Originally Posted by lenny b

surely the rush of heavy metal has never looked or sounded better than in the movie Bullitt. And I'm not talking about the Mustang GT390. Even with its ripped-off GT40 soundtrack and the benefit of Steve McQueen's tasty car control, the permanently smoke-wreathed, axle-tramping Ford took forever to dump that black and comparatively huge Dodge Charger.

In real life it wasn't like that. The stunt team responsible for the celluloid duel admitted that the big cube combatants weren't evenly matched. Out of the crate, the bulky Dodge had too much for the 'Stang; the problem was getting the cars to stay in the same shot. Now tell me you weren't rooting for the Charger all along. Then you wore thick-framed Ray-Bans for a week, right?

If so, you're probably up for this. We're about to ignite a four-way, 1627bhp, Blighty vs Bavaria megasaloon grunt-fest and scorch some tarmac of our own (or pleat it in the case of one massively powerful all-drive contender from Ingolstadt) on the winding roads of the Somerset and Devon coast. But first we have an empty Thruxton race circuit to play with...

This will, of course, be a grin. Heaps of weight, preposterous power. Which is a different proposition entirely to achieving speed by removing mass. Major metal wrapped around *****-grade firepower requires alternative thinking. Might as well crank commitment up to max too, because there's little room for error once things get moving. Everything to do with sliding may seem to happen in slo-mo but the physics are just as inevitable and the values more spectacular.

You can't just jink or twitch your way out of a situation, either. Go with the flow, but only having already worked out which way the flow is going. No good focusing on your fingertips. We're talking big, pre-emptive inputs, liberal use of corrective lock and throttle travel; real, physical cockpit action. You've got to loosen up, wipe the sweat from your palms, boss it.

Then? Well, there's just something about lighting up rubber the size of real estate, seeing the scenery streak to liquid grey-green then pan from windscreen to side window, smoke simultaneously funnelling across the span of all three mirrors. The sensation of speed may not be as intense as in a tarmac-skimming sports car, but the feeling of momentum is vaguely awesome. Mighty forces are at work and you're at their fulcrum. It honestly doesn't get much better if you like your action large.

But it's immediately apparent that, without doing any of this, the Audi RS6 (£57,700, 444bhp) doesn't seem to slow down for Thruxton's corners. It has enormous all-drive grip, traction and drive out of bends. It will even kick its tail wide at a businesslike angle if you lift out of its preferred steady understeer suddenly. From the outside it sounds like the super-concentrated American V8 of a Le Mans Corvette racer muffled by a 30-tog duvet. On the inside it's as quiet and comfortable as it possibly can be given the ambient scream of the tyres and violent transient shifts in g-force pressure against those sculpted Recaros.
Astounding and anodyne at the same time.

The natural off-the-leash attitude of the BMW M5 (£52,000, 400bhp) is a kind of insouciant, ***-on oversteer McQueen himself would dig. Given sufficient incentive, it will scribe long, languid, 'it's-nothing-really' arcs with clouds curling off the rear arches all day long. It relaxes into a powerslide with a sigh. Nothing much seems to change. Steering weight and feel are just as good on opposite lock. Stability and suspension control, too. All the driver has to do is balance the relative quantities of throttle and corrective steering. There isn't an optimum angle of drift as such. Shallow or deep, the M5 is cool with both -and anything in between. On the track, it was born to burn rubber.

Needing even less encouragement to break loose at the rear with the traction-scavenging electronics switched off, the S-type R (£47,400, 400bhp) does its best to ape the Bee Em's balletic ballistics through the snaking Complex and will go just as smokily sideways but dissipates more speed in the endeavour. It also requires a little more work at the helm to keep the slide tidy; bumps the M5 doesn't seem to notice modulate the Jag's rear-end grip and unsettle the calm of the suspension. It sounds a little strained fully wrung-out too, sharply metallic supercharger whine souring the more mellifluous backbeat of its big, quad-cam V8.

But the most brutal sight of the morning is truly astonishing. Somehow larger. Somehow darker. Somehow broadside for an eternity. Different sound, too: lower, less distinct, more akin to a force of nature. That once feared presence is back - the Lotus Carlton.

We registering any public hysteria yet? Choppers been put on alert? Perhaps it's just as well the new guns in this gang - Audi RS6, Jaguar S-type R, BMW M5 - are down with the concealment angle. Soberly suited in true Reservoir Dogs style, they're careful to present a reassuringly benign face to the world compared with the LC. Hormonal bulges have been smoothed and chamfered, big scary wings and chins left on designers' drawing boards.

The only common signifiers of their phenomenal performance are disc brakes that are nearly as big as those vast wheels which fill the wheelarches as snugly as knuckles in a duster, and callipers (eight-pot for the RS6) hanging behind the spokes like sides of beef. Step back and the look is superhero-trying-to-blend-in, especially the Audi which somehow squeezes a set of 19x8.5in rims under its carefully inflated arches. The M5 and S-type R stuff barely less extravagant 18-inchers under their lightly flared wings and opt for fatter rims at the back: a racecar-aping ten inches for the BMW, half an inch wider than the Jag's. All beautifully de-emphasised, of course, although the M5 - dated as it's now beginning to seem in some ways - only just manages to keep its enormous potential for kinetic thuggery on the safe side of discretion.

Ten years ago the Lotus Carlton knew nothing of steroidal stealth, much less political correctness. The 176mph, 377bhp 'cause for public concern' was neither self-conscious nor apologetic. Quite the opposite, and it's easy to understand why. Between them, GM and Lotus had to perform a modern day miracle: turn the acme of humdrum family saloons, the Vauxhall Carlton, into something that could embarrass any supercar this side of a Ferrari F40 and for which they could charge £48,000.

Apart from the mind-boggling feat of actually summoning the necessary performance, the idea was to bury the core identity and homely image beneath a hugely suggestive muscle suit as pumped-up as today's equivalents are sucked-in. In the event the Carlton bit wasn't completely subsumed. Just enough of it remained to twist the knife into the egos of drivers of more conventional supercars humbled by its pulverising pace. This car was too much to stomach for some people, and not just Porsche 911 pilots. Questions about its right to exist were asked in Parliament. Sensitive souls wanted it banned.

Which makes it infamous, iconic and, quite possibly, legendary - a kind of McLaren F1 of tin tops. Its right to be here needn't be questioned. It earns its wild card both for being the bad-*** blueprint for the megasaloon genre and submitting a set of stats that haven't sagged with age, even though engine technology has ascended from the tree tops to the stratosphere in the intervening decade. You just wouldn't think a 24-valve 3.6-litre straight six developed from the 3-litre lump in the GSi 3000 (even one blown by two Garrett T25 turbos fed through a 'chargecooler') could pose any kind of threat to the state-of-the-art, superheated V8s deployed by the class of 2002. And with a quoted peak power output of 377bhp at 5200rpm it's true that the Carlton is 23bhp shy of the 400bhp pumped out by the normally aspirated 5-litre M5 and supercharged 4.2-litre S-type R and a breezy 67bhp behind the 444bhp twin-turbo 4.2-litre Audi.

Game over, then? It's hardly begun. The Lotus Carlton's first ace is that it weighs 1685kg - beefy enough to qualify for the 'heavy metal' brigade, but significantly more svelte than the next lightest car, the 1720kg M5. The Jag piles another 80 kilos on top of that and the Audi is 40 heavier than the Jag. It means that with a power/weight ratio of 231bhp/ton, the LC gives little away to the M5 (236bhp/ton) and pips the 226bhp/ton S-type R. Only the RS6 is out on its own with 245bhp/ton.

But not even the Audi can match the old-timer for raw twisting effort: 419lb ft at 4200rpm plays 413lb ft. All right, that's 413lb ft between 1950 and 5600rpm but the Carlton's torque curve looks about as peaky as Ayres Rock and benefits from mechanical six-speed drive to the rear wheels rather than via a torque converter to all four.

The only other car with a manual six-speed box, the M5, has a comparatively modest-looking 368lb ft at 3800rpm to play with. True, its ratios are somewhat snappier (the LC will pull 80mph in second and is geared to do 287mph in sixth - or 2250rpm at 100mph) but then, when it comes to the torque/weight ratio our almost pristine LC (preserved by Vauxhall with just 12,000 miles on the clock for perspective-focusing exercises just such as this) is way ahead of the modern game with 253lb ft/ton, followed by the Jaguar (230), Audi (228) and the BMW (218).

When John Barker took the Lotus Carlton to Millbrook for Performance Car in 1991, it recorded the following figures: 0-60mph in 4.8sec, 0-100mph in 10.6sec, a standing quarter of 13.2sec (at 114mph) and a top speed of 163mph round the two-mile bowl, which would have equated to a surefire 170mph+ on the flat, possibly even that controversial 176mph claimed top speed. Too good for modern cars limited to 155mph, though there seems little doubt the M5 and S-type would be able to crack 170mph given the opportunity and Audi reckons the RS6 would be knocking on the door of 190mph. It also claims the RS6 can blast to 60mph in 4.7sec. We'll wait for a right hooker before taking a full set of figures but at Thruxton this German-registered car couldn't quite dip below five seconds and was into the high 11s on the clock before it hit the ton. Even the best independent figures we've seen for the RS6 put it nearly a second off the pace of the Lotus Carlton at 100mph. Old metal rules in the sprint.

Continued...

Comments: 0

Originally Posted by Nat21

Amazing cars. Think their clubmeet up at Billing is sometime this month when theres usually 10-15 on show Used to work at Billing in arcades in summer hols from school and it was always the highlight of all the car shows for me!!!

Originally Posted by chris's scooby

If its not a stupid question why is the top speed reached in 5th not 6th?

Originally Posted by Brendan Hughes

14k is peanuts for such awesome performance and reputation.

Would people pay that much, or are these a car that is great to own provided someone else is picking up the bills?