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Alpine A110 in European car of the year final


Barry

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On 12/2/2018 at 11:28 AM, desertdude said:

I totally understand bread and butter white good fleet and just A to B transport vehicles. But if you are making a sports cars which your average joe is not going to buy. Give it some proper guts atleast, instead of just trying to fake it with strapping on turbos 

Like Carol Shelby famously said, there is no replacement for displacement. 

Like I said before, it all comes down to running costs, especially when petrol can cost 7-8 dhs per litre. Many people can go out and buy a huge engined car but not everyone can afford to run it every day with the price of fuel. Last time I checked, in my place it was 60% excise duty tax on fuel then another 20% vat on top of that. Fuel costs 3 times what it should. Then you have to pay road tax and insurance every year. My last road tax was £165 (770 aed), my last yearly insurance was £2,500 (11,700 aed). And that was only third party covering fire and theft, not full comprehensive. If I had an accident it comes out of my own pocket. This is why we like small turbocharged cars.

Weight is an issue too, especially on B roads and narrow mountain passes.  Small and light = being able to carry speed through tight corners, big and heavy = fast in a straight line but having to brake a lot to change direction. 

Carol Shelby came out with the no replacement for displacement statement in 1967 and it has been bandied about a lot since but that was over 50 years ago and technology has come a long way since. It’s something said now by people who are scared of anything modern and don’t know how to tune an engine other than fit oversized pistons or a stroker kit then rejet the carb to suit. A V8 making 400 bhp is nice in a noice nostalgic sort of way, but a girl driving a V8 with VVTi, EFI, coil over plugs and a whining blower making 800 bhp is going to make me take my boots off faster. 

Europe isn’t the rich place many people think. If it was, there wouldn’t be so many Europeans here. C63s, M5s, even bog standard 911s are a pretty rare thing to see. Ferrari’s and Lamborghinis are even rarer. Most of these cars are produced for the export market and sent to places like the uae where millionaires are plentiful. I see C63s every day here but I had never seen one in the wild until I came here. The only reason I have experience of cars like these at home is because I was working for one of the top specialists where people would send their cars on a boat from hundreds of miles away. 

The big market in the UK now for sports cars is smaller engined, light sports cars. This is where the money is made. The MX5 is king of this market right now. It’s nippy, light, and does exactly what people need it to do. I could go out and buy a mustang, camaro, challenger etc, I would be king dingaling at all the meets and shows but in the real world, it’s completely and utterly pointless, there’s nowhere you can use it in real life situations. 

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