all been good sport and I’ve enjoyed (mostly) every minute.

Motoring journalism isn’t a serious job, cars aren’t a serious topic of conversation, and yet the deeply-felt emotions they trigger in people never fail to amaze me. Sometimes it’s just too partisan, too personal. But it reminds me how much the internal combustion engine, and the odd volt of electricity, matter to people. And that has to be a good thing.

So thank you to everyone who’s watched the video embeds, read the words, engaged in the forums and kept me on my toes. Keep enjoying your cars and bikes.

Chris

Lots of questions about videos and lack thereof - I hope this statement answers a few of them. http://chris-harris.kinja.com/statem...=1413181847142 …

I've had the most wonderful time working on @drive. A great team, and some great shows. But It's time to try something new.

And huge thanks to those who supported the pay-wall. But I think I can just about make it work for free, and need to see if it works.

Crucially, I'm staying involved with @drive on many current and future projects. But CHOC will move to a separate channel mid-november.

There is a new question swirling in the ether: “So which one would you have?” No preamble, zero pleasantries – just straight in with a query so straightforward and containing so much assumed knowledge that the protagonists don’t even warrant a mention in the narrative. What is your hypercar position?

Which one would you have?

I’ll open my response by saying I have studiously avoided giving any response because I didn’t want to pass comment until I’d driven all three at the same time, on the same circuit and on the same roads. If testing cars is your day-job, then it’s fair to say people should be able to assume that you have the capacity to remove all superfluous peripheral noise and be able to extract the key ingredients and behaviours of any car. But the launches of these three were so widely spaced, their locations so varied and the level of theatre surrounding them so extreme that I defy any of the few people who attended to each event to announce a clear ‘winner’. Partly because in the spirit of modern British primary school sports days – there shouldn’t be a winner; partly because they’re so different to each other.

But which one would you have?

Well, the case for each is actually quite easily made – and now almost a year has passed since the first of the three, the 918, was launched I think their respective personalities and performances have had time to develop, perhaps the more enlightening question to answer isn’t which is best, but which is the most surprising – and in many way’s the unequivocal answer is the slower-on-paper Porsche.

The 918 is the most complicated and, in terms of pure driving experience, the most compromised. It is heavier, less powerful, less extreme, less ‘hypercar’, but boy is it impressive.

Its powertrain is the most complicated in that it harvests electricity under braking and can be driven in fully-electric mode. Its chassis is four-wheel-drive, and the calibration work that went into defining what should go where, and when would make a NASA engineer scratch his or her head. But the net effect of all of this crazy technology is a very, very fast car. I have not conducted a lap-time comparison myself, but I hear those private individuals who have keep finding that the Porsche will keep up with a P1. I suspect much of this is down to traction from slower turns, but despite its power-to-weight deficit, the Porsche is immensely fast.

It can be a real handful though. It’s the only one of the three in which I found myself really leaning on the electronic chassis systems through high-speed turns. The Porsche also claimed the greatest number of comedy spins from the UK media who attended the launch. The Ferrari claimed a single scalp, likewise the McLaren.

Drive a P1 soon after a 918 and despite its hybrid powertrain and spaceship styling, in terms of communication and demeanour it feels about as advanced as a Caterham Seven. It’s smaller, more immediate, more aggressive and I suppose more straightforward. Quite how McLaren managed to make its beastly, near-1000hp hypership more approachable and more fun to drive than its blue-collar 650S is beyond me, but it really has.

I loved the P1. I was completely in its thrall. I drove it from 11pm to 1am on the Yas Marina circuit – never was there a better or more immediate antidote for jet-lag. For speed, braking, stability and the sense of being present at the dawn of something entirely new it left me speechless – well, capable only of emitting the same phrase about twenty times. The manual DRS and Boost functions were silly, but the rest was undeniably, ridiculously wonderful.

It could be argued that by the time Ferrari let us loose in the LaFerrari my body had become more accustomed to the new era of power-to-weight ratio, and was therefore less shocked, or maybe I was less jet-lagged. The latter wasn’t true: after a sleepless LA to Milan flight I fell asleep during Franco Cimatti’s tech presentation!

On the road the LaF felt way too much if you used even a fifth of its performance. Like riding a superbike in town, you spent every moment keeping it legal, as opposed to enjoying its capabilities – the same was true of the P1 in Abu Dhabi. I didn’t drive the Porsche on the road.

Back at Fiorano circuit we could let the car show its full potential – and the manner in which it foreshortened every straight was initially quite alarming, even using braking points and track knowledge from a fast-lapping F12. Traction was excellent, the chassis balance was decidedly 458; the propulsion was more Eurofighter.

The LaF straddles the gap between the 918 and the P1 – it is more obviously a car for use on the road (despite being way, way too fast for any situation – but then they all are really), but it will also blow your mind on the track. It didn’t stop quite as well as the McLaren – then it can harvest volts under brakes and the Macca cannot – but if anything it felt more accelerative and the noise from that V12 is just outrageous. Actually, the mention of noise reminds me they should be ranked for that, too… I’d go Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche. That’s the Porsche in third place, despite making a sound from the gods.

The LaF really does handle superbly – I think it has the most straightforward handling of the three – it really does feel like a very, very fast 458, but it can’t counter the P1’s transformers-style Track mode which sees it drop to floor-height and sprout the most stupendous rear-wing. I suspect when Ferrari saw that, a collective Doh! echoed around Maranello. For true high speed cornering potential, the P1 has to hold a clear advantage.

But which one would you have?

That was the original point – and the beautiful simplicity of that question is that you can allow yourself to be completely swayed by the most puerile, basic attributes.

Want the best looking? To my eyes, take the Porsche. The 918 somehow emerged from an awkward gestation as the most beautiful Stuttgart product since the 904 GTS. It is stunning. The LaF grows on me by the day though – in the flesh it has vast presence, and you think it can’t be bettered until you peer-in though the semi-naked rear of the P1 and wonder if such a machine can be classified as a ‘motor car’. It seems like an alien device.

And I think that is something I’ve come to realise over the past year – two of these cars feel like logical progressions of a model line-up; halo vehicles that have a strong connection to a well-understood brand DNA. Those are the Porsche and the Ferrari. But ever since I first saw it in the flesh, the P1 has always felt like it was dropped from another planet altogether. I love its size and its ferocity and its brilliant execution of the torque-fill concept that allows a vast, heavily turbocharged motor to use electricity to feel so immediate.

THE VERDICT: LAFERRARI VS. PORSCHE 918 VS. MCLAREN P1

So if I had the funds, based on what I know and what I like, I’d have a P1. Not necessarily the best, nor perhaps the fastest – but the closest to what I’d want in a hypercar.

And when I do drive all three together, which I will sometime soon, I fully expect to look-back at these words and laugh at how badly I called it.

'Oh, and think of a name for your column too." The words sat discarded at the bottom of a Hardigree email containing the details of the miserly sum he'd offered in exchange for me filling this space once a week. So I thought I'd write a column about how you might go about naming a column. And see if the process helped me name a column.

It is a fact – beyond the fact that repetition is the first sin of column writing – that naming a column is the more difficult than staying awake reading the Editor's missive at the front of an issue of Motor Trend. And that comparison probably tells you more about the way I intend to run this particular show than any name could. I've done my stint as raw-meat for the YouTube comments section, it's time for some revenge.

Because there are already enough carefully crafted personal words about our industry and the products it produces, so you don't need any more from me. This is a clever strategy because it neatly circumvents the unavoidable fact that I can't write as beautifully as many of those seasoned pros, but it also means we can make this stuff a bit punchier. Call it like it is

You know the drill: That whole zero-bull****, I'm totally independent and don't rely on the goodwill of the motor industry Gawker thing – which sits very uncomfortably with the beautiful Audi RS6 I have, er, sitting outside my house right now. Which Audi has lent me for six months. You don't get the RS6 over there; we do, it's ace. Did I ever tell you that I love Audis? Brilliant company. Best cars in the world. That is until the RS6 gets taken away, at which point they of course revert to being heaving ****-barges with front-axle push not seen since Dolly Parton did the wheelbarrow.

So should the name reflect that this column will say the unsayable; unearth the stories no one else would dare publish? No, because I'm not going to do that – Hardigree would love nothing more than a weekly dose of professional suicide from me, but the fact remains that I have to work in this industry, and that these car brands do actually spend a few pennies advertising on these websites, so deliberately antagonizing them – by saying things like the Mercedes GLA must have been designed in three bodily sections, but the respective teams clearly never actually met, exchanged words or saw each others' work, isn't clever. Or helpful.

Most of the conspiracy theories you read about in the weird little world I inhabit are just that – urban myths. Apart from the one about a German manufacturer having a list of journalists who are deemed especially 'sympathetic' to the brand, and who get special treatment.

That one's true.

'Loud pedal' 'VMax' 'Into the red zone.' Oh God help me. I'm going to have to trudge through the usual gamut of lazy, slightly **** oblique references to driving and being a gearhead.

'Intersection.' Nice word. Doesn't actually mean anything though. I'll prattle a bit more, see if it brings inspiration.

Did I tell you about the time I crashed an Aston Martin DBS on the launch event, then wrote a slightly scathing review, and the then CEO Dr. Bez went ape-****? Understandable I suppose, but despite it being only a little crash-ette he still wouldn't look at me, let alone talk to me for six years. He once shook the hands of five people standing next to me, and refused to shake mine. What a silly man. He's written a book about how great he is and published it himself. I'm so glad he's left Aston Martin.

I don't think there's a car company I haven't fallen-out with at some point. Even Porsche, and most people seem to think I'm paid by them. Wish I bloody was – all that crap I spout about 911s being brilliant and I've never seen a penny. I should invoice them

Years ago Merc went nuts when I said a Hyundai Coupe was better than a C320 coupe. And rightly so, looking back I must have been smoking something especially potent. I've had minor wars with everyone from BMW to Koenigsegg – and not because I've actually set out to have a war, but because car companies find it quite hard to accept that people might not think their car was the best thing ever committed to four wheels. Even when it's an Alfa Romeo. I mean, we're not in this to make friends, are we?

Actually I'm friends with most people at the moment, but that won't last long – it never does. Hold that for a minute: I'm not friends with Lamborghini. They got all hormonal about letting an Aventador go against an F12 a while back, largely because they knew it would get soundly thrashed in every dynamic department, and they don't like me any more.

This process isn't working. I'm spilling my guts here and am no closer to identifying a suitable soubriquet. ' Dust up'? Meaningless, context-less, not even witty.

I think what I'd like to do here each week is talk about stuff I might not be able to elsewhere. Because Matt's a bit fearless and doesn't really play by the unspoken rules of the motoring cartel. He kind of laughs at those, and I suppose I do, too. Or do I? I have a free Audi. I am writing this sitting on the Eurotunnel train, ticket paid for by Mercedes Benz. Much of what I do is paid for by car companies. And I have absolutely no problem with that.

The bit I have a problem with is the assumption that just because BMW lent me an M235i for several months, people think I'm unwilling to say that I'd rather disembowel myself than be seen within twenty feet of an X4. It can be done. You can accept an invitation to a product launch event, and still say the product is ****. Best of all, almost every car manufacturer will still invite you back on the next product launch. Which when you think about it is terribly open-minded and meritocratic.

Chris Harris's Jalopnik Column, on Jalopnik. That's the best I can do Matt. For both our sakes', I hope the content is better than the naming skills.

Much like the humble butterfly and Doctor Who, the BMW M3 always suffers when it regenerates. After the media speculation and the unveil and the admission that Tom Baker really was a bit OTT, comes the usual diatribe of how something has been lost from old to new. It’s quite telling that much of the critical ammunition aimed at these new versions of performance icons (yes, the confused metaphor has now moved from Time Lord to Bavarian automobile) is non-specific. It trades on subjective negativity and quite often grudgingly accepts that, underneath it all, the new car is actually faster, more efficient and, well, better.

As you can tell I rather dislike the older-is-better mantra. In my experience there are very few performance cars which are replaced by inferior products, because the companies that make them are very good at what they do, and the engineers who define them are talented enough to know what is right and wrong. Occasionally one slips through the net – the original Ferrari 575 Maranello was a largely bespoiled 550 Maranello – but they rectified that with some hasty chassis upgrades.

But the M3 appears to be stuck in something of a rose-tinted-rut, and the F80 version is now being quite heavily panned in the UK specialist press (I think it’s a brilliant package), so we’d best start from the beginning and try to de-bunk some of the myths.

We begin in 1985 and with BMW about to spend serious marketing budget on some touring car racing. The basis for this is the E30 3-Series, but it is heavily modified with changes to the shell, the suspension and the introduction of the S14 4-cylinder motor which is ideal for motorsport. The street car costs way more than the existing 325i range-topper, but the car sells well everywhere, despite being left-hand-drive-only.

Was the E30 M3 as good as they all said it was? A moot point, but on balance it probably was. The steering was sublime, the chassis had a superb blend of balance and grip and it looked superb. But the motor was coarse and brash and to out-drag a 325i it needed to be thrashed. As a road car, a 325i Sport with the optional LSD was probably a better bet, but for the obsessive few, the E30 was irresistible.

It was replaced by the E36 M3 in 1992 and, surprise surprise, the motoring media decried the loss of the ‘real’ M3 conveniently ignoring a far superior inline-six giving a big performance advantage and a very competent chassis. The M3 had allegedly gone soft; it was no longer a racing car for the road – not that the E30 ever felt like one in the first place, but hey, why let facts get in the way of subjectivity. There was one justifiable point of criticism though – the 3-litre E36 M3 had a horribly slow steering rack. But they fixed that in the later 3.2 version.

Drive a 3.2 E36 M3 Coupe back-to-back with a 2.3 litre E30 M3 and you might just struggle to understand what all the fuss over the early car was about.

A few of m’learned colleagues tried to call the usual ‘not a real M3’ when the E46 version was launched in 2001, but that was complete *****. In fairness, most people immediately recognised that they were in the presence of greatness, and the E46 M3’s legacy still endures. It looked right, it sounded right, it felt right. Sometimes a car’s overall talents actually exceed what you’d expect even considering the excellence of the individual components. This was one of them.

The E90/92 M3 wasn’t quite. It didn’t steer quite so well, the new V8 revved like a maniac but it had a tragic thirst and a weeny fuel tank which drove owners mad. And despite being very competent, it didn’t quite have the same feeling of all-round excellence, with the steering lacking some life. But even so, it was and still is a cracking car. Was some of the criticism leveled at it compared to the E46 deserved? I defended the E92 at the time, but I think on reflection it probably was justified.

Now we have the F80 M, and the purists are terribly unhappy. Unhappy with the lexicon of evil technologies: turbocharging, electric steering, dual-clutch gearboxes. Unhappy that it doesn’t handle on the race track and it’s not very good on the road and that the engine noise is rubbish – and I really don’t understand what they’re talking about. I think it’s a corker.

For starters it’s massively lighter than the car it replaces, and yet it has more power and torque. This means it will sprint from rest to 100mph in a little over 8sec. That places it in a completely different performance category to the previous V8.

Yes, the steering is lifeless but then so was the E92’s. And for that matter the E46’s. And the E36’s. In fact the only M3 to ever steer particularly pleasantly was the E30. And that ended production in 1992. On bumpy Portuguese roads I found the damping superb, so long as you were in the softest setting. Most of the time I couldn’t tell the thing was turbocharged because throttle response was immediate and the thing wanted to rev right to the limiter. The noise was pretty uninspiring, but I find it hard to severely criticise that in a modern M3, when the original, never-to-be-bettered E30 M3 sounds about as appealing as a lawn tractor.

Furthermore, as a 4-door, I think it’s the best-looking M3 ever. That’s subjective, but I have to allow myself some margin for baseless opinion!

It’s also hugely more economical – the cost probably won’t bother too many M3 owners – but being able to cover 300 miles on a tank certainly will. The optional ceramic brakes are immense, the one-piece front seats (again, optional) are ace and, you know what, I’m actually struggling to think of bad things to say about a car that’s taking quite a kicking in the media. Either I’m out-of-touch, or my colleagues are looking for things in an everyday, discreet but crazy-fast saloon car that I am not.

Maybe I’m just wrong? Wouldn’t be the first time. But if I was spending my own money on a fast car for 2015, it would be an M3 saloon. Maybe a red one.

Oh how the generations change – where I was once asked by my father to go and count the rivets on the Forth Bridge as his respite for moments of abject infant irritation, life is so much simpler for me. I simply tell the boy to get online and attempt to number the different variants of Porsche 991 – shazzam – an entire rainy afternoon zips by in a frenzy of ‘do they make a 2WD Targa?’ type questions.

Does Porsche indeed make a 2WD Targa? According to my son, no it doesn’t. Are all Porsche 911s the same? No they are not – here’s a brief blagger’s guide to what’s hot and what’s not.

Rule of thumb with Ferdi’s bum-powered sportster is that there is no rule of thumb. Just when you think you have carte blanche to apply generalisations across certain portions of the 911 range, you will uncover something problematic.

This is certainly the case with the coupé, that is the base 2WD coupé, known as the Carrera. Purists often laud the smaller engined (this time 3.4-litre) of the two cars as being best, and in previous models this has been the case, but it isn’t in the 991 range. I can’t quite believe that I’m about to suggest that a 350hp car with a 178mph claimed top-speed is lacking some grunt, but the 991 is quite a big lump and the extra 50hp and 37lb ft of the 3.8-litre S model make a difference. Do they make £10,000 of a difference? No. But then come resale time, you’ll probably find shifting an ‘S’ model much easier, so the real-world difference might be somewhat less.

Manual or paddles? The manual should be preferable, but the 7-speed version in the 991 is a mangled version of the PDK system and the lever just isn’t very pleasant to use. So, whisper it, I’d have paddles.

Fancy steering and chassis systems? Avoid them all. Take your 911 with normal suspension and normal steering ratio.

I’d have an S over a base Carrera, but would I have 2WD or 4WD? Again, the 911 purist scoffs at front-axle drive the way we he does at novelty-editons of the great single malts. Talisker Dark Storm? Oh please grow up. But the slight fly in the whiskey here is that when you ask Walter Röhrl, two-time rally world Champion and Porsche ambassador what 911 he always chooses, he will answer ‘the Carrera 4’. Damn.

His reasons for this are quite simple: ‘Traction and stability’. He doesn’t care about the teensy bit of extra weight or the wider body style or really what size of motor it has (therefore completely de-bunking my work above), but he always goes 4WD. And I kind of agree with him. With four driven wheels the 991 is monumentally accomplished in all conditions and any argument suggesting that the 2WD car moves around a bit more and is more fun doesn’t stack-up because both offer levels of grip that if over-stepped on the public highway will land you in trouble.

But I think the Carrera 4 is just too wide. Nearly another 50mm on a car which is, in my worthless opinion, already way too wide for a 911. So I’d stick with a Carrera 2S.

What about a convertible? Porsche 911 cabs are always brilliantly engineered and they drive far, far better than most be-headed sportscars, and the 911 is no different. But it now has competition from the new Targa which, to my eyes looks brilliant and offers almost as much open-air fun. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d take a Targa 4S over any Convertible 991.

The fast ones? The agony of choice. If you don’t drive on track and you want the ultimate all-weather performance car, have a Turbo. The classifieds show that everyone appears to buying the Turbo S model, which offers ceramic brakes and lots besides as standard, but I think the non-S is the clever choice. It is already obscenely fast and I like the inverse snobbery of owning the ‘poverty’ spec 911 Turbo.

Oh, and make sure you tick the heated seats button on the options list – for some reason they’re not standard on a £120,598 Porsche. Nor is a rear-wiper (necessary) or floor mats (robbery). The 997 Turbo was a mixed-bag, the 991 Turbo is the 911 at its very, very best – albeit with the wide Carrera 4 body style.

And the 911 luminary – the 991 GT3? The well-publicised engine recall is now completed, and despite all the sabre-rattling from disgruntled owners, it seems not many people rejected their cars. Understandably so – accepting that it’s a paddle-shift only, the GT3 is a crazy amount of car for the money. I’d have one in a flash.

So where does that leave us?

Normal 911: Carrera S PDK
Open: Targa 4S PDK
Fast road: Turbo
Fast road/track: GT3

And to save you the laborious inquest next week. My findings on the subject of the best model in the Ferrari F12 range are as follows: the Ferrari F12 is the best F12.

The problem with writing a column with the working title 'the problem with Lamborghini' just before a major motor show is that it doesn't account for the possibility that Lamborghini might unveil its best concept car since the Miura. But even post-Asterion unveil, I think Lamborghini has regressed into being a caricature of what it thinks the world wants it to be.

The genius of Lamborghinis in the past was that they justified the pornographic styling by being brilliant to drive – well, post Miura. But the Miura gets away with being a bit rubbish to drive because it's a stunner and it has a transverse V12. An idea so bat-**** it deserves the Nobel for just existing.12

But the Countach is truly amazing. People forget that Walter Wolf got hold of that thing and made it a proper drivers' car. Mate of mine you might know called Harry Metcalfe has a four-valve version and it still feels fast enough to scare the crap out an unsuspecting passenger. But it kind of stops and the steering is pretty delicious at speed. Anything that looks like it should deliver the ultimate driving experience and then gets very, very close is a hero car.

And in period, a late Countach QV would laugh at a Testarossa. Because the Testarossa claimed to have 390hp, which was way down on the Countach's 455hp, but might have just about been enough pant-bulge to bring to the 1987 generic supercar shootout – if indeed those 390 horses were actually in attendance. Sadly, unless you were in dense fog by the ocean on an especially chilly morning, a Testarossa has never ran three ninety. It had more like three seventy. Or sixty.

These were the bad days of Ferrari. And I know this is supposed to be about Lamborghini, but bear with me because I want to suggest the beginnings of a conceit that links the two Italian supercar houses as their fortunes change over time.

Il Commendatore didn't really care about Ferrari street cars, and the Testarossa epitomized that thinking. It handled like a drunk lobster and it wasn't very fast – but it looked flipping awesome. Maranello had become a styling show by the mid '80s – the cars were poorly built, dynamically shabby but people bought them because they looked good and had a decent badge. They were entirely style over substance; at a time when Lamborghinis were the opposite. So much so that when Luca De Montezemolo arrived in 1992, he was shocked at how bad the cars were. He forced changes.

The first all-new LDM Ferrari was the 355. It was an instant classic, and it started undoubtedly the greatest unbroken lineage of great Ferrari road cars in the company's history. I've had my problems with the boys and girls in Maranello over the years, but the cars have been spectacularly good for a very long time now.

And after the Countach, Lamborghini continued to support the outer-limits of acceptable car styling with real power figures and great driving characteristics – oh, and scissor doors. You have to have silly doors. Even when Audi got involved it gave us the 6-litre Diablo which is still one of the best supercars I've ever driven. You could argue things improved even more with the Murcielago, and the final LP 640s, with a stick and three pedals, were perhaps the definitive analogue Italian supercars.

Then came the Aventador, and with it came some trouble. It looked, and it still looks, like it landed from Mars. It's the best looking supercar of them all, I think, and that's why it sells in such obscene numbers. This proves that styling and noise are everything in supercarland – because it's not very good to drive. The Aventador is the first Lamborghi I've driven that can't support its looks with adequate dynamics.

The Gallardo pictured above never had that problem, but then the Gallardo lived too long a life. Endless special editions, facelifts and tweaks during the period that Ferrari sold the 360, the 430 and the 458. Watching the Gallardo go all Gandalf made me think Lamborghini was in trouble; driving the Aventador on a track confirmed it. After three laps the brakes caught fire. But that didn't really matter because the understeer was contaminating the driving experience so much that I wanted to stop anyway. Only I couldn't because the brakes were shagged.

Then I drove another Aventador, and it understeered less, but its brakes were still combustible. And this worried me because there's only one thing worse than a car shaped like a spaceship that doesn't deliver the goods, and that's one which appears to be inconsistent from example to example. So I phoned mates who do the same as me for a living and they all said, yep, they'd never driven two Aventadors that handled the same. That's not a good thing.

How many photos have you seen of the new Huracan fully-sideways? Of course that's a puerile way of assessing a car's dynamic attributes, but find me those images. They don't exist because Lamborghini is now the purveyor of understeer. They haven't let me drive one yet and this column probably won't alter that situation, but everyone I speak to whose opinion I trust says it just pushes. Lamborghinis should not push. And some honcho from Sant Agata was quoted on the launch event boasting about how the most impressive aspect of the new Huracan was it being easy to drive for the Chinese market.

And that statement is the one that links back to the mess Ferrari was in in the late 80s – Lamborghini has lost the plot. It has become the purveyor of jewelry. Its cars exist to be seen and heard; not driven. Style has superseded substance. Their natural habitat has now been reduced to revving when stationary on the King's Road in London – not Imola or the Futa pass or Valentino Balbone scorching the back- pistas of Modena, but with some mindless billionaire's offspring pushing the right pedal to get himself seen on some equally mindless YouTube channel. Never has a car brand skulked so far from the origins that defined its past greatness. Typing that makes me so sad.45

So I really do think Lamborghini is in trouble. Even after all these years of German ownership it doesn't sit easily within the VW Group. The Huracan will have the new Audi R8 – effectively the same car – snapping at its heels and it can't (thankfully, some might say) expand into SUVs and big sedans because that's Porsche and Bentley's role. Of course, what Lambo should be doing is making million-dollar low volume specials, but when it does that we get the Veneno, which next to the LaFerrari and friends looked like a self-build by someone harboring severe *****-envy.6

Can the Asterion stop the rot? I hope so. It's a brilliant concept and were it to make production it would be the perfect antibiotic to counter the germs of understeer, if indeed they can purge the thing of generic Lambo-understeer.7

If they don't build it, then I think the future is bleak, at least until someone asserts themselves in a De Montezemolo-style intervention. Until then, Lamborghinis are the perfect cars for people who can't drive and want to be seen.

Turbocharging is supposed to gag the vocal qualities of the gasoline internal combustion engine, but the team at AMG clearly ignored this engineering stipulation. The start-up Ka-ka-ka-BOOOOOOOOM of the new twin-turbocharged GT S coupe is, if anything, even more cacophonous than the last generation normally aspirated AMG V8s. With the exhaust flaps set to noisy, it booms and fidgets at idle and each little exploratory prod of throttle sees the revs shoot above 4000rpm and is followed by great cracks and crackles of ECU overrun fakery. Even when stationary, the GT S is more exuberant than a Porsche 911 at full-chat.

Previous experience tells us that AMG knows how to do exuberant very, very well – what we didn’t know was if the company’s first attempt at the toughest sports car sector of them all, the one named after that pesky Porsche would be a step too far. I’ve just spent a day at Laguna Seca Raceway attempting to answer this.

First we should discuss the subject of styling – not something I should be doing because I normally refuse to pass judgment on subjective aesthetics, but you need to know one thing about the GT – it somehow doesn’t quite work in photographs, but it really does in the flesh. If you’re drawing breath between a clenched jaw and shaking your head, just wait until you see one on the road – it’s a great shape. It looks short, wide, low and aggressive. The long bonnet, truncated bottom shape is undeniably Jaguar F-Type Coupe in silhouette, and it has purpose.

The cars we used on track were the Edition One launch specials with some rather inadvisable nose and tail additions – the standard looks far better to my eyes.

The GT is in effect a cut-down SLS. It uses the same track widths and much of that car’s floorpan. The front suspension is carried over too, as is the hydraulic steering rack. Both of these are very good news: the front suspension assembly is massively over-engineered and effectively of race specification, and we all know how well electric power steering appears to be going down with the enthusiast community. Entering a battle with the 911 carrying a hydraulic rack is like tackling Superman with a fluorescent green rock in your pocket – a very handy advantage.

So the wheelbase is shorter than the SLS’s, and into the rear is attached an all-new rear suspension assembly: multi-link in design, and on this ‘S’ model a transaxle dual-clutch gearbox that incorporates a variable locking differential.

Connected to this via a whopping carbonfibre prop-shaft is the new twin-turbo V8, codename M178. Wedged in behind the front axle line, it’s a packaging miracle with two turbochargers sitting in between the cylinder V – fed by an intake tract that runs down the length of the underside of the bonnet and directly into the heads – creating what AMG calls the ‘Hot-V’.

Capacity is four litres and the outputs place this car firmly in 911 turbo territory: 510hp and 479lb ft. That’s for the launch model GT S – a less powerful 462hp GT arrives next summer in the UK. It will be a more direct rival for normally aspirated 911s, but still way more potent than the Porsche.

It’s a very trick motor, dry-sumped and with minimal intake length to provide the best possible throttle response. It uses complicated engine mapping to create a torque curve that should feel almost normally aspirated. Interestingly, in full manual mode with the RACE setting engaged, a little more torque is allowed in the mid-range.

I only drove the car, a GT S Edition One, on track yesterday, so that’s the driving behavior we’ll discuss here. I’ll have a go on the road later today, but Mr. Editor Chris-R wanted his words pronto!

Joy of all joys, the driving position is perfect – it wasn’t quite in the SLS. The wheel pulls close to your chest, the special bucket seats are quite thinly padded but clinch in all the necessary places and the centre console is high and wide. On it are large, widely spaced buttons for all the chassis and transmission options. Three damper settings, numerous transmission settings, including a full-manual mode for the Getrag dual-clutch 7 speed ‘box which is heavily updated over the SLS – and needed to be.

Rolling away from the pit-lane exit at Laguna, the GT S feels instantly potent – and not just ordinarily quick – the turbo V8 spits it forwards with unexpected force and you instinctively grab another gear to calm the thing down. But it just keeps on pulling. The effective power-band is from 3000rpm to 6500rpm – the final 500rpm doesn’t add much beyond the ability to hold a gear into a braking zone.

And it’s a characterful motor – the volume is high, the urge is instant and the over-run crackles get louder the harder you try. It doesn’t quite have the same response as the last M156 normally aspirated AMG V8, but it counters by offering brutal mid-range and, dare I say it, an even better noise. As an exercise in attempting to replicate a high performance atmospheric engine with something blown, I think this is the best I’ve seen. BMW’s V8 (M5/X5M) and straight six (M3/M4) are great efforts, but this matches sheer performance and surprising response with real character.

The chassis is better still. That short wheelbase brings more agility than in the Gullwing, the car turns accurately and predictably and as a driver you feel more naturally positioned within the car than in the long-nosed SLS. The standard Pilot Super Sports grip really well at the front axle and traction is really superb – better than the SLS. But what really surprised me, and what confirms all the hard work on eliminating turbo-lag is the way you can adjust the line with the throttle several times in a given turn. The car feels adjustable and playful.

With the powertrain set to Sport Plus, the ESP in Sport mode and the dampers in the firmest position, anyone could drive the GT fast. The ESP and ABS intervention is so smooth and progressive you hardly know they’re working and you take huge liberties trail-braking into turns. The brakes, optional ceramics on the test car, are immense – no fade after four laps of Laguna. The whole powertrain is suspended on dynamic engine mounts that can stiffen when needed: you can feel them working on the track and it feels more nimble than the 1540kg kerb weight would suggest.

I expected this car to be belter, but it’s actually exceeded expectations. I need to go for a pootle on the road and try the gearbox in slush mode and see what the ride is like with the dampers in pillow mode and then tell you more about the packaging and the cabin and the size of the glovebox, but right now I love the quasi-hot rod character matched against some real track ability – wrapped in a body that works outside the sports-car cliché.

Will report back again when I’ve had a go on the road. For now, I’d put that F-Type R order on hold.

Ken Block giving a ride to the automotive journalist Chris Harris in his Mustang #Hoonicorn RTR for the #GymkhanaSEVEN.