Opinion

The BYD-owned Denza brand has thrust itself onto the European stage with a lavish launch event at the Palais Garnier in Paris.

This cinematic, blockbuster-scale soirée marked its official entry into the European market - and it was by far and away the most opulent launch event I've ever attended.

The Palais Garnier is, of course, the Parisian opera house. Completed in 1875, it's a bona fide cultural institution and the legendary inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. 

The guest list was suitably stellar: motorsport royalty like Felipe Massa and Jean Todt rubbed shoulders with a glittering array of modern celebrities. Naturally, the requisite army of influencers did their bit, dutifully supplying the correct hashtags and parroting Denza's tagline, 'Technology Drives Elegance'. Global CEOs and politicians were reportedly in attendance too, keeping a decidedly low profile.

On arrival, I was met by a scrum of the young and glamorous queuing for half an hour just to snap a picture alongside the Z9 GT shooting brake, its modern lines contrasting sharply against the ornate Second Empire architecture. It was undeniably buzzy. It looked fantastic on Instagram.

But will any of this actually equate to sales? I understand the strategy: soft power is a potent weapon, one that nations and corporations alike have wielded for decades. BYD’s sponsorship of the Euro 2024 football tournament made perfect sense, capturing a cumulative audience north of five billion.

Yet I wonder if this Parisian spectacle possesses the same mainstream traction. Denza is not merely a new brand but also one deliberately swimming against the tide. It's transparently pitching itself as a Porsche rival, demanding Porsche money.

The Z9 GT EV will command around £100,000 when it lands in the UK. Granted, it boasts more than 1100bhp, a level of performance that would require parting with £160,000 in Stuttgart. But a standard Porsche Taycan can still be had for roughly £90,000, and Porsche buyers will require serious convincing to abandon heritage for an upstart.

So where else are buyers coming from? Polestar customers might embrace the disruptor narrative, but they are reassured by the underlying Volvo pedigree. Jaguar enthusiasts, perhaps? If online comment sections are any metric, Jaguar is currently struggling to attract Jaguar buyers.

Does the grand illusion work? Do buyers in the £100,000-car bracket actually attend the opera While the Palais Garnier projects an aura of 'old money' to the uninitiated, it isn’t exactly where true wealth spends its weekends. A cursory Google search reveals the reality: it's a tourist attraction that occasionally stages an opera. You can rent a room there on Airbnb. You will find more about it on GetYourGuide than in Art Review.

Denza is undoubtedly a bold new brand attempting something different. However, the Z9 ultimately lacks the elusive 'wow' factor that's required to sever buyers' allegiances to established European marques. And I remain unconvinced that hosting a glitzy gala dinner at a heavily trafficked opera house will be enough to lure them into the showrooms.

I have never hung art in my bedroom. I can never find anything that looks right: too cliché, too kitsch or too highbrow.

I have, however, always displayed a poster of a Metro 6R4, mid-slide. That, for me, is worth 100 Warhol soup cans or Mona Lisa parodies - even if my university housemates didn't have quite the same vision. The appeal of the 6R4 lies partly in the brilliance of its development brief.

For the sake of appeasing British Leyland's marketing bods, the company's Group B racer simply had to be based on a Metro. That brought virtues - a short wheelbase, boosting agility - but also barely any room for cramming in a title-worthy drivetrain. In retrospect, the sensible answer would have been to fit a huge turbo to a downsized engine, graft in a four-wheel-drive transfer case and call it a day.

Turbos were all the rage: Audi, Lancia, Renault and Mitsubishi were all at it, with the newfangled tech promising huge power. Austin Rover Motorsport could have followed easily.

But no. The engineers instead stuck two naturally aspirated fingers up at the new school and set to work on an all-new free-breathing V6, enlisting ex-Cosworth maestro David Wood. The thinking was that you could have sold a showroom full of Metros in the time it took a small engine to build turbo boost - then the engine would have grenaded.

Plus, all the ancillaries required to manage the extra heat and thirst for fuel would have added significant weight, upsetting the Metro's balance. The end result was indisputably a success: a masterpiece in aluminium revving to 9000rpm. It could produce 400bhp, but that's not really the point, because it's the sound that is punched indelibly into my consciousness.

As propaganda tools go, little is more effective than the sight and sound of a gargling, mid-mounted, highly strung six-pot echoing through a forest. The shriek of the Metro as it approached pummelled spectators from head to toe. It's Megadeth on four wheels.

Were the 6R4 anything but a Metro, we might never have been gifted that sound. A larger, heavier Rover or Austin might have meant turbocharging would have been an acceptable compromise, and the resulting soundtrack may have fallen flat.

Nor, for that matter, would it have been so utterly outrageous to look at. Those comically extended arches were functional, but they gave the 6R4 plenty of billboard space to facilitate colourful liveries, and its popularity with privateers elicited a smorgasbord of memorable designs. The works Computervision livery, Jimmy McRae's Rothmans scheme and the lurid P&O Ferries rallycrosser all come to mind.

But most of all I think it's the 6R4's cruel luck that gets me. While MG toiled away at making everything work, the rest of the field had properly figured out forced induction. By the time of the Metro 6R4's launch in 1985, its boosted competitors were rumoured to be nudging 600bhp. No matter how much more drivable or dependable the 6R4 might have been, its tardiness doomed it to sit on rallying's fringes. What could have been, if only it had arrived a year or two sooner?

That the 6R4 is still so fondly remembered by so many is testament to its single-minded genius. I fear that if I ever drove one I'd lose the will to live, knowing I'd never be able to buy it. Yet it remains right at the top of my bucket list. For now, watching old videos of Kris Meeke and Colin McRae chucking theirs around the streets of Donegal in a demo event will have to suffice.

Few things have split opinion in the Autocar office in recent memory like the 2025 movie F1.

While some of my colleagues enjoyed the whimsical, engagingly dramatised nature of Brad Pitt's motorsport blockbuster, I found it about as thrilling as watching a DRS train lap Monaco 50 times.

I thought it was unrealistic, corny and predictable, and some of the more appalling snippets of dialogue made me (and other members of the audience) laugh out loud.

But while the storyline failed to impress, I couldn't fault director Joseph Kosinski and his team for the way in which the movie was filmed: the racing sequences, shown from the perspectives of driver and audience, were epic.

Every on-track duel invoked the adrenaline-fuelled thrill of the very best movie car chases, which got me thinking: what are the key ingredients for an exhilarating hot pursuit? This is subjective, of course, but for me a good car chase needs three things: realistic stunts, exciting cinematography and the complete absence of computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Far-fetched crashes and disproportionate explosions do nothing for me. They're used as a desperate attempt to entertain when really they achieve the exact opposite, dulling any sense of believability. In many ways, the rise of CGI has been the downfall of the Fast and Furious franchise.

Back in the early 2000s, these were car movies first and action movies second. Now they're just a series of utterly impossible stunts and chase scenes with some priceless hypercars thrown in as support actors (and Vin Diesel mumbling "family" every 10 minutes).

This is why I get a more tangible thrill from movie car chases of the past: well-choreographed sequences with real cars, real stunts and the unmistakable sense that a human is actually behind the wheel deliver a visceral experience that we car lovers can enjoy.

Take 1998's Ronin, for example. The chief of police in Paris told the production crew they could basically do what they liked, so stunt co-ordinator and former racer Jean-Claude Lagniez ensured the cars were really doing 100-125mph during the chase.

In fact, he scripted the entire chase, chose the cars and planned how the accidents would happen. The pivotal scene in the tunnel was shot at night and filmed at full speed because director John Frankenheimer (who had in 1966 directed the excellent Grand Prix) refused to speed it up in the edit, as he wanted it to feel real.

The details are spot on, too: there are no silly misplaced gearchanges, no randomly cut scenes of the hero accelerating hard while already driving flat out, no slide-whistle barrel rolls.

That's what makes this fine example of the genre (and other car chases in movies like the Jason Bourne series, Quantum of Solace and Baby Driver) so captivating, because you feel like you're in the passenger seat with the protagonists. They're real, they're exciting to watch and they ensure that we petrolheads leave the cinema with something to talk about, no matter the quality of the rest of the film.

Look at Bullitt (1968): I must have watched the entirety of that 11-minute chase 30 times but couldn't tell you anything about the characters involved, nor what the movie is really about. What a classic.

It's fair to assume that if you're reading this, you like driving. I love it.

And I'm not just talking about haring up and down a mountain road in a Porsche 911: I've enjoyed the occasional 5mph trudge around the M25, revelling in the one-two-three shifts and rev-matched downchanges. But I can also take great pleasure in not driving - more specifically in watching great drivers at work.

There was a period when it was a fixture on Porsche launches for rally legend Walter Röhrl to turn up and give passenger rides. That was sadly before my time, and I'm quite envious of anyone who got to sit next to him.

Thankfully, YouTube is a pretty good substitute, and Röhrl is hugely enjoyable to watch. He has this economy of motion to his driving style that makes it look as if he's just fetching an apfelstrudel at the bakery on a Sunday morning. Yet the speedometer and the lap times confirm he's not pootling.

Watch closely and there's always something to learn about lines or steering and gearchange technique. I feel like I become a better driver simply by osmosis.

Following Autocar's Jaguar Type 00 prototype passenger rides, there was some discussion about how much one can learn about a car by being a passenger. I'll go one further and say that there's a huge amount to be learned about a car by watching an on-board video of it being driven by a benchmark driver.

When the 992.1-generation 911 GT3 RS (the one with all the downforce) was launched a few years ago, some on-board footage surfaced of Le Mans winner and Porsche works driver Jörg Bergmeister taking it around Silverstone. In general his style seems to be more aggressive than Röhrl's, but this was something else.

If I didn't know better, I'd think he was an amateur, being very busy at the wheel and always understeering slightly, punctuated by spikes of oversteer. But we know that Bergmeister is quite the opposite. Clearly the effect of all that aero is a car that wants to be slightly over-driven; better to maximise the speed and ride out the understeer than lose speed and the associated downforce.

Meanwhile, when French motoring magazine L'Argus tests a performance car, its ace driver, Mathieu Sentis, heads to the Nürburgring. He does this on the open 'tourist days', so I dread to think of the insurance and risk assessment implications, but the resulting video is always fascinating and says more about the car than some reviews. (Not ours, obviously...)

Sentis is very much an adherent of the Röhrl academy of zen, so the cars in which his driving gets ragged really stand out. The way some let themselves be effortlessly teased into a graceful drift while others doggedly grip, the speed of the manual gearchanges and the apparent steering effort reveal so much about the cars.

Conversely, I think the joy of watching great drivers is why I've long tuned out of Formula 1. It has the best drivers in the world and the best cameras to capture them with crystal-clear imagery, so it should be the pinnacle of vicarious driving. But the cars have such quick steering and are so perfectly composed most of the time that there isn't all that much to see or appreciate.

Historic racing is the exact opposite, and all the better for it. The cars are very much not the fastest things going, because their classic-style tyres mean that they're sliding around all over the place and their recalcitrant old gearboxes require a bit of care. As a consequence, the drivers are kept very busy with fancy footwork and sawing away at the huge steering wheels. The result is magnetic to watch.

There is more than one type of V8 engine in the world, of course, but when people say they like V8s, I think we know what they're mostly talking about.

They don't usually mean high-revving, flatplane-cranked V8s like those you will find in many supercars or racing cars - the ones that sound like two four-cylinder engines welded together, which is not surprising, because that's essentially how their cylinders fire.

No, they usually mean old-school, fat (in both the 'f' and 'ph' versions of the word) crossplane-cranked V8s, often of Detroit descent, with a low rumble, a broad and responsive powerband and often a shouty upper range.

These are the noises of Nascar, Mad Max and the drag strip, and yet also a luxury sports car or off-roader or speedboat. This kind of V8 engine is as versatile as the breadth of its torque band. And if you like them, I think you probably really like them.

Seemingly a lot of people do. Start typing 'why do V8 engines' into a search engine and 'sound so good?' is one of the top suggested sentence completions.

Exactly why they sound so good is hard to say, because the precise sound that one makes depends on a lot of factors, from firing order to engine size, vee angle, bore and stroke plus everything ancillary besides.

Whatever, though, there is a particular character to them. I did read that at low revs the offbeat rumble, which comes because two cylinders on the same bank will often fire one after the other before the firing order swaps banks again, is redolent of a heartbeat, so a softly pulsing vee can be soul-soothing, like being back in the womb.

Call it redneck floatation therapy. But there might be nothing in that. If it wasn't in the womb, I can't tell you when I first heard the sounds of a V8 engine, because, as with you, it will have been present throughout my entire life.

The first known V8 was made in 1904, designed by Léon Levavasseur for French engine maker Antoinette.

So in the same way that I don't remember first hearing Beethoven's Symphony No 7, the V8 has always been there. The two are among my favourite sounds, and it would have been extraordinary to be fully conscious when I first heard either so I could remember the shock of it.

Such was the success of Beethoven's seventh that when the composer finished conducting the piece at its premiere, the audience demanded part of it was played again immediately as an encore.

I can imagine that when the Antoinette was first shut down there might have been bravos from onlookers too. 'Hey Léon, fire that up again, won't you?'