Will IVA loophole give supercars a stay of execution?
A couple of weeks back, a few old friends got together after what felt like far too long. We made sandwiches for lunch, messed about on a boat during the afternoon, for we had met by the seaside, then had a barbecue and a few beers in the evening. Nothing of any importance happened.
So why mention it now? Because the careers of those present have gone in dramatically different directions since we all worked on Autocar in the 1990s. A couple are extremely famous, one supplies copy to a large number of the country’s biggest newspapers, another edits a magazine and I do this. Yet did we take this opportunity to catch up with each other’s lives, and their twists and turns since we were last all together? Of course we didn’t. We just talked about cars. And I could not help but think how lucky I was, how lucky we were, to have this common glue.
It’s the strangest of things, but there was none of that awkwardness that has kept me away from every school reunion to which I’ve been invited. We are to a man older, fatter, balder and greyer, but wherever we’ve been and whatever we’ve done, the one thing that has not aged or in any other way become diminished is our love for the thing that brought us together in the first place. The years didn’t melt away because it never felt like they’d been there in the first place. We just kept talking about all the things we’d talked about on and off for the last 30 years. And it was wonderful.
Can you believe the McLaren F1 is already 30 years old? In one year’s time it will be as close to the dawn of manned spaceflight as it is to the present day. To celebrate the anniversary the people behind Kiklo Spaces – a brand new, great-looking and vault-secure car storage facility outside Petersfield, Hampshire – decided to see if they could persuade some owners to bring theirs along. In the end a dozen turned up, which amounts to over one in every ten F1s ever produced, road and racing cars included.
It was a staggering sight, not least because almost every version of the car was represented. It was especially fascinating to see how the race car evolved from 1995’s hastily converted road car into something altogether more bespoke for the 1997 season. But really it was just amazing to see them together, all beautifully lit. Because to see one F1 is a vanishingly rare experience, to see two or more requires attendance at a special event like the Goodwood Festival of Speed – but a dozen? Until now I never have and I doubt very much I ever will again.
“I asked two attendees to value the room. The average was £350m”
And yet what usually happens to me when I see too much of something incredible somehow didn’t. I remember my first visit to the then Schlumpf Collection and now the French National Motor Museum and wandering past all those rows of grand prix Bugattis and after a while my brain becoming so sated that each additional car became no longer important or even, dare I say, very interesting. But because among those 12 cars were so many different versions – road cars, short-tail race cars, long-tail race cars, race cars that have been turned into road cars and at least one road car which looked like a race car and another apparently identical to the ’95 Le Mans winner, each had its own story to tell.
And, just for a laugh, I asked two attendees from rival, very well-known auction houses to value the room. The average of their quotes was £350m.
You can read my review of the new Porsche 911 GT3 RS elsewhere in this issue, but the question plenty are asking is that if its target Nürburgring lap time is that set by the old GT2 RS in 2018, how fast will the next GT2 RS go? Because even the last one was quick enough to have qualified well inside the top 10 for the 1983 Nürburgring 1000Kms, the one and only time that race was held on what is approximately the same Nordschleife used today, so it’s not much of a leap to imagine the next one up among the Porsche 956 Group C prototypes. Which for a street car on street tyres would be unbelievable.
Except that it may never happen. Talking to Andreas Preuninger, chief architect of all Porsche GT product since the 996-generation GT3 RS almost 20 years ago, he cast doubt on the possibility of such a car even being built. The problem is that the next round of European emissions legislation – whose arrival date is expected to be around 2025 – is likely to blow a regulatory hole in plans for such a car. “We could do one,” says Preuninger, “but it would be less powerful than the last and what would be the fun in that?” He’s not ruled it out but genuinely doesn’t know how to make it happen.
One way would be to damn the regulators and do it anyway. Build exactly the car he wants to build, then invite owners either to register them themselves though a scheme like our Individual Vehicle Approval process or simply not drive them on the road. Andreas told me he could have sold five times the number of new GT3 RSs that he will actually build, so selling out a new GT2 RS shouldn’t be difficult, whether they can be registered for the road or not.
A former editor of Motor Sport, Andrew splits his time between testing the latest road cars and racing (mostly) historic machinery
Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_Frankel