Car review

Famed German speed merchants break the habit of a lifetime to deliver an uber-Porsche 911 Some things just go contrary to the natural automotive order, such as a Porsche 911-based Brabus conversion.I mean, what next, an Audi RS4 by Alpina Anybody who remembers the heyday of lunatic, Brabus-fettled Mercedes-Benzes with Ferrari-crushing power will find even the idea odd, never mind the reality. German tuners (in fairness, Brabus is more than a tuner and has manufacturer status, just like Alpina) mostly stay in their lane when it comes to their affiliations with the big manufacturers.So Brabus has swerved off script, but don’t mistake the surprising existence of this 900 Rocket R – a €549,130 (£470,975), 25-off creation based on the 911 Turbo S – for rash decision-making. Brabus has long yearned to plough the Weissach furrow, so it has always been a matter of when, not if.In any case, over-endowed Mercedes saloons will continue to be the beating heart of the business, as shown by the numerous half-finished AMG GT 4-Door Coupés, S-Classes and E-Classes in the workshop during our visit to the sprawling Bottrop facility.A marauding, 8ft-tall Crawler (imagine a G-Wagen-style CFRP body on a dune-bashing tubular chassis) lurking in the corner also confirms that Brabus’s sense of humour remains in rude health.Why do a Porsche? The reasons aren’t complicated. Brabus sought to build its most dynamic car ever and with it create an all-new Rocket – a badge reserved for only the most involved and powerful conversions. Brand allegiances aside, Brabus knows that in terms of natural agility and grip, Porsche has the better of Mercedes. It is, after all, the true sports car marque of the two.As for why the Turbo S was specifically chosen, again, not complicated. It’s the 911 that is most Brabusy. The Carrera isn’t wild enough and the GT3 is too racy. Neither quite tallies with the company’s unofficial ‘300kph with one hand on the wheel’ mantra, but the Turbo does. Power, security and relative luxury are in its DNA.What turns a 911 Turbo S into a 900 Rocket R is split almost equally between what’s visible and what is hidden from view. A donor car is stripped then fitted with a 70mm-wider CFRP bodykit. The extra width is in the offset of the forged, turbo-disc wheels, rather than any changes to the suspension, and attention to detail is clear. Canyon-esque vents that inhale or expel airflow are artfully torn in the flanks and the ducktail spoiler flows into the rear haunches seamlessly. It's plenty lairy.As for mechanicals, the Bilstein damper rates are a little firmer across the board, although they still work through the factory driving modes. Meanwhile, an Inconel exhaust, larger turbos and an additional ECU take power from 641bhp to 888bhp and torque from 590lb ft to 738lb ft. It’s an uplift that the fastest A-to-B car on the planet scarcely needed, but Brabus has always been about outrageous power, and its efforts with Porsche’s 3.7-litre flat six don't disappoint.Brabus admits that the aesthetic of its cars matters to many clients as much as anything else, but the R’s aero is not without substance. The company uses Toyota’s wind tunnel in Cologne (which operated around the clock during Formula 1’s V10 era), and while this Rocket makes less downforce than the 911 Turbo S, high-speed stability is helped by a subtle increase in rake.Top speed is pegged at 211mph, but only because that's what Continental’s SportContact 7 tyres are rated to. With the right rubber, the R would be faster. Maybe 240mph. After all, the PDK ’box is geared to 330mph.Driving the Rocket R is – hold the front page – a lot like driving the regular Turbo S, although distinctions exist. The visible drop in ride height and the tightening up of vertical body movement results in a discernible uplift in responsiveness.Unexpectedly, the steering is lighter than standard. It’s fingertippy at speed. Mind you, it’s also susceptible to tramlining. Not so fingertippy. It’s still a terrifically precise helm, underlining the R’s usability – if you can stand the real but fabricated dump-valve whoosh.Also note that the R rides nicely. Very nicely indeed. Brabus's cars are in general defined by their improbable power, but long-distance comfort is equally important to the company, hence its natural affinity with Mercedes saloons. This 911 Turbo-derived model isn't especially quiet at high speed but it has an effortlessly long stride and surprisingly silken gait. And what about performance? Oh boy, the R has it. The extra boost leaves this engine feeling less tame, but it picks up cleanly, is still so linear and never, ever lets up – at least not until well beyond 150mph. Neither is traction an issue, on dry asphalt anyway.In truth, you only really begin to notice the extra oomph this Brabus has over the donor Turbo S when you're flat-out in the final thrid of the rev range. Most of the time, the thing's as sure-footed and rapid as the regular car, which is to say extremely.There was a time when certain members of Mercedes’ board were commuting with a little Bottrop magic under the bonnet of their company cars. It’s unlikely that Oliver Blume and co will be seen in a 900 Rocket R, but were any of Porsche’s top brass ever to slide aboard, they might, I suspect, quite like it. This car preserves the broad-batted essence of the 992-generation Turbo S but brings a dash of GT3 RS-style flamboyance and drama.

Mazda's aging offbeat family SUV still offers driver appeal atop solid foundations Mazda is a firm that tends to do things its own way, and the Mazda CX-5 is no different.Sure, this family SUV from Hiroshima conforms to a few norms. It’s fairly traditionally styled and offers lots of trim variations and options, but where it is firmly different from rivals is in the powertrains.A 2.0-litre naturally aspirated petrol engine in a big SUV? A 2.5-litre with four-wheel drive? And a diesel!? In this day and age?The original CX-5 got in fairly early on the current craze for SUVs, and a remarkable 1.5 million units were built and sold around the world over a six-year lifespan. So this second-generation model, with its zany power options has a lot of heavy lifting to do.Mazda plainly has the SUV segment’s premium and semi-premium brand players in its sights but sets out to undercut them by several grand in some cases once equipment level is taken into account.This means the CX-5’s main rivals range from mid-level models such as the Ford Kuga, Kia Sportage and Skoda Karoq right through to the cheaper end of the market with the Citroën C5 Aircross.

Is the Mk5 Range Rover better than not only all its peers, but all its predecessors too? We find out For more than 50 years, the Range Rover has simply done what it does: combine the best off-road ability with a plushness – a theme Land Rover pretty much claims it invented. It has, traditionally, been a car you can take anywhere: from checking the fences in the bottom field in the morning, to the market, to a school pick-up, then out for an opera, all in a day.The questions are whether that is something it still needs to do today and, if so, just how much car does it take to do it? Land Rover sells SUVs in 130 countries and they all have different ways of doing things – and different amounts of space in which to do it. We’re already aware that the Range Rover is a big car, more than five metres long and two metres wide across the body even in its more modest forms.We use the term modest lightly. There are three bodystyles to choose from, none of which are small. There's the standard wheelbase, long wheelbase and long wheelbase with seven seats.And one can go much further: the standard wheelbase car gets four trim levels, the long wheelbase two and the long wheelbase with seven seats two more. Plus there are petrol, diesel and plug-in hybrid models to choose from. And that's before you even get into more bespoke Special Vehicle Operations territory. This makes the Range Rover not just a high-end SUV but one that wants to be a luxury car, too.With such a degree of choice and personalisation, rivals for a Range Rover are slightly hard to pin down. The Mercedes G-Class offers similar levels of off-roading ability with a bit of old-school charm, the BMW X7 is an all-round more sporting affair while the Bentley Bentayga adds a touch more individualism.Not all engines are available in the long-wheelbase versions and are all straight sixes, apart from the BMW-powered V8. A Range Rover EV is due fairly soon too.

Flagship 5 Series has turned PHEV and promises to be BMW's most extreme super-saloon yet The G90-generation BMW M5 is the first M5 to stretch beyond five metres in length. And in terms of width? Compared with the already expansive 5 Series on which BMW’s latest super-saloon is based, the wheel arches are swollen by 75mm at the front and 48mm at the back.Had such a car been released three years ago, it wouldn’t have been an M5 but an M7 – the one product M division has never even attempted. As for weight, we will get to that topic in a moment, but it’s the most eye-widening statistic of them all.Yet if M division has made an art from anything in recent memory, it’s making chunky cars feel great to drive. Take the current M3 Competition. This big-nostrilled beast hogs more of the road than a 3 Series has any right to. It also weighs 100kg more than any of us were expecting. But so too is it a masterclass in exploitable handling.Anyone who tells you the M3 of the previous generation – usefully smaller and far lighter, sure – is a sweeter-handling car probably hasn’t experienced both. You would be a fool to bet against M division pulling off the same trick with this supersized, hybridised M5.Rewind to the Salzburgring in mid-May 2024 and our first chance to get a read on the hottest ever Fünfer. We have pre-series cars to try briefly and some engineers to talk to. As pre-series cars, rather than prototypes, these camoed cars are “95%” finished.It means there’s no going back in terms of hardware but there may yet be some calibration tweaks. For example, to the rear-axle steering – new to the M5 toy box – or the specific way in which the 196bhp electric motor between the 4.4-litre V8 engine and gearbox can pre-decelerate the crankshaft for faster upshifts or accelerate it for snappier downshifts. But in the main, this is it: your seventh-generation M5.

Olde-worlde charm meets modern tech in revised manual-specced roadster A few years ago, one of Britain’s oldest car makers entered a new, outward-looking modern era.After the business had been owned and run by the Morgan family for more than a century, a controlling share of the Morgan Motor Company was bought by Italian-led venture capital firm Investindustrial (which also remains a minority shareholder in Aston Martin Lagonda). Then, the company’s first all-new models in decades – the new Morgan Plus Four and Plus Six – entered production, based on a box-fresh aluminium platform and powered by up-to-date turbocharged BMW engines never used by the Worcestershire-based outfit before.Tradition is a concept that lies at the core of any Morgan’s appeal and yet it is a word to be applied quite carefully to this car, because this was the first four-cylinder Morgan not to use the steel ladder-frame chassis first introduced with the Morgan 4/4 of 1936. As much as 84 years is a pretty decent innings for any model platform, to Morgan diehards who have favoured what had become known as the marque’s ‘trad’ roadsters, ‘traditional’ is clearly the last thing that the new Plus Four may seem.It uses the 2.0-litre turbo four from the entry-level BMW Z4 but unlike that car can be specified with a six-speed manual (as can the range-topping Z4 now, slightly confusingly). It has been updated for 2024 but still looks mostly the same as the 1955 4/4 from which it’s loosely descended (even if the only real physical connection between the two these days is the continued use of ash wood for the frame). The Plus Four is only a few years into its current era, having switched onto an aluminium monocoque in 2020 and been zhuzhed up a couple of years later. This latest update is rather subtler: there are new one-piece light clusters at each end, the splitters are now less prominent for being painted matt black and the mirrors are lighter aluminium items. There has also been a bit of chassis fettling (which we will come onto) and the optional Sennheiser sound system has been improved.